CDs/DVDs
Kieron Tyler
Where is the Queen? doesn’t hide where it’s coming from. Drawing so gracefully from disparate strains of Nineties rock while augmenting them with a literate sensibility, it immediately sets itself up as an album which stands apart.The soft-loud dynamic which The Pixies pretty much invented – probably heard most widely on Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” – is here. So is the rave-rock rhythmic collision heard when My Bloody Valentine began venturing inwards immediately before their lengthy hiatus. “Country Bliss” confesses “I can’t remember what my butt looks like in a dress, I’ve built a Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Le Week-End is the third film written by Hanif Kureishi and directed by Roger Michell to probe late-flowering lust. So empathetically do the duo depict Anne Reid's character in The Mother (2003), Peter O'Toole's in Venus (2006), and now those played by Lindsay Duncan and Jim Broadbent that the unofficial trilogy constitutes a revolt against the cultural hegemony of teen movies.Nick (Broadbent) is a lecturer just fired by his Birmingham poly for making a racist remark to a female student. Initially unaware of his crisis, his wife Meg (Duncan) yearns to quit her job as a secondary school Read more ...
Guy Oddy
The new album by Sunn O))) and Ulver isn’t what you'd expect. American band, Sunn O))) (pronounced as “sun”) generally play an ambient take on pagan sludge rock, suggesting the spirit of Black Sabbath, condensed into binary numbers. Ulver from Norway have dabbled in black metal, minimalist and ambient but over the last 10 years they’ve concentrated on a more symphonic style. This had me anticipating an apocalyptic variant of “O Fortuna” from Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana but with loud and droning electric guitars.Sunn O))) and Ulver have form in collaboration. They previously produced the 15- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Seeds: Raw & Alive / The Dream Syndicate: The Day Before Wine and RosesTwo live albums. Both by bands rooted in psychedelia and based in Los Angeles. Each recorded in a studio rather than on stage. One, by The Seeds, from 1968. The other, by The Dream Syndicate, from 1982. The links between these two releases – coincidentally issued a week apart – are about more than the circumstances of their creation, geography and musical style. Both bands had brushes with the mainstream and in the form captured here both proved too raw, too unstable and too wilful to last the course.As 1968 Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It’s a good thing After the Disco turned up in the post last November. Initial listens suggested it as a slight follow up to 2010’s eponymous debut. Living with the new album and allowing it to bed in was obviously the way to go. Unfortunately, repeated revisits haven’t revealed any depth or much to grab onto. The thin gruel that is After the Disco isn’t a worthy successor to Broken Bells and is nothing its creators Danger Mouse and James Mercer should be proud of. Yet more listens raise the questions of what this is for and why did they bother?After the Disco is propelled by either chugging Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
With that warm, slightly husky voice of hers - not unlike that of an old friend at the other end of the telephone - Suzanne Vega has always been one of those singers I’d happily listen to reading the Yellow Pages. To be honest, there are parts of the often mystical, always curious Tales From the Queen of Pentacles that would probably have been easier to understand if she had done, even if the names in Vega’s directory turned out to be as ill-fitting as Mother Teresa, the Knight of Wands and Macklemore.It’s an interesting one to unwrap, this first collection of new material in seven years, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The history of motor racing films is littered with detritus. While the sport itself, particularly back in the Sixties and Seventies, undoubtedly pitted man and machine against each other in circumstances where the smallest wrong-headed twitch could be fatal, Hollywood’s response has mostly been turgid: either po-faced, petrol-head fare such as Le Mans, Grand Prix and the Tony Scott/Tom Cruise turkey, Days of Thunder, or affable slapstick gibberish such as The Cannonball Run and Monte Carlo or Bust. This lame record, combined with director Ron Howard’s record of stirring unnecessary added Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Torn between mainstream adulation and the select approval of the folk community, Seth Lakeman has recently seemed unsure of who his audience are. Propelled into the big time on the back of the Mercury nomination for his 2004 album Kitty Jay (recorded in his kitchen for £300), Lakeman then released two albums aimed squarely at the Tesco’s CD aisle (if not at impressing critics), before returning to his roots with the 2012 solo recording Tales from the Barrel House, celebrating the vanishing artisans of his native Devon. He seems now to be aiming for both audiences at once. The concept of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
A funny thing happened to English pop acts when they embraced LSD in the 1960s. Whereas the original Californian musical tripsters suddenly started emphasising the cosmic nature of reality – think of The Byrds’s beautiful ‘5D’ – the English discovered a weird pastoral idyll, a Looking Glass world of village life through the lens of psilocybin. From The Kinks – who, admittedly, were halfway there already – to Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd, whimsy and teapots and butterflies and bicycles were where it was at. In the 1980s, there was a strain of wilfully obscure indie that aimed again for this Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The DVD release of this devastating film brings its impact even closer. Watching it at home is a squirm-inducing experience which brings moments where it’s hard to fight the urge to leave the room or put your hands in front of your face. The overpowering effect stems from more than the discomfort of watching the young boys Arbor and Swifty attempting to navigate through a world which is against them, out to exploit them and, ultimately, probably going to exclude them despite the integrity of their friendship.The Selfish Giant hinges on the extraordinary, magnetic presences of Connor Chapman Read more ...
joe.muggs
A quiet revolution has been underway over the last 10 or 15 years. As digital synthesis becomes more and more available and powerful, as does the ability to manipulate the sound of real wood-and-metal instruments inside a computer, so the boundaries between “electronic” and “organic” have been eroded to the point where they are now meaningless.While some of the artists doing that have been those who parade their technological nous – the Autechres and Flying Lotuses of this world, as well as more academic experimenters – a lot of innovation in this area has been taking place in the less Read more ...
Matthew Wright
The pared-down beauty and integrity of this remarkable new album is all the more exciting given the quantity of stylistic clutter typically associated with its two principal genres, jazz and soul. Showing excellent taste and artistic self-confidence, McFarlane has stripped away warbling vocal ornaments, stale generic phrasing and redundant backing tracks, trusting the assured, true-grained timbre of her voice to carry the emotional weight of her potent and original writing.A handful of these songs are surely destined to endure in the repertoire. They balance McFarlane’s exposed voice and Read more ...