CDs/DVDs
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Oh Yes We Can Love – A History of Glam Rock Despite Marc Bolan fashioning glam rock’s starting block in 1971 with T. Rex’s “Hot Love”, 2013 has been the year when pop's era of androgyny, inappropriate and shiny trousers, and stomping, sometimes arty music has been marked. The 40th anniversary passed largely unmarked, but the 42nd saw Tate Liverpool mount the Glam! The Performance of Style exhibition. Now, this confounding five-disc box set – the first to tackle glam – has arrived to tell the story too.The choice of 1973 as a marker makes some sense: it was the year Read more ...
Tim Cumming
People go on about how many members have been in The Fall, but I reckon even more have passed through Hawkwind. The Notting Hill counter-culture of 1969 in which they formed is a lifetime away, on another planet, and only Dave Brock remains from those wild, formative years under the Westway with Lemmy, Bob Calvert and co. But they still travel with that aura of proper rock'n'roll mythology – extreme, even insane, too far out, uncompromising and sometimes brutally overpowering.On this typically peculiar new album of old songs refreshed, new mixes, and new tracks, intimations of their Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Though never really part of the country’s groundbreaking New Wave, František Vláčil was a Czech master who's best known for his films like Marketa Lazarová and The Valley of the Bees, both complex historical works. His first feature The White Dove, which appeared at the very beginning of the momentous Sixties, is the exact opposite of those two large-scale movies: it's a small film of poetry and mystery, which has a fabular quality remote from any political dimension (very likely the reason why its production in 1960, a time of continuing censorship, was possible).The symbolic nature of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Union J are a boy band consisting of George Shelley, Josh Cuthbert, JJ Hamblett and Jaymi Hensley. They finished fourth in last year’s X Factor.In November 2012, after being voted off the talent contest, teen competitor Ella Henderson revealed to Look magazine that she had actually been hoping for romance with Union J’s Josh Cuthbert, not George Shelley as everyone had previously assumed. Jaymo Hensley, meanwhile, revealed to the Sun on Sunday the same month that he was gay and also growing close to Katie Price.Twenty-five-year-old JJ Hamblett’s girlfriend, model Caterina Lopez, recently Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Anyone familiar with the hermetic sound-world of Argentina’s Juana Molina is not going to be surprised by WED 21, her first album in five years. Despite an added rhythmic pulse, a new use of squelchy and clanking electronics and a more spare approach, she hasn’t arrived in a new territory. More one where some fresh outsiders have been welcomed.That’s not to say WED 21 isn’t good – it is. It’s more that her vision remains so singular she has stepped beyond the boundary of self to become the presiding authority for a genre for which she has set the template. Her sound is rooted in rotating Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Amsterdam is in ashes. The Vatican City has been wiped off the map. Abandoned cars litter Trafalgar Square. The National Gallery has become the base camp for an arms-dealing Major. It’s a bad time alright, yet a group of people aren’t fussed about that. Instead, they are exercised by the death of the father of Jerry Cornelius. Dad had a formula, a computer programme they’re seeking. It’s the final programme. A programme which will create a super-human.This adaptation of the Michael Moorcock science fiction-adventure book of the same name was released in 1973. It was retitled The Last Days of Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
While it wouldn’t have been fair to expect 100 percent authenticity from a performer whose last stage show began with her rising from a trapdoor with two giant peppermint patty pinwheels spinning over her breasts, the follow-up to Teenage Dream was never going to replicate the bubblegum formula of its predecessor. As the recent documentary Part of Me showed in heartbreaking detail, Katy Perry has had a tumultuous few years - and no amount of Scandinavian hit-factories-for-hire were ever going to paper over all of the cracks.Still, as infectious lead single - and PRISM opening track - “Roar” Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Madness: Take it or Leave itIn 1981, Madness followed The Beatles, Slade and The Sex Pistols by playing versions of themselves in a film. Take it or Leave it is no masterpiece, but it is hugely entertaining. At the time, surprisingly, a soundtrack album wasn’t issued and its belated appearance on CD plugs a gap in the story of Madness.This smart, two-disc set teams a DVD of the film with the shelved album, for which a master tape was assembled. The CD is not a live set though, collecting the rough-and-ready performances seen in the film, but assembles familiar studio recordings and Fats Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Few artists make critics wince like James Blunt. One described his biggest hit, “You’re Beautiful”, for instance, as being like “Japanese water torture”. Another said Blunt made him want to “rip his ears off”. Still, the erstwhile army officer doesn’t seem to care what critics say. And why should he? Not only have his songs brought him platinum discs, they’ve also helped pay for houses in Ibiza and Switzerland. So, with such a big audience what exactly are the critics' issues? And is Moon Landing going to change their minds?Not a chance. Blunt's mother once opined that some people are simply Read more ...
Serena Kutchinsky
It’s official. The Saturdays are the nation’s number one girl group. Well, these days they’re more of a yummy mummy collective, with two of their members having recently popped out sprogs. Since Girls Aloud bowed out last year amid the usual round of back-stabbing and bitch fighting, this overly made-up fivesome have elbowed their way to the top of the charts.With Little Mix battling to overcome both second album syndrome and the X Factor curse, The Saturdays have little competition. No longer a cheap alternative to the glossier girl groups, their sound and style has matured since they first Read more ...
Tim Cumming
In the age of big data where nothing escapes retrieval and the afterlife is a matter of cloud storage, the whole idea of "lost BBC tapes" seems about as inconceivable as a hunter-gatherer climbing out of an Iceland freezer cabinet. Dead of Night was broadcast in 1972 and has since become the object of a considerable cult. Thankfully, with this BFI release, it proves to be as odd, as arresting and as eerie as the best weird programming of the decade.Scripted, directed and produced by old-school, left-field, left-leaning BBC staffers – the kind of extinct animal whose return would have Paul Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This is studio album number 10 for the seasoned Seattle-ites, and on a first listening you might feel inclined to flip it into the bin marked "solid but unexciting". Give it a bit of time to breathe though and it starts to reveal its strengths.Among these are the lead guitar playing of Mike McCready, something of an unsung hero in the annals of axemanship but a chap eminently capable of blowing the bloody doors off in a variety of styles. For instance in "Mind Your Manners", one of the disc's standouts, he unleashes a blistering riff-and-chord barrage in a bring-back-the-Dead-Kennedys style, Read more ...