CDs/DVDs
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The debates that come with music awards tend to be more interesting than the institutions themselves, which is why it was so novel to see this year’s SAY Award - the Creative Scotland-backed equivalent of the Mercury Prize - go to a work that was not only innovative but genuinely loved. Though it must have been tempting for RM Hubbert to take some time out and blow the prize money on a Porsche, the Glasgow guitarist - a 20-year veteran of the local music scene - announced his next album two weeks later.Breaks & Bone is the final part of what Hubbert has termed “the ampersand trilogy”, a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
National Wake: A Walk in Africa 1979–81South Africa’s National Wake would be noteworthy enough even if their music wasn’t. The mixed-race group emerged in 1978 in a country where the establishment and institutions were directly opposed to what they represented. In this compilation’s booklet the band’s Ivan Kadey recalls a typical show: “We were greeted by a promoter informing us that he had applied for permission for us to perform, and that it been denied. He wanted us to withdraw and go back to Johannesburg. I told him to shove it and that we were playing whether he liked it or not. Read more ...
Joe Muggs
I am increasingly finding it almost impossible to express just how bored I am by Miley Cyrus. I mean, seriously, are we really in such a fix that this guff is a serious talking point? A second-generation celebrity and former child star seems to be going off the rails a bit? OH REALLY, GOSH, THIS HAS NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE, PLEASE TELL ME MORE. A young female celebrity is flashing her parts? SWEET BABY JESUS ON A BORIS BIKE THIS IS AMAZING. A white pop star is crassly adopting the tropes of black culture? WOW NO WAY, YOU'RE LITERALLY SHITTING ME. An American TV awards show has indulged in tacky Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although it’s impossible to make a case for The Breaking of Bumbo as a great film, it is a bizarre, compelling, hyper-real slice of Swinging Sixties nonsense as essential to the era as Privilege, What’s Good For the Goose and The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour. It gave Joanna Lumley her first proper role and pretends to be radical, but is in fact about as envelope-pushing as a Whitehall farce. The makers were so out of touch with the mood of times that it was primed for release in September 1970, by which time the Sixties bloom had all-but withered and died.After 15 minutes of dull scene- Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The Full English album and live tour is the stage and studio result of an ambitious project from the EFDSS (English Folk Dance and Song Society), drawing together songs from the early 20th-century collections of songhunters including Lucy Broadwood, Percy Grainger, Frank Kidson, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Cecil Sharp.The Full English is also a web portal, describing itself as the most comprehensive searchable database of English folk songs, tunes, dances and customs in the world. For fans of traditional songs, the newly-launched Song Collectors Collective site features living source singers Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“How does drum’n’bass fare when taken out from the underground?” asked Joe Muggs on Monday on theartsdesk, reviewing the new Sub Focus album. He went on to refer to “a fizzy youth-friendly strain of the genre” and “rictus grin euphoria”, making further reference to Jaegerbombs and “stadium pop”. It’s all a long way, he concluded, from the “dark, strange, spontaneous creativity” of the scene’s origins. He’s right.Candied bass-pop has busted the charts wide open and, riding these changes, surfing the wave, are Chase & Status. They began as furious junglists on labels such as the reliably Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The new BFI release takes its title from the 1977 essay movie directed by Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen; the package includes its more speculative predecessor, 1974's Penthiselea: Queen of the Amazons. Each is a demanding feminist work that destabilises a Greek myth, thereby challenging the patriarchal oppression of women ingrained in it.Riddles reconfigures Freud's phallocentric application of Sophocles' play by focusing on maternal agency. At its core is the evolution of a young mother whose story is told through thirteen 360-degree pans. Deserted by her husband and confined to such Read more ...
Joe Muggs
When drum'n'bass emerged from hardcore rave's interactions with London's pirate radio culture, 20-odd years ago, it created some of the most radical grassroots music ever to come out of the British Isles. It came in such a white heat explosion of underground, transforming repeatedly and rapidly through different iterations its first few years, that nobody could have predicted that it would reach a commercial high-point two decades on. Yet here we are with the likes of DJ Fresh creating chart toppers, d'n'b's top rank of DJs still touring the world to arena crowds, and a whole range of new Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Dino Valente: Dino ValenteDino Valenti’s reaction to his sole solo album being credited to Dino Valente isn’t recorded, but any confusion probably wouldn’t have mattered as he had such high-profile cheerleaders. Before its release in October 1968, Ralph J Gleason, then America’s most important commentator on rock and pop, called Valenti – who died in 1994 – “an underground Bob Dylan”. After its release, Lillian Roxon, New York’s most trenchant observer of musical trends, said he was “a macrobiotics-solar-energy legend”. In Rolling Stone in January 1969, Ben Fong-Torres repeated the " Read more ...
James Williams
Justin Timberlake continues his global charm assault with the second in his 20/20 Experience project. Teaming with long-term collaborator Timbaland, the duo turn the taut funk and chart-busting hits of the first instalment in the series on their head. Where The 20/20 Experience was in turns sensual and muted, The 20/20 Experience 2 of 2 is more in the vein of the more familiar futuristic synth-led sound that created Timbaland’s name in the Nineties, producing for artists such as Aaliyah and Missy Elliot. No one has shaped and directed Timberlake’s sound more than Read more ...
graham.rickson
Czech director Jindřich Polák’s 1963 science fiction epic Ikarie XB 1 was known in the West for many years only in a recut dubbed version. Happily, Second Run’s restored print looks and sounds marvellous. There is a slowly unfolding narrative, though Ikarie grips more as an acutely realised study of what life could actually be like on a 15-year space voyage.Polák’s source material was a novella by Stanisław Lem, better-known for Solaris, and a team of scientific advisors was assembled by Polák to give the adaptation greater credibility. One character describes the Ikarie spaceship as “a Read more ...
peter.quinn
It's only the truly great albums that usher you into a sound-world that is entirely sui generis. And so it is with this second chapter of jazz sax player and composer Matana Roberts's Coin Coin project, a vast musical work-in-progress exploring themes of history, memory and ancestry. Divided into 18 separate tracks, but heard as one continuous arc of sound, we enter into the leader's all-encompassing “panoramic sound quilting”, as she calls it, a reference both to her family’s handicraft heritage but also to the collage-like juxtaposition of her materials.Over a bowed pedal note in the Read more ...