CDs/DVDs
peter.quinn
Jamie Cullum's sixth studio album is about as good a pop record as you'll hear all year. Newly signed to Island Records, the singer-songwriter has seemingly raided ideas from the entire history of pop music, such that low-fi vintage synth lines and jazzy piano breaks rub shoulders with heart-on-sleeve soul belters and subtle electronica. The kind of stylistic pluralism that directly reflects Cullum's own musical loves, in other words.The mash-up of opening salvo “The Same Things” is typical of the album as a whole, combining a deep, New Orleans-type rolling percussion groove with stacked up Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The first of the Dresden-born Robert Siodmak’s eight film noirs, Phantom Lady (1944) was adapted from a Cornell Woolrich novel that typically endows its heroine with traditional masculine energy and guile while rendering its hero impotent and passive.Her dynamic investigator-avenger is eventually compromised by her becoming prey to the killer who framed the man she loves. However, Siodmak’s focus on her drive and her brief donning of a femme fatale guise during the second act powerfully reflects the male anxieties about women’s perceived threat to the patriarchal order during the war years.In Read more ...
joe.muggs
A wise man once said: DON'T BELIEVE THE HYPE. It's a simple concept, but it seems so very hard to grasp, even – or especially – in a supposedly media-savvy world. The oddest thing of all is that it seems to be the people who consider themselves the most resistant to, or able to rise above, hype campaigns who have been caught up the most in the frenzy around this album.I have been consistently boggled and slightly saddened by the number of people who should know better that I have seen tripping over themselves to explain how “bland” or “disappointing” or “derivative” or “cynical” or "shallow" Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It is no hyperbole to say that The National have made some of my favourite albums of all time. In every case, it has never been a decision I have reached lightly, or quickly. Those first few listens, you’re merely aware that your heart beats a little faster when the band expertly hit certain emotional pressure points. It could be six months later before you realise why.2010’s High Violet marked a progression in the music of a band whose arrangements have always been the most remarkable thing about their work. Trouble Will Find Me is album number six and the music here is richer still, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Pop that summons the word “cute” has a tendency to nauseate. If executed with the correct ratio of candy to content, however, it may persuade. The Scandinavians have proved effective in this area and Jonas Angergård and Karolina Komstedt, from the south of Sweden, add to the region’s good stock. Their latest album sits somewhere between The Cardigans and St Etienne, a very conscious electro-pop tinge coming to the fore, especially on numbers such as the toy town hi-NRG of “Taking My Time”.The duo have been around for years and this is their eighth album. Angergård is also a member of mid- Read more ...
David Nice
Fans of this bewilderingly popular musical, and they are legion, will not be disappointed. Director Tom Hooper knows how to tell a fast-moving tale that makes light of the final running time (originally 158 minutes, slightly shorter in this DVD release, which offers no extras. Those who went to the film more than once will, I'm told, miss a couple of scenes). The lighting is appropriately lugubrious, most of the settings convincing – though occasionally there’s too much dependence on CGI – and famously the singing actors perform their numbers on set, often in long takes. Casting is strong, Read more ...
fisun.guner
Steve Martin has a number of strings to his bow: comedian, actor, playwright, novelist, screenwriter and – who knew? – banjo player. And if you need any convincing, his 2010 release The Crow: New Songs for the Five-String Banjo, won a Grammy for best bluegrass album.It’s in this capacity that he’s collaborated with Edie Brickell, formerly of The New Bohemians, with whom she had a major hit with single "What I Am" way back in 1988. Aside from raising a family, the intervening years have been quiet, but some off-radar musical collaborations include those with Harper Simon (she’s married Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: The Sun Rock Box - Rock ‘n’ Roll Recorded by Sam Phillips 1954-1959It’s no exaggeration to say that Sam Phillips transformed society. With his associate Ike Turner, he brought Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket 88” to the world in 1951. He may or may not have known it then, but Phillips had set the template for what would become rock ‘n’ roll. Then, in quick succession, he disseminated the message via Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison and Jerry Lee Lewis. By the end of 1956 rock ‘n’ roll was, indeed, here to stay. The world would never be the same again.Then there’s the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Anything said about A won’t affect its sales. Guaranteed to sell millions, it’s the first album from ABBA’s former singer since 2004’s all-covers set, My Colouring Book. It’s also the first to contain original material since the one which preceded that, 1987’s I Stand Alone. In keeping with the privacy with which she leads her life, she’s not prolific. Fältskog’s return is newsworthy and welcome, so it’s deeply depressing that A is so feeble. Worse than that, her personality is hardly evident.Can the lyrics to "Perfume in the Breeze" (“I’m not sure what happened, it happened so fast/ people Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Post-Screamadelica, there's a general consensus that Bobby Gillespie’s acid rockers have been gently sliding downhill (their nadir being the dad-rock of "Country Girl"). Those who believe this may feel better disposed towards More Light. It's not their best, but it's significantly better. The album is an eclectic, angry mix of stoner rock, industrial sounds, rave and rock’n’rollMore Light may also be one of the most evocative recession albums so far. There’s nothing particularly illuminating in what Gillespie actually sings. The lyrics apparently include nonsense like "police station Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
There’s a slight unease I feel about Savages which only grows with every listen to the band’s heavily-hyped debut album. Perhaps I’m too old to experience my music as just one facet of a conceptual art project, where it comes as part of a package that’s as much provocative manifestos about the emptiness of modern living and interviews packed with loaded statements about sex and violence.Yet these things demand to be examined by the fact of their very existence, because everything else about Silence Yourself seems to be carefully constructed. That in itself is unsettling, as the sonic Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A female hiker is naked. A village is close. Lying on the slope down to a river, she invites the taciturn man she’s followed to have sex. They do. She begins shrieking and foaming at the mouth. He fastens his face to hers. She could then be dead yet begins crawling into the water, looks heavenwards and spreads her arms.The images of baptism and rebirth are clear. But the motivation of the man, David Dewale’s Le gars (the man or guy), is less clear cut. Bruno Dumont’s Hors Satan (Outside Satan) is hard to read in terms of specifics, but overall it dwells on the arrival of a mystical outsider Read more ...