CDs/DVDs
Kieron Tyler
Killing Joke: The Singles Collection 1979-2012Killing Joke were one of the most singular British bands to emerge in wake of punk. Their metal-edged, tribal stomp didn’t fit in with anything else going on at the time. Collecting 33 tracks from their singles and EPs to date, The Singles Collection 1979-2012 shows them as single-minded, a trait bringing a timelessness and consistency. “In Cythera”, from 2012, is as impactful as 1988’s “America”.Their sound has changed though. The rough edges and bark of “Follow the Leaders” (1981) or "Let's All Go (to the Fire Dances)" (1983) have been tempered Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
With two chart-topping singles under their belt, Rudimental have arrived. The unassuming, feel-good quartet from Hackney have chopped through mainstream radio’s mug-step cheese and post-Guetta club pop with an efficient hatchet of drum & bass soul-funk. Their debut album makes them sound like a great, energized festival act too, with lots of beats’n’bass to make feet shuffle, laced with a musicality attractive to casual listeners. What’s more, much of it doesn’t come across as calculated. When the trumpet arrives on the number one hit “Feel the Love”, it has an easy swing, and the guitar Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Rock geeks will generally tell you that Deep Purple needs to include either Ritchie Blackmore or Jon Lord to be truly deserving of the name. Sadly, neither will ever again be available for duty. Lord – to whom this album is dedicated – passed away last year. Blackmore irrevocably turned his back on rock years ago. Their absence, however, has little to do with this album's deficiencies.Short of hiring a spirit-medium to bring back Lord, the band couldn’t have achieved a more classic organ sound than that of Don Airey. Guitarist Steve Morse is equally virtuoso and none of the others performs Read more ...
fisun.guner
Are we approaching some sort of Brontë anniversary? Or is it simply the 40th anniversary of this long-forgotten dramatization of the “Brontë story” that’s being marked with a two-disc DVD release? The Brontës of Haworth has hardly gone down in the annals of TV drama history, such as, for instance, I, Claudius, the 1976 adaptation of the Robert Graves’ novel currently being repeated on BBC Two. This is probably not surprising, since the Roman emperor’s life was hardly lacking in incident, and the same cannot be said of the talented siblings Emily, Charlotte, Anne and their troubled, Read more ...
peter.quinn
The CD booklet note by NASA astrobiologist Daniella Scalice is just the first of many striking features on this third Basho CD by the Mercury Prize-nominated pianist Kit Downes. Joined by his core trio of bassist Calum Gourlay and drummer James Maddren (both fellow alumni of the Royal Academy of Music), plus reeds player James Allsopp and cellist Lucy Railton, Light From Old Stars sees Downes really getting into his compositional stride.With rippling arpeggiations on the piano strings and icy harmonics in the cello, album opener “Wander and Colossus” ushers you into the album's singular sound Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
While it’s impossible to recreate the impact of their astounding first Sixties sally, it’s still a thrill when a new album appears bearing the name “Stooges”. Punk’s ragged-arsed Detroit progenitors first popped up again in 2007 with visceral live shows but a lacklustre album, The Weirdness. Since then original guitarist Ron Asheton has died and, in a strange mirror to history, James Williamson, guitarist on 1973's classic Raw Power, has returned to the fold (following a 30 year career in engineering management!)For fans who dared to hope, it’s good rather than great news. This isn’t an Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
It’s hard to imagine that anyone on earth has yet to see Ang Lee’s four-times Oscar-winning Life of Pi, the sensational SFX adventure based on Yan Martel’s hitherto unfilmable spiritual classic. But, along with Skyfall, there are reasons why anyone would want to own a film they’ve already seen at least once: it’s a visuall -soothing if existentially unsettling portrait of trauma and loss told by a master storyteller.Suraj Sharma stars as Pi Patel, a young man shipwrecked while immigrating to Canada with his family and the family zoo. Whether he survives in mid-ocean depends on the actions of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Gainsbourg-Birkin dynasty is akin to a gift that keeps on giving. Just when it appears to be dormant, another member of the extended family reveals a new role. Lou Doillon, daughter of Jane Birkin and film director Jacques Doillon, is best known as a model and actress. Last September her debut album, Places, was released in France and its belated arrival over here is sure to make a few waves. Hopefully not because of who she is, but due to it being first-rate.With Places, Doillon is some way ahead of half-sister Charlotte Gainsbourg, whose albums are written by others. All the songs are Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Art Ensemble of Chicago: A Jackson in Your House/Message to Our Folks/Reese and the Smooth OnesA New Orleans brass band plays a death march. What sounds like a saucepan is tapped steadily. The music suddenly dives into swing. A bicycle horn parps. A group of muttering voices are agitated. Reed instruments parp like angry parrots. Someone grunts and hollers. A trumpet signals a fanfare. Bells tinkle. Sonny Rollins appears to wander in and out. So does Ornette Coleman. The whole is arrhythmic, but bedded by percussion. Melodies come and go in the same piece, but are never repeated.The Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Frank Turner has been setting his life to music ever since he re-emerged as a heart-on-the-sleeve singer-songwriter type some time in 2005, and so it’s hard to avoid the temptation to play therapist when considering his most personal collection of songs to date. Tape Deck Heart, his fifth album since then, is more love and loss than love and ire.It’s been billed as a breakup album so it’s not surprising that loss of the romantic kind features right from the opening track. On first listen, “Recovery” comes across as upbeat indie-rock-by-numbers but its jaunty chorus and effervescent wordplay Read more ...
Russ Coffey
On the cover of Bye Bye 17, Har Mar Superstar – the creation of musician Sean Tillman – is still wearing his infamous underpants. Inside, however, his music has moved on. By trading Har Mar's former Prince stylings for influences ranging from Sam Cooke to Curtis Mayfield, Tillman has found a whole new sound palette to play with. And he's getting completely stuck in.This change of direction makes for a riotously entertaining listen, and a very satisfying one too. Behind Tillman’s personas – he also performs as Sean Na Na and with the “alternative supergroup” Gayngs – there has always been Read more ...
Graham Fuller
British film noir followed two courses in the 1980s. Whereas the American neo-noir revival of the 1970s prompted such contemporary crime thrillers as The Long Good Friday, Mona Lisa, and Stormy Monday, three superior BBC drama serials, though also neo-noirs, drew more rigorously on Hollywood’s classic noir era.Troy Kennedy Martin’s Edge of Darkness (1985) and Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective (1986) were acknowledged as masterpieces. Howard Brenton’s Dead Head (1986) was admired but not lauded to the same extent. The red tops’ predictable reaction to a sex scene that showed the woman Read more ...