CDs/DVDs
Kieron Tyler
“Cut Copy me”, the opening track of Petula Clark’s first British studio album in six years, is beautiful. It could have been created by Saint Etienne at their most melancholy. Her voice almost a whisper, it’s the sound of shadows and uncertainty even with what sounds like a light touch of autotune. The title track follows. Similarly assured, it’s sparse and centred around a rippling piano. Then a by-rote, in-the-shadow-of-Adele version of Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy" breaks the spell.Accompanying “Crazy” are versions of “Imagine”, “Love me Tender”, Gershwin’s “He Loves and She Loves” and a Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Having excitedly put The Messenger on I thought my iPod was playing tricks and it had unearthed a previously unshuffled gem from Miles Kane. The opening track, "The Right Thing Right", is packed to the gills with the kind of well-coiffed mod-soul thwack that has helped Kane to make his mark. It's good, but it's terribly, terribly safe. If Marr wants to stop David Cameron listening to his new music as well as stop him from listening to The Smiths, as has been suggested in the press, he's going to have to come up with something less conservative than this.As it happens, The Messenger – Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Walter Salles was an obvious choice to direct the movie of Jack Kerouac’s roman à clef about his peripatetic life in 1947-50 and his worship of the dynamically dissolute Neal Cassady (Garrett Hedlund as Dean Moriarty). Not only did the Brazilian filmmaker have the advantage of being able to bring an outsider's perspective to the rusty Beat canon, but his handling of Central Station and The Motorcycle Diaries had revealed his knack for harnessing topographic images to the emotional experiences of traveling companions. Atmospherically photographed by Éric Gaultier, the vistas don Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Dido Armstrong’s first two albums are at numbers 19 and 29 in the UK’s all time best-sellers. The 41-year-old singer became an emblem of post-millennial dinner parties, of Bridget Jones-era singleton moping, and of post-electronica easy listening. Her success was massive but with it she became an easy target, mainly because she emanates Mogadon melancholy without emotional depth.OK I admit I loathe everything she put her hand to although I confess a soft spot for the chorus of “White Flag” – “I will go down with this ship/I won’t put my hands up and surrender/There will be no white flag upon Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Currently finishing off the NME Awards Tour with Django Django and Miles Kane, this lot seem about as New Musical Express as it gets. Which is to say that, from a cynics perspective, their NME championing is almost off-putting. Given the recent history of such promotions, they were liable to be yet another retrogressive indie unit whose guitar sound is indiscernible from their peers or, indeed, multiple bands of the last two decades. And it’s true, the music on 180, named after the Lambeth venue where they had a residency, could have been made at any point between now and 1980, perhaps Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Jacques Audiard's follow-up to A Prophet (2009) is an off-centre but haunting piece derived from short stories by Canadian writer Craig Davidson. Marion Cotillard is Stéphanie, whom we first meet outside a nightclub on the Côte d'Azur where she has been involved in a drunken fracas. She's rescued by Ali (Belgium's Matthias Schoenaerts, from Bullhead), a bouncer, ex-kickboxer and petty criminal who's come to the coast with his young son Sam in search of some sort of existential last chance. He tells her she looks like a whore. She thinks he's a lunkheaded schmuck.It's unexpected Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It’s not much of a surprise that My Bloody Valentine have eventually followed up 1991’s Loveless. They’ve been playing live with increasing regularity, with the same line-up as back then. The way the new album has arrived – with no warning via a new website – isn't so surprising either. Despite the widespread co-opting of their sonic template, what is surprising is how much m b v sounds like My Bloody Valentine.Being confronted with the real thing is a jolt, putting the pretenders in the shade. m b v is as beautifully opaque and seductive as Loveless, sounding like nothing other than Kevin Read more ...
mark.kidel
Anaïs Mitchell is one of America’s leading new folk singers, a protégée of Ani di Franco. She is a poet steeped in the archetypes of Greek mythology, old stories that she has evoked in a contemporary setting, not least in her re-telling of the Orpheus myth, Hadestown.It is hardly surprising then that her latest album, made with Jefferson Hamer, should tap into the mother of all British American sources, the Child Ballads, a compendium of Scottish and English ballads, brought together in the 19th century by Francis James Child. These tales of love, death and sorcery are cousins of the Greek Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Family: Once Upon a TimeFamily were always difficult to place. This lavish box set doesn’t make getting a handle on them any easier. They were as idiosyncratic as Jethro Tull and, in Roger Chapman, had a vocalist as offbeat as Joe Cocker. Not that they sounded like either, more that their DNA was as sharp-edged as both. The Leicester-born band had roots in soul-pop outfit The Farinas and the psychedelic underground embraced them – they were integral to the 1969 novel Groupie, a lid-lifting, supposedly fictional, exposé of rock’s seamier side. Despite these leg-ups and their popularity, they Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Skyfall is the rarest of Bond films, dividing critics and wowing doubters with extraordinary cinematography and memorable theme tune. Nominated for five Oscars and eight BAFTAS (and winning two), it is the first Bond film to earn more than £1 billion at the global box office.People who may not see another film at the cinema for years will make an effort to see Bond, and the challenge to Mendes and Eon Productions was how to refresh a spy story for the 23rd time. Effectively a Bond reboot without rebooting the lead actor, director Sam Mendes took an intricate script by Bond regulars Neal Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
In theory, it’s close to impossible to achieve some semblance of mainstream success without being decried as a sellout by at least a proportion of your fanbase. Yet I don’t think there was a Scottish indie music fan who greeted this week's news that Frightened Rabbit had scored a Top 10 chart place for their major-label debut without a mixture of pride and delight.It helps of course that on Pedestrian Verse, Selkirk’s most famous sons have stripped back the slight gloss of over-production that threatened to overwhelm 2010’s The Winter of Mixed Drinks. This fourth album sees Scott Hutchison’s Read more ...
howard.male
With BBC Four currently mourning the passing of the LP, it’s encouraging that some artists still like to confine themselves to the format’s time limitations and its implicit requirement that the songs etched into its silky surface should be connected by some kind of theme or mood.Nick Cave is one such artist, never more so that with this suite of nine darkly warm numbers that have been nurtured by him and his long-standing and (here anyway) remarkably restrained band. The Bad Seeds have always understood that the needs of the song outweigh the needs of individual musicians to do their thang, Read more ...