CDs/DVDs
Russ Coffey
Along with bands like Belle and Sebastian and The Beta Band, Yo La Tengo represent a kind of lo-fi vibe indie-aficionados can get a little smug about. To be found in the section marked “cult", they have been going forever, never broken into the mainstream, and exude an effortless superiority. YLT's cred, however, doesn’t always guarantee a thumbs-up. Not from me anyway. Previously I've gone both ways on them.It’s hard to argue with Fade, however, their thirteenth studio album. This is, quite simply, a very pretty record. Gone are the unnecessary jazz diversions or rummaging through blues and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Deep Forest have sold in the region of 10 million albums. That’s a shocker, isn’t it? Then again we’ve probably all heard them at some point, burbling away in an incense-saturated shop selling mass-imported batiks, carvings, hammocks and knickknacks from Thailand. And anyone who’s undergone massage at their local tie-dye emporium will undoubtedly have been subjected to them. Deep Forest are anonymous but inescapable.There used to be two of them until 2005 but, nowadays, Deep Forest consists solely of French recording studio hippy Eric Mouquet. Twenty years ago they broke into the then new Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Contemporary homages to the silent age are tuppence are dozen, but none are quite as eccentric as Miguel Gomes’s Tabu. One of last year’s oddball gems, it joins The Artist and Hugo in sending a love letter to cinema’s formative geniuses and yet sets its swooningly romantic silent section in a Portuguese colony of Africa in the turbulent early 1960s. Its starcrossed protagonists have a scene of frank lovemaking, and one of the silent stars is a baby crocodile.Tabu’s two segments – which take the names of Paradise Lost and Paradise – are the story’s effect and cause. The first is set in wintry Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The carillon is the world’s heaviest musical instrument. It consists of a collection of bells, usually played via a keyboard. There’s one in Oslo’s town hall, many tons of bronze whose sound reverberates daily across the Norwegian capital. Hendrik Weber – AKA Pantha du Prince - is a German techno DJ-producer. He’s at the arty, modern-classical end of the spectrum, as interested in Steve Reich as Carl Craig. Hearing Oslo’s carillon he was inspired to make it the centrepiece of his fourth album. Such an idea could have bred a chin-stroking journey into noodling ambience but Weber instead nails Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Broadcast: Berberian Sound Studio Original SoundtrackMore than the soundtrack to one of last year's most impactful films, the release of the music for Berberian Sound Studio is a tribute to the memory of Trish Keenan. With her Broadcast partner James Cargill, Keenan had begun working on Peter Strickland’s film before her death in January 2011. Cargill found sound files of her voice on her computer and began from there – a task that must have been both eerie and poignant.Broadcast had long drawn inspiration from Italian soundtrack music and their 2009 album collaboration with The Focus Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Up to this point it’s all gone swimmingly for Manchester-based quartet Everything Everything. Their debut album Man Alive charted high in the summer of 2010, but follow-up Arc is the test of whether they’re in for the long haul. Although the answer is largely in the hands of their strong fan base, the unfocused Arc suggests the band themselves aren’t sure of who they are.It’s difficult to stand still while paddling furiously, but that’s what Arc sounds like – a band with a million-and-one ideas and no overriding sense of unity. Not only does it fail to take them beyond Man Alive, it dilutes Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Thirty year old London harpist Serafina Steer goes admirably her own way. Her sound is often sparse and acoustic, but never predictably so, and lyrically she’s off-piste, gambolling carefree from the opaque galactic ruminations of “Alien Invasion” to a clear-eyed glance at nude physicality in “Skinny Dipping”. The song “Island Odyssey”, for instance, appears initially to be a soppy love ballad - “I am a flower/You are a flower” etc – but then suddenly veers wildly into the undergrowth with the line “They killed your pigs and drank your wine”, and the listener is knocked off kilter, wakes up, Read more ...
geoff brown
René Clément? Who he? Sixty years ago the question didn’t need to be asked: 1952 was the year of his greatest triumph, Forbidden Games (Jeux interdits), one of four titles being issued separately by StudioCanal to mark his centenary. A quick glance at The Deadly Trap (1971), a tension-free thriller, with Faye Dunaway and Frank Langella all at sea, will partly explain why his reputation faded. Poor material aside, Clément was also a victim of bad timing. Rising to fame just before the New Wave hit, he felt himself in his own eyes to be a New Wave precursor. To Godard, Truffaut and company Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The world goes apeshit when the Stones manage to drag themselves out for a few gigs after half a decade or so of indolence, but Neil Young rightly gets a bit prickly when people accuse him of making a "comeback". He tends to snarl that "he's never been away."And he's right. Though he's not far short of 70, Young keeps banging out albums which are at least intermittently impressive (eg Fork in the Road, Living With War, Le Noise), and this year the cantankerous old North Ontarian has been particularly productive. There's been Jonathan Demme's on-the-road film Neil Young Journeys, a box set Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Quite reasonably, many of 2012’s year-end reviews focused on the triple celebrations of the Jubilee, Olympics, and Royal pregnancy. For many, the year was quite different. In February, on Blues Funeral, Mark Lanegan’s end-of-the-world vocals presaged apocalyptic weather, war and death. It felt like an Old Testament prophecy being filtered through a Seattle drug addict. Which it virtually was.This was the Mark Lanegan Band’s first album in eight years. After 2004’s Bubblegum, Lanegan had concentrated on a series of collaborations, most notably with yang-to-his-ying, Isobel Campbell. With Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
By declaring that You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet wasn’t his final film, the 89-year-old Alain Resnais might have been acknowledging his lack of a fixed relationship with time and memory, his continual exploration of their interchangeabilty. In his mind, final could mean anything at any given moment. Anyone could be forgiven for thinking he might pack it in and this would become his last. His next film is already in production.The Pirandello-esque You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet (Vous n’avez encore rien vu) is a deliberately paced, deliberately choreographed and deliberately stilted exercise. It’s slow Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
This is both a bang up-to-the-minute album, but also a throwback to the glory days of Ethiopian jazz in the late 1960s and 1970s - an era excavated with loving care over the last 15 years by Francis Falceto’s Éthiopiques series (now up to 27 releases). That series created enormous interest in Europe and the States, reviving the careers of some its leading proponents like Mulatu Astatke and Mahmoud Ahmed, and in recent years has resulted in some fabulous new music from the likes of The Heliocentrics, Imperial Tiger Orchestra, The Ex and Dub Colossus, in whose ranks pianist Samuel Yirga could Read more ...