CDs/DVDs
Kieron Tyler
“If shit were music, you’d be a brass band”. Bish Bosch is no easy ride and that lyric, from its 22-minute centrepiece “SDSS1416+13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter)", is typically abstruse, emblematically challenging. Although the album has clear themes and becomes less impenetrable the more it is lived with, it’s never going to achieve the cosy familiarity that future cult items so often exude on early passes. If anything, Bish Bosch is an anti-cult album, one that seeks to jar, disorient and remain inscrutable.Nonetheless, emotional connections can be made. There is an anger to Bish Bosch. Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Paul Geissinger, AKA Starkey, is a musicians’ musician who has turned to the gnarly side. Classically trained from an early age in piano, woodwind and later, prophetically, bass guitar, he’s become known, following in fellow Philadelphian Diplo’s footsteps, as the American who dabbles impressively in raw British styles such as dubstep and grime. Having built a reputation with “street bass” parties in his hometown and showcased his production skills on albums and EPs for the cutting edge UK labels Planet Mu and Ninja Tune, he’s since been employed by Tinie Tempah to add crunchiness to his Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
What if your childhood teddy bear came to life and never went away? This unlikely premise (explained by Patrick Stewart no less) establishes the opening moments of one of the most unlikely breakout comedies of 2012. Ted, starring Mark Wahlberg, Mila Kunis and Seth (Family Guy) MacFarlane as the voice of Ted himself, is a brilliant shining example of stupid comedy made smart.As a child, John Bennett (Wahlberg) was never popular. He was so unwelcome that even the victims of bullies told him to go away while they were being beaten up. But Bennett's dream of a life long buddy becomes a reality Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Sometimes as a critic one cannot help pre-judging an album however hard one tries not to. I expected the worst of this all-star jamboree bag from TV's most haphazard interviewer, which mixes some Hootenanny turns with new recordings of old favourites by some of music's blandest and/or most irritating personalities. Yet apart from a few excruciating exceptions this is not a bad something-for-all album to stick on when the in-laws pitch up on Boxing Day.Best of the crop by a fair lick is the Hootenanny 2006-era duet of Amy Winehouse and Paul Weller on "Don't Go to Strangers". Winehouse's vocal Read more ...
theartsdesk
10cc: TenologyKieron Tyler10cc occupied a strange place. Balancing cleverness and humour, pop and the musically complex with an archness that was never far, they nonetheless managed to fix themselves, limpet-like, to charts. As this, their first box set, amply makes clear, they were about more than the singles and well-known albums like The Original Soundtrack. The four CDs and DVD reveal 10cc as mad scientists whose inventions were more disciplined than the complex stew of ingredients would suggest.Tenology – geddit: a typically 10cc-ish pun on phrenological head on the cover – Read more ...
howard.male
It might have looked good on paper; the best of Bryan Ferry revisited in a 1920s swing jazz style. But in practice, rather than reveal previously unrecognised properties of some of the most haunting and original pop/rock songs of the late 20th century, subtracting the vocals and placing them in an early 20th century context simply eviscerates them of their uniqueness and power.For example, the deliciously awkward Dada pop of “Do the Strand” bounces merrily along like the needle on the old wax 78rpm record it’s seeking to emulate, but fails to capture anything of the original’s arch cool Read more ...
peter.quinn
14 Grammy Awards, over 30 million albums sold, immortalised in song by Bob Dylan. It's hard to believe that Girl On Fire is only Alicia Keys's fifth studio album, such is the extent of her success. The singer-songwriter's previous release, The Element of Freedom, successfully mined the juxtaposition of powerful beats and understated vocals. And, following the solo piano amuse-bouche of “De Novo Adagio”, Girl On Fire initially looks set to deliver more of the same.The slow burner “Brand New Me”, the futuristic, cut-up beats and wobbly analogue synths of “When It's All Over”, the warm ambient Read more ...
emma.simmonds
In Magic Mike the Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh turns his camera on the “cock-rocking kings of Tampa”, and the result is one of the most eye-wateringly entertaining and surprisingly stylish movies of the year. With more thrust than a jumbo jet and more packages than the Royal Mail will handle this Christmas, thank God they didn’t release it in 3D.Channing Tatum plays Magic Mike, one of the dancers at the Xquisite Strip Club in Tampa, Florida. His colleagues include the extraordinarily monikered Big Dick Richie (True Blood’s man mountain Joe Manganiello), with the club owned and run Read more ...
graeme.thomson
English singer-songwriter Steve Adey has taken six years to follow up his excellent debut album, All Things Real, and at first it’s hard to tell why. These 10 songs, simply constructed, are executed without any great fuss or ornament, but slowly their sense of depth and unhurried devotion to quality reveals itself. The album is aptly named. Adey doesn't do party music. “Are we laughing?” is the question posed during the second song, “Laughing”. Not on Adey’s watch, we’re not. Recorded in a 19th-century Edinburgh church, this is relentlessly downbeat midnight music. When a (terrific) Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
For those wont to say “that’s well dark,” at the slightest hint of edgy content, here is true darkness. The third album by London alt-folk oddballs David Cronenberg’s Wife is stewed in pitch-black lyrical themes and revels in dragging its listeners to truly uncomfortable places. If this album had been made by an artist with a higher profile, I suspect it would have been greeted by a chorus of disapproving voices from every side of the ideological spectrum.Musically, the four-piece plough a furrow not dissimilar to The Fall or LIARS, but only if both had joined forces to create a new and Read more ...
Laura Silverman
Michael Palin's adventures in period drama as star and co-writer, with director Tristram Powell, pass a pleasant if forgettable hour and a half. The main thread – repressed Englishman loosens up abroad – links other familiar elements: the closeted life of Oxford academics; mild-mannered English types; and audacious, wealthy Americans. Perhaps the actor can be forgiven: the story is based loosely on his great-grandfather's diaries.The younger Palin is predictably strong as Francis Ashby, the reserved Oxford don “without moral blemish”. Hiking in the Swiss Alps, Ashby relaxes enough to take Read more ...
Jasper Rees
No one would have believed in the last years of the 1970s that human taste was for concept double albums based on novels by HG Wells about invading Martians. No one could have dreamed that the era which spawned shouty gobshites in skinny trousers would also find house room for the alien union between late Victorian science fiction and pompous orchestral pop. Yet, across the gulf of time we can confirm that this did indeed happen. And much as they did in the flash-forward conclusion to the original album, the Martians are invading all over again.Jeff Wayne’s The War of the Worlds, many of a Read more ...