CDs/DVDs
peter.quinn
Possessing one of the most recognisable sounds in jazz, US trio The Bad Plus don’t so much subvert genre as wrap it up in a little parcel and put an incendiary device under it. Jazz, rock, pop, country and classical all get thrown into their inimitable blender, as typified by album opener “Pound for Pound”, which traces a musical journey from Satie-like simplicity to an all-out rhapsodic assault on the senses.“Seven Minute Mind” mines the trio’s characteristic embracing of minimalism, with piano and bass pounding out an aggressive, slightly crazed, ostinato before pianist Ethan Iverson peels Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The songs are instantly recognisable. Bacharach & David’s “Don’t Make Me Over” “There's Always Something There to Remind me”, “I Say a Little Prayer” and “Make it Easy on Yourself” will always be evocative. So will Dionne Warwick’s voice, though it’s huskier these days. Now sits the old alongside a brace of new songs, two by Burt Bacharach and one with a lyric by Hal David, the last he wrote.Another of the 50th anniversaries washing up right now was the impetus for Now. In this case, it’s been a half-century since the release of Warwick’s first single, “Don’t Make Me Over”. It must have Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
It’s not often you get a sumptuous spectacle like Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows. Then again, it's not often 200-year-old vampire Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp) returns to his brooding family mansion in Maine. Burton’s love of style over content transformed America's favourite horror soap of the 60s into a gem-like retro horror comedy that combines just the right hair with just the right wardrobe in just the right car. Storywise, though, it's a glossy mess soundtracked with pop hits from the 1970s (sticklers will note The Carpenters' "Top of the World" is from the wrong year)The cast is Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Poetry has a habit of colliding with rock'n'roll. Mick Jagger read some Shelley when the Stones played in Hyde Park in 1969. John Cooper Clarke's speedball delivery lit up the late Seventies and helped to inspire comedy poet John Hegley and the ranting punk scene of the Eighties. Lest we forget there was also the cod-Byronic Murray Lachlan Young who, legend has it, signed to EMI for a million-pound advance in 1996, but if he did he hardly shifted the units to justify the cheque. Poetry and rock can clearly be cosy bedfellows, but unmitigated successes are rarer than rhymes for the word " Read more ...
peter.quinn
Surprising transitions, unusual segues, a myriad of I-wasn't-expecting-that moments. Saluting some of the iconic figures in Caribbean history and paying tribute to the tentacular reach of its culture, with House of Legends Courtney Pine has delivered one of the finest albums in his already well-stuffed discography.While his previous album Europa focused on the woody timbre of the bass clarinet, his fifteenth studio album features the plangent tones of the soprano sax exclusively, heard at the outset in a virtuosic flourish that announces a heart-wrenching ballad composed in memory of Stephen Read more ...
theartsdesk
John Carpenter: Halloween II/Halloween IIIKieron TylerPeople celebrate Halloween in different ways, but the arrival of these reissues of the soundtrack music to two John Carpenter horror films is enough to put pumpkins, cut-out bats and capes in the shade. Both are landmarks in using electronic music for cinema, and both are a great, spooky listens. Even when divorced from the imagery.Carpenter had already worked with composer Alan Howarth on the music for Escape From New York (1978) and the pair reunited in 1981 to create a score for Halloween II. Howarth built the new music around Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Leona Lewis has a whole new look: all mouse-brown hair, sullen expression and the oddest-looking facial jewellery since Kate Nash misappropriated the bindi in the video she made to accompany “Underestimate The Girl”. It really doesn’t suit her.Forgive me. I too find it pretty disrespectful when writers comment on an artist’s appearance before they start to consider what a work sounds like. But as I listened to Glassheart, the third album from one-time X Factor winner and ridiculously successful Lewis, it was the artwork I kept coming back to. The head-and-shoulder shot makes her look washed- Read more ...
graham.rickson
Tony Palmer’s first film was originally slated to be directed by Humphrey Burton. Palmer stepped up at short notice, quickly gaining the confidence of Britten and Peter Pears – neither of whom, it later transpired, really wanted to be filmed at all, until Palmer’s appointment allowed them to have a far greater say in the production. You can sense the director's giddy excitement at being given so much access to a figure he clearly worshipped.Britten’s reputation, musically and personally, took a bit of a dip in the decades following his death in 1976 – allegations about his professional and Read more ...
bruce.dessau
To paraphrase Shakespeare, when albums featuring strident, post-feminist "I am woman hear me roar" naked cover sleeves come, they come not in single spies but in battalions. I'm not so sure about the motives of Christina Aguilera, but the recent album imagery from Martha Wainwright and Natasha Khan aka Bat for Lashes has offered an opportunity for prodigiously talented, modern singer/songwriters to lay themselves bare, literally as well as emotionally.Khan cites Patti Smith's early uncompromising incarnation, famously captured by Robert Mapplethorpe, as an inspiration. One just wishes there Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Donald Fagen's fourth solo album arrives 30 years after his first one, The Nightfly, though there can be no doubting that it's the work of the same artist. The quizzical chord sequences, supple instrumental interplay and teasingly cryptic lyrics will be instantly familiar to students of his work, and indeed of the later days of Steely Dan.Fagen and his partner Walter Becker have successfully rejuvenated the Steely Dan legacy by assembling a touring version of the group bristling with hyper-capable musical gunslingers, and Fagen has used several of them here, notably guitarist Jon Herington, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s little beauty of any conventional kind in this tale of the hidden queer - "gay" would have associations of a very different world - life of South African patriarch François (Deon Lotz) imploding. He falls for Christian (Charlie Keegan), the 20-something son of an old friend, with violent and wrenching consequences: the closet door may be opening, but the cracks are in a deeply repressed family life.An opening wedding shows François in all his provincial Bloemfontein status, a proud father giving away his daughter, the prosperous owner of a timber yard, a figure in the local Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A lot has blown in since the last Scandinavian round-up. The most recent releases sifted here include singer-songwriter intimacy, various forms of electropop, several shades of jazz experimenta, joyous dance-pop and some distinctly non-Scandinavian flavours. High points are many. Satisfaction is a certainty.On their last album, 2010’s Magic Chairs, Danish moodists Efterklang gently embraced a more direct way of presenting their songwriting. Up to that point, their sepulchral melodies had intertwined with instrumentation that merged glitchiness with the organic. Magic Chairs smoothed the edges Read more ...