CDs/DVDs
Jasper Rees
It’s been a fallow few years in the long recording life of Van Morrison. The last release was his highest charting release in the US, but that was four years ago. His 34th studio album finds him back on the Blue Note label, where he last recorded What’s Wrong With This Picture in 2003. Can you tell? The albums may come, the labels go, but in the end Van is Van and this set of a dozen songs confirms mostly to the sound Morrison has been turning out since the mysticism first got plush on the likes of Beautiful Vision and Poetic Champions Compose. His own breathy sax, the ambling bass, the Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Sugaring season refers to the time of year when maple trees are "tapped", gallons of sap collected and boiled down to make the sweet syrup that goes so well with pancakes. The words trip off the tongue; conjure images of homeliness and those early autumnal sunsets that are by far the prettiest. As titles go it would have been hard to find one more apt for Beth Orton's first release since 2006's Comfort of Strangers; packed itself with pretty moments and the comforts of home.But before the sugar comes that sap, and the Norfolk-born songwriter's six years away have been as tumultuous. Single Read more ...
peter.quinn
Ivo Neame is not only one of the finest multi-instrumentalists, composers and arrangers of his generation. Given that the Royal Academy of Music graduate also performs with Phronesis, MOBO award winners Kairos 4tet, Fringe Magnetic and Marius Neset's Golden Xplosion, as well as lead his own regular quintet, his time-management skills are clearly nonpareil too.Neame's 2007 debut Swirls & Eddies, scored for the humble piano trio, was followed in 2009 by his quartet album Caught in the Light of Day. With Yatra, Neame really steps things up a gear, luxuriating in the possibilities offered by Read more ...
geoff brown
Five million dollars: in the 1940s that was enough profit to make this Technicolor melodrama 20th Century Fox’s biggest box-office hit of the decade. Reaching cinemas in January 1946 on the heels of World War Two, John M. Stahl’s film didn’t offer audiences the conventional home comforts. Derived from a best-selling novel by Ben Ames Williams, Leave Her to Heaven tells a crazed story of obsessive jealousy, of a family and marriage wracked by sudden death, a violent abortion, and arsenic poisoning, all perpetrated by its scheming heroine – a beautiful shoulder-padded basilisk played with Read more ...
graeme.thomson
There’s nothing much wrong with Mumford & Sons on paper. Personally, I couldn’t care less where they went to school. I choose to ignore the fact that their head boy – sorry, lead singer – looks like a Cameron clone auditioning for a part in All Creatures Great and Small. We might even forgive Marcus Mumford his outrageous good fortune in marrying Carey Mulligan. These are factors that, to paraphrase Malkovich-as-Valmont in Dangerous Liaisons, lie entirely beyond their control. In any case, bands don’t make music on paper. Best to concentrate on the noise.So that's what we do and this is Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The three-act drama has an established formula: setup, confrontation, resolution. This first part is rarely noted for its thrilling highs and gasping lows - tension builds organically as characters and themes are introduced before that first dramatic turning point.Contemplating ¡Uno!, the appropriately-named first of three albums Green Day are set to release at six-weekly intervals going into 2013, I am reminded of this structure and wonder whether in making this album something of an anti-climax the California punk veterans know exactly what they are doing. It wouldn’t be the first time they Read more ...
theartsdesk
R.E.M.: Document 25th Anniversary EditionKieron TylerAlthough the band themselves have not lasted out the 25 years since the release of their fifth album Document, R.E.M. haven’t dropped off the face of the earth. The memory will live, fed by reissues. Document built on the more straightforward approach of its predecessor, Lifes Rich Pageant, and was issued in the wake of their breakthrough hit “The One I Love”. A re-promoted “It’s the End of the World as we Know it (and I Feel Fine)” gave them another hit in early 1988. Both singles were included on the album. At this point R.E.M. were Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Right, never mind the rest - this is it! Very occasionally electronic dance music takes a bunch of steroids and pulps all opposition. With Stunt Rhythms Amon Tobin, a longterm Ninja Tune artist from Brazil who’s dabbled in everything from filmic sampledelica to jazzy drum & bass, crashes out of the traps wielding a sonic lump hammer he hefts with suppleness and a ballistic funk.One of the highlights of Ninja Tune’s 20th-anniversary boxset, XX, a couple of years back was Two Fingers’ “Fools Rhythm”, here present in even sturdier form. It was and is a dubstep-marinated breakbeat hoover Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Begun in 1943 and released in 1945, Les Enfants du paradis, which unfolds in two acts – the first frantic, the second slow – in Paris’s theatre quarter in the 1820s and ’30s, is regarded as the crowning glory of director Marcel Carné and screenwriter Jacques Prévert’s fertile partnership.It has traditionally topped French polls of the country’s greatest films, but it cannot be said to match Jean Renoir’s La Grande illusion and La Règle de jeu or Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante for the depth of their humanism. Le Quai des brumes and Le Jour se lève, Carné and Prévert’s gloomy, existential poetic Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s been 27 years since Suzanne Vega began pressing her almost fey coffee-shop songbook on a receptive global audience. The albums came out at a measured lick – seven by 2007 - each making a successively smaller impression on the charts. Then two years ago she went back and embarked on Close-Up, a four-album project to rethink her entire back catalogue. On each release she partitioned the songs along thematic lines. The first volume dealt with love, the second people and places, the third something called “states of being” and with Volume Four she rounds off the project with Songs of Family Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Unlike the heavy weather and hard lives of British folk songs, Central Europeans seem more concerned with imagination. Or maybe it's just that with their gypsy violins and heaving accordions everything sounds like it’s about Hänsel and Gretel forests. Southampton-based Anja McCloskey lived in Germany until she was 20, and it shows. Her debut, An Estimation, combines elements of The Mummers, The Tiger Lillies and Spiro with a hint of Berlin cabaret in the Thirties.But despite playing the record solidly for a week I can't say I’m much closer to knowing what the songs are actually about. One Read more ...
Sarah Kent
It's a brave director who not only plays herself but also sings and dances in a story based on real events. After obsessively cleaning her table, Sally Potter (Orlando) sits down to write the screenplay for a film called Rage. Inspiration comes in visual flashes that, filmed in vivid colour, tell the story of three supermodels mysteriously murdered during fashion shoots in Paris. But the project is doomed because Potter refuses to make the compromises suggested by her backers.Meanwhile, though, she has taken up dancing. Wandering into a Paris theatre she is entranced by Argentinian tango Read more ...