CDs/DVDs
james.woodall
Elles promises much. Małgorzata Szumowska, from Poland, is an engaged, serious film maker. 33 Scenes from Life (2008), which won a Locarno special prize, had an edgy, bohemian authenticity to it, and looked with wry east European melancholy at the darker side of real life. It might be thought that Polish edginess and French sharpness combined with beauty – in the form of Juliette Binoche – would be a winning ticket. Yet with Szumowska’s translation to Paris something’s gone wrong.First screened at Toronto last year and then Berlin earlier this, with a star of Binoche’s sureness Elles might Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Stumbling across the perfect pop hit must be its own kind of curse. It’s been two and a half years since Owl City’s “Fireflies” shot its way into the charts, seemingly from nowhere. With its lush, quirky melodies and wistful, lovelorn lyrics, Adam Young’s quirky electronic project seemed almost to have been custom-built by a crack team of pop scientists to appeal to dreamy girls like me. “Fireflies” used to play on a loop at the store where I was working at the time; Young’s vocals and programming a dead ringer for Ben Gibbard’s work with The Postal Service - a band whose one album I loved to Read more ...
joe.muggs
Although the Eighties revival has now been going on for longer than the actual Eighties, it shows no sign of abating – to the point where maybe it would be more sensible to refer to it as a tradition or a palette of techniques rather than than considering it as retro at all. However you see it, Jessie Ware and her production team do it with style.Ware was initially best known for her collaborations with UK electronic artists like Joker and SBTRKT, and producers Dave Okumu of The Invisible and Julio Bashmore normally deal in post-Radiohead experimentalism and classic house music respectively, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although the collaboration between Jane Arden and Jack Bond was truly two-way, their films were wholly driven by a female perspective. They also evolved from Arden’s explorations into the nature of self and how external forces affect that. Yet instead of being a form of therapy, the Arden-Bond films are magical journeys blurring the boundary between the real and unreal.Separation (1967) has some mod-ish trappings: music by Procul Harum, visuals from light-show artist Mark Boyle and clothing from Ossie Clark. The character Jane (Arden herself) drifts through a world where she interacts with a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Ry Cooder is an unpredictable quantity. He’s a prickly, opinionated old coot who doesn’t seem the type to pass a night in the pub with. He’d probably not get your jokes and moan about the Rolling Stones nicking his songs. His musical output is equally tricksy. For every fab film soundtrack (Paris, Texas, Southern Comfort, The Long Riders) or Buena Vista Social Club, there’s some less loveable tangential whim, such as his Buddy concept album, about a cat and a toad.However, there’s little doubt Keith Richards did find a golden seam of new songwriting via Cooder in the early Seventies, or that Read more ...
mark.kidel
James Yorkston, the very able singer-songwriter from Fife, is now on his fifth album for Domino. This comes hot on the heels of the reissue of his first and excellent release, Moving Up Country, which established him as one of the most talented artists in the crowded field of nu-folkies, musicians who have drawn inspiration from British folk traditions but worked the forms up in an imaginative and risk-taking way. James Yorkston’s well-crafted songs, swathed in atmospheric strings, and tinged with melancholy and mystery, are never far from “this strange country, with its strange old gods Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Kinks: The Kinks at the BBCKieron Tyler“Meet a group that recently came from nowhere to the top of the hit parade. A rhythm and blues outfit with long, shoulder-length hair and the strange name of The Kinks.” With that, Brian Matthew introduced The Kinks to BBC listeners on 19 September 1964. Two months later, Matthew declares the band “members of the shaggy set”. On being asked why they grow their hair so long, Ray Davies says that “girls go for it”. His brother Dave offers that girls are going kinky.Almost 50 years on, these off-the-cuff remarks are amongst the wealth of fabulous Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Electronic dance music is notorious for its multiple sub-genres and niche categorizations. One of the more obscure is a style known as "dark ambient" (or "darkwave"). Its micro-interest status is unsurprising since it combines lethargic downtempo with unsettling moodiness, hence it’s best suited to depressed darkened Winter bedrooms and bleak art-film soundtracks. That said, the best of it has a modern classical flourish that can be sonically exciting.Before the term “dark ambient” existed, Dead Can Dance were making it and, along the way, consolidating the reputation of 4AD Records. In the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Britain’s New Towns – constructed to address post-World War II housing shortages – were meant to be places of dreams. Modern amenities abounded. The clean lines of post-Le Corbusier architecture screamed “this is the future”. Yet there was no sense of community, more a sense of alienation for residents. That wasn’t an issue for on-message government agency the Central Office of Information, whose 1974 film New Towns painted them as places of wonder. Retitled A Dark Social Template, this ad for the miracles of concrete, bathrooms and a bank on your doorstep has been recast with a new Read more ...
howard.male
The North African desert blues, as played by Tuareg musicians like Tinariwen, may well be the most popular kind of “world music” amongst mainstream rock fans since South African township jive post-Paul Simon’s Graceland. However, this presents a problem in that it’s intrinsically a rather limited form and so there’s a risk that its audience may soon grow tired of those circling, intertwining guitars, that mid-tempo lope and those understated almost-spoken vocals that make up a typical song. So does this debut solo album from the one-time Etran Finatawa member bring anything new to the Tuareg Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Considering how over-stuffed Brooklyn is with music, south London’s Dignan Porch being issued by that locale’s super-hip Captured Tracks imprint smacks of coals to Newcastle. But they fit in a treat, sharing an outlook with Brooklynites Crystal Stilts and Frankie Rose, or label mates Wild Nothing and Holograms (who are Swedish). What this means is that Dignan Porch have taken a raft of Eighties indie rock - when it meant independent – influences from the pre-Grunge era, whizzed them up together to remake them afresh.The Chills, first album Dinosaur (before they added the Jr.), Sonic Youth ( Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Those familiar with Italian director Paolo Sorrentino’s elegant political feature Il Divo (2008), or perhaps the beautiful, cynical The Consequences of Love (2004) may find themselves struck (pleasantly) dumb by the direction of his latest. Inspired by Lynch’s The Straight Story, This Must Be the Place takes its name from the Talking Heads track (with David Byrne providing original songs and popping up for a cameo). This curio sees Sean Penn’s mischievous goth rocker turn Nazi hunter, taking up his dead father’s mantle of revenge.Penn plays retired rock star Cheyenne, the sartorial twin of Read more ...