CDs/DVDs
Kieron Tyler
After his über-memorable performance at Her Majesty’s jubilee concert, the next step on Sir Elton John’s journey through 2012 is just as arresting, but less likely to be dusted off at such conventional occasions. In fact, it’s hard to see how he could even perform his new album outside a club setting. Good Morning to the Night could have been a colossal misfire. It’s not. It’s spiffy.The story of its genesis doesn’t need repeating in detail. Sir Elton heard and liked Australian electro-dance duo Pnau, scooped them up for his management portfolio and offered access to the masters of his early Read more ...
Nick Levine
There's something about Frank Ocean that sets him apart from other male R&B singers. It's not the letter he wrote on his personal blog last week revealing that his first love was a man. It's his songwriting: Ocean sketches out a scene with economy and aplomb, then illustrates with indelible detail.Ocean's stint with the Odd Future collective, home to several controversial but verbally dextrous rappers, will have sharpened his pencil. But he's clearly a natural storyteller and a keen observer anyway. See how he skewers the lifestyles of "Super Rich Kids" with a single line: "Too many Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Massive commercial success usually buys an actor the right to bring a pet project to fruition. The Artist had not yet conquered the planet when The Players was cooked up. But its release in the UK – simultaneously in cinemas and on DVD, which says it all – is of note mainly because it features Jean Dujardin. Teamed with Gilles Lellouche, the two stubbly middle-aged roués explore the corridors and back passages of playing away, French style.The film’s original title is less euphemistic: Les infidèles is an adultery palimpsest whose original French poster (pictured right) caused a storm in a PC Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The first thing that strikes you is the voice. At once coarse and warm, like the creak of the stairs of your childhood home as it settles in at night, Meursault’s Neil Pennycook sounds like a man with more than a few stories to tell. Of course it helps that, instrumentation-wise, Something for the Weakened is one of those musical "progressions" which sees the band abandon the programmed beats that punctuated earlier recordings in favour of a more conventional sound that knows when to play it sparse and when to swell, filling out beautiful melodies that top the five-minute mark in places. But Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Once upon a time – six years ago - there was “nu rave” and it was immediately taken to pieces as a media construct and trashed. Fair enough, it was, but then so was Britpop and some people are still crapping on about that a decade and a half later. At least nu rave plugged in some whacky synths and psychedelic attitude. Such grumbles aside, Van She, named after frontman Matt Van Schie, were and are four Australians who hooked into the scene that the media called “nu rave”. No-one involved but The Klaxons (briefly) embraced the term. Then again, British punks didn’t embrace that term either, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The great Spanish surrealist film-maker Luis Buñuel was 72 when he made The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie but it is as madcap a piece of weirdness as ever he came up with. It also won him the 1972 Oscar for Best Foreign Film. One of the great things about Buñuel is that, while his films are unhinged, dipped deep in artsy satire and opaque avant-garde concepts, they remain supremely watchable entertainment, often very funny.Discreet Charm stars Fernando Rey as ambassador of the fictional Republic of Miranda and involves the foiled attempts by he and five friends to dine together. As the Read more ...
howard.male
English producer Will "Quantic" Holland has brilliantly captured the sound of this Colombian big band who came together solely to make an album that represents the best of Colombian tropical music past and present. For capturing is all you really have to be able to do when the standard of musicianship is so high and the sheer joy of playing so apparent.Colombian styles such as cumbia, gaita, porro and champeta (“ondatrópica” is the overarching name for these styles) are all well represented but not in a dull, archival way. Every track is taut and springy with life and buoyed up by both new up Read more ...
Graham Fuller
If not as ensnaring as Double Indemnity, The Big Sleep, or Out of the Past, Otto Preminger’s urbane police procedural Laura is one of the best film noirs because it transcends the genre. It is an inverted women’s picture – about the hubris of a successful career girl cum Galatea – a savage critique of the decadence of Manhattan high society, and a commentary on the neurotic idealisation of beautiful women.It begins like Rebecca: the Wildean newspaper columnist Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb) musing, with the words “I shall never forget the weekend Laura Read more ...
theartsdesk
Various Artists: Sound System - The Story of Jamaican MusicThomas H Green This is lovely, a box-set celebration of Jamaican music, marking 50 years of the country’s independence. In a brooks-no-argument fashion, it reminds the forgetful that the Caribbean island punches so, so far above its geographical weight that gobs remain fully smacked over 30 years after the death of the man who gave reggae a global profile in the first place, Bob Marley (who is, incidentally, absent). Aside from the music, though, Sound System’s eight CDs arrive in a chunky 12 x 12in box that contains a coffee table Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Despite his previous nine albums, Duke Special may still be best known for his “hobo Tim Minchin” look, and the lavish songs “Our Love Goes Deeper” and “Last Night I Nearly Died”. For those on the lookout for more of the same action, however, the new album may prove something of a disappointment: Oh Pioneer is actually a much more subdued creature. Yet, by shedding the melody-rich “chamber pop” mantle, Peter Wilson has, in fact, arrived at a sound that's potentially more mainstream. So what’s it like, and will it sell?This is an album that, when in a reflective mood, you can get lost inOne Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
It's over an hour before we see a woman in Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. And even then, she arrives slowly, appearing at first more of a heavenly human smudge than a fully formed figure. But moments later she is filling the screen, and setting it ablaze with warm light. Light that seems to emanate as much from her blue eyes and young face as it does from her lamp. For the first time in the film, we can see. The male-dominated darkness that grips the opening 60 minutes lifts in response to this moment of clarity and beauty. The tired male eyes that greet her, all double- Read more ...
Nick Levine
Compared to previous Dirty Projectors records, Swing Lo Magellan is a walk in the park with a piece of cake to follow. Then again, previous Dirty Projectors records include a so-called "glitch opera" about Don Henley, a "re-imagining" of a punk album that Dave Longstreth hadn't heard in 15 years, and an EP featuring a 10-piece chamber music collective that Longstreth put together and then named "First Orchestral Society for the Preservation of the Orchestra."Their last album, 2009's Bitte Orca, found the singer-songwriter-producer and his willing minstrels edging towards the straightforward. Read more ...