CDs/DVDs
howard.male
Over recent years a number of musicians and bands have immersed themselves in the exotic funky sound of 1960s/70s Ethiopian jazz (brought to our attention by the Éthiopiques CD series) to produce excellent new music. The best of these acts include The Heliocentrics (with guest Éthiopiques star Mulatu Astatke), The Imperial Tiger Orchestra, Getatchew Mekuria and the Ex (Mekuria being another of the style’s original exponents) and Dub Colossus. The latter provided a useful launchpad for this supremely gifted and versatile young pianist.But this solo album is by no means just a showcase for Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Motives of secrecy and fear, set against the background of a totalitarian system, have been crucial elements in Hungarian director István Szabó’s work. Internationally he may be best known for his Oscar-nominated collaborations with Klaus Maria Brandauer in Mephisto, which won him the prize in 1981, as well as Colonel Redl, from three years later.His Confidence, from 1979, was also nominated as Hungary’s best foreign-language film, and excels in a more local context than Szabó’s following two films – it’s now released internationally for the first time from distributor Second Run. It’s a Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It seems disingenuous to refer to Milk Maid as a band: among the few facts you're likely to glean about this project is that lynchpin Martin Cohen has, through no fault of his own, gone through 11 different bandmates in the last two years. Fans of last year's debut need not despair though - the work of the former Nine Black Alps bassist has never exactly suffered from pursuing a lo-fi, intimate approach.There's a certain element of wilful stubbornness in the determination to eschew the likes of Pro-Tools in favour of a 16-track tape machine, but the dark lyrical themes and surprisingly poppy Read more ...
theartsdesk
The Searchers: Hearts in Their EyesKieron TylerAlthough second to The Beatles as Liverpool’s most consistent Sixties chart presence, The Searchers have never previously been given the box set treatment. Like the Fabs, they were innovative and influential. They presaged folk rock, and without them there would have been no Byrds and maybe even no Tom Petty. The subtitle, celebrating 50 years of harmony & jangle, says it well. The four CDS and 121 tracks take the story from 1963, before they signed with Pye Records, to the present day via their Seventies new wave-inclined recordings for Sire Read more ...
bruce.dessau
This is presumably called "Doing a Damon" in the music business these days – when an acclaimed songwriter steps out of their comfort zone to try their hand at something more ambitious. Last year Paul Heaton presented his extended composition The 8th, exploring the Seven Deadly Sins, at the Manchester International Festival in a theatrical setting and the performance is replicated here.This is no Dr Dee-style opera though, more a case of Heaton finding guest vocalists to slot into his well-established sweet-sour compositional style. Cameos include Mercury nominee King Creosote, old Read more ...
howard.male
The strikingly clumsy cover (possibly designed by a 12-year-old boy with a rotring pen, a compass and a setsquare) is so amateurish that it just about tips over into being good, but it gives no indication of what the music therein might be like. So it came as something of a pleasant surprise that it was the most sophisticated, superbly played Afro-funk I’ve heard in the last year.While Nigerian Afrobeat is arguably the main template for this London based Ghanaian band, the grooves are looser and more elastic than we are used to from that genre. There’s an agreeable amount of air Read more ...
joe.muggs
A few of the things that are made to seem intensely erotic in this film: glue, bread, nails, carp, a satchel, a lift door, the death of a hen, the postal service, and in one particularly discombobulating scene, giant multi-headed shaving brushes. The Czech director Jan Švankmajer's allegiances couldn't be clearer: in the credits, he references Sacher-Masoch, de Sade, Freud, Buñuel, Max Ernst and 1930s Czech surrealist, psychoanalyst and author of Autosexualismus a Psycherotismus, Bohuslav Brouk. The almost-silent movie Conspirators of Pleasure (or, to give it its original title, Spiklenci Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Twenty years ago Mary Chapin Carpenter used to sing about loving and losing, but also about lusting. Even her ballads went at a bullish lick. The essence of what she had to say was distilled in “He Thinks He'll Keep Her”, which captured the emotions of a 35-year-old woman at the moment she realises her marriage is a dead duck. Here was a Nashville grandee who, rather than standing by her man, stood up for herself. Her feminist folk preeminence has helped Carpenter to sales of 12 million albums.Ruined romance is still on the agenda in Ashes and Roses, but this time Carpenter is nowhere near Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Anyone familiar with the 1915 spy thriller The 39 Steps and Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1935 adaptation – fleet, déclassé, and oneiric – knows the movie is a superior piece of entertainment to John Buchan’s coincidence-laden potboiler, which as a gentleman's adventure is smugly establishmentarian. In its depiction of a pre-war Britain mired in political complacency yet socially discontent, the film better caught the tenor of the times.Passive everyman Richard Hannay (Robert Donat) is accosted by an exotic spy (Lucy Mannheim) as he pushes through a panicked mob in a London music hall and brings Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Like most things about the suited, bespectacled image of Chris Brown that stares intensely at something to his right from his new album’s cool blue artwork (currently: the remains of the delicious spicy chicken pizza I had for dinner), the title Fortune is not an accident. For Brown has, as anybody who hasn’t been living under some pop culture rock these past three years, been a very fortunate lad. Although technically still on probation for the brutal assault of his then-girlfriend Rihanna in 2009, such is the esteem with which this man is held by his contemporaries in American pop that he Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Bloopy Seventies synths. Glitter Band drums. The fuzz guitar of Sweet’s “Blockbuster”. Eighties electro-robot-pop. New wave chug. The hot dog streets of West Bromwich. Morning TV. Bailiffs at the door, The secularisation of institutions and the decline of civic pride. Mickie Most and his plastic pop. These then, are amongst the contents of the new tablet handed down by former Felt leader, perennial underdog and über-cult figure Lawrence. Bizarre and enjoyable, it’s disquieting too. “Hello, I’m Lawrence and I’m taking over” he declares colourlessly.A series of close-typed, dense paragraphs Read more ...
Nick Levine
"Synthetica is about forcing yourself to confront what you see in the mirror when you finally stand still long enough to catch a reflection. Synthetica is about being able to identify the original in a long line of reproductions. It's about what is real versus what is artificial." That's what Emily Haines says about Metric's fifth album. It's as much about getting older. It would be unchivalrous to reveal the singer's age, but it's closer to 40 than 30, and her band have maintained a steady upward trajectory since 1998. Their last album, 2009's Fantasies, sold half a million worldwide and got Read more ...