CDs/DVDs
Thomas H. Green
Martin Schmidt of the US electronic experimental outfit Matmos once said, “If you make a living from your art, that starts to poison it. You can’t help thinking, how can I change this art to make a better living. The obvious answer is that you make it more palatable to more people.” It’s a statement that sums up the conundrum facing any creative person, excepting rich dilettantes, which is why it’s always a pleasure to be confronted by an album such as Black is Beautiful, the third from the duo of Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland, who also record as Hype Williams.The pair have left a trail of Read more ...
bruce.dessau
I first encountered Sweet Billy Pilgrim via the sitcom The IT Crowd. In an episode in the fourth series shouty departmental boss Jen somehow ended up dating the keyboard player. The keyboard player lost his job and subsequently lost shouty Jen, but in reality the Aylesbury quartet are winners. 2009's Twice Born Men was nominated for a Mercury Prize and their latest release, recorded on a larger budget in the cottage of songwriter Tim Elsenburg, is even better, a thing of pastoral beauty, full of heart, soul and compelling off-kilter magic.Progressive music and anything with a hint of rhythmic Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Although only a couple of shots are fired in Jean Renoir’s 1937 La Grande Illusion, its stature as one of the greatest of anti-war films is unquestioned; perhaps only All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) and Paths of Glory (1957) are comparable.Renoir’s film, though, is also a disquisition on the insurmountability of the barriers that divide men of different classes, religions, and ethnicities. National allegiances may count the most in wartime, but in peacetime it’s illusory that men who’ve fought together will stick together if they hail from the opposite ends of society. By 1937, the idea Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Lost Harmony is the third album from Norwich to London transplants Sennen. Although they’re pretty much an under the radar band, it’s been made with David M Allen, The Cure’s long-term producer. Their songs have been heard on the soundtracks of One Tree Hill and True Blood. Obviously, they’re doing something right. Steeped in melancholy, Lost Harmony is defined by the insistent “Vultures”, which is about Nikolai Kondratiev, the Russian economist who evolved the concept that capitalist economies are defined by cycles of boom and bust.That the best entry point into Lost Harmony is “Vultures”, Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Andrea Arnold’s starkly naturalistic reboot of Emily Brontë’s masterpiece of 1847 isn’t the first costume drama of the last 20 years to scorn the heritage-culture approach. In 1995, Roger Michell’s Persuasion, one of the best but least fêted of the Jane Austen adaptations, put handheld camerawork, natural lighting and grainy images in the service of the downwardly mobile Elliot clan’s shabby gentility, making poor Anne’s Cinderella plight all the more affecting.Evocatively photographed by Robert Ryan, Wuthering Heights goes much further in its invoking of pathetic fallacy. There are times Read more ...
theartsdesk
The Human League: Dare (Deluxe Edition)Thomas H GreenLast year, when I interviewed The Human League for theartsdesk, singer Susan Sulley said of Leonard Cohen, “He’s got a personality voice. It’s not a voice that’s going to pass the auditions on The X Factor but you wouldn’t mistake him for anyone else on the radio.”You would never mistake The Human League for anyone else either, a unique band born of Sheffield, punk and a love of Kraftwerk. It’s hard to credit that their hugest song, “Don’t You Want Me”, and its massively successful parent album Dare, were put together with little Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Immediately before Edgar Reitz (pictured below) made Heimat - the 52-hour film sequence begun in 1984 telling 20th-century German history in profound provincial detail - he was washed up, a New German cinema revolutionary who was no longer new, outpaced by Wenders, Herzog and Fassbinder. In his 80th year, Heimat has secured him a unique place in German culture, and now these first two releases in The Edgar Reitz Collection (both UK DVD debuts) excavate his own buried past.Lust for Life, his 1967 feature debut, begins as a nouvelle vague-beholden, breezily erotic romance between Elizabeth ( Read more ...
graham.rickson
Dvořák: Symphony No 7, In Nature’s Realm, Scherzo capriccioso Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra/José Serebrier (Warner Classics) Each of Dvořák’s last three symphonies is a wonder, and the Seventh is possibly the best of the lot. It’s a work which can get under your skin. The dark D minor tonality is so right for this music; there’s a brooding darkness to the orchestral sound coupled with swaggering rhythmic drive. And the melodies are consistently gorgeous. The symphony is often described as Brahmsian, though José Serebrier rightly suggests that Dvořák was a better orchestrator, having Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
On Tell Tales's opening cut, The Cornshed Sisters declare “If bombs were love, then you could call mine Dresden”. Their debut is allusive, with literary leanings. But the emphasis on the words doesn’t drown out the music, a slinky confection that’s not too far down the road from Dory Previn, Tom Rush, Kate and Anna McGarrigle and even Brian Protheroe.Tell Tales isn’t folk – it’s a folk-influenced singer-songwriter album with a distinct whiff of 1972 to 1975. Sunderland’s Liz Corney, Marie Nixon, Jennie Redmond and Cath Stephens harmonise like a dream and have more on their mind than the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Richard Norris has been mucking about making strange noises and joining the dots (and sometime microdots) in electronic dance music’s shadowy regions for 25 years. He's had multiple incarnations, from NME writer to creator of proto-acid house with Psychic TV’s Genesis P Orridge (on the 1988 M.E.S.H. single and Jack The Tab album). He was one half of The Grid (with Soft Cell’s Dave Ball) and is one half of Beyond The Wizard’s Sleeve (with DJ Erol Alkan); he also worked with Joe Strummer, not to mention having some part in the whole narcotic band-gang messiness that resulted in Screamadelica. Read more ...
howard.male
With the subject of the legitimacy of the label “world music” having just had another airing in The Guardian, it seems fitting that Mali’s favourite musical couple should be releasing their least “world music” album to date. For essentially, Folila (which translates as "music" in Bambara) is a blues/rock album. Yes there’s an occasional appearance of a politely plucked kora between blasts of distorted electric guitar, or the distant patter of African percussion discernable behind the workman-like rock drumming, but they seem almost like a token nod towards their roots when measured Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Alright, I admit it - I fell halfway in love with multi-instrumentalist Laura Kidd, the London-based artist known as She Makes War, from the first time I met her heavily made up panda eyes in the Groundhog Day-esque horror video for “Exit Strategy”. It’s not quite a title track, as the only little battles Kidd is fighting are the ones that punctuate the wrong sort of relationship’s implosion, but as a stage-setter it’ll do nicely.Be it the stage make-up, the pseudonym or the titles like “Minefield” and “Shields and Daggers”, there’s an edge to Kidd’s music; defensive layers built up around a Read more ...