CDs/DVDs
Kieron Tyler
The dust will eventually settle around the flapdoodle about withdrawn albums, whether Lana Del Rey is authentic, a fabulist construct or rubbish live. And when it does, this, the debut album, will be left. There’s no doubt that “Video Games” and its follow-up “Born to Die” were terrific singles, sieving the existential drift of Julee Cruise and Chris Isaak through a hip-hop sensibility. The package was completed by the irresistible Del Rey voice, a downer-dosed Stevie Nicks.Whatever the carping, the former Elisabeth Grant’s name is all over Born to Die. She – as Lana Del Rey – has written Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Director Nicolas Winding Refn says that his LA heist fable Drive was inspired by Grimm's Fairy Tales, but viewers unfamiliar with the perverse labyrinth of Refn's imagination are more likely to detect echoes of Bullitt, Walter Hill's The Driver and Clint Eastwood at his most taciturn. Ryan Gosling plays The Driver, auto-wrangling movie stuntman by day and getaway wheel-man by night. A pre-credits sequence follows him as he ferries two anonymous clients away from a robbery, mixing raw speed with calculating guile as he eludes police pursuit with icy efficiency.Despite being solitary and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
A semantic side effect of my longish involvement in music culture has been hearing certain phrases pass from fringe slang obscurity to mainstream acceptance. Among these is the term “chill out”, purloined by ravers from the hippies to describe post-club Ecstasy comedown music, especially after the KLF used it. By the early 2000s, however, “chill out” was tired and ubiquitous, conjuring images of candlelit Primrose Hill dinner parties where Zero 7 played predictably, coolly in the background.If there was a tipping point in this process it was Air’s extremely successful 1998 debut album Moon Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
If The Wombles had made this it would likely raise a smile despite its lame, lazy nostalgic guitar pop. It even goes as far as to include a feeble version of seminal skiffle song "Rock Island Line". The harsh words it deserves, however, are tempered with pathos, for Ringo 2012 only garners limelight because its creator was drummer for the biggest band of all time. Despite the constant Beatles hagiography of the frotting heritage rock press, these days no one under 50 has personal recall of their epic impact (the rest of us watch BBC Four documentaries and sigh). The Beatles led Western pop Read more ...
graham.rickson
Handel: Agrippina Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin/René Jacobs (Harmonia Mundi)Handel’s early opera appears in a new edition from René Jacobs, in a version which aims to reconstruct Handel’s original intentions. Agrippina was premiered in Venice in 1710 and was a huge hit, bolstering Handel’s operatic confidence which blossomed after he pitched up in London two years later. Jacobs’s edition is trimmed – several arias in the third act are gone – but you don’t feel you’re missing much. As with this conductor’s superb Magic Flute, there’s a thrilling sense of theatre, helped by the Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Elegantly riding an upswing that began with his return to touring in 2008, Leonard Cohen's first album in eight years finds him deep into his seventies and more than ever with mortality on his mind. Which makes it all the more delicious that the music for roughly half of these songs was composed by Patrick Leonard, the man who co-wrote Madonna’s “Hanky Panky”. Strange days indeed in the Tower of Song. We shouldn't be surprised. Despite his age and gravitas, one of Cohen's great virtues is that he makes no claim to be any kind of authority, musical, moral or otherwise. The title of the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It may be glimpsed only in brief flashbacks, but Vietnam is always on the mind of Rolling Thunder (1977), one of the earlier attempts by Hollywood’s generation of indie filmmakers to confront the conflict’s impact on its citizenry. William Devane plays Major Charles Rane, who returns from the war zone hardened after years in captivity to discover that women no longer wears bras and his wife has moved on. Worse, hoodlums come to steal the cache of silver dollars ceremonially presented to him by his grateful Texan hometown. When they can’t break him into submission with violence, they kill the Read more ...
howard.male
Whatever post-modern subtexts and layers of irony may lie behind the title Yes and Also Yes, the fact remains that Mike Doughty’s fourth solo album exudes a sunny positivism that makes a completely literal reading perfectly reasonable. From its opening lyric onwards - “You’re man won’t dance but I will” - this is largely a collection of bouncy, affirmative declarations of intent which find the one-time Soul Coughing front man more comfortable in his own skin than he’s ever been before.As someone who thought Soul Coughing were the best American rock band of the 1990s, I initially missed Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although they’ll still be filed under jazz, Portico Quartet’s third album takes them even closer to the ambient and trance they’ve been edging towards since they attracted attention in 2007 after the release of their Mercury-nominated debut, Knee Deep in the North Sea. It’s partly to do with the departure of founder member Nick Mulvey and his replacement with keyboard/percussion player Keir Vine, and also a natural progression.Much that’s familiar remains: Milo Fitzpatrick's pulsing, snappy bass, Jack Wyllie’s drifting, occasionally dissonant, sometimes squalling sax and the precision of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Best known for comedies like Chasing Amy and Mallrats, indie-land workaholic Kevin Smith has made a handbrake turn with Red State. Set in the small-town American South, it's a hectic mash-up of slasher flick, horror-fest and muscular action movie, with a caustic political twist in its tail. It's too much to pack into one short-ish (80 minutes) movie, but Red State's hectic pace, stylish visual design and provocative checklist of hair-trigger issues make it bogglingly watchable.Plot-wise, we kick off with a trio of sex-crazed teenage boys looking to get laid by any possible means. They end up Read more ...
joe.muggs
I've seen some genre intersections in my time, but gangsta ambient takes the biscuit. Baghdad born South Londoner VersA Beatz began as a grime producer, but like many has moved from that genre's hyped-up energy into the slower, more menacing electronic “trap beats” of hip hop. This in turn has overlapped with a current American style of melancholic leftfield hip hop sounds pioneered by Clams Casino (best known as producer to Lil B and current sensation A$AP Rocky) to produce, in this free album of instrumentals, a narcotic sound that feels as if gravity has been loosened and the imagination Read more ...
bruce.dessau
The term "folktronica" always makes me think of that horror-porn abomination The Human Centipede. Two entities being joined together in a way that they should never be joined together. Finger-in-your-ear choral harmonies and groovy basslines? It should not work but it often does. Audacious outfit Tunng regularly cocked a snook at received boundaries and pulled off this unholy alliance with flying colours, so perhaps it is no surprise that frontman/founder Sam Genders repeats the trick with the debut release of his latest outfit, Diagrams. And then some.Black Light is the kind of album that Read more ...