CDs/DVDs
Nick Hasted
The Cranes Are Flying begins with the literal rush of young love, as Boris and Veronica skip down a street, giddy with endorphins. They could be infatuated young Americans in the rock’n’roll year of its making, 1957. But this is Moscow in 1941, as a radio announces Russia is at war, and Boris (Alexei Batalov) volunteers for the front. The chaotic crush of women saying goodbye to men, in which Veronica (Tatiana Samoilova) can’t quite reach him, heartbreakingly brings home war’s human cost, as do later scenes of Moscow’s equivalent to VE Day – another visceral spectacle of overwhelming emotion. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Scotland’s Bill Wells is hard to pin down. Although ostensibly a jazz pianist, boundaries don’t concern him. He’s played with Aidan Moffat and Isobel Campbell. In 2009 he made the GOK album with Japan’s Tori Kudo (who records as Maher Shalal Hash Baz). Lemondale was made in Japan with a raft of collaborators that include Jim O’Rourke, Kudo and members of Tenniscoats.It’s a lovely album. Coherent, too. Especially considering that it was recorded in one day. Overall, Lemondale is filmic, edging towards Michel Legrand’s jazzier moments and even Francis Lai soundtracks. Equally, it’d be at home Read more ...
Russ Coffey
At last, seasonal talent-show spin-offs are showing signs of real talent. Hot on the heels of the appealing, if insubstantial, Olly Murs album, comes Rebecca Ferguson’s debut. And, if Murs’ release wasn’t too bad, people are saying that Ferguson’s is such a leap forward it’s bad form to mention her in the same breath as the other alumni. Part of the fuss is, no doubt, down to the fact that, finally, The X Factor seems to have uncovered someone with authentic, visceral ability. But the reaction is not just about confounded expectations. Ferguson seems genuinely capable of giving Adele Read more ...
David Nice
Among the many singularities of Pasolini’s films, the proportions of his narrative structure have to be the strangest. Here we, like the young Jason who grows before our eyes, get a six-minute introductory lecture from the hero's foster centaur which tells us what to look out for in the obscurities that follow: all is sacred, nature is never natural, myth and ritual are a living reality, this is a story of deeds, not thoughts. Then there’s hardly any dialogue for the next hour or so: look away, if you’re squeamish, at the climax of the chthonic rituals to which Medea's Colchians who guard the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
A decade and a half ago I was junglist correspondent for Eternity magazine, a long since defunct organ that catered to the then thriving print press for rave devotees. This was how I ran into Aquasky, a trio of studenty, long-haired guys from Bournemouth making chill-out drum and bass. A lot has happened to them since then. Most notably - apart from being much less hirsute - they long ago dumped the marijuana’n’jazz approach and make, under the radar, contagiously ballsy rave music that takes no prisoners but also welcomes anyone with a party bone in their body to their party.Their new album Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
In the mid-Nineties, America had a bit of a moment with electronic dance music. The most emblematic sign of this was The Prodigy’s Fat of the Land topping the Billboard charts in 1997. The truth was, however, that despite inventing house music and techno, en masse nationally they didn’t really get rave culture. The US liked their electronic dance stylistically performed as close to a KISS concert as possible. They liked it, in other words, to be rock’n’roll.Now it’s happening again, but on a broader scale. On the one hand American R&B superstars have absorbed Euro-pop and dubstep, on the Read more ...
david.cheal
Let’s hope that the first posthumously released Amy Winehouse album is also the last; not because it’s in any way bad – actually it’s a pretty decent collection of songs from throughout her career – but because “pretty decent” is about as good as it gets. After this, if there’s anything left, it will surely only be the sound of a barrel being scraped.Assembled by Winehouse producers Salaam Remi and Mark Ronson, it’s a patchwork of alternative versions, some newer stuff, some bits and bobs, plus her famous duet from earlier this year with Tony Bennett. What shines through immediately – and Read more ...
howard.male
Some critics have lazily compared Baloji to Somali rapper K’nann: both are African rappers who had lucky childhood escapes from countries about to descend into war and chaos, but beyond that they seem to have quite different approaches to what they do. K’naan is as much a pop musician and poet as he is a hip-hop artist, firmly concentrating on melody, song structure and hooks. Whereas Baloji, at least on the evidence of this album, seems to want to engage more with roots music while finding ways for his rhymes to fit in with already established musical idioms.So Kinshasa bands Zaiko Langa- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Connecticut-born Jules Dassin graduated from lightweight suspense and comedy fodder for MGM to pungent, location-based crime dramas, hitting his stride with Brute Force (1947) and The Naked City (1948), both included in this package. However, his upward trajectory was derailed after he was identified as a communist at the HUAC hearings. Producer Darryl Zanuck gave Dassin the script for Night and the City and dispatched him to London to shoot it, days before the Committee was due to grill the director. Then Dassin relocated to France, where he created the noir masterpiece - and the third Read more ...
Russ Coffey
For a couple of uber-hip rock nerds, The Black Keys do often still make pretty conventional music. After flirting with hip hop on the Blakroc project (and some of that mentality rubbing off on 2010’s release, Brothers), it’s back to straightforward, if sophisticated, blues-rock for the Ohio-based duo. But if there’s not much that's groundbreaking or experimental here, it’s all pretty likeable stuff: the sort of material that gives unchallenging listening a good name.By resting the Seventies guitarscape over rhythms that are more Fifties and Sixties in tone, Auerbach and Carney have given El Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
One of the great revelations of the decade-long HBO TV invasion is that so many of their series take everything at a truly leisurely pace. Their groundbreaking MO is not to rush, as pre-millennial TV shows usually did, but to give the plot space to breathe in a way that matches how we now watch TV - at our own pace, in our own time. In the case of Mildred Pierce, film director Todd Haynes’s beautiful-looking, Emmy-winning five-episode adaptation of the 1941 James M Cain novel, this sometimes backfires. The narrative has almost too much space to spread out, with five and a half hours viewing Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Dan Treacy of the TV Personalities told a magazine that, “If the word cult ever described a band then it’s The Callas.” Given that his own band are one of the ultimate British cult groups, that’s saying something. The TV Personalities reference is apt, for The Callas have supported them and have a certain amount of the same shambolic charm, as well as the same art-world aspirations. The Callas’s Ionas brothers, Aris and Lakis, are involved in organising exhibitions of their artwork and early editions of the album arrive decorated with their personalised handiwork. When they get together with Read more ...