CDs/DVDs
Thomas H. Green
Scratch Massive sound from their name as if they should be a very dodgy hip-hop outfit. They are not. Instead, French duo Maud Geffray and Sebastien Chenaut are a music-based art unit who have worked on sonic projects with Karl Lagerfeld, soundtracked films for Zoe Cassavettes and were once produced by German techno DJ-producer Moritz von Oswald. Their first album, back in 2003, dabbled in hefty rock dynamics but somewhere along the way – possibly that Moritz von Oswald connection - they were persuaded of the power of synthesisers.Their third album is a moody beast that wishes it were Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“I tell myself that I have created the modern woman's wardrobe,” declares Yves Saint Laurent during the press conference that opens L’amour fou. Hubris, but the trouser suits, safari jackets and Mondrian dresses he created did – in other manufacturers' hands - become day-to-day wear. The gathering was called in 2002 so the designer could announce his retirement. Despite his death in 2008, the YSL brand lives on. The hagiographic L’amour fou won’t undermine that.Like the Simon and Garfunkel documentary reviewed last week on theartsdesk, L’amour fou is intimately entangled with parties linked Read more ...
joe.muggs
If there's one electronic sub-genre that is not worth approaching blind it's “tech-house”. Since the late Nineties, it has tended to be the most functional and generic of club soundtracks, a steady, decadent plod, all clean lines and predictable shifts: nothing to frighten the horses or interrupt the steady progress of weekend hedonism. In short, boring. However, there are practitioners who have raised its slowly evolving repetitions to an art form that has life outside the club: the Kompakt label, Chilean maverick Ricardo Villalobos, and Brightonian in Berlin Matt “Radio Slave” Edwards.This Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It’s pronounced doh, like Homer Simpson’s favourite exclamation. Although The dø aren’t yellow cartoon characters, they edge towards the caricature with songs like “Gonna be Sick!” and “Smash Them All (Night Visitors)”. Their art pop has a slight taste of The Sugarcubes and Olivia Merilahti’s vocals can be a bit too cutesy-pie. But Both Ways Open Jaws is great.Hot property in France, the duo got together in 2005 and might as well be Gallo-grown. Dan Levy is French and Merilahti is Finnish. The D and O come from their names. They initially wrote for film soundtracks and ballet. Both Ways Open Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
I remain bemused when bands such as U2 or Coldplay announce they are “going experimental” and are greeted as if they might be. The correct response is: “No, you’re not, you’re as alternative as avocado in a prawn cocktail rather than lettuce.” So here we have U2 and Coldplay’s wet younger sibling supposedly stepping into the wild unknown for their sixth album. In reality this means having a tentative crack at sounding like an early Simple Minds album, albeit firmly filtered through the epic sonic template laid down by those aforementioned older brothers.Snow Patrol’s early history is a story Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Witchfinder General, along with The Wicker Man, has latterly been claimed as a pinnacle of a peculiarly British style of film. “Weird Britain” is a default description. It’ll do fine for these unsettling, intense horror films which draw from the British landscape and its history. This sparkling restoration of Witchfinder General can only enhance its status.Set during the English Civil War, 1968’s Witchfinder General centres on freelance witch detector Matthew Hopkins. Naturally, he’s corrupt. The Wicker Man featured Christopher Lee and Witchfinder General features Vincent Price as Hopkins. Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
“I’d had five years of being really, really fucked around personally. That’s definitely where the songs come from.” Kami Thompson’s five years of being fucked around is good for us listeners though. You want to say thanks to all the horrible guy(s) who broke her heart, because it’s resulted in an emotionally powerful and astoundingly assured debut. The assured bit is not totally surprising perhaps, as she is the youngest daughter of Richard and Linda Thompson, and sister of Teddy. As we know, genes don’t guarantee talent, but this is thrilling in its eviscerated, warped pop sensibility.Take “ Read more ...
mark.kidel
The Dreamer is the relatively low-key swansong from one of soul’s greatest divas, a mountain of barely restrained power, who inspired and influenced several generations of singers. Why some musicians survive lives of excess and others don’t is something of a mystery. While Janis Joplin, for whom Etta James was the ultimate vocal and performance model, crashed early in her wild career, James has soldiered on, in spite of serious heroin addiction and a number of illnesses that would have felled most women of her age.James has always manifested irrepressible energy, an intense force field that Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Wim Wenders’ fictionalised Dashiell Hammett biopic, the first of his six American films, was a critical and box-office failure, which, along with Francis Ford Coppola’s equally damned Vegas musical One From the Heart, brought down Coppola’s Zoetrope Studio. It almost goes without saying that both films - they starred the unstarry Frederic Forrest - are jewels: bracing, dream-like homages to old-fashioned sound-stage artifice. Where One From the Heart is a neon-crazy confection, however, Hammett is a dankly claustrophobic neo-noir.Seven years in gestation, it premiered at Cannes in 1982 after Read more ...
bruce.dessau
“My friends don't add up to one hand,” intoned Mark E Smith on his 1988 album Frenz Experiment. Maybe not, given his legendary propensity for dramatically falling out with band members, but his albums now add up to considerably more than a single appendage. Ersatz GB is Smith's 29th studio album, and while not necessarily his best, it certainly demonstrates that his appetite for creating angry, angular, wonderfully warped state-of-the-nation addresses is hardly diminished.Ersatz GB reflects Smith's increasing despair at this sceptic isle's rotten-to-the-core decline. The lyrics are Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Fusion is a pretty difficult word to deal with. Miles Davis's Bitches Brew might have inspired a raft of jazzers to embrace rock, but an awful lot of the crossover that followed – like prog rock – became the musical equivalent of the love that dare not speak its name. Shoot!, the debut album from Norway’s Hedvig Mollestad Thomassen, might fit that bill, but it’s not that straightforward.A formally educated guitarist, she was the 2009 Molde International Jazz Festival’s Jazz Talent of the Year. Her work with The Trondheim Jazzorkester and her own Trio Thomassen (whose repertoire includes the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There’s a curious misconception that pop music began with The Beatles, or possibly with mid-Fifties rock’n’roll. Bruce Forsyth was involved with musical entertainment long before that. At 14, during World War Two, he was on the road playing ukulele, accordion, singing and tap-dancing as Boy Bruce, The Mighty Atom. Most perceptions of him date from his years fronting cheesy Saturday-night TV, from The Generation Game to Strictly Come Dancing, but with his first album in three decades, at 83 years old, he has returned to his roots with a certain charm and style.Forsyth has chosen old standards Read more ...