CDs/DVDs
graham.rickson
Good cinema can show us the unimaginable, the unknowable. As does Werner Herzog’s documentary, taking us deep into the Chauvet Caves in the Ardèche in southern France. Discovered in 1994, they contain the oldest known cave paintings. Created 32,000 years ago, they were preserved after a fortuitous rock fall sealed the cave’s original entrance.Herzog and his team of three assistants were recently granted limited access by the French Ministry of Culture. Battery-powered lights were used, along with a 3D camera. The group were restricted to a narrow steel walkway, unable to touch the rock Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Remember the big music? Eighties big. Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” big. Simple Minds’ “Waterfront” big. Anthony Gonzalez does. He might say his fifth album as M83 is inspired by The Smashing Pumpkins’ 1995 double set Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, but it’s built on foundations from a decade earlier.Ten years on from the first M83 album, Antibes’s Gonzalez hasn’t travelled quite as far as Messier 83, the galaxy whose name he’s adopted, but he has arrived at a point where intimacy has become distant. His reconfigured shoegazing – which prefigured much of the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
A few years ago – peaking in 2007 - “cosmic disco” was a brief clubland rage. It came mostly from Oslo and consisted of calm, bearded Norwegian dudes creating a fabulous psychedelic stew of groovy house, Italo-disco, and their own ineffable proggy weirdness. Where filter disco, the unkillable dance-pop sub-genre kick-started by Stardust’s “The Music Sounds Better With You”, has mostly been hugely unadventurous, relying on basic retro pilfering, cosmic disco was always marinated in the deep, druggy pulse of the best nightlife. Names such as Lindstrom, Prins Thomas and Todd Terje rightly Read more ...
graham.rickson
Ravel: Complete Music for Violin and Piano Alina Ibragimova, Cédric Tiberghien (Hyperion)Ravel’s output for violin and piano clocks in at around 50 minutes, so there’s a generous bonus on this CD in the shape of Guillaume Lekeu’s Violin Sonata. Lekeu, a pupil of Cesar Franck, died in 1894 aged 24 and his sonata was written for the great Eugene Ysaÿe. For Lekeu, good music was all about feeling, not charm. He was so highly strung that hearing the prelude to Wagner’s Tristan at Bayreuth caused him to faint and be carried unconscious from the theatre. His sonata is an accomplished piece, Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Martin Scorsese’s mammoth, authorised survey of the life of George Harrison is a strange old thing. Deeply moving, poetic, full of love, wit and warmth, it's also at times oddly assembled and, at a shade over three and a half hours, runs wide but not always terribly deep. Using archive footage - including much unseen film and photography - and music that's both instantly familiar and previously unheard, the film's narrative voice is stitched together from old interviews with Harrison and the comments of other principals: the two surviving Beatles, wife Olivia, son Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
With Cliff Richard it’s tempting for commentators and critics to pull a conceptual double bluff. Cliff is regarded as naff, safe and beloved of grannies, so restating that angle and sneering is tired - it was tired 40 years ago. So what to do? Dig around his back catalogue for a corner to be fought? (I’m Nearly Famous and Wired for Sound are the usual contenders.) Make the valid case that he was the British stepping stone between rock’n’roll and The Beatles? Or simply quote the stats – upwards of 200 million records sold, a national treasure, etc?It doesn’t wash, any of it. Cliff and the Read more ...
david.cheal
Who needs songs, when you have song titles that are as good as those written by Luke Haines? The man who, we’re told, could have been a Britpop contender (though I’m not convinced myself; he’s far too clever, and much too odd) has previously, under his own name or in bands such as The Auteurs and Black Box Recorder, penned tunes with titles such as “Unsolved Child Murder”, “Girl Singing in the Wreckage”, “The English Motorway System”, and of course “Luke Haines is Dead”, now brings us this cornucopia of magnificently titled tat. Gems here include “Inside the Restless Mind of Rollerball Rocco Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Because Humphrey Jennings was a director of documentaries, he is never spoken of in the same breath as the greatest British directors of the past - Chaplin, Hitchcock, Powell, Lean and Reed. Another reason is that his career was short, compressed into the 16 years before his death at 43 in 1950 from a cliff fall in Poros, Greece, where he was scouting locations for a film about postwar healthcare in Europe. Yet Jennings was a visionary whose best films were touched with oddness and poetry - he was a poet and a painter, a champion of Surrealism - and chronicled more movingly than any Read more ...
graeme.thomson
A companion piece to last year’s Scratch My Back, on which Gabriel restrung classic material by the likes of Radiohead, Lou Reed and Elbow, New Blood finds the arch tinkerer dismantling some of his own greatest songs, stripping them of their rockist infrastructure (bass, guitar, drums) and rearranging them for a 46-piece orchestra.The two fundamental problems rest with the wide-ranging choice of material and the mode of reinvention: the fact that Gabriel has struggled to write anything of real magnificence for a couple of decades (hence why he’s doing this, Read more ...
matilda.battersby
After two years holed up in a Toronto retreat hiding from the fame and adulation that filled arenas for three solid years after her breakout album The Reminder went platinum, excitement has been mounting for Leslie Feist’s new recording, Metals. She has spoken about her struggle to write it after exhausting herself touring, but the 35-year-old’s new material doesn’t disappoint. It is rockier, more melancholy and doesn’t have the same commercial charm as her last record - which is probably quite deliberate.The Reminder was full of chirpy songs with lovelorn refrains and breathlessly whispered Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Treacle Jr is a cautionary tale of the fragility of UK film careers. Writer-director Jamie Thraves’s debut The Low Down (2000) is still regarded as a minor classic, but he took nine years to follow it up, then remortgaged his house to make this third film.He surely risked his home from a need to bring the film’s odd couple to life. Tom (Tom Fisher) is one of those men who walk out for the paper and don’t come back, nameless anxiety driving him from his young family and comfortable Birmingham home. Taking the train to London, he feels free for a while in a sunny park. He becomes homeless in Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It can’t be a coincidence that the simultaneous release of four Agnès Varda DVDs draws a film each from the Fifties, Sixties, Seventies and Eighties, bringing the opportunity for a broad-sweep appraisal. It’s equally unsurprising that the films share Varda’s non-judgmental empathy with her subjects and their day-to-day worlds.La pointe courte, released in 1954, is Varda’s first film. Although it captures the life of the eponymous fishing village, it’s a loose-ended examination of the collapsing relationship between a locally raised husband and his Parisian wife. Even at this point Varda had Read more ...