CDs/DVDs
Nick Hasted
Nouvelle Vague directors have grown to seem more diverse than bonded, a golden generation linked by extreme cinephilia and the mutually supportive main chance. Godard endures at one extreme, pushing the movement’s implications to their terminus, collaging gnomic capitalist critiques holed up in Swiss self-exile, still fiercely repulsing acceptance.Claude Chabrol lasted almost as long making chilly thrillers beloved by the French public but distrusted by the academy, steeped in Lang and Hitchcock, but most of all Georges Simenon. He was similarly prolific and accepting of human Read more ...
joe.muggs
This album starts and ends so brilliantly. It kicks off with a salvo of three tracks that remind you exactly why Def Leppard became one of the biggest bands in the world in the mid Eighties. They distilled the things they most loved growing up – T Rex, Mott The Hoople, Queen, ABBA – down to their rawest essences, then built up a sound using the most elaborate studio technology available at the time that was in tune with the current post-Van Halen US rock world but actually belonged entirely to them. “Take What You Want”, “Kick” and “Fire it Up” are archetypes of that process. They are Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
While Britpop was a retrogressive media construct, Oasis were a genuine socio-musical phenomenon (albeit also retrogressive!). And at their heart was, of course, Liam Gallagher, bullishly Manc, sneeringly rude and pugnaciously charismatic, a proper rock star, perhaps the last before the oncoming generation of coffee-drinking, fleece-wearing nice-boys-next-door.He’s mellowed with age; the 2019 documentary As It Was revealed a more self-aware, likeable fellow, yet retaining just enough truculent edge. It’s a shame that more the latter is not present on his third solo studio album.Gallagher told Read more ...
graham.rickson
Parallel Mothers unfolds at a daringly slow pace, and there are moments in the first half of Pedro Almodóvar’s 2021 drama when you wish that things would speed up. And then you’re wrong-footed by the unexpected shifts in tone and direction, and amazed at the veteran director’s ability to knit together so many seemingly disparate threads.Penélope Cruz plays affluent photographer Janis; becoming pregnant after a liaison with Israel Elijalde’s married forensic anthropologist Arturo (whom Janis asks to help investigate a Civil War grave in her home village), she later shares a hospital room with Read more ...
Tim Cumming
As break-up albums go, Heidi Talbot’s new set knocks that tightly wound ball of heartbreak, separation and release into the front rank, on an arc of often beautifully melodic self-penned songs, choice covers, and accompanists including guitarist Mark Knopfler and fiddle player, singer and the album's producer Dirk Powell.After more than a decade of marriage and musical collaboration with fiddler John McCusker, Sing it for a Lifetime finds Talbot negotiating the rapids of that union’s end. The title song opens the album with a beguiling melody carrying hard-won words that speak of their Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Harry Styles’ previous two albums sounded like someone rifling pleasantly through the history of pop and rock, but always genially and politely. More entertaining than his scalpels-ready critics wished when One Direction paused in 2016, those albums still didn’t fully hold together as bodies of work. Harry’s House does. It’s also more middle-of-the-road, albeit in a self-aware and musically sussed way.The nearest historical equivalent to Styles’ career is probably Robbie Williams, but whereas Williams went off on bizarre tangents that somehow usually worked, Styles is smoother. Even more so Read more ...
Liz Thomson
I have to confess, it’s a long time since I’ve thought about the Nitty Gritty Dirty Band and a new album serves as a reminder of how good they were, and are. Formed in Long Beach, California in 1966 by a Bob Dylan-obsessed high school student named Jeff Hanna, the band has been through many incarnations (Jackson Browne was briefly a member) and has worked with some great names, among them Mother Maybelle Carter, Doc Watson, and Merle Travis on Will the Circle Be Unbroken (1972) and scored a hit with a cover of “Mr Bojangles”, thus helping to bring folk-rock to the mainstream. Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The first film rendering of Christopher Isherwood’s experiences in early 1930s Berlin, I Am a Camera has been restored and released on Blu-ray to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Bob Fosse’s Cabaret. Popular when released in the UK in 1955, presumably because it was then risqué, director Henry Cornelius’s movie has curiosity value as a monument to bad writing and acting and for the feebleness of its condemnation of Nazism.Julie Harris won the first of her five Tony awards playing Sally Bowles in Henry Van Druten’s Broadway play, which he'd adapted from Isherwood’s novella Goodbye to Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
Swedish singer Lykke Li has called her new album Eyeye “her most intimate work to date”. In regard to Lykke Li’s music, this feels almost impossible at this point. Her music has time and time again explored the depths of heartbreak. Is it possible to write a song more intimate than “Love Me Like I’m Not Made of Stone”?Eyeye is her fifth album and it sees Li return to familiar topics of love and heartbreak. She also returns to work with Björn Yttling, who worked on her first three albums. Eyeye leaves the more electronic experiments of 2018’s So Sad So Sexy behind and returns to more minimal, Read more ...
Tom Carr
Since their 2010 debut, Man Alive, Everything Everything have dissected the various structures of human relationships, from socio-political to interpersonal, but all in their own experimental art-rock sound.As a result, their recent albums took on an uncanny relevance: 2017’s A Fever Dream was inflected by the uncertainty of Brexit and Trumpian rhetoric, while 2020’s Re-Animator was heavily poignant amidst the isolating pandemic owing to its deep, personal introspection and drawing from Julian Haynes’ theory of the bicameral mind. Now on Raw Data Feel they cast a curious glance over our Read more ...
mark.kidel
There is so much gospel out there that it’s not easy to stand out above the crowd. Mavis Staples, with a distinctive voice that has delivered a gritty contralto for many decades, never stops. This new release, a set of songs that were recorded in 2011, is a collaboration with the Band’s late drummer Levon Helm, a sure-fire fan of African-American church music.It’s a only just more than a decent collection, with a few moments of glory, not least a rocking and rolling version of the classic “You Got to Move”, but there's something a little too efficient rather than ecstatic about it, even if Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Driller Killer, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer form a self-descriptive yet misunderstood trinity in American cinema’s sordid underground. Originally subtitled Sympathy for the Devil, Henry modernised the serial killer as protagonist, minus Hopkins' later suave intellect as Lecter, or Dexter’s benign foibles.Debutant director John McNaughton begins with a close-up of a beautiful woman’s face, then pulls back to contemplate her body in blood-splashed grass, one of several aestheticized tableaus showing a slaughter pandemic. The sound design’s Read more ...