CDs/DVDs
Liz Thomson
“I wanna hear the music play, I wanna dance and laugh and sway” sings Norah Jones on “Christmas Calling”, the opening track of this her first festive outing, “I wanna happy holiday for Christmas”. Doubtless when she recorded I Dream of Christmas, all that seemed easily possible, along with a smooch under the mistletoe. Now much of the world faces not a white Christmas but possibly another Covid Christmas – for many people sadly “a blue Christmas without you”, as the old chestnut has it.The Billy Hayes and Jay W Johnson song is well-covered, most famously by Elvis Presley, and it’s always hard Read more ...
Graham Fuller
GW Pabst’s The Love of Jeanne Ney (1927), adapted from the novel by the Russian revolutionary author Ilya Ehrenburg, is a fascinating example of a major movie, vividly rendered by a filmmaker at his peak, that was compromised by its producers’ commercial agenda.Survive though it does as a late-silent-era German classic, Pabst’s sixth feature suffers in comparison with his Joyless Street (1925), the Louise Brooks vehicles Pandora’s Box and The Diary of a Lost Girl (both 1929), and The Threepenny Opera (1931).The arch-realist Pabst was the leading exponent of the socially driven Neue Read more ...
joe.muggs
Liverpudlian singer-songwriter Kathryn Williams has always had a literary bent. This doesn’t just manifest in overt ways, like writing a concept album about Sylvia Plath in 2015’s Hypoxia, but in perfectly potted narratives, microscopically brilliant turns of phrase, and even titles that make you double-take going all the way back to 1999’s “Dog Without Wings”. And this tendency is not just written into her lyrics, but her performance too. Her understated style and vocals which combine impossibly pure tone with conversational earthiness bring the fine detail of words to the surface, on Read more ...
graham.rickson
That Bleak Moments exists at all is largely due to Albert Finney; the BFI funded Mike Leigh’s 1971 debut to the tune of £100, as an "experimental film", and Finney’s production company supplied the rest of the £18,000 budget. Shot on location in suburban South London, Bleak Moments looks incredibly assured and confident.Leigh complains about the quality of the soundtrack in an entertaining bonus commentary, but this pristine BFI reissue looks pristine and sounds ideally clear. Tulse Hill has rarely looked so desolate, cinematographer Bahram Manoochehri eerily accentuating the shadows. The Read more ...
Justine Elias
Naked (1993), the fifth and finest feature film written and directed by Mike Leigh, remains a searing, eerily prescient look at Britain on the verge of a social and economic breakdown.Maybe even a verbal breakdown, too, for Leigh, unlike any other filmmaker, has an ear for drawing out compelling characters from their distinctive modes of expression. Where so many other British films draw obvious lines between class with emphasis on accents, Leigh’s characters have an inimitable way of winding up words until they shatter.Though Leigh’s work – which spans 56 years of stage, television, and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“It was the night before Christmas and all through the house not a creature was sober, especially my spouse.” So runs the giggly spoken word opening line of “Harlan County Coal”, the third song on Hell of a Holiday by American country trio Pistol Annies. A semi-rock number, it insists the titular lump of combustible sedimentary rock is what the man in each of their lives will receive if he doesn’t straighten up his act.This cheerfully sassy woman-powered attitude permeates the album… well, the parts that aren’t Jesus-lovin’ or simply old fashioned Christmas cheese.Pistol Annies are big in the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Irrespective of its seasonal nature, the thread running throughout O Come All Ye Faithful is a mood of contemplation which could colour any of Hiss Golden Messenger main-man M. C. Taylor’s albums. The opening cut is “Hung Fire,” a Band-esque, downtempo, soulful reflection beginning with the line “Things were bad for me, if I’m honest.” The song opens out to declare “it’s Christmas day, thank God we made it.” Next up is an interpretation of “O Come All Ye Faithful” which, arrangement-wise, is of a piece with “Hung Fire.”Three of the albums tracks are new songs by Taylor and, as well as “O Come Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Neil Young’s ornery spontaneity has resulted in a remarkable number of mediocre songs. His sketchy 21st century has conjured audacious sonic conceits – the jazzy sparseness of Peace Trail, or the plastic-sounding live album Earth, both 2016 – without the writing to match. Last year’s disinterred, lost Seventies album Homegrown recalled how very different Young’s inspired instinct sounds. Reconstituting Crazy Horse with early member Nils Lofgren on Colorado (2019), after “Poncho” Sampedro’s retirement, covered similarly pedestrian work with his old band’s comforting sound. This follow-up has Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Neil Young’s ornery spontaneity has resulted in a remarkable number of mediocre songs. His sketchy 21st century has conjured audacious sonic conceits – the jazzy sparseness of Peace Trail, or the plastic-sounding live album Earth, both 2016 – without the writing to match. Last year’s disinterred, lost Seventies album Homegrown recalled how very different Young’s inspired instinct sounds. Reconstituting Crazy Horse with early member Nils Lofgren on Colorado (2019), after “Poncho” Sampedro’s retirement, covered similarly pedestrian work with his old band’s comforting sound. This follow-up has Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Christmas albums can traditionally be slippery beasts with a whole host of quality control issues. This is not unlike the compilation albums that also make an appearance at this time of year, with one or maybe two previously unreleased tracks, which are targeted to separate long-term fans from their cash.An artist may write a handful of tunes to celebrate overindulgence, inclement weather and, occasionally, a mythical birth at the eastern end of the Mediterranean. However, from there on in, it’s usually cover versions that sound like carbon copies of the originals and shockingly large amounts Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Just as love's downward spiral can deconstruct a lover's sense of self, so SJS's plangent post-modern prog deconstructs itself as it ebbs and flows toward gorgeous but muted crescendos.On the band's second album The Unlikely Event, lovely melodies stop dead and mutate. Electronic interjections – like leaks from a nerve centre or a super-computer – fizz, throb and splutter out. A searing guitar solo, bent on rockist glory, suddenly falters, chokes and has to regather itself. Uncertainty and impermanence rule.In 2017, English musician-producer-engineer Stuart Stawman launched his Australia Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Jef Costello, the lone contract killer in Le Samouraï (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967), carries out the murder of the boss of a night club. We see how meticulously he has prepared for it, including the construction of an airtight alibi involving precise times – which others will corroborate – for his arrivals and departures at locations other than the scene of the crime. In spite of that, he is rounded up on the same night, identity-paraded the following morning, and once he is released by the police, he still remains their main suspect. And then finds he is also being pursued by his Read more ...