CDs/DVDs
CD: Hifi Sean - Ft.Wednesday, 07 September 2016
One of the great things about club music is that it deals with ageing in very different ways to rock – and as such can offer fantastic creative rebirths. Witness theartsdesk's recent startling Q&A with Mark Hakwins aka Marquis Hawkes, who'd been... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: Embrace of the SerpentTuesday, 06 September 2016
The jungle, a region of Edenic fantasy and unspeakable terrors, has always fed the white man’s imagination as well as kindled his greed. Not surprisingly, this is rich ground for the movies – a place beyond time, the home of noble savages and an El... Read more... |
CD: Pictish Trail - Future EchoesMonday, 05 September 2016
Johnny Lynch – the artist otherwise known as Pictish Trail – is one of the country’s most intriguing musicians. In 2010, he upped sticks and moved into a caravan on the remote island of Eigg, ensuring every appraisal of his work evermore would refer... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: The Beach BoysSunday, 04 September 2016
The Beach Boys signed with Capitol Records on 24 May 1962. Early the next month, their first single for the label became “409”/”Surfin’ Safari”. It was not their debut release. The “Surfin'”/ “Luau” single had been issued in November 1961 by Candix.... Read more... |
CD: KT Tunstall - KINSunday, 04 September 2016
This album is the rebuilding of KT Tunstall - in a spiritual sense if not a musical one.It’s not a huge departure from the norm in terms of sound. She's kept the distinctive zazzy guitar pop and poetic lyric, imbued with a style of music that skirts... Read more... |
CD: M.I.A. - AIMSaturday, 03 September 2016
Back in February, M.I.A. released the first single “Borders” from this her fifth and allegedly last album, taking a powerful aim at the refugee crisis engulfing the world. The video was as stark and simple as the track, with still, almost painterly... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, The Seven MinutesFriday, 02 September 2016
Although Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (****) hit cinemas in summer 1970, it is a pivotal Sixties film as it depicts the era in terminal crash-and-burn mode. Cashing in on but not a sequel to Valley of the Dolls, it caught the female pop-group trio... Read more... |
CD: Meat Loaf - Braver Than We AreThursday, 01 September 2016
Britain loves Meat Loaf. Never mind that his 1977 breakthrough, Bat Out of Hell, was once inescapable on pub jukeboxes and in school sixth form rooms throughout the land. Or that “I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That)” was the country’s... Read more... |
CD: Soundwalk Collective featuring Patti Smith - Killer RoadWednesday, 31 August 2016
The full credit is actually Soundwalk Collective and Jesse Paris Smith featuring Patti Smith but as her “resonating acoustic instruments” make no identifiably audible contribution to Killer Road, omitting Patti’s daughter Jesse Paris from the header... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: Conversation PieceTuesday, 30 August 2016
Luchino Visconti's penultimate film, made entirely in a studio recreation of a two-floor Roman apartment for the benefit of the semi-invalid director, is an atmospheric drama split down the middle.The better half of it is very definitely Burt... Read more... |
CD: King Creosote - Astronaut Meets ApplemanMonday, 29 August 2016
While there will, if there is any justice, be plenty written about King Creosote’s Astronaut Meets Appleman, few will probably state what to me is obvious: this is a really, really sexy record. Now, being Scottish, I’m perhaps predisposed to believe... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Judy Henske & Jerry YesterSunday, 28 August 2016
In 1969, a tranche of American musicians looked back to the country’s past for inspiration. Bob Dylan followed John Wesley Harding with Nashville Skyline. The Band’s eponymous second album hit the shops. The Flying Burrito Brothers debuted with The... Read more... |
