CDs/DVDs
peter.quinn
14 Grammy Awards, over 30 million albums sold, immortalised in song by Bob Dylan. It's hard to believe that Girl On Fire is only Alicia Keys's fifth studio album, such is the extent of her success. The singer-songwriter's previous release, The Element of Freedom, successfully mined the juxtaposition of powerful beats and understated vocals. And, following the solo piano amuse-bouche of “De Novo Adagio”, Girl On Fire initially looks set to deliver more of the same.The slow burner “Brand New Me”, the futuristic, cut-up beats and wobbly analogue synths of “When It's All Over”, the warm ambient Read more ...
emma.simmonds
In Magic Mike the Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh turns his camera on the “cock-rocking kings of Tampa”, and the result is one of the most eye-wateringly entertaining and surprisingly stylish movies of the year. With more thrust than a jumbo jet and more packages than the Royal Mail will handle this Christmas, thank God they didn’t release it in 3D.Channing Tatum plays Magic Mike, one of the dancers at the Xquisite Strip Club in Tampa, Florida. His colleagues include the extraordinarily monikered Big Dick Richie (True Blood’s man mountain Joe Manganiello), with the club owned and run Read more ...
graeme.thomson
English singer-songwriter Steve Adey has taken six years to follow up his excellent debut album, All Things Real, and at first it’s hard to tell why. These 10 songs, simply constructed, are executed without any great fuss or ornament, but slowly their sense of depth and unhurried devotion to quality reveals itself. The album is aptly named. Adey doesn't do party music. “Are we laughing?” is the question posed during the second song, “Laughing”. Not on Adey’s watch, we’re not. Recorded in a 19th-century Edinburgh church, this is relentlessly downbeat midnight music. When a (terrific) Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
For those wont to say “that’s well dark,” at the slightest hint of edgy content, here is true darkness. The third album by London alt-folk oddballs David Cronenberg’s Wife is stewed in pitch-black lyrical themes and revels in dragging its listeners to truly uncomfortable places. If this album had been made by an artist with a higher profile, I suspect it would have been greeted by a chorus of disapproving voices from every side of the ideological spectrum.Musically, the four-piece plough a furrow not dissimilar to The Fall or LIARS, but only if both had joined forces to create a new and Read more ...
Laura Silverman
Michael Palin's adventures in period drama as star and co-writer, with director Tristram Powell, pass a pleasant if forgettable hour and a half. The main thread – repressed Englishman loosens up abroad – links other familiar elements: the closeted life of Oxford academics; mild-mannered English types; and audacious, wealthy Americans. Perhaps the actor can be forgiven: the story is based loosely on his great-grandfather's diaries.The younger Palin is predictably strong as Francis Ashby, the reserved Oxford don “without moral blemish”. Hiking in the Swiss Alps, Ashby relaxes enough to take Read more ...
Jasper Rees
No one would have believed in the last years of the 1970s that human taste was for concept double albums based on novels by HG Wells about invading Martians. No one could have dreamed that the era which spawned shouty gobshites in skinny trousers would also find house room for the alien union between late Victorian science fiction and pompous orchestral pop. Yet, across the gulf of time we can confirm that this did indeed happen. And much as they did in the flash-forward conclusion to the original album, the Martians are invading all over again.Jeff Wayne’s The War of the Worlds, many of a Read more ...
bruce.dessau
The remix album is an ungainly beast. The worst feel like a sign of creative bankruptcy while even the best feel like a shameless cash-in on a successful project. Hopelessly devoted fans might still call it a win-win situation, but to outside ears it doesn't matter how hot the hotshot producers are, the lingering echo of a remix album is often the sound of a product being milked dry.And so to Mogwai's A Wrenched Virile Lore, which takes it cue from 2011’s Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will (the title is almost an anagram, a remix, of the earlier title). The genre-trouncing Glaswegians have Read more ...
theartsdesk
The Jam: The GiftThomas H GreenGiven his continued artistic renaissance, it’s currently rather unfashionable to suggest Paul Weller was never better than with The Jam. Nonetheless, a trawl through their back catalogue will assure most this was the case. Musically, it’s arguable but lyrically it’s definitive. The Gift was The Jam’s sixth and final album, released in the spring of 1982. The trio were at the peak of their powers, riding chart success that melded punk’s snarl with Weller’s suburban angst, including, in “Going Underground”, one of the greatest and most furious songs ever to hit Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Entirely in keeping with the heightened narrative surrounding pop stars and their perpetual crises, Christina Aguilera’s recent history has been spun into the kind of tragedy worthy of Piaf or Callas. Her last album, Bionic, singularly failed to shift anywhere near the kind of numbers pop divas need to keep a hand on the crown; she had the temerity to put on a few pounds and – worse – seem pretty relaxed about it; she got divorced; she got drunk. Ravens were seen leaving the Tower.These routine potholes in the yellow brick road are rigorously exploited and amplified on Lotus. Aguilera returns Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
How much suffering is it possible to take? Can suffering be depicted on film in a way which evokes its true depths? Is it possible to draw anything positive from a film that succeeds in capturing the essence of suffering? In short order: the human spirit can surprise; yes; yes. Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc) is a film that still affects and has an ominous power, despite being silent, being made in 1928 and eschewing the overly demonstrative. It’s also strikingly timeless.Dreyer has been celebrated this year and the opportunity to assess the films Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Well that's a shame. Little Mix were likable, talented winners of The X Factor – four times Everygirl in clashing neon, funky, funny, vulnerable but self aware. They proved repeatedly on the show that they could sing and then some, and even though they were a thrown-together group harmonised like they were sisters. Their most memorable turn, doing En Vogue's “Don't Let Go”, perfectly caught the beginning of the current wave of nostalgia for the great 1990s R&B girl groups, and when they won it felt like they could be an actual characterful pop band in the way the Sugababes and Girls Aloud Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It has a cracking cover, Example’s new album. Look at it above. A boy by a lake stretching his hands skywards, emanating untrammelled childhood freedom, contrasted with a festival crowd, innocence long gone, roaring for more. Example appears to be positing his conflicted status. It works well as a metaphor and the album covers the same territory.This is London pop rapper Elliot “Example” Gleave’s confessional fourth album, a loose concept piece where many songs are raw pleas, reeking of rehab speak. In essence, he bitterly regrets and abhors the way he let his idealised former girlfriend down Read more ...