CDs/DVDs
Thomas H. Green
Over the years, Sinead O’Connor has put her fan base though the mill but, with her ninth album, may have redeemed herself. Quite apart from her many well-publicized personal eccentricities, those who have been waiting for her to make an album that’s stylistically akin to her early material rather than, say, a collection of reggae numbers of Irish folk, should now be happy. Together with her first husband and long term collaborator John Reynolds, with whom she created her debut The Lion and the Cobra back in 1987, O’Connor delivers 10 songs freighted with passion, raw emotion and occasional Read more ...
peter.quinn
Where the creative interconnections between hip hop, jazz and soul are concerned, Robert Glasper proves himself a master on Black Radio. Featuring an impressive roll call of guest singers and rappers, the pianist has finally made the album which brings together all of his musical predilections into a single whole, and the results are outstanding.With three Blue Note albums in the bag - Canvas (2005), In My Element (2007) and the Grammy-nominated Double Booked (2009) - the pianist clearly feels he's demonstrated his bona fide jazz chops, and devotes this first full-length album from his Read more ...
graham.rickson
Handel: The Eight Great Suites Lisa Smirnova (ECM)This set slipped out quietly at the end of 2011. The typically muted ECM cover gives no hint of how life-enhancing these two discs are; I felt like getting the fluorescent highlighters out and jazzing up the monochrome sleeve art. Pianist Lisa Smirnova, Moscow-born and now living in Vienna, makes a bold case for these underrated, immensely enjoyable suites. Comparing them with Bach’s keyboard output is inevitable. Both are fabulous, of course, but it’s hard to disagree with Uwe Schweikert’s comments in the sleeve notes, that Handel’s Read more ...
Mark Kidel
The fourth album by Carolina Chocolate Drops, the old-time string and jug band with 21st-century attitude, fizzes with their characteristic energy. They’re essentially a live band, great communicators and purveyors of a musical style that was designed to brighten the evenings of hard-working mountain people in the Piedmont region of the Appalachians. The upfront quality of Buddy Miller’s production and the contagious joy the musicians bring to their singing and playing goes a long way towards transcending the limitations of the studio.The Carolina Chocolate Drops learned much of their Read more ...
Ismene Brown
With most horror films the monster gets flushed down the metaphorical toilet - blown up, spat out, switched off. In this one you must live with the monster forever. As most people know, We Need to Talk About Kevin is about a boy who becomes a multiple murderer. That’s established in the opening shot (using barrel-fuls of tomato passata, I'd guess) with a vivid repellency and realism that you only slowly realise has drawn you deep into his mother’s mind - where you will stay for the rest of the story.Lionel Shriver’s novel seemed to me somewhat too schematic and clever in its treatment of her Read more ...
howard.male
It’s four years since their extremely successful debut album. But then again it’s not easy to hone perfect dumb-ass pop music from just two or three major chords while still making it shine like a new gold coin. The art of simplicity is a complex thing: in the Ting Ting’s case it’s about paring down, resisting overt sophistication, sounding freshly squeezed rather than made-from-concentrate, and being in your face without getting on your nerves. So has the long gestation period and rejection of a whole load of material they weren’t happy with resulted in another swaggering, kicking bag Read more ...
Joe Muggs
There's a whole world of music out there that floats in the zone somewhere between jazz, club music, sound art, contemporary classical and meditative new age background sound – so much of it that it all too easily blurs together. But there are artists who can make something more, and when you stumble on something truly individualistic like this album it shines out like a beacon in the fog. Like Santiago Latorre's first album, Órbita, but more expansive, this passes breathy saxophone sounds, voices singing in Spanish and Taiwan Chinese, field recordings, rhythm tracks and more through digital Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Une Femme Mariée has been all but lost. Made in 1964 and barely seen since, it lurked silently in Godard's filmography between Bande à Part and Alphaville. Its availability on Dual Format DVD/Blu-ray plugs a gap and also offers the chance to find a continuity in Godard’s film-making that previously didn’t seem to be there.Although Une Femme Mariée shares much of its languorously disassociated atmosphere with Alphaville, it’s more comfortably slotted into a line traced from Une Femme est une Femme and Vivre sa Vie to, later, Masculin Féminin: films dissecting the female role and perspective, Read more ...
bruce.dessau
When I heard that Meat Loaf's new album was called Hell in a Handbasket I thought for moment that this lover of rock operatics might have decided to set the collected scribbles of Richard Littlejohn to music. If that thought chills your marrow brace yourselves, because this is worse than that. Hell in a Handbasket is a titanic misfire wherein Meat Loaf dips his toes into the world of rap and hip hop.The good news is that he does not rap like some over-lubricated dad at a disco, but gets in the likes of Chuck D and Lil Jon to do it for him between rather cloying reflections on the vicissitudes Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Nottingham's Tindersticks were always a band out of time. They may have had something of the night about them when they started two decades ago, but they were too late for the Nick Cave-franchised post-goth party. By the time they had brightened up a little the Britpop bandwagon had saddled up and left town. They split, then reformed in 2006. Now on their ninth studio album, the remaining originals and some interesting chums have come up with a swirling, elegant, multi-genre beast, which manages to be both melancholic and wry, proudly defying categorisation."Chocolate", the opening nine- Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: Trauer-Music: Music to Mourn Prince Leopold Taverner Consort and Players/Parrott (Avie)Prince Leopold was Bach’s patron in the small town of Cöthen, where the young composer arrived to take up the post of Capellmeister in 1717. Leopold was a cultured and genial employer, who, according to Bach, “both knew and loved music”. And though the composer only stayed until 1723, his Cöthen years were creatively productive. Much of Bach’s music from this period has been sadly lost, including the sequence of pieces written in 1728 to mourn Leopold’s sudden death at the age of 34. A libretto Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Nanci Griffith, the Lone Star State’s dirty realist, has done much of her better work with a Democrat in the White House. I remember interviewing her once soon after the first Gulf War, when she was glum about the prospect of George Bush Snr walking the next election. She turned out to be wrong about that, and the Clinton years confirmed her as the pre-eminent godmother of rootsy, narrative singer-songwriting. Then the next Bush, far from firing up her busy liberal wrath, ushered in an emotional downturn.This intoxicating set of songs finds her defiantly in recovery mode, never louder or Read more ...