CDs/DVDs
Russ Coffey
Christmas albums are often a time to forget about the other 11 months of the year and get stuck into some festive silliness. Not for Kate Rusby. On this, her second volume of carols inspired by the South Yorkshire tradition, she’s still doggedly plying her trade, recasting some well-known and other unfamiliar Christmas melodies as simple hearth-side folk songs. The result may not be the sort of thing Jim Royle would open presents to, but it’s sure Christmassy in a soft, poignant and delicately beautiful way.While Mortals Sleep’s mix of folk, Yorkshire and Christmas is never better Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
In truth this probably deserves one star rather than two but it’s all about expectations, isn’t it. A Yuletide outing from the professional bumpkins who hit big in 1976 with "I've Got a Brand New Combine Harvester", replete with a dopey-eyed cartoon cow angel floating on the cover and Christmas dinner on the CD itself, is hardly claiming to be vanguard art. If you buy this, you know what you’re getting – daft yokelised versions of creaky Christmas perennials. And they really are all the most predictable songs imaginable, with the possible exception of orchestral pop composer Leroy Anderson’s Read more ...
graham.rickson
Nightmarish images abound. There’s a giant plastic fish. There are several scary beards and the world’s most unconvincing bear costume. Often cited as one of the most unsettling of children’s entertainments, The Singing Ringing Tree is reissued by Network DVD along with The Tinderbox. Both were made in East Germany in 1957 and 1959 and became known when shown in serial form on BBC television in the 1960s.A naïve prince has to win the hand of a spoilt princess by obtaining said tree; into the mix come a malicious dwarf and a variety of helpful animals. There’s a lot of transformation going on Read more ...
bruce.dessau
There are plenty of recent examples of videogenic movie stars embarking on questionable musical pursuits, from Keanu Reeves to Scarlett Johansson, to name two whose rhythmic careers should have been throttled at birth. Zooey Deschanel, Hollywood's go-to kook, has actually recorded some remarkably pretty music. Volume One, her debut album with M Ward, the other half of She & Him, was as fine an example of tweetastic vintage-store pop as you would come across this side of Belle & Sebastian. Cute as a kitten and just as playful.In fact, Deschanel excels at wistful, shimmery, Sixties- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Serge Gainsbourg died in 1991. His son Lulu was five at the time. Dad and son shared the given name Lucien. Now, they share more than that. On the confounding, unsatisfying From Gainsbourg to Lulu, Gainsbourg junior tackles 16 of his dad’s classic songs for his debut album.Gainsbourg is often revisited in France. Current pre-Christmas shelf-hoggers include an all-encompassing box set, a new version of Histoire de Melody Nelson and Bashung’s 2006 run through of L'homme à tête de chou. Lulu joining in seems perverse as the past few years have seen him gain recognition as a jazz pianist – he Read more ...
matilda.battersby
Even if you haven’t heard of Slow Moving Millie, aka Amelia Warner, there’s a 99 per cent chance that if you reside in the UK and have access to television, you’ll have heard her sing. The 29-year-old’s cover version of The Smiths’ “Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want” features on the most talked-about, eye-misting Christmas advert of the year: John Lewis’s 30-second commercial of a little boy who can’t wait for his present (wait for it!) to his parents to be given.Millie’s slowed-down, plaintive and beautifully sung cover version is in a big way responsible for the ad’s success. And Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Cranes Are Flying begins with the literal rush of young love, as Boris and Veronica skip down a street, giddy with endorphins. They could be infatuated young Americans in the rock’n’roll year of its making, 1957. But this is Moscow in 1941, as a radio announces Russia is at war, and Boris (Alexei Batalov) volunteers for the front. The chaotic crush of women saying goodbye to men, in which Veronica (Tatiana Samoilova) can’t quite reach him, heartbreakingly brings home war’s human cost, as do later scenes of Moscow’s equivalent to VE Day – another visceral spectacle of overwhelming emotion. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Scotland’s Bill Wells is hard to pin down. Although ostensibly a jazz pianist, boundaries don’t concern him. He’s played with Aidan Moffat and Isobel Campbell. In 2009 he made the GOK album with Japan’s Tori Kudo (who records as Maher Shalal Hash Baz). Lemondale was made in Japan with a raft of collaborators that include Jim O’Rourke, Kudo and members of Tenniscoats.It’s a lovely album. Coherent, too. Especially considering that it was recorded in one day. Overall, Lemondale is filmic, edging towards Michel Legrand’s jazzier moments and even Francis Lai soundtracks. Equally, it’d be at home Read more ...
Russ Coffey
At last, seasonal talent-show spin-offs are showing signs of real talent. Hot on the heels of the appealing, if insubstantial, Olly Murs album, comes Rebecca Ferguson’s debut. And, if Murs’ release wasn’t too bad, people are saying that Ferguson’s is such a leap forward it’s bad form to mention her in the same breath as the other alumni. Part of the fuss is, no doubt, down to the fact that, finally, The X Factor seems to have uncovered someone with authentic, visceral ability. But the reaction is not just about confounded expectations. Ferguson seems genuinely capable of giving Adele Read more ...
David Nice
Among the many singularities of Pasolini’s films, the proportions of his narrative structure have to be the strangest. Here we, like the young Jason who grows before our eyes, get a six-minute introductory lecture from the hero's foster centaur which tells us what to look out for in the obscurities that follow: all is sacred, nature is never natural, myth and ritual are a living reality, this is a story of deeds, not thoughts. Then there’s hardly any dialogue for the next hour or so: look away, if you’re squeamish, at the climax of the chthonic rituals to which Medea's Colchians who guard the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
A decade and a half ago I was junglist correspondent for Eternity magazine, a long since defunct organ that catered to the then thriving print press for rave devotees. This was how I ran into Aquasky, a trio of studenty, long-haired guys from Bournemouth making chill-out drum and bass. A lot has happened to them since then. Most notably - apart from being much less hirsute - they long ago dumped the marijuana’n’jazz approach and make, under the radar, contagiously ballsy rave music that takes no prisoners but also welcomes anyone with a party bone in their body to their party.Their new album Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
In the mid-Nineties, America had a bit of a moment with electronic dance music. The most emblematic sign of this was The Prodigy’s Fat of the Land topping the Billboard charts in 1997. The truth was, however, that despite inventing house music and techno, en masse nationally they didn’t really get rave culture. The US liked their electronic dance stylistically performed as close to a KISS concert as possible. They liked it, in other words, to be rock’n’roll.Now it’s happening again, but on a broader scale. On the one hand American R&B superstars have absorbed Euro-pop and dubstep, on the Read more ...