CDs/DVDs
david.cheal
Let’s hope that the first posthumously released Amy Winehouse album is also the last; not because it’s in any way bad – actually it’s a pretty decent collection of songs from throughout her career – but because “pretty decent” is about as good as it gets. After this, if there’s anything left, it will surely only be the sound of a barrel being scraped.Assembled by Winehouse producers Salaam Remi and Mark Ronson, it’s a patchwork of alternative versions, some newer stuff, some bits and bobs, plus her famous duet from earlier this year with Tony Bennett. What shines through immediately – and Read more ...
howard.male
Some critics have lazily compared Baloji to Somali rapper K’nann: both are African rappers who had lucky childhood escapes from countries about to descend into war and chaos, but beyond that they seem to have quite different approaches to what they do. K’naan is as much a pop musician and poet as he is a hip-hop artist, firmly concentrating on melody, song structure and hooks. Whereas Baloji, at least on the evidence of this album, seems to want to engage more with roots music while finding ways for his rhymes to fit in with already established musical idioms.So Kinshasa bands Zaiko Langa- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Connecticut-born Jules Dassin graduated from lightweight suspense and comedy fodder for MGM to pungent, location-based crime dramas, hitting his stride with Brute Force (1947) and The Naked City (1948), both included in this package. However, his upward trajectory was derailed after he was identified as a communist at the HUAC hearings. Producer Darryl Zanuck gave Dassin the script for Night and the City and dispatched him to London to shoot it, days before the Committee was due to grill the director. Then Dassin relocated to France, where he created the noir masterpiece - and the third Read more ...
Russ Coffey
For a couple of uber-hip rock nerds, The Black Keys do often still make pretty conventional music. After flirting with hip hop on the Blakroc project (and some of that mentality rubbing off on 2010’s release, Brothers), it’s back to straightforward, if sophisticated, blues-rock for the Ohio-based duo. But if there’s not much that's groundbreaking or experimental here, it’s all pretty likeable stuff: the sort of material that gives unchallenging listening a good name.By resting the Seventies guitarscape over rhythms that are more Fifties and Sixties in tone, Auerbach and Carney have given El Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
One of the great revelations of the decade-long HBO TV invasion is that so many of their series take everything at a truly leisurely pace. Their groundbreaking MO is not to rush, as pre-millennial TV shows usually did, but to give the plot space to breathe in a way that matches how we now watch TV - at our own pace, in our own time. In the case of Mildred Pierce, film director Todd Haynes’s beautiful-looking, Emmy-winning five-episode adaptation of the 1941 James M Cain novel, this sometimes backfires. The narrative has almost too much space to spread out, with five and a half hours viewing Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Dan Treacy of the TV Personalities told a magazine that, “If the word cult ever described a band then it’s The Callas.” Given that his own band are one of the ultimate British cult groups, that’s saying something. The TV Personalities reference is apt, for The Callas have supported them and have a certain amount of the same shambolic charm, as well as the same art-world aspirations. The Callas’s Ionas brothers, Aris and Lakis, are involved in organising exhibitions of their artwork and early editions of the album arrive decorated with their personalised handiwork. When they get together with Read more ...
Joe Muggs
It's understandable that people get put off leftfield dance music, given how much micro-genre delineation and dog-in-a-manger protectionism there can be in underground scenes. It can seem a shame sometimes, but then again, these are part and parcel of the fertile creativity and passion that exists around the music, so it's swings and roundabouts. However, there are some areas you're guaranteed not to find frowning chin-strokers, and one of those is inhabited by Brighton label Tru Thoughts, which consistently produces music that's friendly, welcoming and veritably insists you forget nitpicky Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although they're beginning to get cold, the winds blowing in from Scandinavia have recently brought enough music to keep anyone warm through long, dark nights. Finnish intensity, pop and introspection from Denmark, Swedish luxuriousness, Icelandic keyboard quirk, Norwegians that enfold - all are here. Along with Estonian haziness.Finland hits hardest with a new EP from K-X-P. theartsdesk has met them before, live and on album. Previously with Norwegian label Smalltown Supersound, Easy is their first outing for Manchester’s Melodic. It’s an extraordinary thing, coalescing a vision marrying a Read more ...
bruce.dessau
It is probably just wishful thinking from the haters that The X Factor is going into meltdown. Pop might be the sound of a bubble bursting, but the Class of Cowell is still having hits. Olly Murs is currently in a chart battle with Rihanna for the top spot with his single “Dance With me Tonight”, so don’t go sobbing for Louis Walsh just yet. In Case You Didn't Know is the second album from oily-haired Olly. I was hoping for something with the intrigue of Will Young. I got something with decent melodies and the lyrical complexity of Jedward.Proceedings kick off enjoyably with the Number One Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
There’s a scene in Theo Angelopoulos’s The Travelling Players where those gathered in a square hear “the wind of freedom is blowing” being sung. The wartime Nazi occupation is over. Greek, Russian and American flags are aloft. A bomb goes off. In asking whose freedom this was, Angelopoulos had chosen his moment carefully. The film was released in 1975, a year after Greece held its first election since the Colonels took power with American backing in 1967.Angelopoulos made his first film in 1968, just after the coup d’état had installed the quasi-fascist regime. A new four-DVD box set collects Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It sounds Vietnamese. A wordless vocal floats above bowed strings. Chiming strings drift in, shimmering. Piano notes twinkle. Musical fog, it rolls in and is then suddenly gone. “In the Valley” opens Music for Confluence. It’s a perfect evocation of geography and environment.The sense of his music being informed by the spatial is reflected by Broderick’s path. Born in Maine, he’s spent time in Oregon and then, in 2007, joined Danish moodists Efterklang, whom he worked with live and in the studio until last year. He settled in Denmark and also recorded solo on labels based in Sweden, Denmark, Read more ...
howard.male
With an expensive-looking camera in one hand and a cigarette in the other, Spanish singer Buika’s sepia-tinted CD cover photo is making eyes at me, making it hard for me to think of a bad word to say about this career-so-far summation. I don’t know about the camera, but that cigarette may well be a valuable tool in Buika’s trade, helping her voice to achieve that sandpaper surface texture. It’s a voice which perfectly contrasts with the occasionally overly tasteful piano-led arrangements which grace material which embraces flamenco and jazz as well as R&B and Latin dance rhythms.From a Read more ...