CDs/DVDs
david.cheal
Who needs songs, when you have song titles that are as good as those written by Luke Haines? The man who, we’re told, could have been a Britpop contender (though I’m not convinced myself; he’s far too clever, and much too odd) has previously, under his own name or in bands such as The Auteurs and Black Box Recorder, penned tunes with titles such as “Unsolved Child Murder”, “Girl Singing in the Wreckage”, “The English Motorway System”, and of course “Luke Haines is Dead”, now brings us this cornucopia of magnificently titled tat. Gems here include “Inside the Restless Mind of Rollerball Rocco Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Because Humphrey Jennings was a director of documentaries, he is never spoken of in the same breath as the greatest British directors of the past - Chaplin, Hitchcock, Powell, Lean and Reed. Another reason is that his career was short, compressed into the 16 years before his death at 43 in 1950 from a cliff fall in Poros, Greece, where he was scouting locations for a film about postwar healthcare in Europe. Yet Jennings was a visionary whose best films were touched with oddness and poetry - he was a poet and a painter, a champion of Surrealism - and chronicled more movingly than any Read more ...
graeme.thomson
A companion piece to last year’s Scratch My Back, on which Gabriel restrung classic material by the likes of Radiohead, Lou Reed and Elbow, New Blood finds the arch tinkerer dismantling some of his own greatest songs, stripping them of their rockist infrastructure (bass, guitar, drums) and rearranging them for a 46-piece orchestra.The two fundamental problems rest with the wide-ranging choice of material and the mode of reinvention: the fact that Gabriel has struggled to write anything of real magnificence for a couple of decades (hence why he’s doing this, Read more ...
matilda.battersby
After two years holed up in a Toronto retreat hiding from the fame and adulation that filled arenas for three solid years after her breakout album The Reminder went platinum, excitement has been mounting for Leslie Feist’s new recording, Metals. She has spoken about her struggle to write it after exhausting herself touring, but the 35-year-old’s new material doesn’t disappoint. It is rockier, more melancholy and doesn’t have the same commercial charm as her last record - which is probably quite deliberate.The Reminder was full of chirpy songs with lovelorn refrains and breathlessly whispered Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Treacle Jr is a cautionary tale of the fragility of UK film careers. Writer-director Jamie Thraves’s debut The Low Down (2000) is still regarded as a minor classic, but he took nine years to follow it up, then remortgaged his house to make this third film.He surely risked his home from a need to bring the film’s odd couple to life. Tom (Tom Fisher) is one of those men who walk out for the paper and don’t come back, nameless anxiety driving him from his young family and comfortable Birmingham home. Taking the train to London, he feels free for a while in a sunny park. He becomes homeless in Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It can’t be a coincidence that the simultaneous release of four Agnès Varda DVDs draws a film each from the Fifties, Sixties, Seventies and Eighties, bringing the opportunity for a broad-sweep appraisal. It’s equally unsurprising that the films share Varda’s non-judgmental empathy with her subjects and their day-to-day worlds.La pointe courte, released in 1954, is Varda’s first film. Although it captures the life of the eponymous fishing village, it’s a loose-ended examination of the collapsing relationship between a locally raised husband and his Parisian wife. Even at this point Varda had Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Walls reclaim the soft-focus beats and keyboard wash that soundtracks the lounges of continental European hotels. The half-remembered chillout of their second album hazily drifts through a world where Ibiza, shoegazing and Krautrock travel on the same passport.Walls are Alessio Natalizia and Sam Willis. Outside Walls, both have musical day jobs. Natalizia is the mainstay of the fuzzy, shoegazing-leaning Banjo or Freakout. Willis is a producer, and one of the people behind Allez-Allez, a regular dance podcast. Their first contact came in 2009, when Banjo or Freakout got the Allez-Allez remix Read more ...
bruce.dessau
The 14th album from Vince Clarke and Andy Bell is supposed to herald a change, or so we are told by their people. Have they gone Goth? Have they discovered dubstep? Like heck. The only thing that has changed appears to be Andy Bell's eerily robotic face. Don't be fooled by the title. There is nothing futuristic about the nine songs here. There isn't even a cameo on backing vocals from Raymond Baxter, the presenter of the BBC series that got to their title first.But before you start demanding a refund, have a listen. Tomorrow's World is classic handbag electro with knobs on. From the yearning Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“Cocaine Blues” is a song whose murky origins lie at the very roots of blues, folk, country and rock’n’roll, possibly right back to the last days of minstrelsy. When Johnny Cash performs it on his riveting 1968 live album At Folsom Prison, it fairly hums with potency, just about as heartening as popular music gets. When Merle Haggard has a crack at “Cocaine Blues” on his latest album, however, the mood is the polar opposite. The clean easy-going tone conjures a country and western version of Hugh Laurie’s recent sedate, chart-bothering take on the blues.
Then again, Haggard, at 75, has Read more ...
peter.quinn
This Edition Records debut from pianist Andrew McCormack and saxophonist Jason Yarde is a powerful marriage of brilliant musicianship and composition of the first rank. While this is only their second release in the duo format, a follow-up to the 2009 album My Duo, their attention to the smallest detail of phrasing and dynamic has been steadily honed since the days of playing together in seminal groups J-Life and Tomorrow's Warriors, dating back to the 1990s.The new album ranges from the rolling, Jarrettesque vamp of album opener "D-Town" to the duo's elaborate unpacking of "Embraceable You Read more ...
Joe Muggs
I never really dug Suede. I could hear great pop songwriting in some of their work, but their rampant adoption of Bowie-as-Ziggy-Stardust sonics and vocal tics seemed to be just as representative of Britpop's necrophiliac tendencies as did Oasis's tired Beatle-isms. So I'm slightly puzzled as to why I'm enjoying this record by their singer as much as I am, given that it is almost as retro – albeit in a different way.The soundscape of Black Rainbows is a return to rock after the orchestral stylings of previous solo records, but it belongs to the mid-1980s. In particular there is a Goth Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Cosmo Jarvis’s welter of ideas is sometimes too much for him. He explodes in multiple directions at once, ebullient, madcap, raucous, goofy, the very antithesis of cool (hence a 1/10 score for this in NME). He simply cannot rein it in, thus beautiful melodic orchestration fights it out with sea shanty stomping, dodgy, heartfelt rapping, rugby club choruses and Jarvis’s inability to be serious for very long. Nothing, however, can disguise the fact that there’s raw talent here, discovering itself.The Devonshire 22-year-old’s second album is demented fun. His first was a blink-and-you-missed-it Read more ...