CDs/DVDs
Graham Fuller
In the most famous scene in Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour, Catherine Deneuve’s resplendently blonde Séverine fantasises being tied to the wooden frame of a crude outdoor eating space. There she is pelted with mud by her surgeon husband Pierre (Jean Sorel) and his friend Husson (Michel Piccoli), an older roué she hates but to whom she is perversely attracted.A herd of cows is nearby and the black mud is likely mixed with their shit. Before throwing the ordure and calling Séverine filthy names, the two men discuss the time of day, which is between 2 and 5 pm. These are the hours the 23-year-old Read more ...
howard.male
It’s easier to admire than fall in love with the music of St Vincent aka Annie Clark. But then again does one genuinely fall in love with a Bacon painting or a Beckett play? It’s just that we’re more used to taking pop songs to our heart, fondly looking back on them as markers of key moments on our lives. Having said that, some love struck couple might semi-ironically play Massduction’s lead single “New York” at their wedding. It’s resigned hook line, ‘You’re the only motherfucker in the city who can stand me,’ is delivered with such melancholy gratitude that it does evoke an emotional Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Director Jakob M Erwa's Centre of My World may be a coming-of-age story, but it’s definitely not a “coming out” one. Youthful hero Phil (Louis Hofmann) has barely reached the third sentence of his voiceover narration before he tells us he’s gay, and absolutely fine about it. There may be plenty of other emotional dysfunction in Phil’s world, but concerns about his own sexuality don’t feature.It’s an encouraging perspective to start from, particularly when we remember that Erwa’s film is an adaptation of an acclaimed Young Adult novel by Andreas Steinhofel The Centre of the World (Die Mitte Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Courtney Barnett’s debut album, Sometimes I Sit And Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit, was a quirky and bitter-sweet disc of sunny lo-fi tunes about wanting to be an evaluator operator, the price of organic vegetables and generally being at a bit of a loose end. Well, that was a couple of years ago and for her follow-up, she’s taken the somewhat unexpected step of getting together with lo-fi king, Kurt Vile for an album of largely laidback, Americana-infused duets that take a lead from Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris’ 70s hippy cowboy ballads and 90s slacker couple Evan Dando and Julia Hatfield Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Marilyn Manson, the man and the band, have maintained impressive global success for over two decades. Their albums – this is the band’s 10th - continue to shift by the bucket-load, and they can still sell out a worldwide stadium tour. Partly, their appeal is tribal. In the age of the beige hoodie and jeans, they don’t kowtow but continue to offer a studded, debauched black-splatter of Hollywoodised punk-goth kitsch. In recent years they’ve also undergone something of a musical renaissance. This continues on Heaven Upside Down.As with 2015’s The Pale Emperor, film composer Tyler Bates is co- Read more ...
Barney Harsent
When Liam Gallagher turns up with an album in tow, no one is expecting "Jazz Odyssey". You wouldn’t call a plumber to turf your lawn, and you wouldn’t ask ISIS to explain the dynamics of intersectionality. Similarly, you wouldn’t expect the former Oasis and Beady Eye frontman to deliver anything other than Beatles-inflected rock stompers. For the most part that’s exactly what you get. I stopped counting Fab Four references when I ran out of digits, but lyrically, there are nods to “Helter Skelter”, “All Things Must Pass”, “Happiness is a Warm Gun” and “Run For Your Life” among many Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s an intriguing combination of style and atmosphere in Berlin Syndrome, one that proves that, although director Cate Shortland has embraced genre with conviction, she certainly hasn’t left the arthouse roots that she established with her first two films, her debut Somersault and the much-acclaimed Lore from five years ago, behind. Whether the result finally and fully convinces may be another mattter, especially over a rather protracted length of nearly two hours, but it’s certainly a curious journey.It begins in laid-back mode, as we encounter heroine Clare (Teresa Palmer, intense) Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Carla Bruni delivers smooth and sophisticated pop. She undoubtedly has plenty of talent, and this latest collection of songs – all of them covers, and sung in impressive English – reeks of good taste, careful artistic choices and a wide knowledge of popular music, from which she has drawn material, as she has said, that "blew her away".She is a wide-ranging pop connoisseur, and the tracks run from the Stones’ “I Miss You” to Abba’s “Winner Takes All”, and from Lou Reed’s “A Perfect Day” to Willie Nelson’s “Crazy”. The production by hit-maker David Foster is flawless, well suited to the Read more ...
peter.quinn
With her third recording for Mack Avenue, Grammy Award-winning vocalist and songwriter Cécile McLorin Salvant has delivered a vocal jazz album for the ages. A 2CD set recorded live at NYC’s renowned Village Vanguard, the fascinating track list juxtaposes jazz standards, vaudeville songs, blues and more. A number of studio recorded originals sprinkled throughout, featuring the exquisite playing of the Catalyst Quartet, offer an intriguing commentary on the live material.Having immersed herself in early jazz and blues, it’s no surprise to see McLorin Salvant dusting down the glorious “You’ve Read more ...
joe.muggs
When Miley Cyrus released the deliriously patchy Bangerz in 2013 she was as over-exposed as any pop star has ever been, as I subtly pointed out at the time. Far less so now. Her only album in the interim has been a slightly tedious, flung-out drug folly of a Flaming Lips collaboration in 2015. Other than that, she's steadily edged away from the limelight, meaning this record arrives with less fuss and kerfuffle than more or less anything she's done since her very beginnings as the child star of Disney's Hannah Montana.And it's all the better for it. My first reaction on seeing the title was “ Read more ...
graham.rickson
Sweet isn’t the right word; in Mike Leigh’s 1990 film, life is unfair, frustrating and confusing by turns. Though, despite the darkness, Life Is Sweet exudes positivity and remains one of Leigh’s funniest, most quotable features.Many of the best lines are mumbled by Timothy Spall’s grotesque would-be restauranteur Aubrey, especially when he’s talking us through the menu for his Edith Piath-themed restaurant. Anyone for prune quiche? Saveloy on a bed of lychees? Or liver in lager? Spall here is a brilliant physical comedian, whether he’s capsizing a caravan or tumbling off an expensive Read more ...
joe.muggs
It was this album's good fortune to arrive on a miserable rainy afternoon. At other times my first impressions might be a bit harsher about its comfortable, retro dad-grooves and easily flowing sax solos, but instead I let it wrap me like a blanket, and by three tracks in it was absolutely impossible to dislike it.But then again, back in the Eighties, The Blow Monkeys were always adept at turning the smooth, super-mainstream and potentially pastiche-y into something rather more interesting – somewhere in the British white soul continuum between the gruff urgency of The Style Council and the Read more ...