CDs/DVDs
Graham Fuller
In Jean Grémillon's final fiction film The Love of a Woman, Marie Prieur (Micheline Presle) arrives on the Breton island of Ushant to replace the tiny settlement's aging Dr Morel (Robert Naly). While showing Marie her new digs and surgery, Mme Morel (Madeleine Geoffroy) compliments the lady doctor on her youth. Marie sighingly replies that she is 28. Quel horreur!Ninety-five now, Presle was 31 when the film was released in France in 1953. It is no discourtesy to say she looked closer to 35 – Marie is an attractive, dignified woman who performs her work with a quietness and authority that Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
This rerelease of Stephen Frears’ My Beautiful Laundrette comes as part of the wider BFI programme marking the 50th anniversary of the passing of the Sexual Offences Act 1967, and its presence in that strand, as one of the foremost works of its time to engage with gay issues, is a given. But watching it again today brings home just how much broader the film’s concerns are, how writer Hanif Kureishi approached the issue of British identity, his insight coming via the perspective of the country's Pakistani immigrant community. “Could anyone in their right mind call this silly little island off Read more ...
Liz Thomson
A striking and memorable debut made possible by a combination of crowd-funding and an Arts Council grant, Stories of the Sky combines 31-year-old Kev Minney’s twin obsessions, music and astronomy.Born in Northampton, and Brighton-based these last few years, he’s created an unusual and distinctive sound world in which his own impressive acoustic guitar playing is to the fore. The songs are thoughtful, unformulaic, but what makes Stories from the Sky stand out from the pack is the fact that it’s scored for a wide variety of instruments – and real instruments at that, not synthesised. There are Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Jean Gabin’s gangster’s paradise says more about him than the bullets he later lets fly. France’s greatest male star made a barnstorming comeback to pre-eminence as sharp-suited, drolly masterful Max in Jacques Becker’s Touchez Pas au Grisbi (1954), after wartime exile and post-war doldrums. But his most memorable scene is when he takes his fellow middle-aged gangster friend Riton (René Dary, pictured below with Lino Ventura) to a rarely used Paris bolthole. In a surprising, self-sufficient domestic interlude, he opens one of the Champagne bottles that fill his fridge, and carves foie gras Read more ...
Barney Harsent
It’s telling that, on their 2014 debut LP, Ballad of the Ice, Dori Sadovnik and Niv Arzi covered Bauhaus’ epic proto-gothic ode “Bela Lugosi’s Dead”. The 1979 single, with its incessant shuffle, dubbed-out tape delay and post-punk guitars, straddled the worlds of rock and dance with perfect balance and fine judgment. It has, quite clearly, been an influence on Tel Aviv’s Red Axes, who, with their second full-length offering, The Beach Goths, have delivered a collection that shares a similar sense of poise and purpose. After a slew of single releases on labels including their own Garzen Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The brass band/electronica interface is not a seam which musicians have previously mined regularly. Or, for that matter, at all. Mary Casio: Journey to Cassiopeia is probably – nothing else springs to mind – the only album teaming pulsing analogue synths with trombones, trumpets and tubas. Add in its creator Hannah Peel’s ploy of adopting the alter-ego Mary Casio, an elderly, small-town, north of England stargazer who travels to Cassiopeia, and it’s clear this is a high-concept album.It could, so to speak, be all concept and no trousers but Peel has form in this area. She’s part of the meta- Read more ...
Javi Fedrick
Across their 17-year career, Liars have become renowned for both their genre-jumping and for making good music wherever their stylistic tent is pitched. With founding member Aaron Hemphill leaving the Los Angeles band on amicable terms earlier this year, sole Liar Angus Andrew was left with the task of maintaining their momentum, and with TFCF, he’s made a uniquely strange album that encompasses this stripped-down band in both its music and its production.Making almost unprecedented use of the acoustic guitar throughout, TFCF feels rawer and more intimate than their previous album, the dance- Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Abel Gance’s remake of his 1919 classic was a worthy but overwrought attempt to avert World War II, which by 1938 was already a fait accompli. In their comparative sombreness, King Vidor’s The Big Parade (1925) and Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) are greater anti-war films, but then Vidor and Milestone couldn’t possibly have feared, as did Gance, the coming conflagration.Gance’s sardonic dedication to those viewers who would become “the Dead of tomorrow’s war” sets the tone of the second J’Accuse as an awful mirror of death. Transactions between the living and the dead Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Queens of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme recently declared that, while recording Villains, his intention had been to redefine the band's old sound. His recent work with Iggy Pop, he said, had recharged his imagination and now he wanted to make some changes. Two objectives seem to have been uppermost in Homme's mind - to keep things fresh and to make people dance. To achieve these he hired none other than producer Mark "Uptown Funk" Ronson.On paper, the combination sounds pretty mind-boggling. But on record, the results are less radical. Certainly, there are no disco-rock tracks Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Dylan aficionados will get the cover art reference immediately: one of Elliott Landy’s celebrated Woodstock photos, taken in 1968. Joan Osborne, Grammy nominated “no-nonsense Dylan” (New York Times) interpreter, is wearing neither hat nor guitar on the sleeve of her latest album but the allusion is clear and two of the songs on what she hopes will develop into a “songbook series” (in the manner of Ella Fitzgerald’s homage to the great American songwriters) are from The Basement Tapes.On this her ninth studio album, the Kentucky-born singer-songwriter who’s called New York City home for some Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
One of the stranger things about popular music is how unwilling most are to crossbreed and experiment. Surely that’s where the real kicks are? Most seem to prefer ploughing ruts that were overfamiliar 10, 20, 30, even 40 years ago. Either that or slavishly imitating contemporary cheese. Why’s there not more avant-salsa? Where’s the ambient country scene? Who’s into Teutonic electro-ska? The career of New Jersey three-piece Dälek hints at the answer to such questions. Consistently firing out an absorbing and original fusion of hip hop and feedback-laden space-rock/noise, they’re no nearer the Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Iron and Wine’s songs sweet melancholy songs are instantly recognisable, as if their principal author Sam Beam inhabited a parallel universe of the American imagination, a slightly whimsical and yet soulful territory, in which the extremes of hope and despair, love and disappointment, joy and grief, co-exist, feed of one another and provide one of the essential tonal colours of what is know as Americana.There has always been a strain of hard-sought purity in the American adventure, a natural and yet paradoxical contrast with the greed and a territorial expansion and exploitation that have as Read more ...