CDs/DVDs
Thomas H. Green
This Anarchy Arias consists of 13 operatic covers of British punk rock classics from the late Seventies and early Eighties, and it’s almost all skin-crawlingly horrific. Clearly, then, this review is going to be a predictable reaction, from a writer who rates the original versions moaning about how their ultimate mainstream co-option robs them of bite, fury and authenticity. Why, for instance, couldn’t I take a step back and listen from a broader perspective, observing the post-modern nuance, the skill involved and the “sense of fun”?The fact is, smirkers completely numbed by this century’s Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi’s 1989 debut feature My 20th Century (Az én XX. Századom) opens on a grandiose scene depicting the first public demonstration of Thomas Edison’s electric light-bulb. We see the wonder of onlookers as they witness the new phenomenon, the brightness of light contrasting with surrounding darkness. The discovery would, in due course, give rise to cinema itself.Enyedi’s film is shot in glorious black and white (by master cinematographer Tibor Máthé, who with the director supervised this luminous HD restoration), and in the course of its complex, non-linear Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s now four years since the release of London Grammar’s debut album If You Wait, with its sublime and sophisticated chill-out tunes, and so their sophomore effort has been a source of some anticipation for a while. Unfortunately, the wait has born scanty fruit, and Truth Is a Beautiful Thing looks undeniably beige when compared to its predecessor.While Truth Is a Beautiful Thing maintains London Grammar’s down-tempo inclinations, it is the work of a band that have seemingly dumped many of the elements that made If You Wait really shine and instead find themselves fishing around for Read more ...
Mark Kidel
There has been a rush of valedictory ‘last albums’, apparently made in the knowledge that the artist in question’s life was coming to an end: Leonard Cohen, David Bowie, and now Chuck Berry, who left us on 18 March of this year.While the first two wrestle with the demons at the threshold, and predictably offered a meditation on death, the king of the duck-walk and rock’n’roll, is in more celebratory mood, with a series of recordings made slowly, with much help from his family, over the last few years. This is a survivor’s album: “While I’m still pickin’, I’ll still play my tunes”, the old man Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Some say Alt-J represent a paradox, blending, as they do, consummate artsiness with some absurdly catchy tunes. It's precisely this combination of ambition and accessibility that's helped them become one of Britain's most universally acclaimed bands. Everyone, it seems, has a soft spot for them, except, possibly, hipster journalists who feel they've sold out. Relaxer is a slightly different proposition. It's more ambitious than ever, and in places sublimely pretty, just not as immediate.The songs naturally divide into two groups. Firstly, there are a handful that still evoke the spirit Read more ...
Nick Hasted
After Eyes Without a Face, came this. Georges Franju is largely known for the grisly, surreal horror of his second feature, about a mad surgeon grafting stalked young women’s faces onto his disfigured wife. His all but forgotten follow-up, Spotlight On a Murderer (1961), is a breezy lark by comparison. It relocates the Agatha Christie-style country house mystery to a Breton chateau, where a complicated inheritance causes the corrupt de Kerloguen family to revert to murderous type. Its flightiness is tethered by Franju’s elegance and wit, and his mostly young cast’s charm.This could easily be Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Roger Waters described The Final Cut, the last Pink Floyd album he appeared on, as “a requiem for the post-war dream”. Funnily enough, he could say much the same for Is This the Life We Really Want?, his fourth solo album. (The answer the title invites is of course supposed to be “No”).In “Broken Bones”, he explicitly lays the blame for what he sees as the world’s current morbid malaise on the aftermath of that self-same conflict: “When World War Two was over, well the slate was never wiped clean… we chose to adhere to abundance, we chose the American Dream”.As the album progresses, Waters, Read more ...
Barney Harsent
“When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life,” said Samuel Johnson. It’s utter balls, of course. When someone’s tired of London, they’re probably just knackered and wouldn’t mind living somewhere with more trees, fewer people and in a house that isn’t partitioned off by papier-maché walls. For many, returning, like salmon to the counties that spawned them, is the obvious move. Sure, they know that they’ll die there, but there’s an almost magnetic force at work – an attraction that is both complicated and impossible to ignore.For Saint Etienne's ninth album, Bob Stanley, Pete Wiggs Read more ...
Nick Hasted
David Lynch’s Hollywood horror film is casually stripped here of what seemed fathomless mystery back in 2001. Former Cahiers du Cinema editor Thierry Jousse kicks off a packed extras disc by using Lynch’s 10 clues on the original DVD case to easily decode its otherwise utterly disorienting last 30 minutes. The relationship between Betty (Naomi Watts), a perkily indomitable blonde actress from Deep River, Ontario, statuesque brunette amnesiac Rita (Laura Harring) and their seedier inversions of those characters in the final reel becomes almost mundane, when viewed through Jousse’s prism. Read more ...
graham.rickson
The best music is always ripe for reinvention, though for every disc of Kraftwerk songs performed in mambo style there's a collection of Beatles hits massacred on pan pipes. Happily, Sandy Smith’s superb brass band version of Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells is a triumph. Mostly it's based on composer David Bedford’s 1974 orchestral arrangement, Smith adding details taken from Oldfield's various recordings. Oldfield's original is the product of one musician and lots of tape, but this one uses 28 brass players plus Hannah Peel on synthesizers. It lives, moves and breathes in a very different way Read more ...
peter.quinn
Two of the most impressive young musicians on London’s jazz scene, tenor saxist Binker Golding and drummer Moses Boyd hoovered up every award in sight following the release of their debut album Dem Ones, including a brace of gongs at the Jazz FM Awards 2016 (for UK Jazz Act of the Year and Breakthrough Act of the Year) plus Jazz Newcomer of the Year at the 2016 Parliamentary Jazz Awards.Recorded live direct to tape over two days in July 2016 – with no edits, drop-ins or studio trickery of any kind – the duo’s follow-up Journey to the Mountain of Forever is a big sprawling beast of an album, a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Helmut Geir has been around the block multiple times but, like an electro-sonic Batman, always pops up just when he’s needed. Never much moved by fads, the Bavarian DJ-producer has always kept a foot in pre-house music styles, notably punk, Eighties synth-pop and Seventies electronica. His new album, only his fifth in a 25 year recording career, is, without doubt, his meisterwerk. Titled after the German for “Music of the Future”, a Wagnerian term, it’s actually retro-futurist in tone, yet so startlingly original and ambitious it posits directions for not only electronic music, but pop, rock Read more ...