CDs/DVDs
Javi Fedrick
Although Wire have regularly fired out albums, ever since their inimitable strain of angular punk first exploded into the Seventies, their later efforts have never quite reached the same coveted cult status as 1977’s Pink Flag or 1978’s Chairs Missing. Silver/Lead does, however, continue the upwards trajectory the four-piece are currently on, sparked by 2015’s frenzied and cathartic Wire.With musical nods to Bowie, Killing Joke, and even Johnny Cash holding up the first half of the album, Wire wait until the second half to delve into more uncharted territory. This Wire is more melancholy and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There’s nowhere to go with this one, is there? Like any music writer, I want to come at James Blunt afresh. I’d love to say, “No, put your prejudices away, this album is actually alright and here’s why…”, but even the most accomplished sophist would, I suspect, find this impossible. That said, there’s not much quality difference between the better tracks here and those on Ed Sheeran’s well-loved, hugely successful Divide. The Bee Gees-like “Heartbeat”, with its simple guitar motif, underplayed drum tattoos and subtle, catchy tune is the best song on The Afterlove and I’d as soon listen to it Read more ...
joe.muggs
One tries not to conflate the man and the music too much. Getting overly tangled up in questions of authenticity is a fool's errand, songs are ultimately public property, and in general, short of Gary Glitter-level crimes, dislike of a pop star's demeanour or attitudes shouldn't stand in the way of enjoyment of a good piece of music. All that said, snide, smirking, condescending, tax-avoiding Gary Barlow makes it very, very hard to enjoy his work.Not that there's a huge amount to enjoy here. It's a shame, because after being a good to excellent boyband, Take That upset every standard pop Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This is the Italian cinema Berlusconi suppressed. Elio Petri directed broadsides between the crossfire of the Sixties and Seventies’ Years of Lead, as fascists, communists and ill-defined fifth columns brought ideological violence to rock gigs and terrorist murder to, most notoriously, Bologna train station. Petri was the pulp politician among the era’s film Maestros. His early Seventies work was a committed enquiry into his country’s corrupt, Janus-faced soul.Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970) won the Foreign Language Oscar, and by this 1973 release, capitalism’s iniquity was Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Silver Eye is Goldfrapp’s seventh long-player in an 18-year career that has taken in electronica sounds of all stripes. It sees the duo make a stab at melding together the club-friendly electropop and the witchy rural folk-noir sounds of their repertoire. Not ones to repeat themselves sonically, this involves the band inhabiting a sound characterised by dirty and sparse electronics with distorted, helium-powered vocals that annoyingly bring to mind Thereza Bazar of Eighties pop-muppets, Dollar.While this is initially an interesting and intriguing concept, it soon starts to wear pretty thin. Read more ...
Russ Coffey
On Jethro Tull's classic "Songs from the Wood" Ian Anderson promised "all things refined". And refined the band certain has been. Musically educated, too. For 40-odd years they have specialised in baroque rock and minstrel ballads all served up with harpsichords and flutes. There were even a couple of albums featuring a full orchestra. Yet, notably, string quartets have only made the occasional appearance. In a way, then, you could say an album like this is actually a little overdue. The thing is, though, Jethro Tull – The String Quartets isn't really a Tull album. Nor is it Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The two words cut to the chase. The cast play, or actually are, maniacs. There are lots of them. Multiple Maniacs also nods to the title of Herschell Gordon Lewis’ 1964 proto-gore movie Two Thousand Maniacs! John Waters’ 1970 second full-length film also borrows from Ingmar Bergman’s Sawdust and Tinsel and Tod Browning’s’ Freaks as well as demonstrating a fondness for John Cassavetes’ affected naturalism. And yet this was, and remains, a film like no other.That the black-and-white Multiple Maniacs is perverse is a given, but seeing it with fresh eyes rams home its aberrance and wilfulness. Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Lebanese singer Yasmine Hamdan founded Beirut’s groundbreaking 1990s electro-duo Soapkills with Zeid Hamdan – the first Middle Eastern electro band to garner a cult following across the Arab world. More recently she featured in Jim Jarmusch’s 2013 movie, Only Lovers Left Alive, the same year she released her debut album, Ya Nass, on the hip Berlin label Crammed. Her latest is a dreamy, lyrical foray into the shifting soundscapes of contemporary Arabic and Western music.For Al Jamilat (The Beautiful Ones), she turned to UK producers Luke Smith and Leo Abrahams, who between them have worked Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Judy Collins was one of the great folk icons of the 1960s, competing for the spotlight with Joan Baez. Where the latter was instrumental in bringing Bob Dylan to wide prominence, the former was crucial in putting Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen on the musical map. She was first to record their music – on Wildflowers (1967), a seminal collection arranged by Joshua Rifkin, celebrated scholar of Bach, Beatles and Scott Joplin.Collins’ tastes are no less eclectic: she was exploring Brecht and Blitzstein in 1966 and, a decade later, won a Grammy nomination for “Send in the Clowns”, a trans- Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Listening to the Jesus and Mary Chain’s first album of new material in 19 years is like meeting up with an incorrigible old friend. Maybe there are a few more wrinkles and grey hairs but the original spirit is most definitely still there. Fuzzy, distorted guitars and a gallows humour may still predominate but maybe there is now also a certain maturity in the mix. Produced by Youth and featuring vocal contributions from Sky Ferreira, Isobel Campbell, Linda Reid and Bernadette Denning, as well as including a number of tunes that have been previously aired on Jim Reid solo projects, Damage and Read more ...
Nick Hasted
It’s strange to think that Sean Connery is still out there somewhere, aged 86. But this 17-year-old Gus Van Sant cousin to the director’s Good Will Hunting remains the great Scot’s penultimate film (Sam Mendes pulled back from the Skyfall cameo that should have been). His brawn, brusque charm and impatient street-wisdom are undiminished as the J.D. Salinger-like William Forrester, who wrote a generation-defining novel, but now lives as a secretive recluse in a locked Bronx apartment. This Oscar-winning role joins Playing By Heart (1998) in reviving Connery’s range, away from the wry old-time Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
For many, music is simply background, blurring tinnily from phones, sense-candy to “Like”, swipe and scroll alongside Pokemon and Snapchat. Music is content, filling digital space in the same way Polyfilla fills dents in walls. Zara Larsson epitomises this. Hers is the sound of nothing happening, albeit to a relentless masturbatory tang of gossipy sex obsession. Her second album is a void in the human soul.Larsson came to prominence on her native Sweden’s version of Britain’s Got Talent in 2008, aged only 10, and has been a star there ever since. As well as guesting for Tinie Tempah and David Read more ...