CDs/DVDs
Russ Coffey
Laura Marling's new album is called Semper Femina - two words the singer-songwriter also has tattooed on her leg. It's Latin for "always a woman". Despite having the motto inscribed on her flesh, Marling claims to find it hard to write intimately about other women. Hence the singer describing her recent spell in Los Angeles as a particularly "masculine time" causing her now to look "specifically at women". Full marks for ambition, some might feel, but might she be overthinking it?If the underlying rationale can seem a tad laboured, the music is anything but. Fans will be familiar with Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Soundtrack work may have been seen as a respectable sideline for veterans of the punk era for a while but it has taken 40 years for Paul Weller to join the likes of Nick Cave and Barry Adamson and strike out in this genre. Somewhat fittingly, Weller’s first foray into cinema provides the accompaniment to Johnny Harris’ gritty boxing flick Jawbone and it’s certainly no aural wallpaper but instead provides an ebb and flow of its own even without the accompanying visuals.The sprawling “Johnny/Blackout” opens the album with a sonic soundscape that builds and falls back for 20 minutes and is a Read more ...
joe.muggs
There is no band of the Eighties generation who've remained both as big, and as great, as Depeche Mode. Duran Duran? Lightweights. U2? Sunk into self-parody a long time ago. But the boys from Basildon are something else: they've come through all the pressures of fame, addiction, ageing and the rest with their mojo very much intact, sounding like themselves but still writing fresh songs and hitting new emotional spots. They are also clearly still willing to experiment sonically, as signalled by the drafting-in of James Ford of techno duo Simian Mobile Disco as producer for their 14th album.All Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Joan Crawford’s towering, lauded and Oscar-awarded lead performance in Michael Curtiz’s powerful 1945 film Mildred Pierce has the potential to diminish appreciation of the film as a whole. It can be watched for her career-reviving depiction of the titular character, and that could be enough. But it is a film of rare depth, extraordinary subtlety and can be taken many ways. It is about female empowerment, made when many of America’s men were otherwise occupied. It is also about a mother’s sacrifice for her daughter. It has a string of venal characters whose goal is to use others for their own Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Temples’ debut album, 2014’s Sun Structures, was an instant and surprise success. Within weeks of its release, the Brit-psych outfit were headlining major venues for the first time. Sun Structures went UK Top 10. Tame Impala had opened the door and Temples stepped through. As if to stress this, Volcano’s fourth track, “Oh the Saviour”, rhymes “lava” with “impala” and, three tracks on, “Open Air” could pass for a Tame Impala stomp-along.Instead of taking Temples further out, their second album Volcano is a consolidation which drops the overt nods to Oasis and supplements the edgy 1966-Beatles Read more ...
Nick Hasted
When Carrie White’s hand jumps out of the grave to drag Amy Irving’s character to hell, the shock is Psycho-intense. Carrie’s director Brian De Palma had, though, put equal care into the seconds preceding it, as Irving leaves the house to a score signalling calm after the film’s convulsive climax. He had Irving exit backwards, and when the footage was reversed to seem normal, a distant car now drove the wrong way. Wrongness was buried in the frame, the camera readying your subconscious for terror.Among the Movie Brats who marvellously came of age in the Seventies, and are now mostly in Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Sleaford Mods have had an amazing run. The duo are prized by their fans for their ultra-basic set-up – a guy with a can of lager standing by a laptop, and a guy ranting – but few would have imagined them almost making the Top 10. Yet that’s exactly what last year’s Key Markets album did. However, the backlash has started, with dispiriting talk of a one-trick pony having run its course.Jason Williamson and Andrew Fearn have previously done four albums together (Sleaford Mods also existed before that), catering to a punk-spirited fan base who relish the ethos of a socially conscious outfit Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
With its familiar scenario of massed zombies on the offensive against the living, South Korean blockbuster Train to Busan stands or falls on the fresh twists in brings to the table. For director Yeon Sang-ho’s first feature with live actors – previous films The Fake, King of Pigs and Seoul Station were animated – he sets the action on a high-speed train hurtling towards a zombie-free zone on which hordes of zombies are sniffing out the unafflicted. Its prequel, Seoul Station, was also a zombie film and set in the titular train station and its trains. Train to Busan, so to speak, leaves the Read more ...
Liz Thomson
An album to please old fans and make new ones, Windy City is a peach – even at first playing it feels like slipping in to a worn-in pair of jeans or boots, a comfy ol’ fit. And that’s because the songs are country classics and in our musical DNA.Alison Krauss might have grown up in Decatur, Illinois but she surely has Tennessee blood in her veins. Windy City finds her paired up with Buddy Cannon, a state native who’s produced albums by the likes of Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard and Billy Ray Cyrus. Her debut for Capitol, it’s her first solo outing in almost 18 years and she’s backed by some of Read more ...
Matthew Wright
At least you always get something different from José James. Originally sprung to fame for blending jazz and hip-hop, this album has little of either, but according to his blurb, touches on R&B, soul, pop, electronica, folk, gospel and funk. Quite an achievement for 11 four-minute songs. What stands out, though, is less the ticking of genre boxes than the imaginative way he uses electronic sound a little like an acoustic instrument, with exceptional sensitivity to its diverse effects. His journey of chameleonic experimentation started with jazz, but like many musicians who’ve Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Does a review of a 25-year-old film need a spoiler alert? Much of the success of The Crying Game – its 1992 release earned both six Oscar nominations and huge box office returns (although not enough to save its producers from bankruptcy) – is due to its mid-narrative revelation that one of its central characters is not quite as they first appeared.The story centres on the Troubles in Northern Ireland, with Miranda Richardson as an icy IRA operative. She seduces a British soldier, Jody (Forest Whitaker, superb despite struggling with a British accent), who is then held prisoner at a run- Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Any listeners who may have been concerned that Anton Newcombe’s last few years of sobriety might result in him turning down the psychedelia and tip-toeing towards the mainstream can breathe a sigh of relief. Don’t Get Lost is yet another cracking psychedelic head-spin with plenty of good grooves. In fact, the Brian Jonestown Massacre have created a double album here without a single duff track a mere four months after the release of their last set.As with many double albums, there is plenty of experimentation here, and in due course it may come to be viewed as the Brian Jonestown Massacre’s Read more ...