CDs/DVDs
Bernadette McNulty
Back in February, M.I.A. released the first single “Borders” from this her fifth and allegedly last album, taking a powerful aim at the refugee crisis engulfing the world. The video was as stark and simple as the track, with still, almost painterly long shots of M.I.A. sat among a boatful of motionless migrants or surrounded by bodies clinging onto barbed wire fences, staring with her trademark fierce poker face down the eye of the camera.This wasn’t new territory for the always geopolitically polemical singer, herself a child refugee from the civil war in Sri Lanka, and as she said on Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (****) hit cinemas in summer 1970, it is a pivotal Sixties film as it depicts the era in terminal crash-and-burn mode. Cashing in on but not a sequel to Valley of the Dolls, it caught the female pop-group trio the Kelly Affair’s assimilation into and corruption by Hollywood. Renamed the Carrie Nations, they consume drugs, have ill-advised sexual liaisons and sell records by the bucketful. Good-natured singer Kelly MacNamara (Dolly Read) side-lines her boyfriend – their manager – to purse an affair with a money grubbing beefcake.Characters vampirically Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Britain loves Meat Loaf. Never mind that his 1977 breakthrough, Bat Out of Hell, was once inescapable on pub jukeboxes and in school sixth form rooms throughout the land. Or that “I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That)” was the country’s biggest-selling single of 1993. Let’s talk more recently. Meat Loaf’s commercial clout has globally dropped away, but he remains a bestseller here, his every album of the last 30 years, including ones released in 2010 and 2011, making the Top Five.Braver Than We Are is Meat Loaf’s first album in a decade to feature predominantly the songwriting of Jim Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The full credit is actually Soundwalk Collective and Jesse Paris Smith featuring Patti Smith but as her “resonating acoustic instruments” make no identifiably audible contribution to Killer Road, omitting Patti’s daughter Jesse Paris from the header to aid clarity is not the sin it initially appears. Soundwalk Collective was founded by Stephan Crasneanscki and also features Simone Merli and Kamran Sadeghi – plus whoever else Crasneanscki decides is on board. It’s his ship.It’s one which has roamed freely to create in-situ soundtracks for exhibitions and installations, performed live and Read more ...
David Nice
Luchino Visconti's penultimate film, made entirely in a studio recreation of a two-floor Roman apartment for the benefit of the semi-invalid director, is an atmospheric drama split down the middle.The better half of it is very definitely Burt Lancaster's restrained characterisation of the alter-ego Professor, withdrawn from the world and devoted now to collecting family-group portraits; his world is an amazing recreation of a patrician's rooms, looking good in this 2K restoration. The other aspect has dated horribly. This is the portrayal of a group of brash and sometimes violent "people of Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
While there will, if there is any justice, be plenty written about King Creosote’s Astronaut Meets Appleman, few will probably state what to me is obvious: this is a really, really sexy record. Now, being Scottish, I’m perhaps predisposed to believe that about anything that features what I can only describe as techno bagpipes - but I defy you to listen, really listen, to the sprawling seven-minute album opener “You Just Want” and not feel at least a little shiver. There’s a creak, a craving, to Kenny Anderson’s always expressive vocals, “can I be him?” almost the only variation on a droning Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 1969, a tranche of American musicians looked back to the country’s past for inspiration. Bob Dylan followed John Wesley Harding with Nashville Skyline. The Band’s eponymous second album hit the shops. The Flying Burrito Brothers debuted with The Gilded Palace of Sin. The rootsy was a default. But choosing to draw on country and Appalachian traditions did not have to mean playing it straight. On the amazing Farewell Aldebaren, Judy Henske and Jerry Yester used banjo and hammered dulcimer. They also employed the Chamberlain, a Mellotron-like instrument where the keyboard triggers tape Read more ...
Katie Colombus
On first listen, Queen Britney's new album is nothing more than a glorious booty call. I'm no prude, but listening to her sensual requests in musical form feels like earwigging on the soundtrack to a sex tape.In "Invitation", she asks "Put your love all over me". "Slumber Party" has the lyrics "We use our bodies to make our own videos, put on our music it makes us go fucking crazy, oh!". In "Private Show" she purrs "Pull my curtains until they close" and in "Hard To Forget Ya" she quips, “Since I tasted you I got a craving, Shaking in the heat of the night, Oh, yeah, baby you got me Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Women in Love was Ken Russell’s first cinema film to directly reflect his work in television. He had directed The Billion Dollar Brain (1967), but that was an adaptation of a Len Deighton book. French Dressing (1964) was a few steps removed from a Carry On film. As an adaptation of the DH Lawrence novel, Women in Love (1969) tapped into the ethos of his work for the BBC and featured Oliver Reed, with whom he had worked in television. While Reed’s naked wrestling scene with Alan Bates was a sure-fire attention grabber the film, nonetheless, didn’t have quite the free-spirited spark of Russell' Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
One of popular music’s mightiest talents, Leonard Cohen, at the age of 82, has a new album out in the Autumn, the fabulously titled You Want It Darker. If it’s anywhere near as good as his last one, this is great news. Those, however, who can’t wait until its arrival, may wish to check out the debut solo effort from Maarten Devoldere of the Belgian group Balthazar. It also has a great title, lifted directly from the pages of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and it boasts a deliciously Cohen-esque sensibility.Other reference points might be Johnny Cash, especially on the cantering chug of “The Good Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 1966, David Warner assumed the title role in Karel Reisz’s satire Morgan – A Suitable Case for Treatment. The film’s Morgan Delt was a fantasist with a communist family background married to the posh Leonie, played by Vanessa Redgrave. When she seeks a divorce, he campaigns to win her back but ends up in an asylum where she reveals she is pregnant with his child. As a depiction of class clashes, thwarted aspirations and unmediated behaviour, it was a very Sixties confection.Phase Zero is the second album by a California native who has assumed the name Morgan Delt. Fittingly, it is shot- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
As this year has been designated the 40th anniversary of punk rock hitting the UK, there’s no surprise that Alex Cox’s Sid & Nancy is up for another home cinema release. It’s been on DVD at least three times previously. This new version, though, also comes on Blu-ray, its first outing in the format. The other selling point is a sparkling image restoration that's removed what now seems to have been a layer of murk from the earlier versions.Sid & Nancy was released to cinemas in 1986 so is, itself, enjoying its 30th anniversary. Seen now, it comes across as hyperventilating cartoon of a Read more ...