CDs/DVDs
Katie Colombus
For Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler, country music is the new rock n’roll. And it seems an easy transition from one kind of heavy beat to another, with simple melodies, alongside rich textures and honeyed harmonies in this new vista.Tyler brings his own unique flava into the Nashville-infused mix, with album opener “My Own Worst Enemy” introducing us to a deliberate accordion backdrop but with some decent riffing and a screeching hot guitar solo at the end of the song. "We're All Somebody From Somewhere" is set to be a summer hit. It’s a great time to be preaching unity for “Some Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Cliff Martinez isn’t your average Hollywood film composer. He didn’t come up via an orchestral academy or even move sideways from the electronica/classical crossover milieu. Neither John Williams nor Jóhann Jóhannsson are his template. Instead, he took a sharp left out of the LA punk scene, drumming in bands ranging from Lydia Lunch’s no wave noisiness to the nascent, raucous Red Hot Chili Peppers. He even played on Captain Beefheart’s final freak-out, 1982’s Ice Cream For Crow. However, since the Eighties, and especially working with the director Steven Soderbergh, he’s carved himself a Read more ...
graham.rickson
Hail, Caesar!’s shortcomings are easily forgiven. You could complain that the multiple plotlines aren’t given enough time to breathe, or that the deeper issues rumbling beneath the film’s frothy surface could be explored in more depth. Superbly designed and beautifully shot on film by the Coens’ regular cinematographer Roger Deakins, this really needs to be seen on a large screen. But repeated DVD viewing allows the barrage of sight gags and wordplay to really hit home.Set in the early 1950s, it centres on Josh Brolin’s studio manager Eddie Mannix (pictured below with George Clooney), Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The weight of expectation can be a terrible thing to bear. When Since I Left You, The Avalanches’ patchwork party debut, was released in 2000, there was no sense of how long it had taken to make, just a collective intake of breath at the dense layers and intricate detail. Plundering anything and everything in their bid to create this delightful decoupage, it was the sheer scale of the band’s collective imagination that thrilled. How could any follow-up possibly compare?Listening to their long-awaited comeback Wildflower, which has been 16 years in the making, it sounds like they've not given Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Bands have grown slack about releasing albums. The Beatles used to pump them out, releasing both Help and Rubber Soul in the first half of 1965, whereas, say, Bastille’s second album arrives three years after their debut (although they released a “mixtape” in-between). Feeble. Kudos, then, to The Fiction Aisle, the newish project from Thomas White of Electric Soft Parade and Brakes. Their second album appears a mere six months after their debut. And it’s well worth investigating.Debut Heart Map Rubric was an opulent orchestral affair, described here as “hewn in the shadow of John Barry, John Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Back in 1959, Black Orpheus was a revelation – a reworking of the Greek myth of doomed lovers Orpheus and Eurydice, played out in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro during Carnival. It was the first movie to win both the Palme d’Or at Cannes and the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. French director Marcel Camus cast his beautiful American wife Marpessa Dawn as Eurydice and Breno Mellor (a handsome Brazilian footballer Camus had spotted on a Rio street) played Orpheus. Cast for their looks, they were not great actors, and neither ever achieved much success again on screen.Criterion has Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Pictured above is the label of an exceptionally important Pink Floyd record issued last November. Only a thousand people bought a copy. That was the amount that hit shops. Pink Floyd 1965: Their First Recordings was a double seven-inch set with a historic importance inversely proportionate to its availability. It was the first ever outing for the earliest recordings by the band and, as such, the earliest compositions for them by its prime songwriter Syd Barrett. He died on 7 July 2006 at age 60, and a look at this hard-to-find yet significant release is a tribute to his memory.The band is the Read more ...
howard.male
When David Bowie died in January, one person quick off the mark with a striking and respectful tribute was the American composer Jherek Bischoff with Strung Out in Heaven – a string quartet medley of half a dozen of Bowie’s songs. And in fact we‘re back in Bowie territory here in that these tentative yet austere instrumentals are full of romantic yearning and physiological unease reminiscent of the ambient sides (in vinyl terms) of the thin white one’s Low and Heroes.The main difference is that Bowie, Brian Eno and Tony Visconti utilised synthesisers and Bischoff has a preference for Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Every decade throws up a handful of guitar acts intent on capturing the mood of the age. The Noughties, for example, marched to the spiky rhythms of Kasabian and Kaiser Chiefs. Almost a decade on and the current crop have a somewhat heavier touch. Bands like Biffy Clyro, for instance, set out their intent – to speak with a serious rock voice – with impressive tattoos and heavy chords. Except Clyro also serve their heavy dishes with a side order of mainstream AOR, which makes some doubt whether it's really rock at all.A parallel might be drawn with Imagine Dragons' mega hit " Read more ...
graham.rickson
Irish director Pat O’Connor’s 1987 adaptation of J L Carr’s A Month in the Country has been unavailable for many years; this BFI reissue was only possible after a few surviving prints were located. It’s a disquieting watch – a superficially English reflection on faith, loss and recovery, full of dark shadows and sharp edges. Simon Gray’s screenplay wisely avoids using a voiceover, the plot’s subtleties conveyed instead by a well-chosen cast.Notably a young Colin Firth as Birkin, a world-weary World War One veteran arriving in a remote Yorkshire village to uncover a mural in the Reverend Keach Read more ...
joe.muggs
The Eighties revival in dance music started in earnest with the Electroclash subculture, the first records emerging around 1996. That is to say, the Eighties revival has now lasted twice as long as the actual Eighties itself. And if you think that the heyday of electropop – which is what we generally mean by Eighties sounds – really lasted from about 1978 to 1984, we're talking about a very long revival for a very short “decade”.The thing about dance music, though, is that its riffs and schticks seem particularly durable. Because they were aimed at a relatively unchanging physical environment Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The first I heard of Beyond the Wizards Sleeve was eight whole years ago. It was a tune called “Winter in June” and was a Lemon Jelly-meets-The Orb-style cosmic noodle with the added, and memorable, benefit of long-deceased BBC gardener Percy Thrower rambling over the top. It was exquisitely rustic English electronic weirdness. From their Viz-on-LSD name onwards, BTWS seemed to be just a passing fancy for Erol Alkan and Richard Norris, a couple of thoroughly imaginative DJ-producers with their fingers in multifarious musical pies, and it seemed unlikely they’d do much more with it.And so it Read more ...