CDs/DVDs
Graham Fuller
As a director of Westerns in the 1950s, André de Toth is seldom spoken of in the same breath as Budd Boetticher and Anthony Mann, but there’s a case to be made that he was their equal. Day of the Outlaw (1959), de Toth's ice-cold farewell to the genre, matches Mann’s James Stewart Westerns in its harnessing of landscape to psychological dynamics, while its story of a hardened loner who won’t be shaken from his mission recalls Boetticher’s Randolph Scott films.Constantly in dialogue with Shane (1953), it’s a redemption drama, set in a snow-shrouded Wyoming settlement called Bitters at the end Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Christmas albums are an annual parade of froth and fun, designed to be fluffy and celebratory rather than challenging, especially imaginative or, indeed, truly great. With the Smoke Fairies seasonal outing, however, no mulled wine-fuelled critical generosity is required. Wild Winter is by turns moving, gorgeous, funny, and rockin’ – a rich and enjoyably snappy 37 minutes.Female folk/blues/“dream-pop” duo Smoke Fairies have been going for over a decade, supported by a small coterie of fans including names such as Jack White and Public Service Broadcasting. This is their fifth album and it Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Kate’s no stranger to the Christmas collection – Sweet Bells from 2008, and While Mortals Sleep from 2011 both focused on South Yorkshire-inspired carols and seasonal songs, and the Kate Rusby at Christmas DVD from 2014, filmed at Harrogate Hall, put listeners firmly in the picture, with the Barnsley Nightingale supported by her excellent band, featuring partner and guitarist-singer Damien O’Kane, and a five-piece brass section.That soft northern brass sound features again on “Bradfield”, the mellifluous opener for The Frost Is All Over, a plump, pillowy arrangement that fits her voice very Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The story of the Soviet Union’s ice hockey team's pivotal role in relations with North America is fascinating. Its players were not just sportsmen. They were also in the army and integral to their home country's portrayal of itself on the world stage. Central to the Cold War battle of wills, the seemingly unbeatable team was a propaganda tool and, after perestroika, its members played for American and Canadian teams. Russia had infiltrated its adversaries. The Werner Herzog-produced documentary Red Army tells this tale.The film is packed with characters. Chief among them is Vyacheslav Fetisov Read more ...
joe.muggs
This has been a truly glorious year for electronica albums. Records by the likes of Arca, Kode9, Jlin, James Place and Rabit showed digital music could still feel like it was writing the future, while others like Altered Natives, The Orb, Syracuse and Levon Vincent made the decades-old templates of house, techno and chillout still feel as fresh as you like, and one-offs like King Midas Sound & Fennesz simply occupied their own unique emotional space. And it's into that final category that the second album by KRTS, AKA Kurtis Hairston, falls.Hairston is an African-American producer from Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
How many live versions of “Heroin” are necessary? The new four CD set The Complete Matrix Tapes includes, yes, four. One per disc. If that seems excessive, consider this: one version previously appeared, in the same mix, on last year’s reissue of the third Velvet Underground album; a second and third were included, in different mixes, on differing configurations of the 1969: The Velvet Underground Live album; an audience recording of a fourth was issued on 2001's The Velvet Underground Bootleg Series Volume 1: The Quine Tapes. All four versions are previously released.Overall, of The Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
After opening with a flurry of wobbly, woozy, Durutti Column-ish guitar, A Different Life travels through nine distant, foggy ruminations which suggest dissociation. Titles like “Far Apart”, “It’s Getting Better”, “Dive” and “Drive-by” posit Olivier Heim as a songwriter displaced from the day-to-day. And, atmospherically, his debut album reinforces the impression. With his sigh of a voice, it’s clear Heim’s music mirrors his moods. Indeed, on “Ocean”, he sings of a sleepy feeling he thought was left behind.A Different Life makes its case with sparse instrumentation: the treated guitar to the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
A Seventies comic classic, almost unseen in Britain, starring Walter Matthau and Elaine May? Sign me up. A New Leaf’s first pleasure is its casting, which goes intriguingly against physical type, drawing superb responses from its stars. The hangdog Matthau plays an upper-class playboy, while May just about hides beauty she never showed much interest in. His would-be Bluebeard is eager to “mur-marry” her fabulously wealthy, eligibly unworldly, lonely wallflower botanist, to replace the fortune he’s carelessly spent. As his canny Mancunian butler, played by George Rose, observes: “It’s the only Read more ...
joe.muggs
It must be tough being Coldplay (bank balances aside). To hit a formula so successful that you essentially make all of pop music sound like you is quite a weight to carry. It wasn't just the obvious Keane/Starsailor/Snow Patrol copycat bands of the noughts, nor even the reformed Take That (their 'Rule the World' was the Coldplay template taken to pop perfection). It was the American megastar soft rock singers, the rap and R&B players from Jay-Z on down, and the mainstream dance producers like Swedish House Mafia, all cashing in by getting a plaintive white guy (sometimes even Chris Martin Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Recently, after listening to the over-polished tryhard that is Justin Bieber’s Purpose, I concluded that it was no Off the Wall. That still stands, but Love Sax and Flashbacks, the debut from Fleur East has a bloody good (horn) stab at providing us with a passable impression of it. A bit karaoke perhaps, but fuck it, karaoke’s fun. Or so I’m told.Fleur East is, as you may know, part of the X Factor alumni. Her key moment on the show was a rendition of "Uptown Funk" and album opener "Sax" sounds like the brief was: ‘Something like "Uptown Funk", but not "Uptown Funk". But really like "Uptown Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Most three-act movies include a scene in which the protagonist and his or her intimates are at their happiest – a state of affairs that can’t last. Oren Moverman and Michael A Lerner, the writers of the Brian Wilson biopic Love & Mercy, lit upon an organic – in fact, magical – way of encapsulating the effect of Wilson’s genius on the other Beach Boys.It comes when the 24-year-old Wilson (Paul Dano) steers his bandmates into finding the exact blend of harmonies needed for “Good Vibrations” one day in 1966. Even the song’s lyricist Mike Love (Jake Abel), a surf pop conservative who’d Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Kannon, Sunn O)))’s (pronounced “sun”) first non-collaborative album since 2009’s epic Monoliths and Dimensions, is a doomy triptych that will make long-term fans of the American band very happy indeed. Taking inspiration from the Buddhist Guanyin Bodhisattva “perceiving the cries of the world”, walls of distorted guitars played very, very slowly provide a cosmic and crushingly heavy groove that suggests that Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson are still very much on top of the drone metal game after their recent, more avant-garde collaborations with Ulver and Scott Walker and almost 20 years Read more ...