CDs/DVDs
Russ Coffey
Is it really 18 years since Natalie Imbruglia had her mega-hit “Torn”? Since then her musical career has been pretty low-key. This week, however, she returns with Male, an album of covers all originally sung by men. More significant, though, is that, as a playlist they wouldn’t sound out of place in a hipster coffee shop. So, is the former soap star reaching out for a bit of musical street-cred? Or is pulling off convincing versions of tracks by Death Cab for Cutie and Daft Punk just a little too ambitious?For the most part, it would seem so. As perky and likeable as her voice may be it’ Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Ian Levine’s Stax Soul SensationsTaking 41 years to follow up a successful compilation is perhaps not sound in commercial terms. No matter. Ian Levine’s Stax Soul Sensations is not about marketability, but instead about celebrating the music heard. This new collection of tracks drawn from the Memphis operation and its related imprints comes not-so-hot on the heels of 1974’s Solid Soul Sensations, another Levine-compiled set, which was dedicated to the associated Scepter and Wand labels.Beyond his fascination with Doctor Who, Levine has dedicated his life to soul music. Read more ...
caspar.gomez
One of the anomalies of the early 1980s synth-pop boom was how few bands there actually were. Most scenes that blow up have the main faces and a plethora of lesser acts with lesser hits. There were a few one-hit wonders and vanguard acts – Landscape, John Foxx, Yello etc. – but not really very many. The bottom line was the Human League, Gary Numan, OMD, Soft Cell and Depeche Mode. There was only one band who ran alongside that electro-gold quintet, mustering low-level hits and even three that crept into the outer reaches of the Top 10: Blancmange.Somehow the duo of Neil Arthur and Stephen Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Billed as the hardest hitting Public Enemy album for years, Man Plans God Laughs has a lot to live up to; as far as sonic sledghammers go PE have more than their fair share. However, with lone Bomb Squad member Gary G-Wiz at the controls and the current socio-political climate in America built on the twin foundations of despair and anger, the stage is well-set for Chuck D to lay down the law at his direct, sloganeering best.“No Sympathy from the Devil” sees him dive right in, and just as well – the album clocks in at less than half an hour long so there’s no time to waste. Occasionally, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
For sheer, visceral performances we’ll be lucky if we get anything as strong this year as the central roles from Jack Reynor and Toni Collette in Gerald Barrett’s Glassland. Their mother-son relationship has such an almost unbearable intimacy to it that comparisons to the last chapter of the Terence Davies Trilogy aren’t out of order.In Davies’s film the son was confronting the impending death of his mother, and here Reynor (very different from the confidence of his What Richard Did character) as the long-suffering John is all too aware that’s what faces his mum Jean unless she can battle her Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Bands who successfully emulate their heroes on their debut album, as The Strypes did with Snapshot, their 2013 homage to sharp-edged garage blues, sometimes find themselves wondering where to go next when the dust of critical and popular acclaim settles. Instead of the well-worn path of a timid, evolutionary change to their sound, the Strypes have decided to shake things up considerably by throwing something from all their favourite bands into Little Victories. Unfortunately this has led to the creation of an album that is unfocused at best and derivative at worst. It also suggests that the Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Iris DeMent’s settings of poems by the great 20th century poet Anna Akhmatova are as original as they are courageous: it's so easy to fall short of the genius displayed by the Russian mistress of the lyric verse. This is a work of love and devotion – prompted in part by DeMent’s adoption, along with her partner the equally original and talented Greg Brown, of a girl from the former Soviet Union.There is a kinship between the singer from the American South , raised in the Pentecostal church, and the tortured soul of Akhmatova, who lived through Lenin and Stalin’s terror, refused to go into Read more ...
Nick Hasted
I walked out of Videodrome into Soho’s neon in 1983, and felt the film’s hallucinatory visions had infected the street. It’s one of a handful of times a film has shifted my mind. David Cronenberg’s crowning achievement before, as critic Kim Newman notes in a documentary extra, he diluted his work by adapting others’, it retains a cohesive, grubby surreality.We are in the early days of VCRs, clandestine cable networks and easily transmitted, contraband imagery. Max Renn (James Woods) is on the hunt for filth to get ratings for his low-budget channel, and is passed a sadomasochist snuff tape. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Company could have been recorded any time in the past 25 years. Although Slime’s debut feels fresh, affinities with the familiar tag Company as a retro-nodding debut which will have a broad appeal. Chin-stroking collectors will love its references. Hipsters dwelling in the edgy zones of cities will love the comedown, late-night, reflective atmosphere. The Newcastle-born, Hackney resident electronicist Will Archer – who assumes the name Slime – has created an album with the potential to cross boundaries.The chief attribute of Company is the ease with which it brings together the disparate as a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
America: The Warner Bros. Years 1971–1977Prime amongst the many ironies associated with Seventies soft-rock trio America is that when they reached number one in America in March 1972 with “A Horse With No Name”, the single they knocked off the top spot was Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold". “A Horse With No Name” sounds so like Young, it might as well be him. Young’s thoughts on the ousting are not a matter of record.It went further. America’s fine, eponymous debut album is so much a Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young knock-off that frequent double takes are unavoidable. CSNY's distinctive, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Bullet For My Valentine retain their fury. Last time round, on 2013’s aptly named Temper Temper, frontman Matt Tuck was snarling about substance abuse affecting his band. This time, on their fifth studio album, he claims his enraged microphone onslaught results from pondering his dead-end origins in Bridgend, Wales, and the way he was dismissed at school for being a metaller. Be that as it may, the album also reeks of torment, indignation and pure fury at a love affair turned sour.Since splitting with bass-player Jay James earlier this year, Bullet For My Valentine’s sound is, if anything, Read more ...
Graham Fuller
In John Ford’s rueful 1946 allegory about the human cost of America’s new role as global peacekeeper, Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) agrees to clean up Tombstone, Arizona, as a pretext for revenging his teenage brother's murder by Old Man Clanton (Walter Brennan) and his rustler sons.Ford dodges many facts about the real Earp clan’s politically driven feud with the Cochise County ranchers’ faction, which erupted inconclusively in the 1881 OK Corral gunfight. Frank Perry’s revisionist Doc (1971) comes closer to the skimpily documented truth but lacks My Darling Clementine’s mythic resonance and Read more ...