CDs/DVDs
Thomas H. Green
Anywhere the Chemical Brothers’ music has been posted online at least a third of the comments are liable to be their 1990s fans moaning. The essence of what they have to say is, “Why doesn’t their new music sound like Exit Planet Dust or all those giant breakbeat monsters they used to do?” This has been going on for a decade. During that time the duo of Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons have created some of their most muscular music, including killer singles “Galvanize” and “Do It Again”, the smart soundtrack to Joe Wright’s lethal tween thriller Hanna, and the equally filmic concept album, Further Read more ...
David Nice
Pallid figures in striplit rooms with too much empty space: if you’ve seen a Roy Andersson film before, you’ll know what to expect from his latest essay on the human comedy. Truly human the film becomes only by cautious degrees, even if we start out laughing at rather than sighing with characters like the hapless salesmen Sam (Nils Westblom) and Jonathan (Holge Andersson), who only want people to have fun with vampire teeth, a bag of laughs and a sinister rubber mask. It’s a bit like a sketch show with running gags, but instead of diminishing returns this meditation on harsh, sad existence Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
An all-analogue space-rock, Krautrock-influenced, motorik-driven psychedelic ride on Saturn’s rings, Gwenno’s Y Dydd Olaf is a treat from start to end. Her sweet but dislocated vocals mesh with snappy bass guitar, bloopy synths and the otherworldly atmosphere of Ralph & Florian Kraftwerk. Apart from a track in Cornish, the Welsh-language album has its own flavour with exotic, lilting, almost-Japanese melodies, but it fits snugly with other recent-ish albums drawing from similar influences which also lean towards the conceptual by Eccentronic Research Council, Jaakko Eino Kalevi, Jane Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Love Affair/Steve Ellis: Time Hasn’t Changed us - The Complete CBS Recordings 1967-1971The connection between Sex Pistols, the stars of last week’s Reissue CDs Weekly, and late-Sixties London soul-pop hit-makers The Love Affair is unlikely, but genuine. Shortly after they formed, when their repertoire of originals was thin, the instigators of UK punk rehearsed a version of The Love Affair’s 1968 Top Ten single “A Day Without Love”. Despite the supposed year-zero ethos of Brit-punk, Sex Pistols covered a fair amount of pre-hippy nuggets, including – as well as that Love Affair song Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
“It’s gonna get loud, it’s gonna get heavy,” purrs Nina Gordon on “The Gospel According to Saint Me”, the opening track from what must surely, if you overlook Independence Day getting a sequel 20 years later, be one of the more unlikely of the current wave of Nineties reunions. It’s a lyric that succinctly captures what were always the band’s best features – gooey back-and-forth harmonies and an unyielding commitment to the distortion pedal – and one that bodes well for the Chicagoans’ first album together since 1997.Sonically, Ghost Notes picks up where Eight Arms to Hold You left Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Post-Blitz London starts as a playground and ends as a shadowy nightmare for 12-year-old Frankie (Andrew Ray). The Yellow Balloon is both a fine film about children and Britain’s second X certificate release, not really a contradiction as it shrugs off its early disguise as a kids’ adventure yarn to explore how vulnerable a child’s life can be.Frankie is the happy son of loving parents Ted and Em (Kenneth More and Kathleen Ryan), given sixpence to buy a yellow balloon. A swift sequence of thoughtless misadventures leave his friend a corpse fallen from a bombed-out building, watched by crooked Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Vintage is word I’m not comfortable with. I make it a point of principle not to pay a 3000% mark-up on clothes someone’s already worn, and when it comes to wine, I’m more likely to shop by ABV in truth. Vintage is however, a word at the heart of The Sweet Pretty Things (Are in Bed Now, of Course . . . ), the new album by R’n’B upstarts-turned-psychedelic story tellers The Pretty Things. Recording on vintage, analogue equipment in a "let’s do the show right here" flurry of activity, the band – a going concern since 1963 – are certainly capable of producing the goods, but, going in, I'm Read more ...
Guy Oddy
If Jerry Dammers was a time-traveller who had decided to launch the 2-Tone movement in 2015 instead of back in the late 1970s, it would be easy to imagine that the predominant sound might be something similar to the glorious noise of Asian Dub Foundation. This is a place where lively indie rock collides with drum‘n’bass beats, reggae toasting and bhangra sounds and textures – all with strident and political lyrics.More Signal More Noise sees a reformation of sorts of Asian Dub Foundation and marks the return of original members Dr Dass and Ricky Singh, as well as long time on-off vocalist Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Since his debut Honour of the Knights back in 2006 Catalan director Albert Serra has carved out a niche for himself, creating cinema that is frequently oblique and visually engrossing. Story of My Death (Història de la meva mort), which won the director the Golden Leopard at the Locarno festival two years ago, looks like his most approachable film to date – it includes considerably more language than his previous works, as well as a touch more narrative – but still reveals itself slowly.There’s no direct revelation until well in as to the identity of its main character, the inimitable 18th- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“I’m having too much fun, my arms around the toilet like a long-lost chum, I’m kneeling at the throne…I’m learning what it means to really pray.” Four tracks into Perpetual Motion People, on “Haunted Head”, Ezra Furman paints a picture which must be drawn from real life. If this album screams one thing loudest, it’s that Furman isn’t keeping anything hidden. What’s also more than apparent is the eccentricity of this musical vision. With honking sax, country-tinged confessions, doo-wop and nods to Todd Rundgren, The Violent Femmes and Rufus Wainwright, the tune-stuffed Perpetual Motion People Read more ...
Mark Kidel
The Xaos project arises out of a lineage that goes back to the early days of the world music phenomenon, at the start of the 1980s, when Jon Hassell spoke of “Fourth World” sounds, and David Byrne and Brian Eno extended the compositional palette with their groundbreaking transcultural explorations on “My Life with A Bush of Ghosts”. There is a kinship between the exploration of new musical frontiers and the rediscovery of ancient traditions.The album has been lovingly created by two members of the Greek diaspora: Dubulah – known for his work with Transglobal Underground and Natacha Atlas – Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Sex Pistols: SpunkFor an album that was never meant to be widely available, what’s become known as Spunk has had a surprising afterlife. The bootleg Sex Pistols album first became available in selected shops around three weeks before the release of Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols, the band’s debut album proper, issued on 28 October 1977. Knowledge of Spunk’s existence was pretty instant as the weekly music paper Sounds wrote about it that October, as did the monthly music magazine Zig-Zag the following month.Never Mind the Bollocks was less an album, more a greatest hits Read more ...