CDs/DVDs
peter.quinn
Taking its title from the opening line of WB Yeats's The Second Coming, this new album from legendary traditional Irish band Altan sees them decamp to Nashville for an imaginative, celebratory exploration of the links between traditional Irish and American roots music. It also allows them to collaborate with many of the musical friends they've made along their 30-plus years journey.Listeners looking for the uniquely driving tune sets that Altan are famous for have plenty to get their teeth into, not least “Buffalo Gals/Leather Britches/Leslie's Reel”, which includes a bracing gear change from Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Zakary Thaks: It’s the End – The Definitive CollectionGalloping with the urgency of a sweat-flecked horse running a steeplechase, the choppy guitar riff takes early Kinks raunch and filters it through a testosterone-driven sensibility that won’t let up. The drums are unremitting. Then, a solo guitar peels off a berserk fistful of notes which Dave Davies would have been proud of. A key change raises the intensity level even higher. And then, at just over two minutes, the relentless performance grinds to a halt. Sixties garage rock at its finest, “Bad Girl” is 126 seconds of Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Songhoy Blues, a punchy guitar band with roots on the edge of the desert, take the downhome country sounds of Ali Farka Toure, Afel Bocoum and Sidi Toure and give them a high-octane dose of urban urgency. They don’t just play those mesmerising Sahel blues licks with electric instruments, but they pack a punch that comes from transplanting laid-back village cool to the steamy cauldron of the city. It’s a lot like Elmore James or Howlin' Wolf taking the raw Delta sound of Robert Johnson or Charley Patton and upgrading it to match the citified excitement of the South Side of Chicago.“Music Read more ...
Russ Coffey
The past few years have seen a glut of successful rock comebacks – in fact, acts like Judas Priest, Kiss and Saxon are rocking as hard now as they ever did. Unfortunately, for every group that has defied the years, there’s another who should have hung up the Spandex years ago. Scorpions, it would seem, are one such band. As a fan of euro-rock it gives me no pleasure to say it, but this return to the studio adds nothing to their back-catalogue.Ironically, the album came about while the band members were making plans for their retirement. As a final "thank-you" to their fans they'd been Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"Blood Brothers" is the title of the featurette included with this DVD. It tells how Brad Pitt and his fellow cast-members learned what it felt like to be the crew of a World War Two tank – Fury is the name painted on the gun of their battle-scarred Sherman – thanks to some hard-slog dawn-to-dusk training and conversations with 90-year-old veterans of the US 2nd Armored Division. The actors (including Shia LeBeouf, Jon Bernthal and Michael Peña) seem sincere as they describe how the experience gave them some insight into the true nature of warfare, and blood brothers is what they felt like Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Those with long memories may remember Tad from the first wave of Seattle grunge. The band accompanied Nirvana on their first UK tour and released some lively metal-heavy records such as God’s Balls, Salt Lick and Eight-Way Santa, before disappearing in the late 90s. 15 or so years later, mainman Tad Doyle is back with a sludge rock, pagan rite of immense proportions.Clearly Tad’s new band, Brothers of the Sonic Cloth, don’t have a life full of sunshine and flowers, as their debut album is not exactly stuffed full of life affirming ditties. Brothers of the Sonic Cloth does, however, feel very Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The 1960s media's wild excitement about the space race is now almost forgotten. The era when every boy wanted to be an astronaut is ancient history. The period is, however, a goldmine for gloriously kitsch cosmic samples, a fact electronic groups such as The Orb have taken advantage of. Conversely, the new album from Public Service Broadcasting mines the area for neither irony nor comedy. The London duo’s second album is, instead, determined to celebrate humanity’s wide-eyed initial glee at blasting beyond the Earth’s atmosphere.Musically Public Service Broadcasting are somewhat Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Wild River blurs documentary and fiction, tackles racism and segregation in America’s south, addresses the predicaments of little people coming face to face with the will of a behemoth of a government, considers the nature of progress and – maybe a minor concern in the light of these – is also an against-the-odds romance. If all that weren’t enough, it was seen in cinemas in über-panoramic CinemaScope. Wild River was ambitious.Released in 1960, Wild River was the last film Elia Kazan made while under contract to Twentieth Century Fox and followed 1957’s sly satire A Face In the Crowd. The Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Had it not been for the fact that Charli “XCX” Aitchison had struggled to find a hit of her own until last summer’s Fault in Our Stars-soundtracking “Boom Clap”, I’d be convinced that she had tapped into some secret formula for producing perfect pop hits. “I Love It”, the rabble-rousing breakup anthem she wrote for Swedish electropop duo Icona Pop and her attention-grabbing hook on Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy” share a distinguishable swagger, but had little impact on the negligible success of her 2013 major label debut True Romance. In the fickle world of pop music, that should have been enough to Read more ...
Barney Harsent
There’s a danger in an artist having their work reinterpreted that the end result will be little more than a rough outline of the original. Look at Metallica’s axe job on the Velvet Underground for instance. Still, on the bright side, at least they increased the band’s "reach" to include jocks and morons.Following a series of live shows over the last few years, Throbbing Gristle alumni and art-dance legends Chris & Cosey were inundated with requests for recordings of the live versions of old songs and ended up complying, dressing up their back catalogue for a night out on the tiles.So, Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Children – they’re inherently scary, right? Add to that the fraught rip-tides of a claustrophobic mother-son relationship – a son with behavioural problems and a compulsive fear of monsters under the bed, and a single mother tormented by the violent death of her husband – and then stir in a character from a pop-up book called Mr Babadook, who pops up just a little too close for comfort, and you have the necessary ingredients for a consummate chamber piece of mounting and inexorable terror.Written and directed by Jennifer Kent, The Babadook stars Essie Davis as sleep-deprived, rapidly Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
While much of Hexadic is a blast, the first album from Six Organs of Admittance since 2012’s Ascent offers much that’s familiar: the snail’s pace heaviosity and shifts between bone-crushing density and desiccated sparseness of Dylan Carlson’s Earth, spaghetti-western guitar interludes (also favoured by Carlson), an approach to malformed riffing and guitar mangling blending Bad Moon Rising-era Sonic Youth, Harry Pussy and early Pussy Galore. Six Organs of Admittance’s prolific constant presence Ben Chasny used to be tarred as freak-folk, but nowadays his various musical guises hop with ease Read more ...