CDs/DVDs
David Nice
If you have trouble grasping all the plot-lines of Fritz Lang’s 1928 silent thriller, fear not: they’re chimerical, existing only to display all the accoutrements of a spy-movie genre which Lang is credited with having launched. All paths lead to the sinister Lenin-Trotsky visage of master-spy Haghi (Rudolf Klein-Rogge, slickly transformed from his villainous roles in the Doctor Mabuse films and Metropolis). The essence is a love-triangle between him, the infinitely various Sonja Barnikowa of Gerda Maurus, Russian exile at his command, and “No. 326” as played by Willy Fritsch, who brushes up Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The five lads who comprise the biggest slice of Simon Cowell’s pension fund are back with the follow up to last year’s Midnight Memories. One Direction, are not, in all fairness, canvassing my vote with new album Four. In fact, on the basis of this new collection of songs, they’re doorstepping eight-year-old girls to ask whether their mum’s in.1D have long had a knack of delivering songs that sound, in part, like already established hits, however the reference points here seem less pop and more… well, MOR. Single "Steal My Girl" has a piano introduction that echoes Meat Loaf, before the Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Antony Hegarty has one of those voices that’s poised on the edge of tears. With a singing style at times reminiscent of the great Italian tenor Beniamino Gigli, who broke a thousand hearts in the 1930s, he knows how to draw deeply from his most vulnerable self, gently but firmly taking his audience to the same fragile inner spaces.Explorations of androgyny in popular music have often made possible a form of creativity that rides a knife-edge. Fuelled by transgender freedom, Antony Hegarty plunges resolutely into the cloud of undoing, a place where courageous speaking from the heart can assume Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Velvet Underground: The Velvet Underground Super Deluxe EditionMGM, The Velvet Underground’s label, didn’t have a clue how to promote the band’s third album. The press kit accompanying its March 1969 release described drummer Maureen Tucker as “not your typical virgin. She looks like a red-headed music hall tart and pounds the drums with the force of a weight lifter. A female Brendan Behan.” Lou Reed was said to have “a face that arouses interest but gives no satisfaction.”So it was no suprise that the album indeed became a poor seller and aroused little mainstream interest, which Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If you glanced too hastily at the sleeve you might think Bryan Ferry had made another album called Avalon, that epitome of the sleek autumnal heyday of Roxy Music. But no. Avonmore, though it may sound like a single malt whisky, is named after Ferry's studio complex in West London, not far from Olympia which gave him the title of a previous album in 2010.Avonmore is a worthy addition to the string of solo albums (the self-written ones, rather than his parallel stream of covers discs or the peculiar Twenties throwback The Jazz Age) which Ferry has made since the Eighties, with 1985's Boys and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The world is getting hotter. Unbearably so. Along Fleet Street, the centre of British newspaper production, on-the-skids, drink-sodden Daily Express reporter Peter Stenning (a square-jawed Edward Judd) begins looking into the reasons for the change. With the help of his charismatic science editor Bill Maguire (a wonderful Leo McKern), he begins piecing things together – nuclear weapons testing has shifted the Earth’s axis. Even worse, the orbit has changed and a spiral towards the sun has begun. On his hunt for information, Stenning finds love in the arms of the beautiful Jeannie Craig (a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
This October lo-fi, fuzzy VHS-style footage of Kylie Minogue in a ripped tee-shirt swaying on a mattress in a messy loft apartment singing Flight Facilities’ breakthrough song, “Crave You”, popped up in internet-land. It was an unexpected move that successfully amped up expectations for the Australian duo’s debut album. Kylie’s acapella appears on the album, uncredited, as well as the original, a smooth, sleepy, longing, slothful love song and lazy dance throb which first appeared in 2010. It made clubland sit up and pay attention. If this album had swiftly followed, ahead of the deep house Read more ...
Matthew Wright
In the end, I had to disable every auto-correction feature in my word processing package to complete the sentence. Wiggly red lines and pop-up boxes were swarming all over the words “philosophy” and “Cheryl”. But eventually the machine understood: Cheryl’s fourth album has a philosophy. Not only that, but it also has a philosopher (Alan Watts) intoning worthily on the opening track about the meaning of life, with Cheryl first speaking, then (on subsequent tracks) singing her response.What she says is perfectly sensible at the level, perhaps, of a lifestyle column in a glossy magazine, though Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Italy’s nominee for next year’s Foreign Language Oscar is an ambitious satire on the ruinous machinations of the super-rich, symbolised by the overworked waiter clipped by a speeding SUV in the opening minutes. Three perspectives on the events tangentially leading to his death follow, giving writer-director Paolo Virzi (transplanting Stephen Amidon’s US novel to northern Italy) a broad canvas.The innocent, snuffed-out waiter isn’t served much better by Virzi, though. He’s a convenient metaphor, around which the film’s intricate puzzle-parts spin. Valeria Bruni Tedeschi’s Carla, the beautiful Read more ...
Guy Oddy
When TV On The Radio released their breakthrough album, Dear Science in 2008, they were hailed in some quarters as saviours of indie music through a modest injection of intellectualism and an eye for throwing the unexpected into the mix. Six years on and three years since Nine Types Of Light, it all feels like we’ve been here before.Recent single, “Happy Idiot” is pure homage to New Order and is catchy and danceable without slipping into daft clichés. Elsewhere Tunde Adebimpe, David Sitek and their merry men show off their 80s fetish with hints of Echo and the Bunnymen on “Could You” and Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Eight musical cities, eight films, eight sounds, eight songs: grasping the scope of Dave Grohl’s ambition with the Sonic Highways project is a strenuous business. The album cover, all distorted visual references packed together, looks more like a dystopian computer game than music from the honest-to-goodness Dave Grohl. It doesn’t sit well with the Foo Fighters’ core strengths: their frank, immersive, overwhelming energy and emotional honesty. And the connection between TV series and album is strained.The HBO docs, currently showing on BBC Four, in which Dave Grohl talks to musicians from Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Cyril Davies' All-Stars: Radio Sounds of Cyril Davies Various Artists: Girls With GuitarsAn escalating side effect of the current vogue for vinyl is that some reissues are being released only in that format – and some are so interesting they merit covering. theartsdesk saw this a while ago with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Jimmy Page’s Lucifer Rising soundtrack and John Tavener’s The Protecting Veil. So, once again, this week’s reissues aren’t available on CD.The compilation Girls With Guitars does though draw from a series of CDs – three so far – issued under that title, each of which Read more ...