CDs/DVDs
Karen Krizanovich
Hugely underrated, The Two Faces of January packs more filmmaking power than, at least, its poster would ever suggest. Based on the Patricia Highsmith novel, which puts it streets ahead of most films, Two Faces... has a superb ensemble cast: Viggo Mortensen is the alluring Chester MacFarland, travelling with his equally alluring wife Colette (Kirsten Dunst) and their accidental tour guide, the charming Greek-American Rydal Keener (Oscar Isaac). Set in 1962, the couple are sightseeing and become entangled with Rydal, a small-time crook. Coming to their hotel quite innocently, Rydal sees Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
John MacLean has been recording as The Juan MacClean for just over a decade on former LCD Soundsystem main man James Murphy’s label DFA Records. Previously, Murphy was involved in MacLean’s old band Six Finger Satellite. In a Dream makes the link even more explicit as Nancy Whang, singer in the now-defunct LCD Soundsystem and before that an intermittent collaborator, has now joined MacLean full time.But In a Dream, The Juan MacLean’s third album, is not LCD Soundsystem part two. It maintains the boffinish fascination with electro-dance prototypes of 20-plus years ago, but raises the bar by Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
Kicking off with an epic eight-and-a-half-minute-long tribute to New Jersey’s Palisades amusement Park and a lament to forgotten friendships, the Counting Crows seventh studio album intentionally invokes the spirit and sound of Seventies rock. The opening track has high aspirations with its triumphant horns, confident piano chords, shore setting and coming of age theme clearly paying homage to Bruce Springsteen’s early work, most obviously the Born to Run album.Tearing away across time, states and continents, and evoking the bands of a highly romanticised era, Counting Crows map the geography Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Game Theory: Blaze of GloryThe news of the death on 15 April last year of Scott Miller was a shock. Although hardly a household name, he was one of pop’s great auteurs. The California-born songwriter may no longer be with us, but the music he made with his bands Alternate Learning, Game Theory and The Loud Family will forever testify to his originality, single-mindedness and, above all, way with a tune and a meaning-filled snarky lyric. The structure of his songs twisted and turned, but they were always melodic. He was clever, eloquent, sarcastic and, in person, always charming. All of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
When a person approaches a Barbra Streisand album, they would be a fool to go in carrying the same expectations as with, say, the forthcoming collaboration between experimental frontiersmen Scott Walker & Sunn O))). Or even, in all honesty, the new Jesse Ware album, the new Marooon 5 album, or some such. This applies most especially to music journalists, so often obsessed with the vanguard, with what’s coming next, and dismissive of mainstream, comfortable or rehashed sounds. So let’s approach the 72 year old actress-diva-legend’s latest in the knowledge that her debut album appeared 51 Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s war in the world outside and much conflict at home in Norwegian director Eric Poppe’s A Thousand Times Good Night. The film is centred in every sense around the poised, taut performance of Juliette Binoche as war photographer Rebecca, whom we first encounter at work in Afghanistan, as she follows the detailed preparations of a female suicide-bomber being prepared for martyrdom. The opening minutes are extremely gripping cinema, quietly understated but no less powerful for that, and raise the question of whether Binoche’s character has stepped over a professional line.But it’s the Read more ...
joe.muggs
Aside from the title track, there are pieces here called “Febrile,” “Red Sex,” “Drowned in Water and Light,” “Kin to Coal.” You might not be surprised to learn, then, that this is not a set of jaunty singalongs. But neither is it the techno the young Bristol producer has become known for, either. If you wanted the point hammered home that this isn't an easily accessible record, the sub-two-minute opener “Febrile” appears to be an improvised jam between death metal drummer, road drill and police siren, punctuated with long silences, while the following instrumental “Red Sex” is a seasick Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The story is a familiar one: four lads rattling through three-minute garage rock songs full of sweary, lovelorn couplets. With the exception of the name (a tribute, apparently, to a busker that frontman Van McCann met as a child) there’s little to set Llandudno four-piece Catfish and the Bottlemen apart on paper - but there’s something about their debut album that makes me smile. Clocking in at just under 40 minutes, making it the perfect length for my walk home from work, The Balcony is the aural equivalent of orange squash: drunk too often it tastes cheap and a little bit sickly, but Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Tricky has consistently displayed the genius of the self-taught DIY music magician and his latest album, a varied collection of sounds sombre, mysterious, melancholy and ceaselessly surprising, proves his continued worth as one of the most creative of the ground-breaking musicians who emerged from Bristol in the 1990s.In giving the album his real name, “Adrian Thaws”, he once again proclaims his mixed-raced roots, the Knowle West boy who turned his wounds – the loss of his poet mother when he was a young child, asthma and eczema so serious he was often kept away from school – into a source of Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Dream Your Life Away is the debut album from Vance Joy, a pop-folkie whose style suggests Ed Sheeran without the cloying niceness. These songs of young love and of a young man spreading his wings are pretty much created out of little more than vocals and an acoustic guitar. There is occasional support from other musicians, but this is understated and the rolling groove that characterises much of Dream Your Life Away is pretty much just Joy singing and strumming along.Most of the first half of the album is mellow and laid-back but still manages to swing from time to time. The previously Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
I suspect that, a good few years after a dodgy couple of albums, Ryan Adams has reached a stage in his career where they’re all going to be dubbed a return to form. I seem to remember writing something similar about 2011’s Ashes and Fire – but here we are, three years on, and I couldn’t tell you the last time I listened to it (I should probably mention that I’m writing this not just as a critic, but as somebody with his artwork tattooed on my arm).There are a few things about Ryan Adams – the album, not the man – that make the story. Firstly there’s that self-titled thing, which will always Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Calypso CrazeIn 1956, calypso battled it out with rock ’n’ roll to become America’s hottest musical craze. As the year ended, newspaper reports quoted pundits predicting it would wipe Elvis and his like out. One such was Reverend Norman O’Connor, a “Catholic chaplain at Boston University and a jazz authority”, who said “rock ’n’ roll is on the way out.” Showbiz trade mag Variety concurred in December, proclaiming calypso “the exterminator of rock ’n’ roll” and “the hot trend.” They seemed to have a point. Pop’s first million selling album became Harry Belafonte’s Calypso, Read more ...