CDs/DVDs
Thomas H. Green
It’s hard not to admire Kelis Rogers’ spirited and unpredictable approach to the music business. She’s been through multiple incarnations, approaching them with real zest, the spiritual successor to Nena Cherry, albeit more prolific and emanating a very American hip hop raunch. At her career’s start she explored the shouty borderland where R&B meets rock; in “Milkshake” she created one of the sexiest, starkest, best R&B numbers of the century, yet her last album was produced with EDM-pop Satan, David Guetta. Even outside her music, there’s always some new enthusiasm. The only time I Read more ...
graham.rickson
That Bill Forsyth’s 1979 debut feature is so polished shouldn’t be a surprise; he’d been working on documentaries and short films since the 1960s. Several of these are included as generous bonuses on this disc. KH-4 and Mirror are offbeat mini-dramas, but more pertinent is Oscar Marzaroli's Glasgow 1980, an upbeat short edited by Forsyth in 1970, outlining in optimistic fashion how the city would soon be transformed for the better. The depressing gap between aspiration and reality is clear in That Sinking Feeling. Glasgow remains grubby and congested, its pasty-faced denizens negotiating a Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The ease with which Wallis Bird can flit between genres armed with nothing but a guitar and her warm, raggedly bluesy voice has been apparent since at the very least her 2012 self-titled third album. Even still, those of us who fell for that album’s considerable charms could hardly have expected its architect to celebrate a move to Berlin by going full-on Eurodisco.It’s an acquired taste, the throbbingly incessant disco beat that punctuates “Hardly Hardly”, the opening track - and first single - from Architect from about four bars in, but the multiple Irish Meteor winner Bird has never been Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Chicago Hit Factory – The Vee-Jay Story 1953-1966According to the book accompanying this 10-disc tribute to the Chicago independent label, “in one month alone in 1964 Vee-Jay records sold 2.6 million records. Two years later the company was bankrupt.” The reason for it flying so high in 1964 was a deal made in 1962 when the label began licensing material from Britain’s EMI. The prize then was yodelling popster Frank Ifield, whose “I Remember You” Vee-Jay got into the US Top 10. Along with Ifield, they got an unknown quantity called The Beatles. When 1964 arrived, Vee- Read more ...
Guy Oddy
2014 marks rock-jazzers/post-jazzers Led Bib’s tenth anniversary as a going concern and three years since their Bring your Own album. It also sees the release of The People in your Neighbourhood: an album that in no way suggests a band that is merely marking time. Weird electronics rub up against psychedelic bebop and there are even hints of dub reggae on closing tune “Orphan Elephants”. There are, however, still plenty of the pounding grooves and driving sax riffs that we have come to expect from Led Bib. Tracks like opener “New Teles”, “Giant Bean” and “Curly Kale” see them Read more ...
Russ Coffey
In the five or so years since Paolo Nutini’s last release, the profile of the tousle-haired Scotsman has hardly diminished. Ladies, of all ages, continue to find his raspy voice seductive whilst his laid-back style still gets of the nerves of many men. Or should I say laid-back styles - for Nutini's first two albums were nothing if not eclectic. Caustic Love, however, is appreciably more coherent. The overriding mood is a Seventies-ish mix of blues, soul and funk with a strong undertow of Al Green. But whilst the tone is defiantly retro, Nutini’s gravel voice prevents tunes like “Let Me Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Bradenville is on the way up. The town might only have one bank, but it does have a copper mine and a newly opened pyjama factory. In Arizona, it’s sufficiently isolated to seem the right target for a trio of bad guys looking to help themselves to what’s in that bank. Their plans culminate on a Saturday.The 1955 film Violent Saturday is, potentially, standard film noir. A darkly drawn bank heist caper, it is also a Peyton Place-style melodrama examining the lives of townsfolk, their infelicities, insecurities and foibles. The two styles exist in parallel and meet head on the fateful Saturday Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
In a galaxy all too near, amid tattered old copies of Future Music magazine, tangles of cables and a couple of broken sequencers, a trio of electronica nerds huddle around a glowing console plotting a recipe for the perfect album. “It should,” says one, “have all the bleak urban dystopianism of Detroit techno at its most sci-fi, a sense of glacial blank robot cool, but with a dirty analogue edge, like Drexciya having it off with Cabaret Voltaire.”“But also let it be pastoral,” adds another, contrarily, “let it have mesmerising, somniferous, trance-inducing qualities, a groove and a sense of Read more ...
peter.quinn
There's something about the way in which the musical surfaces of album opener “Urban Control” glitter and sparkle that immediately announces you're listening to a Phronesis recording. By the time Danish bassist Jasper Høiby reaches the end of his first, elegantly constructed, descending phrase, you already sense the impending explosion of motifs and rhythmic energy that it will detonate. And, sure enough, once British pianist Ivo Neame and Swedish drummer Anton Eger are brought into play, the trio's characteristically rich counterpoint takes on an unstoppable momentum.Recorded over Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Atom Egoyan’s stock has dropped a bit in the 21st century. This box-set of his first seven films remains – along with his response to the Turkish genocide of Armenians, Ararat (2002) – the essence of his work to date.These early films have as much personal character as his compatriot and mentor Cronenberg’s. His feature debut Next of Kin (1984), in which a teenager escapes his loveless home by pretending to be a Toronto Armenian family’s long-lost son, introduces several themes: carefully faked identities, and the erasable memories enabled by video-tape. Family Viewing (1988), Speaking Parts Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Erika M Anderson’s dystopian follow-up to 2011’s critically acclaimed Past Life Martyred Saints was always going to be prescient, but in the end even she was taken by surprise. “Facebook just bought the company that makes … the VR headset I am wearing on the cover of The Future’s Void,” she wrote on her blog a week or so back, by way of introduction to “3Jane”, the single that is the album’s "lyrical centrepiece". “People ask me about themes of paranoia on the record but obviously I am not the only one with dystopian dreams of our plugged-in future.”If it seems hardly any time at all since we Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Gram Parsons: The Early Years Vol 1 & 2Without Gram Parsons, The Rolling Stones could not have transformed themselves into what they became in the late Sixties and early Seventies. The bond between the South Carolina-born walking encyclopaedia of the music of America’s south and Keith Richards changed the Stones. Without Parsons there would have been no Eagles. They emerged from what he developed with The Flying Burrito Brothers and turned it into platinum. Without Parsons, Emmylou Harris would not have had the opportunity to soar. Parsons died in 1973 and did not rejoice in the Read more ...