CDs/DVDs
Aimee Cliff
It’s kind of a shame that for whatever reason (presumably SEO), Vienna-based producer and singer SOHN (formerly known as S O H N) had to drop the spaces in between the letters of his name. As well as a self-conscious aesthetic flourish, it was after all a neat tie-in with the artist’s overall approach: patience, space, cool restraint.Emerging in 2012 with the future pop jam “Oscillate” and grabbing the internet buzz machine by the ears with the irrepressibly catchy “The Wheel”, SOHN has always had a focus on movement, his tracks talking about life’s unpredictable twists and his production Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Aloe Blacc is at a crossroads. The 35-year-old Californian soul singer arrived slowly via the hip hop underground and Peanut Butter Wolf’s smart Stones Throw label, then blew up with the monster hit “I Need A Dollar”, which will surely be used as a recession anthem for decades. His next sliver of profile was as singer of Swedish EDM cheese-merchant Aviici’s chart-topping country’n’western’n’happy hardcore monstrosity “Wake Me Up”. Blacc’s new album, his third, can surely, then, be used as a guide to see which way he’s going to jump?You’d have thought so, but the man born Egbert Dawkins III, a Read more ...
Guy Oddy
About 25 years ago, the Cult decided that they were going to turn the punk/alternative crowd onto “classic rock”. While they were widely derided by most of the music press of the time, they did manage to increase their record sales immeasurably. The Afghan Whigs are also admirers of seventies’ guitar music, with band leader Greg Dulli previously stating that he wanted them to sound like a mix of the Band, the Temptations and Neil Young in Crazy Horse mode. While the Afghan Whigs may have achieved their artistic aim on Do to the Beast, the band’s first album since 1998’s 1965, it seems an Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Norwegian saxophonist Marius Neset is not yet 30, and he already has several acclaimed albums with smaller forces to his increasingly neon-lit name. With this release of new and adapted work for 12-piece big band, he sets out to work on a larger (and notoriously complex) canvas. It’s intense, dramatic and finely wrought, with numerous changes of style and direction.Some tracks are adapted from two previous albums, Birds and Golden Xplosion; others are original. The lion theme is everywhere: the Nordic blonde Neset himself, his gleaming sax over one shoulder; the Read more ...
joe.muggs
It seems that the gradual leakage of avant-garde-post-classical-call-it-what-you-will music from the rarefied environment of concert halls and into the spaces traditionally inhabited by alternative and club music is now inexorable. And violinist Aisha Orazbayeva is one of the instrumental (pun intended) figures in this move from trickle to flood. As one quarter of the organising team for the London Contemporary Music Festival (along with erstwhile classical editor for theartsdesk, Igor Toronyi-Lalic), she has helped bring Parmegianni, Schwitters, Radigue and other 20th/21st century composers Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Social mores and the nature of what’s taboo change as time passes. The once acceptable or abhorred can become the opposite. The psychedelic-era British film Wonderwall is a case in point. Its storyline is built around a man who finds a hole in the wall between his and his neighbour’s flat. The wall becomes the wonderwall of the title as he looks through it to a naked, or near-naked, woman.And yet this was not a film about the unpleasantness of a peeping tom. It was a fantasy, a whimsy from an era when free love was a bandwagon for jumping on. It had an unexpected afterlife as Oasis’s Noel Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
By the time I reached “Coming Home” - the second track on Kaiser Chiefs’ fifth album, and the band’s "comeback" single - I was predicting not a riot exactly, but certainly a few snide comments below re: my knowledge of the Leeds lads’ back catalogue. While not wholly unpleasant, its drivetime radio-friendly smoothness seemed an odd choice for a band best known for anthemic, stadium-filling indie swagger - particularly as it was always going to be seen as something of a mission statement for their first album without chief songwriter and drummer Nick Hodgson.But then Education, Education, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Elton John: Goodbye Yellow Brick Road box set“Elton John plays cricket as he plays piano; dressed to kill and as if his life depends on it.” The commentary on the film included in the box-set version of this reissue of 1973’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road is hugely over the top and rococo, and treats its subject as a form of showbiz Moses. Brian Forbes’s 45-minute Elton John and Bernie Taupin say Goodbye to Norma Jean is crammed with eyebrow-raising moments, but none more so than when John declares he writes songs in just 30 minutes. “It takes me on average about half-an-hour per song,” he Read more ...
David Nice
Hands Over the City is to Naples at a crucial point in its 20th-century history what Rossellini’s Roma, città aperta is to the Italian capital and Visconti’s La terra trema to the Sicilian coast. Francesco Rosi’s decision to capture the only boom that Italy has ever really known in the early 1960s is an uncompromising film about the energy that directs itself to bad ends.Its embodiment is Rod Steiger’s Eduardo Nottola, a councillor who embroils city housing plans in his own profiteering property development. "So what’s new, or rather old?" you might ask. And indeed the film remains pertinent Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Anyone who came across Band of Skulls' sophomore album, Sweet Sour, in 2012 would have heard the sound of a band that was more than conversant with the Led Zeppelin songbook but who had no intention of staying put in the early Seventies. The chugging guitar was there alright, but there was plenty more than that going on in the likes of “Bruises” and “You’re Not Pretty but You’ve Got It Going On”. Follow-up, Himalayan, breaks still further from the strict blues-rock template with the introduction of a bucketful of other textures. That said, the echo of Jimmy Page’s crunching riffs and Robert Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The other day I woke up with Shakira’s “Hips Don’t Lie” fracking my mind. Round and round it juddered, wouldn’t leave me alone - horrid production, killer chorus - and much too much of that bloke whose career used to be endlessly repeating, “One time, one time” on Fugees tunes. Turns out it’s not just me. “Hips Don’t Lie” is globally the best-selling song of this century. When I discovered that fact, it fried my head.Then again, it’s possible for Europeans to forget what a massive deal Shakira is, one of the top-earning female entertainers of all time. The petite Colombian burst out of the Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
It’s strange that probably most of the best-known Brazilian artists here are over 60 and from one state, Bahia - those being Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Maria Bethania and Tom Zé. Brazil is the size of Europe, though, and of course there are younger generations from other states. One of the leading new voices is Karol Conka, whose Brazilian electronica is as fresh as anything you are likely to hear this year. Her breakthrough hit “Boa Noite” kicks off and ends the album (see video, overleaf) in which she raps that she is “totalmente livre e leve ao mesmo tempo que ferve” (“totally free and Read more ...