CDs/DVDs
Russ Coffey
One of the unwritten rules of pop music is that a surfeit of talent doesn’t necessarily lead to the most affecting tracks. The rhythmic complexity of Beck’s 2008 opus Modern Guilt, was, for instance, undeniably unemotional. And then there was his 2012 release, simply a book of sheet music called Song Reader. Morning Phase, however, is a different matter. As the hype and press releases rightly claim, it really does hark back to his most lovely work, 2002’s Sea Change.Like its predecessor this is not a record of exceptional moments, rather one of sustained ethereal meditation. Now, however, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The primary DVD extra with Captain Phillips is an hour-long behind-the-scenes featurette. Most heavyweight Hollywood films have these but they’re often backslap-fests with little true revelation. The Captain Phillips featurette bucks the trend with genuine insight into the film-making methods of Paul Greengrass.Captain Phillips is classic Greengrass, close in flavour to his shockingly powerful United 93. He combines earnest attention-to-detail coverage of the minutiae of extreme situations with a fat-free forward-driving narrative and enough glimpses of real humanity to keep the emotions Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Nowhere near enough was said by James Gandolfini before he died at the age of 51 in 2013. His monument is of course Tony Soprano, but in this late role he unveiled a charming doughy side as the bruised romantic lead in Nicole Holofcener’s lo-fi autumnal romcom.Enough Said was conceived as a vehicle for Julia Louis-Dreyfus, formerly of Seinfeld and latterly of Veep. She plays masseuse Eva, who ticks all the genre’s boxes: goofy, kooky, adorable and borderline desperate. She and big slobby Albert (Gandolfini), both with daughters about to desert the nest for college, swiftly laugh each other Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It’s always difficult to know quite how seriously bands approach the things that distinguish between an album and a collection of songs: the naming, the sequencing, the artwork. For instance, I could say that “Life in the Sky” - the sprawling, six-minute epic that opens Fanfarlo’s new album - is the perfect microcosm of an album called Let’s Go Extinct: from the sounds it opens with, like whistles and whale song; to the melodic chaos the brass brings to its middle section; to the simplicity of its closing moments and the way that the song fades into nothingness. But it could just be that the Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Reverend & the Makers are known for a sound that is characterised by a hotpot of indie pop, electronica and Madchester vibes with witty and pithy lyrics, delivered in a Yorkshire accent, that venture beyond the subjects of getting hammered and hanging out. Something like Kasabian with a raised IQ or Dan le Sac vs Scroobius Pip with a bit more swing about them.New album, ThirtyTwo, is a slightly different take on their sound, with added ska among other flavours, but it is still most certainly recognisable as John McClure and his band of musical renegades. “The Devil’s Radio” and “Nostalgia Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The silent-era Wings is not a subtle film. Director William A. Wellman’s action-packed World War One tale of loyalty, love and war is also, at just short of two-and-a-half hours, long. At the time of its release in 1927, the film news bulletin Movie Time News declared it “the spectacular epic of the year, the national box office sensation of 1927”. In 1929 it became the first film to pick up an Oscar for Best Picture, at the first Academy Awards ceremony.As one of the extras on this new edition makes clear, the path which led to Wellman helming the film was collaborative and needed to be Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It’s easy, if you don’t live in London, to be dismissive of the capital’s endless miniature enclaves of snooty, self-satisfied indie hipsters. I certainly am. But sometimes they get it right. Hatcham Social, associates of Tim Burgess (of The Charlatans) and Faris Badwan (of The Horrors) are a case in point. Their third album is a lovely thing, lo-fi but full of restless, melancholic, creative spirit. That whole lost boy English indie thing was dead creative currency long before Barat & Doherty relentlessly finished it off, yet occasional bands still pop up and find new seams to mine Read more ...
joe.muggs
For those of a certain vintage, Lisa Stansfield's voice is woven into the fabric of memory. Of course there was her 1989 monster single “All Around the World” (“and ay-ay-ay-ay can't find my baby”) – but just as importantly, we first heard her earlier that year on Coldcut's monumental bit of starry-eyed acid house utopianism “People Hold On”, which has been sampled, bootlegged and repurposed so many times that the tiniest inflexions of her “give a little life, give a little love” refrain are as familiar as our own faces.Of course, she was a middle-of-the-road soul singer before that, and Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Gay cinema in Poland is emerging slowly, for understandable reasons, which makes Malgoska Szumowska’s accomplished, if somewhat traditional drama In the Name of something of a ground-breaker. Not least because its story is centred around the country’s most established institution, the Catholic church, putting the subject of homosexuality squarely into the national debate. Interestingly, and encouragingly, the film topped local box office results for its opening weekend last autumn.It has a very different setting from the more sophisticated urban milieu of last year’s other gay film from Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Fans of British psychedelic underground music of the Sixties and Seventies need read no further. This Twink is not the drummer from The Pretty Things and The Pink Fairies who was good mates with Syd Barrett all those years ago (and who is now known as Mohammed Abdullah, incidentally). That said, what’s going on with this Twink – Mike Langlie of Boston, Massachusetts - is oddball enough to be just as appealing, in small doses, to first-generation LSD freaks searching for something to send their brains into a spin.Langlie’s oeuvre is music made with toys and children’s instrumentation. If you Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Michael Bloomfield: From his Head to his Heart to his HandsMike Bloomfield was undoubtedly one of rock’s greatest and most distinctive guitarists. He was also wildly erratic and did much to undermine what others saw in him. He died at age 37 in 1981. He had been a drug addict and self-mythologist. The records he left behind were many, and he never landed in one band or place for long. Crucial to Bob Dylan turning his back on the acoustic, he was on stage with him when he went electric at Newport in 1965. His stinging tones helped define “Like a Rolling Stone”. Dylan told Bloomfield not Read more ...
Guy Oddy
On seeing that new Tinariwen album, Emmaar, had been recorded at Joshua Tree (due to ongoing security problems in their native Mali) with a number of American guest musicians, my heart sank. I imagined some special guest-heavy yet artistically bankrupt effort, and this was reinforced with the somewhat loaded phrase “including Red Hot Chilli Peppers’ guitarist...”.However, while Emmaar takes the band’s guitar-driven, assouf groove to new places, it will also sound familiar to any who were bitten by the Tinariwen bug in 2000, with their The Radio Tisdas Sessions debut. For while all five albums Read more ...