CDs/DVDs
Nick Hasted
This progressively darkening Liverpool love story centres on scenes of sadomasochistic sex. Its 90 minutes divide neatly after 45, when Kelly (Antonia Campbell-Hughes) wrecks her relationship with Victor (Julian Morris) by carving his back with broken glass. But Kieran Evans’ feature debut is mostly gentler and sadder than that.The violence Kelly brings into the bedroom after she meets Victor at a club intensifies sex as a place of dangerous refuge from the outside world’s storms. When Kelly goes to her erratic mum’s for tea, she finds her violent ex-boyfriend there too; Victor’s happy-go- Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Romania’s cinema renaissance continues with this Golden Bear-winning study of smothering mother-love and social division. Director Calin Peter Netzer sneaks in outrageous black comedy and unsettling emotion, as architect Cornelia (Luminita Gheorghiu) has her 60th birthday spoiled when her son Barbu kills a working-class child while speeding through a village.As with Italy’s post-war cinema, Romania’s current films combine humanity and social purpose. Cornelia and her doctor sister-in-law know money and status can fix almost anything. They enter a police station puffed up with protective fur Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Mali has been in the news this year: music was under serious threat from the fundamentalism that spread through the north of the country and ransacked parts of the ancient city of Timbuktu. The jihadists are hardly music-lovers and Mali’s creative community, one of the most productive in Africa, stood firm while feeling the cold winds of Islamist repression, and reacted with characteristic vigour. The griots or jalis of West Africa have always sung alongside the just warriors, giving them courage with their heart-warming musicBassekou Kouyate, the great ngoni player from Ségou, known for his Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Beachwood Sparks: Desert SkiesBeachwood Sparks didn’t become Fleet Foxes, but their DNA is integral to the harmonious Seattleites. Both bands have been issued by the Sub Pop label, but after two albums Beachwood Sparks drifted apart in 2002. Fleet Foxes picked up the torch in 2008. The connection is more than a shared label and general musical preferences. It’s through the torch held for Gram Parsons's “cosmic American music” and the debt both owe to David Crosby’s 1971 solo album If I Could Only Remember my Name. Beachwood Sparks had started something – a parallel path to, but not, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's a happy coincidence that John Fullbright hails from Woody Guthrie's home town of Okemah, Oklahoma, but his debut album presents an artist who is far from being a mere clone of the fabled balladeer. A spin through the dozen tracks on From the Ground Up reveals traces of blues, country, gospel, folk and rock, all handled with rough-hewn earthiness. But while Fullbright has a traditionalist's respect for old-fashioned stuff that works ("old country and bluegrass is my bread and butter," as he puts it), it's his gift for imagery and storytelling that makes his songwriting special.Reared on Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“Like the legend of the Phoenix…” So began the party song of this year, last year, next year, probably the year after.I always thought Daft Punk were overrated. The Nineties was a wondrous narco-techno rave, then along they came with their wah-wah filter disco and every trendy from Hoxton to Brooklyn started wanking on about them, the second coming, as it were, a couple of Parisian aristos in motorcycle helmets. They were alright – fun and all that – but they were hardly Orbital or The Prodigy. They also unlocked our super-duper acid house party to an endless array of vocal house-pop Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Since it’s Christmas time and everyone’s in office party mode, here’s the pub chat verdict on The Conjuring: “It’s that bloke who did Saw, starts off a bit naff, then gets quite scary for a bit, but blows it in the end. You getting them in? Mine’s a pint of Cobra. What? No, they always boil all the alcohol out of mulled wine in pubs, but I’ll have a port, if you’re buying. Yeah, there are a couple of bits that make you jump, like when this zombie-witch thing leaps off a wardrobe but it’s not as scary as the trailer made it look. Cheers! No, I’ll sip the port, not down it in one, thanks.” Read more ...
Matthew Wright
The Sons of Kemet’s peculiar forces of two drummers, tuba and reeds have been on the road for over two years now, their performances landing on an unsuspecting crowd like a petrol bomb on seasoned timber. With the tuba playing as part of both the rhythm and horn sections, the Sons can deploy both massive rhythmic firepower and potent melodic edge. It’s an intense and compelling sound, exploring the triangular musical dialogue between North and West Africa, the Caribbean, and New Orleans, in a musical language primed with exploding dance hooks and entwined with spiralling North African melody Read more ...
joe.muggs
It's an understatement to say that the massive revival of fortunes of club music in the 2010s has had its ups and downs. It's been a time of chaotic glut, of excess and spectacle – thanks particularly to the American “EDM” (electronic dance music) wave, which has seen egos, assholery and unnecessary fireworks that make the 90s UK superstar DJ era seem like a gentle Sunday afternoon stroll in the park – but also of diversification and fertility. And one particularly interesting phenomenon has been musicians who've picked up certain threads which the diminished scenes of the 1990s had left off. Read more ...
Katie Colombus
It’s very unusual to hear ballet dancers talk. The extent of ballerina acting is normally a flamboyant point at a ring finger to announce a wedding, dramatically wiping away tears to express sadness or furrowing a heavily pencilled brow to portray anger. So it comes as a bit of a surprise to see that the two ballet dancers employed for the main parts - soloist Cindy Jourdain, formerly of the Royal Ballet, and Arionel Vargas, principal dancer with the English National Ballet – can manage the theatrics as well as they do in this sweet little independent film, directed by Christopher Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
In the right circles, Jason Isbell already has enough of a reputation as one of contemporary Americana’s finest songwriters - both solo and as part of the Drive-By Truckers - that for him to drop an album as subtly stunning as Southeastern shouldn’t really have been a surprise. But what edged this album - the songwriter’s fourth either under his own name or alongside his band the 400 Unit - above The Julie Ruin’s Run Fast in my choice of best of 2013 was its consistency. While previous Isbell albums have featured some of my go-to, favourite-ever songs, the sucker punches were usually held Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It’s ironic that the album which has invited itself back onto the turntable more often than any other this year is wholly redolent of another time and place: the California of the early Seventies. Whatever the shortcomings of his live performance, on his second album Fanfare Jonathan Wilson fashioned a dense, atmospheric whole whose constituent ingredients were explicitly acknowledged – and not just by the identity of those guesting on the album. But it was also wholly original and showcased a unique yet disconcertingly familiar voice. And it revealed more and more depth with repeated visits Read more ...