CDs/DVDs
Karen Krizanovich
For the child who wants to see everything, Japanese anime Studio Ghibli’s Blu-ray double bill of 1989’s Kiki’s Delivery Service and 1988’s Grave of the Fireflies – called one of the saddest movies ever made – brings a fresh truckload of emotion. Based on novels, both films are award-winners pivotal in the history of Japanese animation. In Kiki’s Delivery Service (aka Witch’s Delivery Service) a young witch, according to custom, spends one year in another town surviving on her own magic. Grave of the Fireflies tells the harrowing tale of a young boy and his younger sister in the harsh climate Read more ...
joe.muggs
The part-Japanese Brit Maya Jane Coles displays elaborate asymmetric hair, interesting piercings and enormous tattoos in her moody photoshoots, makes sounds that are uniformly smooth and high-gloss, and has a sonic palette that takes in populist trance, chillout and straight-up pop music as well as more nerd-cred underground sounds. And in an era of techno that's been dominated by Berlin-centric cosmopolitanisms – by sophisticated internationalist crowds with creative haircuts and intricately-knotted scarves as well as sometimes tediously tasteful musical minimalism – it'd be very easy to Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
What’s the point of Harry Connick Jr in a world where Michael Bublé exists? Twenty years ago Harry Connick Jr was the Bublé of the day. He was among the first to run a comprehensive and commercially successful update of swingin’ Sinatra schtick, adding youthful sex appeal. Suave, good looking and a charmer, he also had other strings to his bow. An easy presence as an actor – which led to a parallel career on TV and on Broadway – has been matched by a connoisseur’s appreciation of jazz. The latter led to an interest in the musical history of his native New Orleans, resulting in a number of Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Mavis Staples keeps on comin': with a contralto voice soaked in gospel and soul, she delivers consistently heart-warming music.This is her second collaboration with Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, a rocker with enough knowledge and taste to create a contemporary ambience in which Mavis can deliver classics such Washington Phillips’s spine-chilling religious classic “What are They Doing in Heaven Today” alongside Funkadelic’s secular lament “Can You Get to That”.Mavis grew up under her father’s musical and spiritual guidance: Pops was a Mississippi man, from the same plantations that gave us Charley Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The youngest of the seven children officially fathered by 1908-16's liberal Prime Minister, the writer-director Anthony Asquith was a socialist who wore a blue boiler suit on the sets of his films. If that was a gesture of solidarity with his crew’s gaffers and grips and the British working class generally, it carries over into the second of his four silent films, Underground, a light romantic-triangle melodrama that morphs unexpectedly into a cruel thriller and culminates in a vertiginous chase.Asquith appears to pluck three of his four main characters at random from the hoi polloi packing Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Being assigned to review Editors on the Other Stage at Glastonbury 2007, when Shirley Bassey was on the main Pyramid, was not a good way to consolidate my already fragile critical relationship with the Brummie quartet. Their music pushed my mind to predictable comparisons, ones many had drawn before – Joy Division, notably. Thus I avoided them from thereon, left them alone and they left me alone, going on to sell millions of albums of gloom-flecked indie, tinted with a – to my ears, rather unsatisfying - smidgeon of electronics.Now their fourth album arrives bearing possible good news (at Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It could be Katie Crutchfield's voice: in the moment, its ragged timbre packs the punch of a cross-my-heart whispered secret. It could be the songwriting itself: stories half-told in two minute bursts, frank and funny and even contradictory the more you listen to the album as a whole. Or it could be some combination of the two that makes Cerulean Salt feel like an undiscovered treasure, a 33-minute mystery between you and your headphones.Only it's not like that at all, because Crutchfield grew up fronting enough girl-punk bands for this to be old hat to her and this album is in fact her Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
With its story of youthful love entrapped by fate, Tabu relishes the glorious primal energy of the South Seas, which was where German director FW Murnau, best known now for his expressionist Nosferatu, but then recently established in Hollywood and acclaimed for the likes of Sunrise, found himself in 1929. He came along with documentarist Robert Flaherty (Nanook of the North), but what had been planned as a joint project ended up as Murnau’s film; Flaherty shot the opening sequence (including the famous fisherman shot, below right), before handing over cinematography to Floyd Crosby, who Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Nicky Haslam is best known as an interior designer. His clients include Rupert Everett, Bryan Ferry and Mick Jagger. His first book was called Sheer Opulence. He has also written, bred horses and performed in cabaret. Accompanying him on his album Midnight Matinee are Everett and Ferry, Cilla Black, Tracey Emin, Bob Geldof, Helena Bonham Carter, AN Wilson and Prince João of Orléans-Braganza. The press release proclaims Haslam, born in 1939, “the most promising performer of his generation.” Geldof declares that he “has… shown us all how it should be done,” and says Midnight Matinee is as Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Scared to Get Happy – A Story of Indie-pop 1980-1989It’s a good thing this box set has the hedge-betting sub-title A Story of Indie-pop. Making the definitive statement on a whole decade of pop’s undergrowth is probably impossible, but being so equivocal from the off sets up Scared to Get Happy as not bold enough to nail its colours to the mast.Compiling and licensing the material on Scared to Get Happy must have been a nightmare. Spread across the five CDs of this first large-scale collection of the era are 134 tracks, beginning with The Wild Swans’s 1982 single “ Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It is unfortunate that those who hate Deap Vally find it way easier to articulate why than those who love them. There’s little new in the bluesy, garage-rock riffs that pose and swagger their way through debut album Sistronix, and it’s not as if - on the evidence of the hidden a cappella track that closes off the album - they have the greatest voices. Even the two-piece, guitar and drums setup has been done before, with the White Stripes so obvious a reference point it would be negligent not to mention it.But it is its very simplicity that makes the Californian duo’s music so direct and so Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Long before the release of Tom Odell’s debut, certain critics’ knives were drawn ready to give this middle-class lad a good stabbing. The recent stories about his dad ringing up the NME to complain about his no star review, and the contents of that piece, say it all. The reviewer wished there was a “particular place in hell” for this daddy’s boy and bridled at the idea he might be “all over 2013 like a case of musical syphilis”.But although Odell has been primed for success by his early Brit award, it’s ludicrous to suggest that he’s as bland as the face of 2012, Emeli Sandé. It’s true he may Read more ...