CDs/DVDs
Lisa-Marie Ferla
There’s a slight unease I feel about Savages which only grows with every listen to the band’s heavily-hyped debut album. Perhaps I’m too old to experience my music as just one facet of a conceptual art project, where it comes as part of a package that’s as much provocative manifestos about the emptiness of modern living and interviews packed with loaded statements about sex and violence.Yet these things demand to be examined by the fact of their very existence, because everything else about Silence Yourself seems to be carefully constructed. That in itself is unsettling, as the sonic Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A female hiker is naked. A village is close. Lying on the slope down to a river, she invites the taciturn man she’s followed to have sex. They do. She begins shrieking and foaming at the mouth. He fastens his face to hers. She could then be dead yet begins crawling into the water, looks heavenwards and spreads her arms.The images of baptism and rebirth are clear. But the motivation of the man, David Dewale’s Le gars (the man or guy), is less clear cut. Bruno Dumont’s Hors Satan (Outside Satan) is hard to read in terms of specifics, but overall it dwells on the arrival of a mystical outsider Read more ...
peter.quinn
Born just a year apart in the 1950s and having both clocked up almost 40 years' work in their respective scenes, it's surprising that it's taken quite so long for fellow trailblazers Pat Metheny and John Zorn to work together. It's certainly been worth the wait, as this collection is a real barn-burner.Apart from his frequent collaborator, drummer Antonio Sanchez, guitarist Metheny is responsible for every other sound you hear on his contribution to John Zorn's gargantuan Masada songbook project: bass, keyboards, bandonéon, percussion, flugelhorn and much more. All six richly detailed Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Russian director Karen Shakhnazarov has three decades of memorable film-making behind him, but remains much less known than he should be, at least in the English-speaking world: his edgy perestroika-era films like Courier and Assassin of the Tsar deserve far more atttention than they've generally received. Last year's White Tiger reunites him with longtime co-scripter Alexander Borodnyansky, and this time they've aimed resolutely for the mainstream, though it's a bid for the popular with an unusual twist.Shakhnazarov's first venture into locally popular World War II territory, White Tiger is Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
There isn’t really a consensus on what the single best Fall album is. However, I did come across a thread on a fansite asking devotees to nominate their favourite album title. Not album – album title.This prompts a number of observations. Firstly, there are a lot of Fall albums: Re-Mit is the 30th studio release since 1976. Secondly, there plenty of very serious Fall fans out there. Thirdly, Mark E Smith, the band’s frontman and only common denominator across its 37-year life, has a somewhat legendary turn of phrase (most votes on the poll went to 1983’s Perverted by Language ).On that front Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: We Are One - Eurovision Song Contest Malmö 2013From the British perspective, one thing stands out at this year’s Eurovision Song Contest. And it’s not our entry, the turgid power balladry of Bonnie Tyler’s sure-to-stumble “Believe in Me”. It’s the Armenian entry, “Lonely Planet” by Dorians. Although not that great a song for Armenia's return to the contest after last year's withdrawal, the composer is Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi. Its building chorus, powerful delivery, authentic rock dynamics and plank-spanking guitar solo would easily slot into in the musical Rock of Ages. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Rod Stewart has not exactly been inactive since he last wrote a decent tune towards the tail-end of the Seventies, but all that squiring and siring has left him little time to gaze navelwards in song. Since he started having fun with blondes, his best lines have been funnelled into seduction. So it's a bit of a turn-up that 20 years after he last recorded his own compositions, here comes Stewart’s most personal testament yet.As detailed in his delightful autobiography there’s a lot of material to work through, including third-time-lucky nuptial bliss. It's moot whether the pleasures of late- Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Benga is at a crossroads. Like many who arose from the dubstep scene, the 26-year-old is finding the term an albatross that’s hard to throw off. Sure, he was one of the Croydon originators of a sound that now dominates Transatlantic pop, a sound which is the basis for his national radio show and his band, Magnetic Man, but the term has become restrictive, too often tired shorthand for a lack of imagination among his lesser peers. The new album, then, is called Chapter II, although it’s his third, presumably to emphasize that we’re witnessing a rapid and drastic evolution.The truth is it’s no Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Robert Altman’s 1973 deconstruction of the private eye movie freely adapts and updates Raymond Chandler’s final completed novel from 1952. With Leigh Brackett (the remarkable female screenwriter who worked on Howard Hawks’s Chandler classic The Big Sleep in 1946 and The Empire Strikes Back in 1981) and his M*A*S*H star Elliott Gould, he offended purists, but caught some of Seventies LA's confusion.Gould’s Marlowe is a shambling anachronism, dawdling past his mostly half-naked, zonked hippie girl neighbours, callous police and psychotic criminals with the same laconic response: “It’s okay by Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Caro Emerald is the biggest act to arrive on the music scene in Holland for a very long time. Her debut album, 2010’s Deleted Scenes from the Cutting Room Floor, stayed at the top of the Dutch album charts for an astonishing run of over seven months, oulasting even Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Her stock is now rapidly rising in the UK, with Deleted Scenes… heading back into the album charts upon the release of her recent single, “Tangled Up”, which isn’t even on it.It’s easy to see Emerald’s appeal, a sassy 32-year-old with admirable old school Hollywood curves and songs dipped in ballroom Read more ...
joe.muggs
Alison Moyet is not just one of the great voices in pop, she's one of the most likeable figures. A brilliantly no-nonsense character, she consistently skewers music industry pomposity, laughs in the face of the expectations the world has of female artists, and generally does precisely what she wants while retaining an abnormally acute sense of the absurdness of it all.All of which seems to have fed into the minutes, which is a fabulously immature album – in the sense that this is clearly a singer-songwriter having nothing but fun in the studio, like a kid in a candy shop. With production Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Continuing its voyage through Scandinavia’s music, theartsdesk opens the latest chapter in Norway with Still Life With Eggplant, the 16th album from Trondheim’s prolific, long-lived, occasionally challenging and always vital Motorpsycho.Their last album, 2012’s The Death Defying Unicorn, was an orchestrated collaboration with jazz composer and musician Ståle Storløkken which was performed at Oslo’s opera house. The one before that, 2010’s Heavy Metal Fruit, included the 20-minute “Gullible's Travails” and was almost as musically elaborate as …Unicorn. Their new album, the magnificent Still Read more ...