CDs/DVDs
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Paramore’s fourth album picks and chooses from so many genres that, first time around, I thought that I had accidentally begun to play it on shuffle. Its opening two tracks make an incongruous pairing: the seemingly light-hearted “Fast in My Car”, with its “we just want to have fun” refrain, and the gothy first single “Now”, which piles on the war metaphors.It’s on the second listen that I figure it out, which seems fitting because this self-titled release marks the full-length debut of Paramore the trio, following the departure of Josh and Zac Farro at the end of 2010. The album’s opening Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Shuggie Otis: Inspiration Information/Wings of LoveShuggie Otis's vanishing act after the release of his 1974 album Inspiration Information belatedly created one of pop’s great what-ifs. However, it only became so in the Nineties after the album was recognised as a soul treasure. David Byrne reissuing the album on his Luaka Bop label in 2001 didn’t plug the information gap, and Otis remained in the shadows. Now though, with this new reissue, the enigmatic soul auteur has resurfaced to supplement the album with a series of unreleased tracks dating from 1971 to 2000. Whatever else he was doing Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark are too often remembered for their musical sins. Their long career has taken multiple twists and turns including way too much watery tweeness in the mid-Eighties, then, later on, soppy, occasionally successful attempts to crack American FM radio. Many forget that initially they were one of the first electro-pop bands, Liverpudlian Kraftwerk devotees whose early work stands up beside any equivalent act of the era.The classic quartet line-up, featuring Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphries, the creative core from 1978 until the end of the Eighties, reformed in 2005 Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Shaking The Habitual’s centrepiece – the seventh of its 14 tracks – is the 19-minute “Old Dreams Waiting to be Realized”. A tone which ebbs in and out, it’s occasionally underpinned by distant rhythmic colour. Although thoughts inevitably turn to the similarly lengthy “SDSS1416+13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter)", the 22-minute amelodic experience exemplifying Scott Walker’s recent Bish Bosch, the astonishing Shaking the Habitual is, over its 97 minutes, an album retaining connections with what is recognisably music. Even so, it’s still pretty far out.Karin Dreijer Andersson and Olof Dreijer – Read more ...
howard.male
These two 1960s movies have more than just their director, Joseph Losey, and their writer, Harold Pinter, in common. They also both star Dirk Bogarde, escaping his matinee idol mould to startling effect, and feature soundtrack composer John Dankworth, whose jazzy scores cleverly veer between generic sexy swagger and disorientating dissonance, as and when appropriate.Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is the most self-consciously avant-garde of the two films that has dated the most. Accident (1967) is at times stilted and painfully slow. And although it might be argued that the pace is a Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Over here, They Might Be Giants are mainly known for the insanely catchy “Birdhouse in My Soul”. There's also a general assumption that it's their only hit, and a suspicion that they're, probably, Canadian. In fact, TMBG are a Brooklyn-based band centred around founders John Flansburgh and John Linnell. A long and often successful career in the States has included several children's albums and even the theme for the sitcom Malcolm in the Middle. The latter won them a Grammy. Nanobots is their 16th album and, quite consciously, looks back over their 21 years in pop.Impressively, it does so – Read more ...
joe.muggs
There's an easy answer to James Blake's naysayers (and there are a lot of them): you're not listening loud enough. I made the mistake myself. Even knowing his early, brilliant electronic works, I was quite unimpressed by the breakthrough cover of Feist's “Limit to Your Love”, idly listened to on laptop or radio, until I heard it delivered over a club soundsystem and realised just how perfectly the song structure was built around the annihilating bass.What Blake does, and is doing better than ever on his second album, is, roughly speaking, what Radiohead have been fumbling for since Kid A. Read more ...
Veronica Lee
David O Russell's multi-Oscar-nominated film is a romcom with a difference, dealing as it does with mental-health issues. Bradley Cooper, more usually found parlaying characters with arrested adolescence, here plays Pat Solitano, a man with a condition for which he hates taking his meds because they make him both physically bloated and mentally foggyPat returns home after a spell in an institution, having lost his marriage, his home and his job, and he hopes to win back his adulterous wife. But Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), herself troubled after the death of her husband and who has been self- Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It’s clear that Sarah Blasko is in a defiant mood right from the timpani roll that opens her fourth solo album. A lush, gorgeous work, in which the frantic strings of the Bulgarian Symphony Orchestra offset the Australian singer’s husky, intimate vocals, I Awake is an enthralling and unsettling listen.Blasko is the first of the three singers behind Seeker Lover Keeper, her project with countrywomen Sally Seltmann and Holly Throsby, to release her own material since their collaborative album was released last year. Although her contributions to the project tempered its more sugary-sweet Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Simple Minds: Celebrate – The Greatest Hits +Of all the bands which surfaced in 1977 in response to punk, Simple Minds occupy a singular status. Despite line-up changes, they have never split up. After their 1982 success with “Promised You a Miracle”, they have never surrendered the glittering prize. Their enviable career is defined by a tenacity which can go hand-in-hand with a music that runs on rails. Although they can’t be faulted for sometimes putting their musical development on hold to embrace causes and the needs of the stadium, this chronologically sequenced triple CD suggests their Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“That’s the sad thing today,” said Martin Gore of Depeche Mode in the Guardian last Friday, “Most people who get involved in music are so normal. It’s supposed to be full of weirdos.” What’s great about the Flaming Lips, whatever your opinion of the sound they make, is that they are a major league indie-rock band who truly are weirdos.Led by the maverick Wayne Coyne, renowned for wandering across his audiences in a giant transparent bubble, they are both imaginative and unpredictable. Unlike so many bands who simply adopt psychedelia as a sonic style, they understand the psychedelic mindset, Read more ...
Rob Copsey
Those who have seen the music video that accompanies NKOTB’s new single “Remix (I Like The)” may be shocked to learn they own a wicked sense of humour. The clip itself sees an unassuming fan - played by “It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia” actress Artemis Pebdani - strutting her stuff a little too exuberantly at a pool party. While it’s a brilliantly self-aware nod to the now mature groupies they’ve no doubt encountered on their recent world tour with the Backstreet Boys, the song itself is a perky slice of dance-pop that sounds - whisper it - surprisingly fresh.Unfortunately, it’s also a Read more ...