CDs/DVDs
Russ Coffey
Quite reasonably, many of 2012’s year-end reviews focused on the triple celebrations of the Jubilee, Olympics, and Royal pregnancy. For many, the year was quite different. In February, on Blues Funeral, Mark Lanegan’s end-of-the-world vocals presaged apocalyptic weather, war and death. It felt like an Old Testament prophecy being filtered through a Seattle drug addict. Which it virtually was.This was the Mark Lanegan Band’s first album in eight years. After 2004’s Bubblegum, Lanegan had concentrated on a series of collaborations, most notably with yang-to-his-ying, Isobel Campbell. With Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
By declaring that You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet wasn’t his final film, the 89-year-old Alain Resnais might have been acknowledging his lack of a fixed relationship with time and memory, his continual exploration of their interchangeabilty. In his mind, final could mean anything at any given moment. Anyone could be forgiven for thinking he might pack it in and this would become his last. His next film is already in production.The Pirandello-esque You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet (Vous n’avez encore rien vu) is a deliberately paced, deliberately choreographed and deliberately stilted exercise. It’s slow Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
This is both a bang up-to-the-minute album, but also a throwback to the glory days of Ethiopian jazz in the late 1960s and 1970s - an era excavated with loving care over the last 15 years by Francis Falceto’s Éthiopiques series (now up to 27 releases). That series created enormous interest in Europe and the States, reviving the careers of some its leading proponents like Mulatu Astatke and Mahmoud Ahmed, and in recent years has resulted in some fabulous new music from the likes of The Heliocentrics, Imperial Tiger Orchestra, The Ex and Dub Colossus, in whose ranks pianist Samuel Yirga could Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Can’s The Lost Tapes towers over any of the other reissues theartsdesk has covered this year. Although not strictly a reissue – it collected unheard recordings from tapes which had lain in the band’s archive – it rewrote the story of the seminal German band, offering a new perspective on their creative process and what they had issued. More than any of this, its three discs were a great listen and as essential as any of their albums - Soundtracks, Tago Mago and Future Days.Re-reviewing The Lost Tapes is unnecessary, but taking it as a yardstick for the year’s other reissues is, by turns, Read more ...
bruce.dessau
We're not doing a Best Gig of the Year chart on theartsdesk but if we did succumb to live listomania an unforgettable night in May would be certain to figure close to the top. One of pop's most mercurial figures, Kevin Rowland appeared on stage at the Shepherds Bush Empire and, more than three decades on from his band's incendiary beginnings, delivered the performance of a lifetime.Dexy's Shepherds Bush gig reinterpreted and revisited some of the band's early classics, but what was even more striking was that the new album, One Day I'm Going to Soar, performed in its entirety, more than Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It feels a little like cheating to call Celebration Rock, the second album from Vancouver duo Japandroids, an album at all. Featuring only eight songs, the whole thing is over and done with in a little over 35 minutes. Plenty of bands these days would be happy to file that under "extended play".And yet, Japandroids squeeze so much into their alloted time that any more would be exhausting. This late in the year, it feels like giddy repetition to suggest that the album’s title is its mission statement; a summation as stark as the simple black and white cover art the band favours. The two-piece Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Not-long into this farrago, Peter – the former Pete - Doherty opines that “nothing is beyond romance, except for the pain that is killing me every day”. Thankfully, the pain here is limited to the close-to two hours that Confession of a Child of the Century takes to trudge towards its conclusion.That the dialogue is so risibly apt cannot entirely be lain at Doherty's or director Sylvie Verheyde’s door. A faithful adaptation of Alfred de Musset’s dark 19th-century romance Confession d'un enfant du siècle, Confession… employs literal translations from the novel. But with a film this dull, this Read more ...
peter.quinn
On Sailing to Byzantium Christine Tobin's utterly singular music fuses with the amaranthine force of WB Yeats's poetry to create one of the most transporting jazz releases in aeons. From the iridescent colours of “The Wild Swans at Coole” and the statuesque tranquility of the title track, to the subtly ornamented melodic line of “The Song of Wandering Aengus” and the deeply poignant “Long-legged Fly”, the album's unique sound-world and intense depth of feeling completely seduce the senses.Tobin's incredibly empathetic band features Liam Noble (piano), Phil Robson (guitar), Gareth Lockrane ( Read more ...
howard.male
How does one choose just one favourite album of the year? Should it be the one that knocked you for six on a first hearing, the one that you admired rather than loved but nevertheless admired an awful lot, or the one that sneaked up on you gradually so that eventually you found yourself putting it on over and over again, even when you’d set out to play something else entirely, until eventually you ended up playing it more than any other album in 2012? Well, needless to say I’ve gone for the last.On early plays, my knowledge of all the 1970s bands that these bright young things from Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Berberian Sound Studio has the quirky flavour of an academic treatise on shlock horror with lively slide illustrations. Peter Strickland’s claustrophobic homage to the Italian giallo – in which diabolical dismemberings are perpetrated upon female innocents - would seem an odd leap from Katalin Varga, his brooding revenge drama set in rural Romania. But both films bring an outsider’s all but ethnographic eye to the rituals of Euro-barbarity. The game changer is that Berberian Sound Studio is also funny.A meek British sound engineer called, improbably, Gilderoy is hired by an Italian film Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Leonard Cohen has been the king of melancholy ever since he set out on his slow journey through the dark side. Befriending the black dog means being aware of the finite nature of life at every moment. It’s also about relishing slowness. As he enjoys mature old age, Cohen now inhabits, with almost joyful resignation, the blue mood he has made his own – to the irritation of those who have dismissed him as a purveyor of self-indulgent bedsit blues.He was always old before his age: there is, in many ways, nothing new about Cohen’s Old Ideas, a collection of profoundly moving songs of love and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Gil Scott-Heron: The Revolution Begins – The Flying Dutchman MastersKieron TylerThis fine box set has a cuckoo in its nest which has to be dealt with instantly. Like Eric Clapton’s 1976 declaration of support for Enoch Powell, Scott-Heron’s “The Subject Was Faggots” is a blot that’s hard to erase from a career otherwise marked by inclusivity. “Giggling and grinning and prancing and shit… faggots who were balling because they couldn't get their balls inside the faggot hall,” is how it goes, with Scott-Heron plumping for “he, she or it” as his favoured signifier. Yeah, times were different, the Read more ...