CDs/DVDs
Thomas H. Green
Ah, cosmic disco. We’re not supposed to call it that anymore as the DJs and producers who popularised it half a decade ago don’t like it - but that’s what this is. To cut a long story short, a bunch of Norwegians rediscovered a sound that had been popular in Italy in the early Eighties, disco’s electro-funk groove but extended and spaced out, somewhere between Giorgio Moroder and a big fat spliff. The main names among these Scandinavians were Todd Terje, Prins Thomas and Hans-Peter Lindstrøm. The latter, a quiet bearded studio-bound fellow, can claim to be the premier producer of the three as Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Internationally he may be Russia's best-known film director, but Alexander Sokurov’s fame - his unique single-frame Russian Ark from 2002 aside - hasn’t travelled as widely as it might. Critical reaction has often been mixed, but at least the majority of his main films from the last two decades are available outside his homeland.This Artificial Eye collection brings a welcome couple from the very end of the 1980s (without any extras, however). Both are from scripts by Yury Arabov, Sokurov’s most frequent collaborator, and are simultaneously mesmeric and challenging to watch, their intensity Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
From Elvis and Mick Jagger to the Spice Girls and, er, Chris Brown, pop music has often - whether covertly or overtly - been a fairly sexual medium. Listening to stuff you know your parents would hate is probably part of what fosters such tremendous loyalty between the listener and those first favourite groups and singers; the idea that you’re listening to something that’s truly yours, and your friends’. The good news is that the fourth album from JLS is a rich, urban pop record that is fresh, exciting and downright sleazy in places. The bad news is that I might just have become your mum.An Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Ennio Morricone: In ColourKieron TylerThe recent release of Berberian Sound Studio raised the level of interest in Italian film soundtracks. From the moment Ennio Morricone’s compositions for the spaghetti westerns of the Sixties attracted attention, it became obvious that Italy operated to a different metronome than the other filmmaking nations. Morricone will always be a prime interest, not least because he has made so much music, in a bewildering array of styles. This exceptionally good value, neatly packaged clam-shell box collects eight of his soundtracks from 1969-1979 over four discs. Read more ...
graeme.thomson
There is, of course, something inherently disagreeable in the notion that a great modern pop song is like some grubby Eliza Doolittle, secretly longing to be smartened up and made respectable by the tasteful accoutrements of strings, a sensible arrangement and a more stately rate of BPMs.The appropriate response to the news that Kylie Minogue has given the crown jewels from her back catalogue the Pygmalion treatment is to groan, yet what appears iffy in concept actually works rather well in practice.The first bit of good news is that the orchestra is a Trojan horse which allows for generally Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
We last heard from Young and Crazy Horse as recently as June, when they released the bizarre covers album, Americana. By contrast, Psychedelic Pill is a gargantuan helping of new material - the first released by Young with the band since 2003's Greendale - which sprawls across two CDs and manages to revisit virtually every familiar landmark of their collective history.And despite the manic waves of creative energy surging from these grooves, "history " is the operative word. Having recently issued an autobiography, Waging Heavy Peace, Young is evidently in stock-taking mode, as we Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Jacques Tati is probably the most famous French comic of all time. Monsieur Hulot is one of those well-loved outsiders, rebels by default rather than vocation and melancholy clowns pitted against the conventions of bourgeois society and the false promises of progress.The latest in the BFI’s very thorough re-releases of Tati’s major works include Mon oncle (1958) (the second Hulot which followed his celebrated holiday adventures), an eccentric's critique of modernist excess, and the earlier Jour de fête (1949), in which he plays François, the bicycle-riding postman, persuaded by his fellow- Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Pop is a cruel mistress. Watching numerous BBC4 rockumentaries, such as the recent one on Squeeze, a pattern emerges. You make it, go through an imperial phase when you can do no wrong, then the honeymoon ends. The records are still great but the parade has moved on. This struck me again listening to the 10th studio album from Madness, which comes complete with a classy Peter Blake sleeve design. But despite plenty of TV coverage and an unforgettably moving profile-boosting performance of “Our House” on the Buck House roof at the Diamond Jubilee concert I cannot see this album topping the Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
To the first-time listener of Martha Tilston’s work, the “folk” tag seems like a tremendous over-simplification. Right from its opening track, “Stags Bellow”, the songwriter experiments with novel percussion and call-and-response choruses to create complex compositions that demand to be gotten lost in.These compositions do, however, blend the more traditional percussive and string sounds associated with the genre with some of its central concerns; both personal and political. And Tilston certainly has the pedigree: her father, Steve Tilston, ran a folk club with Bert Jansch and has released a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Hocus-pocus, mumbo-jumbo, black magic.” That about sums up The Devil Rides Out, Hammer’s fantastic adaptation of Denis Wheatley’s devils ‘n’ demons page-turner. If you’d seen it in on its release in July 1968, it would have been billed with Slave Girls, made by Hammer as an opportunity to recycle sets and costumes from One Million Years B.C. There was nothing cut-rate about the deadly serious The Devil Rides Out, a stylish dig into the wild wild world of Satanism.The Devil Rides Out was filmed between 7 August and 29 September 1967. It might have been the Summer of Love, but darkness was in Read more ...
joe.muggs
Pop is a silly business in so many ways, but even so I don't think I ever imagined that when the year 2012 came, the globe's charts would be dominated by a dopey-looking middle-aged Frenchman and a lanky grouch from Dundee. But here we are, with a billion radios blasting a new, ramped up, amped up, obliteratingly popular kind of dance-pop, with David Guetta and Calvin Harris the new overlords, each with megastars on speed-dial.Where Guetta is the bland enthusiast, never less than 100 percent on-brand, Harris is a cantankerous sod and perpetual square peg, and that's maybe reflected in his Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The concept album can be a tricky beast; Titus Andronicus’s 2010 epic The Monitor more so than most. How to follow up an album that loosely ties your frontman’s break-up to the American Civil War, complete with spoken-word interludes voiced by contemporary punk artists playing historical figures, in which rousing choruses bounce surprisingly out of 14-minute rock operas? The answer, as provided by Local Business, is that you don’t.Titus’s third full-length is instead probably as close to a straight-up rock record as they have in them, bearing in mind that we are talking about a band from Read more ...