CDs/DVDs
theartsdesk
Peter Gabriel: So Russ Coffey In early 1986 Peter Gabriel was still the guy who used to be in Genesis. He may have released four solo albums, but had also done his best to keep them in the “cult” section of local stores. With So, however, his spell as a bona fide pop star began. The video for the lead single, “Sledgehammer”, with its iconic stop-motion animation would eventually become the most played ever on MTV. That was, in part, due to the brilliance of the guys at the Aardman studios. But it was also because the song is close to pop perfection.Now, 26 years later, comes a belated Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Year after year Kate Rusby, one of the undisputed stars of the British folk revival, turns out quality albums and even better live performances. Ten years ago she celebrated a decade in the business with a collection of re-recordings and unreleased material. Ten years on, she has put together a double CD that features a number of star collaborators and less well-known but equally talented friends and contains new versions of her favourite songs.The magic Rusby touch is characterised by a sweet and soft-toned vocal style and a heart-warming melancholy. It’s not by accident that the family Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Joseph H. Lewis’s The Big Combo (1955) isn’t as celebrated as Gun Crazy (1950), his other great film noir, but it’s as perverse and violent as anything in the canon. A vehicle for the husband-and-wife team of Cornel Wilde and Jean Wallace, it’s about a dogged plainclothesman, Leonard Diamond, who has spent three years following Susan Lowell, a masochistic socialite enmeshed with suavely sadistic Mob boss Mr. Brown (Richard Conte) whose organisation, the Combination, leaves no traces. Diamond thinks Susan will lead him to expose Brown – but, of course, he’s fallen obsessively in love with her Read more ...
peter.quinn
Possessing one of the most recognisable sounds in jazz, US trio The Bad Plus don’t so much subvert genre as wrap it up in a little parcel and put an incendiary device under it. Jazz, rock, pop, country and classical all get thrown into their inimitable blender, as typified by album opener “Pound for Pound”, which traces a musical journey from Satie-like simplicity to an all-out rhapsodic assault on the senses.“Seven Minute Mind” mines the trio’s characteristic embracing of minimalism, with piano and bass pounding out an aggressive, slightly crazed, ostinato before pianist Ethan Iverson peels Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The songs are instantly recognisable. Bacharach & David’s “Don’t Make Me Over” “There's Always Something There to Remind me”, “I Say a Little Prayer” and “Make it Easy on Yourself” will always be evocative. So will Dionne Warwick’s voice, though it’s huskier these days. Now sits the old alongside a brace of new songs, two by Burt Bacharach and one with a lyric by Hal David, the last he wrote.Another of the 50th anniversaries washing up right now was the impetus for Now. In this case, it’s been a half-century since the release of Warwick’s first single, “Don’t Make Me Over”. It must have Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
It’s not often you get a sumptuous spectacle like Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows. Then again, it's not often 200-year-old vampire Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp) returns to his brooding family mansion in Maine. Burton’s love of style over content transformed America's favourite horror soap of the 60s into a gem-like retro horror comedy that combines just the right hair with just the right wardrobe in just the right car. Storywise, though, it's a glossy mess soundtracked with pop hits from the 1970s (sticklers will note The Carpenters' "Top of the World" is from the wrong year)The cast is Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Poetry has a habit of colliding with rock'n'roll. Mick Jagger read some Shelley when the Stones played in Hyde Park in 1969. John Cooper Clarke's speedball delivery lit up the late Seventies and helped to inspire comedy poet John Hegley and the ranting punk scene of the Eighties. Lest we forget there was also the cod-Byronic Murray Lachlan Young who, legend has it, signed to EMI for a million-pound advance in 1996, but if he did he hardly shifted the units to justify the cheque. Poetry and rock can clearly be cosy bedfellows, but unmitigated successes are rarer than rhymes for the word " Read more ...
peter.quinn
Surprising transitions, unusual segues, a myriad of I-wasn't-expecting-that moments. Saluting some of the iconic figures in Caribbean history and paying tribute to the tentacular reach of its culture, with House of Legends Courtney Pine has delivered one of the finest albums in his already well-stuffed discography.While his previous album Europa focused on the woody timbre of the bass clarinet, his fifteenth studio album features the plangent tones of the soprano sax exclusively, heard at the outset in a virtuosic flourish that announces a heart-wrenching ballad composed in memory of Stephen Read more ...
theartsdesk
John Carpenter: Halloween II/Halloween IIIKieron TylerPeople celebrate Halloween in different ways, but the arrival of these reissues of the soundtrack music to two John Carpenter horror films is enough to put pumpkins, cut-out bats and capes in the shade. Both are landmarks in using electronic music for cinema, and both are a great, spooky listens. Even when divorced from the imagery.Carpenter had already worked with composer Alan Howarth on the music for Escape From New York (1978) and the pair reunited in 1981 to create a score for Halloween II. Howarth built the new music around Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Leona Lewis has a whole new look: all mouse-brown hair, sullen expression and the oddest-looking facial jewellery since Kate Nash misappropriated the bindi in the video she made to accompany “Underestimate The Girl”. It really doesn’t suit her.Forgive me. I too find it pretty disrespectful when writers comment on an artist’s appearance before they start to consider what a work sounds like. But as I listened to Glassheart, the third album from one-time X Factor winner and ridiculously successful Lewis, it was the artwork I kept coming back to. The head-and-shoulder shot makes her look washed- Read more ...
graham.rickson
Tony Palmer’s first film was originally slated to be directed by Humphrey Burton. Palmer stepped up at short notice, quickly gaining the confidence of Britten and Peter Pears – neither of whom, it later transpired, really wanted to be filmed at all, until Palmer’s appointment allowed them to have a far greater say in the production. You can sense the director's giddy excitement at being given so much access to a figure he clearly worshipped.Britten’s reputation, musically and personally, took a bit of a dip in the decades following his death in 1976 – allegations about his professional and Read more ...
bruce.dessau
To paraphrase Shakespeare, when albums featuring strident, post-feminist "I am woman hear me roar" naked cover sleeves come, they come not in single spies but in battalions. I'm not so sure about the motives of Christina Aguilera, but the recent album imagery from Martha Wainwright and Natasha Khan aka Bat for Lashes has offered an opportunity for prodigiously talented, modern singer/songwriters to lay themselves bare, literally as well as emotionally.Khan cites Patti Smith's early uncompromising incarnation, famously captured by Robert Mapplethorpe, as an inspiration. One just wishes there Read more ...