CDs/DVDs
Adam Sweeting
Donald Fagen's fourth solo album arrives 30 years after his first one, The Nightfly, though there can be no doubting that it's the work of the same artist. The quizzical chord sequences, supple instrumental interplay and teasingly cryptic lyrics will be instantly familiar to students of his work, and indeed of the later days of Steely Dan.Fagen and his partner Walter Becker have successfully rejuvenated the Steely Dan legacy by assembling a touring version of the group bristling with hyper-capable musical gunslingers, and Fagen has used several of them here, notably guitarist Jon Herington, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s little beauty of any conventional kind in this tale of the hidden queer - "gay" would have associations of a very different world - life of South African patriarch François (Deon Lotz) imploding. He falls for Christian (Charlie Keegan), the 20-something son of an old friend, with violent and wrenching consequences: the closet door may be opening, but the cracks are in a deeply repressed family life.An opening wedding shows François in all his provincial Bloemfontein status, a proud father giving away his daughter, the prosperous owner of a timber yard, a figure in the local Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A lot has blown in since the last Scandinavian round-up. The most recent releases sifted here include singer-songwriter intimacy, various forms of electropop, several shades of jazz experimenta, joyous dance-pop and some distinctly non-Scandinavian flavours. High points are many. Satisfaction is a certainty.On their last album, 2010’s Magic Chairs, Danish moodists Efterklang gently embraced a more direct way of presenting their songwriting. Up to that point, their sepulchral melodies had intertwined with instrumentation that merged glitchiness with the organic. Magic Chairs smoothed the edges Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Styles and innovations in music, as in all the arts, change incrementally over time. Suddenly we can find ourselves in an unrecognisable landscape. Things moved on when we weren’t paying proper attention. Sometimes this is due to a wave of game-changing talent – exciting and all to the good. On other occasions we’re startled to awake in a mire. What’s worse, as in a nightmare, everyone around is carrying on regardless. Are their souls asleep? Listening to Ellie Goulding’s new album is such a moment.Goulding’s debut, Lights, was a big seller. It opened doors and she even played Elton John’s “ Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Motherhood doesn’t always bring out the best in singer-songwriters. On the album Aerial Kate Bush, for instance, sings “luverly luverly luverly Bertie…you give me so much joy/ and then you give me more joy”. Yeuch. So when I heard that recent mum Martha Wainwright’s new album was to be called Come Home to Mama my heart sank. It needn’t have. If there’s one thing this album isn’t, it’s sickly.The title actually comes from “Proserpina", the album's only cover and the last song her mother, Kate McGarrigle, wrote before her death in 2010. In Roman mythology Proserpina was condemned to live the Read more ...
theartsdesk
B B King: Ladies & Gentlemen…Mr B.B. KingKieron TylerOne of the stranger manifestations of U2’s Eighties fascination with the iconography of American music was “When Love Comes to Town", their collaboration with B B King. As a single, it was a hit, something King has never chased. This smart, career-spanning box set is probably not going to have the same effect as U2’s patronage, but the still-constantly touring 87-year-old blues legend is unlikely to be fussed about that.Ladies & Gentlemen…, confusingly, comes in two configurations: a 4-CD, 77-track set and a 10-CD, 194-track Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Who are Wes Anderson’s films actually for? They can be read as wistful visits to the confusing domain of childhood or kids’ movies full of droll turns from Hollywood stars. Moonrise Kingdom, which tells of a pair of damaged runaways who find solace in the woods and each other, exists charmingly on that faultline. And in Kara Hayward and Jared Gilman, it features delightful turns by its two young leads.Suzy, troubled oldest daughter of a loveless marriage, and Sam, an unpopular scout who is dumped by his latest foster parents, conspire a resourceful escape into the wilderness. They also take a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Despite the fact that this month marks the 50th anniversary of the release of The Beatles’ first single, the focus on the Fabs right now is as much on their 1967 psychedelic folly Magical Mystery Tour. The arrival of Tame Impala’s second album seems appropriate as it’s a modern psychedelia which knows all about the detachment brought by mind expansion – the distant vocals on opening cut “Be Above it” echo John Lennon’s on “Strawberry Fields Forever”.Not that Tame Impala are specifically Beatles-influenced. For their first album, 2010’s fabulous Innerspeaker, they were pretty much a one-man Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“Killer Queen” by Queen, “Rocket Man” by Elton John and “Laura” by the Scissor Sisters are all songs that reek of design. Their finest details have been engineered to their smallest component parts, yet the tone is light, almost throwaway. They’re crafted, calculated classics, but they revel raw in pop glee. This is the feeling Mika constantly strives for and which, despite his brilliance at constructing songs, continues to evade him. Not that the world minds too much: his records are globally successful on a huge scale, especially his first album, Life in Cartoon Motion. He has sold multi- Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
There are, roughly speaking, two types of record. There are the ones that it is hard to consider as anything other than a complete unit - gimmicky concept records or complex themes, tracks that ebb and flow and blend together as if making a mockery of the single-track-friendly digital future. And then there are records like Deer Creek Canyon, from which any song could be plucked to form the centrepiece of a homely, autumnal mixtape.And “homely” is the operative word this time around for Colorado-born Sera Cahoone, who on this third album shines her songwriting lantern on the foothills of home Read more ...
joe.muggs
A confession: though very fond of the Beatles, I'd never seen their self-directed Magical Mystery Tour before this DVD release. Not that I have anything against psychedelic follies, but I felt like I'd had my fill of this sort of thing a long time ago and had never bothered seeking it out. Consider me chastened; it's a joyous film – yes, it's the result of a bunch of rich young men fooling about with drugs and looks like it, but there's so much warmth, so much colour, so much affection for the textures and quirks of a lost Britain shot through it that it's hard not to love.Two things make it Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
After 65 years in music, over 55 of them as a solo artist and songwriter, it’s a tad surprising that Neil Sedaka has taken until now to declare he’s revealing the real Neil. Even when his former girlfriend and Brill Building colleague Carole King was baring it all in song, he kept it less personal. The Real Neil isn’t so much a window into his soul though, but a follow-on from recent tours where Sedaka has performed solo, accompanying himself on piano.The Real Neil, a mix of old songs and newly written material, opens with a speech from Sedaka: "Hi, this is Neil, welcome to my world of music Read more ...