CDs/DVDs
Jasper Rees
It’s been 27 years since Suzanne Vega began pressing her almost fey coffee-shop songbook on a receptive global audience. The albums came out at a measured lick – seven by 2007 - each making a successively smaller impression on the charts. Then two years ago she went back and embarked on Close-Up, a four-album project to rethink her entire back catalogue. On each release she partitioned the songs along thematic lines. The first volume dealt with love, the second people and places, the third something called “states of being” and with Volume Four she rounds off the project with Songs of Family Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Unlike the heavy weather and hard lives of British folk songs, Central Europeans seem more concerned with imagination. Or maybe it's just that with their gypsy violins and heaving accordions everything sounds like it’s about Hänsel and Gretel forests. Southampton-based Anja McCloskey lived in Germany until she was 20, and it shows. Her debut, An Estimation, combines elements of The Mummers, The Tiger Lillies and Spiro with a hint of Berlin cabaret in the Thirties.But despite playing the record solidly for a week I can't say I’m much closer to knowing what the songs are actually about. One Read more ...
Sarah Kent
It's a brave director who not only plays herself but also sings and dances in a story based on real events. After obsessively cleaning her table, Sally Potter (Orlando) sits down to write the screenplay for a film called Rage. Inspiration comes in visual flashes that, filmed in vivid colour, tell the story of three supermodels mysteriously murdered during fashion shoots in Paris. But the project is doomed because Potter refuses to make the compromises suggested by her backers.Meanwhile, though, she has taken up dancing. Wandering into a Paris theatre she is entranced by Argentinian tango Read more ...
peter.quinn
Enthusiasts of the tenor sax will find it impossible not to be swayed by this terrific follow-up to Trish Clowes' impressive 2010 debut, Tangent. Apart from her highly distinctive melodic fingerprint, it's the composer's terrific ear for textural detail that really draws you into this 10-track collection: the ever-so-subtle cello harmonics that underpin the intro to album opener “Atlas”, the constant ticking of “On/Off”, the ghostly violin figurations enfolding the bass solo in “Animator”.The album's sole song is typically individual and about as far from the Great American Songbook as you Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Shields leaves standing everything Grizzly Bear have done previously. Four albums in, the Brooklyn quartet move forward with their most focused, most cohesive album yet. The folk influence remains, as do traces of their love of The Beach Boys, but Shields is – mostly – so confident it could be a debut album. It’s also the first time all the songwriting has been credited to the entire band.It opens with “Sleeping Ute”, a swirling psychedelic vortex evoking longing and endings: “those countless empty days made me dizzy when I woke… I know no other way than straight on out the door”. It’s a Read more ...
theartsdesk
Joe Strummer & the Mescaleros: Global A Go-Go, StreetcoreLisa-Marie FerlaAs well as marking the 10th anniversary of Joe Strummer's death, 2012 would also have been the year the legendary Clash frontman turned 60. The reissue of these two albums, recorded with his last band the Mescaleros, is therefore doubly timely.The band's three albums built on the very best of the globe-trotting, more experimental themes that had begun to sneak into The Clash's work before they disbanded in 1985, but did so in a way that kept them vital and accessible to those of us raised on three-chord punk Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Gaslamp Killer is Californian DJ-producer William Bensussen, beardy Weird Al Yankovich lookalike and one of the key figures in LA’s Brainfeeder label collective. His reputation began to rise around five years ago with an LA club night called Low End Theory that would play music rooted in hip hop and electronica, far from four-to-the-floor house - tending, in fact, towards the bizarre. His debut album is much anticipated by those who like their beats broken and their synthesisers gnarly. Breakthrough, then, is a thoroughly enjoyable experience in that vein, albeit not as off-the-wall Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Described by Peter Falk as, “a love story between a woman who’s half wacky and a guy who’s inarticulate”, John Cassavetes’ seventh feature from 1974 is without doubt one of his finest achievements. It’s one of several collaborations between Cassavetes and his actor wife Gena Rowlands, here giving a performance of show-stopping complexity.Falk plays Nick Longhetti, an overworked construction foreman. Rowlands is his wife Mabel and the mother of his three young children. She’s struggling with mental illness and - though their relationship is placed under violent strain - their love for each Read more ...
joe.muggs
It's hard to hear P!nk without thinking of the kind of “punks” that scowl in the corners of American high-school movies, possibly befriending some “nerds”, revealing a sensitive side, and/or standing up to a “jock” at some crucial point in the plot. Angst and outsiderdom with a predictable designated role to play within a regimented and ritualised ecosystem. None of which is a bad thing as such – teen movies can be great, and so can P!ink albums, if you're in the mood. Or drunk. This is her sixth album since switching from R&B to punky-poppy-rocky-pop for 2001's M!zzundaztood, and the Read more ...
bruce.dessau
The showbiz titibit that has intrigued me more than any other in recent weeks is the story that comedian Jimmy Carr helped to inspire one of the tracks on The Killers’ fourth album. The Lloyd Cole lookalike apparently suggested to Brandon Flowers over dinner that the next album to make a breakthrough would be looking at the problems of the economy. Imagine Jim Davidson giving tips to Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Flowers took note, went away and returned with "Deadlines and Commitments".Battle Born comes after an extended break for the band and refines the quartet’s increasingly trad pedal-to-the Read more ...
peter.quinn
Django Bates has commented that he probably first heard the music of Charlie Parker while still in the womb. Parker's music has thus been part of his musical make up ab ovo, as it were. This brilliant follow-up to Bates' 2010 Parker tribute Belovèd Bird comprises three classics from the Parker canon – the title track, “Donna Lee” and “Now's the Time” – plus six compositions from Bates.The trio's amazing rhythm section, bassist Petter Eldh and drummer Peter Bruun, are both alumni of Copenhagen's Rhythmic Music Conservatory, the leader's erstwhile stamping ground. The sudden shifts of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The onset of puberty is difficult, and especially so for girls in art house films. Marta is 12 and has been away from Italy for 10 years. In the days after returning with her mother and sister, she contends with being prepared for her first communion and her changing body. Quietly, as if not there, Marta observes the hypocrisy of adults. Dog-tired from working in a bakery, her mother is forced into the background.As Marta, Yle Vianello is terrific, a watchful presence who tries hard to do the right thing but is frustrated, who keeps a distance but is forced to interact. She bakes a cake for Read more ...