CDs/DVDs
Mark Kidel
With the overwhelming acclaim that welcomed their first album, Très Très Fort, the musical paralympic champions Staff Benda Bilii faced a challenge with their second. Would their unusually stirring backstory as disabled polio victims and destitute street children in Kinshasa become a burden rather than a draw?Bouger Le Monde doesn’t disappoint, although there are moments when their very exuberance becomes a little excessive, as if they were responding to audiences that clearly preferred the super-charged frenzy of their up-tempo rumba to the slower songs that brought greater balance and Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
You’ll know by now, perhaps, that Sun is supposed to represent a “rebirth” for Chan Marshall, the famously intense singer-songwriter who performs as Cat Power. Since the release of 2006’s The Greatest Marshall has shunned her own material, instead reinterpreting Memphis soul and Delta blues in a sensual, dusky croon. When your songs are as personal, as taut and extreme as some of Marshall’s work can be, however, there must be times it pays to take a step back.It may sound as if I’m trying to say that Sun is one of those albums is difficult to listen to, but it’s not like that at all. It’s Read more ...
graeme.thomson
It’s remarkable how many of the 20th century's most culturally significant popular musicians – from Louis Armstrong to John Lennon – emerged from a childhood defined by lack or absence. As Kevin MacDonald’s epic and enlightening documentary about the life of Robert Nesta Marley illustrates, much of his righteous anger, steely determination and elusive nature stemmed from the dubious legacy of a shady, philandering English father who was white, feckless and an almost entirely ghost-like figure in his son's life.This is a vivid and balanced portrait, neither hagiography nor hatchet job, which Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Before acid house came along and saved our souls, there was no nation-embracing socio-musical phenomenon to latch onto. Outside of mainstream pop and niche heavy metal, there was hip hop, but that was adamantly American at the time, there was retro “rare groove” funk, and there was post-C86 indie. C86 was a tape put together by the NME of a generation of bands – Shop Assistants, The Pastels, Primal Scream and so on – who applied a shambling Velvet Underground aesthetic to whimsical English tweeness. It turned out to be a dead end but kept thing ticking over until the ecstasy arrived.It was Read more ...
Russ Coffey
It’s been 17 years since Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill gave “complaint rock” a feminine make-over. With a captivating combination of therapy-angst and offbeat melodies, it didn’t matter that Alanis didn’t understand the word ironic, the whole package was iconic. Since then, however, her efforts to recreate the same magic have been patchy.Havoc and Bright Lights is no exception. Let’s start with the good stuff. At its best it turns the clock right back to the mid-Nineties. Subjects like motherhood (“Guardian”) may be new, but her idiom is still feisty, confessional, kooky and Read more ...
theartsdesk
Green Day: The Studio Albums 1990-2009Thomas H GreenPrior to a trilogy of new albums, ¡Uno!, ¡Dos! and ¡Tré!, all to be released by the end of the year, a box set arrives containing the eight albums that brought Californian trio Green Day to this point. At the dawn on the Nineties, parallel to grunge’s hairy existential rock, there was another American punk explosion more directly imitative of Seventies originals such as The Clash and The Ramones. Alongside groups such as Rancid and The Offspring, Green Day led the charge and their first two albums, on the independent Lookout! label, lay out Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
America comes with an artist statement where Deacon says “I never felt American until I left the United States”. His third album digs into his “frustration, fear and anger towards the county and world I live in and am a part of”.The album ends with the 21-minute suite “USA”, where, over four sections titled “Is a Monster”, “The Great American Desert”, “Rail” and “Manifest”, Deacon explores the nature of his country.Baltimore’s Deacon is classically trained and has a Masters degree in electro-acoustic composition. His first album, 2007’s Spiderman Of The Rings, cast him as an electronic Read more ...
Graham Fuller
In 1979, my father stayed in a railway hotel in a Wiltshire town on the eve of a family fiftieth wedding anniversary party. During the middle of the night, the heavy bedside table in his locked room apparently threw itself five or six feet from the bed, landing on its side, without waking him. A rationalist, skeptical of psychic phenomena, he never was able to explain the incident. The only logical explanation is that he moved the table while sleepwalking. But there are, perhaps, more things in heaven and earth…M.R. James (1862–1936, below), the Cambridge University and Eton medieval Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
They’re best known for soundtracking a car advert with “Don’t Upset The Rhythm” - a song so preposterously catchy it’ll be stuck in your head by the end of this sentence - so you could be forgiven for trying to write the Noisettes off as a one-hit wonder. However Contact is in fact the third album from the London duo, and it surprises with its depth and sophistication.The strengths of the duo - Brit School graduates Dan Smith and Shingai Shoniwa - are well-established: think upbeat, bass-heavy dance pop with energetic vocals, as if Shoniwa was channelling the most pepped-up of gym instructors Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Berlin’s Paul Van Dyk has remained in or around the top ten of DJ Magazine’s defining annual poll of the top 100 DJs in the world for at least a decade, occasionally making the number one spot. Unlike all others in the current top 20, however, he’s the only one with a pedigree going back to contemporary club music’s roots. As Visions of Shiva at the dawn on the Nineties Van Dyk can claim to be one of the inventors of trance music, the style that, alongside recent dubstep developments, is at the root of massive American interest in what they laughably term “EDM” (electronic dance music). Later Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Bavo Defurne’s North Sea Texas is a more than distinguished addition to the coming-of-age film genre, catching the painful moments of approaching maturity. Set in a Sixties provincial seaside town in Belgium, the poignancy of 16-year-old hero Pim discovering his gay sexuality rings very true, and movingly.In a location of low-rise flats and a long, lonely beach, there’s little in the place to excite a teenager except for the local bar (its neon sign explains the last word of the film’s title). The excitement for Pim (Jelle Florizoone) comes more with the son of his neighbours, Gino (Mathias Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The available evidence suggested both these artists were well past their sell-by date. The Orb were early Nineties titans of mischievous narco-ambience but haven’t made a decent album in years, even when they worked with Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour on their last outing. Meanwhile, anyone who’s seen a recent concert by Lee "Scratch" Perry, the man who pretty much invented dub in the first place, will attest to the fact he simply turns up and mucks about while his backing band fill the allotted time.The good news, then, is that The Orbserver in the Star House has brought out the best in both. Read more ...