CDs/DVDs
Russ Coffey
They're calling it "Conormania". One website says that unless you don’t “like things that are awesome” you should be developing a healthy obsession with him. He is Conor Maynard and his debut album is Contrast. Over the last three years, Maynard has built up a massive fan base from YouTube cover songs recorded in his bedroom, and mixed by Anth Melo, his American “sick rapper brother from another mother”. Then came a subsequent record deal and MTV award. Now many are calling him the British Justin Bieber.Maynard hates that comparison. He wants to be taken more seriously. Rather than using his Read more ...
theartsdesk
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: Nocturama, Abattoir Blues, The Lyre of Orpheus, DIG!!! LAZARUS, DIG!!!Howard MaleThere’s something just not right about having to reassess a bunch of Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds albums in August, just as the sun is finally making a concerted effort to do its job. Cave is generally either icily cold or autumnally melancholic with the only heat being issued from the fiery hell awaiting some of his vividly conjured protagonists.The first three of these rather swiftly re-released albums - Nocturama, Abattoir Blues, and The Lyre of Orpheus (2003, 2004, 2004 Read more ...
bruce.dessau
If there was ever an album that could be reviewed on the basis of its track titles it is this one. "Helping the Retarded to Know God", "I'm Working at NASA on Acid" and "That Ain't My Trip" sound like they have been automatically generated via some Flaming Lips Title-Generating Machine. Luckily the music, recorded with chums including Nick Cave, Yoko Ono, Ke$ha, Bon Iver and Erykah Badu and first released in limited edition outside the UK on this April's Record Store Day, does not feel quite so formulaic.It is definitely thrilling to hear Nick Cave in playful comedy sex god mode barking out Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
The tone of these two new Pier Paolo Pasolini's re-releases couldn't be more different. The Hawks and the Sparrows stars the Italian prince of laughter Totò and one of Pasolini's most popular Calabrian peasant-actors (and lovers) Ninetto Davoli, and ambles gently through the Italian countryside in a surreal and inventive and Last of the Summer Wine-ish way. Pigsty, on the other hand, is the kind of Pasolini film where, when two boys meet, you have no idea if they're going to fight each other, fuck each other or eat each other. Mostly, they eat each other - and anything else that they can lay Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Idjut Boys are a London DJ/production duo who, like peers such as Optimo, Ashley Beedle, Tom Middleton or DJ Harvey, are not corralled by the electronic pulse that rules dance music. Like many good DJs of their generation, they veer towards the spirit of acid house, but they plug a wide range of other, often older, music into that feeling without drifting off course. The pair of them – Daniel Tyler and Conrad McConnell - have been around for 20 years, running labels and parties, cutting tunes, DJing the global circuit, but are claiming this is their first artist album, despite long- Read more ...
joe.muggs
Sometimes a record tells you whether you're going to like it before you've even hit play. With electronica this goes double: track titles like "Scanlon's Leaping Gore Pull", "Pneuquonsis on Return" and "Fewton Tension Chords" are either going to intrigue a potential listener, or make you think "stop playing silly buggers". If the former, then this collection is for you; if the latter, then there's not one nanosecond in the collection of grinding, bending, warping electronic sounds that is going to make you think otherwise.Though there is some repetition to these grooves, there is nothing that Read more ...
geoff brown
Long before the invention of digital technology and the birth of Keira Knightley, cinema shows in Britain contained not one feature, or two features, but also what the advertisements called a "full supporting programme". That meant newsreels, maybe a cartoon, or what the trade called "interest" films: travelogues and such. Many of those weren’t interesting at all, nor have they become so with age, though that’s not the case with the 12 examples drawn by the BFI National Archive from a travelogue series shot all over London’s highways and byways in 1923/1924. The producer of the series, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
On her sixth album Joss Stone does what she does very well so the only question is whether it’s worth doing. When she first appeared with volume one of The Soul Sessions, tackling songs such as Aretha Franklin’s “All the King’s Horses” and Carla Thomas’s “I’ve Fallen in Love with You”, it was generally acknowledged that, while she was vocally proficient, she was only 15 and hadn’t really lived enough to inhabit raw soul scorchers.A decade later few would argue she’s not been through the mill - battling EMI and narrowly avoiding a kidnapping, amongst much else – and her voice is, indeed, a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Coming off the back of million-selling soul concept album The Defamation of Strickland Banks, the third album of Plan B - who is soon to be seen as George Carter (the Dennis Waterman role) in the remake of The Sweeney - is a belated soundtrack to his feature film ill Manors.Ben Drew’s 2006 debut was the sweary, snarling urban youth apocalypse and Daily Mail nightmare, Who Needs Actions When You Got Words? His latest returns to the same gritty British hip-hop territory, but with harsher criminality and disgusted social commentary. It is of a piece with the film, dropping in snippets Read more ...
theartsdesk
Blur: 21Bruce DessauThe recent closure of Word magazine has been seen by some as linked to the demise of "Fifty Quid Man". Who can afford such a wallet-frightening splurge these days on the kind of music the monthly's writers wrote so eloquently about? Well, have a chat with your friendly bank manager because this lavish tribute to the winners of the Britpop long game retails at £134.99 and is just about worth it. Every stage of Blur’s career is here – apart from, annoyingly, one their recent new tracks, "The Puritan" – charting the band's evolution from pre-Madchester incarnation Seymour to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As a refreshing change from Disney-style hyper-tech 3D animated blockbusters, A Cat in Paris offers a modest story of adventure and intrigue on a pleasingly human, as well as feline, scale. The titular character is a faintly sinister black-and-orange tomcat called Dino, an accomplished lizard-hunter who lives in a Parisian apartment with Zoe and her mother Jeanne. Or at least he does by day. After dark, he slips out onto the rooftops and window ledges of Paris, and becomes the accomplice of Nico, the notorious cat burglar. Writers Jacques-Rémy Girerd and Alain Gagnol (who also co- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The sacred word 'om' is spoken in different ways according to its context. Elongated, it can be stretched over multiple syllables. As a musical unit, OM work with building blocks that are similarly minimal, yet drawn out for maximum effect. And like the origins of their name, their heady, psychedelic music is heavily indebted to cultures which lie to the east.California’s OM were originally vocalist/bassist Al Cisneros and drummer Chris Hakius. Both used to be in drone/metal outfit Sleep. After a late-2007 five-hour live set in Jerusalem, Hakius left and was replaced with Emil Aros. Although Read more ...