CDs/DVDs
Adam Sweeting
Naturally it couldn't be anything as straightforward as a mere album. Rather, Smashing Pumpkins supremo Billy Corgan would have it that Oceania is "an album within an album", and that its 13 songs form a subset of the ongoing Teargarden by Kaleidyscope project, part of which appeared in digital download format in 2009. But prune away all the baggage and Oceania stands up as a very plausible specimen of Pumpkinness. It also marks the arrival of a brand new line-up, namely drummer Mike Byrne, guitarist Jeff Schroeder and the band's latest female bassist/vocalist Nicole Florentino, but as ever Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The press release for The Woman in the Fifth says it’s “a twisted and intense love story” that's about a “passionate and intense relationship”. It is, to a degree. But that undersells the film. As an oblique examination of mental breakdown, director Pawel Pawlikowski's film shares a lineage with Polanski’s Repulsion.The Woman in the Fifth adapts Douglas Kennedy’s novel. American author Tom Ricks (Ethan Hawke, sporting an excellent haircut) arrives in Paris to seek out his estranged wife and their daughter. Whatever barriers there are between them are insurmountable – she has a restraining Read more ...
howard.male
As all the background information to this new release can be found in Nick Levine’s recent interview with Neneh Cherry for theartsdesk, let's get straight down to scrutinising the music. For this serious contender for album of the year deserves more than just a reshuffling of the information on its press release.Just as one can take pleasure in the physical substance of paint on a canvas (dragged, splattered or elegantly arced), it's also enjoyable when the music issuing from the stereo seems to violently push the air aside before threatening to ransack the room. Take this Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
When your albums tend to drop into a frenzy of anticipation after gaps of six or seven years, the creation of a certain mythology becomes inevitable. So much has been written in certain circles about Fiona Apple since the release of 2005’s Extraordinary Machine - an album which itself seemed certain to never see the light of day at one point - that it has become impossible to distinguish the music from the character - reclusive, frustrating, challenging.And yet the opening track to Apple’s fourth album (its poetic full title - The Idler Wheel is wiser than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
In the English-speaking world we know most about France's Ursuline possessions of the 1630s through Aldous Huxley’s 1952 The Devils of Loudun, and of course through Ken Russell’s 1971 film The Devils. But a decade before Russell’s scandalous work, Polish director Jerzy Kawalerowicz treated the same subject in his 1960 film Mother Joan of the Angels, now re-released from Second Run in a restored version.Kawalerowicz was at the height of his powers, heading up the Kadr state film unit, which was the effective central axis of the Polish film school, that took off from the mid 1950s as political Read more ...
joe.muggs
Though he first came to public attention via the Los Angeles-based Brainfeeder psychedelic electronic hip hop collective led by Flying Lotus, 25-year-old producer Lorn comes from “the middle of nowhere in Illinois”, and it's easy to see in his music a less sunny disposition than many of his comrades. Most of the Brainfeeder crew have a loose-limbed funkiness to their sound and an accumulation of sonic detail that speaks of heat and humdity. But while Lorn shares their aesthetic of complex rhythms that slip off the grid, there's something chilly and chilling about his industrial-sounding Read more ...
joe.muggs
The formula is well established now. Take a hard-living, lately under-appreciated legend of music approaching the end of their life, give them a modern production sheen to highlight every crack and bit of grit in their careworn voice, stir in some lyrics of regret and redemption and Bob's your uncle. It worked spectacularly for Rick Rubin with Johnny Cash, and for XL Records' Richard Russell with Gil Scott Heron, and now Russell has teamed up with Damon Albarn to perform the same job on soul originator Bobby Womack.Unfortunately, the production isn't as modern or radical as it thinks it isIt' Read more ...
theartsdesk
David Bowie: The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars 40th Anniversary EditionHoward MaleLet’s start with the bombshell. Yes, Ziggy is a landmark Seventies album but it’s not the masterpiece it should or even could have been, and no amount of remastering or repackaging can change that. For one thing, it simply doesn’t hold together as a concept album or rock opera. For another, the apocalyptic theme set up by the opening number “Five Years” is never followed through (and anyway, Bowie covered this whole area so much better on Diamond Dogs). Then there’s the sore thumb of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It has occasionally worked against Hot Chip that their first single – or, at least, the first to make any impact – was “Over and Over”. This 2006 song is such a perfect pop nugget, brutally reducing the appeal of club culture to a snappy yet celebratory couplet, that later work seemed wet in its shadow. Not that you’d know it from the music media adulation that attends the band. Consisting of five smart, geeky-looking blokes from London, they were quickly taken up by that same city’s taste arbiters, their clever electronic pop appealing to those observing the dance floor rather than on it.In Read more ...
graham.rickson
Five and a half hours of documentaries about beer and pubs. The temptation is to stock up on pork scratchings and consume the whole lot in one session, but this wonderful, handsomely-restored two-disc set is best savoured in several sittings. There’s a paradox in the fact that thousands of pubs have closed in recent years but the rate of alcohol-related illness has soared. We’re now getting more smashed than ever, but we buy our booze from Tesco and drink ourselves senseless at home.Roll Out the Barrel will make all but the hardest-hearted drinker shed a tear for what’s been lost, namely the Read more ...
David Nice
Only one of the five films in Artificial Eye’s selection is palpably a classic, a turning point in Ingmar Bergman’s early career. It’s flanked by curiosities spanning 11 of the master’s 59 years as a film-maker – two of them flaunting the beginner’s uneasy mixture of melodrama and realism, two later specimens making good use of the actresses who came to dominate his world. All have characteristic moments of intensity and will be welcomed by Bergman buffs keen to add to the substantial roster already available on DVD.The masterpiece is Sawdust and Tinsel, Bergman’s fantastical 1953 take on how Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“We’re back together, easy money”. For anyone feeling a wee bit cynical about The Beach Boys' reunion, that lyric – from “Spring Vacation” – is likely to push them towards full-blown contempt. Although That’s Why God Made the Radio is defined by missteps, it’s worth persevering to the end.The album reanimates The Beach Boys’ brand to celebrate its 50th anniversary. Given that they formed and released their first single in 1961, it must be the anniversary of the first chart hit, 1962’s “Surfin’ Safari”. Reunited are three originals - Al Jardine, Mike Love and Brian Wilson - and Bruce Johnson Read more ...