CDs/DVDs
bruce.dessau
Don't be fooled by the top hat and tails that they've got, The Hives is still the dirtiest garage band on the block. The high velocity Swedish quintet's fifth album marks a change in sartorial terms, as anyone who spotted vocalist Howlin' Pelle Almqvist doing his cartoonish Boris-at-the-Bullingdon, rubber-hipped Jagger swagger on Later this week will have seen. But in musical terms it is classic riff sandwich business as usual. Lex Hives is so old school maybe it should be released on wax cylinder rather than download.The 12 tracks certainly wear their influences on their well-turned sleeves Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
We in the UK have much enjoyed our contemporary Sherlock Holmes recently, courtesy of Cumberbatch et al. It’s amazing to think that, at the height of the Cold War, Soviet television was bashing out TV versions of the Holmes stories. And they were water-cooler discussion productions (despite obvious absence in those days of water-coolers). Director Igor Maslennikov made no fewer than nine Conan Doyle-themed works in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The first of these to reach further shores in DVD format is this 1981 account of The Hound of the Baskervilles.It has production values to rival Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The songs here that work are lush treats which hit the buttons they’re aiming for. The ones that don’t are a bit stinky. The two varieties are divided about half and half. Difficult to score out of five, that, hence the neutral three. Job done.More? Fair do’s.London-born Paloma Faith hails from the crop of burlesque-y, quirky female singer-songwriters who appeared post-Gaga-Florence-Lily. Petite and well spoken, she also appeared more genuinely ensconced in cabaret-land than peers who adopted the same schtick. Her debut album, 2009’s Do You Want the Truth or Something Beautiful?, displayed Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Boys Don’t Cry is a collection of flawless reinterpretations of songs originally performed by men by the honey-voiced singer known as Rumer, whose million-selling debut Seasons of My Soul chalked up high-profile admirers and a clutch of award nominations.The female-singer-puts-her-own-spin-on-traditionally-masculine songs is nothing new, having become a staple of live performances by everybody from country starlets to X-Factor contestants. Laura Marling, who beat Rumer to the Best Female Brit back in 2011, put out an EP featuring songs by Neil Young and Jackson Browne and, as far back as 2001 Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The bad taste left by The Black Panther lingers like a mouthful of cinders long after it’s been expelled from the DVD player. This latest entry in the BFI's Flipside series of rescued British film obscurities is the shocking adaptation of the story of British murderer and psychopath Donald Neilson, dubbed The Black Panther by the Seventies’ press. The film arrived in cinemas in 1978 within months of Neilson's conviction and was swiftly banned by local authorities concerned it was a gratuitous cash-in.It opens with Neilson preparing for crime. Ex-army, with a head full of the sound of marching Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The use of Sigur Rós’s aural drama for the soundtracks of Life on Earth, Vanilla Sky and its subsequent sound bed ubiquity has meant their music has become divorced from who they are. The enthralling Valtari emphasises that these four Icelanders are a band rather than a machine supplying lazy directors with ready made atmospherics. Even so, Valtari’s “Ekki múkk” and “Varúð” are so spectacular they’ll no doubt warm the hearts of filmmakers world wide.Thankfully, Sigur Rós have ditched the outside elements that made their last album, 2008’s Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust, a compromised Read more ...
Russ Coffey
The end had long been nigh for The Cult, when it first came in 1995. It wasn’t just the booze and the arrival of grunge. It was as much that smart-arse Brit Pop was never going to have much truck with a man who called himself Wolf Child and wrote lyrics like, “Cool operator with a rattlesnake kiss”. More fool them. But yet, for all the brilliance of Love, Electric and Sonic Temple there was no denying things went seriously downhill after the fourth album. Still, fans have long believed in one last Memphis hip shake from the old peace dogs. And finally, on their second comeback, we now have Read more ...
theartsdesk
Paul and Linda McCartney: Ram (Deluxe Edition)Jasper ReesThe project to reissue the big moments in Paul McCartney’s solo career continues. McCartney and Band on the Run have already had the deluxe treatment. Now it’s the turn of 1971's Ram, the one and only time the uxorious former Beatle gave the lovely Linda equal billing. She takes a co-writing credit on half a dozen songs, supplies backing vocals and, most of all, sleeve shots of her hubby wrangling livestock and jamming. Ram is more notable for other things. Having played all the instruments on his first solo effort, it found McCartney Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It's hard to remember sometimes, as you hum along to the singalong refrains and soaring choruses of their relative hits such as "Trains to Brazil" or "Get Over It", that Guillemots have never been a pop band. Rather, the four-piece have always provided the musical manifestations of some of the more deranged ideas flitting through fabulously named frontman Fyfe Dangerfield's head at any given time. Songs that seem charming enough on the surface reveal more with every listen, whether it's the clever instrumentation or the lyrical flights of fancy or - as early as the band's debut - the 11- Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Chocolat, a film about chocolate addiction, was extremely sweet. Trainspotting, a film about drug addiction, was wired and hip. Shame, a film about sex addiction, assaults you with wave upon wave of tristesse.When Sarah Kent reviewed the theatrical release for theartsdesk, she found in it a stereotypical joyride secretly in love with the thing it deplores. Those aren’t the colours this male reviewer takes away from the fractured relationship between sex addict Brandon (Michael Fassbender), a pump-action Adonis running on emptiness, and his sister Sissy, a brittle, wandering chanteuse (Carey Read more ...
graeme.thomson
In the eight years since the fourth – and very possibly last - Blue Nile album, High, Paul Buchanan has seen his band disintegrate and a close friend die. Little wonder, then, that his solo debut is a reflective record. The most cinematic of bands, the Blue Nile's ravishing sound-pictures generally came in widescreen; Mid Air may be a more intimate, art house affair, but it is no less affecting.Mostly recorded in Buchanan’s Glasgow flat over the course of a couple of years, there's not much to it: 14 songs, as beautiful as they are brief, consisting of soft piano, the occasional daub of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
In an on-point attempt to shake things up a bit, Artsdesk writer Joe Muggs suggested the new Squarepusher album should be reviewed by someone other than an old raver. There were, unfortunately, no takers so you’re stuck with me… an old raver. Then again, look on the bright side, look at this way - I’m fully qualified! Thus, although I cannot tell whether you’ll enjoy this if you wasted the last decade dredging slowly from The Strokes to Adele, if you revel in the sound of electronic trickery twisting your synapses inside out – wahay! – you’re home dry.Enough with the self-indugent intro, Read more ...