CDs/DVDs
Adam Sweeting
In one of the DVD featurettes included here, Ewan McGregor puts his finger on what gives this movie its curious air of detachment. Director Steven Soderbergh, says McGregor, is "meticulous" and "like a surgeon", master of every detail from script to sound to shooting set-up. Thus, this story of female super-agent Mallory Kane (Gina Carano), betrayed by her handlers and now out on a remorseless quest for vengeance, is a sleek technical tour-de-force lacking a heart or any discernible emotions. Even a beefy cast (Antonio Banderas, Michaels Douglas and Fassbender, Bill Paxton and Channing Tatum Read more ...
bruce.dessau
If you are old enough to recall the heady excitement of running out of breath as you hurtled to the record store to buy a single on the day of release Words and Music by Saint Etienne will strike an instant chord. This deliciously melancholic concept album is a love letter to the manic pop thrill of music and the way it can overshadow everything and offer a means of emotional escape.As Sarah Cracknell dreamily sings on the statement-of-intent opening track "Over The Border", as a teenager she knew she should have been studying for her mocks but instead "just wanted to listen to Dexys, New Read more ...
theartsdesk
My Bloody Valentine: Isn’t Anything, Loveless, EPs 1988-1991Kieron TylerEach of these three CDs is essential. My Bloody Valentine’s 1988 Isn’t Anything and 1991’s Loveless were era-defining albums that time has done nothing to tarnish. The EPs they released around then are just as indispensable. But the world of My Bloody Valentine is as mysterious as their noise. Reissues were originally scheduled in 2008 and promo copies sent out. But nothing hit the shops. After that, the band began being seen live again, while main man Kevin Shields also cropped up playing with former Creation label mates Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In one productive week in the early Sixties, Willie Nelson wrote "Crazy", "Night Life" and "Funny How Time Slips Away”. In Heroes the original Outlaw has submitted three new songs, but also loyally budged up to make room for his composing son Lukas Nelson. Nelson Jnr may have inherited the quakey singing voice, but it’s going to take the 23-year-old nipper rather longer to knock out a trio of tunes quite so monumental. There are three of them here and, while earnest enough, melodically they don’t sit quite right on the old man’s larynx.Nelson will be 80 next year and continues to scratch away Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
As a teenager in the 1990s, there were two female-fronted bands that occupied my heart and my attention. Although I’d never have called Garbage my favourites, thanks to flame-haired Scottish frontwoman Shirley Manson it was fair to say that I felt more of a kinship towards them than many of their grungy contemporaries, so now Courtney Love’s blasphemous resurrection of the Hole name for Nobody’s Daughter in 2010 is a distant memory I’ll confess to having approached Not Your Kind Of People with far more enthusiasm than cynicism.“Blood For Poppies”, the first song to emerge from what amounts to Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Like many 20th-century Britons, the documentarist Humphrey Jennings was inspired to do his greatest work by World War Two. The crisis elicited not only his genius as a poetic propagandist but as an unofficial sociologist who demonstrated that the class struggle and ingrained cultural differences, if irresolvable, were not necessarily an impediment to the collective effort of beating Hitler.The films on the second of the BFI’s three DVDs of Jennings’s total output date from 1941-3 and describe an evolution from morale-boosting montages of primarliy static images (give or take the odd dolly or Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Traction isn’t a very rock‘n’roll word, but sometimes it’s difficult to understand why one act achieves a hold where another doesn’t. So it is with Beach House. They are great, but so are – say – the similarly positioned and styled, but less-lauded, Papercuts. Who grabs ears isn’t predictable. Conversely, Beach House’s fourth album doesn’t deviate massively from how they’ve already defined themselves: misty, shoegazing-derived pop with melancholy melodies and distracted vocals. Resignation hangs heavy.The Baltimore-based duo of Alex Scally and Victoria Legrand (she's the niece of Michel) Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
One of my formative musical experiences, small but important, was tuning into John Peel’s late night Radio 1 show, early in the Eighties, and hearing …and the Native Hipsters’ “There Goes Concorde Again”. It was, quite simply, the weirdest “pop music” I’d ever heard – lo-fi, abstract and deranged, most of it consisting of a female voice, sounding funny-farm pie-eyed, repeatedly announcing, “Ooh look, there goes Concorde again”. It had a whiff of actual madness and, setting aside Guardian-style agonising over pop revelling in mental illness, to my junior self this was thrilling. It was also, Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Any concerns that Best Coast might have abandoned the sun-kissed California scuzz-pop sound that made their 2010 debut, Crazy For You, such a runaway success are answered in its opening - and title - track. “So leave your coat behind / We’re gonna make it to the beach on time,” Bethany Cosentino sings, and I sigh from a rainy Glasgow attic and keep on waiting for summer.It’s a little simplistic to call The Only Place a rehash, so perhaps in deference to producer Jon Brion we could call it a sequel. The album is full of the things that have always made Best Coast great - short, simple songs Read more ...
joe.muggs
This is a techno album. A techno album on a British label best known for the indie-est of indie rock, from a duo whose last album featured rock vocalists Beth Ditto and Alex Turner among others, but a techno album nonetheless. It's all about pulse and texture, immersion and physicality, the power of the hypnotic beat, and it is absolutely bloody lovely.And why shouldn't it be? There's a school of thought that to make music in genres most popular in the early 1990s is “retro”, and that this is by definition a bad thing – but this is clearly idiocy. This is no more beholden to the past than, Read more ...
Russ Coffey
To recap the Keane story so far: in 2004 three precocious middle-class boys stormed the charts with bland anthemic radio-friendly rock that used no guitars. Over the next six years, they then went on to experience the kind of growth that George Osborne dreams of. This culminated in the Night Train EP which not only contained guitars but managed the improbable feat of mixing in rap in a non-embarrassing way. Artistically, things were looking good. And when they announced with this year's follow up, the consensus was that their main problem would simply be the lingering issue of brand image.But Read more ...
theartsdesk
Small Faces: The Decca Album (Deluxe Edition), From The Beginning (Deluxe Edition), The Immediate Album (Deluxe Edition), Ogden's Nut Gone Flake (Deluxe Edition)Kieron Tylertheartsdesk’s reissues round-up is usually dedicated to three unrelated CDs, but these spiffy Deluxe Editions of the first four Small Faces’s albums derail that for a week. This quartet – preceding the posthumous Autumn Stone – are testament to a band developing at lightning speed during the headlong rush towards their inevitable fragmentation. One of Britain’s greatest, they created accessible, zeitgeist-infused hit Read more ...