CDs/DVDs
howard.male
It would be an impossible to do a comprehensive global history of cinema in just 15 hours. You could attempt it by throwing hundreds of thousands of second-long clips at the viewer in a firework display of celluloid. But film-maker and critic Mark Cousins opts for gentle hypnotism over dazzling pyrotechnics. In the opening episode alone, in a lucid correlation of words and images, he shows us how filmmakers evolved a grammar for this new medium which took full advantage of an intrinsic plasticity which theatre, photography and painting lacked. The close-up, the flashback, the move from one Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The title isn’t far from literal. Adventures in Your Own Backyard was recorded in Patrick Watson’s Montréal apartment. Thankfully for his neighbours, despite a song called “Noisy Sunday”, it’s a restrained album where even the percussion crescendos wouldn’t have rattled windows – too much. It’s also, recognisably, a Patrick Watson album.Four albums in, it remains difficult to know how to react to Patrick Watson, the person and his eponymous band. As with Andrew Bird, Antony and the Johnsons still loom large over proceedings. Watson’s tremulous, high-register voice, the chamber-like Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Before we begin, a confession: despite my overwhelming fondness for sensitive male singer-songwriter types, Rufus Wainwright and I have never gotten on. I recognise that famous rich, luscious voice as an exquisite instrument in its own right yet find the songs it performs too theatrical to really warm to.It may be “the most pop album I’ve ever made” in Wainwright’s own words, but despite a big name production credit from Mark Ronson Out of the Game doesn’t come across as an album that’s trying for some sideways sidle into the mainstream. “I’m looking for something that can’t be found on the Read more ...
theartsdesk
T Rex: Electric Warrior 40th Anniversary Special EditionHoward MaleThe most blinkered and subjective music fan is the teenager. But is it my teenage self (barely mediated by my adult self) informing you that this T Rex album from 1972 is the most perfect collection of fey cosmic ballads and sexy pop/rock that there has ever, ever been? I’d like to think not. You see the thing is, even today, as soon as the earthy unearthly “Mambo Sun” fills the room with its sultry, ineffable presence, I’m thinking what I always think when I play Electric Warrior: this sinuous, fey, funky, majestic, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Santigold – Philadelphia singer Santi White - does not neatly fit into any stereotype of the modern female pop star. In fashion photographer Jason Schmidt’s multiple cover images she is both an Amazonian warrior guard and a waistcoat clad masculine business overlord, and on record she adopts many more personas, but none of them are submissive or porno-chic sexual. Instead, Santigold makes stomping proud, shout-pop, chanty anthems that sit midway between early Eighties chart-toppers and utterly modern post-R&B US dance, of the Beyoncé ilk.With a production team that includes DJs such Boyz Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Sometimes I feel I’m the only one who finds Jack White’s music overrated. Although he's undeniably a prodigious axe man, I've never found his trademark raw, “underproduced” sound as convincing. That, however, was The White Stripes and The Raconteurs. Now White’s made an album just under his own name. And that begs the question of whether he has come up with a new musical manifesto. And, if so, is it any good?Anyone hoping for a substantial creative left-turn will be disappointed. Blunderbuss still pounds the stripped-down blues rock trail. It's true there are more diversions along the way, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Poliça aren’t lacking support. Jay Z posted one of their videos on his blog. Prince turned up to check out their live debut. Bon Iver's Mike Noyce sings on a couple of Give You the Ghost’s tracks. For an outfit whose debut album is only just getting its UK release (it was issued in the States in February), Poliça have got the jump on most contenders. They’ve also got an added leg up by having their origins in hip Minneapolis collective Gayngs. Most importantly, Give You the Ghost is great.Like Gayngs, Poliça – Polish for policy – aren’t a band. Both are projects drawing together producers and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Anyone remember gabber? It was a moment in the mid-Nineties when Dutch and New York dance music went as fast and loud as it could. In retrospect it was a bizarre anomaly but achieved brief cult popularity combining puerile juvenility, punk, avant-garde experimentalism and techno in a way that’s never been repeated. It was a bloody racket but the best of it had a real venomous sting and eventually appealed to the heavy rock community as much as ravers. The same can be said of Huoratron, AKA Finnish producer Aku Raski.Raski was discovered by Last Gang Records, the label that homed fellow Read more ...
fisun.guner
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the wunderkind of New German Cinema, worked at a prodigious rate. By the time of his death in 1982, aged just 37, he’d made over 40 feature films and directed over half as many stage plays. He also made films specially commissioned for television, something that was certainly looked down upon by both mainstream and avant-garde film-makers in the Seventies. Treating his television projects with no less commitment, Fassbinder was an arthouse film-maker who broke the mould in many ways, though his output must be said to be of vastly variable quality.I Only Want You to Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
As probably befits the title, when the words “human, don’t be angry” are spoken for the first time on the Chemikal Underground release of the same name the voice they emerge in is anything but. Repeated over a dreamy guitar riff rendered otherworldly under a synthesised beat, ostensibly male and female robotic voices sound conciliatory, confused, commanding.The final voice, as the track ends, slows and fades out as if dependent on a flattened AA battery or, more poignantly, recognising the central theme as a lesson in futility.Better known for a more straightforward style of arch, acoustic Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Two things are certain with music coming from the north: there will be some wonderful surprises and some of it will sound like nothing else on earth. It’s even more enticing when the two merge. Making the peculiar accessible is a uniquely Scandinavian knack. There are more than a few examples of that – the creation of new micro-genres – in this round-up of current and new releases, but some straightforward albums are equally striking. First, however, we head for the offbeat end of the spectrum.After my first encounter with Denmark’s Sleep Party People, I remarked they were “a peculiar Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Love is a four letter word. So is “shit”. But I decided not to travel the punk bile road on this one. Too easy. Still, I couldn’t imagine a worse fit for me than Jason Mraz, a relentlessly positive clean-living vegan Californian grinner. He’s not actually Californian, he’s from Virginia, but he might as well be since holistic sunshine bleeds from every note of his fourth album, like an acoustic Deepak Chopra ear enema. He appears to be the antithesis of everything likeable about popular music - so let’s give him a fair chance as there’s little lamer than a pre-estimated critique.The first Read more ...