CDs/DVDs
theartsdesk
Various: Cumbia Cumbia 1 & 2 Peter CulshawThese totally irresisitible compilations were originally issued as separate albums in 1989 and 1993, and were for many (including me) a first taste of this loping, vivacious sound, which originated originally in the 17th century on the Caribbean Coast of Colombia and has been a badge of identity for Colombians ever since.The music is a mix of African and indigenous rhythmic elements overlaid by brass, accordion, clarinet and electric guitar, pushed along with an addictively rocksteady bassline.Although Cumbia has since spread to Mexico, with more Read more ...
graham.rickson
Endless Borders: Choral music by Bo Hansson The Choir of Royal Holloway/Rupert Gough (Hyperion)Swedish composer Bo Hansson began his musical life as a guitarist and teacher, moving into composition in his thirties. Hansson writes in the sleeve note that “the human voice is the nearest you can come to your soul.” And you’d be forgiven for expecting, with trepidation, an hour of wishy-washy new-age mediocrity. Fortunately the music on this disc is consistently good; Hansson’s beginnings as an arranger of folk and popular song have helped him develop gifts as a writer of contemporary Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There was time when “trance” was not a dirty word amongst connoisseurs of electronic music. It became, eventually, regarded as an aberration in the hip techno universe. Gentlemen of a certain age still make statements such as “I only like real trance music, like Brian Eno and David Byrne.” They speak of pre-acid house music that is mantric, tribal, original and brilliant but “trance” came to mean something else, a Nineties style that was created by two German DJs, Sven Vath and Paul van Dyk, a bangin’ club soundtrack that combined the pulse of techno with the great melodic flourishes of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Terence Davies's screen treatment of Terence Rattigan's play gets plenty of things right, not least its smoggy evocation of the seedy, exhausted London of the early 1950s, with its shabby colours, peeling paintwork and bomb damage. The piece is essentially a three-hander, and Davies's lead trio acquit themselves admirably. Rachel Weisz may be a little too fresh and luminous as Hester Collyer, repressed wife of High Court judge Sir William Collyer, but her determination to break free from her background and claustrophobic circumstances through her affair with ex-fighter pilot Freddie Page Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Martin Schmidt of the US electronic experimental outfit Matmos once said, “If you make a living from your art, that starts to poison it. You can’t help thinking, how can I change this art to make a better living. The obvious answer is that you make it more palatable to more people.” It’s a statement that sums up the conundrum facing any creative person, excepting rich dilettantes, which is why it’s always a pleasure to be confronted by an album such as Black is Beautiful, the third from the duo of Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland, who also record as Hype Williams.The pair have left a trail of Read more ...
bruce.dessau
I first encountered Sweet Billy Pilgrim via the sitcom The IT Crowd. In an episode in the fourth series shouty departmental boss Jen somehow ended up dating the keyboard player. The keyboard player lost his job and subsequently lost shouty Jen, but in reality the Aylesbury quartet are winners. 2009's Twice Born Men was nominated for a Mercury Prize and their latest release, recorded on a larger budget in the cottage of songwriter Tim Elsenburg, is even better, a thing of pastoral beauty, full of heart, soul and compelling off-kilter magic.Progressive music and anything with a hint of rhythmic Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Although only a couple of shots are fired in Jean Renoir’s 1937 La Grande Illusion, its stature as one of the greatest of anti-war films is unquestioned; perhaps only All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) and Paths of Glory (1957) are comparable.Renoir’s film, though, is also a disquisition on the insurmountability of the barriers that divide men of different classes, religions, and ethnicities. National allegiances may count the most in wartime, but in peacetime it’s illusory that men who’ve fought together will stick together if they hail from the opposite ends of society. By 1937, the idea Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Lost Harmony is the third album from Norwich to London transplants Sennen. Although they’re pretty much an under the radar band, it’s been made with David M Allen, The Cure’s long-term producer. Their songs have been heard on the soundtracks of One Tree Hill and True Blood. Obviously, they’re doing something right. Steeped in melancholy, Lost Harmony is defined by the insistent “Vultures”, which is about Nikolai Kondratiev, the Russian economist who evolved the concept that capitalist economies are defined by cycles of boom and bust.That the best entry point into Lost Harmony is “Vultures”, Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Andrea Arnold’s starkly naturalistic reboot of Emily Brontë’s masterpiece of 1847 isn’t the first costume drama of the last 20 years to scorn the heritage-culture approach. In 1995, Roger Michell’s Persuasion, one of the best but least fêted of the Jane Austen adaptations, put handheld camerawork, natural lighting and grainy images in the service of the downwardly mobile Elliot clan’s shabby gentility, making poor Anne’s Cinderella plight all the more affecting.Evocatively photographed by Robert Ryan, Wuthering Heights goes much further in its invoking of pathetic fallacy. There are times Read more ...
theartsdesk
The Human League: Dare (Deluxe Edition)Thomas H GreenLast year, when I interviewed The Human League for theartsdesk, singer Susan Sulley said of Leonard Cohen, “He’s got a personality voice. It’s not a voice that’s going to pass the auditions on The X Factor but you wouldn’t mistake him for anyone else on the radio.”You would never mistake The Human League for anyone else either, a unique band born of Sheffield, punk and a love of Kraftwerk. It’s hard to credit that their hugest song, “Don’t You Want Me”, and its massively successful parent album Dare, were put together with little Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Immediately before Edgar Reitz (pictured below) made Heimat - the 52-hour film sequence begun in 1984 telling 20th-century German history in profound provincial detail - he was washed up, a New German cinema revolutionary who was no longer new, outpaced by Wenders, Herzog and Fassbinder. In his 80th year, Heimat has secured him a unique place in German culture, and now these first two releases in The Edgar Reitz Collection (both UK DVD debuts) excavate his own buried past.Lust for Life, his 1967 feature debut, begins as a nouvelle vague-beholden, breezily erotic romance between Elizabeth ( Read more ...
graham.rickson
Dvořák: Symphony No 7, In Nature’s Realm, Scherzo capriccioso Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra/José Serebrier (Warner Classics) Each of Dvořák’s last three symphonies is a wonder, and the Seventh is possibly the best of the lot. It’s a work which can get under your skin. The dark D minor tonality is so right for this music; there’s a brooding darkness to the orchestral sound coupled with swaggering rhythmic drive. And the melodies are consistently gorgeous. The symphony is often described as Brahmsian, though José Serebrier rightly suggests that Dvořák was a better orchestrator, having Read more ...