CDs/DVDs
Nick Hasted
Theo Angelopoulos (pictured below) was hit and killed by a motorcyclist on 24 January, as this now final collection of his work was readied. The films of this 76-year-old Palme d’Or-winner (for 1998’s Eternity and a Day, included) wrestled with the tragic recent history of his native Greece and Balkans at sometimes notorious, slowly unfolding length. An old-time maestro aspiring to novelistic depth, he lured Willem Dafoe, Michel Piccoli, Bruno Ganz and Irene Jacob to his unintended swansong, 2008’s The Dust of Time (unreleased in the UK in any form till now). These DVDs are an elegy to the Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
In their native Australia Sarah Blasko, Sally Seltmann and Holly Thorsby are award-winning solo artists in their own right, even if their reputations have for the most part not yet preceded them internationally. Seeker Lover Keeper is both the name of their collaborative recording project and its first release, the name easily calling to mind a tripartite structure in which the identity of each major player shifts with each track - writer, frontwoman, harmony.With three formidable talents on board the project could never be anything less than a true meeting of minds, with each artist writing Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Poles is a significant step for Lonely Drifter Karen. For their third album, the pan-European trio have moved their trademark piano-led, torch song-influenced introspection into new territory. The graceful Poles is a pop album of the very highest calibre.The shimmering harpsichord glissando that opens the album and “Three Colors Red” lays the table for a rhythmic, minor-key song which traces a path from Martha and the Muffins to the yearning pop of Rose Elinor Dougall. The Eighties are in there, so are John Barry and Lykke Li. As the album unfolds, Lonely Drifter Karen reveal a new fondness Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Everyone wants their own Madonna. Some want the mischievous, tinny, Eighties, New York club chick; some want the sexadelic, Shep Pettibone-produced art-nudie; some want the gently euphoric Ray of Light trance angel; some want the house-tinted fashionista “Vogue” queen, and so on, and so on – but what does Madonna want?I’d hazard a guess she stopped knowing shortly after her last great single, the ABBA-sampling Stuart Price-produced floor-slayer “Hung Up”. Since then she’s been flailing about more than usual, and misfired into R&B with 2008’s Hard Candy album. Finding new producers is Read more ...
graham.rickson
Renée Fleming: Poèmes - Music by Ravel, Messiaen, Dutilleux (Decca)The veteran French composer Henri Dutilleux is known for his select, refined output; this is a musician who only speaks when he’s sure he has something worth saying, usually expressed in music of intense elegance and poise. American soprano Renée Fleming, known to the composer, was chosen to give the first performances of his recent song cycle Le temps l’horloge in 2009, and it’s a live recording from 2009 that we get here. Four contrasting poems are set alongside a brief orchestral interlude, and the results are compelling. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
John Bunting is currently serving 11 life sentences. He was Australia’s serial killer. A murderous manipulator masquerading as a vigilante, he brought young people, their family members and a disenfranchised suburban community into his madness. Snowtown dramatises these deeply distressing events.Produced by Warp Films - also behind the challenging Tyrannosaur - Snowtown slots into a lineage with the fictive Funny Games and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and the fact-based Bundy. Like Ted Bundy, Bunting was a charmer. He wheedled his way into a fractured household on the edges of Adelaide Read more ...
Russ Coffey
First a word of warning: The Mars Volta is not for everyone. Their hardcore progressive metal may contain light and shade, but it's also there to show the world that Muse is for sissies. And, for all its delicate moments and complexity, at its most intense it is as discordant as the music played in the interrogation rooms of Guantanamo Bay.However, for those with the balls to handle it, TMV’s music is considered to be not just as powerful as it is radical, but also as interesting. And therein lies the rub. Just as main men Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Omar Rodriguez-Lopez have reformed their Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
There's an unlikely comparison in the publicity material that accompanies my copy of In Time to Voices, the third release from Blood Red Shoes, in which the Brighton boy-girl duo are likened to Fleetwood Mac. While name-checking sound-alikes is the staple of the lazy music journalist, Nicks and Buckingham would probably have been the last place I'd have gone for a point of reference for Laura-Mary Carter and Steven Ansell's eerie harmonies.Like a flash of the eponymous footwear in a dark city alleyway, Blood Red Shoes are a shock to the system. Lead single "Cold" opens with Ansell's thudding Read more ...
emma.simmonds
The poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow once wrote, “It is difficult to know at what moment love begins; it is less difficult to know that it has begun.” Andrew Haigh’s superb second feature may or may not give us the precise moment but it certainly does capture the thrill of forging a soulful connection, alongside the apprehension and difficulty of allowing oneself to fall. In Weekend, the focal romance is shown to be both ordinary and extraordinary as it rises from the ashes of a one-night stand.Based in Nottingham and taking place (as the title suggests) over a single weekend, it’s a semi- Read more ...
bruce.dessau
I decided to listen to the new album by former Ultravox frontman John Foxx on a trip to buy some louvre doors at a branch of Homebase. I thought the journey to the city's edge industrial estate via flyovers and concrete spur roads would provide the appropriate scenery for this master of Ballardian urban alienation. I was not disappointed. Well, I was actually. They didn't have louvre doors in the right size. The Shape of Things, on the other hand, was a perfect fit.From the opening track “Spirus”, in which an almost funky riff morphs into a synthesiser lament, Foxx has skilfully tracked back Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The word “grimes” conjures up images of a Dickensian London underworld, or of tough modern urban music, but Grimes is far, far from these reference points. For starters, she’s from Canada. She also makes music that defies easy categorisation. Visions is her third album but it is a lot less niche than her first two, as if she has finally bloomed sonically. In the broadest sense it’s electro-pop but Claire Boucher – Grimes – spices her computer sounds with a swooping multi-tracked vocal style that recalls Kate Bush, Enya and the Cocteau Twins rather than Lily Allen.Some songs, such as “ Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It’s two songs into Port of Morrow, the Shins’ first album since 2007’s Wincing the Night Away (and the band’s first to be distributed by a major label, Columbia) and it hits me that what I’m hearing isn’t something I’ve heard before. Sure, the track - “Simple Song” - started streaming on the band’s website back in January with accompanying fanfare, but that isn’t exactly what I mean. It’s more that those first two songs sound like a continuation, and a surprising one at that.When you’ve had any level of investment in a band at all, news of a full-on line-up change never goes over well. While Read more ...