CDs/DVDs
graham.rickson
Louis Andriessen: Anaïs Nin, De Staat London Sinfonietta and soloists/Atherton (Signum)A friend of mine studied with the Dutch composer Louis Andriessen in the 1980s. He sent me a cassette (remember those?) of De Staat, and I can remember being bowled over by the music’s stark majesty and rhythmic punchiness, Andriessen’s repetitive vocal lines soaring over minimalist riffs, more redolent of Stravinsky than Glass. Written in the mid-1970s, Andriessen wrote of one early performance that he “had to sing every note for them (the musicians), because they articulated the piece like Bruckner Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Mark Lanegan, ex-junkie and one-time singer with Screaming Trees and Queens of the Stone Age, so fully inhabited his cover of “The Beast in Me” on last year’s Hangover II soundtrack you could easily have assumed he'd written it. With Blues Funeral, his first full solo outing since 2004, he again uses his grated baritone to express the twilight zones of the soul. The result? A magnificent account of a life lived to within an inch of its limits. Bible-black and whisky-soaked this is the work of a man who was born to be living through a depression. And still, there’s a lightness of Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist, originally released in 1970, is without doubt his masterpiece and marks the Italian director’s move from experimental art-house movies to larger scale-studio production. The film is stunningly beautiful, each frame carefully composed in terms of colour and form, and every camera movement contributing to mood and story rather than being used for effect. Vittorio Storaro’s cinematography broke new ground and inspired many other great film makers, not least Coppola who hired him for Apocalypse Now.In a series of seamlessly handled flashbacks, the film tells Read more ...
bruce.dessau
I don't know if Mark Ronson was too busy or too expensive to produce Maverick Sabre's debut album, but although his name does not feature in the credits the spirit of the mixmeister behind Back to Black looms large here. Which is both a plus and a minus. If you loved the immaculate retro-soul of Amy Winehouse – and Plan B's soulman rebirth – you will love 21-year-old Michael Stafford's impressive stab at the same sub-genre. If you don't? Poor you. I'm sure there is someone from The X Factor to meet your musical needs.Lonely are the Brave has much going for it. For starters, Stafford has a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The dust will eventually settle around the flapdoodle about withdrawn albums, whether Lana Del Rey is authentic, a fabulist construct or rubbish live. And when it does, this, the debut album, will be left. There’s no doubt that “Video Games” and its follow-up “Born to Die” were terrific singles, sieving the existential drift of Julee Cruise and Chris Isaak through a hip-hop sensibility. The package was completed by the irresistible Del Rey voice, a downer-dosed Stevie Nicks.Whatever the carping, the former Elisabeth Grant’s name is all over Born to Die. She – as Lana Del Rey – has written Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Director Nicolas Winding Refn says that his LA heist fable Drive was inspired by Grimm's Fairy Tales, but viewers unfamiliar with the perverse labyrinth of Refn's imagination are more likely to detect echoes of Bullitt, Walter Hill's The Driver and Clint Eastwood at his most taciturn. Ryan Gosling plays The Driver, auto-wrangling movie stuntman by day and getaway wheel-man by night. A pre-credits sequence follows him as he ferries two anonymous clients away from a robbery, mixing raw speed with calculating guile as he eludes police pursuit with icy efficiency.Despite being solitary and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
A semantic side effect of my longish involvement in music culture has been hearing certain phrases pass from fringe slang obscurity to mainstream acceptance. Among these is the term “chill out”, purloined by ravers from the hippies to describe post-club Ecstasy comedown music, especially after the KLF used it. By the early 2000s, however, “chill out” was tired and ubiquitous, conjuring images of candlelit Primrose Hill dinner parties where Zero 7 played predictably, coolly in the background.If there was a tipping point in this process it was Air’s extremely successful 1998 debut album Moon Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
If The Wombles had made this it would likely raise a smile despite its lame, lazy nostalgic guitar pop. It even goes as far as to include a feeble version of seminal skiffle song "Rock Island Line". The harsh words it deserves, however, are tempered with pathos, for Ringo 2012 only garners limelight because its creator was drummer for the biggest band of all time. Despite the constant Beatles hagiography of the frotting heritage rock press, these days no one under 50 has personal recall of their epic impact (the rest of us watch BBC Four documentaries and sigh). The Beatles led Western pop Read more ...
graham.rickson
Handel: Agrippina Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin/René Jacobs (Harmonia Mundi)Handel’s early opera appears in a new edition from René Jacobs, in a version which aims to reconstruct Handel’s original intentions. Agrippina was premiered in Venice in 1710 and was a huge hit, bolstering Handel’s operatic confidence which blossomed after he pitched up in London two years later. Jacobs’s edition is trimmed – several arias in the third act are gone – but you don’t feel you’re missing much. As with this conductor’s superb Magic Flute, there’s a thrilling sense of theatre, helped by the Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Elegantly riding an upswing that began with his return to touring in 2008, Leonard Cohen's first album in eight years finds him deep into his seventies and more than ever with mortality on his mind. Which makes it all the more delicious that the music for roughly half of these songs was composed by Patrick Leonard, the man who co-wrote Madonna’s “Hanky Panky”. Strange days indeed in the Tower of Song. We shouldn't be surprised. Despite his age and gravitas, one of Cohen's great virtues is that he makes no claim to be any kind of authority, musical, moral or otherwise. The title of the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It may be glimpsed only in brief flashbacks, but Vietnam is always on the mind of Rolling Thunder (1977), one of the earlier attempts by Hollywood’s generation of indie filmmakers to confront the conflict’s impact on its citizenry. William Devane plays Major Charles Rane, who returns from the war zone hardened after years in captivity to discover that women no longer wears bras and his wife has moved on. Worse, hoodlums come to steal the cache of silver dollars ceremonially presented to him by his grateful Texan hometown. When they can’t break him into submission with violence, they kill the Read more ...
howard.male
Whatever post-modern subtexts and layers of irony may lie behind the title Yes and Also Yes, the fact remains that Mike Doughty’s fourth solo album exudes a sunny positivism that makes a completely literal reading perfectly reasonable. From its opening lyric onwards - “You’re man won’t dance but I will” - this is largely a collection of bouncy, affirmative declarations of intent which find the one-time Soul Coughing front man more comfortable in his own skin than he’s ever been before.As someone who thought Soul Coughing were the best American rock band of the 1990s, I initially missed Read more ...