CDs/DVDs
graham.rickson
Mozart: Piano Concertos no 6, 8 and 9 Angela Hewitt (piano), Orchestra da Camera di Mantova (Hyperion)This first volume in Angela Hewitt’s projected Mozart concerto series deserves praise for featuring three early pieces, instead of starting with the better-known mature works. Which isn’t a slight on these three concertos, each of which sounds like fully-formed Mozart, particularly the Concerto no 9, written when the composer was 20. Rather than a work made up of solos interspersed with tutti passages, piano and orchestra feel inseparable here, the piano making a cheeky entrance within Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Filmed and acted with suffocating intensity, Ben Wheatley’s second feature (after 2009’s Down Terrace) is a macabre mutation of horror and crime thriller. Stripped so bare exposition-wise that it’s jolting and intentionally enigmatic, Kill List is a ferocious, promising piece of filmmaking which drenches its audience in various shades of darkness.In Kill List Jay and Gal (Neil Maskell and Michael Smiley) are two soldiers turned hitmen, returning to their dirty work after an eight-month hiatus; we learn that their last contract, in Kiev, was unspecifically bodged. Jay has a volatile Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It could have been Fleet Foxes’s Helplessness Blues, or maybe The War on Drugs’s Slave Ambient, but this is the one that keeps being returned to. Lykke Li’s Wounded Rhymes kept forcing its way to the top of the pile, insisting it had to be heard. The music was forceful, the melodies instantly unforgettable but it was also impossible not to be distracted by the lyrics of “Get Some”: “Don’t pull your pants before I go down… Like the shotgun, I need an outcome, I'm your prostitute, you gonna get some”.She told me earlier this year that “Get Some” was “not sexual. It’s not really submission Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Recorded in the Eternal City by Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton and Italian composer Daniele Luppi as a self-financed labour of love, the widescreen orchestral luxuriance and sheer craft of Rome made it one of the most accomplished and darkly romantic pop artefacts of the year.In the same way that Buena Vista Social Club used musicians from the glory days of Cuban music, Rome reunites musicians who appeared on the much-loved soundtracks of the Spaghetti Westerns of the Sixties and Seventies. But where the spirit of Buena Vista was pure nostalgia, the inclusion here of freshly written songs and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Two French films, both exploring the nature of the erotic charge and its impact on characters whose well-being is off balance. One leaves things mostly unsaid, with its leads barely expressing what’s hanging in the air. The other leaves nothing hanging in the air.In Q, Cécile (Déborah Révy) gets on with it. Fetching up in nowhere-ville, France, after the death of her father, she’s looking to fill an empty space and create sexual havoc in her wake. Cécile needs conformation that the men she comes across are affected by her. She also needs to make the younger Alice (Hélène Zimmer) aware it’s Read more ...
joe.muggs
If 2011 was the year when dance music's natural tendency to fragmentation was taken to extremes, this album was the one that bound those fragments together into one demented but scintillating vision. Russell Whyte – Rustie – comes from a very particularly Scottish club scene that is the perfect antidote to the idea that musical connoisseurship means nerdiness.From the very simple imperative of moving a dance floor in fresh ways comes an explosion of ideas and influences: retro video game soundtracks, obscure Japanese noise bands, the hyper-capitalist hyper-pop of 21st-century R&B, the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Readers in America might be perplexed. Stateside, A Christmas Carole hits the streets as A Holiday Carole. Play spot the difference by comparing the images above and below. It’s not the only disconnect on offer. King is Jewish, so a Christmas-themed album seems offbeat – especially as it features “Chanukah Prayer”. Then there’s the minor matter that one of pop’s greatest songwriters doesn’t contribute any songs to the album.It’s been 10 years since King's last album, Love Makes the World, and once the brow furrowing is over, A Christmas Carole deserves little further thought beyond Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
This is an unexpectedly wonderful album. A five-star rating might seem a bit much but then judging music in the same way as sport or exams is a bit crap anyway. So let’s say 5/5 compared to other Christmas albums and, yes, this is at the very summit. Ever. Then again, it’ll be useless from 2 January until next December.Making a Christmas album is like writing haikus or cooking soufflé - it follows a precise formula, absolutely requiring key elements that are incredibly hard to quantify correctly and, most especially, make even faintly original.The backstory here is that smashingly affecting Read more ...
emma.simmonds
In JJ Abrams’s retro sci-fi Super 8, a group of budding film-makers are terrorised by a mysterious creature. With credible camaraderie and poignant performances from its young leads, it’s as much about growing up and the thrill of first-time film-making as it is a dalliance with the fantastical.It’s 1979 in the small American town of Lillian, and Joe Lamb (saucer-eyed newcomer Joel Courtney) has just lost his mother in an industrial accident. Neglected by a father struggling to cope with his own grief, Joe escapes by helping with his friend’s zombie film and, in the process, he falls for Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Christmas albums are often a time to forget about the other 11 months of the year and get stuck into some festive silliness. Not for Kate Rusby. On this, her second volume of carols inspired by the South Yorkshire tradition, she’s still doggedly plying her trade, recasting some well-known and other unfamiliar Christmas melodies as simple hearth-side folk songs. The result may not be the sort of thing Jim Royle would open presents to, but it’s sure Christmassy in a soft, poignant and delicately beautiful way.While Mortals Sleep’s mix of folk, Yorkshire and Christmas is never better Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
In truth this probably deserves one star rather than two but it’s all about expectations, isn’t it. A Yuletide outing from the professional bumpkins who hit big in 1976 with "I've Got a Brand New Combine Harvester", replete with a dopey-eyed cartoon cow angel floating on the cover and Christmas dinner on the CD itself, is hardly claiming to be vanguard art. If you buy this, you know what you’re getting – daft yokelised versions of creaky Christmas perennials. And they really are all the most predictable songs imaginable, with the possible exception of orchestral pop composer Leroy Anderson’s Read more ...
graham.rickson
Nightmarish images abound. There’s a giant plastic fish. There are several scary beards and the world’s most unconvincing bear costume. Often cited as one of the most unsettling of children’s entertainments, The Singing Ringing Tree is reissued by Network DVD along with The Tinderbox. Both were made in East Germany in 1957 and 1959 and became known when shown in serial form on BBC television in the 1960s.A naïve prince has to win the hand of a spoilt princess by obtaining said tree; into the mix come a malicious dwarf and a variety of helpful animals. There’s a lot of transformation going on Read more ...