CDs/DVDs
Mark Kidel
Kate Bush has always steered a dangerous course between pure genius and mannerist excess. Her latest album, a hymn to snow and the icy element’s soft and crystalline associations, is no different. There are moments when she teeters on the edge of self-parody and cliché and others when she makes music that dazzles as much as it moves. She is a unique British artist, existing in a creative bubble well outside the mainstream yet never marginal or beyond the reach of popular taste.She is uniquely British, too, or more exactly English, resonating with a strain of our island’s culture that Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Like a fist to the face of the traditionally insipid, female-fronted rom-com, Bridesmaids marks a departure from the oft-derided norm, not by being brassy or crude (OK, there might be a sizeable helping of the latter) but because of its authentic humour, credible character dynamics and the foregrounding of female friendships over romance. It is also wildly funny.Kristen Wiig (who co-wrote the film with Annie Mumolo, who appears as “Nervous Woman on Plane”) is Annie, a thirtysomething singleton asked by her childhood chum Lillian (Maya Rudolph) to be her maid of honour. Despite her outstanding Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
You’ve got to love the “I Can Only Give You Everything” riff. Admiral Black do and base their “Got Love if You Want It” around an inverted version on their debut album. Cheese-wire fuzz guitar pulses, Bo Diddley drums bash and a wheezy organ, well, wheezes. From the borrowed title alone, it’s obvious where Admiral Back are coming from: classic Sixties-leaning rock. It's not all scuzz and psych though in the house of Black. “Madman’s Blues” drifts by in a haze and “Crystallised” begs for lighters in the air and a swaying audience.Not to be confused with the Chicago rock/metal outfit Admiral of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Scratch Massive sound from their name as if they should be a very dodgy hip-hop outfit. They are not. Instead, French duo Maud Geffray and Sebastien Chenaut are a music-based art unit who have worked on sonic projects with Karl Lagerfeld, soundtracked films for Zoe Cassavettes and were once produced by German techno DJ-producer Moritz von Oswald. Their first album, back in 2003, dabbled in hefty rock dynamics but somewhere along the way – possibly that Moritz von Oswald connection - they were persuaded of the power of synthesisers.Their third album is a moody beast that wishes it were Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“I tell myself that I have created the modern woman's wardrobe,” declares Yves Saint Laurent during the press conference that opens L’amour fou. Hubris, but the trouser suits, safari jackets and Mondrian dresses he created did – in other manufacturers' hands - become day-to-day wear. The gathering was called in 2002 so the designer could announce his retirement. Despite his death in 2008, the YSL brand lives on. The hagiographic L’amour fou won’t undermine that.Like the Simon and Garfunkel documentary reviewed last week on theartsdesk, L’amour fou is intimately entangled with parties linked Read more ...
joe.muggs
If there's one electronic sub-genre that is not worth approaching blind it's “tech-house”. Since the late Nineties, it has tended to be the most functional and generic of club soundtracks, a steady, decadent plod, all clean lines and predictable shifts: nothing to frighten the horses or interrupt the steady progress of weekend hedonism. In short, boring. However, there are practitioners who have raised its slowly evolving repetitions to an art form that has life outside the club: the Kompakt label, Chilean maverick Ricardo Villalobos, and Brightonian in Berlin Matt “Radio Slave” Edwards.This Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It’s pronounced doh, like Homer Simpson’s favourite exclamation. Although The dø aren’t yellow cartoon characters, they edge towards the caricature with songs like “Gonna be Sick!” and “Smash Them All (Night Visitors)”. Their art pop has a slight taste of The Sugarcubes and Olivia Merilahti’s vocals can be a bit too cutesy-pie. But Both Ways Open Jaws is great.Hot property in France, the duo got together in 2005 and might as well be Gallo-grown. Dan Levy is French and Merilahti is Finnish. The D and O come from their names. They initially wrote for film soundtracks and ballet. Both Ways Open Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
I remain bemused when bands such as U2 or Coldplay announce they are “going experimental” and are greeted as if they might be. The correct response is: “No, you’re not, you’re as alternative as avocado in a prawn cocktail rather than lettuce.” So here we have U2 and Coldplay’s wet younger sibling supposedly stepping into the wild unknown for their sixth album. In reality this means having a tentative crack at sounding like an early Simple Minds album, albeit firmly filtered through the epic sonic template laid down by those aforementioned older brothers.Snow Patrol’s early history is a story Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Witchfinder General, along with The Wicker Man, has latterly been claimed as a pinnacle of a peculiarly British style of film. “Weird Britain” is a default description. It’ll do fine for these unsettling, intense horror films which draw from the British landscape and its history. This sparkling restoration of Witchfinder General can only enhance its status.Set during the English Civil War, 1968’s Witchfinder General centres on freelance witch detector Matthew Hopkins. Naturally, he’s corrupt. The Wicker Man featured Christopher Lee and Witchfinder General features Vincent Price as Hopkins. Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
“I’d had five years of being really, really fucked around personally. That’s definitely where the songs come from.” Kami Thompson’s five years of being fucked around is good for us listeners though. You want to say thanks to all the horrible guy(s) who broke her heart, because it’s resulted in an emotionally powerful and astoundingly assured debut. The assured bit is not totally surprising perhaps, as she is the youngest daughter of Richard and Linda Thompson, and sister of Teddy. As we know, genes don’t guarantee talent, but this is thrilling in its eviscerated, warped pop sensibility.Take “ Read more ...
Mark Kidel
The Dreamer is the relatively low-key swansong from one of soul’s greatest divas, a mountain of barely restrained power, who inspired and influenced several generations of singers. Why some musicians survive lives of excess and others don’t is something of a mystery. While Janis Joplin, for whom Etta James was the ultimate vocal and performance model, crashed early in her wild career, James has soldiered on, in spite of serious heroin addiction and a number of illnesses that would have felled most women of her age.James has always manifested irrepressible energy, an intense force field that Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Wim Wenders’ fictionalised Dashiell Hammett biopic, the first of his six American films, was a critical and box-office failure, which, along with Francis Ford Coppola’s equally damned Vegas musical One From the Heart, brought down Coppola’s Zoetrope Studio. It almost goes without saying that both films - they starred the unstarry Frederic Forrest - are jewels: bracing, dream-like homages to old-fashioned sound-stage artifice. Where One From the Heart is a neon-crazy confection, however, Hammett is a dankly claustrophobic neo-noir.Seven years in gestation, it premiered at Cannes in 1982 after Read more ...