CDs/DVDs
Kieron Tyler
Sixties-style garage rock can really hit the spot. Snotty vocals, amped-up guitars and an attack that draws from The Kinks, Pretty Things and so on can be just the tonic when a sea of tougher-to-process stuff is drowning everything else out. But unless you’ve been at it a million years – cf Billy Childish – or have some spiffy new spin, it’s hard to stand out. Europe is littered with besuited combos with the right haircut. The tack that Les Bof! take is to do it in French. Les Bof! are actually Edinburgh based. Only singer Laurent Mombel is French, a Marseilles transplant. Guitarist Read more ...
graham.rickson
There's a Gallic flavour to this week's new releases, with two unusual recordings of orchestral music played on period instruments. And there's a set of seminal 20th-century ballet scores, played by a wonderful French orchestra under their much-missed Russian principal conductor.Poulenc: Concerto for Two Pianos, Concert champêtre, Suite Française, Anima Eterna Brugge/Jos van Immerseel (Zig Zag territoires)
Jos van Immerseel’s period-instrument band have already recorded exciting versions of Beethoven and Berlioz symphonies, and they’re also one of the few groups willing to tackle 20th-century Read more ...
David Nice
“I wanna blow you all… a kiss” are our hapless heroine’s first and last words in this opera dealing with Anna Nicole Smith's real-life rise and fall in strip-cartoon, morality-ballad style. But it’s not by any means the shallow, voyeuristic tack-fest you might have expected from, among others, the creator of Jerry Springer: The Opera.That’s Richard Thomas, whose words have their fair share of cheap thrills. But here he’s in harness with a composer, Mark-Anthony Turnage, as well as a director (the ever-amazing Richard Jones) and a conductor (Royal Opera helmsman Antonio Pappano) who know how Read more ...
joe.muggs
The Seventies “Kosmische” music of Germany – the more spaced-out and synthesister-led counterpart to Krautrock that had its commercial apogee in Tangerine Dream – seems to be a gift that keeps on giving. Perhaps because the releases were for so many years mainly obscure and had to be hunted down by passionate and/or deranged followers, it has built a global network of followers who extend its principles into new music. From Gorillaz' Damon Albarn to techno legends like Carl Craig, its rippling synth patterns and sidereal twinkles can be heard woven into the fabric of popular culture. And Read more ...
david.cheal
This is pretty weird stuff. Or at least, that’s the way it seems at first. If all you know, as I did to begin with, is that DJ Diamond is a 24-year-old DJ from the West Side of Chicago whose real name is Karlis Griffin, and that Flight Muzik is his debut album, then this will seem like music from another planet – one where notions such as melody, structure and listenability have little meaning; it’s music, but not as most of us know it.The rhythms are complex and multilayered – often there’s more than one going on at the same time: a hummingbird-fast heartbeat as the backdrop, with Read more ...
howard.male
I’m pleased to report that the expression “like father like son” becomes more applicable to Vieux Farka Touré with each album he makes. But perhaps I should qualify that statement. It’s not about Vieux slavishly imitating the legendary Malian blues man’s unique guitar style, or becoming in any way a tribute act. But what The Secret represents is a certain maturing of his style and a noticeable calming down of his dependence on the kind of rock clichés and histrionics that can still mar his live performances.Also there are fewer nods towards hip hop or the dance floor. Instead the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Nostalgia drew me to this rerelease. In a household where the television was mostly off, A High Wind in Jamaica was sanctioned viewing when it cropped up on BBC Sunday afternoon schedules and we watched it as a family. I must have seen it a couple of times before the age of 10 but, decades later, it was to disappoint.Many of director Alexander Mackendrick’s films – Sweet Smell of Success and Ealing classics such as Whisky Galore! and The Ladykillers – have stood the test of time. The Ealing films clearly represent a bygone era but they maintain charm and brio. Unfortunately, A High Wind in Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Cerebral Ballzy’s debut album is over in a good deal less than half an hour. Would that American R&B and hip-hop bands took a cue here rather than filling their CDs with 80 minutes of skits and filler, as if that offered more value for money. Not that Cerebral Ballzy are an American R&B or hip-hop outfit. They are, instead, a New York hardcore punk quintet whose name is designed to make anyone who hears it ask, “Who on earth is this?”Unlike some of their peers – notably the wonderful Deathset – Cerebral Ballzy make no attempt to update raw ballistic walls of guitar with new Read more ...
joe.muggs
The Anticon label is a deepy peculiar animal. Around the turn of the millennium, its core members – going by names like Boom Bip, Doseone, cLOUDdEAD, Jel and So-Called Artists – took a nerdy yet intensely psychedelic approach to hip hop, and ended up creating a woozy and out-there sound that prefigured a huge amount of currently hip music. Now that the appallingly named new shifts in stoner music - “glo-fi” and “chillwave” - are opening up the territory between indie and hip hop/dance again, Anticon seems hugely prescient, but with new artists like Son Lux, it seems the label is once again Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Looking back over his life, Szindbád admits, “I’ve never loved anybody but my vanity.” After drifting through liaison after liaison, ritualised meal after ritualised meal, he’s come to the end of the road. Zoltán Huszárik's extraordinary Szindbád is an elegiac evocation of a life spent pursuing gratification at the expense of forming any real bonds. It’s also a magical film that was barely heard of outside Hungary until the last decade.Huszárik completed just one other feature, 1980’s Csonataváry. Szindbád premiered in 1971. Huszárik died, consumed by depression and alcohol, in 1981. He had Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Spencer Krug must have problems knowing the name he should adopt. Over the past six years, he’s played with his main band, Wolf Parade, recorded as or with Fifths of Seven, Frog Eyes, Moonface, Sunset Rubdown and Swan Lake. Organ Music not Vibraphone Music Like I’d Hoped is his second release as Moonface, a guise he now reserves for his entirely solo work. Organ Music... is quirky, but worth hearing.
Wolf Parade (nothing to do with Wolf Gang) are often driving, anthemic indie rockers on a line between Animal Collective and Krug’s fellow Montréal dwellers Arcade Fire. Moonface, though, follows Read more ...
bruce.dessau
When They Might Be Giants first appeared in the 1980s it became rock critic shorthand to describe them as bouncy, bushy-tailed pop oddballs. What is amazing is that nearly three decades on that description still applies perfectly to the fiftysomething whipsmart duo of John Linnell and John Flansburgh. On Join Us they never seem jaded or cynical or going through the motions, just joyous and delightful and as bouncy as ever.On their 15th studio album, a return to wiggy adult songs after a hiatus making wiggy music for children, they are still having a great time larking about with language, Read more ...