CDs/DVDs
Nick Hasted
John Huston’s 1970 spy movie is the sort of baggy, eccentric work that is routinely dismissed by critics at the time, but whose untidy pleasures become apparent with age. Max von Sydow and Orson Welles are among the cheap but arresting all-star cast in what begins as a colourful and camp 1960s caper, only to darken shockingly. It’s the DVD debut of as bleak a film as Huston made.The Kremlin letter itself is, like the Maltese Falcon in the film which made the director’s name almost 30 years before, a device to set base and interesting human desires in motion: a rash US diplomatic note Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The problem with the apparently endless success of musical TV talent shows is it normalises them, validates them. Thus we end up with critical forums grading sonic diarrhoea rather than dismissing it all as banal overblown Brave New World kaka. Snobby and elitist? Sure, if that means I don't have to spend a second longer listening to best-selling platinum Welsh pop baritone Rhydian Roberts.This isn't the place to assess the qualities that breed X Factor success. Suffice to say that what makes for flashy TV froth hasn't given us a single act worth passing mention. All right, Girls Aloud had Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Between 1996 and the earliest years of the 21st century, the Manchester-based duo Lamb defined a moody, ambient, dance-influenced pop – the trip-hop/chill-out nexus. "Górecki", their 1997 chart single, will always be their most well-known moment. Lamb played what was announced back then as their final live show in 2004. But Andy Barlow and Lou Rhodes reunited for a slew of festival dates in 2009. Both had been working solo, and 5 is the first recorded evidence of their second life.Rhodes’s voice is smokier than before, fuller, more rounded and less likely to dance around the melody line. A Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Symphonic pop of the Electric Light Orchestra variety is a hard thing to pull off and even when it succeeds it’s very much an acquired taste. When Max McElligott – AKA Wolf Gang - first appeared a couple of years ago with an EP on the Neon Gold label, he seemed have the balance between opulent and poptastic just about right. It had a blustery chamber-pop charm and was, at the very least, a promising opening shot. His debut album, though, has pushed the boat out too far. It is over-enamoured with its own lusciousness, a precision Crufts-groomed show poodle of an album wearing diamante Read more ...
graham.rickson
This week's chronologically varied selection includes instrumental music written by one of the giants of Elizabethan music and a baffling, beguiling work composed by a 20th-century maverick, inspired by a visit to a Japanese garden. There's also a splendid new recording of an Italian opera which opens with one of the world's most famous tunes.William Byrd: Complete Consort Music Phantasm (Linn Records) This is a collection of music composed by William Byrd for viol consort, probably between 1560 and 1603. The viol is the ancestor of the cello, a fretted, bowed instrument with six strings. It Read more ...
Graham Fuller
1985 was an annus mirabilis for harsh Liverpool comedies, both of them. Letter to Brezhnev, about two Liver birds wooed by Soviet sailors, was the quintessential grassroots production of the British Film Renaissance. No Surrender, Alan Bleasdale’s sole foray into cinema, was a £2 million epic farce about sectarian fury erupting when two coachloads of OAPs are double booked into a Stanley Road nightclub one New Year’s Eve. (A group of infirm geriatrics, wailing and flailing, also materialises.) Arriving on DVD this month, it has lost none of its edge as a bracing blend of reality, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Nat Baldwin’s alt cred is impeccable. Not only is he a former bassist for Brooklyn’s über-cool Dirty Projectors, he’s also responsible for a string of releases that began with 2003’s free jazz set Solo Contrabass. Also prepared to take a stroll with the less cool, he’s been heard on a TV ad for Orange mobile phones, the one with the barefoot, ladder-descending lady. Although People Changes worms intimately in, it’s hard to detect a singular voice. Formerly in thrall to Anthony Braxton, he’s now trying on Arthur Russell.Opening People Changes with a faithful cover of Russell’s “A Little Lost” Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Why is it that a certain strand of faceless electronic music, currently best represented by outfits such as Caribou and Gold Panda, often achieves such a strong media profile? These acts and their kin have their moments - the odd real cracker, in fact - but the impression is given that their classy, considered bedroom noodling is more valid than something equally faceless that's sweatier and more percussive.It's that old "intelligent electronica" crap that's been lurking around for nigh on two decades like a bad smell wearing designer glasses. In fact, I'm surprised Gold Panda didn't Read more ...
joe.muggs
It's always interesting to see how revolutions in music get folded back into the fabric of the culture that fomented them. Dubstep, which changed club culture so dramatically in the mid-2000s, is now an intrinsic part of that culture from mainstream to margins, and the forms it takes as it beds into these various parts of the ecosystem are manifold. And Jazzsteppa – two Israelis named Gal and their trombones – turn their hands to a fair few of those forms.Watch video for "Investment Decision"
Hyper Nomads is on a label run by dance/dub veteran and ex-KLF producer Tony Thorpe. It is a Read more ...
howard.male
Gagner l’argent Francais (which translates as “to earn French money”) begins, like any other West-targeted West African album, with the pitter-patter of tiny congas and some delicately picked kora. But then, two minutes in, a bright stab of reverb-heavy keyboard heralds the entrance of grungy rock guitar and drums. It’s a bold way to open an album in that it may alienate some of the Radio 3 Late Junction world music demographic. But it isn’t the first time Mamani Keita has put before her audience challenging and innovative music. I have particularly fond memories of Electro Bamako, her 2001 Read more ...
Russ Coffey
His daughter may be Hannah Montana and he may have set country music sales records but, worldwide, Billy Ray Cyrus will never escape his mega-hit “Achy Breaky Heart”. Although that was a novelty record, it epitomised everything people find preposterous about America’s red states. Which is why, outside of America’s heartlands, most people find it difficult to take Cyrus seriously. It's something he finds very frustrating.I’m American is Cyrus’s “patriot” album. It’s all about troops and home and stars and stripes. It’s full of girls left behind, and parents’ war records. Just the sort of Read more ...
howard.male
I never thought I’d find myself saying that a French female vocalist reminded me of Howard Devoto. But there we are, what can you do? There’s just something in the way she sings the verses of “Hell be Damned and Look Out”: the pauses between words (“Let’s face it… you may only live… once”); the way the last note (word) of the line just kind of hangs there, emotionally ambiguous and philosophically inscrutable. But Florence Joelle also has the sensuous purr of a French Marilyn Monroe. So whichever way you look at it, you’ve got to sit up and take notice.Recorded straight to analogue tape, the Read more ...