CDs/DVDs
graham.rickson
This week’s carefully sifted classical releases include two symphonies by a fastidious, underrated Lancastrian, and a life-enhancing compilation of scratchy recordings conducted by a notable British composer. On a smaller scale, there’s an engaging collection of music for horn and piano, brilliantly performed by a young Hungarian player.The Elgar Edition – The Complete Electrical Recordings of Sir Edward Elgar Various Orchestras and soloists/Sir Edward Elgar (EMI)Elgar made many acoustic recordings of his music between 1914 and 1925. The acoustic recording process used a large horn funnelling Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Filmed in 1969 by Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski, the London-set Deep End captures the late-Sixties comedown mood. The lack of swinging trappings, a perverse attitude to sexuality and the dowdy mundanity of its setting make the film compelling viewing. Jane Asher may have once been the girlfriend of a Beatle, but this is no Sixties romp.The presence of the then-unknown Krautrock band Can (The Can, as they were then) on the soundtrack immediately indicates that this isn’t a normal Sixties yarn. Skolimowski had collaborated with Roman Polanski on Knife in the Water and, post-Repulsion Read more ...
david.cheal
It’s 69 years since Went the Day Well? was released, but its moments of brutality still have the power to shock. It’s not so much the actual violence that’s shocking; when people die (and quite a lot do die), there’s precious little blood or gore, and the camera mostly shies away from the impact of knives and axes (how different on-screen death has now become, with its sploshing and spurting). What’s surprising is the steely-eyed determination with which the inhabitants of Bramley End dispatch the Germans in their midst.Based on a story by Graham Greene, and filmed as a piece of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
As subtlety in popular music becomes increasingly worshipped by heritage-led taste arbiters, we should relish proper shouty moron tunes. Few come more shouty and moronic than LMFAO, a Los Angeles duo named after the text abbreviation for "Laughing my fucking arse off". They comprise Berry Gordy's youngest son Skyler (AKA Skyblu) and his grandson Stefan Gordy (AKA Redfoo), renowned for goon club anthem "I'm in Miami, Bitch". They claim their second album is "more refined" - but it isn't unless your idea of refined is pole dancing to Limp Bizkit.A decade ago the hard house sound Read more ...
emma.simmonds
David Michôd’s stark, screw-tight debut is, in his own words, a “grand Melbourne crime drama”. Though it presents us with a menagerie of criminality it eschews many of the paradigms of the genre and feels courageous in its elegant, near suffocating intensity.Joshua “J” Cody (James Frecheville) is our emotionally impotent, blank-slate narrator, blunted by a life that relentlessly deals him a losing hand. After his mother overdoses he is taken in by his Grandma “Smurf” (a stunning, Oscar-nominated Jacki Weaver), a “Mommie Dearest” mafioso who has raised a gang of armed robbers. A lumbering Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The musical identity of Midlands town Stourbridge is largely defined by Ned's Atomic Dustbin, Pop Will Eat Itself and The Wonder Stuff, a trio that charted with varying degrees of wackiness in the late Eighties to mid-Nineties. The Voluntary Butler Scheme, the recording identity of fellow Stourbridgian Rob Jones, shares their leaning towards wackiness, but it’s more surreal, less surface. He’s also way more interesting musically. Second album The Grandad Galaxy is a musical rummage through a jumble-sale mind.Jones is closer to Davyhulme absurdist Jim Noir than any of his local predecessors. Read more ...
howard.male
How refreshing it is to learn of an album the recording of which was fuelled by black tea rather than, say, marijuana. Although having said that – given the heady, languorous music that Brooklyn’s Roberto Carlos Lange (aka Helado Negro) has come up with - I’d like to think that at least a smidgen of the world’s most popular illicit substance was also involved. But perhaps it was just the natural high brought on by a decampment to rural Connecticut - where he apparently sat in the forest “centring himself” – which contributed to the otherworldly ambience.The press release describes the music Read more ...
Ismene Brown
This is the one DVD of all the recent issues of dance on film that will show you simply and honestly the rigour and the beguilement of how people are drawn to dance, and what dance draws out of them. A straight documentary about the dance-theatre of Pina Bausch, it's really about teenagers and their extraordinary ability to soak up opportunities, innocently perform complex things and wipe them clean of old associations - and make all us feel more human and restored.The kids are one of the two amateur casts in the staging of Bausch’s dancework, Kontakthof - a portrait of goings-on in a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Mention of Southend-on-Sea calls to mind tawdry seafront attractions and Dr Feelgood, and certainly wouldn't prime you to expect The Horrors. Prepare to be flabbergasted, however, because with their third album, this quietly purposeful quintet have taken a giant leap forward into their own phantasmagorical hyperspace.Their last effort, 2009's Primary Colours, dropped enough hints about the band's burgeoning abilities to nab a Mercury Prize nomination, but think of that one as Andy Murray to this year's Djokovic. To create Skying, they dispensed with outside production help (Portishead's Geoff Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
French interpreters Nouvelle Vague have a seemingly unsustainable path. Reinterpreting Anglo songs of the post-punk and new wave eras in unlikely semi-easy-listening settings (bossa nova, reggae, country and bluegrass) would appear to bring diminishing returns. But on their last album, 2009’s 3, they went gently Gallic, covering “Ça plane pour moi”, originally by Belgium’s Plastic Bertrand. Fourth time out, it’s all Francophone.Marc Collin and Olivier Libaux’s first three Nouvelle Vague albums mainly featured lesser-known female Franco singers (notably Camille and Mélanie Pain – some original Read more ...
joe.muggs
Abstract music will always be at a disadvantage compared to abstract art because of one thing: duration. It requires commitment and immersion, you can't sum it up at a glance, and when it stops it's gone until you go back to the start. Yet a record like this Finnish collaboration can have all the fascination, all the exploration of chaos and control and deep archetypal patterns of a Kandinsky painting or Hepworth bronze.
Jan Anderzén aka Tomutonttu is part of the hypermodern pyschedelic band Kemialliset Ystävät, while Sami Sänpäkkilä aka Es is the boss of Fonal Records and a respected film- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Blondie took 17 years off between 1982 and 1999, and bounced back with the chart-topping single "Maria". Now, refreshed after an eight-year power nap following 2003's The Curse of Blondie, they've returned with their ninth studio album.This would have been a splendid record in 1980, a year which its snappy synth-pop flashbacks seem to want to evoke. In 2011 it's still not bad, though there's a sense that the tracks are compensating with artful studio technology for shortcomings in the writing, and perhaps in Deborah Harry's brittle vocals. Nonetheless, the disc comes roaring out of the blocks Read more ...