CDs/DVDs
Kieron Tyler
Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore has never been constrained by being in one of the planet’s coolest and always-interesting bands. Since the late Eighties he’s released a string of collaborations and solo releases that are mainly experimental, atonal or outré – he still issues material solely on cassette. Enthusiasms define who he is and as a card-carrying record collector he’s never been shy of declaring his favourites. Holding a torch for improvisers like Derek Bailey, he’s also a supporter of outer-edge folk artists like Ed Askew. His new, Beck-produced solo album is the culmination – so far - Read more ...
Graham Fuller
At the end of Joanna Hogg’s acutely observed drama of bourgeois manners, Patricia (Kate Fahy) and her grown-up children Cynthia (Lydia Leonard) and Edward (Tom Hiddleston) restore to the living-room wall of their Scilly Isles holiday house a painting they’d removed for being “rather horrible". It turns out to be a dark, stormy seascape - a metaphor not only for their miserable vacation, which had been intended to give Edward a happy send-off to Africa where he is (or was) to work as a sexual-reproduction health volunteer during his gap year, but also for the family's compatability. William, Read more ...
david.cheal
What is it with synthesisers and sadness? There’s something inherently melancholic about this instrument, a quality that’s been accentuated by its use in the soundtracks to dystopian movies such as Blade Runner. Moby is a man who has exploited this quality to the full during his 20-year recording career, and he does so more than ever on this, his 10th album: Destroyed is really sad. Not bleak, or dark, or bitter; just really sad.Written in hotel rooms in the course of a world tour, it reflects the rootless, shifting and lonely existence of a man who finds himself in a string of strange Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The video for W’s opening cut “Doorway” is unforgettable. Janine Rostron – who is Planningtorock – is seen face on. The music is tense, yet sepulchral. The voice is treated, neither male nor female. With her prosthetic nose, she looks alien but not cutely so. It’s disturbing, a bad-dream version of what Cindy Sherman might film to soundtrack the song.Rostron isn’t from another planet. She was born in Bolton and now lives in Berlin. W is her second album. She plays all the instruments. She produced W. One track is called “Janine”, another is titled “9”, from the “nine” in her first name. Read more ...
graham.rickson
This week we review Bellérophon, a rare Baroque opera from Lully which was exhumed by Christophe Rousset and performed for the first time last year, Debussy recorded live from the Barbican, and we answer the key question: how much is too much Percy Grainger? Would, for example, 19 discs be considered sufficient?Debussy: La mer, Jeux, Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune London Symphony Orchestra/Gergiev (LSO Live)
If you don’t know Debussy’s 1913 tennis-inspired ballet Jeux, then start here. Performed by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes with choreography by Nijinsky in May 1913, it flopped, and had Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
I've spent the last week feasting on John Martyn via Spotify. He was a gap in my musical education. He turns out, as a large portion of you reading already well know, to be a rich, raw talent. I knew his rep but had a misguided notion he was another blueprint for whiny contemporary singer-songwriters. All that reveals is my own ignorance.There's a fair chunk of miscalculated stodge in his back catalogue but the best of it combines Britain's folk heritage with all manner of jazz, blues, funk and roiled emotion and is something that will require a great deal more investigation on my part. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The career of Natalie Portman has always had more light than shade. Even her lapdancing sylph in Closer erred towards the porcelain. Casting her in Black Swan was a calculated risk by Darren Aronofsky. The journey of her prim prima ballerina Nina towards a fatal knowledge of the dark side is mirrored in Portman’s odyssey as an actress in a compelling performance which deservedly won her an Academy Award.You probably need a big screen for all the colours to come out. Portman’s emotional march takes her from demure containment to a kind of orgasmic hallucinatory hysteria, and not just in the Read more ...
joe.muggs
This is, not to put too fine a point on it, a masterpiece – but it could easily have been a bloody mess. The team-up of Mark Pritchard and Steve Spacek is the kind of thing that brings genre purists and scene snobs out in hives: Somerset-born, Australian-resident Pritchard having delved into everything from sensuous ambient jazz to bouncing booty bass, hardcore rave to exotica over his two-decade career, while vocalist and co-producer Steve Spacek formed the highly individualist and criminally under-appreciated techno soul band Spacek at the start of the 2000s. Together they have brought Read more ...
bruce.dessau
I missed out on Miles Kane's earlier work with The Rascals, but was quickly seduced by his partnership with Arctic Monkey Alex Turner as The Last Shadow Puppets, whose cinematic grandeur struck the right balance between contemporary pop, wistful nostalgia and terrific haircuts. This leg-up has given Kane's new album a high profile, and while it certainly has its moments, the 25-year-old from the Wirral wears his influences a little too obviously here.If an alien with a heavy schedule downloaded Colour of the Trap they could get a pretty neat round-up of rock history in one sitting. Bolanesque Read more ...
william.ward
Blue Valentine takes place in two different time frames – the “now” (shot on Red One, which endows even the most intimate of scenes with an almost unsettling widescreen look), and the “then” scenes on Super 16 mm. They are interwoven in what appears to be random fashion, but which on closer inspection provides an almost perfectly choreographed explanation on why this most touching – and beautifully related – love story breaks down and disintegrates so utterly.Was all the effort – which resulted in both Williams and Gosling being nominated for an Academy Award – really worth it? Definitely yes Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Of course, Hanson are a joke. Literally. On the internet you’ll find them as a subsection of "blonde jokes". And looking back on 12-year-old Zac’s ridiculous hair on “MMMBop”, it’s easy to see why. But they are no longer blond, nor are they kids anymore. In fact, between them, they’ve got eight kids of their own. And so the question is, is now the time to take the clean-cut brothers from Tulsa, Oklahoma seriously?And the answer is, sort of. Sure, Shout it Out is unlikely to make anyone’s album-of-the-year list, but where they get it right there’s something so joyous about the trio’s Motown- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Luppi had already issued The Italian Story album in 2004, a tribute by the LA-dwelling Italian orchestral arranger and composer to his influences. The Grey Album surfaced the same year. Luppi and Burton soon gravitated towards each other. Both were fascinated by composers like Ennio Morricone, Alessandro Alessandroni, Piero Piccionni, Armando Travajoli and Piero Umiliani and I Marc 4, the studio quartet that played on countless soundtracks including those of Morricone’s. They also loved Alessandroni’s eight-piece vocal outfit I Cantori Moderni, and the wordless vocals of their member Edda Read more ...