CDs/DVDs
Thomas H. Green
Cologne label Kompakt has been home to a plethora of very fine electronic dance music over the last decade. They also occasionally develop acts, as in proper bands rather than professorial Teutonic sorts standing behind laptops with intense, funereal expressions, pale-lit by console glow. Los Angeles couple Danny and Tiffany Preston don't look professorial. In the only publicity shots I've seen they traipse through the desert dressed in Arab garb, carrying synthesisers and machine guns. It's a good look and bodes well.Apparently the duo's first bit of kit was a Lebanese Casio with Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Poor Charlie Fink. First losing Laura Marling to Marcus Mumford, and then, last month, suffering the indignity of having to watch Mumford & Sons win Album of the Year at the Brits. Still, on recent evidence he’s the one with the real talent, and the confidence with which he changes style implies he knows it too. On 2009’s The First Days of Spring Fink had morphed from naive nu-folk into sophisticated Bill Callahan-style acoustica, and now he’s gone all Eighties pop-rock. Unsurprisingly for such a radical change of sound, Last Night on Earth has divided opinion, with the way people feel Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Kurt Elling’s new one has the potential to push him out of the hermetic world of jazz insiderdom where he has been a big figure now for over a decade. It's produced with the right mixture of restraint and pizzazz by Don Was. Elling has sometimes been seen as the nearest thing to a successor to Frank Sinatra. His inventive ease dancing vocally over the strict metres, his charismatic ability to front a band, not to mention his sharp suits and his love of a killer melody are Sinatraesque.But like his fellow top American jazzers such as Brad Mehldau and Cassandra Wilson – both also in their Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Some say that R.E.M. haven't made a great album since original drummer Bill Berry left in 1997. Others don't care whether they have or not. But regardless of whether Collapse Into Now is "great", it's an excellent R.E.M. disc which erases the memory of equivocal efforts like Reveal or Around the Sun. It does so by successfully re-establishing contact with the band's original strengths (guitars, harmonies and a whiff of folk-rock mysticism) and doing it with a barrelling rush of energy which verges on the phenomenal for a band now past its 30th birthday. Maybe it's taken this long for the Read more ...
peter.quinn
A jazz concept album exploring the historical origins of Europe. No, not the synopsis of a new Christopher Guest film – although how I'd love to see Fred Willard in that - but an ambitious, far-reaching new recording from sax maestro Courtney Pine. Except, Courtney doesn't play any sax at all. In one of several firsts, Europa hears him blowing up a storm through the delightfully rich, woody timbres of the bass clarinet, an instrument he fell in love with when he heard Eric Dolphy play on John Coltrane's seminal 1961 recording, Live at the Village Vanguard.Pine is a musician who is constantly Read more ...
Nick Hasted
If you’ve seen Tomas Alfredson’s remarkable Swedish adaptation of John Alfrede Lindqvist’s vampire novel Let the Right One In, then this US remake by Matt Reeves is far from required viewing. He shadows the original so closely, you’ll never be surprised or scared. But like a loving cover version of a favourite hit, there are pleasures in the riffs he plays.The idea of a lonely, bullied 12-year-old boy bonding with a similarly isolated girl who tells him she’s been 12 “for a very long time”, due to being a vampire, works as well in Los Alamos, New Mexico as on Alfredson’s bleak Swedish housing Read more ...
joe.muggs
On paper Jessie J is an amazing pop star. Great looking but not willing to play the eager-to-please dollybird, full of cheeky Essex girl vim and verve, clearly musically multitalented, thoroughly immersed in soul and funk, and with a healthy pair of lungs to boot – as her early solo YouTube appearances (see below) amply demonstrated.And there are bits of this album where she shows what she's capable of, in particular the high-kicking cabaret blues with dubstep bass of “Mamma Knows Best” in which she hollers her heart out like Christina Aguilera at her belting best. “Casualty of Love” is Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
What's weird about the reams of commentaries that have already sprouted around The King of Limbs is the way they try to tell you what it resembles, but not what it actually is. Apparently it's like Miles Davis, Foals, Autechre, dubstep, Talk Talk, Philip Glass and Charles Mingus, among others. But is there an essential Radioheadness at its core?Perhaps what says most about its authors is its method of delivery - by digital download now, followed by a plush multi-format "newspaper" version in May. Audio-wise, its unifying characteristic is Thom Yorke's voice, a baleful and fragile Read more ...
Graham Fuller
It is, of course, a masterpiece - not Castleton Knight’s primitive 1929 British talkie, but Sir Nigel Gresley’s LNER Class A3 4472 Flying Scotsman, which iconic steam locomotive is currently being refurbished for commissioned runs in the spring. It enjoyed its inaugural London-Edinburgh journey on 1 May, 1928, and so excited the public that it generated a silent comedy-thriller, to which sound was added in 1930. The talking scenes, introduced halfway through, weigh down the story but sound effects enhance the thrilling train action that was shot with Gresley's co-operation.Moore Marriott, Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Listening to The Human League’s Credo is a bit like listening to one of Ray Davies’s more recent outings – you know they’ve both said all they have to say years ago, but there is still something very pleasing about just hearing them do their thing. I use the word "say", advisedly, as part of Credo’s charm is its prosaic half-spoken words, strong on storylines yet purposely piling banality on top of cliché, where “stranger” rhymes with “danger” and we learn things like “There is a place the night people go/ There is a place that only night people know”.Musically Read more ...
peter.quinn
A recent Grammy nominee for his 2009 album Historicity, composer-pianist Vijay Iyer is one of an increasing number of young jazz artists who refuses to be corralled by genre. Iyer's work traverses a continuum that embraces everything from hip hop to orchestral music. Tirtha, his latest project, sees three great traditions seamlessly flowing into one another to create something vital and entirely personal.The album presents a fascinating three-way dialogue between jazz, Hindustani (north-Indian classical) and Carnatic (south-Indian classical) music. Also featuring tabla virtuoso Nitin Read more ...
graham.rickson
This month’s selection includes historical recordings by a neglected violinist and interesting interpretations of Brahms and Mahler. A notorious choral blockbuster works its insidious magic, and Australia’s best-known classical musician takes on Kipling. Two young pianists shine in very different repertoire, and orchestral fireworks are provided by a provincial French orchestra. Can a respected British conductor cast new light upon a staple of 20th-century British music? And what does one of the world’s scariest film scores sound like played by four people? Spiritual sustenance is Read more ...