CDs/DVDs
CD: Alice Cooper - ParanormalSaturday, 22 July 2017
The cover of Alice Cooper’s first album in six years shows the erstwhile Vincent Furnier with two heads. This, one assumes, is supposed to provide a neat little illustration of Paranormal’s musical content which is spread over two discs. On the... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: The Fabulous Baron MunchausenFriday, 21 July 2017
Baron Munchausen’s exploits have been filmed before. Terry Gilliam’s star-studded 1988 version floundered thanks to a sub-par script, and there’s an infamous 1943 German adaptation, commissioned by Goebbels. This one, Karel Zeman’s The Fabulous... Read more... |
CD: Arcade Fire – Everything NowThursday, 20 July 2017
If you consider the fanciful notion that Arcade Fire are a kind of Canadian art house Dexys Midnight Runners who have substituted strained angsty soul for strained angsty rock, then the title track of their new album is their “Come On Eileen”. It’s... Read more... |
CD: Jupiter & Okwess - Kin SonicWednesday, 19 July 2017
Staff Benda Bilili and Kasai Allstars redefined the sound of Congolese dance music: the supremacy of the Rumba popularised by Franco and others, with its cascading guitar solos and instantly recognisable beats, was replaced by a host of other... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: LolaTuesday, 18 July 2017
“I would love it,” Lola (Barbara Sukowa) sighs, warned of a world without morality. “My problem is that they don’t let me in to take part.” In Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1981, 1950s-set reworking of Sternberg’s Dietrich-creating Weimar classic The... Read more... |
CD: The Vamps – Night and Day (Night Edition)Monday, 17 July 2017
Watching the YouTube clips that accompany the release of the Vamps’ third album, Night and Day (Night Edition), it becomes immediately apparent how keen they are to come across as a "real" band. They talk eloquently about the writing process and are... Read more... |
CD: Alan Broadbent - Developing StorySunday, 16 July 2017
Hearing the London Metropolitan Orchestra ripping a hole in the silence with the impassioned opening theme of the three-movement "Developing Story", I’m not entirely convinced that the New Zealand-born, US-based pianist, composer and arranger Alan... Read more... |
CD: Dizzee Rascal - RaskitSaturday, 15 July 2017
In the four years since Dizzee Rascal’s last album the landscape around grime has changed. In 2013 grime MCs were busy hooking up with as many pop stars as possible, fusing their machine-gun lyricism with Autotune-addled pap pop. A Dizzee single... Read more... |
DVD: Cézanne et moiFriday, 14 July 2017
For viewers not familiar with the background story of Cézanne et moi – which surely includes most of us without specialist knowledge of late 19th century French artistic and literary culture – the moi of this lavish yet curiously uninvolving double... Read more... |
CD: Emma Stevens - To My RootsThursday, 13 July 2017
What’s not to like about To My Roots, the third album by singer-songwriter Emma Stevens? That’s the problem. Not just her problem, of course, but the problem with so many DIY indie artists who release albums, often crowdfunded (as this was), pick-up... Read more... |
CD: Boris – DearWednesday, 12 July 2017
Boris are a trio of Japanese noise rockers who are masters of all things heavy, and Dear, a double album of superior quality, marks the band’s 25th anniversary as a going concern. Covering a range of bases from doomy slabs of heavy noise to riff-... Read more... |
CD: Pete Fij/Terry Bickers - We Are MillionairesMonday, 10 July 2017
To anyone other than Eighties and Nineties indie obsessives, the guitarist from The House of Love and Levitation and the singer from Adorable getting together in 2014 did not cause a stir. However, both had stylistically leapt away from their pasts... Read more... |
