Category Archives: Music
June 12, 2013 For Love’s Sake
By Spank The Monkey
At the Cannes festival last month, you could see – and hear, thanks to some conspicuous booing – the breakdown of the love-in between Western critics and Japanese director Takashi Miike, as his latest thriller Shield Of Straw got very short shrift indeed. Does this mark the end of Miike’s career as the go-to director for Asian weirdness? I suppose it depends on whether you trust the judgment of the sort of wankers who think that yelling at projected images will improve them.
Perhaps it’s the end of the respectable phase of Miike’s career – after a couple of years of working on the sort of serious drama that attracts festival programmers, he’s going back to just doing whatever takes his fancy. That’s not to say the boo-ers are wrong, though: in a career that’s getting close to hitting the 100 feature mark, he’s made a couple of undeniable stinkers. But no single film in his canon gives you any idea what the ones either side of it will be like. We can go back in time just one year – to June 2012, and the Japanese theatrical release of For Love’s Sake, now available in the UK – for a good example of that.
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Tags: For Love's Sake, Takashi Miike
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- Posted under Asian Cinema, Cult Movies, Directors, DVD, Music
June 3, 2013 The Perfect American
By Spank The Monkey
I don’t go to many first nights at the opera. As I settled into my seat at the Coliseum for the UK premiere of Philip Glass’ The Perfect American, his new piece about the final days of Walt Disney’s life, I suddenly flashed back to a first night I attended twenty-five years ago. That was also at the Coliseum, and it was for another Philip Glass opera. The Making Of The Representative For Planet 8 was his adaptation of a Doris Lessing sci-fi novel, and I can remember precisely one thing about it.
Roughly three-quarters of the way through Planet 8, there was a brief pause in between sections. Outside, there was a sudden commotion, and a police car could be heard roaring down St Martin’s Lane, its siren NEE-NAW-NEE-NAWing at full volume like they used to back in the eighties. The orchestra paused, waited for the noise to die down, and then launched into the next part of the opera. This being Philip Glass, it started with a simple repeated bass figure on the strings, just a pair of notes separated by a minor third. It went nee-naw-nee-naw. The audience laugh that followed was extraordinary – a sudden burst of guffawing, which was just as suddenly truncated as everyone remembered that the composer of both of those notes was sitting in the room with them.
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Tags: English National Opera. Walt Disney, Philip Glass, The Perfect American
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- Posted under Animation, Music, Theatre
April 24, 2013 Mostly Pop April 2013
Hello! Mostly Pop here again. This month we have artists looking back, looking forwards and some just staying right where they are, unable to do anything but repeat their horrific mistakes over and over. So prepare to dance like a fool, tap your foot like someone’s Dad and, if you’re anything like me, curl into a corner, gibbering at the shock of the genuinely new. How do you feel about disarranged body parts and pleather gimp cows? Nervous?
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Tags: Amelia Lily, Azealia Banks, justin bieber, Little Mix, Missy Elliott, Psy, will.i.am
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- Posted under Music
March 18, 2013 Mostly Pop March 2013
Welcome back to Mostly Pop! Last time out it was all a bit tedious because it was old men trying to be pop stars even though their career was about ten, fifteen, thirty years ago and they’re mostly rock stars gone soft. Enough of that. We’re 4/5 female this time and it’s all about POP POP POP, in your face. No ballads, all bangers. Get comfy, turn your speakers up and click through as I attempt once again to not get too confused and angry in the face of music intended for people twenty years my junior.
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Tags: Icona Pop, Nicole Scherzinger, Olly Murs, Sean Paul, Taylor Swift, The Saturdays
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- Posted under Music, New Releases
March 13, 2013 Mostly Covers – Let’s Get Down to Bushness
by TheTramp
When you said ‘let’s cover Kate Bush’, this wasn’t what I had in mind…
Usually on Mostly Covers I fixate, sorry focus, on one great song and some of the more interesting interpretations of that song by artists; some great and some not so great. This time I am changing the format. This time I am looking at one artist and focusing on five of her better known songs. That artists is Kate Bush and those songs are; Wuthering Heights, Running Up That Hill, Cloudbusting, Babooshka and Hounds of Love.
Why, you may well ask, the change in format? Well in honest truth it is because I am greedy and yearn to share.I could, it is true, have focused solely on Wuthering Heights, which has generated the most cover versions (take a gander on YouTube if you like, there are hundreds and the majority are at best karaoke or, if you’re a little less kind, just plain old godawful), but I just couldn’t resist sharing a few other favourites that I felt were worthy of your attention. So here I am indulging myself, and I hope you, by providing you with a schmorgasboard of my favourites, with a couple of “special” curiosities as well – after all Mostly Covers wouldn’t be Mostly Covers without them.
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Tags: covers, Divine Comedy, futureheads, Gemma Hayes, Kate Bush, MPHO, Paper Crows, Placebo, Puppini Sisters, Sweptaways, Too Many Tags, Ukelele Orchestra, Wolfmother
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- Posted under Music
January 28, 2013 Pig’s Ear
Niall Anderson has listened to to all of the Now That’s What I Call Music Albums so you don’t have to
The Now! pig, imaginatively named ‘The Pig’
The saddest and most interesting place I’ve ever been in London is the Old Vinyl Factory in Hayes. In its 1950s salad days, when it was owned by HMV, it employed 10,000 people, producing and packaging the label’s roster of recording artists. When I visited the site in 2008, it was owned by EMI and employed just four people: two of them part-time. A 17-acre site occupied by a maximum of two people daily, all there to manage the EMI archive. With its empty concrete offices and effusively strewn barbed wire, it was like visiting a post-apocalyptic prison camp.
I asked one of the archivists what he spent his time doing. ‘We’re only really busy around Christmas when the compilation albums get made,’ he said, and with that took me around the archives. Master reels of Beatles albums, signed gold and platinum discs by The Beach Boys, Scott Walker’s hesitant signature on a two-album contract in 1981 (only one album appeared: 1982’s Climate Of Hunter). Gold-dust for the archivist and pop aficionado. I happen to be both.
So as a tribute to the discouraged archivists, I decided I’d listen to EMI’s own historical effort at canonising pop: the Now That’s What I Call Music series. All of it. Currently running to 83 volumes (or 10 days of continuous listening), it has valid claims to being the biggest selling compilation series of all time. The Top Of The Pops albums aren’t pop enough! The Motown Chartbusters comps didn’t bust enough charts! Even unimpeachable pop blockbusters like Thriller and ABBA Gold haven’t sold in the quantities that the Now! series has. We’re talking about a collection of songs popular enough and deep enough to be worth an extended trawl. Ladies and gentlemen, this is it. This is pop. Continue reading this article ›
Tags: Classic Pop, EMI, Naff Pigs, Now That's What I Call Music!
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- Posted under Music
January 21, 2013 Mostly Noise – the best of 2012 (“this one time, on Bandcamp…”)
by KasperHauser
“So, do you think Biggie and 2Pac are in Heaven?”
It’s January and, by now, you’ve probably read enough year-end lists to last you until, well, the end of this year. So here’s another one. The only difference is that all of these 2012 releases are available on Bandcamp, and some of them are even free. And if there’s one thing I can’t refuse, it’s free music (even bad free music; you don’t want to know how many Lil B mixtapes I downloaded in 2012).
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Tags: Greydon Square, Krallice, Peter Prautzsch, The Green Pajamas
January 16, 2013 Mostly Pop January 2013
by MrMoth
David Bowie
Where Are We Now?
This month on Mostly Pop – old people! Well, some of them are merely getting on a bit in pop terms (ie they are now in their 30s), but some are proper old. Like David Bowie! Remember David Bowie? Ask your granddad etc. Anyway, as Jim touched on in his Music For Old People column last week, Bowie’s back after ten years of, I dunno, playing Call of Duty and wanking. This is his first single since some single literally no-one gave a toss about, and it’s my duty to review it because people apparently give a toss now, plus January is just the worst month for singles releases and I need material. Sorry, Jim, I do know he’s your turf.
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Tags: 50 Cent, Calvin Harris, David Bowie, Justin Timberlake, One Direction, Suede, tinie tempah
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- Posted under Music, New Releases
January 14, 2013 The Music of James Bond
by Victor Field
There are very few screen productions to have had entire books written about their music; Peter Jackson’s The Lord Of The Rings,Tim Burton’s Batman, Star Trek (but not Star Wars or Doctor Who, ha ha). The Music Of James Bond sees the world’s most famous spy added to that short list.
The appropriately initialled Jon Burlingame (no stranger to writing about spy music following his liner notes for FSM’s excellent The Man From U.N.C.L.E. albums) covers Commander Bond’s musical history from the late ‘50s US TV version of Casino Royale* to almost the present day – press deadlines mean Thomas Newman and Adull (er, Adele) don’t get a look-in with Skyfall – with a minimum of musicological textwork and a maximum of revealing information. Just as Burlingame’s TV’s Greatest Hits is an essential for anyone interested in small screen music, this is a must for those who have every Bond soundtrack from LP to download.
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Tags: Bond, Monty Norman, Soundtracks
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- Posted under Books and Movies, Music, Uncategorized
January 11, 2013 Mostly Records, January 2013
By Jim Eaton-Terry
In retrospect maybe Tuesday wasn’t the best day for Dido to announce her comeback
Obviously there’s only one story this week. Like everyone (OK, like everyone over about 35 with an interest in pop music) I woke up on Tuesday to find my Twitter feed melting with the news that Bowie had reappeared with a new single, something I’d given up on years ago. In the time since it seems that pretty much every music writer worth reading has held forth on the subject[1] so I’m not sure there’s much to add. The single is lovely, the video deeply peculiar, the cover is awful, and I’ve already ordered the album.
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Tags: Belbury Poly, Darren Hayman, David Bowie, Dido, Mogwai, The North Sea Scrolls
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- Posted under Music
