Reviews

Ten years into the game, Patrick Carney and Dan Auerbach add funk and soul to their potent blues-rock brew, with triumphant results...Of all El Camino’s many achievements, the most easily overlooked might be the fact that it exists at all. Ten years and seven albums is, after all, an impressive distance to travel on the back of The Black Keys’ consciously primitive manifesto. It’s partly a matter of providence.

Fired up by disco and punk, Jagger’s swagger returns, with a disc of unreleased songs...Wrongly or rightly, the allegations against the Stones came thick and fast in 1977. They’d lost their edge. They’d become gluttonised, lazy, too rich and bored to care. Some of them had the temerity to be in their mid-thirties (NME called them “The Strolling Bones”). The urgent sound of punk had made their jet-set rock seem passé.

The final album, compiling offcuts into heartbreaking shape...This is, perhaps, the most gruelling album review I’ve ever had to write. It’s a record by a dead person who I met, and really liked, and fully expected to meet and like again. The Amy Winehouse I interviewed in late 2003 was an insanely charismatic and shamelessly frank 20-year-old who looked like a Jewish punk Jessica Rabbit and wore pink ballet shoes so worn her toes poked through.

One (or rather, three) from the heart of Coppola’s American Zoetrope dream...Hammett was intended by Francis Ford Coppola to be one of his American Zoetrope studio’s first movies, a calling card for the Zoetrope vision and the American debut of German director Wim Wenders. In the event, the film, an homage to novelist Dashiell Hammett boasting a rare lead from Coppola regular Frederic Forrest, did become synonymous with the studio. Just not the way Coppola had hoped.

Five whole remastered discs and a mountain of trinkets. But is it worth a ton?JEEZ, THE SOUND quality is INCREDIBLE. It’s like David Gilmour is playing his acoustic guitar IN YOUR ROOM. You really can hear the strings BUZZ and hear his fingers SCRAPE on the fretboard. You can hear Nick Mason’s drum stool SQUEAK, hear Rick Wright’s Clavinet THROB, and you can actually hear Roger Waters having a BREAKDOWN about two minutes into “Welcome To The Machine”. Amazing.

Wenceslasaire! Spangladasha! Shnamistoflopp'n! Come frolic in Kate Bush's winter wonderland...

Remake of Peckinpah shocker lacks original’s impact...

40th anniversary reiossue of Krautrock's greatest double album...

Bigger not necessarily better for Florence...

Medical disaster flick: Soderbergh goes viral...