Lovingly restored version of Fritz Lang’s silent sci-fi classic with another 20 minutes’ worth of footage, plus the original music score, so even if you know the movie well you’re in for treats and surprises. If you don’t, you’ll discover incredible visuals, the sexiest robot ever made and a core message?capitalism without compassion sucks?that’s as fresh now as in 1926.
The Business Of Strangers
Passable psychodrama as up-tight corporate suit Julia (Stockard Channing) and haughty PA Paula (Julia Stiles) play out malicious power games in a hotel suite. This often lacks the wit and IQ required for a nerve-jangling thriller, but the assured leads provide seductive intrigue.
Men In Black II
The law of diminishing returns applies as Barry Sonnenfeld hacks out a scant sequel to the initially promising sci-fi spoof. Will Smith must again save the human race from oddly-shaped monsters and hedonistic worms, and so restores Tommy Lee Jones’ erased memories. Lara Flynn Boyle replaces Linda Fiorentino, who bailed. Wisely, it’d seem. Funny in flashes.
Singles
Set in grunge-era Seattle, Cameron Crowe’s quick-off-the-mark 1992 romantic ensemble comedy managed to corral members of Pearl Jam into the mix alongside Bridget Fonda, Matt Dillon, Kyra Sedgwick and Campbell Scott. Crowe falls short of his masterful memoir Almost Famous, partly as Scott and Sedgwick are too stiff for the central rock’n’romance plot, but this is still a charming historical snapshot.
The Weight Of Water
Kathryn Bigelow’s lavish direction can’t keep this creaky adventure afloat. Catherine McCormack is Jean, a photo-journalist researching a century-old double murder while rekindling her relationship to Thomas (Sean Penn) on a sailing trip. A clich
The Ages Of Lulu
Bigas Luna’s 1990 film deals with, yes, sex, but like most Spanish movies it does so unapologetically and flamboyantly. A teenager is corrupted by her brother’s friend: later they marry, but by now the libido of Lulu (Francesca Neri) is out of control. Sounds like Channel 5 fare, sure, but as with Jam
Frankie & Johnny
Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer are the short order cook and waitress in a New York diner in Garry Marshall’s romantic drama. The stars ensure that it’s at least watchable, but the chemistry between them is nowhere near as intense as it was in Scarface, a few years earlier.
While Guitars Gently Weep
The Concert For George Harrison
Royal Albert Hall, London
FRIDAY NOVEMBER 29 2002
Before the show began, Hare Krishna devotees chanted outside as celebrities emerged from their limos. Ticket touts sold
Josh Pearson – Upstairs At The Spitz, London Wednesday December 4 2002
You can’t see his fearsome, feral face any more. It’s covered by a beard so vast and wild at first you think Josh Pearson’s become a mountain man, until he raises his eyes to the heavens, and that forked, dark growth makes his head so huge he just looks like a mountain. He’s making his solo debut in London, because the second album with his band of apocalyptic Texans, Lift To Experience, has been holed and gashed on the road to completion (crises of confidence and heroin are mentioned), so he broke off to write another album, minus their storm-guitar protection, in seven days. Nothing in the songs could be changed after that?it would test if he was really a writer. Playing them tonight will test him again.
Though he just has an acoustic guitar (and, for a few songs, a female fiddler), all the power of the Lifts is still his to command. On “The Clash”, as he roars and murmurs and weeps, “I just can’t get these devils off my back…oh, my God, why me?”, the guitar seems to carry his body at times, as his clawed fingers flutter over it like his hand’s some independent beast, and his dead eyes look upwards?for what?
The feeling that Pearson’s some primal, Biblical creature is undercut by hilarious tales of Texan snake-killing, told between songs in a shy stoner whine. But when on “Banished” his voice grows gigantic like a bad dream, as he sings “I spoke the truth to keep me alive, and now I’m ostracised…”, or on the head-down strum of “Six Bloody Strings”, his hair hanging in sweaty strings now, baring his teeth as he bites at its words, you know a heavenly fire is still here.
The song he’s most nervous of playing is the best, and furthest from the Lifts, a shamelessly, extravagantly loving 10-minute epic about his sister. But somewhere between the quiet needed for an acoustic show and the noise needed for an atmosphere, and the Pentecostal Texan brimstone of Pearson’s background and the blas
Borderline Genius
Alejandro Escovedo
Uncut Presents… At The Borderline, London
WEDNESDAY DECEMBER 4 2002
Midway into his second-ever London performance?the hottest ticket in town after his rapturously received Barbican debut five days earlier?Escovedo dedicated a song to Dee Dee and Joey Ramone, Chet Atkins and Waylon Jennings.
Accompanied by a superb band?a mind-boggling mix of delicacy and outlandish swagger?he then played “I Love It When She Walks Away”. He explained it was a composition about “falling for a girl with no sense of rhythm who moves to San Antonio to follow her dream to become a castanet player”.
As you are reeling from the song’s barely containable joyous and surreal abandon?cello sawing into a wild wiry synth, guitars blazing?you can’t help stop and wonder, is there anything this 51-year-old hero can’t do? A veteran of campaigns with Rank And File and The True Believers, as a solo artist Escovedo has staked out his musical territory for two decades. In the process, he’s become an underground king, combining Dylan’s grasp of musical history, Van Morrison’s way with exile laments and Springsteen’s vintage knack for narrative and monologue.
The range he covers is as wide as the Tex Mex and California borderlands where his ancestral song stories often take place, and as deep as the emotional torments unveiled in the harrowing “13 Years” (about his wife’s suicide) or the poignant “Wave”. The latter is a dizzying time-travelling wonder that recreates his grandfather’s farewell to Mexico in the early 1900s.
Tonight, the packed house greeted his arrival on stage with hushed, respectful silence. The songs that opened, from his Tex Mex musical By The Hand Of The Father, were poignant distillations of family history; the stately cello-centred arrangements recalling post-Velvets Cale classicism. The way “Wave” segued into “Five Hearts Breaking” shone with the sanctifying glow of The Who in their raging, spiritual glory. A wondrously eerie interpretation of The Gun Club’s “Sex Beat” simply sounded like a previously unacknowledged pinnacle of rock legend?an effortless blend of cliffhanging interplay and daredevil dramatics.
Then came the demonic howling and scowling “Burn My Clothes”, a beautifully spare and aching Townes Van Zandt salute, “Follow You Down”, and an encore which revelled in his past.
Escovedo didn’t start writing until he was 30, and covers of Mott The Hoople, Iggy Pop, Neil Young and David Bowie classics showed how he’d served an apprenticeship mining garage-band gold, but, crucially, always bringing more to the party than he took away.
He is quite simply a colossal talent, a missing part of the rock’n’roll tapestry ready to take his rightful place among the greats. And?praise the skies and pass the moonshine?he’s coming back here in April! Don’t miss out.
Thomson
Ian and David Thomson, from Nailsea in Somerset, signed to Alan McGee’s Poptones after a series of acoustic gigs in London. Can they do a Hives? Well, their debut album is harmony-laden pop-rock that recalls Something/Anything?-era Todd Rundgren and the thrilling Anglophilia of Eric Carmen’s Raspberries. “Mexican Pixilated Sun” and “Loaded Dice” are well-crafted melodies, but then it goes a bit dysfunctional and distorted with the Crazy Horse-style bittersweet ballads “Shirley McGee” and “Suicide”. Their career, like this record, could go either way.
Talib Kweli – Quality
Talib Kweli grew up in the same neighbourhood as Mos Def, they’ve often collaborated, and the two even run an education centre in Brooklyn. No surprise, then, to find Mos Def among the guests on Talib Kweli’s album, alongside Common, Res and Bilal.
Whether he’s being flippant or concerned, it’s lyrically potent stuff, and musically he deploys most of the trademark devices of modern hip hop.
Yet he also draws on a wider heritage of modern African-American music, so that on “Keynote Speaker” he almost becomes a modern-day Gil Scott-Heron, while “Waiting For The DJ” invokes the spirit of George Clinton. Refreshingly clich
All About Eve – Iceland
With All About Eve clambering cannily back towards the profile they enjoyed in the ’80s, this seven-track snowstorm is a stopgap, a “Christmas special”, before their return proper. Its wintry themes include three bizarre cover versions?Wham’s “Last Christmas”, Aled Jones’ “Walking In The Air” and Queen’s “A Winter’s Tale”?which, if nothing else, prove they have funny bones. Elsewhere, old hit “December” is radically revamped and “Cold” is an effective instrumental. Julianne Regan’s voice is frustratingly under-used, but it’s a joy to hear them tumbling down our chimneys again.
Faust – Patchwork 1971-2002
Similar in feel to The Faust Tapes, the legendary Krautrockers’ biggest-selling 1974 album on account of being sold for 50p by Virgin, Patchwork is a collage of studio outtakes spanning their entire career. There are familiar moments, such as a fragment of “It’s A Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl”, but mostly the sounds here run the entire Faust gamut from tentative, acoustic half-ideas to minimal, Triassic riffery to primal electronica from one of rock’s forgotten futures. A good taster for those unfamiliar with the band.
DPZ – Turn Off The Radio
A stridently combative duo formerly known as Dead Prez, M-1 and stic.man apply gangsta-style aggression to an anti-capitalist agenda that circumnavigates Chuck D and heads straight back to the Black Panthers and Mao. No liberal platitudes on Turn Off The Radio?DPZ preach a rifle, library book and health food-powered insurrection over prickly, minimalist electro-soul. Vilifying the fool Bush as a bigger enemy than Osama is one of their milder edicts. But the best moment comes with a rare glimmer of wit when Aaliyah’s “We Need A Resolution” is hijacked and restyled as?what else??”We Need A Revolution”.
Threnody Ensemble – Timbre Hollow
Away from the jazz faction, post-rock’s stately drift towards classical music continues apace with the release of the Threnody Ensemble’s debut album. Like Rachel’s, their most obvious contemporaries, the San Diego collective make the ideal soundtrack to those poignant moments in the conservatoire. Actually, Timbre Hollow is less precious than that. A lot of artful acoustic guitar, cello and clarinet, for sure. But there’s unexpected wit and catholicism, notably when a salsa groove gatecrashes the tranquillity of “Tha Roman (Formerly Valerie White) Part 2”. Engaging.
Emily Sparks – What Could Not Be Buried
Emily Sparks composes delicate, ephemeral, intimate pop songs that flit between delicate yet upbeat pop and the darker stylings of fellow Americana songstresses Nina Nastasia and Neko Case. Using spartan orchestration with drums and keyboards, Sparks’ acoustic slide guitar work and vulnerable, untrained voice deliver an unpretentious set of deeply felt songs. Recorded with a little help from Drew O’Doherty, who is also contributing to the new Willard Grant Conspiracy album.
Erasure – Other People’s Songs
Advance copies of the new album from Vince Clarke and Andy Bell were sent out with a special security number and a pompous letter warning the disc should not be “left with a third party” and demanding that “we must globally recognise the risk of illegal copying of music”. Why anyone should want to is another matter. Ten years ago, Erasure released a witty, chart-topping Abba pastiche. Here they try it again with daft versions of songs by the likes of Buggles, Cockney Rebel, Peter Gabriel, the Three Degrees and the Righteous Brothers. The results are risible but the joke is no longer funny. It’s this sort of copying that should be made illegal.
This Month In Americana
Since the success of O Brother, Where Art Thou?’s multi-platinum soundtrack and Down From The Mountain, bluegrass has snagged an audience far beyond its Foggy Mountain origins. Alison Krauss and Union Station have been deemed the pearl around which the revivalist grit has gathered, though, in truth, the band has been busy smudging the edges of Appalachia, country and pop for over 15 years now.
As phenomenal as the genre’s second coming is Krauss herself: classical violinist aged five; award-winning fiddler aged 12; first album at 14; youngest Grand Ole Opry inductee, eulogised by the legendary Bill Monroe. Since joining Union Station in 1987, the Illinois prodigy has done more to clear bluegrass of its hick antiquity than anyone, reshaping non-traditional material into progressive new forms. And she’s still barely out of her 20s.
If 2001’s New Favourite was a high watermark, Live is its perfect complement. As a touring ensemble of impeccable musicianship, Union Station are almost as astonishing as, say, Dylan’s Never Ending Tour troupe. Guitarist/mandolinist Dan Tyminski, Ron Block (banjo), Jerry Douglas (dobro) and Barry Bales (bass)?all singular talents in their own field?prove a blinding flash of perfection when locked into the same orbit.
Highlights? Too many to mention, but witness how Douglas’ virtuoso piece “Monkey Let The Hogs Out” gives way to, first, yminski’s lead on “The Man Who Wouldn’t Hoe Corn” and then Krauss’ glassy warble on “Take Me For Longing”, and you have the full breadth of her talent laid bare. The only beef is the over-ecstatic, whoopin’ an’ a-hollerin’ crowd noise, showing there’s much to be said for the Live At Leeds school of punter smothering. Then again, maybe they’re excused this one time.
Buddy Miller – Midnight And Lonesome
Nashville-based Miller’s stock has never been higher: Emmylou Harris’ musical director for the past five years; superb 2001 collaboration with wife Julie narrowly edged out by Dylan’s Love & Theft at the Grammys. Four albums in, this is his finest solo foray yet, remarkable for Miller’s skilfully-woven fretwork and plaintive moonlit moan. A couple of throwaway rockers aside, its ambitious scope reins in cajun, dirty blues and old-time country. Emmylou duet “A Showman’s Life”, Southern soul corker “When It Comes To You” and slowie “Please Send Me Someone To Love” are guaranteed to elicit envious glances from Miller’s peers.