Issue 575

Sex.com

7 May 2007

LEGAL CASE

Wolverine: Origin

Comics

7 May 2007

SUPERHERO

Julie Fowlis

Album

7 May 2007

FOLK Ever since she won the prestigious New Horizon award for 2006 at the BBC Folk Awards, Julie Fowlis has been landed with the unenviable expectation that she might succeed in taking Gaelic singing to a wider audience than it currently reaches…

Kenny Werner

Album

7 May 2007

JAZZ Pianist Kenny Werner forsakes the comfort and familiarity of his customary trio setting for a more ambitious conceptual approach to his music on this recording, his first for Blue Note. A row of lawn chairs upturned by the wind near his home…

Walk the Blue Fields

7 May 2007

SHORT STORIES

Young Gods

Album

7 May 2007

ELECTRONIC ROCK The hassle with being pioneers - which this Swiss trio are, having invented the kind of theatrical but mechanical electro rock parents and families that are just taken for granted nowadays - is that you rarely get the credit you…

Led Bib

Album

7 May 2007

JAZZ Another burst of rock-influenced musical mayhem from the experimental fringes of the London jazz scene. Led Bib are probably not for jazz purists - their energised, in-your-face music explores the kind of edgy, raucous musical direction…

Also Published

7 May 2007

Also Published

DVD - General Idi Amin Dada: Autoportrait

7 May 2007

To coincide with the DVD release of Kevin MacDonald’s excellent fictional feature The Last King of Scotland comes the re-emergence of this disturbing and illuminating 1974 biographical portrait of Idi Amin by German filmmaker Barbet Schroeder (Barfly…

Also Released

7 May 2007

James Yorkston Roaring the Gospel A compilation album of off-cuts, outtakes, covers and traditionals that are of a quality that most artists would have as singles, not in their archive. (Domino) Seefeel Quique Welcome reissue of the drifting…

Comics - Calvario Hills

7 May 2007

CRIME/POLITICS

The Cinematic Orchestra

Album

7 May 2007

SOUL JAZZ Orchestra leader Jason Swinscoe’s genius is his lightness of touch. Rather than labouring the point with the same hooks, his music ebbs and flows like music has a simple plaintive beauty that is too often forgotten in an attempts to…

The Jodorowsky Collection

7 May 2007

We’ve been banging on about the return of deranged visionary filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky for so long that we could hardly overlook, however briefly, this six-disc box set featuring three of the master’s films. El Topo and The Holy Mountain are his…

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club

Album

7 May 2007

ROCK You know what you’re getting when it comes to BRMC. Straight ahead, no frills rock’n’roll delivered with a degree of calculated nonchalance. Loops, samples or a ten-minute long jazz jam are not concepts these guys are familiar with. But…

The Tamarind Seed

7 May 2007

Blake Edwards’ 1974 cold war jape was sumptuously shot in widescreen by Freddie Young, presumably to fit stars of the then magnitude - Omar Sharif and Julie Andrews. Andrews is the humble British civil servant to Sharif’s military attaché from the…

God-Fearing Atheists

Album

7 May 2007

COUNTRY ROCK With two ex-punks, one indie-boy and a drummer who plays in jazz bands at a tennis club, it was an obvious career move to form an alt.country band together. Not only that, but a really quite good one - the Glaswegian God-Fearing Atheists…

Butcher Boy

Album

7 May 2007

INDIE You won’t read about them in hype-hungry magazines or find them bombarding Myspace profiles with friend requests, and as a result Butcher Boy may well be one of the most exciting discoveries you’ll make this year. This debut album from the…

Von Sudenfed

7 May 2007

INDIE ELECTRONICA This first-time collaboration between The Fall’s mouthy frontman, Mark E Smith and German electronic maestros, Mouse on Mars sounds like the imaginary soundtrack to an after-party for the 1990s. Andi Toma and Jan St Werner do a good…

Wilco

Album

7 May 2007

ROCK With their last two albums Wilco rewrote the book on what rock bands could do, so where next? The answer is they’ve reined in the experimentalism a tad and are indulging in exquisitely crafted, plaintive country-soul which manages to be…

The Twilight Sad

Album

7 May 2007

INDIE Rarely can a band have managed to sum themselves up so well just within their own name. Glasgow’s Twilight Sad are, let’s not beat about the bush, a band who make sad music - yet it’s that particular Scottish sadness which finds itself couched…

Kraak and Smaak

Album

7 May 2007

HOUSE Apparently a reference to an old Dutch proverb rather than Pete Doherty’s breakfast, Kraak and Smaak serve up a double remix CD of jazzy house vibes and percussive, break-beat rhythms. Groove-led basslines are reminiscent of the US West Coast…

Nasty P

Album

7 May 2007

HIP HOP REVISITED Love or loathe them, it looks like the blend trend that combusted spontaneously in both indie and hip hop scenes two or three years ago is set to burn on unabated. Here, Edinburgh’s own Nasty P casts in his own tuppence worth. The…