Music, Reviews and Paul Dale

The Qatsi trilogy at the 2011 Edinburgh International Festival

Godfrey Reggio's film trilogy with Philip Glass Ensemble live score is a masterpiece

15 Aug 2011

It’s been twenty-eight years since I saw Koyaanisqatsi, twenty-odd since I saw Powaqqatsi, and almost a decade since Naqoyqatsi. The first two I saw in empty art house cinemas on wet afternoons, I watched the third in a somnambulistic state from my sofa…

Review - Orchestre Poly Rythmo de Cotonou, Old Fruitmarket, Glasgow, Tue 28 Jun

Beninese Afrobeat with brass, percussion, guitar, bass and drums

1 Jul 2011

Nine good men and true fill the stage of Glasgow’s most beautiful (internally) venues in a Django like return to European conscience. Presumed missing or dead, or both, in their home country of Benin, West Africa, the Orchestre Poly-Rythmo were hunted…

Jim Jones Revue - The Bongo Club, Edinburgh, Mon 28 Mar 2011

Storming show from the old school rock'n'rollers

30 Mar 2011

Clement Monday nights in the shadow of the parliament and a stumble away from the pounded sheep trails where the radicals of the Enlightenment once surreptitiously gathered, are not supposed to be this loud, or fun.

Tindersticks: Claire Denis Scores 1996–2009

Excellent anthology of film scores from the French filmmaker and regular collaborator Stuart Staples

21 Mar 2011

(Constellation) This five-disc boxset containing six film scores are testament to the remarkable collaboration between French filmmaker Claire Denis, arguably the most intellectually fertile auteur working today, and Tindersticks bandleader Stuart A…

Benda Bilili!

A documentary on the Congolese rhythm'n'blues band Staff Benda Bilili

2 Mar 2011

Kinshasa is the largest city in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It’s rated as one of the most dangerous cities in the world in terms of crime with a spiraling homeless problem that includes over 20,000 children under the age of 18 living rough…

Lord Rochester - Hey!

Sounds and smells like a 1960s garage band, but isn’t

1 Mar 2011

(Twenty Stone Blatt) What sounds and smells like a 1960s garage band but isn’t? Lord Rochester, that’s who. Resurrected from some fantasy about aristocratic ruin and the ghosts of the D-Men, Lord Rochester fizz and fuzz their way through thirteen…

Genius Within: The Inner Life Of Glenn Gould

Film of archive material untangles the the life of Canadian pianist

18 Jan 2011

(U) 108min What a deliriously nutty double bill this film would make alongside Thirty Two Short Films about Glenn Gould, François Girard’s schematic but pleasingly conceptual project completed in 1993. Michèle Hozer and Peter Raymont’s feature…

No One Knows About Persian Cats

23 Jul 2010

(12) 106min (Network) Gifted and celebrated Iranian filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi (A Time for Drunken Horses, Turtles Can Fly) threw caution to the wind and hung his reputation on the line in the making of this freewheeling semi-documentary about…

Gil Scott Heron

HMV Picture House, Edinburgh, Mon 26 Apr 2010

12 May 2010

At over three score years, novelist, poet and musician Gil Scott Heron cuts a dapper, if weathered figure. Slender and sage-like, he resembles a jazz Gandalf. His famous baritone cuts through the packed auditorium, here to witness the return of a true…

Crazy Heart

17 Feb 2010

(15) 111min It’s another day in another shit hick town for country and western singer-songwriter Bad Blake (Jeff Bridges). The music business isn’t what it used to be; his schedule now consists of bowling hall and the back rooms of bars. Between the…

No Distance Left To Run

15 Jan 2010

(15) 104min Taking its title from a song on their 1999 album 13 (believed to refer to Damon Albarn’s protracted split from his long term partner Justine Frischmann) this solid, occasionally compelling documentary revisits Britpop’s fabulous four on…

Soul Power

9 Jul 2009

Just when you thought there were no more films to be made about the Muhammad Ali/George Foreman bout in Zaire in 1974 there comes a remarkable film about the 12-hour, three-night-long concert which took place around the event. In 1974 musician Hugh…

Scott Walker: 30th Century Man

7 May 2007

‘Reach out you can touch it’s true/He’s not a shadow of shadows’ (‘Boy Child’, 1969). At last, a decent film about the most enigmatic music star to have come out of pop’s golden age. One third of the Walker Brothers, Jacques Brel obsessive, musical…

Veils, The - album review

The Veils

11 Nov 2006

ROCK POP FOLK This New Zealand band fronted by beguilingly vulnerable lead singer and songwriter Finn Andrews return with their first album proper since their court battle with Blanco y Negro records and the disbandment of the original line up in…

Kultur Shock - album review

Kultur Shock

11 Nov 2006

WORLD ESOTERIC Insane Seattle-based collective Kultur Shock have been gathering Bosnian, Bulgarian, Japanese and American members for almost ten years now with the sole intention of mashing up the music of their homelands in hitherto unrealised…

Bob Dylan - CD review

Bob Dylan

4 Sep 2006

BLUES FOLK ROCK Dylan’s long-gestating 32nd studio album may not, as the man pointed out in a recent, much publicised interview, sound half as good on CD as it did in the studio, but there is plenty here to warm the hearts of those who rallied behind…