The nature of the product that is pop music is that its stars rarely get the chance to be prolific. It’s something that Ariana Grande – the biggest pop star in the world right now, at least on the numbers – complained about in a recent interview: how, when it came to music, she just wanted to “drop it the way these [rap] boys do”.
Jimmy Hendix’s Greenwich Village studios are the venue for LCD Soundsystem’s third live album, which features the most recent touring line-up playing a set heavy with songs from 2017’s American Dream album along with a smattering of covers.
Tinariwen and others have made taken the haunting sonorities and lolloping camel rhythms of the Sahara far and wide. Kel Assouf are the next wave, more deeply soaked in the rock energy of bands like Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath or Queens of the Stone Age.
The Delta Sweete was Bobbie Gentry's second album. Issued in February 1968 six months after her single “Ode to Billie Joe” topped the US charts, it did not make the US Top 100. Nonetheless, it is classic southern-gothic country and a peerless concept album about her roots. Of its 12 tracks, eight were written by Gentry.
The opening shot of Jan Němec’s 1964 debut feature, Diamonds of the Night, recalls the start of Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil.
Tip of the Sphere is a freewheeling blend of vintage sounds that evokes San Francisco in the early Seventies. To fans this will come as little surprise. McCombs has been moving in this direction for a while, and his new album draws heavily on his earlier work. There's a some of the intimacy of Wit's End and a lot of the prettiness of Catacombs. More than anything, the singer takes what he did with his last LP, Mangy Love, and makes it all a little better.
The opener starts with a looping psychedelic riff reminiscent of early Tim Buckley. Over the next few tracks we hear hints of the Grateful Dead, and Gram Parsons, all served up with shovelfuls of prog and country. The closer you listen, the more depth you discover. Tinkling pianos jockey for position with stabs of jazz-flute, tabla drums and acoustic guitars. But while the musical atmosphere sounds free-form, much of it is actually executed with great precision. McCombs' guitar has never sounded so subtle. The way he weaves around it his vocal lines is often exquisite.
Unsurprisingly, given the soundscape, McCombs' lyrics tend towards the abstract. There's real poetry in lines like "Take from the body its shiver", and "You laughed like the wind was nothing." And yet, some of the best stuff is actually the easiest to decipher. Like "The Great Pixley Train Robbery", a rip-roaring account of a 19th-century train heist.
Elsewhere the singer demonstrates admirable empathy while remaining, as ever, a little cynical. Only once does this cynicism misfire: "American Canyon Sutra" tells of the garbage dump where McCombs played as a child and how it got turned into a Walmart. By delivering the lyrics as a Jim Morrison-style spoken-word piece accompanied by a drum machine, the track sounds disappointingly like a piece of a fringe beat poetry.
Things rapidly return to form. "Tying up Loose Ends", a gentle alt-country piece looking back on the narrator's life, is a real highlight. Then we get to the album's finale - ten-minutes of sweet, improvised rock in the form of "Rounder". If it's about anything, it's about a cranky middle-aged man's sense of hope and love. In a way the song sums up the album, and why it feels so authentic. Unlike many latter-day hippy-rockers there's nothing contrived or trendy about McCombs. And on Tip of the Sphere, he's never sounded more like the real deal.
Ripples may be Ian Brown’s first album in nine years but it gives absolutely no impression of a man grasping at straws to resurrect his career after the non-event that was the Stone Roses’ 2011 reunion. Baggy grooves, dancehall reggae vibes and socially conscious lyrics mark King Monkey’s latest solo set, all delivered with characteristic swagger.
The Specials were era-defining, making this a hugely anticipated album for many. On paper they’ve released a bunch of albums since the Eighties but their discography is misleading. Encore is their first major work in decades. It’s a big ask for it to match their iconic status, akin to when The Stooges and Kraftwerk reappeared with new music decades after their legendary prime.
Barbara Sukowa won Best Actress at Cannes in 1986 for her title role in Margarethe von Trotta’s Rosa Luxemburg, and the power of her performance looks every bit as engaging and insistent today. A century after Luxemburg’s death (she was assassinated in Berlin on January 15 1919, her body then thrown into a canal), as her significance and influence as a political figure attracts new attention, the film deserves the handsome restoration it receives here in StudioCanal’s “Vintage World Cinema” strand; particularly – remarkable though it may seem, even given von Trotta’s rather neglected status as a director on these shores – as it’s really the first ever English-language home entertainment release in the UK.
Sukowa compellingly catches Luxemburg’s prowess as an orator, that force-of-nature ability to capture the attention of an audience – it's a performance that Sukowa seems to carry on the strength of her jaw alone. Rosa Luxemburg certainly opens as an extroverted film whose set pieces owe more to an older, more traditional style of European filmmaking (the score by Nicolas Economou is particularly stately) than to the New German Cinema from which the director herself emerged.
Von Trotta stresses the loneliness of her heroine
The changing panorama of revolutionary politics in Germany over the two first two decades of the 20th century can sometimes daunt, not least because von Trotta’s script is chronologically elliptical. It dots backwards and forwards, from an opening escape from imprisonment in Warsaw (which actually came later) through grand Berlin New Year celebrations in 1899 at which the fancy-dressed comrades (complete with Luxemburg ias a geisha) saw in the hopeful new century.
But it’s as Luxemburg becomes increasingly isolated – in her angry rejection of the Social Democrats’ collusion with the declaration of war, followed by long confinement in a German gaol – that the film’s greatest strength, its sense of an interior life, emerges. In the 20-minute interview that is the main extra on this release, von Trotta stresses the loneliness of her heroine: never afraid to criticise her Party colleagues, she was unsparing about the ruthless paths taken by the Bolsheviks in Russia. But the sense of personal separation is even more potent, something never assuaged by her passionate involvement (more on her part than his) with the revolutionary, Leo Jogiches (played by Daniel Olbrychski, pictured below with Sukowa), or a later affair with the much-younger son of fellow revolutionary Clara Zetkin, or even close friendships with women with whom, like Zetkin, she was part of a shared political circle.
One of the stories that von Trotta heard from a surviving acquaintance during her research speaks volumes – of how when Luxemburg was at home on her own, she would eat across the table from her cat, Mimi (the feline ate from a plate, too: it took close on three months for the cat’s performance to finally come right). The source for this private portrayal was Luxemburg’s letters, though their gradual East Berlin publication was still highlighting public achievement over personal drama: von Trotta was allowed (on the strength of an earlier involvement with the Peace Movement) unusual access to the archives, something denied to some major West German historians before her.
The sense of the director’s engagement with her character becomes absolute, von Trotta creating a fully rounded portrait that goes far beyond the stereotypes of “Red Rosa” as a figure unflinchingly devoted to revolution at any cost; her directorial handling is as confident, as vigorous even as her subject. Rosa Luxemburg is a film as much about that almost abstract concept, moral development, as it is about particular historical events, a process that led her to convictions that put human life above ideology or dogma, as she articulated a powerful insistence on social justice that would especially chime with later generations. .
The other extra is a short interview with Sukowa, in which she remembers her surprise at the casting suggestion from von Trotta (“I thought she’d gone mad!”), given that the director had initially been looking for an actress who more obviously resembled Rosa as the short, dark, vibrant woman she had been in life. There may be something slightly more detached, chillier even, in Sukowa’s performance, but the sense she gives of the “profound intelligence and morality” of her character is unmatched.
Overleaf: watch the German trailer for Rosa Luxemburg