The Cribs are almost the ultimate fringe band; the band that is big with ‘musos’ but has never quite ‘broken’ the mainstream. Well, thank God for that. This album is them at their peak. The quirkiness is there, but so are the indie-pop melodies and the rock riffs. The album is a triumph- the most negative thing about it is the poor title. I mean, ‘In The Belly Of A Raging Bull’? Really?

Awful titling aside, the album is a perfect example of The Cribs at their best. It’s not quite perfect, but it’s pretty damn close, and that’s the magic of it. The tension of having two songwriters with conflicting influences shines through and is constructive rather than destructive in this case. From the echoes of 90s grit to the more modern influences, it mostly gels well. The opening track ‘Glitters Like Gold’ is perhaps not as energetic or raw as some of The Cribs’ other work, but the melody and punchiness is still there.

There’s less cockiness and more maturity on this album but that’s probably right- cockiness in a band gets irritating after a while. Think Oasis, weren’t we all just a little bit pissed off with them by the end of it all? Arguably the best thing about this album is that The Cribs haven’t sunk into complacency or self-parody.

The different producers employed for this album each bring their own feel to the mix- the three ‘songettes’ recorded with Albini, in particular, have a different, mellow feel to them.
The song ‘Arena Rock Encore With Full Cast’ sums up The Cribs right now perfectly. Here, they seem almost apologetic for not selling out but we shouldn’t take their apology. The Cribs are back in their groove, doing their own thing after a difficult period, and this album screams quality.

Pretty much as close to five stars as you can get.

Rufus Wainwright is not your average singer-songwriter. His various projects have ranged from camp and light-hearted (his live tribute to the music of Judy Garland) to serious culture-vulture type activities (composing an opera and setting Shakespeare’s sonnets to music). Perhaps the most famous of his songs is a cover of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’, included on the soundtrack of the film ‘Shrek’. You’d think that he’d have made more of an impact on popular culture than he has.

Unfortunately, the sheer range of Wainwright’s projects has made him rather an acquired taste. He is yet to produce an album with broad critical and popular appeal. This should all change with his latest offering, Out of the Game, which is, simply put, a big, old-fashioned pop album.

This shouldn’t really be a surprise, given that Mark Ronson is on producing duties – it seems that most things he touches turn to commercial gold (there’s a case for calling him the mainstream Steve Albini). However, Out of the Game is not crammed with the usual Ronson bells and whistles (which are actually horns and trumpets), instead aping the comfortably kitsch ‘70s sounds of Steely Dan and Harry Nilsson.

The title track is as lush and flowing as anything else Wainwright has written, and touched with a hint of eye-rolling cynicism that sets a tone of mischief for the first side of the album. ‘Montauk’, by contrast, is an elegant rumination upon the subject of parenthood and family, accompanied by rolling arpeggios on the piano, which could have been lifted from 2010’s ‘Who Are You New York?’. The most surprising moment is undoubtedly the bagpipe solo at the end of the guitar-led ‘Candles’. Normally, this would sound out of place, but Rufus makes it work.

In short, this is Rufus’ chance for a huge hit and a classic album – here’s hoping that this record gets him exactly what he wants.

FIVE STARS

Listening to J. D. McPherson’s album in my room in college, surrounded by the detritus of unread books for unwritten essays and a disturbing number of mugs of half-drunk coffee, does it a disservice. Signs and Signifiers is music made for dancing. Turn up the volume and picture yourself at a basement dance party back in the 50s. Stretching the imagination too much? Try Itchy Feet, or at the very least the ‘cheese’ floor of Park End during a Grease medley.

Yet tagging Signs and Signifiers with all the obvious labels (‘rock ‘n’ roll’, ‘retro’, ‘rockabilly’ ) undervalues its complexity.  ‘Country Boy’ borrows a piano loops from the Wu Tang Clan’s Enter the Wu-Tang , whilst the tremolo guitar of ‘Signs and Signifiers’ is based on Johnny Marr’s part in ‘How Soon Is Now?’  Nevertheless, the album largely plays it straight. Innovative it is not; fervent, toe-tapping and alive it is. Rooting itself firmly in the 1950s, the albums still sounds contemporary in its heady, warm enthusiasm. On ‘Wolf Teeth’ McPherson almost growls at times, rasping like a pre-war Elvis, scat-singing, whooping and hollering over ragged jazz/blues piano. ‘Fire Bug’ features spiky bass cutting between angular guitar lines, building to a raucous cacophony. ‘Scratching Circles’ drops midway through to just piano, hand claps and vocals. But even when distilled to its essence, the song retains all the energy and joy of McPherson’s other offerings; with his rock ‘n’ roll, melody and rhythm suffice without any extraneous trickery.

Aside from the rather lacklustre ‘A Gently Awakening’, Signs and Signifiers rips through from start to finish. Recorded with vintage microphones and a 1960s tape machine, the album aptly uses to the analogue production of its forebearers. Highlights ‘North Side Gal’ and ‘Dimes For Nickels’ present the very best of the EP: visceral, swinging, liberated.

4/5

After the successes of Blur and Gorillaz, Damon Albarn has set the bar high for his collaborative projects, and Dr. Dee represents his first real step into solo territory.  Conceived as an operetta based on the life of the advisor to Queen Elizabeth I, it was staged in Manchester in July last year, and this disc has been released as an amalgamation of the soundtrack from it and a freestanding album in its own right.

Across the eighteen tracks there is little sense of narrative, or any kind of aesthetic cohesion.  Edward Kelley, for example, uses a viol and countertenor, while Preparation is entirely percussion, driven by an electronic kit.  The Marvelous Dream, which had some airtime on BBC Radio 6Music, is more what one would expect from Albarn; just his distinctive vocal timbre following the bassline of an acoustic guitar, with lyrics that tread the borderline between the profound and the pretentious.

With the amount of variety in this album, it becomes tricky to get a grip of what’s going on or even follow the plot of the opera.  More banal than fascinating, the lack of a single breadth of expression so necessary in opera leads to a complete lack of direction, either narrative or musical.  The ‘olde musicke’ effect that Albarn tries to implement comes across as a sequence of poorly-researched caricatures (assuming they were meant to be authentic), and the tolling bells, contrabassoons, and deep bass voice of A Man of England comes across as comical because it is so over-the-top.  While this disc might offer some persuasion to other bands to expand their arsenal of instruments to include things like sackbutts and theorbos, the way it has been done here is not conducive to establishing a sense of being in the sixteenth-century, and simply adds to the disjunct nature of an already disjunct album.

While this was originally the soundtrack to a visual spectacle, the fact that it is being offered up for sale as a standalone musical item means that someone (presumably Albarn) thought that it would work as an album which, because of an almost complete lack of continuity, it doesn’t.  Like Will Gregory’s Piccard in Space, this is an opera to prove that writing good songs and writing good operas are two very different challenges.  Whatever Albarn chooses to do next, it can only be better than this effort.

Making a movie is always hard. Making a movie under Cuba’s strict state guidelines is much, much harder. Director Alejandro Brugués, whose debut feature Juan of the Dead hit UK cinemas this month, knows all about the difficulties of making a movie in Cuba. When asked about how the Cuban film industry works Brugués explains, ‘there’s actually an argument about if there’s really a film industry here or not. And I really don’t care anymore. The truth is it works like this: there’s only one “official” production company, the ICAIC, run by the state. You want to make films with them, you stand in the line and wait for your turn’.

This reality makes Brugués’ breakout success all the more surprising and impressive. Juan of the Dead was shot in only 44 days and utilized hundreds of zombie extras, who swarmed the streets of Havana. It was a massive production for the country and Brugués points out that it had a budget ‘ten times bigger than the average production in Cuba’. The scale of international production would have been an enormous feat for even the most experienced directors and producers.

Surprisingly, Brugués’ background isn’t in directing, but in writing. After becoming frustrated with the limited options available for screenwriters working in his small island nation, Brugués decided to forge his own path. ‘When you’re a writer, on set, the director’s work doesn’t seem so difficult! I decided to try. Turned out I was wrong, it’s hard as hell!’ Though the work was challenging, it also proved to be instantly rewarding. Brugués found the process of systematically destroying his hometown onscreen to be a profound experience. ‘I loved arriving to a street that’s usually crowded with thousands of people and having it closed just for me. I’d just smile and say “destroy it”. There aren’t many things better than that in life!’

The zombie movie, as a genre, has had as many re-imaginings as vampire movies have had sparkly bloodsuckers and six-packed werewolves, so Brugués felt like he had to be cautious when approaching such a distinctly ‘genrified movie’. ‘Can we do something original? Sure. Now, do we want to see it? I’m not so sure about that.’ Taking its basic premise from George A Romero’s 1978 classic Dawn of the Dead (which was famously resurrected in the UK in Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead), Juan of the Dead sets out to, as Brugués describes, ‘change the settings, characters and make them do a kind of unique business. As a zombie film fan, there are some rules you can’t just break, or they’ll eat you alive.’

So Juan of the Dead ended up being a traditional zombie movie, albeit located on the tropical streets of Havana. Whilst Brugués is willing to acknowledge the role that other films played in its conception, he is also cautious about drawing excessively close parallels to the social metaphors informing classic zombie movies.

‘I wanted to make a film that would be hard on social subtext, so Romero is a big reference. But Juan was always it’s own thing. It has a very peculiar tone. The balance between the social, the comic, the zombies and the charac ters was the hardest part.’

The reception for the film has been staggering. It opened at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, ‘with a packed theatre and an audience that laughed and clapped throughout the film’ and then, when it opened on home turf back in Cuba things really got exciting.

‘In Cuba, at our first screening in the Havana film festival there were 15,000 people trying to get into the theatre!’ The adoration for the film in Cuba might be inspired by local pride but with a UK cinematic release on the cards it’s clear that the admirers of this little zombie movie stretch far beyond the Caribbean. ‘It’s been great. It has gotten a lot of love,’ Brugués says, and there’s little doubt that his infectious enthusiasm for the project has been a massive factor in the film’s success.

When I ask him what project he will be undertaking as the follow-up to Juan, he is somewhat coy. ‘Well, I’m writing right now. I have a new script, which is not a horror film. More like an adventure. You’ll probably be seeing lots of weird stuff from me in the future!’ Weird or not, his next project is likely to have the significant foreign studio backing that Juan of the Dead lacked, and could propel Brugués’ name to the top of the list of South American film directors, alongside Alfonso Cuaron, Alejandro González Iñárritu and Fernando Meirelles.

For the time being, however, Brugués is keeping his feet on the ground and focusing on making sure that people around the world get the chance to see Juan of the Dead. He counts it a blessing that the film has even been made, let alone that it has managed to reach such a large audience, possibly on a scale never before seen for a Cuban movie. ‘I always think of all the ways this could have gone wrong’, Brugués says, ‘I mean, just think about it: a zombie film from Cuba called Juan of the Dead. I don’t know what I was thinking. I was playing with fire! But it turned out fine, thank God.

Thus, the famously isolated island nation has been opened up to international movie-going audiences. It might have taken a tremendous amount of perseverance and dogged determination but, finally, Brugués and his team have a film that glorifies Cuban life through the classic medium of rampaging undead corpses. Whilst he might be reluctant to predict the future or over exaggerate the effect that Juan of the Dead will have on his career, it is certain that Brugués’ star will be burning brightly in his homeland for as long as his cult movie continues to be seen.