The Laconic

A highly styled 'genre' film which can perhaps be seen as a pastiche of all gangster movies. Tom Reagan is the laconic anti-hero of this amoral tale which is also, paradoxically, a look at morals within the criminal underworld of the 1930s. Two rival gangs vie for control of a city where the police are pawns, and the periodic busts of illicit drinking establishments are no more than a way for one gang to get back at the other. Black humour and shocking violence compete for screen time as we question whether or not Tom, right-hand man of the Irish mob leader, really has a heart.

For an artist whose bio reads that she was “born in 1784 in the backseat of a sea-foam green space pinto,” LA-based soul singer Kadjha Bonet’s debut LP The Visitor sounds a bit closer to home than that. Her sound is retro-fitted, but you only have to travel to, say, the experimental jazz-meets-soul-meets-singer-songwriter traditions of 1974 to find her home planet. Her voice twists Roberta Flack’s velvet tone around the archness of Shirley Bassey over creamery-rich strings, producing a sound as familiar as it is haunting.

Interpol - Turn On The Bright Lights
EAC secure mode (FLAC image+cue+log) + MP3 (320 kbps CBR) | 365.54 Mb (FLAC) + 118.93 Mb (MP3) | 49:00 minutes | Info & covers.
rock, alternative | Matador Records, Recorded in 2002. Cd published on August 20, 2002

To make music marked distinctly of a specific period that's somehow so compelling as to be timeless is no mean feat. Interpol initially sounds as if they must have been roaming about Manchester as the 1970s screamed to a close, yet they emerged across the ocean in New York City some two decades-plus later...