Reviews
theartsdesk
The House of Love: The House of LoveKieron TylerAfter The Jesus & Mary Chain, The House of Love were Creation Records’ next most-likely sons. Their melodies had an epic sweep, they had a top-notch songwriter in Guy Chadwick and, with Terry Bickers, a fabulous guitarist. Yet, after signing to a major label their potential was never achieved despite regularly packing major venues. Their first, eponymous, album – reissued here, 24 years on – is their finest hour. All that said, as the liner notes reveal, Creation were more convinced stablemates The Weather Prophets were more likely to happen Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Nostalgia is not what it used to be. With kids who were not even born when Mick Jagger first shimmied across the stage singing the praises of the Rolling Stones, it was nice to see an audience at the Shepherds Bush Empire, give or take a few young goths of no fixed hairstyle, almost perfectly fitting the expected Adam Ant demographic. Well-preserved women who loved the pop hits, bulkier men who liked the punk phase. I may have missed that meeting, but Antmusic clearly lives onThe end of the gig, however, found both sociological sub-sets united in one of the most bizarre Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“It’s an expression of our collective souls coming together,” said The Beach Boys’ Mike Love of his band, in this celebration of their 2012 50th anniversary world tour and recent album That’s Why God Made the Radio. Subsequent to the making of Doin' it Again and during the ensuing global jaunt, Love announced he was ditching fellow Beach Boys Alan Jardine, David Marks and Brian Wilson, whom he had been sharing the stage with. Not much of a shelf life for this collective expression, with little chance of doing it again. Love’s own Beach Boys – without that trio – picked up the baton after Read more ...
graham.rickson
Oliver Knussen: Violin Concerto etc Various artists/Oliver Knussen (NMC)Collecting music written between the early 1970s and 2010, this NMC disc is an enthralling tribute to one of the greatest of contemporary composers. Oliver Knussen has never been prolific. And, in Colin Matthews’s words: “One of the reasons that Knussen’s output is relatively small… is that he takes such pleasure in discovering new things when instead he should be composing… every bar that he writes is measured against all the music he knows and loves.” Unsurprisingly, as a conductor he's an inspirational Read more ...
Graham Fuller
At 23, Xavier Dolan may not be the new Jean-Luc Godard, but he could be the new Léos Carax. And Laurence Anyways – a tempestuous romantic melodrama spanning the entire 1990s – could be his Les Amants du Pont-Neuf. The third feature made by the Québécois enfant terrible dazzlingly demonstrates his prodigious talent as a metteur-en-scène and director of actors, though, at 168 minutes, it’s about 45 too long.It’s also burdened by narrative cul-de-sacs (not least a clumsy framing device) and peppered with baroque and disco-flavoured visual flourishes that render it stylistically inconsistent. Read more ...
garth.cartwright
My, my, what a big arena. First ever time I’ve set foot in the O2 Arena. Never before made it down here to view New Labour’s hubris. Another cherry about to be busted involves seeing tonight’s band – I’ve listened to The Rolling Stones for about 40 of my 48 years but never been near a gig of theirs. OK, I once did buy a tout ticket to see Keith Richards at the Town & Country when he toured solo in the early Nineties. And I also caught Charlie Watts’ big band at Ronnie Scott’s a decade ago. Both were great. But the Stones in a stadium? Nah.Never imagined I’d get to this 18,000-capacity Read more ...
mark.hudson
An award for artists whose work engages with "social reality, lived experience and the human condition" has been won by a Mexican forensic technician whose works deals intimately with her country’s brutal drug wars. Britain’s most valuable art award to a single artist, the Cardiff-based Artes Mundi Prize, saw nominees this year from Cuba, England, India, Lithuania, Slovenia and Sweden. But the winning works by Mexico’s Teresa Margolles were the ones that responded most directly and dramatically to the competition’s challenging premise.One involves water used to wash corpses in a Mexican Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Any young composer who finds himself at the opposite end of a programme from Walton’s First Symphony had better be good. Edward Nesbit - whose piece Parallels was commissioned by the LSO Panufnik Young Composer’s Scheme - is certainly that. Indeed the aggressive brass punctuations and nerve-wracking silences that helped point up the symmetry of his very accomplished diptych might have been designed to complement the Walton - or indeed Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto - where silence is not just golden but potent, too.The real meat of Nesbit’s Parallels is communicated in keenly imagined and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Some say director Thomas Vinterberg has never equalled his triumph with Festen (1998), but with The Hunt it's time for everyone to think again. An assured and claustrophobic drama which ruthlessly picks apart the seemingly civilised facade of a small Danish town, it's a film that reverberates in the imagination and proves yet again what a fine actor Mads Mikkelsen is.Mikkelsen plays Lucas, a recently divorced 40-year-old working as a kindergarten assistant following the closure of the school which previously employed him. Though he's still trying to reassemble the disordered pieces of his Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Is discretion really the better part of valour? This question arises in a particularly acute form in this new play, which looks at Danny, a gay primary school teacher who decides to come out — despite the risk of being seen as a paedo. But although it is great to enjoy EV Crowe’s follow up to her 2010 debut Kin, which was an account of a posh girls boarding school in the 1990s, does her latest — which opened last night — have a lesson to teach us about the meaning of courage in daily life?Danny’s choice is not ideological: it comes about almost by accident. He lives in a civil partnership Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It would be unreasonable to describe Charles Gordon-Lennox, Earl of March and Kinrara and heir apparent of the 10th Duke of Richmond, as one of the idle rich. Certainly his Goodwood estate on the Sussex Downs must be one of the most idyllic in the country, and on the face of it he appears to enjoy the most desirable lifestyle imaginable, hobnobbing with the flat-racing elite and mucking about in vintage racing cars. He does not appear to suffer from a shortage of champagne. But the bottom line is, he always has to keep his eye on the bottom line."If I'm sleeping fine every night then I'm not Read more ...
Helen K Parker
If there’s one thing that can ruin the tropical thrill-seeking holiday of a lifetime, it’s got to be waking up, bound and gagged, in the cage of a nasty organisation of modern day pirates who trade in the ransom and murder of yuppie tourists. And so the nightmare begins for young Jason Brody, as he attempts to escape, track down and rescue the rest of his captive yuppie friends and family who are scattered around the mysterious and beautiful Rook Islands.But if you thought fighting pirates in a tropical paradise was going to be all yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum, think again. Under the command Read more ...