2015
joe.muggs
For some musicians operating on the leftfield, achieving accessibility or commercial success means compromising their unique vision. Not so with Los Angeles singer-songwriter-producer Julia Holter. Her first three albums – four, if you include 2009's home-burned CDR Celebration – were intriguing, if blurry, windows into a complicated inner world, within which intensely felt dreams and extraordinary erudition tangled up into constantly moving patterns, but the haze rarely revealed any distinct shapes.Have You in My Wilderness, however, marks a dramatic coming out into the world: not only does Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Say what you will about London theatre during 2015, and by my reckoning it was a pretty fine year, there certainly was a lot of it. I can't recall a year that brought with it a comparable volume of openings, not least during September and December, this year's pre-Christmas slate of major press nights roughly double the same time period in 2014. And as proof that people were actually attending the stuff on offer, empirical evidence as ever was the best guide. One late-November Saturday on my way to an evening show, I counted six House Full signs while weaving through the West End, and for a Read more ...
theartsdesk
The festival market is one that has, like much of Britain, become oversaturated of late. Here at theartsdesk however, we feel that there’s room for one more as long as it’s of the highest possible quality. Here, then, is our line-up, a dream festival pulled together from our writers’ highlights of the past year. It’s two days over two stages and, best of all absolutely no danger of getting some hideous water-borne disease while sleeping in a substandard tent. SATURDAY MAIN STAGEThe Prodigy: 10.00 - 11.30The Prodigy may have been going for a quarter of a century but their fire is far Read more ...
theartsdesk
The autumn cinema schedules of 2015 were assailed by the double whammy of Spectre and The Force Awakens– at times making it hard to find a screen showing anything else. Yet you’ll see that neither that latest instalment in the Bond franchise – though it’s been acclaimed as among the very best – nor the much-anticipated return of Star Wars appears on our list. Does that place us at the higher-brow end of the spectrum? Or sticking to a more determinedly eclectic ground, with Asif Kapadia's remarkable documentary Amy, Bill Condon’s unexpected addition to the Read more ...
theartsdesk
From weaselly shyster to spineless drip, the biographies of Goya’s subjects are often superfluous: exactly what he thought of each of his subjects is jaw-droppingly evident in each and every portrait he painted. Quite how Goya got away with it is a question that will continue to exercise his admirers indefinitely, but it is testament to his laser-like insight that he flattered his subjects enough that they either forgave or didn’t notice his damning condemnations in paint.For all his brutal honesty, Goya was an artist of great humanity and of the two exhibitions dedicated to him in 2015, it Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Revealing a new story which completely rewrites an existing one is not easy in the world of reissues. With so much already known, and with pop and rock history constantly being revisited, it’s always surprising when a fresh tale is told. And it’s even more so when it’s actually worth knowing. Although issued in June, Saved by the Bell: The Collected Works of Robin Gibb 1968-1970 has been saved for the end of the year as it was instantly apparent that it did, indeed, rewrite history. It also included a wealth of extraordinary music, most of which had never been previously released – or even Read more ...
Guy Oddy
To say that The Suicide of Western Culture’s Long Live Death! Down With Intelligence! appeared without fanfare in November would be an understatement. Emphatically underground without even a listing on Amazon UK, the Barcelona duo’s record company were clearly not expecting great sales from their third album. Nevertheless, The Suicide of Western Culture certainly provided a sonically enthralling disc that is head and shoulders above anything released by any of their leftfield fellow travellers in 2015.Long Live Death! Down With Intelligence!’s low tech approach marries a post-rock attitude to Read more ...
David Nice
The musical future looks bright indeed, at least from my perspective. There are more classical concerts than ever going on across the UK on most days of the year, so who can know with any authority what might have been missed? Yet each of theartsdesk’s classical music writers has a special take on the events of 2015, and part of mine has been the special privilege of following a trail of younger players in out-of-the-way places.Serendipity began in Fife’s East Neuk Festival, where travelling up a day earlier than originally planned meant I caught the second concert given by the young Read more ...
Steve O'Rourke
When a discussion about ‘What was the best game of 2015?" stretches through a whole evening in the pub you know that: (a) you need to stop socialising with games journalists, and (b) 2015 has been a corker of a year in videogames.Crystal balls make great paperweights, as the saying goes, and while just a year ago many games critics were lamenting the lack of original titles in the 2015 release list, few could have predicted the breadth of quality that has punctuated the calendar. It has been a year filled with high-achieving, ambitious games alongside shoestring indie gems. And the good news Read more ...
graham.rickson
Does classical music still matter? Of course it does – sample any one of these ten discs and discover why. All of them are available as CDs as well as downloads – the classical CD shop may be almost extinct, but the physical product refuses to die.CPE Bach: Symphonies Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment/Rebecca Miller (Signum)You wonder what facial expressions JS Bach might have pulled when listening to these five symphonies composed by his second son Carl Philipp Emmanuel, whose career blossomed during a 28-year spell under the employ of Frederick the Great in Berlin. These short Read more ...
peter.quinn
My Album of the Year is The Thompson Fields, a stunningly beautiful collection of eight new pieces by the acclaimed composer, arranger and bandleader, Maria Schneider. It's one of those incredibly rare albums in which every element – breathtaking textural detail, gorgeous melodies, transfixing solos and the sheer expressivity of the playing – comes together in a kind of magical alignment.The magisterial Arriving by Loose Tubes, the final piece of the band's valedictory residency at Ronnie Scott's in September 1990, following Dancing on Frith Street ( Read more ...
Jasper Rees
They say there are no second acts, but in the world of contemporary dad rock there’s little else. This year Squeeze became the latest band to re-form, not in quite the original line-up, but in an incarnation which patched up previous cracks between its two front men. The result was a cheerful tour and an enlightening album. I caught the live show at the Royal Albert Hall, where the old songs inevitably fared better than the less familiar new ones. In their studio incarnation, the robust new songs have the potential to sink into the marrow.Cradle to the Grave is the latest addition to a small Read more ...