Glasgow
Lisa-Marie Ferla
“I know what I was angry about when I wrote this,” Nanci Griffith told the crowd as she introduced “Hell No (I’m Not Alright)”, “but you can get your anger out about whatever you want.”It seemed a little odd that Griffith left the big hook (if the bold, sloganned t-shirts of the crowd are anything to be believed) from new album Intersection until after the house lights came back up for the first time, but back in her native America the song can lead to pandemonium. Delivered with gusto, complete with synchronised clapping from two burly roadies in matching sunglasses, its lyrics are not Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Accompanying herself with the violin she hung from the mic stand, the Canadian songwriter Kathleen Edwards performed “Goodnight, California” - the last track from her 2008 album Asking For Flowers - in the sensual rasp of the late night gin-drunk. The song is a sprawling, beautifully-realised portrait of loneliness, and the tightness of Edwards’ backing band only increased its eerie claustrophobia. To her right, the imposing presence of long-time collaborator Gord Tough covered for Edwards as she switched to guitar, and together their instruments squealed and dueled their way through an Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Ever since that first Saturday night when Simon Cowell pulled back the curtain on mainstream pop music's most underhand dealings, there has been a certain type of artiste that a certain type of person struggles to take seriously. What is often forgotten by those of us whose interest in chase-your-dream music-based reality television shows stops at the commercial breaks, however, is that between the tone-deaf girl group that gets voted off in the first week and the insipid, interchangeable boys beloved of teenage girls there is usually at least one remarkable voice. In 2010 that voice belonged Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It would be easy to begin with a reflection on how little the world has changed in the 100 years since the birth of Woody Guthrie; to draw parallels between the Great Depression and our own troubled economic times. Yet en route to last night's “Woody at 100” celebrations at Glasgow's Celtic Connections festival, I realised that to do so would constitute a disservice to undoubtedly one of the most important songwriters of the 20th century.For Guthrie’s centenary, his daughter Nora has once again opened up access to the thousands of uncompleted lyrics and writings curated by the Woody Guthrie Read more ...
joe.muggs
If 2011 was the year when dance music's natural tendency to fragmentation was taken to extremes, this album was the one that bound those fragments together into one demented but scintillating vision. Russell Whyte – Rustie – comes from a very particularly Scottish club scene that is the perfect antidote to the idea that musical connoisseurship means nerdiness.From the very simple imperative of moving a dance floor in fresh ways comes an explosion of ideas and influences: retro video game soundtracks, obscure Japanese noise bands, the hyper-capitalist hyper-pop of 21st-century R&B, the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
You can see why prequels come into being. A dramatic character becomes a national treasure and eventually, once old age or worse removes them from the small screen, they are opportunistically exhumed by means of the backstory. Young Delboy was brought back to life in Rock and Chips. Young Morse is expected to be solving murders soon. And now here comes Young James Herriot. For all the logic of squeezing a last drop of juice out of a character, it seems a bizarre notion to revisit a vet who last shoved a forearm up a barnyard orifice more than 20 years ago.The Herriot industry carried all Read more ...
David Nice
He's just launched the last of seven phenomenally successful seasons as music director of a transfigured Royal Scottish National Orchestra. Subscriptions for the Edinburgh and Glasgow concerts have doubled, attendances soared, and Stéphane Denève is a popular figure not just in the musical world but also in Scotland's wider cultural scene, not least as measured by his special guest appearance in the Sunday Post's long-running cartoon series The Broons.The charm of his concert presentations to his Scottish chums belies a rigour and a seriousness in a preparation that marries intellect with Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Proximity Effect’s two opening cuts set the stall. Glitchiness gives way to a descending, sad, drifting melody on “The Beginning of the End”. “More Than You” is an upbeat, poppy, Tango in the Night Fleetwood Mac refracted through a chilly Nordic musical sensibility. Lovely.Laki Mera's core members are vocalist/guitarist Laura Donnelly and the Italian composer/instrumentalist/producer Andrea Gobbi. Based in Glasgow, where they met, they formed the band in 2004. Their first album, Clutter, caused a minor stir as it first surfaced as a pay-what-you-fancy download in late 2007. A physical Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Peter Mullan’s incendiary and long-overdue third feature is an unflinching, often hilarious look at a teenager’s inexorable descent into delinquency. NEDS (or Non-Educated Delinquents) begins in Glasgow in 1972, immersed in a rosy haze of promise as the chubby-cheeked, saucer-eyed John McGill graduates from primary school. Moments later he’s being threatened with a beating to end all beatings by a malevolent peer.It’s a story told in academic milestones, violent street clashes and graffiti. When the talented scholar John starts secondary school his older brother Benny’s name adorns the walls Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Can one enjoy watching a film supposedly about dance in which competition and being Number One is all and the word “artistry” is not mentioned once? And in which performers are nameless numbers? And the documentary-maker shows not a scintilla of curiosity about why this might be? One might, if it were handled with a twisted sense of humour and cutting observation.Unfortunately, Jig doesn't have that. Sue Bourne's film enters a dance-movie genre that has lately become surprisingly well stacked, but it lacks any of the imaginative lyricism of Wim Wenders’ Pina, the dramatic exhilaration of Read more ...
Ismene Brown
As the young waitress said in the restaurant where we ate after last night’s world premiere of Ashley Page’s Alice in Glasgow, she hadn’t ever been to ballet, but she was tempted to go for this - “It’s Alice after all, isn’t it? Wonderland. I’d love to see Wonderland.” The kind of new audience that any company should kill for.And my friend said, sadly, yes, that’s what we’d also supposed it would be. "So shall I go?" she said. We said, um, you’re right. Ballet is the one place where you really can hope to see Wonderland, the unsayable, the merely imaginable. But there is always the danger Read more ...
david.cheal
This is the sound of a band who want to be big. Really big. Produced by Flood (The Killers, U2 etc) and recorded in California, the second outing from Scotland’s Glasvegas bursts with epic widescreen soundscapes, its chiming guitars designed to shimmer around arenas and festivals, its throbbing, pulsing synths adding depth and drama, the heavily treated voice of James Allan pleading and hollering.Whereas last time around they sounded like The Jesus and Mary Chain, now they sound a bit like The Killers (especially on “Euphoria Take My Hand”) or like U2 (especially on “Dream Dream Dreaming”).It Read more ...