Reviews
peter.quinn
Gregory Porter's Blue Note debut provides one of the biggest sugar rushes of auditory pleasure you'll hear this year. Grounded in jazz but heavily seasoned with the blues, gospel and soul, it's a superbly paced album, ranging from the poetic tableaux of ballad “When Love Was King” to the unstoppable, hand clapping moto perpetuo of the title track.There are many other gems amongst the album's 14 tracks, including the singular intimacy of opener “No Love Dying”, the heartfelt plea of “Musical Genocide” and the soulful melodicism of “Movin'”. With a baritone voice that evokes heartbreaking Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“I see a lot of things up there, I get chills, see shadows. I don’t know if you call them ghosts or whatever, but you feel stuff. They’re trying to tell you something.” This is bolt boss Mohawk Joe “Flo” McComber, one of the many Mohawk iron workers rebuilding the World Trade Center. A tough guy, he’s not alone in sensing the spirits of the dead. “The site is being take care of in a different way. You feel it,” says Mike O’Reilly, another ironworker.Belfast-born artist and film-maker Marcus Robinson has been on site since 2006, recording the rise of 1 WTC from bedrock upwards with time-lapse Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Paolo Sorrentino's latest opens with a Japanese tourist keeling over at the mere sight of an ancient Roman vista: he takes a snap and wipes the sweat from his brow before his fatal fall to the floor. As the Small Faces sang in "Itchycoo Park", for this gentleman at least, "It's all too beautiful." The Great Beauty (La Grande Bellezza) is a love letter to Rome, in the vein of and as grandly ambitious as a Fellini, but don't be fooled by the title. Sorrentino's sixth narrative feature isn't merely a celebration of the city's already much celebrated beauty. It follows a man in existential and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Beach Boys: Made in CaliforniaMade in California is a fantastic thing. Six CDs slot into the inside of the back cover of an LP-sized, full colour hardback book with a padded cover. As an artefact, it’s a triumph. As a career-spanning summary of the best of The Beach Boys’ music it’s flawless. Quibbling about individual tracks which aren’t included is possible, but ultimately pointless. Everything which needs to be heard is here. Made in California is a statement of who The Beach Boys were, are and even – as revealed by some of the originally unreleased tracks – who they could have Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Legends, myths, and Nietzsche’s Superman - which for the purposes of this London Philharmonic Prom was none other than Vladimir Jurowski himself. His extraordinary ear, his nurturing and layering of texture, was a constant source of intrigue and delight and at least one performance - that of Sibelius’ tone poem Pohjola’s Daughter - was revelatory in its musical insights. That began distinctively with a strange little serenade for cello (Kristina Blaumane) and took us to wild and wonderful places in the hinterland of Sibelius’s imagination.But on a blind listening who might we have supposed Read more ...
mark.hudson
You either get Youssou N’Dour, or you don’t. For millions on his home turf, the Senegalese singer is a major cultural figure: the street urchin-turned-superstar who almost became president. For large numbers of Western fellow travellers he’s the sexiest, most charismatic figure to emerge from the whole world music phenomenon. For everyone else, specifically the 99 percent of the Western public who aren’t into world music and didn’t buy 7 Seconds (and even some of those who did), he’s, well, a bit boring: an average-looking, dull interviewee, whose music floats by in a simultaneous blur of Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bartók: Violin Concertos 1 and 2 Isabelle Faust (violin), Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra/Daniel Harding (Harmonia Mundi)Bartók‘s Violin Concerto No 2 remains a work more admired than loved; concertos by Prokofiev, Britten and Shostakovich still receive far more performances and recordings. You hope that Isabelle Faust’s new disc will change things. She and conductor Daniel Harding scythe through the concerto’s difficulties, and what emerges is a dramatic, lyrical and accessible work. Bartók’s opening folk-melody, introduced slyly after a few bars of sultry harp chords, is a wonderful Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
Could you choose between love and knowledge? Between a life of acceptance and affection, and one of self-improvement and learning? These are the questions that Jessica Swale's new play Blue Stockings poses again and again.For the women who provided the inspiration for this play – the students of Girton College, living on the cusp of the twentieth century – this is not a hypothetical question. To choose to study at Cambridge is, for them, to choose the life of an outcast over the possibility of marriage and a family. In 1896, when the action takes place, a campaign is underway to attempt to Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Australian stand-up Matt Okine made his UK debut at the Edinburgh Fringe last month and earned himself a best newcomer nomination in the Edinburgh Comedy Awards, to add to his best newcomer award at 2012's Melbourne Comedy Festival (jointly won with Ronny Chieng). He's certainly an assured performer, even if his observational humour relies too heavily on the everyday in Being Black & Chicken & S#%t.Chicken – whether the companies Okine keeps in business to feed his habit or a controversial television advertisement back home in Australia – features prominently in the first 10 minutes, Read more ...
Simon Munk
A planet ravaged by snowstorms, home to a load of angry reptilian aliens, with human colonies surviving on a mix of giant "mech" walking vehicles and hoarding thermal energy – Lost Planet's setting has always been fairly interesting. It's a shame then that this prequel so badly bodges everything.Told in a series of flashbacks, your gee-shucks, country-loving, everyman contractor is just there, initially, to kill the alien creatures, repair equipment and trudge around in a walking forklift. But soon you uncover a conspiracy among the companies running the colony and it all kicks off.Or rather Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Michael Bay’s fleet-footed, queasy crime-comedy stars Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne Johnson and Anthony Mackie but the less you know, the more you might like it. This is because the more you know, the less it seems an acceptable source of entertainment. Not that Hollywood and movies in general have any qualms about morality, ethical behaviour or what constitutes "entertainment": we shouldn’t laugh at the cry of “She’s in the attic!” when discussing an actress’s bad performance as Ann Frank, but, unfortunately, we do. Terrible stories often grip us the most.So, let’s get the true horror out of the way Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Pianist, composer, and band leader Django Bates was so inspired by Charlie Parker as a teenager that he used to whistle his tunes on the train. This led not to abuse, but the acquaintance (at Brixton station) of saxophonist Steve Buckley. Returning to the Proms this week for the first time since his 1987 debut with Loose Tubes, Bates paid homage with a set of mainly Parker adaptations, performed by his trio, Beloved, in a new collaboration with the Swedish Norrbotten Big Band.About half of the programme revisited tracks recorded on last year’s album Confirmation. Bates’s distinctive sound, Read more ...