Reviews
Kieron Tyler
Roky Erickson & the Aliens: The Evil One Roky Erickson: Don’t Slander Me, Gremlins Have PicturesRoky Erickson is usually depicted as America’s Syd Barrett: the leader of a pioneering psychedelic-era band who took too many drugs, had mental health issues and then dropped off the face of the earth. But unlike Barrett, or even his American contemporary Skip Spence, Erickson returned from the abyss.In 1980 he pulled off the remarkable coup of releasing an album on the British major label CBS. That first solo album – untitled in the UK (but usually referred to as Five Symbols due to Read more ...
geoff brown
Tradition used to decree that the last Friday Prom would be devoted to worshipping Beethoven’s Choral Symphony. Not so today. Anything deemed serious and big occupies the slot, and if Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony isn’t serious and big, what do you want? A 40-tonne truck?The Proms programming had been warming up to this epic blast for just over a week. First we had Bruckner's Seventh conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, then the Fourth under the loose-tongued Vasily Petrenko – neither of them fellows who really suit the repertoire. Salonen treated the Seventh to “I have a plane to catch” speeds, so Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
We learn from the front titles of Pieta that it’s Kim Ki-duk’s 18th film, and it won the Korean director the Golden Lion award at last year’s Venice film festival, against strong competition. Viewers may be asking themselves a rather different question, however, namely how much do we actually look forward to a new movie from Kim? We’re a decade on from one of his masterpieces, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring, with its meditative visual beauty, but that one was very much the exception in the director’s oeuvre to date.Almost all Kim's other films have been marked by varying degrees Read more ...
graham.rickson
Goldmark: Rustic Wedding Symphony, Symphony No 2 Singapore Symphony Orchestra/Lan Shui (BIS)Root around in enough second-hand LP shops and you’ll probably find at least one scratchy vinyl copy of Karl Goldmark’s 1875 Rustic Wedding Symphony. The piece was once a repertoire staple - Bernstein and Beecham recorded it. It’s now an exotic rarity. Why? It’s sublimely orchestrated and the tunes are fabulous. It’s perfectly proportioned. Goldmark’s contemporary Brahms described it as “clear-cut and faultless… it sprang into being a finished thing”. Presumably it went out of fashion through Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It’s hard to imagine much upstaging Martyn Jacques, the indomitable falsetto frontman of the Tiger Lillies. The gaping mouth of an enormous mythical fish that seems to have swum straight from the canvases of Hieronymus Bosch, projected right across the stage in their new show Rime of the the Ancient Mariner, comes close. The show is a glorious visual cabinet of curiosities that enthrals on all its surreal fronts, a version of madness that matches the lonely voice of Coleridge’s mariner with the sadness of Jacques’ lyrics and music – and the lyrical dominates here over the raw fury that the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
How we look at and value art, the stuff we accumulate around us, and our daily surroundings; how we look at and communicate with each other (or avoid doing so in the digital age); and if we do or don't see: these are some of the themes explored in Museum Hours, an immersive docufiction made in Vienna by the experimental, socially progressive Brooklyn filmmaker Jem Cohen.Just as João Rui Guerra da Mata and João Pedro Rodrigues's The Last Time I Saw Macao investigates the former Portuguese colony via a thin neo-noir tale about a search for a gang-targeted drag queen, Museum Hours deploys a Read more ...
David Nice
It’s not because I lament the annual end of a love-hate relationship with the Albert Hall that the last few days of Proms feel rather melancholy. A bittersweetness lies rather in the drawing-in of evenings, however hot it is, so late night Schubert for one and then two pianos seemed like an appropriately introspective way of saying farewell this year.Imogen Cooper – why on earth she’s not a dame is a big mystery, though perhaps not if you look at the honours set-up – can always be relied upon to draw you in to the light-fading of late Schubert. Sure enough, after the startling summons Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The Green Note had put up a Sold Out sign on Monday night when Josienne Clarke and Ben Walker stepped in to play a sometimes mesmerising set on the little stage by the door. It’s a great venue that a lot of big artists have stepped inside to test their real stature, and Clarke and Walker have a future that could see them grow their audience in the way that some of their heroes - Sandy Denny, Richard and Linda Thompson, Nick Drake, Bert Jansch, June Tabor – have done with three simple but rare ingredients: a compelling voice, dextrous guitar work and great songs.There were a few Sandy Denny Read more ...
edward.seckerson
It was too little too late to redress the scant attention gives to Verdi’s bicentenary at this year’s Proms but the “Maltese Tenor” – Joseph Calleja – arrived with an eleventh hour offering of low-key Verdi arias and joining him was the Milanese orchestra bearing the composer’s name. Calleja’s growing legions of fans were much in evidence, of course, more Maltese than Italian flags, but what can they have made of the music stand which came between them and their hero? Five arias, one of which he will have sung a zillion times, and still – despite the presence of TV cameras – the music was Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Scientists may have found a cure for insomnia. It’s thinking up names for television detectives. Have you noticed how elephant-tranquilisingly dull they are? Alec Hardy and Ellie Miller. Len Harper. Denise Woods. Tony Gates, Steve Arnott and Kate Fleming. Sergeant Geoff Plank. DS Fiona Photofit. Oh go on then, couple of ringers in there, but the rest have lately been busting crime on a mainstream channel near you (see sidebar to ID them all).Apparently they end up with these vapid non-names because the plausible ones are all taken by real coppers already. The TV companies are not allowed to Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
Most Real Time Strategy (RTS) games follow a basic template - explore and forage for resources, build a base, generate some units, fight, repeat. This formula is tweaked and expanded upon by games like StarCraft, Command & Conquer and Age Of Empires and sometimes slimmed down to create the subgenre of Tower Defence games, where the key to victory lies mainly in the placing of fixed turrets along a path of approaching enemies.Rymdkapsel is all of this, and less. Not that we are complaining - with its stripped-bare gameplay and starkly functional graphics, this is RTS at its most elemental Read more ...
David Nice
Shallow in its cartoonish whizz through the tergiversations of a troubled reign, hugely energetic in its language and structured storytelling, Marlowe’s horrible history is never less than compelling and challenging at the National. It may have found its best match yet in the collapsible bric-à-brac pageantry of Joe Hill-Gibbins’ vivid, in-your-face production.Another director who’s found a theatrical niche down the road at the Young Vic, where Hill-Gibbins is an Associate Artist, likes to call it "the art school" as opposed to the National’s "grammar school". Well, this is definitely art- Read more ...