Reviews
Massive Attack, Steel Yard Bristol review - propaganda and pompMonday, 04 March 2019
Massive Attack have travelled a long way from the Dugout, the Bristol bar where the collective first tried their hand at spinning discs for a crowd whose cultural mix reflected the constant ferment of one of Britain’s most vibrant cities. The city... Read more... |
Bevan, Padmore, Foster-Williams, LPO, Jurowski, RFH review - rural blissMonday, 04 March 2019
Just as our brief, premature spring collapsed into the bluster of Storm Freya, the Enlightenment certainties of Haydn’s more dependable cycle of nature blew into the Royal Festival Hall. Perhaps because its lovely but (for the most part) serene... Read more... |
Marianne Faithfull, BBC Four review - more than a vagabond lifeMonday, 04 March 2019
French actor and director Sandrine Bonnaire’s warm, langorous film portrait of la Faithfull may not the first – that accolade goes to Michael Collins’s feature-length Dreaming my Dreams (2000), featuring Mick, Keith, Anita and John Dunbar – but it... Read more... |
The Hole in the Ground review - parental horror stays on the surfaceMonday, 04 March 2019
Mothers’ fears for and of their children are primal horror material: The Babadook and Under the Shadow set recent standards for exploring its emotional terror. Lee Cronin’s debut, The Hole in the Ground, has similarly profound subtexts in mind, and... Read more... |
We're Staying Right Here, Park Theatre review - rough and not entirely readyMonday, 04 March 2019
We're Staying Right Here, Henry Devas's debut play premiering on the smaller of the Park Theatre's two stages, carries a trigger warning on the theatre website: "May be affective for people coping with mental health issues". There's also, we're told... Read more... |
Laura Gibson, Hug and Pint, Glasgow review - fable songs and unpretentious intimaciesMonday, 04 March 2019
Laura Gibson’s songwriting was always that of a storyteller but her newest album, Goners, ups the ante still further. Her first album to be made after completing an MFA in creative writing, the album explores weighty themes like grief and the... Read more... |
Sadie Jones: The Snakes review - lacking feelingSunday, 03 March 2019
Bea and Dan are a young married couple. They have a mortgage on their small flat in Holloway and met while out clubbing in Peckham. She’s a plain-looking, modest and hard-working psychotherapist; he’s putting in the hours as an estate agent having... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: SparksSunday, 03 March 2019
Although American, Sparks’ initial commercial breakthrough was in the UK where their rococo art-rock chimed with ears attuned to, say, Roxy Music. Their sensibility has always been more European than American. In 2009 they issued an album titled The... Read more... |
Joan Baez, London Palladium review - fare-thee-well generositySaturday, 02 March 2019
“If you look at music, you see theme, variation, you see symmetry, asymmetry, you see structure,” observed Dave van Ronk, the late folk musician known as “the Mayor of MacDougal Street” in Greenwich Village.He was doubtless talking about composition... Read more... |
The Merry Widow, English National Opera review - glitter but no sparkleSaturday, 02 March 2019
It’s all there. High kicks and tight corsets; silk and sequins and shenanigans in a broom closet; hot pinks and still hotter can-can girls; waltzing, scheming, sparring, and a bit with a banquet table. There’s even a dancing beaver. So why don’t I... Read more... |
Soft Cell: Say Hello, Wave Goodbye, BBC Four review - an electro-pop celebrationSaturday, 02 March 2019
“It’s never been about the success to me,” says Marc Almond, “It’s always been about the adventure.” It’s a great attitude that’s writ large over the band’s uncompromising flame-out of an early Eighties pop career. Soft Cell: Say Hello, Wave Goodbye... Read more... |
Serenity review - a game of two ill-fitting halvesSaturday, 02 March 2019
You’d expect the man who created Peaky Blinders and the ingenious one-man-and-his-car drama Locke to have his ducks in a row and his feet planted securely on terra firma, but in Serenity Steven Knight seems to have permitted himself a leisurely... Read more... |
