Reviews
Katie Colombus
Ghostpoet – aka Obaro Ejimiwe – released his first album Peanut Butter Blues and Melancholy Jam in 2010. He has since been named as The Guardian’s New Band of the Day, nominated for a Mercury Prize and toured the festival circuit with the likes of Metronomy. His third album Shedding Skin, due to be released on March 2nd, was the focus of Pias Nites at Shoreditch’s Village Underground.Featuring tracks like "Off Peak Dreams" (below) there's a roughness and edge to the sound, despite the soft-rock riffs and almost jazzy pockets, that goes well with his towny observations of mugs of tea and bacon Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Following the critical and commercial hits Wreck-It Ralph and Frozen, Disney's latest is a film which will win you over with its charming WALL-E-esque antics, oddball coupling and simple slapstick before it – somewhat annoyingly – reveals itself as a kids' first comic book movie, entering the superhero movie stratosphere by transforming into an origin story for the titular crime-fighting team.Based on a little known Marvel comic series and directed by Don Hall and Chris Williams, Big Hero 6 is set in the fictional mash-up city San Fransokyo – a pleasing blend of ornate Eastern- Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Dating in the internet age is rife with complications, and yet Dave Simpson’s amiable romcom manages to eschew nearly all of them. Bar its online matchmaking set-up, this is a chaste, big-hearted time capsule of a play, with nary a glance at Facebook or Twitter, let alone the ephemeral intimacies of Tinder and Snapchat. Simpson’s old-fashioned piece is a perfect partner to his resolutely gauche paramours, but over its almost two-hour running time offers curiously nebulous commentary on contemporary romance.Following in the fine tradition of digital deceit, lifelong singletons Angela and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Mercifully not preceded by a Broadchurch-style hype-tsunami, the new series of Mr Selfridge has slipped neatly back into the Sunday 9pm slot as if it's the rightful owner just back from a year of travelling round the world. It's not revolutionary, ground-breaking or "subversive", but equipped with some new characters and promising plotlines, this opening episode ushered us into the post-World War One era with a spring in its step and the wind in its hair.However, first we had to dispatch poor Rose Selfridge, Harry's much-loved wife (who was played by Frances O'Connor, latterly of The Missing Read more ...
Guy Oddy
While Julian Cope’s albums are usually fairly expansive affairs which employ a vast array of instruments, an audience with the Arch Drude is a more intimate affair these days. There’s no backing band and the man takes to the stage armed only with a 12-string acoustic guitar, a microphone and a few effects pedals. There’s also a big bass drum set up on stage with “You can’t beat your brain for entertainment” written on the skin – but that’s just a prop and doesn’t get played.Cope started up by launching into “I’m Living in the Room They Found Saddam In” from 2005’s Citizen Cain’d album, and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Norway’s celebrated jazz colossus Jan Garbarek hadn’t played the north Norwegian city of Bodø for 15 years. Moreover, he and his group took the stage of the spanking new Stormen concert house as the openers of Bodø Jazz Open, the city’s four-day festival of all that is and isn’t strictly jazz. If there was any pressure, it didn’t show. Resolutely composed during his hour and three-quarters on stage, Garbarek also said nothing. Given his stature, the waves of power intermittently surfacing in the music and the nature of the event, there was only one possible outcome – a standing ovation. And Read more ...
Florence Hallett
What does it mean to be a great artist? Is it enough for your work to be admired, studied, emulated and quoted by contemporaries and subsequent generations, or is the value of art judged by a more complex set of criteria? By considering the extent of Rubens’ influence on artists from Rembrandt to Klimt, the Royal Academy is having a go at skinning a very old and troublesome cat: the elevation of Rubens from gifted confectioner to worthy Old Master.In examining why Rubens should be given a place at art’s top table his work is explored thematically and compared with paintings, prints and Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
More than once in André Singer’s documentary Holocaust: Night Will Fall – marking in advance the 70th anniversary, on 27th January, of the liberation of Auschwitz, having added that explanatory first word to the title with which the film was released in cinemas last year – his interviewees describe their experience as like “looking into hell”. We hear phrases like “world of nightmare”, “utter shock”, “beyond describing” repeatedly, uttered by the first Allied soldiers to enter the German concentration camps at the end of World War Two.We, the general viewer, have had seven decades to Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Tyrannosaurus Rex: My People Were Fair and had Sky in Their Hair, Prophets, Seers & Sages: Angels of the Ages, Unicorn“I was just reflecting and talking about things most people thought or wanted to hear about at the time.” Marc Bolan’s comment about why Tyrannosaurus Rex became popular so quickly is heard in a brief BBC interview included as one of the extras on this new edition of My People Were Fair and had Sky in Their Hair, the summer 1968 debut album.Bolan himself, as the liner notes to the related reissue of Prophets, Seers & Sages: Angels of the Ages state, was astutely Read more ...
Tim Cumming
There have been Throbbing Gristle reunions at Tate Modern, and Psychic TV last played in London at the now-demolished Astoria in 2008 – the band in nurse’s uniforms, playing psych garage rock over projections of medical procedures and sex scenes – but it’s a long time since Genesis Breyer P-Orridge was in London.Combining a sort of spoken-word memoir with poetry and a closing Q&A upstairs at the October Gallery as part of its Burroughs centenary exhibition, Can You All Hear Me?, the first half was an hour’s impromptu talk about how Neil Megson became the pandrogyne figure there on the Read more ...
ellin.stein
Charlie Lyne’s Beyond Clueless, a Kickstarter-funded film essay about the deeper meaning of post-1990 coming-of-age movies, aspires to be one of those Arena programs that takes a fresh look at a seemingly trivial or minor pop form to reveal deeper truths about the culture at large. Don’t get me wrong – I love teen movies and I think there’s a rich seam here to be mined. Unfortunately, because his analysis lacks rigour and is almost as superficial as the movies themselves, there are few insights here the perceptive viewer won’t have already gleaned for him/herself.Lyne draws on clips from some Read more ...
graham.rickson
Henry Mancini: The Classic Soundtrack Collection (Sony)You get a good sense of any composer's strengths and limitations when you consume their music in box set-sized quantities. With the Juilliard-trained Henry Mancini, you marvel at the catchiness of the melodic material and the transparent orchestration. Sony Music's new box set collects 18 Mancini film scores, and a casual perusal will also highlight the great man's weak spots. He wasn't a master at developing his ideas, relying instead on canny use of ostinati and a clever overlaying of his catchy motifs. Which, if you're writing Read more ...