Los Angeles
joe.muggs
The history of experimental musicians from Europe and North America adopting Japanese aesthetics is … patchy. It got especially dodgy in the 1990s when every other electronica dork started flinging random kanji characters on their sleeves, writing soundtracks for imaginary Akira bike races and the like. And there are so, so many ambient producers who reference Zen gardens, minimalist interior design and bamboo flutes, you can’t go into a health spa without knocking over a pile of their CDs.Thankfully Catskills Mountains-raised, LA resident soundscaper Emily A. Sprague is a little bit more Read more ...
Sarah Kent
This must be the first time a black artist has been honoured with a retrospective that fills the main galleries of the Royal Academy. Celebrating Kerry James Marshall’s 70th birthday, The Histories occupies these grand rooms with such joyous ease and aplomb that it makes one forget how rare it is for blackness to be given centre stage.“I’m trying to establish a phenomenal presence that is unequivocally black and beautiful,” explains Marshall. “What I’m trying to do in my work is establish presence with a capital P.” And boy does he succeed! Gallery after gallery is filled with pictures that Read more ...
joe.muggs
Wolf Alice are a band who consistently over-deliver. Their presentation is so staid, their cited influences so safe (The Beatles! Blur!), their politics so “bad things are bad, m’kay?”, that they give every impression they’re going to be bland and generic.Yet over the past decade and a bit, they’ve consistently built a sound that is super distinctive: a kind of supersized shoegaze that allows their relatively straightforward songwriting to grow into something oceanic and dreamlike. It’s no wonder they fill stadiums, and it’s great that it’s not spectacle, personal soap operas Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Back in the day, when America’s late-night chat show hosts and their guests sat happily smoking as they shot the breeze for a growing audience, the most sought after guest was Oscar Levant. No longer a household name except to fans of vintage Hollywood musicals, in some of which, notably An American in Paris, he appeared, Levant (b 1906) was the Swiss Army knife of the entertainment business: a virtuoso pianist, composer, conductor, actor, a writer of hilarious memoirs, a raconteur with his own TV chat show. He was also beset with mental health problems, notably OCD, hypochondria and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The original Naked Gun series (spun off from the Police Squad! TV show) brought reliable belly-laughs to the Eighties and Nineties and starred the incomparable Leslie Nielsen as the preposterous detective Frank Drebin, but for this regenerated version Liam Neeson has stepped up to the plate.Neeson has become synonymous with his celebrated “very particular set of skills”, though farce and light comedy have not usually been among them (we perhaps tend to associate him more with savage revenge dramas). Nonetheless, he successfully raises a few chuckles here.He plays Frank Drebin Junior, son of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Following the success of its screen version of Michael Connelly’s veteran detective Harry Bosch, starring Titus Welliver, Prime Video aims to make lightning strike twice by televising Connelly’s series of Renée Ballard books. Like Bosch, Ballard works for the LAPD, but has been demoted from the Robbery-Homicide division after reporting a sexual assault by her supervisor, Robert Olivas.It’s a man’s world in the LAPD, people. She now heads a cold case unit, staffed by a motley group of part-timers and civilians, and one of the first cases it revisits is the unsolved murder of the sister of Read more ...
joe.muggs
Dominic “Mocky” Salole has had a long career in which the tension between authenticity and pastiche has been a constant. Toronto-born, of English and Yemeni heritage, he came of musical age in the Bohemian hotbed of 1990s Berlin with a close-knit bunch of other Canadian ex-pats, including Peaches, Chilly Gonzales and Feist.In the early days, this mini-scene was about a delirious collision of huge musical ambition and the urge to goof off at every turn. Puppet shows, silly rap personae, punk provocation and cabaret razzle-dazzle meshed with musical virtuosity, electronic experimentation, with Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Haim’s profile just grows and grows. Since their last album, youngest sibling Alana’s starring role in Paul Thomas Anderson’s whimsical Seventies L.A. nostalgia-fest, Licorice Pizza, has done them no harm. I Quit is, the band says, thus titled because its songs are about “quitting something that isn’t working for us anymore”. More than its concept, though, the listener is swept away by the sisters’ joy in ransacking their skills and studio, any which way they can, to create sun-dappled retro-futurist pop.This is not pop in the Gaga/Roan vein, though. Alongside ex-Vampire Weekend super- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Over its crisp 32 minutes and nine songs, Altogether Stranger embraces electropop, lo-fi terrain and gothic solo contemplation. By deconstructing modern R&B, the upbeat “Come on” is as close as it gets to pop’s mainstream. The unifying factors are Lael Neale’s way with a tune – she writes a memorable song – and her penetrating yet translucent voice.The Virginia-born, now Los Angeles-resident Neale’s third album is firmly in the art pop bag. Her main instrument is the electronic Suzuki Omnichord, which can employ pre-set rhythms, be played with buttons and strummed via a touch-sensitive Read more ...
joe.muggs
There’s always been a goofy charm about Billy Idol. As an implausibly chiselled Adonis shining out from the deliberate ugliness of the original London punk scene, he was a misfit among misfits. As a pop star through the ‘80s, he was visibly so spectacularly high almost all the time that he somehow made everything pantomime-ish around him. Latterly he’s been such a perfect encapsulation of the Brit rock star in LA archetype he could quite plausibly be starring in a Spinal Tap spinoff.Along the way, though, he’s made quite a few really great records and remained absolutely, in every possible Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As well as generating a ceaseless stream of albums, whether live, studio or culled from his copious archives, Neil Young has also amassed a fairly hefty body of film work, either as director, star or both. Like his music, his movies are created with a kind of confrontational spontaneity, grabbed on the run with rough edges and non-sequiturs still intact. His directorial debut, 1973’s only fleetingly coherent Journey Through the Past, gave early warning of what to expect.In the case of Coastal, there’s a directorial hand behind the camera, belonging to Young’s wife Daryl Hannah. She also Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“I knew I wanted all the effects practical and made for real. The movie is about flesh and bones, about women’s bodies.”Coralie Fargeat, writer, editor, producer and director of The Substance, is discussing the “visceral journey” and extraordinary make-up effects in her body-horror genre movie, which won an Oscar for best make-up and hairstyling. It was also nominated in several other categories, and Demi Moore, as ageing Jane Fonda-esque TV fitness star Elisabeth Sparkle, won a Golden Globe award for best actress.A featurette, The Making of the Substance, is one of the extras in this MUBI Read more ...