America
Andrew Perry
When these blazin’ psychedelic jazzers first landed here from Austin in 2007, there’d already been four or five years’ worth of herky-jerky cod-post-punk-reviving going on, way past the point of overdose, but White Denim were different, and obviously worth making an exception for. Initially a trio, comprising James Petralli (guitar/vocals), Josh Block (drums) and Steve Terembecki (bass), their early gigs here were explosive, crystallizing the genre-transcendent ideal of the original post-punk era, blasting through everything – 1960s beat, funk, Tropicalia, Krautrock, folk – with Texas-fried Read more ...
emma.simmonds
With its precocious youngsters, enchanting title, wonderful wit and delight in hand-crafted detail, Moonrise Kingdom is every inch a Wes Anderson film. This year’s Cannes opener is steeped in The Royal Tenenbaums’ director’s faux-naïf, frivolous worldview, with nearly every one of its magical frames carrying his signature. He has always presented adult strife as if seen through a child’s fertile eyes - spinning the prosaic, dark or melancholy into something altogether more quixotic. Anderson’s films are poised and peculiar, with their thrift-store chic and deadpan protagonists. Grim reality Read more ...
David Benedict
There comes a point in almost every great soprano’s career when she tells the world that Tosca, the Marschallin or Isolde be damned: what she wanted to sing all along was The Great American Songbook. This announcement tends to be made - how shall I put this? - later rather than sooner. In Jessye Norman’s defence, in 1987, just five years after her landmark, ultra-luscious recording of Strauss’s Four Last Songs, she recorded a disc of Gershwin, Richard Rodgers et al. Yet since that recording included her terrifying, never-to-be-forgotten cover of Billy Joel’s “Just The Way You Are” ( Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The death of Robin Gibb was announced last night. He had been diagnosed with cancer following surgery for a blocked intestine in 2010, when it was discovered that he had cancer of the colon. This April, it was announced he had contracted pneumonia. His death leaves brother Barry as the only surviving Bee Gee.Although influenced by The Beatles, The Bee Gees did, in time, become as big. From the beginning, Robin’s distinctive, soulful and emotional voice was always crucial to their edge. Scissor Sisters' Jake Shears said of Robin, “You are and forever will be a massive influence and inspiration Read more ...
David Benedict
The competition for best dramatic use of a coffee table is won hands down by the wagon-wheel one that prompts a major argument in When Harry Met Sally. Runner-up is the one that appears in Detroit. So deliciously hideous that it gets its own laugh, the symbolic table from Ben and Mary’s nice suburban home is given to new neighbours Sharon and Kenny whose total lack of furniture stems from the fact that they only recently met during a spell in major substance-abuse rehab. Their back yards may abut one another but you don’t have to be Robert Frost to realise that since good fences make good Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In one productive week in the early Sixties, Willie Nelson wrote "Crazy", "Night Life" and "Funny How Time Slips Away”. In Heroes the original Outlaw has submitted three new songs, but also loyally budged up to make room for his composing son Lukas Nelson. Nelson Jnr may have inherited the quakey singing voice, but it’s going to take the 23-year-old nipper rather longer to knock out a trio of tunes quite so monumental. There are three of them here and, while earnest enough, melodically they don’t sit quite right on the old man’s larynx.Nelson will be 80 next year and continues to scratch away Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Brigham Young University in Utah is the largest private university in America, and is probably best known for its affiliation with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, AKA the Mormons. What’s less commonly known is that the university also has a choir (four different choirs, in fact) that is among the finest collegiate ensembles in the US. Rounding off their three-week tour of England and Wales, the mixed-voice BYU Singers last night offered the audience of St John Smith Square a lively guided tour through the history of American choral music, with just a little bit of God thrown Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Tim Burton is a man who has always been at home in the shadows. His is a world of demon barbers, headless horsemen, deformed sewer dwellers and corpse brides, of chalky complexions, dusky aesthetics and billowing fog. His films are designed to chill children, or bewitch big kids, they hark back to the Brothers Grimm and Hammer horror - not least in the recurring presence of avuncular abomination Christopher Lee. At his most creatively successful, with films such as Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands and Batman, Burton gives us anarchy, askew humour and misfits clad in black. And so it is that Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Traction isn’t a very rock‘n’roll word, but sometimes it’s difficult to understand why one act achieves a hold where another doesn’t. So it is with Beach House. They are great, but so are – say – the similarly positioned and styled, but less-lauded, Papercuts. Who grabs ears isn’t predictable. Conversely, Beach House’s fourth album doesn’t deviate massively from how they’ve already defined themselves: misty, shoegazing-derived pop with melancholy melodies and distracted vocals. Resignation hangs heavy.The Baltimore-based duo of Alex Scally and Victoria Legrand (she's the niece of Michel) Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s maybe one for their shrink. The filmmaking Duplass brothers are irresistibly drawn to male losers still clinging to the apron strings. In Cyrus Jonah Hill played an overgrown mommy’s boy in the grip of an oedipal love-in who fights off his single mother’s new man like a fat hellcat. In Jeff, Who Lives at Home things have moved on, though not in an evolutionary sense. Jeff (Jason Segel) may be a good decade older than Cyrus but developmentally he’s not much further down the track.A lumbering work-shy 30-year-old stoner who hangs, to be specific, in his mother’s basement in Baton Rouge, he Read more ...
joe.muggs
The masterstroke of this take on Othello was to draw its focus away from race. It might seem odd to say that of a production in the rhyming vernacular of hip hop in which the Moor was African-American and the rest of the cast were not – but it was deftly done, and as a result avoided any number of crass parallels that could have been drawn, instead focusing on the meat of the play: love and betrayal among men.Acted and narrated, and occasionally sung and danced, by a cast of four men (plus DJ) taking all roles, the action was transplanted from the original's military campaign far from home to Read more ...
Ismene Brown
A new publicly funded UK web channel for performing arts opens tomorrow morning, preparing for a major launch this weekend streaming top international streetdancers to the web audience and publishing John Peel's notes on his record collection. The channel, called The Space, is funded by the Arts Council England in partnership with the BBC, and will run for six months over and through the Olympics period as an on-demand channel to put performance out via smartphones, tablets and computers.Described as an experimental digital arts channel and "communal playground", The Space clearly hopes to Read more ...