gothic
Edinburgh Fringe 2023 reviews: Casting the Runes / The Return / WoodhillSaturday, 12 August 2023
Casting the Runes, Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★ A viciously critical review gets its unfortunate writer driven mad and sent to an untimely death in this adaptation of a macabre MR James chiller. In that case, I’d better be careful what I say... Read more... |
Lorrie Moore: I am Homeless If This is Not My Home review - between this world and the nextThursday, 27 July 2023
Lorrie Moore’s brief but haunting I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home is a bizarre, unsettling read. At times it’s a road trip, at others a romance, then supernatural horror, Greek tragedy, or an epistolary short story nestled within the larger... Read more... |
theartsdesk at The Three Choirs Festival - Elgar, Vaughan Williams and HammondTuesday, 25 July 2023
The Three Choirs is (are?) off again, for the 295th time, but with a very different look, even from the festivals of my youth, never mind 1715, or whenever the first one was held (there seems to be some doubt about it). The big oratorio... Read more... |
Album: The Damned - DarkadelicThursday, 27 April 2023
The Damned could have been bigger contenders. As anyone who’s seen Wes Orshoski’s feature film biog, Don’t You Wish We Were Dead, will know, their career has been blighted by chaos, line-up changes, catastrophic business decisions and just plain bad... Read more... |
Album: Depeche Mode - Memento MoriThursday, 23 March 2023
Depeche Mode’s Andy “Fletch” Fletcher, who died in May last year, was generally held to contribute to the dynamic of the band more than the music. The only member of the band without songwriting credits, his contribution as peacemaker and “... Read more... |
Album: The Waeve - The WaeveThursday, 02 February 2023
The Waeve is the debut album from life partners Rose Elinor Dougall (long ago in The Pipettes) and Graham Coxon (of Blur), working with James Ford (of Simian Mobile Disco), who co-produces and provides occasional bits of instrumentation. Their album... Read more... |
The Pale Blue Eye review - telltale heartsTuesday, 27 December 2022
Edgar Allan Poe fathered the detective genre as well as a school of Gothic horror, and Scott Cooper’s adaptation of Louis Bayard’s 1830-set novel acts as an origin story for the author and the whodunnit.Augustus Landor (Christian Bale) is the... Read more... |
Album of the Year 2022: Hercules & Love Affair - In AmberFriday, 16 December 2022
It’s been a shit year. Global horrors from Kiev to Karachi and Tehran to Texas all somehow feeling too close for comfort, and even closer to home heatstroke, frostbite, floods, strikes, impoverishment, the grinding realisation that pestilence is a... Read more... |
Dolly Parton's Smoky Mountain Christmas Carol, Queen Elizabeth Hall review - Scrooge goes to TennesseeThursday, 15 December 2022
We’ve had 75 years to get used to Scrooge McDuck, so we can hardly complain if the Americans indulge in a little cultural appropriation and send Charles Dickens’ misanthrope to Depression-era Tennessee for another whirl on the catharsis-redemption... Read more... |
Ott, LSO, Stutzmann, Barbican review - highways to hell (and back)Friday, 11 November 2022
In a Renaissance artist’s studio, a wannabe master proved his skill by drawing a perfect circle. Perhaps playing Beethoven’s A minor Bagatelle (aka “Für Elise”) as an encore should count as the pianist’s equivalent. At the Barbican last night, Alice... Read more... |
Blu-ray: The Strange DoorSunday, 06 November 2022
Under the umbrella Maniacal Mayhem, 1951's The Strange Door has been released on Blu-ray by Eureka Classics with two scarier Boris Karloff movies, The Invisible Ray (1936) and Black Friday (1940). It features one of Karloff’s least maniacal turns –... Read more... |
Album: Slipknot - The End, So FarThursday, 29 September 2022
Make no mistake about it, Slipknot are massive. 23 years after their recording debut, they’ve had 8.5 billion streams, their sixth album, 2019’s We Are Not Your Kind, hit the top of the charts in 12 countries, including the US and the UK, and... Read more... |
