Los Angeles
Joe Muggs
Founded in 1998, the Los Angeles based Anticon collective has become one of the most curiously individual of 21st century groupings. Taking the wordiest and nerdiest tendencies of hip hop – notably the slam poetry-informed tongue-twisting of fellow Californians like Freestyle Fellowship and Blackalicious – and the wordiest and nerdiest tendencies of electronically enhanced psychedelic indie as their starting points, they built a world of introspection and frazzled wordplay that they still inhabit to this day via several dozen collaborative and individual projects.Why? was originally the stage Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
Since time immemorial the Edinburgh International Festival has started with a juicy choral epic designed to show off the Festival Chorus and the opulent Usher Hall. So this performance of Mahler’s Second Symphony would normally have been billed as the opening concert. But the forces of democratisation and outreach have been at work. In recent years the festival has kicked off with a large scale free “opening event,” aptly mirrored by the popular free fireworks concert at the end.This year the grand opening event was in fact a concert on Friday evening by the very same orchestra as that Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
With Gloria (2013), A Fantastic Woman (2017) and Disobedience (2018), Chile’s Sebastián Lelio has earned a deserved reputation as a sympathetic director of women. It may seem a strange move for him to remake Gloria only a few years after the Spanish-language original, but Lelio claims he was inspired to do it by a meeting with Julianne Moore, who said she’d do it if he would direct.The action has been transplanted to Los Angeles from Santiago, with both the English script and many of the camera shots closely following the 2013 version. It’s the story of a 50-something divorcée determined to Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Christian Lindberg: Steppenwolf – Viola Concerto, Tales of Galamanta, Peking Twilight Rafael Altino (viola), Odense Symphony Orchestra/Christian Lindberg (BIS)“I do not write in any style whatsoever! I just listen to what my brain and my soul tell me, and what I hear I simply put down on paper. To say anything more about my work would be pretentious nonsense.” So says Christian Lindberg in this disc’s booklet, so I'll restrict myself to saying just that the music on this disc is witty, engaging and accessible. Lindberg, best known as a virtuoso trombonist and voted the greatest brass Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Rocketman opens with its hero in flamboyant stage costume stomping into a drab group therapy session. Pulling the sparkling horns off his magnificent head-dress and shuffling his feathered wings into a seat, Elton John demands of his fellow addicts, ‘How long is this going to take?’ The intimidated counsellor replies, ‘That’s really up to you’. But the answer for the audience is more precise – we’re about to watch two hours of misery memoir intercut with great songs. Rocketman is biopic as drama therapy; its star gets to tell us in detail how his late parents never loved him Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Unfortunately, it’s now reached the point where it’s impossible to mention Morrissey without politics overshadowing music. His recent wearing of a For Britain Party lapel pin on US TV is only the latest in a catalogue of public stances that seem to indicate he’s a fan of the far right. His new album, an imaginative explosion of intriguing cover versions, including multiple collaborations, may be an attempt to move the conversation on but, for many, things have already gone too far.From mid-Seventies Bowie to 21st century John Lydon, Morrissey’s home of Los Angeles can do strange things to Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
This year, Cannes has been adamantly defending traditional cinema, with more than a few jibes at Netflix (who remain persona non grata at the festival), but that hasn’t stopped them screening two episodes of Nicolas Winding Refn’s new Amazon TV series, Too Old To Die Young. Refn has gone on record stating that his latest project is still cinema — a 13-hour film that shows all the verve and ambition you’d expect from the Danish auteur. If these two episodes are anything to go by, his argument is more than believable.Episodes four and five might seem an odd choice to screen at the world- Read more ...
Joe Muggs
It's five years since Steven Ellison aka Flying Lotus released an album, and it's not entirely clear how far he's moved creatively. To be fair he's been busy branching out in other directions, producing for superstar rapper Kendrick Lamar, making short films, and helping members of his Brainfeeder stable like Thundercat and Kamasi Washington along to greater fame. But with this album he seems to have taken up precisely where 2014's “Your Dead” left off. The same preoccupations are here: exquisite musicianship mashed together with deliberate decay and destruction, high falutin spiritual Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Billie Eilish is a vaudevillian. Crack that and everything else falls into place. Her impossible precociousness (at 17, she's a superstar and has been in the public eye for four years) and voraciousness (her and her brother Finneas's writing swerves from torch songs to trap beats, far-out electronica to glam-goth) should by all rights be an annoying mess, but absorb this album like a hallucinatory gothic cabaret show and it all makes sense. The gender ambiguities and gallows humour make sense. Even the manic pixie dream girl filtered via Resident Evil persona makes sense. Dammit, even the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Disappointment is instant, anyway. David Robert Mitchell’s second film, It Follows, was a teenage horror tragedy of perfectly sustained emotion. His third, Under the Silver Lake, seems superficial and scattershot, a callow effort at a magnum opus, in which the former work’s feeling is replaced by pop culture riffs. Keep watching, though, and the superficiality at least has a point, and its lead actor, Andrew Garfield, makes its heart beat.Garfield’s Sam lives in LA’s Silver Lake neighbourhood, resenting work and so unable to pay his rent. Binoculars to ogle his topless neighbour and phone- Read more ...
Tim Cornwell
Confessions first: I fell asleep mid-way through Time Is Love/Tiempo es Amor, from too much time on trains and planes over the New Year. I was kindly allowed back for a second visit to the Finborough Theatre show, for a Sunday matinee, dosed with coffee and determined to concentrate fully. This was a good thing. The production's name attraction, Olivier Award-winner Sheila Atim, had previously seemed a minor part whereas her masterful performance (must one say mistressful these days?) as Rosa the stripper is a highlight of the piece. It was also a good thing because the plot of Time is Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
On Drums was inhabited by a parade of fine-looking young and middle aged multi-ethnic anglophone drummers, all introduced by Stewart Copeland, the American drummer of the Police. In vintage film and contemporary interviews his chosen musicians seemed almost invariably fit and trim whatever the substances ingested in the past. Presumably touring schedules and the sheer physical effort (only temporarily supplanted, it turns out, by Roger Linn’s 1980s invention of drum machines) of banging the instruments kept our musicians in good nick.Copeland suggested that percussionists, sitting behind Read more ...