Scotland
Adam Sweeting
Apparently on a clear day in the Shetlands, you can see Norway and Iceland. And from about halfway through the first instalment of this Caledonian murder mystery, you could see all the way to the final reel and take a well-educated guess about who did it.I was reading an opinion somewhere the other day that ITV's Broadchurch was an inferior rip-off of such fashionable Scandinavian fare as The Killing or The Bridge. Can't see it myself. Shetland, on the other hand, was riddled with Nordicisms and fit the bill perfectly. Shetland (the place) was even a Norwegian province back in the Middle Ages Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
As a finely drawn portrayal of loneliness and solitude encouraged by bottled-up emotions, Shell would be noteworthy enough. But it also contains two scenes – father and daughter interactions - that are deeply uncomfortable viewing. First-time feature director Scott Graham’s encapsulation of the life of 17-year old Shell and her father Pete’s life at an isolated Scots garage isn’t going to be quickly forgotten.Shell’s mother left years ago, for unspecified reasons. With an epileptic father, her routine, such as it is, is set by the infrequent customers that stop to fill up on the journey Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Straight out of Dumfries, Mull and Inverness, via Edinburgh, with a sound and songs that boast originality and imagination, Homework are small in profile but already nigh-on perfectly formed. Their name, judging from the album cover and sounds within, is a nod to Kraftwerk, but 13 Towers is no retro synth-fest.This four-piece combine electronic effects, pulses and tones with guitars and modern, driving, catchy songs. Not for them, either, the currently in-vogue Vampire Weekend-with-a-synth route. Theirs is not bland indie with slight electronic trimmings. Instead they draw on all sorts of Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The last time James McAvoy played the Scottish king, it was in a scintillating reworking of the play written in the modern idiom by Peter Moffat, for the BBC's ShakespeaRe-Told season in 2005. McAvoy was Joe Macbeth, a Glasgow chef passionate about his work, the restaurant kitchen where he worked a fitting place for the play's blood and gore.Jamie Lloyd's production is equally thrilling and radical, and is set 50 years hence in a (possibly) post-independence Scotland, brutalised by war and, we may assume from the programme notes, ravaged by the effects of climate change. Soutra Gilmour's Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
In theory, it’s close to impossible to achieve some semblance of mainstream success without being decried as a sellout by at least a proportion of your fanbase. Yet I don’t think there was a Scottish indie music fan who greeted this week's news that Frightened Rabbit had scored a Top 10 chart place for their major-label debut without a mixture of pride and delight.It helps of course that on Pedestrian Verse, Selkirk’s most famous sons have stripped back the slight gloss of over-production that threatened to overwhelm 2010’s The Winter of Mixed Drinks. This fourth album sees Scott Hutchison’s Read more ...
David Nice
Viennese night in Glasgow’s Candleriggs was hardly going to be a simple matter of waltzes and polkas. True, its curtain-raiser was a Blue Danube with red blood in its veins rather than the anodyne river water of this year’s New Year concert from Austria’s capital; one would expect no less from Donald Runnicles after the refined but anaemic Franz Welser-Möst. In Runnicles’s programme, though, extreme contrast was all: J Strauss II spookily echoed by the elegiac 3/4s in Berg’s Violin Concerto, and another 12-tone boy, Webern, exercising restraint in arrangements of Schubert’s German Dances to Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
On first play No Selfish Heart, the solo debut from The Phantom Band’s stately baritone Rick Anthony, sounds a world away from the sonic experimentation often played out in the singer’s work elsewhere. Take the time to listen closely, however, and a collection that seems to take its cues from traditional folk songwriting reveals itself to be far more complex: beautiful, menacing and darkly comic.While it’s not uncommon for such solo efforts to be several years in the making, No Selfish Heart has had an even longer genesis than most - with some of this material from Anthony’s ‘Redbeard’ alter- Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Biffy Clyro's sixth album certainly wins in the value for money stakes. Opposites is a double album clocking in at 78 minutes which finds the Kilmarnock trio developing their big, expansive sound and getting to grips, both lyrically and musically, with their arena-bestriding status. It is bold, brash and exciting in places, but it also feels as if it is continuing the process of smoothing over the rough edges which made the band so interesting when they first emerged in the early noughties.It is easy to dismiss Biffy as part of the genus Hotelus Tidyupus – that well-mannered literate Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As political campaigns go, Bob Servant's bid to win a by-election in Broughty Ferry (a real-life seaside suburb of Dundee) looks more like a drunken practical joke, or the result of an ill-judged bet. A fluent and shameless liar whose only credentials are a lifetime of dodginess, Servant's motives are venal and his ambitions entirely self-centred. He knows nothing about politics or, apparently, anything else, expect perhaps selling hamburgers, which he has done for many decades.Adapted from Neil Forsyth's books, Bob Servant Independent is low-key and low budget, but looks capable of building Read more ...
Laura Silverman
“What should it matter to us if a few words, then a few more and then a language just go,” asks Iain Finlay Macleod’s richly textured play. Somersaults may end in a shrug of inevitability, but its thrust is that language defines identity. In losing a few words, we do not just lose sounds. We endanger traditions, memories and relationships.The play, which was first staged at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh in March 2011, centres on James, an entrepreneur in his thirties from the Isle of Lewis, off the west coast of Scotland. James has a beautiful wife, a plush flat in Hampstead and Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
In our chilled Decembers, even when snowless, winter scenes are visually synonymous with Christmas, and Henry Raeburn’s small painting of The Reverend Robert Walker, from the 1790s, skating with abstracted solemnity and perfect balance on Duddingston Loch, only a few minutes away from the National Gallery of Scotland itself, is one of the most irresistibly memorable seasonal images. Since the skating minister entered the national collection in 1949, his portrait has become immensely famous: the gallery’s most popular postcard by far, and reproduced on jewellery, keyrings, ties, scarves, Read more ...
bruce.dessau
The remix album is an ungainly beast. The worst feel like a sign of creative bankruptcy while even the best feel like a shameless cash-in on a successful project. Hopelessly devoted fans might still call it a win-win situation, but to outside ears it doesn't matter how hot the hotshot producers are, the lingering echo of a remix album is often the sound of a product being milked dry.And so to Mogwai's A Wrenched Virile Lore, which takes it cue from 2011’s Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will (the title is almost an anagram, a remix, of the earlier title). The genre-trouncing Glaswegians have Read more ...