America
Russ Coffey
The anticipation of Glen Campbell’s valedictory concerts has gone far beyond the goodbye to his music. It’s involved a reflection on his entire life. The sugar-throated cowboy with film-star looks and ballads as epic as daybreak in Arkansas has lived life like a great American novel. One of 12 children of a sharecropper, he went on to play the guitar with The Beach Boys, act with John Wayne, marry four times, and count Ronald Reagan as his friend. But with the onset of Alzheimer’s this is the last time the public will get to see him reflecting on his extraordinary years.Recent interviewers Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
At the end of the first series, we left our bedraggled band of survivors in Atlanta, their expectations dashed that they might be able to find some glimmer of hope at the Center for Disease Control. Instead, all they'd discovered was a lone, slightly deranged scientist who had failed to find a cure for the zombie plague. Then the generators ran out of fuel, fail-safe devices kicked in and the CDC blew up.Back to the drawing board. Sheriff Rick Grimes (an increasingly haggard and stubbly Andrew Lincoln) is now leading his tattered troupe towards the army outpost at Fort Benning, where there Read more ...
joe.muggs
This is a strangely kaleidoscopic approach to documentary. A selection of recently unearthed footage and interviews which shows the Black Power movement in the USA through the eyes of idealistic Swedish film-makers, now re-edited and framed with the voices and music of both modern and veteran black radical cultural figures, it provides a disorienting, shifting set of superimposed viewpoints of a period in which in any case change seemed to be the only certainty.The footage itself is gripping and often truly eye-opening, particularly when it's at its most ordinary. The stories of dramatic Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Rich with cinematic life but existing doggedly in the shadow of death, Lynne Ramsay’s epically disquieting adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s bestseller is fluid and imaginatively realised. It's an emotional ambush, but executed with extraordinary precision. Steeped in a magnificent malice and caked in frosty beauty, We Need to Talk About Kevin deals with the lead up to and aftermath of a high-school massacre, and gives us every parent’s worst nightmare – spawning a monster.In We Need to Talk About Kevin Tilda Swinton plays Eva, the mother of the titular antagonist. Though it darts back and forth Read more ...
David Nice
How good it feels, after several decades of Shostakovich quartet series, to be able to say not just “what a tragic life” but also “what ingenious treatment of great ideas, what a range of universal human emotions”. And even, walking on air away from the second concert in the Pacifica Quartet’s Wigmore Shostakovich cycle, “how accepting, how at one with the world”.That light-serious aspect to Shostakovich’s music has usually been a bit booted aside, often by the composer himself. Knowing that Russian quartets like the legendary Borodins understood from personal experience something of what Read more ...
Russ Coffey
When a band of a certain vintage comes in from the cold suddenly to record a new album you can reasonably expect one of three things: total nonsense, a half-decent throwback or, if you’re very lucky, a proper comeback. Eighties art-metallers Jane’s Addiction have already had one pretty impressive return this millennium. That was 2003’s Stray, their first original release since 1990’s classic Ritual de lo Habitual. The question fans of Lollapalooza music have been asking in the last few months is, can they pull off the same trick again?So far, reactions to the record have been polarised Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The 1973 series An American Family is often referred to as television's first reality show, though comparing it to Big Brother or the Kardashians would be like slotting Ingmar Bergman alongside the CBeebies. Its 12 episodes were boiled down from 300-odd hours of observational footage of the Loud family, of Santa Barbara, California, at work, rest and play. But whatever the original intentions of the show's producer, Craig Gilbert, An American Family ended up being far from a fly-on-the-wall portrait of humdrum domestic routine, or "five hours of pass-the-salt", as one TV network Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
By 1977, disco was a cliché to be mocked. But a few years earlier, before its ubiquity, disco was a liberating music uniting minorities on the dance floor. Funk, too, became a cliché, little more than a reductive musical cypher. Two new reissues celebrate these genres when both were still vital, still able to surprise. Disco Gold: Scepter Records & The Birth of Disco is exactly what its title says it is, while Darondo’s Listen to My Song: The Music City Sessions collects A-grade funk that had languished in the vaults until now.Disco wasn’t just the place to dance, but the music, too: a Read more ...
Sarah Kent
It took a long time for architects to embrace popular culture. I attended a talk at the Architectural Association in the mid 1970s, when someone (probably the architect Robert Venturi) waxed lyrical about shiny American diners and hot-dog stands shaped like Frankfurters and extolled the virtues of the madcap fantasies built in Las Vegas."Dazed by desert sun and dazzled by signs, between loving and hating what we saw, we were both jolted clear out of our aesthetic skins," wrote Venturi’s partner Denise Scott-Brown of their American road trip. A nervous buzz of excitement swept the room; Read more ...
Ismene Brown
My acid test for whether a show’s worth going to is, specifically, whether it was worth driving 27 miles into town and 27 miles back, spending, say, three or sometimes four hours travelling to see something 80 minutes long. Not often is it worth that. But if it was on in a theatre near you, it would be worth picking up. And so I say for Arthur Pita’s The Metamorphosis.If I lived in London I would not be malcontented to have gone to see it, since Pita is a distinct theatrical talent, rather in Matthew Bourne’s mould, with a showman’s feel for the stage and a considerable skill in entertaining Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A reverb-swathed guitar picks out a rudimentary surf riff. Drums whack out the Bo Diddley shuffle. The four-to-the-floor bass throbs. Vocals drag the vowels out. As whole, the sound spirals, pulses. At eye-rattling volume, The Black Angels serve up a psychedelia that’s mind expanding, but more about the darkness within than the light without. Their trip isn’t the worst ride you’ve ever been on, but it sure doesn’t take you to the third bardo.We all know the Sixties dream was confirmed AWOL with Altamont, 1969 and Chuck Manson. Although Austin Texas’s Black Angels’s vibe is smack bang with all Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Strings waft in, then coalesce like banks of fog. A piano picks out single notes. Space is left between them. With no immediate rhythmic patterns, the minimalist A Winged Victory For The Sullen make music for becalmed oceans. This collaboration between Adam Wiltzie and Dustin O’Halloran could have come form the deck of the Marie Celeste.There’s quite a lot of this around right now. Ólafur Arnalds, Peter Broderick Nils Frahm, Hauschka, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Nico Muhly and Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood complement each other, creating minimalist pieces that draw on modern classicism. Varying degrees Read more ...