America
Jasper Rees
The traditional place for such films is below the radar. A low-budget portrait of an ethnic minority in America which has schlepped round the festivals, Amreeka could just as easily have been cold-shouldered by distributors. It tells of a family of Palestinians redomiciled in the Midwest just as America is invading Iraq and anti-Muslim prejudice infiltrates American streets and classrooms. A good three years after being shot, it would look a bit passé, a story that had missed its moment. But a certain Public Enemy No One being shot in the head last week has given Amreeka a shot in the arm.A Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Of course, Hanson are a joke. Literally. On the internet you’ll find them as a subsection of "blonde jokes". And looking back on 12-year-old Zac’s ridiculous hair on “MMMBop”, it’s easy to see why. But they are no longer blond, nor are they kids anymore. In fact, between them, they’ve got eight kids of their own. And so the question is, is now the time to take the clean-cut brothers from Tulsa, Oklahoma seriously?And the answer is, sort of. Sure, Shout it Out is unlikely to make anyone’s album-of-the-year list, but where they get it right there’s something so joyous about the trio’s Motown- Read more ...
David Nice
Its advertised centre of gravity, a concerto specially commissioned from affable whiz-kid Nico Muhly, turned out weightless, and not in a good way. Yet the programming of the Aurora Orchestra's latest adventure showed us why the Arts Council were right to fund this young and dynamic constellation. OK, so I'd have been happiest with a whole evening of Hindemith Kammermusik rather than one movement. But for the new generation of pick-and-mix onliners, the seven eclectic works on the bill couldn't have been more enticing, thanks to the iron fist of velvet-glove live stream presenter-conductor Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Earlier this week, in my review of Shelby Lynne, I suggested that the record industry’s one-way ticket on a fast train to oblivion is, at least, proving to be the mother of invention. Everyone has to work a little harder and smarter for our attention, a point which David Ford’s latest tour, which ends tonight in a sold-out show in Birmingham, makes emphatically: part book reading, part solo concert, part intimate natter, part request show, it might have seemed desperate if it hadn’t been so engaging.Ford has just published his first book, I Choose This: How to Nearly Make it in the Music Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The Foundling Museum in Bloomsbury preserves the story of the Foundling Hospital, established in 1739 by Thomas Coram, the artist Hogarth and the composer Handel. At the end of April, American country singer Mary Gauthier performed The Foundling, a concept album telling of her birth and adoption in 1962 and the attempted reunion with her birth mother some 45 years later. Spiky-haired, in a black tee, waistcoat and black jeans, and sporting Lennon-style tinted specs, Gauthier cut a striking figure amidst the Rococo splendour of the Museum’s Picture Gallery, the lean, indomitable singer armed Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Two cult singers on the same bill. A stirring prospect in itself, but last night they were both also at watersheds in their careers. The headliner, Ron Sexsmith, was looking to cultivate a more mainstream audience. He’s had his moments over the years, such as when he was covered by Chris Martin, Rod Stewart and Curtis Stigers. But last night he seemed to want the fans to have another look at him. On one song he styled himself as a “late bloomer”, but he didn’t need to convince this crowd.Even though producer Bob Rock has done a good job putting some AOR sheen on the new record, the songs are Read more ...
Joe Muggs
If, as the cliché goes, hardship begets soulfulness, then given her life story between her 2008 debut and this (Wikipedia can provide the details if you're feeling ghoulish), Jennifer Hudson should now be the new Aretha. As it goes, she wasn't short of raw soul talent before: she veritably shone as an American Idol contestant in 2004, and her turn in the movie Dreamgirls has become a watchword for stop-you-in-your-tracks expressive vocal power as well as comic acting talent – ironically, her performance in that film of the song “And I'm Telling You I'm Not Going” has since spawned 10,000 Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The monumental documentary Sweetgrass captures the back-breaking final sheep drives by the herders of the Raisland-Allestad Ranch, Montana, into the vertiginous heights of the Absaroka-Beartooth Mountains, which lie north of the Yellowstone National Park in the Rockies. These herders’ purpose was to bring the huge flock to pasture on public land, a 19th-century tradition that became economically unviable in the 2000s. Lawrence Allestad and his wife Elaine ended up selling the ranch, which had been in business for 104 years, to a non-rancher in 2004 and their federal grazing rights to an Read more ...
lucien.castaing-taylor
I grew up in Liverpool, but my grandmother was from the Lake District - Wordsworth country, and about as rural and remote as could be. We used to stay with her on weekends, and I still remember the sense of freedom as we escaped the post-industrial detritus of Merseyside and Lancashire, and approached her cottage in this Arcadian paradise. But my bucolic fantasy was of course the projection of an urban child, who knew next to nothing about what it was like to actually inhabit this landscape, whether as a farmer, a sheep, a cow, a fox, or any other animal I spent my weekends gazing at.Decades Read more ...
David Nice
We’re talking in Berlin for two reasons: Andrew Litton has just renewed his contract with the Bergen Philharmonic – he’ll see out at least 12 years as the Norwegian orchestra’s principal conductor – and they’ve now reached the holiest of holies on their European tour, the Philharmonie. The long-term relationship is rare enough, given the musical chairs of today’s higher-paid international conductors, though not unique. Yet it seems to me that what they have together probably is - and I can say, hand on heart, that the Bergen/Litton Berlin concert knocked spots off the one time I heard the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Without intending to, Fleet Foxes set a benchmark with their debut album in 2008. One that resonated. So much so that the release of their second album, Helplessness Blues, is accompanied by sell-out shows at top-drawer venues. The love of their sensitively delivered, beautifully crafted and emotive folk rock is clear. But anyone expecting a rerun of the debut on Helplessness Blues is in for a surprise. What’s known and loved is here. There’re also more than a few left turns.Fleet Foxes will keep the fans they have, but the broadened musical palette and new idiosyncrasies exhibited on Read more ...
carole.woddis
David Mamet plays can, nearly always, be relied upon to be muscular. Leastways, when you think about his early signature plays – American Buffalo (1975), Sexual Perversity in Chicago (1976) and the Pulitzer award-winning Glengarry Glen Ross (1983) – the first thing that springs to mind is the manner and cadence of male speech and communication. A consistent critique of capitalism, Mamet’s early works did it by exploring masculinity and brilliantly dissecting the male psyche and the strutting aggression of men involved in scoring one over each other, be it in gambling or pulling a con Read more ...