Canada
Nick Hasted
Jazz’s most popular expressions today stand on or just over its borders: Thundercat’s rubbery bass virtuosity and dreamy laptop soul, Robert Glasper’s improv R&B, Squarepusher’s spontaneous electronica, Snarky Puppy’s jam-band anthems, GoGo Penguin’s rave piano trio, or The Bad Plus’s rock covers. Jazz and hip-hop’s relationship was meanwhile deep-rooted long before Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly (2015) became the decade’s most important album for jazz, lifting collaborators such as Kamasi Washington into the stratosphere, and awakening popular interest in analogue instrumental Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Cassandra and her sister – or perhaps they’re friends or lovers – seem extraordinarily in tune. Like choreographed dancers, they move precisely in unison, down to tripping over their scarves at the same moment or flopping drunkenly into bed together while a cell phone buzzes beside them unanswered, on and on into the night.Slowly, however, it becomes apparent that actually there’s only one Cass and, flipping the idea of actors playing their own twins on its head, she’s played by two women: Amy Nostbakken and Norah Sadava, who co-wrote and co-starred in their acclaimed original two-hander play Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The title is in keeping with those of previous portentously handled albums from the Montréal art-rockers. There was their breakthrough 2007 set The Besnard Lakes Are The Dark Horse and 2010’s The Besnard Lakes Are The Roaring Night. The latter’s cover was similar to that of ...The Great Thunderstorm Warnings – a murky painting of a glowering sky hanging over a hostile milieu.On the new album, their sixth, “Last of the Great Thunderstorm Warnings” is the final track. After just-under seven minutes of soaring, stately drama comes a further 11 minutes of a low drone, akin to what Spiritualized Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The French Canadian director Denis Villeneuve is best known for mainstream films like Sicario, Arrival, and Blade Runner 2049, stylishly expressive in their harnessing of alienating terrains, notably deserts and plains. Their claustrophobic equivalent in Polytechnique (2009), the eerily quiet 77-minute indie Villeneuve made before his 2010 breakthrough Incendies, is a college campus and its environs during a blizzard – the brutalist architecture and freezing temperature redolent of the feelings of the lone shooter who matter-of-factly fires his semi-automatic rifle at women in a classroom, a Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Brahms: Symphonies 3 & 4 Australian Chamber Orchestra/Richard Tognetti (ABC Classic)Why these live performances from 2015 and 2013 have waited so long for release is a mystery; this is the best Brahms symphony disc I’ve heard in ages. Charles Mackerras and Robin Ticciati have shown that small-scale Brahms can work well, but this disc has more energy and feistiness than either. Here, Richard Tognetti leads and directs an augmented Australian Chamber Orchestra of around 50 players. The strings never sound anaemic and there’s some glorious wind and brass playing, the horn solos in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Many have struggled to bring a new slant to the horror genre, but writer-director Brandon Cronenberg has managed it with Possessor, his second full-length feature. Being the son of David Cronenberg, a pioneer of so-called “body horror”, obviously didn’t hurt, but Brandon is shaping up as more than just a chip off the parental block.Possessor centres around Tasya Vos (Andrea Riseborough), an agent working for a sophisticated assassination corporation. Guided by her handler Girder (Jennifer Jason Leigh), Tasya hunts her prey by being implanted into the brain of an unsuspecting stooge, which she Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Moral reckonings don't come much more serious than the one that propels The Lie, in which a family must deal with a murder perpetrated by their daughter. Will Jay (a weary-looking Peter Sarsgaard) and Rebecca (the wonderful Mireille Enos) hand 15-year-old Kayla (Joey King) over to the authorities? Not bloody likely, and their decision leads all three down an abyss which makes for grimly compelling watching, at least until a twist ending that threatens to undo what has come before.Until that time, writer-director Veena Sud's Canadian-shot film, first seen on the festival circuit in 2018, Read more ...
David Nice
How do they do it? Bach and Angela Hewitt, I mean, transfixing and focusing the audience in the Wigmore Hall – at home, too, hopefully, thanks to the livestreaming– through 13 and three-quarter fugues and four canons, all starting in the same key and (until the last) on the same theme, plus a benediction, the glorious whole amounting to an hour and a half without a break. No-one knows quite how the master intended his final studies in counterpoint to be performed, or even on what instrument(s), but in this superlative pianist’s hands the sequence makes total sense – centred, radical-sounding Read more ...
Daniel Lewis
Ian Williams’s writing is always in motion. For his 2012 poetry collection Personals, and since, he has composed little circular poems, similar (in style though not sentiment) to the posies you sometimes find inscribed on the inside of rings. He incorporates a couple into Reproduction, his debut and Griffin Prize-winning novel. “I’m sorry I made you hate me”, “no I don’t hate you baby don’t hurt me”, they read. Supposedly thought up by a teenager in the throes of childbirth, they speak to the seeming endlessness of labour pains as well as the forging of new bonds that are as hard to split as Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
“Produced by Tommy LiPuma.” That phrase has appeared on just about every Diana Krall album since the summer of 1995, when the Cleveland-born mogul arrived at the GRP label – it would be his sixth and last music industry affiliation – and promptly signed the Canadian singer-pianist.The four words appear again in the credits for each of the twelve tracks of This Dream of You. They are the album’s anomaly. And also, sad to say, its problem.It is an anomaly because Lipuma, with 33 Grammy nominations and 5 Grammys to his name, and 75 million albums sold, passed away Read more ...
Mark Kidel
The emotional rawness of Xavier Dolan’s films reflects a rare humanity and empathy. For someone still only 31, the French-Canadian writer and director displays an uncanny sense of the passionate turmoil that animates his characters. The subtle shifts in moods he achieves may often be sustained through an unusual talent for picking the right music or song, but the tone is never set in a way that manipulates the audience. This makes for a movie that feels powerfully authentic and for this reason deeply touching without ever being sentimental.The central story of his eighth film focuses on the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Alanis Morissette was relieved when fame’s comet swiftly fell to more manageable levels, having crashed into her full-force 25 years ago, when she was just 21. Selling 33 million copies of Jagged Little Pill means, though, that she remains on many people’s minds. With a Diablo Cody-scripted hit musical based on its songs, and vivid female confession no longer an anomaly in the age of Fiona Apple, this eighth album arrives at a receptive moment.“This is the sound of me hitting bottom...and the anatomy of my crash,” Morissette sings in the opener, “Smiling”, seeming to announce another chapter Read more ...