Sweden
Kieron Tyler
From its title-track opening cut to the final moments of its closer “Sova”, Allas Sak is recognisably a Dungen album. The musical dynamic between the Swedish quartet’s members and their collective sound is so distinctive that they effectively constitute a one-band genre. Allas Sak does not have as many dives into a jazz-informed inner space as its predecessor 2010’s Skit I Allt, and is also not as pastoral.The new album is, instead, more minimally arranged and balances melody with interrelated instrumental passages with a greater fluidity than previously. As ever, the lyrics are in Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The television series Downton Abbey and Upstairs, Downstairs, along with Robert Atman’s film Gosford Park, notably illustrate the public’s continued fascination with the relation between masters, mistresses and their servants. Yet none of them, not even the Altman, charted that relation with quite as much complexity and ferocity as Strindberg’s Miss Julie, in which no-one emerges well from the class struggle.Written in 1888, the play represented Strindberg’s attempt to bring a new degree of naturalism to theatre. Its style and psychological acuity lend itself well to cinema; though being a Read more ...
Guy Oddy
In a way that is reminiscent of fellow Swedes and label mates Goat, Hills play a primal psychedelia that draws from a far broader spectrum of sounds than the usual garage rock and motorik grooves of their British and American fellow travellers. On Frid, their third album, vocals are largely put aside in favour of spaced-out instrumentals or chanting that suggests medieval plainsong fed into an effects box. While the guitar sounds and grooves of Tinariwen and Songhoy Blues rub up against the chemical drone of Spacemen 3 to make some serious pagan ritual music that both moves hips and flips Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Don’t be fooled by the header picture. Despite the relaxed poses, Iceland’s Pink Street Boys are amongst the angriest, loudest, most unhinged bands on the planet right now. Hits #1, their debut vinyl album – which follows distorted-sounding, lower-than-lo-fi cassette and digital-only releases – is so impolite and wild that once the rest of the world gets the message the story of what constitutes the current-day music of their home country will have to be rewritten.They are not an anomaly. Iceland is currently witnessing a groundswell of loosely punk–inspired bands drawing from the edgy spirit Read more ...
David Nice
Pallid figures in striplit rooms with too much empty space: if you’ve seen a Roy Andersson film before, you’ll know what to expect from his latest essay on the human comedy. Truly human the film becomes only by cautious degrees, even if we start out laughing at rather than sighing with characters like the hapless salesmen Sam (Nils Westblom) and Jonathan (Holge Andersson), who only want people to have fun with vampire teeth, a bag of laughs and a sinister rubber mask. It’s a bit like a sketch show with running gags, but instead of diminishing returns this meditation on harsh, sad existence Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Pinpointing exactly what makes Force Majeure so disquieting is difficult, and a second viewing on DVD confirms this. Overall, the elements of the film are unified so smoothly that focusing on any one of them doesn’t indicate the unexpectedly powerful effect of Ruben Östlund’s dissection of the collapse of male character.The impact could be a result of the director and writer's avowed reversal of the filmic hero trope. It could be Johannes Kuhnke’s intense depiction of father Tomas’s denial and subsequent breakdown in the wake of his transgression. Or it could be that such a sensitive theme Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
If A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence induces reflections on the nature of existence, the resultant mood could initially be very glum indeed. Swedish director Roy Andersson’s meditation is the self-declared “final part of a trilogy about being a human being”. It opens with three vignettes focusing on unexpected deaths and is, overall, grey in tenor. It is also, though, laced with humour and a very precise eye for changes of mood, the subtle differences between each of us and the tenderness which can bond even those who seem directly opposed to each other.A Pigeon Sat on a Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
There’s a certain sound - one that I’d describe as “pastoral folk”, without ever being certain of what that means - that has always struck me as quintessentially English. Jenny Lysander’s debut album is one that ticks many of those boxes: sparse arrangements, ageless vocals, even a song called “Lavender Philosophy”, which is about as pastoral as it gets without involving grazing animals. To immerse oneself, dreamily, in Northern Folk is to feel as you did the first time you heard Laura Marling and wonder how one so young could create something so wise and so timeless (at 21, Lysander is just Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The fault-lines of human relationships are tested in Swedish director Ruben Ostlund’s Force Majeure, and prove much more fraught than the physical threat inherent in the film’s glorious alpine landscapes. Its opening scenes capture a Swedish couple, on a skiing vacation in the Alps with their two young children, having their photographs taken by a resort snapper: as they readjust their poses, it seems like a search for a depiction of the perfect family. But beneath such hinted ideals, there’s a heavy underlying level of unease bubbling, which will duly unravel over the course of the film’s Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Very often, the greatest impact comes without shouting. Subtlety can have a power lingering longer than the two-minute thrill of a yell. So it is with Bridges, the eighth album by Eivør. In the past, the Faroese singer-songwriter has collaborated with Canada’s Bill Bourne, the Danish Radio Big Band and Ireland’s Donal Lunny, and taken turns into country and jazz. Bridges builds on her last album though, 2012’s Room, as further evidence that she is now more focused than ever.Bridges is an all English-language album. It opens with the elegiac “Remember Me”: the song asks “Will I leave a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Sometimes, nothing can prevent love blossoming. Sebastian’s second encounter with Andreas is punctuated by the latter vomiting after too much booze. It doesn’t put the brakes on the former’s growing passion for the leather-jacketed object of his affections. Soon, the pair are lovers despite Andreas declaring that he is not gay. He cannot resist Sebastian.The path of love often takes strange turns. In the Swedish film Something Must Break, the roadmap is ripped up. Sebastian (Saga Becker, pictured below right) is androgynous and gay: he is transgender. Although accepting of who he is, Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
This 1887 domestic drama by August Strindberg is rarely seen in London, and Abbey Wright’s new production of Laurie Slade’s new version might have seized the opportunity to give this gristly chunk of pre-Freudian sexual polemic a thorough 21st-century shake-up. That chance is missed.Instead of bracing modernity (the play would have startled its first audiences with its naturalism), we’re presented with a historical hybrid of a world in which the characters wear approximations of fin-de-siècle dress, and the arrival of visitors is heralded by sleighbells, yet a husband may speak of his wife as Read more ...