America
Rachel Halliburton
Aaron Copland’s gleaming, monumental Fanfare for the Common Man was written to mark the USA’s entry into World War II. Those thunderous drums and soaring trumpets symbolised the moment when America formally announced itself as the greatest power in the world and its most ardent champion of democracy. How poignant, then, to hear it as a resonant opening to this year’s BBC Proms, in a programme that celebrated America’s 250th anniversary while reminding us that we no longer know what this superpower stands for. Nonetheless, in the moment, the crashing tam-tam and the crescendoing brass provided Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Ana Mendieta’s work gives me the creeps. This is a deeply unfashionable view, so much so that I may well be cancelled for it. Mendieta is so highly regarded that The Guardian devoted a four-page feature to her while their art critic Jonathan Jones gave her Tate Modern exhibition a five-star review. For me the job of a critic is to be as honest as possible and, although I would love to like her work, it – or rather, the work for which she is most revered – makes me cringe. But more of that later.Having died in dubious circumstances at the horribly young age of 36, Mendieta has become a Read more ...
Ellie Roberts
Everything I Ever Saw continues The Menzingers’ tradition of heartfelt storytelling through their signature Americana punk rock style. It's an album built on consistency rather than reinvention, leaning heavily into the formula of impassioned vocals and steady rock riffs that has made the band so beloved. The use of Shin Noguchi’s street photography for the artwork immediately stamps the album with a recognisable personality, the same intriguing, sombre vulnerability that is present across most of their album covers is undeniable here. In fact, it is one of their strongest artwork Read more ...
Sarah Kent
How to Live on Earth should be compulsory viewing in every classroom, boardroom, town hall and government office on the globe. Billed as a “how-to video” the documentary offers hope as well as a realistic view of the dire straits our planet is in.Director Fredi Devas worked with David Attenborough on seasons two and three of Planet Earth, recording the stunning beauty of nature so as to bring home what our gung-ho economic policies are destroying, but without suggesting any realistic alternatives.In How to... Devas takes the next step. Focusing on three key questions – How to value nature? Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Confessions II arrives amid a welter of promotional spectacle and global corporate partnerships. At heart, though, it’s Madonna retreating from projects stuck in development hell, and working through bereavement, via the salve of making music in a low-key London situation with Stuart Price. He produced 2005’s Confessions on a Dance Floor, to which this is a sequel. The preceding singles did not bode well but Confessions II contains surprises and shows a superstar holding her own.Returning to the arena of clubland bangers, and presented as a continuous mix, it’s hampered by the fact that house Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Butthole Surfers were once a major force in underground rock music. Due to a combination of bad luck and bad decisions, poor management and selling far fewer records than the likes of Nirvana, however, they have unjustly found themselves relegated to a scanty footnote in music’s history books. One of the pieces of bad luck that led to this story state was their record company, Capitol burying and refusing to release their 1997 album After the Astronaut – claiming it as “unsellable”.In fact, the album was eventually heavily remixed, with some new tracks added and others removed for the 2001 Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
One sometimes finds oneself wondering whether Harlan Coben is an author or a set of AI procedures designed to manufacture plots of ludicrous twistiness. Whatever he or it is, it’s managed to infatuate Netflix and Prime Video, who can’t stop turning this stuff into TV wallpaper (The Stranger, The Woods, Shelter etc). Richard Armitage quite often stars in them.Armitage isn’t in I Will Find You, but most of the usual Coben-esque traits are in evidence. There are frequent enigmatic flashbacks to past events which have paved the way for the present-day action, there are missing persons and altered Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Judging from her second album, young country singer Willow Avalon has kissed her fair share of frogs. She doesn’t let them off the hook. Rather, she stamps all over them with a vivacious ferocity that makes for entertaining songs. “You’re so full of shit that your britches don’t fit, and your mama is the only one that likes you,” she allows on “Work to Do”. And there’s plenty more where that came from.Avalon’s father is the offbeat country singer Jim White, perhaps best-known to connoisseurs of Deep South arcana for the excellent documentary Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus. Maybe she Read more ...
Matt Wolf
O Glengarry, where is thy sting? That's likely to be one response to the bewildering Old Vic revival of David Mamet's defining (and remarkable) Glengarry Glen Ross, which I saw in its 1983 National Theatre world premiere production when I first moved to London and have loved ever since. I missed its Broadway incarnation last year, a star vehicle for a then recently-Oscar'ed Kieran Culkin and directed by Patrick Marber, the Tony-winning Englishman whose own plays (Closer, especially) have more than a whiff of Mametian ruthlessness about them. So there was every reason to see what might Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Currently on show at the Barbican is a video that makes your hackles rise. Two “savages” are on display in a cage surrounded by punters who happily pay a dollar to pose for photographs with these exotic natives or else to watch them dance. These hideous interactions are being played out in museums in supposedly civilised countries including America, Spain and Australia.You don’t have to be Einstein to smell a rat, though; the signs are there for all to see. Along with her grass skirt, the woman wears shades and sneakers while the man’s Mayan-style breast plate and head gear are accompanied by Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Spielberg’s new close encounter of the third kind asks for faith in humanity and extraterrestrial life which it struggles to earn, his old sense of wonder only fitfully sparking as he argues that, whether contemplating our neighbours or the cosmos, we are not alone.Jaws, Close Encounters and Spielberg’s later Munich all borrowed from the Seventies conspiracy thriller, and Disclosure Day too begins as Daniel (Josh O’Connor) pilfers copious buried alien evidence from the US government’s secret Wardex Corporation, taking startled girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) along on his flight from company boss Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
“I tell people this is my first and last big band album,” says Helen Sung about Oracles. The Houston-born pianist received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2021, and that enabled her to bring what she has called this “dream project” to fruition, to write and record a whole programme of music for big band. The new music she says, “pays homage to the jazz masters whose music, wisdom and generosity changed my life,” and that gratitude fuels an album which is an upbeat celebration of several of the jazz luminaries whom she has known, learnt from and been inspired by.If Oracles doesn’t get a Read more ...