California
Helen Hawkins
Can Francesca Moody do it again? Fleabag’s producer has brought Weather Girl to London, after a successful run at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe, mirroring the path taken by Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s creation. But the new show is a much tougher assault on modern mores.Comparisons will be inevitable, though, as both shows are comic monologues, delivered in that conspiratorial way to the audience that became a Fleabag staple. And Stacey, immaculately portrayed by Julia McDermott, is equally personable, though even more out of control. She’s a weather girl for a Fresno TV station, a superslim blonde Read more ...
Sarah Kent
In 2013 the American artist, Noah Davis used a legacy left him by his father to create a museum of contemporary art in Arlington Heights, an area of Los Angeles populated largely by Blacks and Latinos. But his Underground Museum faced a problem; it didn’t have any art to put on display and none of the institutions approached by Davis would loan him their precious holdings.The solution? Davis set about creating clones of famous artworks that feature mass produced items. Collectively titled Imitation of Wealth (pictured below) they now occupy a gallery in his Barbican retrospective. Marcel Read more ...
Tom Carr
The return of Linkin Park has been a long, winding path. The seven years since Chester Bennington's passing have swirled with speculation over what the long term future for the California nu-metal icons would look like.The picture suddenly became clear in September as a 100-day countdown ended (after mysteriously counting back up for another week), revealing a five-hour livestreamed event confirming the bands return, new vocalist, new drummer and new album: From Zero, the band's eighth overall.With the introduction of Emily Armstrong as a new vocalist, an air of contention has followed since Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Tucker Zimmerman is singing a number called “Don’t Go Crazy (Go in Peace)”. At 83, he performs sitting down. Surrounded by support band Iji, who act as his pick-up, he approaches the song in a whispery, affable voice. At the start of his set he was assisted to his seat but, knees aside, he’s not frail. He’s just laid back, a Sixties original, strumming gently. “Don’t go crazy,” he sings, “Go with the flow, go in peace.” Although he’s advised us to not think about politics, it’s hard not to. Yet his hour-long show soothes, offers a window into some of what’s best about America.Tucker is one of Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Like an angry teenager rejecting everything his parents stand for, American artist Mike Kelley embraced everything most despised by the art world – from popular culture to crafts, and occultism to catholicism – to create what he ironically called “blue collar minimalism”. “An adolescent,” he declared, “is a dysfunctional adult and art is a dysfunctional reality”.Noisy, anarchic, silly and disturbing, Kelley’s unruly output makes for uneasy viewing. Despite Tate Modern’s attempts to civilise and rationalise his work, the galleries are filled with the raucous din of loud music and singing plus Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Aside from their musical output, the fame – or notoriety – of Californian rockers Osees derives from two main factors. First, their consistently changing the spelling of their name on different releases (eg, Thee Oh Sees, OCS, etc). Second, their gushing prolificness of output. They’ve been releasing music for 21 years and Sorcs 80 is their 29th album. That’s going some.The short version of this review is that it’s a spirited electro-garage splurge but its sameyness occasionally grows annoying. Although Osees is a band it mostly represents the artistic vision of one person, frontman John Read more ...
Joe Muggs
It seems like Yoni Wolf and his band WHY? may have settled into a cycle of five-year crafting of albums. The last WHY? album was 2019’s AOKOHIO and it was an extraordinary collection of abstracted miniatures locked together with each other and with the accompanying films with Swiss watch intricacy. This one is every bit as ambitious in its execution – perhaps more so as it’s super grand in its scope, expanding out in all directions from the hodge-podge of leftfield and psychedelic influences that have always informed WHY? into the more wide open spaces of the collective American imagination. Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
In the world of popular music, tangential connections to success are profile-raising. They offer an immediate connection to an artist. It is beholden on me, then, despite not knowing it when I first enjoyed this album, to mention that rising Grammy Award-winning Americana star Molly Tuttle appears. She is guitarist-vocalist Sullivan Tuttle’s sister. It speaks to the solid pleasures of City of Glass by Santa Cruz quartet AJ Lee & Blue Summit that the song in question, “I Can’t Find You at All”, written by the Tuttles' dad Jack, is not outstandingly ahead of the restSinging mandolin-player Read more ...
Aleks Sierz
The death of Marilyn Monroe is a wet dream for conspiracy theorists. Like the assassination of JFK in the following year there is plenty of material in the official accounts that doesn’t quite make sense – which opens the door to free-form speculation.Intrigued by the numerous theories about Monroe’s demise, actress Vicki McKellar and Olivier Award-winning West End and Broadway director Guy Masterson have teemed up to create The Marilyn Conspiracy, which was first staged at the Edinburgh Festival in 2018 and now comes to the Park Theatre in north London. The result is a cogent thriller which Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It kicks off with “No Easy Way Down.” First released on 1984’s mini-LP Explosions in the Glass Palace, it was an instant benchmark by which to measure Rain Parade. Churning, dense and foggy, it made good on what this California outfit were portrayed as: integral to a Sixties-inspired wave of bands defiantly reconfiguring the past for the present. Not all Rain Parade songs were like this, but “No Easy Way Down” was a head-spinner. It still is.What was dubbed The Paisley Underground also scooped up The Bangles, The Dream Syndicate, The Long Ryders and The Three O’Clock. But “No Easy Way Down” Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Being a successful artist is not Judy Chicago’s primary goal. She abandoned that ambition six decades ago when the Los Angeles art world greeted her with hostility. Now she’s having the last laugh, though. At 84 she is being heaped with accolades, including induction into America’s National Women's Hall of Fame, and is enjoying worldwide celebrity.Currently filling four floors of the New Museum in New York, for instance, is Herstory, a major retrospective of her work. Which explains why the Serpentine Gallery survey feels a bit thin; inevitably, this show is only an echo of the full- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was – let’s see – 63 years ago today that Brian Wilson taught the band to play. Fabled for their resplendent harmonies and ecstatic hymning of the sun-kissed California dream, the Beach Boys seemed to represent everything golden and glorious about the mythic American West Coast. If you lived in Detroit or Deptford, it looked like a wonderland indeed.But as we now know from a variety of books and documentaries, the history of the Beach Boys would prove to be long, tortuous and bittersweet, littered with casualties and various kinds of heartbreak. Disney+ have brought the heavy mob in to Read more ...