Canada
Thomas H. Green
Before Canadian comedian and British TV panel show regular Stewart Francis arrives on stage his audience are entertained with his one-panel cartoons. These, Sharpie-penned in black, are projected as a slideshow (sample: in a fishbowl, one fish says to the other, “It’s all kicked off again in the Middle East” – title “Topical Fish”). It’s unfortunate that whoever set this up couldn’t be bothered to centre the image, since a good quota of the jokes' key lines were rendered non-existent, chopped off at the top. Happily, a half-hour support slot by UK-based fellow Canadian Dana Alexander went Read more ...
Joe Muggs
The career of the Gran Canaria-born musician Pablo Díaz-Reixa seems to work in an accelerated time-frame, speeding through decades and eras as he develops his sound. Though he has always worked with digital technology, his early work sounded archaic, its massed carnival percussion and traditional melodies roaming around the Afro-Latin diaspora.Then, on 2008's Pop Negro, he embraced modernism, albeit still with a retro twist, rigorously examining and adopting the high-gloss production and songwriting techniques of the biggest mainstream American and Latino pop acts of the mid-1970s to mid-'90s Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Canadian singer-songwriter Basia Bulat’s first three albums were recognisably folky. Her main instrument was the autoharp. Good Advice is different. With its more upfront songwriting and verve, her fourth album is a giant leap. It is also Bulat’s best to date.Good Advice abandons her previous approach to embrace an R ‘n’ B-influenced pop with gospel-inclined melodies (the only element nodding back to her former self). The instrumental framing is totally new: booming drums, bubbling bass, shuffling percussion, keyboards, odd stabs of sax and a supporting chorale. Her voice is more powerful Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A Coliseum Complex Museum is defined by its density. The Montréal band’s fifth album begins with a flurry of percussion which gives way to treated guitar and frontman Jace Lasek’s almost-falsetto vocal. Opening cut “The Bray Road Beast” is initially ethereal, with the space between each musical contribution suggesting a tantalisingly unfinished picture. By the time it finishes, after five minutes, layer upon layer of guitar, Mellotron, double-tracked vocals and more have been added. The result is a steamrolling assault on the ears.The Besnard Lakes’ favoured mélange remains a constant: Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It seems incongruous that this fine country-rockin’ band should come all the way from Canada to play a half-empty room above a pub on a chilly, January midweek night on the British south coast. That they do so with such gusto and aplomb is hugely impressive. By the end, they’ve filled the place with a whooping hoedown and made it feel like a honkytonk bar somewhere off a lost highway in a mythic America, yet with the wry, modern, liberal-minded twist of Corb Lund’s lyrics.Lund grew up on Canada’s endless prairie farmland and, indeed, he plays a couple of songs about cows during the set (one Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Any Christmas album worth its salt draws from the classics. Versions of, say, “We Three Kings”, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”, “Silent Night”, “Let it Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Snow!” and “The Little Drummer boy” are compulsory. What is not so inevitable is how these musical and seasonal chestnuts are tackled. All five songs are covered on Lit Up: Music for Christmas, and all five sound like they never have before.Astrocolor are from Canada. The five-piece from Victoria, British Columbia formed specifically to make a Christmas album like no other. Want a Massive Attack-style “We Three Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Names can be deceiving: take Emilie & Ogden. Once you know that the name is not that of a traditional duo, but rather describes Canadian musician Emilie Kahn and her Ogden harp, it’s hard to escape the thought that the music will be syrupy-sweet, twee and incredibly precious. But while it’s true that Kahn’s instrumental palette lends itself to a certain delicacy, underneath is a steely gaze and core of fire.An example: the album’s title track on which Kahn sings of potential squandered – a path not taken or a bad relationship, it’s hard to say. It would be easy to descend into Read more ...
David Kettle
Incoming director Fergus Linehan has assembled some of the most respected names in their fields for his first Edinburgh International Festival. For classical music, that means Anne-Sophie Mutter, Valery Gergiev and Michael Tilson Thomas (among many others); for dance it means Sylvie Guillem; and for theatre it means Simon McBurney’s Complicite and Robert Lepage.It’s a risky strategy – not to mention an expensive one – and an approach that could threaten to sideline more experimental, less starry artists whose names aren’t quite so well known. But on the strength of Lepage and his company Ex Read more ...
Nick Hasted
I walked out of Videodrome into Soho’s neon in 1983, and felt the film’s hallucinatory visions had infected the street. It’s one of a handful of times a film has shifted my mind. David Cronenberg’s crowning achievement before, as critic Kim Newman notes in a documentary extra, he diluted his work by adapting others’, it retains a cohesive, grubby surreality.We are in the early days of VCRs, clandestine cable networks and easily transmitted, contraband imagery. Max Renn (James Woods) is on the hunt for filth to get ratings for his low-budget channel, and is passed a sadomasochist snuff tape. Read more ...
theartsdesk
Canadian heroic tenor Jon Vickers, who died on Friday 10 July aged 88 and whose full life took him from work on a Saskatchewan farm to the great opera houses of the world, was inimitable, terrifying and titanic. Faced with the intense flavour of what follows, I can only write a sober short introduction to the magical words of our two contributors. I don’t know if I appreciated how ferocious his Peter Grimes was at Covent Garden when I saw it as a teenager, and I must have been missing the point not to find a lightness to his part in a memorable Proms performance of Mahler’s Das Lied von Read more ...
David Nice
Violinists either fathom the elusive heart and soul of Elgar’s music or miss the mark completely. Canadian James Ehnes, one of the most cultured soloists on the scene today, is the only one I’ve heard since Nigel Kennedy to make the Violin Concerto work in concert, in an equally rare total partnership with Elgarian supreme Andrew Davis and the Philharmonia. Last night he found the same emotional core in the Violin Sonata at the end of a colossal programme with a no less extraordinary but much less widely known companion, the American pianist Andrew Armstrong.In their smart suits and ties, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Margaret Atwood’s Forties childhood was spent knocking around the Canadian backwoods with her forest entomologist, proto-ecologist dad, and it shows. Interviewed alongside her husband Graeme Gibson on the Brighton Festival’s closing night, the international literary prizes, like the gushing reverence with which she’s introduced by Festival director Ali Smith and received by the sell-out crowd, seems to have made little impression. This is a modest, earthy, dryly witty and straight-talking couple, with the self-sufficient air of those familiar with isolated, country living.Atwood’s novels, Read more ...