Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 6 September 2024. Beyond Beyond Beyond, the fifth studio record by The Crane Wives, explores the mixture of fear, joy, and deep vulnerability that occurs when a person is on the cusp of changing the course of their life….
A dynamic lead, some stirring and familiar numbers and a moving story with which I wasn’t familiar make Dusty: The Musical well worth attending. Director Jason Langley was one of the actors who workshopped Dusty back in 2004. Written by John-Michael Howson, David Mitchell and Melvyn Morrow (the team that also wrote Shout! The Legend…
The Thread That Keeps Us – the ninth album from Calexico – is yet another artful collection of stories. They’re told with the band’s eclectic musicality and a mature songwriting sensibility that shows up primarily in strong, impressive melodies. Rooted in the long collaboration of singer/multi-instrumentalist Joey Burns and drummer John Convertino, and favoring a…
Irish lyricism, bluster and blarney combine in Wild Mountain Thyme. This romantic drama has the sole purpose of joining a lovelorn woman and her timid neighbour. Rosemary Muldoon (Emily Blunt) grew up initially doubting her purpose until her father told her she was the white swan, like in Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake (which is a recurring…
Whitney is a well-researched and revealing film from Oscar-winning filmmaker Kevin McDonald (Touching the Void). It’s the second documentary in as many years charting the rise and tragic death of pop diva Whitney Houston. Nick Broomfield’s Whitney: Can I Be Me centred more on her later years. it charted her decline through drug abuse and…
You Cannot Kill David Arquette is the redemptive tale of washed-up Hollywood actor David Arquette and his attempt to reverse the mistakes of his past. In 2002, Arquette decided to cross-promote his comedy film Ready to Rumble about wrestling fans, by entering into the wrestling ring himself. However, the gimmick snowballed into Arquette actually winning…
In 2012 amateur historian Phillipa Langley discovered the final resting place of famed fifteenth century monarch King Richard III under a carpark in the centre of Leicester. Most of what contemporary audiences know of Richard, the last of the Plantagenet dynasty, is based on the play written by Shakespeare some 100 years after the king…
Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 18 September 2020. John Coltrane’s Giant Steps – the influential jazz saxophonist’s first album with Atlantic Records – continues to astound and inspire listeners 60 years after its release. Consistently lauded in music histories, Giant Steps was inducted into…
After the death of long-time Gang of Four leader and lead guitarist, Andy Gill, in February, the band released the posthumous EP This Heaven Gives Me Migraine. It included a few spoken words from Gibb, a new track that had been slated for their follow up to last year’s full-length Happy Now, another version of…
Action, corny humour and a thin script mark Hobbs & Shaw; the 9th feature from The Fast & Furious franchise. This one is a spin-off though, not a sequel. At stake is … surprise, surprise … just the future of the world due to a virus the likes of which we haven’t seen before. Hobbs…
