By now, there are some constants that we can assert about The 1975. They like to dream big, and they love a wide concept with lots of room for experimentation. They come up with cool, often long album titles. Oh, and musically, well, they are all over the map. None of this is news, we…
I walked out of A Plastic Ocean feeling guilty … guilty that I hadn’t given due consideration to a dramatic and escalating global problem. It is one that is choking the planet and causing death and destruction to creatures and bird life in and living off the seaways … and is carcinogenic to humans. I…
Liam McIlvanney’s first Duncan McCormack book The Quaker won the 2018 Scottish Crime Book of the Year. In The Heretic McIlvanney brings McCormack back to the mean streets of 1970s Glasgow, six years after the events of The Quaker. So that while this is a sequel and some of the action ties back to The…
Superheroes? Check. Evil villains? Check. Massive battles? Check. Funny jokes? Check. Must be another Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) movie, right? Well, Avengers: Infinity War is certainly that. But this latest from Anthony and Joe Russo – who brought us the Captain America installments Winter Soldier and Civil War – is more filler than killer. Avengers:…
In 2003, Death Cab For Cutie’s lead singer/songwriter Ben Gibbard and electronica musician Jimmy Tamborello (sometimes known as Dntel) released an album of songs they had recreated primarily by mailing tracks back and forth, thus the band moniker, The Postal Service. Late in the process of making their one studio album, Give Up, Jenny Lewis,…
A brilliant, intricate script, outstanding direction and superb acting by an A-list cast are the hallmarks of The Gentlemen, one of the year’s best films (I know it comes out on 1st January, 2020, but I reckon I am allowed one day’s leeway). It takes concentration to follow the web of deception woven, but the…
You get the sense listening to the fifth album from Perfume Genius, aka Mike Hadreas, that at heart he’s a torch singer. Whatever the musical direction or production style an individual track takes – and he does just about everything here, from dirge-y electronica to buoyant faux-50’s dancefloor pop, maudlin grungy rock, and of course…
The last time Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu took to the big screen, he carried the awards season with him as his wildly inventive Birdman swept all before it. Now he’s back with a more subdued but just as intriguing film in The Revenant. Where Birdman was style and movement, The Revenant is stillness and contemplation. And…
Talk about fighting fire with fire. A small company of brave, resilient and resourceful specialist firefighters – known as smokejumpers – are no match for the three brave, resilient and resourceful orphan children they rescue. I should explain that smokejumpers are highly trained men and women who provide the initial attack on wildfires by parachuting…
Sometimes third albums put artists in weird places. You have your introducing debut, avoid the sophomore slump with either more of the same or pushing your artistic boundaries and then where do you go? For Best Coast, it is no different with a great debut like Crazy For You (2010) that put Bethany Cosentino on…
