Escape Artist

Escape Artist's Top 10 Movie Soundtracks: Part 2

2011-07-19T13:20:00.012+01:00

Here are the final five entries of Escape Artist's favourite film soundtracks of all time. Find Part 1 here.

Marie Antoinette - Brian Reitzell (2006)

Sofia Coppola's third film was unfairly and condescendingly dismissed on its release, with critics and Cannes audiences accusing it of misrepresenting history and being little more than a lightweight music video that fetishised the opulence of France's Ancien Regime. The criticism was total bollocks, and a classic example of judging a film based on projected criteria. Marie Antoinette is an aesthetic confection, true, and it's intentionally anachronistic. But it reaches deeper by exploring the confusion and naive flutterings of a teenage girl plunged into a high-pressure royal marriage, destined to become France's eternal Queen Bitch figure. As such, Coppola plays it like a teen drama, mixing the aesthetics of late 18th century French aristocracy with the high-top sneakers and New Romanticism of John Hughes' Shermer high schoolers.

The film's soundtrack is an appropriately time-hopping affair, where the Baroque of Vivaldi, Scarlatti and Couperin meets the pop baroque of Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Cure and Bow Wow Wow. It's a heady cocktail that mixes cold and smooth, the period harpsichord pieces making an elegant bedfellow to the sheen of those 80s beats. The soundtrack even mixes the two on a single track with a special version of 'Hong Kong Garden' that begins with a lush arrangement of strings before kicking into Siouxsie Sioux's art-punk attack. Add in a sprinkling of lilting contemporary post-rock and you've got the recipe for a confusing but oddly perfect soundtrack to a much-misrepresented film.

A bizarrely abridged version of the Marie Antoinette OST on Spotify, here.

El Cid - Miklos Rozsa (1961)

Of all the great soundtracks on this list, Miklos Roszla's score for El Cid is the one that renders my critical faculties utterly obsolete. Within ten seconds of the score's gorgeous strings taking flight, I am at its mercy. El Cid might have been the most formative movie of my early childhood. For better or for worse, it taught me that doing the right thing always supersedes doing the sensible thing. It taught me that the baddies always win at the beginning, but the goodies always win in the end. It taught me that love can be both perfect and broken, and that good love should probably involve the girl fleeing in despair to a nunnery at some point. It taught me all these things in a language I could understand: knights in shining armour and fluttering pennants and Charlton Heston being awesome. For a young boy of a naturally nervous disposition living at boarding school, its uncompromising sense of old-fashioned honour was somehow a comfort and a manual. For me personally, Roszla's score condensed all of that into a few minutes of soaring orchestration. So a shamelessly personal choice. Check out the above video, which contains the film's opening credits and its most recurrent musical refrain. I hope you like it, but I don't really mind if you don't. It belongs to an anxious little boy who needed it once.

The full El Cid OST on Spotify, here.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford - Nick Cave & Warren Ellis (2007)

Nick Cave and his Bad Seeds/Grinderman cohort Warren Ellis are busy men. When not working on their frontline musical projects, they've developed quite a healthy cottage industry composing soundtracks for a number of excellent recent films, not to mention a couple of stage plays and the audio version of Cave's second novel The Death of Bunny Munroe. Ellis and Cave's 2007 soundtrack for Andrew Dominik's stunning western The Assassination of Jesse James... could be their finest collaboration to date. While it feels like their previous work on The Proposition laid the groundwork for Assassination's keening interplay of strings and piano, Cave and Ellis here replace that score's warped brutality with an atmosphere that's altogether more existential. The duo's orchestration has a tentative quality that perfectly mirrors the bewitching, morally complex world that the movie creates.

The full Assassination of Jesse James... OST on Spotify, here.

Days of Heaven - Ennio Morricone (1978)

The full soundtracks for Terrence Malick's first two films, Badlands and Days of Heaven, are sadly pretty tricky to track down nowadays. It's a real shame because both are superb. While Carl Orff's short composition 'Gassenhauer' perfectly encapsulates the childish, deadly fairytale of the Malick's feature debut, Ennio Morricone's compositions for Days of Heaven might be the more substantial of the two.

Morricone brilliantly works around the central theme of Camille Saint-Saens' 'Aquarium' from his suite 'Carnival of the Animals', which plays over the film's enigmatic opening credits. His compositions take enough from Saint-Saens' suite to bring across its otherworldly mystery, while adding a little extra humanity to soundtrack the leisure and labours of the film's men and women working the fields of the Texas Panhandle. Little flashes of playfulness break up all the heavy themes, the zippy acoustic 12-string guitar piece that soundtracks Bill, Abby and Linda's train journey foremost among them. In a long career full of incredible film scores, Morricone's arrangements for Days of Heaven stand as some of his very best.

Shaft - Isaac Hayes (1971)

As an absolute novice when it comes to blaxploitation movies, the most immediate appeal of the genre for me has always been the music. Isaac Hayes' soundtrack to the big daddy of blaxploitation films might be the obvious touchstone, but it's pretty irresistible. For an instant hit of funk-inflected grandeur, the film's main theme is a stone-cold killer, slow-burning through hi-hat drum fills and wah-wah guitars before flowering into that vocal that we've all known, loved and done bad impressions of for years.

Beyond the hit single, the album is filled with instrumentals that show off Hayes' composition skills and the rock-solid musicianship of Stax house band The Bar-Kays, with whom Hayes recorded the rhythm tracks in a single day. The tempo shifts from brash, muscular numbers that hint at Hayes' pioneering early disco style ('Be Yourself') to caramel-smooth jazz-soul ('Early Sunday Morning'). While Curtis Mayfield's Super Fly soundtrack might well be superior when heard in isolation for its socially conscious lyricism and more traditional pop song structure, but as a pure soundtrack, Shaft wins every time. Shut yo' mouth!

The Shaft OST (minus 19-minute epic 'Do Your Thing') on Spotify, here.

Review: The Tree of Life

2011-07-13T13:07:00.020+01:00

Trying to write something meaningful about a Terrence Malick film is getting into serious dancing-about-architecture territory. For a director who clearly puts so little stock in words, a written review seems like a woefully inadequate medium for commentary. But as I am unable and unwilling to start performing reviews through interpretive dance, plain old words will have to do.

Throughout his meandering 40-year career in film, during which time he has only directed five full-length films, Malick has been gradually stripping his work of narrative and character development. Although his films have always exhibited a dreamy quality that prioritises visual communication above all, debut Badlands and its follow-up Days of Heaven maintain strong elements of plot, the latter even coming off as positively Shakespearean, in a floaty sort of way. But his 1998 "war" movie The Thin Red Line and 2005's The New World saw Malick's more abstract themes - a vague but insistent yearning for the spirit of the natural world foremost among them - come to the fore.

The Tree of Life feels like the culmination of this steady drift away from storytelling and towards a sort of visual poetry. At once intensely personal and unabashedly grand, the film sets the day-to-day life of a small-town Texan family against the vast, unknowable scope of the universe, its creation, and the nature of everything that exists within it. Simple.

This split between intimate scenes of family life and portrayals of our planet's fiery birth might seem incongruous. Malick moves in mysterious ways, the twining limbs of his tree providing a link between the smallest events and the very largest. His widescreen vision of the universe is certainly arresting in a visual sense. Tectonic plates sizzle and grind against one another; oceans are born and in turn incubate the multicellular organisms that spiral along the sea bed. Stars burn, forests bloom and dinosaurs roam.

We're introduced to this eon-spanning maelstrom before we ever set eyes on a human character. Nevertheless, it's Mr and Mrs O'Brien of Waco, Texas and their three sons that put it all into perspective. Their life together in a quiet 1950s suburb (depicted so specifically that it is likely drawn from Malick's own memories) is at once idyllic and riven by conflict. The father (Brad Pitt) is the square-jawed embodiment of the do-it-for-yourself American ideal of Darwinian strength. A day's work for a day's pay; relying only on the sweat off your brow. He tries to pass his world view on to his sons, who he subjects to a strict regimen of traditional discipline, physical competition and rough affection.

The mother (Jessica Chastain) is the lamb to her husband's lion, a creature of seemingly unending compassion, childlike and empathetic. While Mr O'Brien mutters stern reprimands at the children across the dinner table, Mrs O'Brien is playing with them in the garden and waking them up with ice cubes down the backs of their pyjamas. If they seem symbolic rather than real, that's because they are - this 50s childhood is all channelled through the memory of their eldest son Jack in later life (Sean Penn), still torn by the incompatibility of his father's "way of nature" and his mother's "way of grace".

As such, Jack plays a major part in the film's family scenes, and Malick's direction beautifully fleshes out all those hazily remembered details of childhood through simple, striking moments, from gangs of children playing in the streets in the twilight just before dinner to Jack obsessing over every detail of his father's face and hands as he plays the local church organ. Jack's experience of growing up also provides a microscopic test bed for all the giant ideas floating around, as he flits to and fro between his parents, tries to reconcile the growing anger he's harbouring, and even deals with guilt and confusion after rifling through his neighbour's underwear drawer. These tiny domestic dramas mix Oedipal frustration with visions of unblemished love, with Jack and his brothers trying to find their way through the middle.

The film makes its own views clear through the judicious application of the Book of Job, the thrust of which rests on man challenging God on why the good suffer along with the wicked. The answer, the film seems to say, is to embrace a way of life that transcends the slings and arrows of fate; to see grief and joy as inseparably joined in the titanic, shared experience of life. While Mr O'Brien's vision of self-reliance gradually crumbles into a ruin of disappointment and failure, his wife's way of life proves resilient through surrender, culminating in the yielding of her most precious treasure to the Everything: the life of her own child.

The film's ending has proven its most divisive moment. The final scenes, which show characters walking down a celestial beachfront, have been criticised as an empty piece of aesthetic doodling, tantamount to the meaningless beauty of a perfume ad. While the comparison is understandable at the visual level, the scene really makes sense as a proper conclusion to the messages of a shared experience, of transcending the whims of grief and fear. These scenes are The Tree of Life's pearly gates, only instead of white marble they're made of all the versions of ourselves and all the things we've seen and done, together in one place.

It's a profoundly spiritual vision, but not in any sense that will pander to fundamentalists. Although many of the film's messages are conveyed through Christian allegory, they could resonate with any number of philosophical, religious or scientific viewpoints. In fact, Malick's larger depictions of the world's biological development seem rigorously scientific, at least to this layman.

The film's performances are roundly excellent; Pitt and Chastain are magnetic as the opposing forces at the centre of the universe, and the children are played with the naturalism that's so vital if the audience is to buy into their physical and emotional awakening. Even so, the performances are barely worth commenting on, so ingrained are they in the film's imagery and themes.

The Tree of Life resonated with me in a way that seems specific to Malick's films; there simply isn't space here to fully plumb its depths. But that doesn't mean I would recommend it to anyone. If you're looking for a great Sean Penn/Brad Pitt movie, don't bother. If you're looking for an immersive story, stay away. If you tend to think art films are pretentious and boring, you'd probably be better off loading into a giant slingshot and firing yourself into the heart of the sun. But if you're interested a beautifully conceived collage of life, one that shows but doesn't preach, that shares but doesn't explain, that mourns and celebrates all at once, The Tree of Life might make a lifelong fan out of you.

Interest Score: Butterflies/10

Satisfaction Score: A baby's toes/10

Escape Artist's Top 10 Movie Soundtracks: Part 1

2011-07-07T13:41:00.013+01:00

Ever since the first Neanderthal cave-dweller was recorded whistling the tune to '(Sittin' On) The Dock Of The Bay', it's been known that we humans use music to express those emotions for which words just can't cut it. Music is emotional shorthand, able to express in a few bars what many novels fail to capture in 300 pages. I'm not sure if this is true of anyone else, but songs give me a lump in my throat on a manhood-threateningly regular basis. And whenever I think about moments on film that have done the same, it's not the images flickering on-screen that I remember. It's the orchestral swells. The violin flourishes. That lonely piano line.

In that sense, it seems crazy that movie soundtracks are given so little attention. In an attempt to redress the balance that, in centuries to come, will surely come to be described as "arrogant and almost comedically presumptuous", here are ten of Escape Artist's very favourite movie soundtracks and scores, in no specific order.

Yojimbo - Masaru Sato (1961)

A brilliant score that brings out the mischief and menace pervading Kurosawa's wandering ronin classic. Masuro Sato's orchestral arrangements are surprisingly timeless too, mixing traditional Japanese instrumentation with some attention-grabbing atonal stabs here and there. With his samurai epics, Kurosawa was in a constant cinematic dialogue with the American western genre, and the dust-flecked soundtrack is as indicative of that as Toshiro Mifune's Kuwabatake Sanjuro, the man with no name who came before The Man With No Name. The film itself also shares a lot of DNA with Hollywood film noir, and Masuro's trilling woodwinds and heavy-handed drums help it walk that noir line between playfulness and brutality.

The full Yojimbo OST on Spotify: here.

Fantastic Mr. Fox - Alexandre Desplat (2009)

Wes Anderson's risky adaptation of Roald Dahl's much-loved children's novel is, like most of his films, a triumph of impeccable taste and judgement. This has always extended to Anderson's soundtracks, and Fantastic Mr. Fox might just be the best of them. The film is perpetually illuminated in an amber haze of autumnal sunlight, and Alexandre Desplat's score is pure, rose-tinted late summer nostalgia. From the gorgeous banjo/violin arrangement on 'Mr. Fox in the Fields' to 'Great Harrowsford Square''s kiddified Mexican stand-off, Desplat's score will bring flooding back the idyllic rural childhood you never had.

Added to the mix is an assortment of superbly pitched pop and folk, all sun-streaked guitar jangle and campfire-singalong fun. Along with a couple of familiar Beach Boys melodies (what kid wouldn't love those kazoo parts on 'Heroes and Villains?) and the Bobby Fuller Four's toe tapper 'Let Her Dance', this soundtrack introduced me to the simple beauty of folk singer Burl Ives with a brace of tracks from his 1959 children's album Burl Ives Sings Little White Duck and Other Children's Favourites. Incredible. Oh, and don't get me started on 'Canis Lupus'. Sets me to sniffling every time. Paws up, wolves. Paws up.

The full Fantastic Mr. Fox OST on Spotify: here.

Blade Runner - Vangelis (1982)

Possibly the most obvious choice on the list, but it's obvious for good reason. Out of context, Vangelis' smoky, synthesised sax might sound embarassingly 80s, like a robot version of the sad bits from Lethal Weapon. But as an accompaniment to Deckard's melancholy hunt for humanoid cyborgs in a future Los Angeles where darkness and rain is the default setting, it's beyond perfect. Vangelis stretches his synths into all sorts of shapes, from sinister arpeggios ('Blush Response') to sweeping Islamic chants (Damask Rose) to soft-focus romance in full bloom ('Love Theme'). Appropriately enough considering Blade Runner's subject matter, Vangelis achieves the rare feat of wiring humanity into his musical constructs.

Blade Runner's full and extended OST on Spotify, here.

There Will Be Blood - Jonny Greenwood (2007)

The musical equivalent of a knife attack and the bloody silence that follows, Jonny Greenwood's score to Paul Thomas Anderson's 2007 tale of cruelty and capitalism during California's early 20th century oil rush is pure Hitchcock. It's deafening silences punctuated by shocking musical violence. It's small moments of humanity washed away by waves of unsettling strings. It's an entire orchestra used as a weaponised bowling pin, poised to bash your brains in. It's little spiders made of coal dust crawling down your throat and laying their sooty eggs in your soul. It's about as fun to listen to as the movie is to watch, and just as enthralling.

There Will Be Blood full OST on Spotify, here.

The Fountain - Clint Mansell (2006)

Much like the film, The Fountain's soundtrack is all about the set-up and the pay-off, years of denial and pent-up frustration culminating in a release that comes all in a rush. Darren Aronofsky's movie - broadly speaking - follows a man living his life to defy death, little realising that peace lies in embracing it. Clint Mansell, with help from the Kronos Quartet and Scottish post-rockers Mogwai, charts this narrative through expert pacing and arrangements with real emotional bite.

The majority of the tracks echo the main character's feeling of being hemmed in, frustrated strings rushing around with echoing drums hot on their heels. The final two pieces are where everything changes. Penultimate track 'Death is the Road to Awe' stacks the confusion and chaos to an almost unbearable degree, then gives us a single second of ecstatic silence before the explosive pay-off of electric guitar, pounding rhythm, howling violins and a choir so unhinged that it might well be possessed. Final track 'Together We Will Live Forever' is a sumptious piano piece, replacing the mad scrum of the rest of the score with a serenity that feels all the more blessed for what has come before. It's about as subtle as a rhinoceros, but Mansell's score is a towering piece of work, and The Fountain would only be half a movie without it.

The full Fountain OST on Spotify, here.

That's it for Part 1 of Escape Artist's best soundtracks. Stay tuned for another five scores that score, featuring cowboys, a guy who no one understands but his woman and Regency-period new wave. Also, please keep in mind that this list will likely be made completely redundant after the recent announcement that the Scissor Sisters will be providing the score for the new Fraggle Rock movie, which will probably be more amazing than this entire list combined. Seriously, I don't even know if I'm being sarcastic.

Videogames: how real is too real?

2011-07-06T13:36:00.007+01:00

So E3, the world's biggest videogame conference, has come and gone. Although I've never been to the event, it seems that some perennial traditions never change. The "booth babes" will strut around in skimpy clothing, pretending to be charmed by the sweaty, tight-crotched advances of the gaming masses. Various games journalists, despite having some of the best jobs in the world, will whine about being exhausted as if they're sending grizzled dispatches from war-torn Libya. The three big console manufacturers will put on gigantic press conferences, during which hardcore gamers will attack anything shown that's not specifically made for them (Kinect, Move, Wii Fit etc) with the impotent ferocity of a thousand weaning infants.

One thing that particularly stood out at this year's E3 was the dominance of the big-budget first person shooter. Although differing in many ways, one thing that the likes of Modern Warfare 3, Rage, Far Cry 3 and Battlefield 3 all share is the quest for the holy grail of computer graphics: photorealism.

And for the most part, the quest seems to be going rather well. A glance at some of the footage from Battlefield 3 provides evidence enough that modern developers (and modern PCs most of all) are making serious strides towards creating truly believable environments and character models. It's certainly enough to make you believe that the next generation of consoles could get scarily close to cresting the far side of the uncanny valley.

So it's a baby Space Race to see who'll get there first. But like the Space Race, all the money and effort is being dedicated to getting there, with precious little thought as to what happens when we do. Don't get me wrong, I'm as excited as the next joystick warrior about the luscious visuals that await us in the next few years, but I remain curious about the unintended consequences.

I'm not about to start prattling on about murder simulators or emploring you to just think of the children; like most people, I believe that violent videogames can be enjoyed as part of a healthy media diet. But if games reach a level of visual fidelity that makes them hard to distinguish from reality, I do wonder if that's what we actually want.

I play violent FPS games because they often have compelling and well-developed gameplay, they can be stylish and immersive, and they give me the opportunity to measure my skills against screaming 14 year-olds from South Carolina or wherever. I don't play them because I want an unflinching representation of what it's actually like to kill a human being. I want cartoon violence, movie violence, comic book violence; I don't want something that feels like the real thing. Or do I? I don't know. Maybe videogame violence will never feel that shocking because no matter how real it looks, we know deep down it's just cleverly arranged pixels. But as computer graphics move us ever closer to scarily realistic recreations of some pretty current world conflicts, I expect we'll all be finding out where our limits lie.

Review: Bridesmaids

2011-06-29T16:34:00.015+01:00

It's an unfortunate fact that in the world of Hollywood movies, male-driven comedies are for everyone while female-driven comedies are for the most part considered to be just for women. Whether this says more about audience perceptions or the way in which comedies focused on women are made and marketed is up for debate, but it's certainly a shame that mainstream movies about women seem to be so segregated by gender.

Co-written by and starring SNL alumna turned movie star in the ascendant Kristen Wiig, Bridesmaids has a real chance to introduce audiences of either and all genders to the funny side of the distinctly female-oriented process of pre-wedding bridal rituals. With The Hangover 2 failing to recapture the sparky energy of its predecessor (despite, or perhaps because of, being a shameless clone), the film is also in position to become summer 2011's best-loved adult comedy.

Thankfully, Bridesmaids grabs its opportunity by the horns, wrestles it to the ground and shouts jokes into its ears until it busts a gut laughing. Anchored by a central performance by Wiig that's as endearing and well-pitched as you're likely to see this year, the film is a roaring success, bringing out the muck and mayhem of wedding showers, bachelorette parties and the awkwardness of enforced bonding with comedic flair and a genuine feel for character.

The movie opens with our heroine Annie (Wiig) autopiloting through an uninspired hump session with handsome, self-obsessed fuck-buddy Ted (Jon Hamm). The inevitable disappointment that follows these meaningless booty calls echoes the vague sense of defeat that follows Annie around. Her bakery business has collapsed like a wet meringue under the weight of the recession, taking her boyfriend and her life savings with it, leaving her renting a small room from a couple of weirdo limeys (one of whom has a suspiciously appalling accent).

When Annie's best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph) tells her she's getting married to her long-term boyfriend, she's secretly worried that they'll drift apart. But she's duly appointed maid of honour, so it's her job to corral Lillian and her friends, including rich, beautiful friendship rival Helen (Rose Byrne), through the fraught process of setting up the bride-to-be for her big day.

The set-up certainly doesn't sound like anything new, but as with all comedy, the secret's in the delivery. And the movie certainly delivers laughs, with the kind of brassy, unaffected style that's so rare in modern rom coms. The character-based comedy rolls easily off the script as the bridesmaids' personalities and histories unfurl, from frustrated mother Rita (on her teenage sons: "Everything is covered in semen. I literally broke a blanket in half, do you see what I'm saying?") to Lillian's future sister-in-law Megan (Melissa McCarthy), a massive slab of a woman who combines hulking machismo, unbridled sexual energy and just a hint of social autism with such commitment that she becomes the movie's most consistent comedy engine.

There's plenty of room for slapstick too, with a hyper-aggressive, mostly slow motion tennis match between Annie and Helen a particular highlight. So much critical vitriol has been poured onto the infamous "dress fitting/food poisoning" scene that I expect to hate it, but it's a pretty spectacular piece of gross-out. You owe it to yourself to behold a fully grown woman in an ornate bridal gown shitting her guts out in the middle of a busy street, staring helplessly at her friends.

But it's the central relationship between Annie and Lillian that binds the movie together and gives it a heart to match its funny bone. Wiig and Rudolph's natural charisma as a duo brings an effortless credibility to their friendship, which in turn gives context to the strain that their relationship endures throughout the movie. Annie's anxiety about being left behind as Lillian embraces a new life and a new set of wealthy friends, as well as her fear of failure and her battered self-esteem, are universally relatable themes, and as the hysteria ramps up towards the end of the film, these themes keep the characters from feeling cartoonish.

Bridesmaids has been hailed by many as a sort of ultra-modern feminist affirmation, but in reality, Wiig and co-writer Annie Mumolo are having far too much fun engaging with and subverting stereotypes of femininity to stick to any particular agenda. While the movie is effortlessly progressive in its portrayal of women as individuals with a diverse set of strengths and flaws (which should surely be a given by now), this is Grade-A entertainment first and foremost. But it's certainly refreshing to see the usually all-engrossing love interest (charmingly played here by The IT Crowd's Chris O'Dowd) sidelined in favour of a genuinely heartwarming female friendship.

A couple of niggling flaws hold Bridesmaids back just enough to be worth mentioning. The core triangle of Annie, Lillian and Lillian's intimidating new friend Helen, impressive as it is, dominates proceedings to the extent that a couple of the bridesmaids are left out in the cold somewhat, with the aforementioned lusty mum Rita and Ellie Kemper's twitchy newlywed Becca not given quite enough room to flesh out their intriguing character concepts. The film also wraps up a little neatly considering the preceding histrionics; Wiig, Mumola and director Paul Feig seem to take their feet off the emotional gas on the home stretch in favour of tried-and-tested rom com cliche.

A couple of minor slip-ups are nowhere near enough to hide Bridesmaids' immense strengths, however. The movie, produced by Judd Apatow, easily stands up with the cream of the crop of the Apatow Productions stable. Like Knocked Up, The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Superbad, Bridesmaids makes walking the precarious tightrope between hilarity and heart look easy. The film may have a hard time marketing itself to a universal comedy audience; several of my friends admitted to dismissing it out of hand, assuming it was cut from the standard chick flick cloth. In reality, it's a hilarious, very sweet movie spearheaded by some very funny women, a must-watch for comedy fans, no matter the shape of their genitalia.
Satisfaction Score: 9/10

Interest Score: 7/10

Review: Green Lantern

2011-06-16T13:23:00.009+01:00

Since the idea of a Green Lantern movie was first batted around a few years ago, it was always clear that it would be a project fraught with risks. An interstellar police force that draws power from green power rings and valiantly does battle against evil, injustice and the dastardly power of the colour yellow is a pretty tough sell, especially given the pseudo-credible superhero films that audiences have grown accustomed to. But there was an enticing opportunity, too: to create a colourful superhero epic of truly cosmic scale and ambition, set against the backdrop of distant galaxies and alien space unicorns rather than dreary old earth.

Now that Green Lantern has finally landed, it's become depressingly clear that the most epic thing about this movie is its lacklustre execution and the ease with which the whole story slips from memory on leaving the cinema. The film is not without its fleeting charms, but any strengths find themselves completely outmatched by a plot so bereft of drama that events seem to unfurl in a dull green blur.

Early signs provoked a wave of cautious optimism from fans. Ryan Reynolds looked good as Hal Jordan in the trailers, Martin Campbell (director of GoldenEye and Casino Royale) was at the helm, and early footage showed off fancy effects shots of the Green Lantern homeworld Oa. You can even look at my own summer movie preview for a prime example of the doomed hope that was circling around Green Lantern a couple of months ago.

But from the outset, the film starts to unravel. Instead of introducing us to Hal Jordan and establishing the characters who will accompany him on his journey, we're subjected to a barrage of exposition explaining the background of the Green Lantern Corps, which many eons ago split the known universe into three thousand-and-something sectors, with a Green Lantern assigned to protect each one. We also make the acquaintance of Parallax, a bubbling mass of evil yellow space diarrhea that feeds on fear and serves as the film's main threat. The creature was imprisoned by legendary Green Lantern Abin Sur, but has now escaped, sending a dying Abin Sur haring off to earth to find a suitably square-jawed human replacement.

When Abin Sur crash lands on earth, his power ring (a weapon that creates constructs through its user's willpower and imagination) chooses Hal Jordan, a cocky test pilot held back by memories of his pilot father's death in a plane crash. While Hal cruises to Oa to learn all about his new duties, spurned scientist Hector Hammond is tasked with studying Abin Sur's corpse, and is promptly infected by traces of Parallax, which turns him into a puppet of the monster and turns his head into a gigantic testicle. Cue Parallax heading to our planet, and a newly anointed Hal Jordan's attempt to overcome his daddy fears and save all life on earth.

Green Lantern's main offender is a clunky, often embarrassing script that introduces characters to push the plot or provide motivation for Jordan before unceremoniously jettisoning them without another mention (Angela Bassett's utterly anonymous government agent Amanda Waller is a prime example). Jordan's own character arc is hardly gripping either, amounting to little more than the standard "be handsome, overcome fear, live up to dead dad" trope that we've seen time and again in superhero movies.

The script also fails to inject any urgency or drama into proceedings. Jordan's trips to Oa, which should always have been the film's crown jewel, are insultingly brief, relegating fellow Lanterns like Sinestro (Mark Strong), Tomar-Re (Geoffrey Rush) and Kilowog (Michael Clarke Duncan) to living mouthpieces, explaining the Lanterns' powers and history. Key scenes are often bizarrely edited, leading to a steady flow of jarring, incongruous moments.

The film's effects range from excellent to shoddy, the beauty and detail of Oa contrasting with Jordan's ugly CG mask and a couple of downright inept action shots. For the most part, Hal's Green Lantern powers are effectively and imaginatively employed, however, Jordan creating all number of impromptu objects, including chainsaws, flame throwers and even a giant spiral race track, to overcome his enemies. The action scenes peppered throughout the movie are well-executed and occasionally thrilling, particularly an early dog-fight between a pre-Lantern Hal and two automated fighter jets.

Ryan Reynolds' turn as Jordan is really the only performance worth analysing, given that most other characters are completely side-tracked by the script. He's typically charming and witty, and does well despite the limitations foisted on him by the script; after all's said and done, Reynolds is the most enjoyable element of the film by some margin. Blake Lively's performance as love interest Carol Ferris is so flavourless that one can only pity the actor, who was so impressive in The Town last year, for the gaping hole where her character should have been. Peter Saarsgard's Hector Hammond goes from mild-mannered nerd to scenery-chewing bollock-head with such speed that he loses all credibility, a problem compounded by the complete lack of grounding for the character, or his pre-existing but completely unexplained relationship with Jordan and Ferris.

With Green Lantern, all the raw materials seemed to be in place for a superhero adventure that offered something different from all the scowling men in capes and tortured teenagers that have populated summer blockbusters of the last five years. Unfortunately, it's a sad disappointment from start to finish, with only Reynolds' strong performance and a couple of stand-out action scenes enlivening an experience that feels more like a cobbled-together collection of scenes than a coherent, confident film.

Satisfaction Score: 4/10
Interest Score: 3/10

Click here for an explanation of the Satisfaction/Interest review scores.

Review: X-Men: First Class

2011-06-07T13:07:00.014+01:00

X-Men: First Class is a good film. Its performances range from solid to excellent, its action scenes are often spectacular and its involving plot culminates in a genuinely thrilling finale. The film is a massive improvement over both its fuckwitted predecessor The Last Stand and 2009's nonsensical mope-fest X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

So why, on leaving the cinema, was my overriding impression one of niggling disappointment? As exciting and engrossing as First Class often is, it is also flawed along its length and breadth, like a spectacular country mansion overrun by dry rot. Or indeed like a big budget blockbuster movie that swapped directors little over a year before its release and only started filming nine months before its premiere.

The film gives the X-Men franchise a Men In Black-style memory wipe, erasing the sweaty nightmare of The Last Stand by turning the clock back to the 60s origin of the mutant team. Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) has just completed his thesis at Oxford University (accompanied by a young Mystique, who has been his unofficial ward since childhood) when he's contacted by the CIA who are looking into the existence of genetic mutants with extraordinary powers.

Meanwhile, Erik Lensherr (Michael Fassbender) is a very angry young man. Cruelly tampered with by Nazi scientists in a World War II death camp, Lensherr endured the murder of his parents and is now huffing around the globe searching for Nazi war criminals with the help of his power over metal and a head full of unresolved rage issues. His primary target is his chief childhood tormentor Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon), who has become the head of the Hellfire Club, a secret (if ostentatiously named) society dedicated to securing global domination for mutantkind as the world's rightful homo superior.

This set-up leads to the fateful meeting and friendship between Lensherr and Xavier as they search for others of their kind and partner up to thwart Shaw's scheme to exploit Cold War tensions and bring about a nuclear apocalypse from which mutants will emerge as mankind's new rulers (somehow).

First Class's chief accomplishment is in establishing and exploring the early relationship between the young Erik and Charles. As Xavier, McAvoy practically purrs with easygoing charm and the hint of arrogance that probably comes with the territory when you're a handsome mind-reader with a genius intellect and the backing of the CIA by your mid 20s. Fassbender is on another level though (despite the much-discussed "wandering accent"), imbuing our proto-Magneto with an inner furnace of rage that drives him to team up with the nascent X-Men while pushing him ever further down his own dark path. Early scenes depicting Erik torturing Swiss bankers and tracking down exiled Nazi war criminals like a deranged Jason Bourne are shot for maximum impact, and effectively give insight into the overt violence and deeply buried nobility behind his goals. This Erik is a master of magnetism in more ways than one.

His friendship with Charles allows us a glimpse at the man Magneto could have been, as Erik's darkness is softened by emotional vulnerability and the wolfish grin that Fassbender is so rarely called upon to show us. The dynamics between the two men provide the film's emotional momentum, and any future installments of this new X-Men timeline should lean heavily on this new chemistry that McAvoy and Fassbender have created.

The direction of Matthew Vaughn (Kick-Ass, Layer Cake) also provides some highlights. First Class is liberally sprinkled with energetic and well-captured sequences. Erik and Charles's search for new teammates (with a prototype of mutant compass Cerebro developed by a young Henry McCoy, the mutant scientist who will become Beast) nails the pair's excitement at discovering that, far from being alone, they're part of a community.

Similarly, a montage showing Xavier's new team - including McCoy, chest-beam jock Havok, sonic screamer Banshee and a radical but effective reinterpretation of Angel - preparing for their confrontation with Shaw exhibits a freewheeling sense of fun, as well as exploring the notion that Xavier teaches his young students to control their powers by giving them respect instead of the cocktail of fear and anger to which Erik was subjected. The climactic showdown, pitting Erik and Charles's team against Shaw, malevolent psychic Emma Frost, devilish teleporter (and father of Nightcrawler) Azazel and tornado-maker Riptide is a stunning finale. Set in the seas around Cuba with US and Russian armadas ready to initiate nuclear war, this final set-piece sees all the mutants unleash the fury in a variety of bracing and imaginative ways. As an action scene, it's easily the equal of anything we've seen in X-Men movies before.

So with the movie hitting the right note on so many occasions, why the disappointment? Unfortunately, much of the great work done here is undermined by some persistent flaws. The film's effects are excellent in places but elsewhere seem to suffer for its rushed post-production schedule. The biggest victim is poor old Beast. Nicholas Hoult plays Hank McCoy well, expressing his intelligence and deep-set insecurities, but the money shot after his accidental transformation into his feral form is painfully botched.

The idea behind Beast's design is conceptually solid in its attempt to bring out the wildness of his look - as opposed to The Last Stand's "fat blue Elvis" concept - but the execution is almost comedically poor. The promo images looked reasonable but in motion, sadly, Beast looks more X-Muppet than X-Man. Elsewhere, dodgy greenscreen work and other examples of poor costume and make-up design (Jennifer Lawrence's Mystique looks positively uncomfortable and unnatural in her blue skin, possibly explaining why it was shown so little) too often rip the audience out of the story.

More importantly, the frantic pace of the story and the overriding dominance of the Xavier-Lensherr relationship stymies almost any other character development. Mystique gets some attention by virtue of being pulled into the orbit of Erik's descent into villainy, but most of the other mutant players are so emotionally malnourished that they effectively become delivery mechanisms for their powers. This makes a number of character beats pretty inexplicable. A prominent betrayal in the plot makes barely a lick of sense, and Charles's "romance" with CIA agent Moira McTaggert is so underwritten that one would assume they were workmanlike colleagues until they randomly suck on each other's faces near the end (wheelchair fetish, perhaps?). These character missteps should serve as a stark warning to Joss Whedon and the Avengers team on the delicate balancing act that goes into creating a whole team of fully fleshed characters.

X-Men: First Class is a film that gets so much right. The disappointment stems not from what the film is, but what it could have been. With a few more months added to the schedule, the prodigious talent in front of and behind the camera might well have produced the finest Marvel Universe movie to date. Instead, we're left with a film that's often brilliant but fails to coalesce as a satisfying whole.

Statisfaction Score: 7/10

Interest Score: 6/10

Archive comedy review: Louis CK

2011-06-03T10:43:00.005+01:00

Comedy reviews seem to be all the rage on this blog at the moment, so I thought I'd reprint a review I wrote for London-ers in November 2009 after seeing the mighty Louis CK at the Bloomsbury Theatre. The man's a master comedy craftsman, so check him out if you ever get the chance.

Original piece here.

Stand-up comedy might just be the ultimate popular American art form. I use the word 'popular' because that allows me to neatly sidestep jazz, which is definitely art but certainly isn't popular. Nobody actually likes jazz, do they? They just like the idea of liking jazz. Yeah, I went there. Suck it, Mingus.

It's true that British stand-ups like Billy Connolly, Eddie Izzard and Lee Evans can stand tall in the weird, deformed line-up of legendary live comedians. But no other country has quite the same heritage as the US, from Lenny Bruce in the early '60s to Richard Pryor and George Carlin in the '70s to Bill Hicks to Chris Rock to Dave Chappelle to Sarah Silverman in a long, steadily evolving line of funny. Maybe it's North America's isolation as a continent; maybe it's that stereotype of American bullishness. Whatever the case, the Americans sure know how to stand up in a packed room and shout an audience to its knees.

Louis CK absolutely deserves his place in that pantheon of American stand-ups. He's been touring the US comedy circuit for two decades, filling the gaps with writing and acting for TV and films. If you've seen him anywhere this year, you'll have seen him in Ricky Gervais' mostly underwhelming directorial debut The Invention of Lying. His acting career has been peppered with cancelled shows and movie flops, but maybe it's better that way. CK clearly shines brightest from a stage with a mic in his hand.

Tonight, the Bloomsbury's filled to bursting with fans (including Steve Merchant, who thankfully didn't sit in front of me) expecting a dose of CK's winning blend of traditional observational comedy and foul-mouthed commentary. If the man is exhausted from his schedule (or the first gig he played at the Bloomsbury just before our late set), he doesn't show it. The audience is firmly in stitches for the duration.

Content-wise, there's nothing new here, CK visiting such well-cropped comedy pastures as air travel, fatherhood and dating. But what makes him such a compelling performer is his ability to take these comedy tropes and rejuvenate them, whether with sly subversion, deft wordplay or pure throat-straining commitment. His descriptions, like that of the middle-class urbanite who doesn't speak but somehow "secretes words out of his head", are dead-on. Just as the audience is lulled into a sense of familiarity with a bit about CK volunteering to help supervise lunch at his daughter's elementary school, he sucker punches us into shocked hysterics by calmly noting that in the event of a fire he'd happily trample other children to save his own.

The benign glint in CK's eye ensures that this isn't a Frankie Boyle-esque aggressive comedy barrage. He's toying with the audience's expectations, tempering pessimism with playfulness while still giving the material enough edge to draw gasps now and then. The word that springs to mind watching CK's set is 'craft'. CK has had 20 years to hone his, and he's seen enough audiences to be able to read us like a book. After all, as any comedy craftsman knows, it's not about the material. It's about the delivery.

Recommended Recent Records Round-Up II (Morrrr)

2011-05-31T13:56:00.000+01:00

Rrrr is back with another brace of recommended records, freshly skinned and gutted for your pleasure and convenience. This week's catch of the day includes firebrands, safe hands, comedy raps and guitar attacks. Hit up the comments below to give your take on any of these albums (or any other new albums). I'm also curious to find out whether the Satisfaction/Interest review scale is working for people or if it comes off as unnecessary and overcomplicated. Let me know!

Tyler, the Creator, Goblin

The controversy swirling around Tyler the Creator and the greater OFWGKTA rap collective has been suitably covered by the internet (Google it if you need a catch-up. Short version: it's all a bit rapey), so I'm going to restrain myself from commenting on Odd Future beyond the bounds of this album, Tyler's second solo LP and his first to be released through a label. Goblin is strangely reminiscent of Kanye West's Dark Twisted Fantasy on a conceptual level: a sprawling exploration of a troubled psyche, long stretches of total brilliance pierced by dozens of tiny, repulsive moments.

Like Tyler's first album Bastard, Goblin opens with a hypothetical conversation between Tyler and his therapist, an intense dialogue of petty tirades and self-recrimination that's revisited through the rest of the record. Musically, Goblin seems like a conscious step away from the smooth electro sheen of its predecessor; it's a bleaker take on hip hop that better suits its creator's nihilistic, self-flagellating fuck-you stance.

It's harder work for the listener, but the likes of 'Nightmare' and 'Her' effectively strip back the layers of surrealism and bravado to reveal a 20 year-old kid still fretting over female rejection and struggling to reconcile his own contradictions. The bangers are still there, albeit better hidden and always subverted: tracks like 'Radicals' ("Kill people, burn shit, fuck school") and 'Sandwitches' see Tyler and his OF cohorts flipping out with fire in their eyes and hate in their hearts. An album of two halves, Goblin is an unforgiving record that's as much at war with itself as with its listeners, aptly demonstrated by the brilliant opening line on standout track 'Yonkers': "I'm a fucking walking paradox/ No I'm not."

Satisfaction Score: 7/10

Interest Score: 9/10

Unintentionally Long Review Score: Whoopsies/10

Three Trapped Tigers, Route One or Die

What's this? A brilliant, genre-bending guitar band? And where are they from? London, you say? Well I never. Yes, Three Trapped Tigers are one of the few bands from the capital proving that UK guitar music hasn't hacked up its last gasp quite yet. At first glance, the trio's instrumental music could be folded into the math rock fold, all precision drumming and intricate riffage. But like most sub-genres, the description proves reductive. If we're talking genre, Tigers bear as much resemblance to the dream-punk of Fang Island or the expansive post-rock of Mogwai as they do Battles and their ilk. Route One or Die's seamless love-in between guitar, piano and fuzzed electro also evokes Scottish digi-punks Errors, but for all the comparisons, the band is staking its own claim here. Opening tracks 'Cramm' and 'Noise Trade' are unashamedly epic, the sweeping grandeur uninhibited by anything so staid as vocals. Later tracks see Tigers unwind a little, the intensity giving way to spacious stretches of lush electronics. With their three excellent preceding EPs, the band proved their potential but occasionally came off like mad geniuses struggling to contain the nuclear-powered behemoth they were creating. With Route One or Die they've established complete control, and now stand poised to inject some tiger blood into London's anaemic rock scene.

Satisfaction Score: 9/10

Interest Score: 7/10

The Lonely Island, Turtleneck & Chain

A glance at my recent piece praising The Lonely Island, among others, for their amazing collaborative spirit will hopefully convince you that, at the very least, The Lonely Island are substantially better than Welsh knuckleheads Goldie Lookin' Chain. Not a massive feat, sure, but the difficulty of eliciting chuckles on an ongoing basis through humorous raps shouldn't be underestimated. Second album Turtleneck & Chain sees the trio run the risk of outstaying their welcome, but for absurd giggles the album is easily the equal of Incredibad. Comedy highlights include a Pirates of the Caribbean-obsessed Michael Bolton ruining the boys' attempt at a smooth club anthem on 'Jack Sparrow' ("He's the pauper of the surf, the jester of Tortuga") and Andy Samberg's cheerful, Fresh Prince-esque description of being pulverised in a bout with cinema's most famous boxing icon on 'Rocky' ("People barfed in the crowd, they were going insane/ Then Rocky punched my nose bone into my brain").

But as ever, what makes The Lonely Island stand out is the genuine reverence for the genre they're working with, along with some genuinely good production, most notably on the Santigold-starring 'After Party', which could be a genuine club hit if the lyrics weren't so ludicrous. A couple of tracks ('Shy Ronnie 2') suffer for their reliance on the visual gags seen in the group's videos, but all in all it's a package that, against all odds, sees Samberg, Taccone and Schaffer match their previous work comedically and exceed it musically.

Satisfaction Score: 9/10

Interest Score: 4/10

Thurston Moore, Demolished Thoughts

With J Mascis' solo debut Several Shades of Why and now Demolished Thoughts from Sonic Youth frontman Thurston Moore, 2011 is shaping up to be a vintage year for elegant acoustic releases by veteran distortioneers. Unlike Mascis, Moore has previous in this area, in the form of 2007 solo collection Trees Outside the Academy. Demolished Thoughts picks up where Trees left off, centred around the delicate interplay between Moore's crystalline strumming and Samara Lubelski's violin. For this album, Moore has virtually abandoned the insistent drums that peppered his last solo record, uniting the tracks under a curious banner that mixes idyllic contentment with a vaguely sketched longing. Tracks like album centrepieces 'Orchard Street' and 'In Silver Rain with a Paper Key' bleed into each other perfectly, carrying over the album's appealing atmosphere from one track to the next. In that sense, Demolished Thoughts makes a superb mood album, ideal for wistful solo listening (staring dolefully through a rain-streaked window isn't obligatory, but would probably help). It's not all meditation music, however, with tracks like assertive foot stomper 'Circulation' testifying to Moore's gift as an expert craftsman of six-string textures.

Satisfaction Score: 7/10

Interest Score: 7/10

Recommended Recent Records Round-Up (Rrrr)

2011-05-20T13:45:00.000+01:00

It appears I've been so consumed with writing articles about reviews of late that I've somewhat neglected to actually write any reviews. Of albums, at least. To redress the balance, here is a collection of choice sentences on some recently released albums that have been floating my boat in the last couple of months. This will also be the illustrious debut of Escape Artist's patented Satisfaction/Interest review scale (see here for long-winded explanation), which I'll be making use of from now on. 2011 has been a mighty fine year for new music so far, so look out for more of these round-ups in the near future.

Dels, GOB

Dels joins Ghostpoet in the vanguard of thoughtful British rappers directly inspired by the surely-knighthood-worthy-by-now Stockwell MC Roots Manuva. Sir Manuva even guests on Dels' first album GOB, bringing his husky drawl to blustering call-to-arms 'Capsize'. But for the most part Dels takes on tracks alone, showcasing both lyrical rigour ('Droogs' affectingly delves into the misery of domestic abuse) and the blend of drowsiness and animation that's rapidly becoming a hallmark of this fertile sub-genre of UK hip hop. With production split between Kwes, Micachu and Hot Chip's Joe Goddard, GOB's beats are an energising mix of monster synth, squalls of videogame electronics and intricate, intimate moments.

Satisfaction Score: 8/10

Interest Score: 8/10

The Pains of Being Pure At Heart, Belong

I wasn't overly impressed with PoBPAH's first album. It was hyped to all hell (they're from New York, did you hear?), and the odour of its Cure-ish, shoegaze influences far outstank the band's own musk. Frontman Kip Berman's nasal vocals didn't do much for me, either. So imagine my surprise when the band's follow up album turned out to be a hook-laden pop rock monster that's likely to dominate many a summer stereo. Belong is a huge improvement over its predecessor in almost every regard: the riffs are clear and punchy, the melodies are more powerful. Even those vocals are somehow less soul-destroying. The lyrics limit themselves to girls, summer and summer girls for the most part, but that's almost a plus for an album that demands mindless pogoing above all else. It was a close run thing between this and Yuck's excellent debut for this year's undemanding summer record par excellence, but Belong steals it by a cheerleader's ponytail.

Satisfaction Score: 9/10

Interest Score: 5/10

Panda Bear, Tomboy

Panda Bear's (aka Noah Lennox) Animal Collective cohort Avey Tare's first solo album Down There was Officially One of My Favourite Albums of Last Year, stuffed to the gills as it was with night-time mystery and just a hint of unseen threat. Tomboy, Panda Bear's fourth solo album, is the lustrous sun to Down There's spectral moon. Lennox's compositions here tread the same ground as previous album Person Pitch, all whimsical electronic hiccups and tribal rhythm. Tracks like 'Surfer's Hymn' and 'Last Night at the Jetty' send out beautiful waves of summery contentment, the latter summoning the spirit of the Beach Boys for a nigh-on perfect end-of-party nostalgia trip. No real change of pace for Panda Bear, then, but it's hard to demand change when the vibrations are so good.

Satisfaction Score: 8/10

Interest Score: 8/10

The Weeknd, House of Balloons

Teenagers are prone to brash statements; one of my best was the cripplingly short-sighted declaration that modern R&B was one of the only genres I'd never get into. Amidst the nauseating rash of late 90s/early 00s "urban" pop, I just couldn't think of any redeeming features for an overprocessed sound that seemed to rely on vocals that stretched a single note into a thousand belaboured syllables. Even back then, I was misjudging a lot of the music I was dismissing. But I certainly never saw a record like House of Balloons on the horizon. The album, released online by singer Abel Tesfaye and producers Doc McKinney and Illangelo, is deeply rooted in R&B, with Tesfaye's falsetto as lush and rich as Michael Jackson's, or Usher's. But this is R&B at a glacier's pace and with an Arctic, crystalline atmosphere. Tracks like 'High for This' and 'The Knowing' share DNA with the more melodic post-dubstep producers like Burial and How to Dress Well, dragging the beats out into new shapes while giving Tesfaye's stunning vocals ample runway space to take off. The best thing about it? You can download it for free at The Weeknd's website, here.

Satisfaction Score: 7/10

Interest Score: 8/10

Kurt Vile, Smoke Ring For My Halo

Hardcore lo-fi enthusiasts tend to sneer at the improved production values on Kurt Vile's last couple of releases of stripped back rock 'n' roll, recorded for Matador in proper studios rather than under an unmade bed in Philadelphia (a topic covered by Vile on 'Puppet to the Man'). For all right-thinking people who realise that being able to hear the motorway in the backround on an LP isn't the cure to all the world's ills, however, studio recording has given a new clarity to Vile's songwriting skills. Smoke Ring For My Halo is his best and most consistent album to date, 10 unmissable tracks rather than an hour of fuzz punctuated by flashes of brilliance. His lyrics, which we can now actually hear, are pleasingly layered, from the co-dependent desperation of opener 'Baby's Arms' to the brittle 'Runner Ups', which flicks a casual middle finger to the world ("When it's looking dark, punch the future in the face"). Vile is also becoming one of my favourite acoustic guitarists, his fingers deftly switching from heavy, buzzy strumming to intricate plucking. 'On Tour' makes for a brilliant centrepiece, a meandering spirit journey through the power and paranoia of a life on four wheels.

Satisfaction Score: 8/10

Interest Score: 8/10

Graphics vs. art in modern videogames

2011-05-10T14:25:00.001+01:00

This is not a post that intends to argue that videogames do or don't constitute art. I believe it was Heraclitus of Ephesus who called this "a fucking boring debate". Art isn't a locked door that needs a password to gain entry. It doesn't respond well to rules or entry criteria. When we bark back and forth about art, what we're really discussing is indescribable differences in perspective, differences in the way we perceive the world. No one's right and no one's wrong. Having said that, green is irrefutably the best colour. I don't think you can deny this.

It's certainly hard to deny that the medium of videogames is at best considered cinema's irritating little brother, the hyperactive pre-adolescent clutching at the coat-tails of its betters for attention. There's a host of reasons for this, with roots within the games industry itself as well as the preconceptions of dismissive outsiders. I believe one of the reasons for many games being considered little more than toys is the industry's preoccupation with graphics.

I appreciate great graphics. There's a huge amount of craft and skill (as well as thousands of miserable, marriage-destroying labour hours, presumably) that goes into making a landscape both beautiful and interactive. Achieving graphics that encourage immersion, enhance gameplay or inspire player creativity is an artful pursuit. But graphics must sit within the larger visual realm; there must always be a point to pushing technology to new levels. Otherwise we're just fiddling with pixels.

Games that prioritise graphics without considering wider visual goals are usually pretty easy to spot. Recently, Killzone 3 proved a visual disappointment despite the big bucks spent on its development. All the bells and whistles are in place, it's just that they have nowhere to go. The game's visual design is so uninspiring that all the superstar rendering isn't driving towards any meaningful artistic goal. It's the equivalent of tearing open an immaculately wrapped, expertly ribboned Christmas present to find a collection of your dad's dandruff scattered inside. Pointless ostentation hiding an ill-considered core.

You might argue that depressing, drab industrialisation is the very point Killzone 3 is trying to make with its visuals. Very true, but does the game's visual identity actually succeed? Where are the incidental insights into the misery of life on Helghan? Does the look of Killzone's world affect how we want to interact with it? The game doesn't hold a candle to Limbo's pervasive sense of monochrome dread, or Machinarium's rusty, apocalyptic charm. Even the Gears of War series used its vision of "destroyed beauty" to enliven its backstory and evoke a sense of a historical grandeur now turned to rubble. With Killzone, all we get is an unending, featureless sea of rivets, railings and warehouses, populated by a faceless army of cockney Nazis.

The ever-expanding library of downloadable titles on all platforms, less burdened by the expectations of cutting-edge graphics, is proving that videogame art can be impressive without graphics. It's a shame that so many developers, and so many gamers, refuse to acknowledge that graphics are utterly useless without art. We can only hope that as this industry emerges from its rebellious teenage years with a full complement of pubes and an art degree, our perceptions of visual beauty in games evolves and, to some degree, inverts. Who knows, maybe in this new utopia, The Secret of Monkey Island will be considered one of Xbox Live Arcade's most beautiful games, and Shadow Complex one of its most ugly.

Review: 13 Assassins

2011-05-06T13:17:00.009+01:00

With something in the region of 30 films plopped out since 2000, Takashi Miike has to be one of the most productive directors in the world. He's also indisputably one of the most extreme, with releases like Ichi the Killer, Audition and Visitor Q clawing at the boundaries of taste and sanity. Of course, with such an extensive back catalogue, he has also been responsible for comedies and family-friendly fare, but it's his more horrifying output that has predominantly established his reputation in the West.

13 Assassins, one of Miike's most accessible and straightforward films to get an international release, might go some way towards persuading Western audiences of his diversity as well as his fertility. The film is a straight-ahead samurai epic (chanbara) based on the relatively obscure 1963 film of the same name by Eiichi Kudo. In the period just before the Meiji Restoration in 1868, the sadistic and murderous young lord Naritsugu, brother to the Shogun, threatens Japan's stability when he is invited to assume a more powerful position in Edo. A secret plan is hatched by the Shogun's advisors to kill Naritsugu before he arrives. The task is entrusted to veteran samurai Shinzaemon, who gathers 12 like-minded warriors to ambush the sick puppy at a quiet village along the way.

Given Miike's reputation, 13 Assassins is a surprisingly stately affair for the first two thirds of its run-time. Classic samurai movie archetypes abound as Shinzaemon gathers his crew of murder machines, including the gruff and skillful Hirayama (a clear riff on the strong, silent template elsewhere exemplified by stone-faced lone wolf Kyuzo from Seven Samurai) and Ogura, the enthusiastic youth with little experience but a warrior's spirit.

The grimy fingerprints of Miike's horror past are still present, primarily in the early scenes depicting the cruelty of Naritsugu. Goro Inagaki plays Naritsugu like a spoilt child idly burning ants with a magnifying glass as he rapes newlywed brides and uses children as target practice for his bow. Most disturbing of all, and most distinctly Miike, is a village girl who Naritsugu punishes by slicing off all her limbs and cutting out her tongue. This is Miike's odd comfort zone, and the director effectively conducts the misery of these scenes to firmly mark out Naritsugu as an irredeemable nightmare, and a valid target for our heroes.

Once the scene is set and the assassins' trap is laid for their target and his 200-odd retinue, a sleepy Japanese boarding village is the scene for one of the most drawn out battle sequences in recent memory. It rivals some of Kurosawa's set pieces for sheer length and depth, but without any of the let-up that the legendary director built into his battles to allow the audience (and the characters) a breather.

Arrows split the sky. Houses are blown up. A herd of weaponised cattle is unleashed. And above all, there are sword fights. Hapless bodyguards are slashed and skewered in almost every conceivable way, each of the assassins slaying their foes in a variety of styles. It's a smorgasbord of carnage, and it's consistently thrilling in its sheer commitment. The action is shot brilliantly, the camera capturing the grit of combat, the bloody haze in the air and the stunning beauty of the battle's forested surroundings with equal vigour.

The audacity of the final battle does hide some lingering flaws. Tonally, the film veers from relative accuracy to moments of surrealism in a way that proves jarring. Both styles are executed well, but being asked to simultaneously believe that 13 samurai could chew through several hundred armed men and that the film's events also took place in a realistic historical setting is a little too much. Given the preposterousness of the film's concept, a more general sense of style and surrealism could have served the film well, as well as making its more baffling moments part of the fun.

The acting, especially by Koji Yakusho, who invests chief assassin Shinzaemon with wry humour and fatherly empathy along with all the honour and determination, is convincing, but few characters are given more than one layer. The group's number is unwieldy as well, too many of the 13 remaining essentially anonymous and undefined as characters.

The fact that 13 Assassins doesn't transcend the limits of its genre isn't necessarily a criticism. By the looks of things, that was never Miike's intention. 13 Assassins happily sits within the chanbara genre, content to take the themes set by its predecessors and execute them with startling conviction. In this sense, the film's main strength is echoed by one of its best (and possibly slightly mistranslated) lines, spoken by Shinzaemon upon being told of Naritsugu's depravities and the mission at hand: "I will achieve this task...with magnificence."

Review: Attack the Block

2011-05-03T15:46:00.000+01:00

Contrary to the opinions of those who live north of the river, plenty of stuff happens in South London. There's a tennis thing every year. We made dubstep in our bedrooms out of clicks and clacks and rat-a-tats we scavenged up in Croydon. We're fairly proficient at murder. All these things and more can be found below the city's belt in London's sweaty crotch.

One thing South London doesn't have is a decent alien invasion. These tend to be reserved for giant American conurbations like New York and Los Angeles; when they do stray over the Atlantic we usually have to make do with a couple of shots of the London Eye falling over or Big Ben blowing up. Even North London got its own zombie apocalypse with Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg's Shaun of the Dead.

With Attack the Block, the debut film by Joe Cornish (of Adam & Joe fame), South London is finally getting its own slice of the supernatural, and we've not been let down. The film follows a group of young muggers and assorted other residents of a Stockwell tower block as they struggle to defend their turf from a batch of snarling, toothy extraterrestrials (or "dem tings", as they are referred to at one point) that have crash landed on the estate. It's a simple set-up that's minimal on exposition, making room for a breakneck pace, punchy dialogue and innovatively orchestrated action scenes.

The aforementioned Shaun of the Dead is one of the first touchstones for Attack the Block, and not only because Edgar Wright is one of the movie's executive producers. The two films share an incredible knack for finding an elegant, unobtrusive balance between humour, characterisation and surprisingly raw horror elements. As our five anti-social heroes, along with the lady they mugged a couple of hours earlier and a foppish suburbanite stoner trapped on the estate, tool up to scrap and scrape through the night, the script makes room for their personalities to bloom in the background without endless reams of clunky exposition.

Attack the Block's performances range from solid to excellent, with the gang's leader Moses a particular standout. Young actor John Boyega brings a bullish physicality to the role, investing Moses with a brooding toughness and fiery charisma reminiscent of a young Denzel Washington. He's the nucleus around which the young punks revolve; his gravitas gives the rest of the gang license to differentiate their characters, from smartmouth whippet Pest to the gentler, altogether more bespectacled Jerome. Special mention should also go to Nick Frost as good-natured drug dealer Ron; though only a peripheral character he makes a disproportionate impact on the film's gag rate.

The Shaun of the Dead comparisons only stretch so far. Audiences are unlikely to find their sides splitting quite so often as with Wright's rom-zom-com; Attack the Block is an action-horror movie first and foremost, and its primary appeal lies in brilliantly kinetic skirmishes. Our boys' encounters with the alien invaders feature pacy chase sequences, claustrophobic brawls through council flats, improvised explosives and more than a couple of grisly demises. In fact, the movie's backdrop of perpetual night and its synthy score often recalls vintage John Carpenter sci-fi like Assault on Precinct 13 and Escape from New York. The film's superb sound design also does a great job of modulating the myriad audio cues, cleanly separating bestial screeches, the roar of misused fireworks and clipped one-liners so they never interfere with one another.

The design of the movie's mysterious space critters might be divisive in its simplicity, but Cornish's creature effects team has turned a limited budget into a virtue here. Somewhere in between giant wolves and gorillas in shape, the creatures are wreathed in slimy shadow, the blackness of their forms pierced only by luminous rows of razor sharp teeth. They're bestial and bruising, and their design economically highlights the only thing that matters: those teeth and how fast they can get at your throat.

Attack the Block might not match up to this summer's blockbuster leviathans in scope or budget, but it's almost certainly destined for cult glory. As such, this plucky South London underdog might end up being fondly remembered far longer than even the glossiest superhero epic. Joe Cornish has made a movie that's lean and mean, without much green; a masterclass of economical filmmaking. He may also, at 42 years of age, have emerged as British cinema's exciting new talent, with a movie that feels more youthful and vibrant than any Harry Potter. Fancy that.

Men of Tomorrow: Summer 2011's Comic Book Movies

2011-04-12T12:56:00.020+01:00

After a relatively uneventful summer for comic book adaptations last year, Hollywood is opening up the comic book stable once more, in the hopes that the newest crop of heroic steeds will carry studios to fun and profit. The big swinging dick stallions are out in force this year, lead by three massive Marvel releases. Here's a little summary of 2011's cosmic contenders and their prospects based on the material we've seen so far.

Thor (d. Kenneth Branagh; UK release 27 April)

Thor trailer HERE

Is it still weird for everyone else that Kenneth Branagh is directing a comic book movie? I guess Thor, with its melodramatic overtones and mythic inspiration, fits into Branagh's world better than most other comic books, but it was a head-swiveling choice from Marvel Studios that still feels surreal. Based on what we've been shown so far, however, Thor will be low on soliloquies and positively throbbing with undemanding mayhem.

Releasing in an almost identical slot to Iron Man 2 last year, Thor's producers will be hoping that the movie will act as the summer season's launch event, a role that Sucker Punch spectacularly failed to play on its release a couple of weeks ago. The trailer shows off the film's lushly designed Asgardian settings, but it seems clear that the majority of the story will take place in the dust of New Mexico, where our titular hero is plopped down to learn humility and fall in love with the nearest photogenic handmaiden (Natalie Portman, luckily, despite appearing borderline anaesthetised in her scenes).

Loki will plot, doom-robots will be unleashed, Thor's hammer will strike the ground to create a ripply wave of ripped-up concrete so you know he's cool and handsome and great at sex. Anthony Hopkins as Odin will chew scenery as all his recent contracts presumably insist (although at his age it might just be a light gumming). The trailer also played up the movie's fish-out-of-water comedy moments as Thor is forced to acquaint himself with his newfound limitations and learn about Midgard's culture. Women will admire his abs all the while, as is only natural. So essentially it should be like Twins, except Schwarzenneger has a hammer and Danny DeVito is a manipulative Norse god-wizard.

Get pumped for: Buff hammer-maniac vs magical robot.

Sinking feeling: Marvel's other films have been grounded in some level of reality; Thor could make for an awkward fit into the cinematic universe they're piecing together.

X-Men: First Class (d. Matthew Vaughan; UK release 2 June)

First Class trailer HERE

Less a movie and more a sobbing flight from the bloated mess that was 2007's The Last Stand, which in itself was less a movie and more of a two hour scream from the world's inner child as it was being buttfucked by a grinning Vinnie Jones. Still, with director Matthew Vaughan bathing in the afterglow of fanboy favourite Kick-Ass and breakthrough British screenwriter Jane Goldman (Kick-Ass co-writer) on board, we can be forgiven for stoking the fires of hope again.

For maximum distance from its predecessor, First Class is taking the X-Men back to their 60s roots, exploring the early friendship between Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr before they became implacable adversaries as Professor X and Magneto. It's a good chance to breathe some vibrancy into a franchise that always threatened to buckle under the weight of its cast, and the likes of James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, January Jones and Jennifer Lawrence easily have the chops to make us excited about the X-Men again if well-directed.

The Cold War backdrop and the central plotline of a fracturing relationship makes this the most straight-faced comic book movie of the summer by some margin, but shots of Erik going all Yoda on a submarine and Nightcrawler's dad Azazel bamfing around the place suggest there will be plenty of spectacle. The plot seems to cast the Hellfire Club, led by the nefarious Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon) as the puppeteer pulling the strings behind some Cuban missile crisis-type event (possibly the Cuban missile crisis) which Xavier's newly formed crew will have to avert, followed by some light high-fiving. Was the high-five invented by the 60s? This mystery, and many more, to be solved in the summer's biggest prequel.

Get pumped for: Michael Fucking Fassbender.

Sinking feeling: Nicolas Hoult has a lot to prove as a young Beast, although his performance in A Single Man should put any dodgy-accent fears to bed.

Green Lantern (d. Martin Campbell; UK release 17 June)

Green Lantern Wondercon footage HERE

After a lacklustre trailer at last year's San Diego Comic Con, the recent footage that came out of Wondercon at last gives us something interesting to latch on to. Apparently studio executives have admitted to dropping the marketing ball on this one, and it really shows. It wasn't until a couple of weeks ago that we got a proper glimpse into director Martin Campbell's intentions for Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds) and his epic jawline, and they appear to be noble ones.

Of all the movies this summer, Green Lantern might be the biggest gamble. While Thor is smothered in fantasy, it's at least based on a mythos with which many are familiar. Green Lantern will have to forge its own cinematic canon that will resonate outside of geekdom. But with so many movie adaptations ending up bland and reductive, it's refreshing to see many of the comic's more outlandish aspects included in the footage that has been shown. The planet Oa will clearly play a big part, as will galactic police force the Green Lantern Corps (including Sinestro, Kilowog and Tomar-Re), and with nebulous alien Parallax providing the main threat it's clear that Jordan won't be warming up against shoplifters and Peeping Toms.

The movie will ultimately be judged on its effects, and there is some stunning work on show, Oa's alien cityscapes chief among them (although some effects, like Jordan's strange CG mask, need work if they're to match that standard). Some of the dialogue we've seen feels a little clunky, and there's every chance, as in most comic book movies, that Green Lantern will lack a charismatic and fleshed-out female lead. But despite its potential to flop like a big green beached whale, sheer curiosity has made it the comic book movie I'm most looking forward to seeing this summer.

Get pumped for: The shot of Hal brandishing a ring-created minigun hopefully demonstrates that the film's not scared to explore the Lantern ring's more imaginative capabilities.

Sinking feeling: The look of the mask needs work, and does the Green Lantern oath sound a bit shit when spoken aloud?

Captain America: The First Avenger (d. Joe Johnston; UK release 29 July)

Captain America trailer HERE

Ah, Joe Johnston. Hollywood's workhorse. The problem with workmanlike directors is the unpredictability. When we sit down to watch Captain America, will we get the clarity and pace of The Rocketeer or Jumanji, or are we going to be lumped with another Wolfman? It's hard to know. If there's anything that we could laboriously apply to Johnston as a common theme, it's a sort of primary colour simplicity that unites a lot of his 90s blockbusters and tends to make him a bit outdated today. But Captain America's trailer seems to suggest that this day-glo optimism could actually work for America's second most-iconic comic book paragon.

Chris Evans looks great in the role, both in his digitally shrivelled form and as the super serum-enhanced shield slinger. The World War II setting is clearly played in the Indiana Jones-esque, Boy's Own vein, which is important as Hugo Weaving's Red Skull probably wouldn't do a historically authentic version any favours. It's also satisfying to see Hayley Atwell (so good in last year's TV dramas Any Human Heart and Pillars of the Earth) playing a proper fighting role rather than the powerless milksops that so often define female characters in comic book blockbusters.

The other layer bubbling under the surface is hiding in plain sight in the film's title. Cap is the first Avenger, the final link (after Iron Man, Hulk and Thor's solo hijinks) in the chain for this colossal ultra-franchise that's due to wake like some long-dormant Kraken next summer. Captain America has been designed as the last step before The Avengers, presumably through the old "frozen in ice after drone plane fall and discovered in suspended animation in modern times" chestnut that reintroduced the character for the Avengers comic books in the 60s. If that's the route the movie takes (and as the Marvel movie universe seems primarily drawn from the Ultimates comics, it's likely that it will), it'll be interesting to see how the overall tone of the movie will gel with this relatively glum denouement. We'll also get a better idea of whether Evans will be authoritative enough in the role to assert his leadership over all the A-list actors (and their A-list characters) who populate The Avengers.

Get pumped for: A technicolour blockbuster that ditches the grit and makes with the glory.

Sinking feeling: Banishing unhappy memories of The Wolfman and Jurassic Park III might be the biggest challenge here.

Cowboys & Aliens (d. Jon Favreau; UK release 12 August)

Cowboys & Aliens trailer HERE

Based on a 2006 graphic novel that does exactly what it says on the tin, Cowboys & Aliens on first inspection seems like a better idea for a videogame than a movie. It also emanates the pungent whiff of the kind of Snakes on a Plane high concept that usually crams most of its ideas into the title.

But director Jon Favreau has broken his blockbuster teeth on Zathura and two Iron Man movies, so we can at least expect some impressive effects and a well-implemented plot (assuming we can forget Iron Man 2's plot and pacing like some bad dream). The cast is impressive too, with Daniel Craig playing the mysterious stranger who wakes up in the desert with no memories and a bizarre bit of fashionwear strapped to his wrist. Harrison Ford plays the ruthless Sheriff of the nearby town of Absolution, who along with the likes of Olivia Wilde, Paul Dano and Sam Rockwell will have to band together when a whole mess of high-fallutin' extraterrestrials arrive on the scene with more than cattle-rustlin' on their minds. The trailer shows off lots of stylish action and big budget effects, along with the enjoyable anachronism of horses and shotguns sharing screen space with glowing space ships. All the ingredients for a fun time seem to be in place, but it remains to be seen whether Favreau's execution can turn a dumb concept into great popcorn entertainment.

Get pumped for: The sequel, Cowboys & Aliens & Zombies & Vampires.

Sinking feeling: Let's hope Craig and Ford don't get trapped in an infinite out-gruffing match.

All release dates are according to IMDB.

Movie Violence: What's The Point?

2011-04-05T13:32:00.025+01:00

A few years ago I was at my parents' house extolling the virtues of The Thin Red Line at length and probably to the mild irritation of my family, who were trapped in the living room with me and unable to escape. After a couple of minutes of waxing pedestrian about the film, my gran (old school, academic, intellectually intimidating) asked me why I would want to watch a film that depicted scenes of war. The question gave me pause for thought. In a hundred years of accumulated filmmaking, violence remains one of cinema's key methods of expression and a timeless device for heightening drama.

I think my gran's question was grounded in a belief that films are, in general, entertainment rather than art, and therefore depictions of violence are morally dubious on the grounds that they are created for entertainment's sake. I would disagree with that argument; there are plenty of movies that I have found edifying and artistically valid, partly through the application of onscreen violence, whether shockingly realistic or stylised. But I also have to admit that I have enjoyed shallow movie violence as pure entertainment without any moral reservations. So I thought I'd have a think about the purpose of cinematic violence and its best and worst exponents.

In the most basic sense, violence is possibly the simplest method of heightening drama and giving urgency to a plot. In war movies like Saving Private Ryan or Platoon, the main antagonist isn't German or Viet Cong soldiers, it's the constant spectre of violence. It's the death-rattle of machine guns; the doom-hum of tanks rolling down the road or warplanes screeching across the sky. When we see medics desperately patching up their ruined comrades on the beaches of Normandy as the rounds continue to thump down around them, when we see Platoon's Sgt. Elias desperately clinging on to life despite being left behind to rot in the jungle, the lump in our throat doesn't rise through hatred of their human adversaries. The real enemy is the loss of humanity, intelligent beings reduced to meat in an instant. The physical and psychological wastage.

Violence in war movies is usually directed at putting across this soul rot in as unflinching and brutal a manner as possible. But in other genres, violence is a potent force to drive plot and character motivation. Revenge movies usually start with a despicable act of violence in order to aim the protagonist at his/her foes. Kinji Fukasaku's Battle Royale, a gore-soaked pulp tale of Japanese schoolchildren trapped on an island and forced to kill each other off as part of a murderous government youth cull, explores the fractures between the values of two Japanese generations through the application of appalling violence. It's violence as the purest representation of a power struggle.

Some movies use onscreen brutality as a reflection on violence as a concept. David Cronenberg's A History of Violence meticulously charts the metamorphosis of main character Tom Stall, a reformed mobster who slowly re-engages his violent impulses after killing two robbers in his small town diner. Tom's mannerisms begin to shift; his relationship and sex life with his wife is affected; even his teenage son begins to assert himself violently at school. In A History of Violence, the ability to inflict pain on others is studied as a destructive, long-term condition that's incompatible with civilised life, as well as a Darwinian defence mechanism that prioritises asserting one's right to survive at all costs. Other filmmakers that have explored the idea of violence through its onscreen application include Sam Peckinpah (Straw Dogs), the Coen Brothers (No Country for Old Men) and Clint Eastwood (Unforgiven).

On a different level, I have no problem with admitting to enjoying cinematic violence for the thrill of it, especially when presented in a stylised and unreal manner. There's a world of difference between Luke Skywalker blowing up the Death Star and violence that feels believable and emotionally wearing. It's the reason we laugh rather than retch when the hulking German mechanic gets mashed up in a plane's propeller in Indiana Jones. It's the reason we suspend disbelief when Jet Li and Tony Leung are dancing their combat ballet on the surface of a gleaming lake in Zhang Yimou's Hero.

Similarly, cinematic violence can be beautiful to look at. The awesome spectacle of the battle scenes in 300 is worth revisiting for its brawny audacity, even if the story is worth forgetting. Martial arts movies only exist to impress viewers, whether kung fu enthusiasts or chop socky casuals, with the forms and movement of make-believe fighting. Hell, gruesome violence can even be funny if the tone is right. I don't know many people who didn't guffaw at Shaun and Ed lobbing old records at a couple of oncoming zombies in Shaun of the Dead, or at Team America's blonde badass Lisa blowing an Al-Qaeda puppet through a Paris store window to the immortal line, "Hey terrorist - terrorise THIS!". I find I'm able to enjoy screen violence as entertainment as long as I'm aware of the artifice, like a rollercoaster of guns and explosions.

The only movies that cross my violence line are those that seem to have been made for the sole purpose of enjoying realistic depictions of human suffering. Most of these fall into the horror category, although only an elite few do I avoid on moral grounds. Even pretty extreme horror movies like Alexandre Aja's Switchblade Romance and claustrophobic Spanish infection freakout [REC] have enough going on under the hood that the violence is about sustaining threat rather than revelling in pain.

No, it's the torture porn of the Saw sequels and the Hostel movies that put me off. The films that seem cynically designed to devalue realistic visions of pain and death, that strategically attempt to inspire voyeuristic murder-boners, often by maiming and killing attractive young women to complete the perfect circle of death/masturbation confusion. Cinematically, it makes for lumpen experiences with no sense of restraint or pacing. More importantly, they're the only movies that I wouldn't be able to explain to my gran.

Review: Submarine

2011-03-30T12:49:00.005+01:00

I guess the surface-level Wes Anderson comparisons were inevitable. A cast of highly literate outcasts? Check. Dry, understated dialogue? Check. Use of stylish title screens to separate acts? Check. If you'd never seen Submarine, Richard Ayoade's big screen debut, you might assume that all the components were in place for a cynical exercise in indie tweeism.

You'd be wrong, though. While Ayoade has clearly been sharing some of Anderson's cinematic syringes, Submarine bobs along to its own ebbs and eddies, seemingly informed as much by books as by other films (not least Joe Dunthorpe's novel, on which the movie is based). Set in Swansea, the film follows hyper-obsessive teenage misfit Oliver Tate as he attempts to woo his red-coated, pyromaniac femme fatale of a classmate Jordana Bevan and takes it upon himself to save the failing marriage of his stately, quietly desperate parents.

Ayoade, having gained recognition through acting in great TV comedies like The IT Crowd, The Mighty Boosh and Garth Marenghi's Darkplace (which he also co-wrote and directed), has settled snugly into the bigger boots of feature film direction. Despite his having graduated from TV work and music videos, there's no hint of the small screen anywhere in Submarine.

The film's visual style is well-defined and stunningly executed, Ayoade capturing the hazy essence of teenage summer holidays with lovingly crafted sunset shots of kids rattling around empty industrial estates and Swansea beaches. But far from Wes Anderson's immaculately poised sequences, Ayoade's camera often breaks away from the widescreen reverie to follow the film's characters by hand, imbuing many sequences with a vibrancy and dynamism that keeps the film from feeling too detached.

Submarine's enviable aesthetics are matched by an attention to character that provides the drive for an otherwise laconic narrative. Oliver's bookishness and pretensions to high culture hide an extreme social ineptitude that borders on disability. In fact, the character often brought to mind Mark Haddon's 2003 book about a child with Asperger's Syndrome The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time in his inability to relate to the world around him and his attempts to repair complex problems with simplistic solutions. Oliver's faking of love letters between his parents and telling his mother, earnestly, with hand on shoulder, that his dad "still wants to make love to you" provides some of the film's comedic highlights. Similarly, his relentless shadowing of Graham Purvis, a sleazy self-help guru (seriously, how useful are sleazy self-help gurus for comedy?) and old flame of his mother's, draws out the character's extremities without seeming contrived.

Oliver's personality disorders make for a satisfying burgeoning relationship with his confident, regal crush Jordana, as he struggles to come to terms with the fact that real-life relationships don't sync up with the grand fantasies he has borrowed from novels and movies. Still, while Oliver and Jordana's relationship faces real-life knocks and compromises, it's brimming with an affecting, old-fashioned romanticism that's primarily concerned with the unique sentiment of young love, no matter how short-lived it's destined to be.

Although Oliver's relationship with his parents, who have resigned themselves to a joyless marriage of barely masked irritation, provides the film's most socially realistic moments, it doesn't feel jarring. Viewing the world almost exclusively through the bizarre kaleidoscope that is Oliver's perspective has a unifying effect on the scenes. Even when the film is exploring depression and despondency (which Oliver's dad likens to being underwater - water being a theme that runs through the film from its title to its final scene), there's always a winning surrealism at work that regularly draws humour from the most unlikely situations.

Impressive performances abound. Craig Roberts's portrayal of Oliver is the standout - Roberts displays an incredible gift for comic timing as well as a rock-solid grasp of character, and carries the film effortlessly. Yasmin Paige imbues Jordana with a teenage mystery that makes it easy to understand why Oliver has fallen under her spell, and a frostiness that gives her scenes with Roberts a sharp edge. Paddy Considine ably performs as the film's comedic powerhouse, making Graham Purvis as garish and unappealing as the ridiculous van he drives, while Sally Hawkins and Noah Taylor wring the drama from their understated performances as Oliver's parents.

That Submarine mixes touching human drama with genuine hilarity with such precision and expertise speaks to its director's confidence on the big screen. Just like Edgar Wright before him, Ayoade has made the transition from TV to the silver screen with his own style and a sensibility that's both distinctly British and unapologetically cinematic.

The mathematics of reviewing II: taking the I out of criticism

2011-03-22T13:40:00.012Z

The rise of the internet has changed criticism forever. The online world detonated the media landscape once dominated by the likes of the NME, Melody Maker and Rolling Stone, scattering its millions of pieces to settle in unoccupied areas of cyberspace. While magazines and newspaper supplements continue to exert some influence on more traditional readers, our attention has now been split among the thousands of websites and blogs that vie to capture our eyeballs for a few moments before they flit off to find another moment of entertainment in our infinite playground.

In many ways this change is a positive one. Access to new music, movie trailers or gameplay footage is now a mere mouse-click away. Gone are the days of suffering through two hours of inane drivel and recycled bullshit on the radio before getting to the one song premiere that was promised. If we've just read an online review of an album or film that sounds interesting, it has never been easier to instantly check out trailers, interviews or songs for ourselves, usually without even having to switch sites. Through sites like Pitchfork, Drowned in Sound, Ain't It Cool News, IGN and streaming services like SoundCloud and Spotify, the world is at our fingertips.

One of the only drawbacks to democratising arts writing is the effect it tends to have on reviews and comments online. Although there are many sites that run really excellent reviews within their fields, the inevitable byproduct of creating a never-ending space where anyone can pick up a loudspeaker is an awful lot of white noise. Garbled, barely comprehensible, egocentric white noise.

Of course, in an environment that's essentially made up of millions of people screaming into the abyss, the natural tendency is to focus on the self. This can have strange and insulating repercussions for our sense of perspective. What separates good reviews from the never-ending waterfall of consciousness is the ability to think outside of the self, to some extent make the self invisible.

I'm not talking about removing "I"s and "me"s and all that stuff we were trained out of when writing essays in school or university. I think one of the things that makes a great review is understanding that an album, movie or game exists to transmit the vision of whoever created it, and it should be judged based on the degree to which it succeeds in carrying out that vision. A piece of art doesn't exist solely to interact positively with its audience, and good reviewers should understand that an album or film not eliciting a personal response doesn't necessarily mean that it didn't succeed at what it set out to do (although it often does).

Stepping outside of one's own perspective to measure the successes and failures of a film, for example, immediately marks a review out from the frothing rabble of fanboys that plagues the net. Bryan Singer's 2006 movie Superman Returns is an example of a film that has been horrendously mistreated online, despite the generally glowing reception it received on its release.

Fanboys decided that it didn't have enough action to sate the cartoon fantasies playing in their heads and railed like petulant princesses against the fact that it didn't cater to their own visions for the character. Despite not being perfect (the secret child ending overcomplicated the film's message and Kate Bosworth was an inadequate Lois Lane), Superman Returns was hugely successful at translating the classic, innate qualities of America's homespun messiah. It's particularly depressing that the fanboy tantrums managed to soil popular perception of this film to the point where Zack Snyder's upcoming reboot is considered not only necessary, but an opportunity to get the character back to his roots, something Returns had already done spectacularly well.

This is something I always try to keep in mind when reading or writing reviews (with limited success, to be sure). To take this argument to its extreme, there's no point complaining that an album by Fleet Foxes doesn't have enough jungle beats or that an Odd Future mixtape wouldn't be suitable for a dinner party. These are the concerns of the listener, not the album. For a review to justify its name and be more definitive than simple comment, the reviewer has to shake off prejudices and bugbears to make a judgement based on something more universal than just opinion.

Killzone 3 review: looks expensive, feels cheap

2011-03-15T13:07:00.011Z

This has been a pretty pivotal console generation for first-person shooters. Developers like Infinity Ward, Bungie and DICE have dragged the genre away from its PC roots, tailoring controls for thumbs rather than mouse and keyboard fingers. In the process, shooters have become one of the most recognisable faces of gaming (as we're reminded every time an isolated psychopath decides to turn his high school into a shooting gallery), with the triple-A development costs, and expected profits, skyrocketing.

As a result, the FPS arena has become one dominated by a few platinum-gilded blockbuster franchises (Call of Duty, Halo, Battlefield, Half-Life) and clogged by the chaff of many more that couldn't make back their huge costs and died on the vine. The Killzone franchise, developed by Guerrilla Games and exclusive to the Playstation 3, has probably done well enough to step up to the big boys' table in gaming Valhalla, but for many has never quite lived up to expectations.

Killzone 3 represents Guerrilla's latest attempt to firmly mark out its own spot in the FPS big leagues. The story of a war between the earth-based ISA forces and a horde of militant offworld exiles called the Helghast has reached a head by the third game, with the ISA beating a retreat from an aborted invasion of the Helghast homeworld, leaving the player (Sgt. "Sev" Sevchenko) and a few stragglers marooned on a hostile planet trying to work out how to escape.

Killzone 3 certainly has compelling core mechanics, with the chug of the weaponry feeling satisfying and industrial, and the controls slightly tuned-up after the intentionally sluggish movements of the second game (although, in this day and age, it still feels strange to look down iron sights by clicking the right stick). Enemies are suitably engaging to fight, diving behind cover and reacting to the player's movements to maintain a dynamism that's essential in the modern shooter. So far, so triple-A.

It's almost everything outside of the core combat that falls flat with Killzone 3. The visuals are impressive and speak to the immense amount of time and money that was undoubtedly spent on providing an appropriately high-res (and 3-D if you can afford it, which you can't) experience. But the art behind all the textures and lighting is as dull and featurelessly industrial as a never-ending chamber filled with spanners.

Much was made of the new jungle and snow environments, but the overriding visual tone here is still one of bleak austerity and axle grease, an issue from which Guerrilla now can't escape as they've woven it into the canon of the game. Level design remains the same linear experience as the last games, in that it takes pains to constrict player movement through trenches and corridors rather than find a way to direct gamers while giving the illusion of freedom (Guerrilla could take a few Bungie masterclasses in this regard).

Far more troubling, however, are the downright amateurish elements of the game, from both a technical and a game direction standpoint. The sound design, while mostly excellent when it comes to the beefy clatter of the weapons, regularly suffers in other areas. Cut-scenes occasionally lose their impact because something that should be deafening is bafflingly quiet. The ambient chatter of your regular squad-mate Rico is constantly cut off before the end of sentences.

Game direction is a hugely important part of development, especially in FPS titles that should thrive on total immersion. Here it seems to have been virtually ignored, with plot points and basic rivets in the gameplay seemingly abandoned entirely. I'll give a couple of examples, without spoiling anything (although I'm probably doing a fair job of spoiling this game for you anyway).

After a daring rescue attempt and escape from a snow-capped Helghast fortress, Sev and Rico need to figure out a way of getting away. The game then simply cuts to giving the player control of the two of them speeding away on Helghast vehicles, with no connective tissue provided in between. I don't know if a cutscene was skipped because of a glitch or if time or money constraints forced a scene to be dropped, but it was a jarring moment that entirely broke the game's already faltering spell.

In another instance, a crane that's essential to player progress fails to work, giving the Helghast a chance to attack Sev and Rico from below. After the Helghast attack is held off, it magically fixes itself with no explanation. Don't worry reader, you haven't woken up in 2001. This is just a modern game with moments of 2001 game design. All these issues seem to point to the fact that, despite its blockbuster budget, elements of the game feel rushed and incomplete, propped up so they're just about playable and shoved onto store shelves.

The story also feels like a blast from the past, and a small step backwards from even Killzone 2, not a game revered for its narrative. The protagonist is a painfully dull, transparent cypher. Rico is an irritating military rebel pastiche whose bickering with higher-up Narville (himself a borderline parody of the good commander held back by his own rigidity) quickly descends into broken-record territory. There's a hot chick, because hey, games need hot chicks. Shame they forget to turn her into an actual character.

The premise of a stranded platoon of soldiers trying to co-ordinate a fighting retreat provides a great opportunity to force players onto the back foot with a battle that revolves around survival rather than victory. I envisaged the daring raids, supply line attacks and covert assassinations that would surely come with this kind of mismatched conflict. Unfortunately, it quickly becomes clear that this is a familiar brand of Killzone action (complete with a grand plot to foil and cackling villains), during which you'll feel no more under threat than in the previous games in the series.

Of course, Guerrilla have also crafted some impressive set-pieces, with walking war buildings to destroy, mechs and space ships to pilot and jet packs to get introduced to and barely use again. But for all the game's amazing polygon count, it seems emblematic of everything that's wrong with blockbuster game development when it turns sour. Big bangs, big bucks and a gaping hole in the middle where the personality should be.

This is a single-player review only. Will update if the multiplayer is worth an update.

Smells like team spirit: music's best collaborators

2011-03-07T12:35:00.022Z

The rock star is the bloated corpse of another musical reality, one where musicians were revered as unto gods, where tales of drug use and casual chauvinism cast their decadent shadow and dimmed the glow of the songs. Yes, the rock star is dead; let us throw rocks at his withered carcass and laugh at ourselves for ever falling in thrall to these idols of pomp and circumstance.

Long live the humble musician. Long live teamwork and creative friendship. Long live fucking and making music babies. Long live music where the concept is the thing, rather than the dude in the skinny jeans who made it. Most of all, long live laying it on really thick for a couple of paragraphs for no real reason at all.

In other words, we should be celebrating the gradual diminishment of the almighty ego from popular music (or at least our kowtowing to such ego). Some amazing music has come to us through unexpected collaborations or musical projects where an artist's cultivated identity has been laid aside. Here are some specialists of double-teaming ideas to create delicious sonic spit-roasts.

Mike Patton (Faith No More; Tomahawk; Fantomas; Mr. Bungle; countless others)

The god-king of restless spirits, Mike Patton might be most famous for lending his elasto-spastic vocal chords to Faith No More after the departure of Chuck Mosely. Patton's performances on FNM albums stretched miraculously from angelic warbling to hacking up chunks of atavistic deathscreech. It's this versatility and enthusiasm for the new that has propelled the post-FNM Patton, skipping spryly from singing Italian pop songs with a 40-piece orchestra (his solo album Mondo Cane) to evoking the horror of surgery without anaesthetic on Delirium Cordia, a concept album with Fantomas, the band Patton presides over with members of Slayer, The Melvins and his first band Mr. Bungle.

If there's one thing that unites Patton's scattershot approach to recording, it's a fascination with the extreme and the absurd. From Tomahawk's self-titled debut album, on which he deliriously inhabits a frothing, Leatherface-esque backwoods madman, to the name of the label he somehow found time to establish (Ipecac), Patton is clearly a first-class fantasist obsessed with the bizarre intersection of humour and nightmare. The amazing thing is that across all his varied releases, the slimy, dribbling dimensions that he creates are consistently as enticing as they are repulsive.

Click here for my retrospective review of Tomahawk, possibly my favourite Patton-led album, on the MOJO website. It even made my top 10 albums of the 21st century.

Danger Mouse (Solo; Gnarls Barkley; Danger Doom; Dark Night of the Soul; Broken Bells)

This might be a bit of a cheat, given that Danger Mouse is a producer as well as an artist. After all, a producer who doesn't collaborate with artists is just a guy sitting on a park bench trying to conduct the pigeons. But Brian Burton is more than just a producer; he's an engine room of ideas, a project leader who clearly thrives on matching collaborators with exactly the right material and bending expectations of genre (most obviously with his Grey Album in 2004, which mixed samples from the Beatles' White Album and Jay-Z's Black Album to startling effect).

Outside of his production work, Danger Mouse has presided over a host of great, original projects. Dark Night of the Soul, a collaborative record he curated with Sparklehorse's now sadly departed Mark Linkous with visual accompaniments (and two songs) from legendary surrealist David Lynch. Despite other contributions ranging from Wayne Coyne to Black Francis to Suzanne Vega and beyond, the album felt united under an umbrella of existential angst and spiritual doubt (and a none-more biblical title). He also knows when to stand back and let other personalities shine - Dark Night bears Linkous' fingerprints all over it, which is appropriate both because doubt was much more his territory and because the album ended up as his epitaph.

Even on the projects that go tits up, Danger Mouse tends to find a way to salvage the situation. Though his inspired idea to team minimalist blues-rock duo The Black Keys and Ike Turner may have been disrupted by Turner's inconsiderately timed death, the material was used to create the Keys' funkiest and most spirited album to date (Attack and Release, 2008). Exquisite judgement, good people skills and the ability to operate behind the scenes and out of the spotlight makes Danger Mouse the music world's ultimate project manager.

Mark Lanegan (Screaming Trees; Queens of the Stone Age; Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan; The Gutter Twins)

Mark Lanegan might be the ultimate collaborator, as he seems to make his best music when he partners up. With his cement-mixer voice and a jaw so set that it appears to have spent the last 40 years chewing on asbestos, Lanegan might appear the epitome of the lone wolf, but he has spent much of his career as a wandering muse. As a man who looks and talks like he's stepped out of a detective novel, he's not been short of dance partners.

With three excellent albums under their belt, his perfectly mismatched partnership with Isobel Campbell (small and sweet and used to play in Belle & Sebastian) has certainly borne fruit, his bleeding baritone mixing with her wispy croon to create a spectral interplay that's reminiscent of pulpy folk tales and old ghost stories. He's also contributed lead vocals to some of Queens of the Stone Age's most memorable tracks ('Hanging Tree', 'In The Fade') and teamed up with pal from the old grunge days Greg Dulli (Afghan Whigs) to create the gloriously scuzzy and curiously eerie rock opus Saturnalia as The Gutter Twins (not to mention his recurring appearances with Dulli's Twilight Singers). Lanegan might have been at grunge's ground zero in the early 90s (check out his collaboration with Kurt Cobain), but he was never trapped by it. He wandered onwards and upwards, seeking inspiration and the ability to inspire.

The Lonely Island

The Lonely Island make stupid music. Glorious, ridiculous, stupid music. Conceived by Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone and Akiva Schaffer as a comedy sketch group, The Lonely Island began to focus more on musical shorts after the phenomenal success of the songs like the mercurial 'Lazy Sunday' and the elegant 'Dick In A Box' on Saturday Night Live. Now there's a hit album, Incredibad, with follow-up The Dudes on the way.

The popularity of Samberg and his hombres can be partly chalked up to the fact that although the songs are hip hop parodies, there's a genuine love of the genre in evidence that boosts their credibility as catchy, well-written tracks as well as effective comedy vehicles. The insane collaborations probably helped, too. Using SNL as the perfect celebrity contact book, The Lonely Island gleefully manipulate their guests' public personas to give the jokes a pleasing meta quality, or just to shock the fuck out of anybody listening. You haven't quite lived until you've heard Natalie Portman threaten to sit on your face and take a shit ('Natalie's Rap'), witnessed Julian Casablancas deliver the deadpan line "I saw a Spanish guy doing the Bartman" ('Boombox'), or watched a music video that features Akon launching fireworks from his dick ('I Just Had Sex'). With the aforementioned Akon team-up and a deliciously grotesque collaboration with Nicki Minaj ('The Creep'), signs suggest that the joke-well hasn't run dry just yet and The Lonely Island will continue to reign supreme in the admittedly underpopulated kingdom of Good-Natured Hip Hop Spoofdom.

Comedy review: Aziz Ansari

2011-03-02T13:06:00.013Z

Aziz Ansari may be the latest breakout comedy star in the US, having been officially enshrined in American pop culture by hosting the 2010 MTV Movie Awards, but he's still relatively anonymous in the UK. He's most recognisable from small roles in recent Apatow-sponsored comedy movies like Funny People and Get Him to the Greek, as well as a memorable one episode appearance on Flight of the Conchords as a racist fruit vendor ("Great speech; too bad New Zealanders are a bunch of cocky A-holes descended from criminals and retarded monkeys"). His most meaty roles, on US sitcom Parks & Recreation and as co-creator of MTV sketch show Human Giant (with Rob Huebel and Paul Scheer) are still niche viewing in the UK, blighted by British broadcasters' bizarre hesitance to purchase or effectively schedule American comedy shows.

Still, Ansari's UK anonymity was gleefully and ruthlessly exploited by the crowd that gathered to see his stand-up set within the confines of the Soho Theatre on Saturday night. After all, seeing Ansari in such a small room (with the stage set of a recent play hastily covered over in the style of a Dexter kill room, no less) is probably an increasingly rare prospect in LA or New York.

Support act Dan Levy is an effective introduction to the slick comedy patter of which Ansari is a master. In his short set, Levy breathlessly covers getting obsessed with random extras in pornos, tripping balls on magic cookies and encountering vengeful Twilight fans with nary a misplaced syllable. It's funny stuff, and one of the rare stand-up instances where I might have appreciated another five minutes of a support act rather than readying a pre-prepared bag of staplers to throw at their head if they stray beyond the 10 minute mark.

But within two minutes of Aziz Ansari taking the stage, we're reminded why it's him we came to see. In some ways, it's hard to define Ansari's appeal to someone unfamiliar with his style. There are other stand-ups who have smarter, better material. There are other stand-ups who are more innovative and unpredictable in their performances. But no one delivers a gag better than Aziz Ansari. The South Carolina native is a massive hip hop fan, and his ability to zip through jokes at a pace that threatens to break the sound barrier while maintaining nuance and clarity would make any rapper proud.

A recent Independent review of Ansari's London show described his tone as "mildly pissed off". With respect, that's bollocks. What's so refreshing about Ansari is his refusal to lunge for the easy laughs with the kind of faux-embittered vitriol that's so common in modern comedy. His set is peppered with a wide-eyed bewilderment that keeps the tone firmly whimsical, even when he's describing shooting a pair of puppies in the face to teach their owners a lesson about respecting one's elders. The jokes centre around his lack of success with women ("I'm gonna hang out with Brian; he's never mean to me"), his abiding love of meaty snacks ("It's scientifically proven that a quesadilla at 3am is 'delicious'. That research was done by me, last night") and the magical insanity of rap stars (one stand-out anecdote sees 50 Cent stubbornly refusing to get the difference between grapes and grapefruit), for the most part delivered with a pep that suggests Ansari is amused by the weirdness of life rather than infuriated by it.

You'd have thought the son of an Indian immigrant raised in the American South would have a preoccupation with race relations, but Ansari bears no grudges here. When he does focus on racism he's more absorbed in the inane details, like how almost any phrase can be interpreted as racist if it's delivered aggressively enough (a risky joke, Ansari explains, because it requires a non-white person to be in the front row at every show) or the sheer randomness of obscure racial slurs ("touched with the tar brush" comes to mind, especially as it apparently applies to me).

There are some nice, personal touches scattered here and there, like the moment at the very beginning of the set when Ansari positions himself in contrived stand-up poses to give the audience a photo op before the show starts, or when he shoehorns a Marks & Spencer reference into a gag before launching into a tirade about how tired that technique is.

For the encore, Ansari does an impromptu Q&A and wheels out Raaaaaaaandy (with eight A's) for us one more time. But he acknowledges that the character has passed his sell-by date. Randy was a moment in time, a stand-up so epically inane that he came full circle back to making us laugh our dicks off. Randy's still a part of Ansari's set to a degree - we get a peek of him in the occasional drawn out syllable or exaggerated movement - but with Aziz the man, we get so much more.

(Picture courtesy of Jakob Lodwick)

IN DEFENCE OF: Peter Molyneux, the man of many promises

2011-02-24T13:06:00.010Z

A few days ago it was announced that Peter Molyneux, formerly of Bullfrog Productions and now head of Lionhead Studios and creative director of Microsoft Game Studios Europe, the creator of games like Populous, Black & White, Dungeon Keeper and most recently the Fable series, is being honoured with a British Academy of Film and Television Arts Fellowship, placing him in the esteemed company of the likes of Anthony Hopkins, Stanley Kubrik and Christopher Lee. It's a continuation of the pleasing trend for influential videogame designers being recognised by the mainstream entertainment industry (Molyneux joins Mario's main man Shigeru Miyamoto and sim superstar Will Wright, who have already been inducted).

But the gaming community isn't as thrilled as one might expect at this latest evidence of game design being ushered into the limelight. That's because, if the internet is to be believed, Peter Molyneux is A Bad Man. If you check out the comments pages on many of the news sites running the story, you'll see quite a few comments like this one from The Telegraph: "If there is an award for failing to deliver then Peter Molyneux should certainly get it." Type Molyneux's name into Google and two suggestions that automatically spring up are "Peter Molyneux lies" and "Peter Molyneux is a liar".

What is it about Molyneux that has gamers so riled? Well, he's an overenthusiastic public speaker with a tendency to make grand proclamations about his games that aren't quite delivered in the finished product. The infamous quote that is often rubbed in his face like a facial scrub of shame is his idea that in Fable, his most recent series (a fantasy role-playing game that emphasises player choice and morality), a player could plant an acorn at the beginning of the game, which would grow to an oak tree as the story progressed, or words to that effect. It has now become assumed knowledge by hardcore gamers that Molyneux is at best a chronic promise-breaker and at worst a PR droid who boosts his game sales with cynical campaigns to build unwarranted hype.

So is Peter Molyneux a liar? Should his BAFTA Fellowship be revoked on the grounds of slithering cynicism and masochistic mendaciousness? Well, no. Molyneux has indeed developed a recent habit for getting excited at press conferences and making statements that probably make his Lionhead developers wince. But this isn't lying or up-selling a poor product.

With the exception of his latest game Fable III, which was a genuine disappointment, Molyneux and his teams have a brilliant record of creating games that positively buzz with innovative gameplay, novel concepts, charming presentation and genuinely British sensibilities and humour. He has done more than anyone to make British game development what it is today. Not through brash talk, but through his games. They're not always flawless, but they've been consistently imaginative, eccentric and forward-thinking from the early days of Populous and Syndicate through to Fable II in 2008. Even Fable III was bursting with ideas, even if most of them were the wrong ones.

It's pretty demoralising to see a game creator as passionate and idealistic as Molyneux being pulled down for the very ambition that makes his games great. The man shoots for the stars on every project. Even if he never quite gets there, his games reach heights that 90% of humdrum military shooters and annualised sports games never even bother to try for. Dungeon Keeper, my favourite of Molyneux's games, crams more wit, character and addictive gameplay into one level than a hundred more polished games that are cranked out via committee and compromise.

And if we're now criticising developers for promising too much, what of the other BAFTA honorees from the gaming world? What happened to Will Wright's Spore, which was due to join us all together in an infinite God simulation, with our evolving races interacting with one another? Miyamoto's Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess had problems with its "revolutionary" Wii controls that put it below the best of the series and disappointed many fans in the long run. But although many of the grandest ideas don't have a hope of perfect execution (at least the first time out), the games industry, which tends to avoid risk and stick to proven concepts, desperately needs these people and their teams for their willingness to stick their necks out and shoot for glory.

I'm not saying don't call Peter Molyneux out when he makes a game that is not up to par. And feel free to take his excited press conference chat with a grain of salt. But let's recognise the role of gaming's innovators, the people who pave the way for other less courageous souls to iterate on. We need to be careful what we're wishing for when criticising the people who emphasise progress over slick layers of polish. If we keep dragging them down, we'll be the ones to blame for turning a great industry into a conveyor belt.

The King of Limbs review

2011-02-21T11:47:00.006Z

This is a blog that purports to be about, among other things, music. According to the unspoken contract I apparently signed upon becoming a contributor to the internet, I am obliged to write something about any new album that Radiohead brings out, especially if they bring it out in some revolutionary, web 2.0 kind of way.

So here are some thoughts, which I will try to keep as succinct as possible, as I'm not sure how much thinking time this planet has left to dedicate to Radiohead. I don't want to be the thought-straw that broke the camel's meta-back, after all.

I should preface this with the fact that I never signed up to the Radiohead Guild of Obsessives. I like the band; their music yields some jaw-dropping moments (the breakdown in 'Sit Down. Stand Up' on Hail To The Thief and 'Pyramid Song' on Amnesiac immediately spring to mind). I stand firmly against the naysayers who claim that everything the band released after OK Computer is navel-gazing nonsense, but neither do I subscribe to the notion that Radiohead get critical immunity on the grounds that they are automatically "interesting". In other words, Radiohead is a band I follow, but not unquestioningly (never that).

The King of Limbs is certainly a bold statement in minimalism. The first five tracks feel like variations on a theme - long, looping melodies composed of guitar, samples and Thom Yorke's sinuous voice, accompanied by fast, soft beats to nail down the mood (Phil Selway's percussion is subtle and nuanced as always, confirming his place as Radiohead's unsung genius). Opening track 'Bloom' follows its name in structure, starting slowly and adding elements in a gradual unfurling, culminating in the introduction of distant brass. The following four tracks work on this template and softly toy with it; 'Morning Mr. Magpie' has a more aggressive tone, muted guitars quietly insistent as Yorke calls out a parasite ("Now you stole it, all the magic/ And took my memory"), while on 'Little By Little' the drums have an almost Madchester, 'Fools Gold' quality that marries well with the song's atonal guitar lines and dusty vibe.

After 'Lotus Flower', the album opens up and allows itself some room to manoeuvre around those all-eclipsing beats. 'Codex' is a gorgeous, bittersweet piece in the vein of 'Pyramid Song', lilting piano playing off what sounds like distant whale calls. It's an escape song, revelling in the isolated beauty of a safe underwater space, illuminated by dragonflies. A horn section slowly begins to puncture the song as it approaches its climax, with a repeated line that speaks as much to past pain as contentment in the here and now ("The water's clear/ And innocent"). 'Give Up The Ghost' is the only song that hints at something new for the band, mixing a little organic strumming and guitar thumping in with the trademark distorted backing vocals, while 'Separator' brings back those clockwork drums for another lonesome trip, complete with psychedelic imagery and surprisingly idyllic guitar twiddling and synths as the dream progresses.

The King of Limbs won't be winning Radiohead many new devotees, and is likely dividing opinions even in their own dedicated fanbase. It's a little too comfortable, too safe, to fully win over those who want the band to be eating boundaries for breakfast, and the old-school brigade will be sighing once more at the lack of assertive guitars and acerbic choruses. But while no single track (with the exception of 'Codex') stands out on its own, this album sees Radiohead committing to a single, alluring world. It lacks the vibrancy and punch of In Rainbows and will probably end up seen as a minor entry into the band's discography. But that's okay, because The King of Limbs isn't an album to enjoy with friends. It's a record to to embrace in dark corners with headphones and high volumes, an untrustworthy dance partner that might waltz the night away with you then suddenly insist on a suicide pact.

Paul review: missing Mr Wright?

2011-02-16T13:51:00.014Z

We all know Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are fanboy royalty, especially here in the UK, where the duo could probably film themselves strangling nuns and get a standing ovation, as long as they were dressed up as wookies while they did it. There's a sense of trust when we see these two onscreen together that's almost unique in the hyper-critical vulture's nest that is the online fan community. That's what Spaced, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz buys you in nerd currency.

But Paul, the road movie/Close Encounters homage Pegg and Frost wrote together and roped in Greg Mottola (Superbad, Adventureland) to direct, marks a momentous watershed for the pair, it being the first film they've appeared in together without the guiding hand of co-conspirator Edgar Wright behind the camera. After all, their records outside of their Wright collaborations are considerably more spotty - Pegg has been earning his bread with amusing but lightweight rom coms (Run Fatboy Run) and "funny little Brit" comic relief roles in massive US blockbusters (Mission: Impossible III, Star Trek). Frost, meanwhile, has mixed some TV roles with the likes of The Boat that Rocked, Kinky Boots and Wild Child, which range from unremarkable to somewhat dreadful.

So here's a story Pegg and Frost have been working on since filming on Shaun of the Dead, a passion project that they're properly invested in, which aims to stake their claim as great screenwriters and comic actors in their own right. They certainly made smart decisions in the lead-up to the film, working with a director with proven comedy chops and bringing on board a veritable troop of credible US comic talent (Jason Bateman, Kristen Wiig, Joe Lo Truglio and Bill Hader, among others). So did they bring it together, or does Paul feel worse off for its Wright-shaped hole?

Well, as Daisy Steiner would say, it's ups and downs. This story, which follows a couple of British geeks who have their sci-fi obsessed US road trip interrupted by the appearance of the titular foul-mouthed little space man who needs to catch his flying saucer home before the M.I.Bs on his tail harvest his magical gizzards, has plenty going for it, but some crucial missteps hold it back from the upper echelons of the action-comedy pantheon.

Let's start with the bad. Perhaps the most surprising thing that occurred to me watching Paul, a criticism I never thought I'd make of a Pegg/Frost movie, was the relative lack of chemistry between the two leads. The script makes a big deal of Graeme (Pegg) and Clive's (Frost) lifelong friendship and the constant assumptions by passersby that they're lovers, but oddly enough, Pegg and Frost lack the amiable onscreen fizz that is so central to all their other collaborations. Their banter at the beginning of the film seems forced and dull (along the lines of "Who'd have thought we'd be here at Comic-Con/this UFO hotspot, eh? Amazing!") and the relationship lacks the little details of familiarity that sell an onscreen friendship to an audience. The fault lies less with Pegg and Frost's performances and more with the script, which fails to differentiate the characters enough to generate some engaging back-and-forth.

Sadly, Paul also lacks the gag hit-rate to really register as an unreserved slice of fried gold. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of really funny moments (on which more later), but few of them are in the saggy first half hour when Graeme and Clive are touring around in their RV. A comedy really needs to hit the ground running to warm up an audience's funny bone for the meat of the movie, and in this regard Paul falls short.

There are also some pretty lazy, easy-target jokes, most notably an ongoing seam of perfectly truthful but painfully cliche anti-Creationism gags. Speaking of ongoing gags, Pegg and Frost somewhat overplay their hand with the movie references - a little goes a long way when it comes to sly nods to other movies, and there are moments (our introduction to Special Agent Lorenzo Zoil chief among them) when what should be a wink feels more like a oversized cock punch.

So there's the bad, but what about the good? Well, there's plenty to choose from here, as well. Alien stow-away Paul is the heart of the movie, as well as the adrenaline shot that kickstarts the plot just when it seems to be flatlining. Voiced by Seth Rogen, Paul is a brilliant creation. Hilarious, sweet and expertly rendered, Paul is an extraterrestrial with a difference. He's been cooped up in government facilities since his ship crashed in the 50s, and his exposure to earthling media has made him a foul-mouthed product of pop culture (in a clever little twist, he's also been the secret consultant behind xeno-inspired artistic endeavours over the years, from Close Encounters to The X-Files). Rogen is an unlikely but surprisingly inspired vocal choice, imbuing Paul with a soft human side as well as the expected sense of comic timing.

Backing Paul and his Limey cohorts up is a dynamic and well-considered cast of supporting players. Kristen Wiig is foremost among them, playing sheltered Christian fundamentalist Ruth, who has her entire theological belief system blown apart the minute she catches sight of Paul's fat grey head. Her overenthusiastic attempts to embrace the sinner's lifestyle, complete with jarring mish-mash swearwords and hyperactive drug freakouts, yield some of the film's funniest moments.

Bill Hader, Joe Lo Truglio and Jason Bateman all shine as the trio of goons on Paul's trail. Hader and Lo Truglio suffuse their bumbling over-zealous rookie roles with a child-like stupidity (Lo Truglio's character at one point loses his shit over the thought of Paul's "space man balls", which in turn sets up a cracking visual gag down the line) that does a lot to bring the movie's hit-rate back up to par. Bateman as the aforementioned Zoil indulges his inner bad-ass, delivering his lines with a straight-faced conviction that counterplays well with his ridiculous subordinates.

Although Paul might lack a little of that consistent comedic flair to put it up there with the greats in terms of comedy, praise should be given to Pegg and Frost, and director Mottola, for creating a genuinely feel-good story with real warmth. Pegg has described Paul as a love letter to Steven Spielberg, and there really is a pleasantly Spielbergian tone here. The story's impetus picks right up as the movie hits the mid-way point, with Pegg and Frost showing they have a real knack for mixing broad humour with more touching moments, especially as the gang get closer to the end-point of their journey.

No doubt Paul would have been a different movie had Edgar Wright been at the helm. But it feels unfair to speculate what Wright could have brought to the table when Frost, Pegg and Mottola have crafted a movie with an atmosphere of its own. Paul is not without its flaws, but as a broad, accessible comedy blockbuster, it's pretty loveable. In its own way.

Review: Drive-By Truckers - Go-Go Boots

2011-02-16T09:50:00.004Z

Here's my review of the new Drive-By Truckers album Go-Go Boots, which went live on the BBC Music website. To see the review on the BBC's site, click here.

BBC Review - Drive-By Truckers, Go-Go Boots

The prolific Truckers hit yet another career peak.

Chris Lo

Georgia-based rockers Drive-By Truckers have to be one of the most prolific bands working today; ninth LP Go-Go Boots comes less than a year after its predecessor The Big To-Do. The songs for both albums were recorded during the same sessions, with the more strident rock 'n' roll tracks released first. Go-Go Boots is no haphazard collection of leftovers, though. It's a well-crafted set of weatherworn country, soul and Southern blues that makes up for its lack of stomping riffs with raw emotion and a more diverse sonic palate, particularly indebted to the Muscle Shoals country-soul sound that the band grew up with.

While The Big To-Do felt a little patchy between its big numbers, Go-Go Boots is rock-solid throughout. The mix of different styles, all filtered through the lenses of lead songwriters and vocalists Patterson Hood, Shonna Tucker and Mike Cooley, effortlessly sustains the album through its 14 tracks and 66-minute run-time. The Truckers have always been evocative small-town storytellers, and these tracks are no different. 'Used To Be A Cop' sees Hood inhabit the ragged old bones of a tired ex-cop riding a mean streak of bad luck, accompanied by a funk-inflected bassline and resigned slide guitar. Tucker's voice evokes the tear-stained cheeks and bleary panic of faithful girlfriend searching about town for her missing lover on Eddie Hinton cover 'Where's Eddie'. Cooley ekes every drop of yearning from the simple line "I think about you when I can / And even sometimes when I can't, I do," on banjo-pluckin' tearjerker 'Cartoon Gold'.

It's this Hood/Cooley/Tucker trifecta that makes Drive-By Truckers such a consistently fresh proposition. Apart from allowing the band to crank out records at the speed of sound, each of the three brings their own angle to the songs. Hood is the go-to guy for full-bodied, heart-on-sleeve rock; Cooley is the band's strongest connection to that stiff-backed, Willie Nelson-esque bare bones country music; and Shonna Tucker brings a sparkling voice and a much-needed female perspective to break up all the bruised masculinity on show. Go-Go Boots is one of the best examples yet of the separate yet complementary skills of the Truckers' three leaders, melding styles and switching moods but retaining an overall feel that's distinctly theirs.

True Grit: the masters of subversion go classical

2011-02-14T13:14:00.009Z

Movie fans have come to expect certain things from a Coen brothers film. Foremost on the list of expectations is, conversely enough, to confound our expectations. Whether teleporting a hard-bitten noir crime story to small-town Minnesota with a pregnant, mumsy police chief as our guide (Fargo) or finishing a thrilling chase movie with a brutal rumination on their sheer randomness of life (No Country For Old Men), the brothers Coen are masters of the sly left turn.

These trademark jarring moments make it easy to forget that the Coens also clearly have a deep attachment to simple genre filmmaking, even if they do like to kick a genre down a flight of stairs every now and again. It's this unvarnished appreciation that seems to guide True Grit, the Coens' re-telling of the Charles Portis Western novel, 40 years after the Henry Hathaway version that yielded the Duke his first and only Oscar.

The movie follows Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld), a plucky 14 year-old who steams into town looking for a suitably tough lawman to help her track down Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), the hired hand who shot her daddy down for the gold in his pocket and the horse beneath his saddle. What she gets is a two windbags, one drunk (US Marshall Reuben "Rooster" Cogburn, played by Jeff Bridges) and one sober but pompous (Texas Ranger LaBoeuf, played by Matt Damon). The three of them head out to the Indian Territories to bring Chaney to justice, where he's thought to be taking refuge with an outlaw gang led by the fearsome "Lucky" Ned Pepper (Barry Pepper).

True Grit is a Western with a capital W and an old, dusty six-shooter replacing the R. It's the kind of classically told, ripping yarn that faithfully adds to a genre that has mostly either been ignored or revised over the last decade. Mattie's journey with Rooster and LaBoeuf (pronounced "le beef", in as laconic a drawl as you can summon) has an irresistible sense of forward momentum as they pin down Pepper's gang of marauders. There's also a surprisingly light tone, as the two lawmen bicker over war records, marksmanship and honour, strutting like old hounds to impress their surprisingly formidable young ward.

There's still a smattering of stylised Coen touches, like the surreal moment that Rooster and Mattie, waiting for LaBoeuf, encounter a bizaare old witch doctor covered in a full bear pelt riding towards them. "That...is not...le beef," drones Rooster. The film's violence is not pervasive but, in true Coens style, is distressing and dehumanising when it does crop up, the shock of bullet wounds and finger amputations leavened only by Rooster's occasionally amusing brutalisation of LaBoeuf.

Roger Deakins' predictably superb (and now Bafta-winning) cinematography also brings the film a sense of detail that the original was happy to gloss over, the camera lingering over the ugly crevices of 19th century Arkansas (corpses, hangings) as much as its inspiring vistas (evergreen forests, autumnal plains, snowcapped peaks).

True Grit's heart lies with the three captivating performances at its centre. Mattie, Rooster and LaBoeuf form a strange triangle made credible and moving by Steinfeld, Bridges and Damon. The former two are getting plenty of attention for their portrayals of Mattie and Rooster, and deservedly so. Steinfeld avoids the typical precocious child performance trap with a genuine sense of wit and pitch-perfect dialogue delivery, while Bridges brings out Rooster's irascibility, poor social skills and deeply buried honour in a way that would have been beyond John Wayne even if it had been expected of him. But for me, Matt Damon stands out as LaBoeuf, a character who reveals the layers behind his loudmouthed vanity as the story progresses. The Texas Ranger's misguided attempts to take Mattie under his wing, as well as the genuine affection that grows between the two, is one of the film's chief pleasures. Rooster Cogburn might get to be the hero, but it's LaBoeuf's fragile nobility and unraveling ego that steals our hearts.

I couldn't help but feel a little disappointed that the film's riveting storyline wasn't joined by an equally impressive sense of meaning. Although True Grit left me satisfied and elated, there isn't the rich seam of subtext that made No Country For Old Men such a meaty offering. The film does take some time to ponder on the fleeting nature of life in a callous era, and one scene involving a night-time ride that pushes Rooster to the limit of his failing frame is particularly effective at delivering that message.

But all in all, the impression that we're left with is a fine story, well told and beautifully acted, and one that could reward repeat viewings in the same way as another Coens genre classic, Miller's Crossing. Even if True Grit doesn't deliver much subtext-jerky to chew over, it's still an incredibly powerful, unashamedly traditional Western story. And that's a helluva thing, pard.

The Fighter: a tale of loyalty, family, and punching

2011-02-10T13:41:00.015Z

The Fighter is at least partly about punching. But it's about other things, too. That's important when a movie features a lot of punching, as it tends to overshadow the scenes that are cursed with a lack of punching. But if a movie has non-punching scenes that still pack an emotional punch, that's when you know you've got a good movie with punching in it, rather than just a good punching movie.

The Fighter is a good movie with punching in it. In many ways, it fits into the archetypal underdog sports movie mould, in the vein of Rocky or, uh, The Mighty Ducks. Based on a true story, the film follows Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg), an Irish-American welterweight boxer living in the blue-collar city of Lowell, Massachusetts, splitting his time between getting pummelled in the ring and laying tarmac on the street. Micky's older brother Dicky (Christian Bale) is the former 'Pride of Lowell', famed for besting Sugar Ray Leonard back in the day. He's now Micky's part-time trainer and full-time crackhead.

The movie charts Micky's rise from a glorified punching bag to a title contender, complete with appropriately stirring training sequences and surprise turnarounds in the ring. As a simple addition to the 'inspiring underdog story' stable, The Fighter more than holds its own. The punching scenes are effectively shot, maintaining an authentic feel but slowing the action down just enough that we can register the force of every haymaker and body blow.

What elevates the movie from its genre is what's happening outside the ring. Micky's family is a tornado that swirls around him while barely acknowledging his existence. He's henpecked into mismatched fights by his domineering mother Alice (Melissa Leo) and his seven sisters, who are more interested in indulging Dicky's boxing past than supporting Micky's present. Dicky means well, but he has become a liability, failing to turn up for training and getting Micky into trouble with the law. Into this scene storms Charlene (Amy Adams), a no-nonsense, bar-tending college dropout who acts as the catalyst for Micky to take control of his life and career, both of which are being dragged down by his oblivious family.

This family drama is heightened by a raft of excellent performances. Christian Bale is superb as the drug-addled Dicky, infusing the character with a bug-eyed charisma that intoxicates the audience as much as it does his family and friends. But he's a ghost of his former self, a wispy shade obsessed with his one defining moment in boxing and deluded about an HBO documentary crew following him around. He thinks they're there to chart his comeback, despite the crew's insistence that they're making a film about the ravages of drug abuse. Dicky's inhabiting his own fantasy, and Bale works hard to heighten the impact when he's finally, brutally, evicted from that fantasy and shoved out into the cold light of day.

There are also great turns from the female influences in Micky's life. Melissa Leo brings out the steely pragmatism of Alice when it comes to shaping Micky's career, as well as her blind, unjustified dotage on Dicky, her first-born and the apple of her eye. We also see a new side of Amy Adams, such an expert at playing timid, as Micky's rock-hard girlfriend Charlene, who hates what Alice is doing to her youngest son's chances but might share more characteristics with the aging matriarch than she cares to admit.

Behind it all is Mark Wahlberg's quietly brilliant performance as Micky, a man undermined at every turn. He embodies the quiet resignation of a younger brother, aware and unresentful of the fact that Dicky casts an inescapable shadow. He's there in every scene, physically cringing at all the shouting and posturing around him. He's at once fiercely loyal to his kin and painfully aware that they are poisoning his chance to make a name of his own. Watching Micky's growing assertiveness despite his reluctance to take the spotlight is a genuine pleasure, and its a real shame that of all the film's Oscar nominations for acting, not one was for Wahlberg.

All of this struggle and tragedy outside of the ring makes the events that go on inside it all the more bracing. Micky's relationship with his family rings out with every punch, both given and received. His quiet determination gives weight to training sequences that would otherwise be simple genre staples. The script, along with director David O. Russell (Three Kings, I Heart Huckabees), makes us care more about this family of nutjobs than the outcome of any title bout. In fact, I can't think of a better recommendation for The Fighter than the fact that none of its most memorable moments involve punching, including one of the most heartwarming and beautiful final scenes that I've watched for some time.

The mathematics of reviewing

2011-02-08T12:41:00.010Z

The title of this post is pretty misleading. Reviewing isn't maths, after all, and boiling a review down to a simple formula is anathema to reading something new and surprising (although it seems to work pretty well for the Daily Mail website, which operates on a strict formula of liberal baiting + contrived outrage x gross hypocrisy - basic human compassion = mad web traffic).

Of course I'm not going to argue for some inane system for reviewing; each one has to be written in its own way. But writing (and reading) a lot of reviews makes you think about what exactly it is that you like or dislike about an album or a film, about the process you naturally go through before you sit down to try and express your conclusions. Exactly why are you willing to forgive those crappy lyrics on that album you just bought? Exactly why do you love that beautiful film that has no plot or dialogue?

Reviews are my favourite things, both to read and to write. As a deep down obsessive, I'd generally rather spend my time deliberating about chord changes and camera angles than trying to vicariously be friends with the people behind them. So I tend to give a lot of thought to qualifying what it is that makes a great album great, or what makes a guilty pleasure guilty, or what makes a film that seems so brilliant on paper such a chore when you're sitting through it.

The best I've come up with so far is a variation of the classic "style/substance" idea that we've read in so many reviews. I always thought the "style over substance" phrase was a little dismissive of the "style" part, given that it's the style that makes an immediate impact on the listener and appeals to the oft-underrated gut. I'm going to explain my idea in relation to music, but I think it applies just as much to film (not so much to games, which I'll touch on in a bit).

It's helpful for me to split an album into two broad, subjective scales - the satisfying scale and the interesting scale. Satisfaction replaces "style" in the aforementioned metaphor as representative of that instant gut reaction that you can't reason with - in essence, it's that feeling we all got from listening to The Darkness' first album and now feel a little ashamed of. The interesting scale is the "substance" that comes after; all the opinions on pacing, lyrics and the musicians' choices that form after bedding down with a record for a while. All the stuff that gets channeled through a thought process rather than a cocky toe tap, in other words.

I think an album generally needs to captivate me on both counts to feel like a lasting classic. An album that you'll love in the moment for its immediate impact, but revisit month after month to plumb its depths. I love all three of Arcade Fire's LPs because they fill my brittle bones with the urge to stomp around like a mad baby rhino, but in the long-run they offer me three very different worlds to explore, from Funeral's inner-city carnival through Neon Bible's great foreboding plains to the restrained desperation of The Suburbs.

An album can be excellent just by nailing one of these two criteria. Biffy Clyro's 2009 album Only Revolutions had me caterwauling up and down the walls of my flat, but the songs didn't quite match those on Blackened Sky or Vertigo of Bliss for atmosphere and strange rhythms. This doesn't detract from my enjoyment of Revolution's bombast, but it gives the album a natural shelf-life that the very best records transcend.

On the other side of the coin, an album can connect with your intellect and build a fascinating space for your ears without ever really grabbing you. I can recognise the poetry and character of Bob Dylan's music, but it has only ever impressed me. It never ambushed me, pushed me up against a wall and had its way with me. When people patiently, sighing all the way, try to explain to me why Dylan's songs are so powerful and timeless, I can understand and agree. But my gut remains stubbornly unstimulated. Give me Springsteen any day of the week. When that guy revs his engines, he leaves tire-marks all over my heart.

This satisfying/interesting balance tends to help me when thinking about films and movies, but falls down a bit when it comes to videogames. Partly as a result of the games industry's relative youth, combined with the prevalence of interactivity over passivity, games can often be considered masterpieces for simply delivering truckloads of sensory pleasure. Genuinely interesting concepts are a bonus, but at the moment they're optional. What developers really have to nail is providing game mechanics that are satisfying to interact with. Games like Bioshock and Braid might be pushing the medium to new heights, but their exploration of the human condition doesn't make them any more fun to play than Tetris or Pac-Man, even after all these years.

So this isn't my "system" for reviewing. There is no system. It's just a broad categorisation of the feelings I get from listening to an album or watching a film that helps me formalise where those feelings come from when I want to express myself about it in the clearest way possible. In order to express myself with clarity, I find that I need to delve a little into why I've reacted to an album in the way I have.

So are there any albums or films that max you out for satisfaction but feel a little empty after the first few spins? Or those that you can appreciate on a cerebral level but leave you yearning to be swept off your feet? Let's compare notes in the comments below. Also feel free to let me know if I'm talking a load of bollocks. I find it hard to tell sometimes.

Escape Artist's Best Games of 2010

2011-02-02T21:31:00.028Z

I've just spent a couple of hours playing Dead Space 2 on my own, in my flat, at night. This might mean nothing to you, but trust me, this pretty much makes me a goddamn superhero. Horror games are the perfect example of the power of the interactive medium. I get scared watching [REC] or Night of the Living Dead, but the difference with horror games is you're expected to actually do something about the awful things happening on screen. The whole appeal of horror is putting yourself in the shoes of someone experiencing a terrifying ordeal, and there's no better way to do that than to pick up a controller and take part.

Anyway, to distract myself from thoughts of horrific mockeries of nature ambushing me from air vents, I thought I'd do a quick round-up of some of the best games of the past year. 2010 was a pretty strong year for gaming, with a great mix of reliable sequels that built on the work of their predecessors and new titles to expand our horizons.

There were disappointments - Fable III and Vanquish spring to mind - but for the most part last year's games delivered. 2010 also marked a bit of a turning point for the games industry, as publishers began to release more top-drawer titles outside of the traditional pre-Christmas period. This is a great thing for gamers and for the industry itself as it begins to realise that quality speaks for itself, no matter what time of year. With the success of early-year titles like Red Dead Redemption and Mass Effect 2, and now Dead Space 2 in 2011, this promising trend looks set to continue.

Bayonetta (Platinum Games)

The third-person action genre is a pretty crowded one, with the likes of Ninja Gaiden, God of War and Devil May Cry filling our screens with musclebound anti-heroes grunting and shouting for our entertainment. Bayonetta trumps all of these games on most counts, and adds a healthy dose of batshit insanity for good measure.

At the game's core is a rock-solid combat system. Titular (not to mention tit-tacular) heroine Bayonetta feels lithe and responsive to control as she pirouettes between enemies unleashing a wide array of crunchy, satisfying combos. But the game really separates itself from the crowd with its sheer eye-humping visual splendour. The design of levels and enemies is consistently surprising, throwing an astonishing variety of extra-dimensional environments and enemies at the player. The story is pretty inscrutable (something about witches and motorbikes and angels with glowing vaginas?), but when a game offers you the chance to throw a reborn god-queen into the fires of the sun, the wheres and whys are pretty irrelevant.

Mass Effect 2 (BioWare)

Hands-down the best videogame story of 2010, as Commander Shepard recruits a new crew on his space-faring mission to defend the galaxy against the planet-harvesting Reavers. Yeah, it might sound like an episode of Stargate SG-1, but the appeal of Mass Effect lies in making the story your own. With the best conversation mechanics of any game so far, the ability to make meaningful choices that alter your game world in sometimes unexpected ways, and some of the best characters this side of the Omega-4 Relay, there's a real feeling of consequence behind the superb firefights. I got my entire team through the game unscathed because I am the King and Queen of Cheese, but the very real chance of losing treasured teammates before the game's end adds consistent tension and even (whisper it) a hint of emotional resonance.

Red Dead Redemption (Rockstar San Diego)

How did it take this long for an unreservedly great cowboy game to come out? All the elements are right there - quickdraw duels, roaming the open plains, fisticuffs in smoky saloons... you know, cowboy stuff. Whatever the case, it wasn't until 2010 that a game brought all these elements together, bundled them into the back of a rickety ol' wagon and rammed them into our eye-holes. Rockstar San Diego has made expert use of Grand Theft Auto's game engine to create a gorgeous natural game world, spanning pine forests and great plains in the north to the ochre-tinged sandstone monoliths of Mexico in the south. The diversity of gameplay options is more than a match for Red Dead's setting. The long journey of blackmailed ex-outlaw John Marsden makes for a great story, filled with imaginative diversions and the colourful characters that have made Rockstar releases so special over the years.

Limbo (Playdead Studios)

A brilliant X-box Live Arcade puzzle-platformer with a unique atmosphere. Players control a little boy searching for his sister in a spectral purgatory realm. That's all the story there is, and this game needs no more. Everything else in Limbo is conveyed through its shadowy, silhouetted world. Threatening little details emanate from every crevice, from the world's mysterious and hostile inhabitants to the shockingly gory death animations when the player slips up. The game's puzzles, which revolve around using physics to move through areas, constantly introduce new mechanics to keep things fresh for the duration. Limbo is an excellent puzzle game, but it's the melancholy ambience that makes it great. Oh, and the giant spider chase sequence. Can't go wrong with a giant spider chase sequence.

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood (Ubisoft Montreal)

After two games that struggled to match their immaculate sense of style with equally engaging gameplay mechanics, Brotherhood is the first game in the AC franchise that's an unmarred pleasure to play. The action may see players jump back into the bejewelled pantaloons of AC2's Ezio Auditore as he murders his way up Rome's corrupt Borgia hierarchy, but Brotherhood comprehensively refines the series' ideas that work and overhauls those that don't.

Combat is smoother and more interesting; assassination missions are better structured and reward good planning; stealth sections are now a joy rather than a chore. The most impressive thing about Brotherhood is the sheer amount of content there is to distract the player in Rome's vast play area, from the simple pleasure of chasing thieves and couriers across the city's terracotta rooftops to piloting a frankly absurd 16th century stealth bomber. The story continues to be sub-Dan Brown secret society wankery, but if the franchise's gameplay continues to improve at this rate, all that nonsense can be forgiven. Now let's have Assassin's Creed III set in Victorian London, please.

Halo: Reach (Bungie)

The only straight-up shooter on this list, Bungie's swansong to the legendary series just radiates the experience and dedication of its development team. The Call of Duty franchise might have overtaken Halo as the number one blockbuster FPS, but for my money Reach outstrips Black Ops both as a single-player story and a multiplayer playground. The game's premise of fighting a losing battle against overwhelming Covenant forces on a doomed colony world packs more emotional punch than most other shooters (including a brilliant ending), and the enemy AI is superb, creating combat moments with a real sense of space rather than the shooting galleries that have become so popular of late.

Online, Reach is the best of the best. I may have spent more hours compulsively logging into Modern Warfare, but Reach makes every new game a unique encounter. The game types are varied, the maps are stupendously well-designed and playing Firefight mode with friends is like a whole extra game. And for hardcore fanatics, there are the well-featured Forge level creation tools. With this treasure chest of riches, Bungie has ensured that Reach will continue to thrive long after the studio has moved on to new projects.

Alan Wake (Remedy Entertainment)

Not a smash hit by any means, but if Alan Wake doesn't get a sequel it would be a great shame. This isn't necessarily because of the scares and solid combat (based on giving your corrupted enemies the willies by lighting them up with your torch), both of which are excellent, but because Alan Wake is quietly revolutionary in its approach to interactive storytelling. We guide our titular confused writer through the town of Bright Falls and the surrounding forests in search of his missing wife who has been abducted by a dark presence that's infecting the whole area.

The fascinating layer buried beneath the narrative is that Wake has lost time, during which he seems to have written about the events he's currently living through. Pages found on the forest floor or strewn about rusty old sawmills serve to deepen the narrative as well as warn players about dangerous encounters ahead. It's an amazing way for the developer to communicate with the player, not to mention push some pretty far-out ideas about authorship and the constraints of moving through a world that has been designed for you. As the game progresses the rabbit hole only gets deeper, with Wake beginning to question why he wrote the things he did and realising that his words might be the key to breaking free of the town's strange curse.

Fallout: New Vegas (Obsidian Entertainment)

After 60 hours or so of exploring Fallout 3's post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland, the thought of diving back in to a sequel that uses the same creaky engine and transports the story from Washington D.C. to the ostensibly less memorable Mojave Desert didn't seem all that appetising. New Vegas didn't immediately prove me wrong - the first couple of hours is filled with the critter hunting, stat-levelling and V.A.T.S. combat strategies that had become all-too familiar from the previous game. The story's opening is also a little contrived. The player wakes up after being shot in the head and having his courier package stolen, and decides, with a slightly incredible level of job dedication, to hunt down his ambushers and get it back.

It was only when I arrived at the New Vegas Strip, filled with decay and corruption but a bustling vibrancy that was missing from Fallout 3's communities, that it all started to come together. Obsidian, a team that contains some of the original Black Isle developers who worked on the first Fallout PC games, has pushed the modern franchise forward by thrusting players into a more rich and morally confusing world. None of the Strip's factions are unblemished, which makes choosing who to support (if any) all the more thrilling because there are no convenient signposts. You begin to realise that you are, much more so than in Fallout 3, a catalyst for massive change across this seedy desert, and by leaving you to make your own mind up, New Vegas burdens you with the full weight of your actions. It's a scary prospect, and one that provokes real thought. After another 60 hours of wandering the wasteland, I really would like to see the back of the game's charming but tired and buggy engine. Then again, I've been proved wrong before...

Film review: Black Swan

2011-02-02T12:25:00.008Z

It's a Gothic melodrama. No, it's a companion piece to The Wrestler. Oh hang on, it's classic body horror in the vein of Cronenberg. But it's Polanski-esque in its exploration of the darkest corners of the mind. And surely it's an unflinching character study about fear and weakness and transcendence, right? Just what is Black Swan?

All of the above descriptors apply to Darren Aronofsky's (Requiem for A Dream, The Fountain, The Wrestler) latest film to some degree. The movie tells the story of fragile mummy's girl Nina (Natalie Portman), who gets cast for the prestigious role of the Swan Queen in a New York ballet company's new production of Swan Lake. In the process of preparing for her role, for which she must excel as both the virginal White Swan (which comes naturally to Nina) and the sensuous Black Swan (which decidedly doesn't), Nina is plagued by nightmarish visions and paranoid fantasies.

Black Swan brings together all the aforementioned elements and sharpens them to a razor's edge to stab its point home. Taken at their face value, a lot of these elements might seem derivative or cliche, but all these techniques are ruthlessly honed by Aronofsky and aimed towards what the film is trying to express. The use of tight, over-the-shoulder camera angles and the constant presence of mirrors are both staples of the horror genre, but here they reinforce Nina's inability to escape her panicky bubble of existence and her crisis of identity (of course, they also serve to make you shit your breeches on several occasions).

Similarly the transformation scenes, in which Nina begins to see herself physically morphing into a swan, owe a debt to the mortification of the flesh seen in some of Cronenberg's best films, and even Clive Barker's Hellraiser. But again, Aronofsky bends this concept to serve his film's specific goals. As such, we see some fairly tired ideas find a new lease of life when bound to a fresh purpose.

Nina's strange hallucinations signpost the growth of her repressed dark side, leading her ever closer to the performance of the Black Swan she so obsessively desires, and ever closer to the brink of madness. When those two roads converge at the end of the movie, it's so cathartic because of the constant tension that Aronofsky has built up throughout.

Black Swan's performances are roundly superb, with Portman the obvious standout. She excels at conveying her character's brittle vulnerability, but really shines as Nina's darker impulses begin to flutter to life. Mila Kunis isn't stretching herself as the Nina's new friend Lily and the liberated yin to Nina's tightly-wound yang, but she's excellently cast and carries an effortless charisma that serves the character well. Similarly, Vincent Cassel's natural sly charm translates perfectly for idealistic but cruel ballet director Thomas. Special mention should also go to Barbara Hershey as Nina's overbearing mother, exposing the character's cloying need to live through her daughter while somehow finding her sympathetic side by the film's end.

So yes, the film is all the things I mentioned at the top of this review. All those things and more. Subtlety has never been Darren Aronofsky's M.O, and Black Swan is no exception. It's gloriously over-the-top, unapologetically theatrical, and hits home with the force and precision of a laser-guided missile. Black Swan isn't out to confound audiences. It's not a brain teaser. It simply concentrates on throwing its every resource behind expressing its ideas (perfection, psychological extremes, absurd dedication, the fracturing of identity) as clearly and as forcefully as possible.

Escape Artist's Top Five Films of 2010

2011-01-25T13:07:00.039Z

I've decided to cut down this year's top films into a list of five for a couple of reasons, both of which are a bit depressing. First of all, there's an uncomfortable number of movies that might well have made the list if I hadn't been too busy and/or lazy to see them (The Social Network, Winter's Bone, The Illusionist). This is depressing because I don't particularly want to live in a world where I miss Winter's Bone but manage to drag my carcass to Fulham to see Solomon Kane.

The second reason is that 2010 wasn't exactly a banner year for cinema, all things considered. Of course there were great movies, but the gaps between them felt unusually wide. A hefty proportion of this year's blockbusters failed to make an impression (Iron Man 2, Clash of the Titans, The A-Team, Prince of Persia), and the latest Harry Potter was baffling and frustrating in equal measure for a non-reader (wait, Ron has another brother? When did the Ministry of Magic turn into a magical wing of the Gestapo? Oh, and what in the motherloving fuck is a Horcrux?). A few smaller films have been thoroughly enjoyable and thought-provoking, but just a little too slight to merit full celebration (Buried, Jackass 3D, Valhalla Rising, I'm Still Here).

With the likes of The King's Speech, True Grit, Black Swan and Never Let Me Go kicking off 2011, hopefully our cinema calendars will be more enticing this year. But in the meantime, here are five films that shone like twinkling diamonds on the dung hill of 2010.

Four Lions (d. Chris Morris; w. Chris Morris, Sam Bain & Jesse Armstrong)

Coming from minds that brought us the likes of The Day Today, Brass Eye, Nathan Barley and Peep Show, it should come as no surprise that Four Lions is bladder-worryingly funny. This story of bumbling jihadists from Sheffield struggling to pull off a suicide attack at the upcoming London Marathon is stuffed to the gills with timeless slapstick gags and hilarious sound bites ("I'm not confused, brother. I just took a picture of my face and it's deffo not my confused face"), with just the right amount of sly subversion.

The surprising thing about Four Lions is everything else. The performances, which are at once funny and sinister and somehow sweet, are a revelation. Riz Ahmed as Omar is the perfect anchor for the film, the Wise to the rest of the crew's Morecambe. Omar's struggles as a leader, his joy as a family man and his inner conflicts as a human being are constantly playing across Ahmed's beleaguered face. Nigel Lindsay as overcompensating fanatic Barry and Kayvan Novak as impressionable simpleton Waj are also both deserving of the highest praise.

It's also surprising that so much poignancy and humanity has been squeezed around all the laughs. The film expertly treads a fine line in not excusing the characters' actions, but portraying them as human and fallible. It looks at the complex factors that lead to radicalisation with a light touch and a great deal of consideration. The secret of Four Lions is that it forces us to see its "martyrs" as real people led down a devastating path by a mix of chance and prescriptive ideology. As such, it's a rare example of a comedy that plays to the best in us, when it could have so easily pandered to the worst.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (d. Edgar Wright; w. Edgar Wright & Michael Bacall)

Possibly the most divisive movie since The Fountain thrilled/bored audiences with its bold vision/pretentious claptrap (delete as appropriate). For every diehard adherent, there's someone else claiming that Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, based on the graphic novels by Bryan Lee O'Malley, is the worst kind of empty hipster nonsense that caters to the worst impulses of the MTV generation.

The sad thing is that most of the bile floating aroung the net has more to do with knee-jerk reactions against an indie culture that is perceived to be snide and pretentious rather than the film itself. Because Scott Pilgrim, viewed without scoff goggles, is 2010's best example of pure, effervescent action/comedy joy. The jokes share the zing and bounce of the original books, and the action fleshes out the vision of the comics with the mischief and flair that Edgar Wright has displayed since his breakout TV series Spaced.

Behind the one-liners and slapstick fight scenes, the film does have something to say about graduating from man-boy to man, as our titular hero (Michael Cera) fights for the heart of his latest infatuation Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) while slowly realising the flaws in his own self-obsessed personality. But at its heart, Scott Pilgrim is pure fantasy, melding Jackie Chan-esque chop socky and hyper-real visuals with the quirks of Toronto's music scene (while also, haters take note, poking fun at it). From the immaculately conceived soundtrack (with Beck's contributions to the Sex Bob-Omb songs a particular standout) to the pervasive presence of videogame stylings, it's a spectacularly well-conceived bubblegum experience, bursting with the vitality and enthusiasm of youth.

Inception (d. & w. Chris Nolan)

One of the finest filmmakers working in mainstream cinema today, Chris Nolan has been on a pretty flabbergasting run in the last few years. He effortlessly restored Batman's street cred. The Dark Knight transcended all expectations of what a superhero movie is expected to be. He knocked out cinematic rubik's cube The Prestige in between his Batman blockbusters. Throughout, his movies have retained the crispness of thought and the purity of vision that made Memento such a success, while simultaneously raking in hundreds of millions of dollars and making Nolan of the most powerful voices in Hollywood.

Inception marks another triumph for Nolan as the pre-eminent master of accessible moviemaking that's as deep as you need it to be. Casual viewers of Inception will find immense satisfaction in the film's thunderous action scenes and strong performances from the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Marion Cotillard. But those who want to delve deeper into this story of subconscious subterfuge will strike hidden reserves. Inception has been created with a blistering level of forethought (nearly ten years of forethought, in fact), Nolan playing with physics and metaphysics as Cobb and his dream spies plunge ever deeper into the recesses of the mind. That might sound dull on paper, but when it's all played out through anti-gravity fistfights and folding cities, it makes for an experience that's as spectacular as it is cerebral.

With Inception, Nolan has also answered the criticism that he is so consumed with the mechanics of the mind that he leaves little room for the tender fluctuations of the heart. That most of the film takes place in the world of dreams allows Nolan to give flesh to raw emotions and thoughts that in other films remains buried behind characters' eyes. Protagonist Cobb's lingering guilt over the fate of his wife Mal, as well as his desire to find his way back to the children he's been forced to flee from, provides the story's backbone and emotional anchor. Inception adds to the already compelling evidence that if Nolan has indeed become the most powerful director in Hollywood, we're in safe hands.

How To Train Your Dragon (d. Chris Sanders, Dean DeBlois; w. Chris Sanders, Dean DeBlois, Peter Tolan, Adam F. Goldberg)

Probably the most satisfying film to watch this year, and definitely 2010's best use of 3-D. I may be slightly biased due to my borderline unhealthy obsession with scaly flying leviathans since the approximate age of zero onwards, but I don't know anyone who has seen How To Train Your Dragon who would disagree with me. The story of soft-hearted muppet Hiccup's struggle to win the approval of his dragon-hunting Viking peers while keeping his new draconic friend a secret, How To Train... is a true family film.

The movie was always going to be a hit with kids, but it snags the affection of adults not by sneaking in some pop culture references, but by giving grown-ups a chance to access their inner child. Watching Hiccup's maiden flights on his tame Night Fury Toothless, it's almost impossible not to giggle along like a child on a roller coaster. The art direction is coherent and well thought-out, from the simple beauty of the rugged landscapes to the charming menagerie of different dragon species, with the strangely feline and utterly disarming Toothless a particular standout (the directors also helmed Lilo & Stitch, and the Toothless-Stitch connection is clear).

The characters and story have a great deal of charm, leading up to a genuinely thrilling climax with real bite (pun 100% intended). But in the end they play second fiddle to the simple pleasure of watching a boy and a dragon make friends while soaring around in the clouds. For anyone else who dreamed of befriending a giant flying lizard (or still does, there's no judgement here), we can finally replace those old VHS copies of The Flight of Dragons with the best dragon fantasy ever. Just figure out a better title for the sequel, please.

Somewhere (d. & w. Sofia Coppola)

It's so easy to dislike Sofia Coppola movies. The fact that she's the privileged daughter of a world-renowned film director, combined with her predilection for hazy ambiguity and eschewing propulsive narrative, often plays to her critics' nastiest assumptions. But Coppola's films would stand with or without the backing of a Hollywood legend (whether she would have gotten the opportunity to make them is another question, obviously). They share a quiet, elegant tone that tries to say a lot with as few words as possible. While Coppola may frustrate some viewers looking for a quick snackdown on some plot pie, we should celebrate directors who are taking the harder path by trying to stretch the boundaries of what can be expressed on film, shouldn't we?

Of all Coppola's films, Somewhere might be the most trying for audiences. Dialogue is really cut down to a minimum, with whole scenes dedicated to the likes of a girl cooking a poached egg or a sports car roaring monotonously around a race track. This story of isolated actor Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) having his 11 year-old daughter Cleo (a radiant and refreshingly unprecocious Elle Fanning) unexpectedly foisted upon him doesn't give much in the way of context. Scenes slide into one another with little connective tissue, building the impression that Marco's existence is confined to a series of sumptuous hotel rooms.

But everything that makes the movie a hard sell is what makes it special. The movie paints Marco as a disconnected, lonely individual, whose luxurious surroundings belie the mind-numbing tedium of his contractual obligations. Like the sports car speeding around the track at the film's opening, Marco is a trinket going nowhere. The sudden intrusion of Cleo doesn't quite kick off the Hollywood-patented journey of emotional reengagement, but it adds a sense of urgency to Marco's confusion about his public and personal life (the former he has lots of, the latter he has almost none).

Although the story marks no seismic change in Marco's life and his relationship with Cleo, there are so many fascinating little details that elegantly build the strange little world he inhabits so joylessly. The film is also one of the best examples of weaving music into the narrative, providing extra hints into Marco's mindset without superfluous lines of explanatory dialogue. Somewhere will never be lauded for its brash visuals or explosive storyline, but it has a boldness of its own; a willingness to speak quietly in an industry that too often rewards the loudest voice.

Escape Artist's Top Ten Albums of 2010

2011-01-17T19:05:00.030Z

I originally thought I'd try introducing this list with a concise paragraph blithely summarising 2010: The Year In Music. I imagined myself like an Errol Flynn version of Lester Bangs, issuing proclamations on the birth and death of genres while swinging from a chandelier and slashing at the darkness of the artless abyss with my gleaming rapier (only the rapier is actually my WIT!). After 30 minutes of staring blankly at the screen, drooling all over my keyboard and pretending I wasn't just fantasising about Errol Flynn, I gave up.

Thing is, music is so huge (and has been for such a long time) that anyone with a brain that isn't located in their belly button knows that the grand musical decree is rendered irrelevant by the vast oceans of the music out there. To make brash, all-encompassing statements about music, you either have to boil it down to what people have been buying this year (that Lady Gaga, isn't she something else?) or you have to think really really hard about it. And I'm not willing to do either.

So suffice it to say that lots of good music came out this year. Here are ten bits of music, in no particular order, which I thought were the goodest.

Marnie Stern, Marnie Stern

Ever since her debut In Advance of the Broken Arm in 2007, Marnie Stern has been a fascinating guitar player and sporadically brilliant songwriter, but it wasn't until her self-titled third album that it all seemed to click. Before, her guitar's mix of reverb-laden distortion and rhythmic finger-tapping was entrancing but occasionally frustrating, too often flitting on to a new melody and tempo before the listener was done with the first.

Not that this year's album is all that different from its predecessors - the zinging guitar twang is intact; Stern's pixie-berserker howl is accounted for; Zach Hill still provides the waterfall of drums that adds to the tracks' breakneck abandon. But Marnie Stern feels like the purest and most condensed distillation of what makes its creator so invigorating. The guitar hooks are purer, the songs are more energised and focused, and the lyrics bleed raw emotion more than ever before. In this case, an eponymous album title makes perfect sense: these songs feel like the same Marnie Stern, just more so.

Kanye West, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

...On which an egotistical virtuoso finally justifies his ego. West's past albums, despite moments of brash power and his undeniable ear for a hit, felt like shades of the versions archived away in his head. But just when we were ready to consign Yeezy to the trash can of promising rap careers swept away on a riptide of swagger and hubris, he opened up and showed us his twisted fantasy. It was beautiful (and dark).

It's not like there isn't boatloads of self-fellatio on Fantasy. Far from it. But it's joined by seething layers of self-hatred and revelations that always seem to come a little too late. What's so astonishing about this record it actually feels like a fairly comprehensive deconstruction (conscious or not) of a mind that straddles the line between preening ego, demented ambition and brittle vulnerability. And all put to one of the most consistently brilliant set of beats that mainstream hip hop has ever seen. From the Godzilla posturing of 'Monster' to 'So Appalled''s resigned decadence and 'Blame Game''s confused heartache, this is the sound of a facade forever cracked.

Deftones, Diamond Eyes

Diamond Eyes isn't a leap forward for Deftones. If anything, it's a scaling back. After a car crash left bassist Chi Cheng in a semi-conscious state from which he is yet to fully recover, the band temporarily shelved the record they had been working on, called Eros, and reassessed. They decided to draft in ex-Quicksand bassist Sergio Vega and record an album fast and loose, sharing more DNA with the relentless shred of Around the Fur than with the more languorous exploration found on Saturday Night Wrist.

The result is the band's least self-conscious record for years, filled with a renewed ferocity and energy. The album's first four tracks, starting with the gothic title track and running through to booming riff monster 'You've Seen The Butcher', comprise one of the best opening sections of the year. Throughout, the band seem more unified than they have since White Pony, and their enjoyment at rediscovering the relative simplicity of their early days is almost palpable. This is Deftones trimmed of the fuzzy edges, all lean muscle and hellcat fury. Just don't call it a comeback. This is a reassertion.

John Grant, Queen of Denmark

After ten years of labouring away as frontman of the Czars to little recognition and suffering through that band's disintegration, John Grant has ironically gotten the attention he deserves by embracing his outsider status. Part of the thanks for dragging Grant into the light should go Texas band Midlake who saw him perform and insisted on producing and recording his debut solo album, more than six years after the Czars' demise.

The spotlight should remain on Grant, however, who has created an album of adventurous yet poised lovelorn anthems. Focussing primarily on growing up gay in a God-fearing Midwestern hometown as well as some of his (by the sounds of it, painful) adult relationships, Queen of Denmark could have so easily been a pity party. But between the album's interesting arrangements, Grant's rich vocals and lyrics both heartbreaking and humorous, it feels more like a treasure trove. Tracks veer from wistful acoustic balladeering ('TC And The Honey Bear') to honky-tonk singalongs ('Silver Platter Club'), but they share Grant's appealingly direct lyrics and a world weariness that's occasionally leavened by bright thoughts.

Avey Tare, Down There

I'll happily admit that the debut solo album of Animal Collective's Avey Tare won't be for everyone. From the first sleepwalking beats on opener 'Laughing Hieroglyphic', a fair proportion of listeners would probably prefer to plug their ears with aggressive termites than continue. But those who stick around are rewarded with one of the year's most immersive albums, the lack of immediate hooks made irrelevant by the addictiveness of Down There's nocturnal atmosphere.

Here's my review of Down There for the BBC Music website.

Flying Lotus, Cosmogramma

A lot has been made of Flying Lotus' (aka Steven Ellison) jazz heritage as a central tenet informing his latest electro-headtrip Cosmogramma. There's definitely something to that - the freeform synths and constantly evolving beats of a track like 'Zodiac Shit' feel like a natural modern progression of the improvisational virtuosity of Miles Davis or John Coltrane (FlyLo's great-uncle).

But the overriding vibe flowing out of Cosmogramma's every pore is a grand psychedelia. If electronic music has a general flaw it's that it too often moves like mathematics, perfect rhythm matching pre-programmed harmonies in a way that can sometimes seem sterile and robotic. Flying Lotus has definitely bucked that trend on his latest album, more so than any of his other recordings. These tracks bend and creak and morph into one another. In a genre that often prioritises keeping toes tapping over scratching through to its soul, Cosmogramma is a revolution in its imperfection and humanity.

Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti, Before Today

One of America's great musical traditions, and one that is consistently underrated in the modern day, is that of the MOR radio rock song. Simple and unpretentious, this very American pop form tends to age well as a result of simple hooks and timeless, accessible melodies.

There are now a fair few US bands looking back into the country's B-league pop catalogue in an attempt to craft something new from the raw material of the 70s and early 80s. With his first major label release after a raft of lo-fi bedroom LPs, the prolific and obsessive Ariel Pink has emerged at the forefront of this movement. Before Today isn't just a series of nostalgic reconstructions, however. Every track seems to take a classic format and jumble it into something effortlessly modern.

The gloriously-named 'Butt House Blondies' matches the heavier moments of Husker Du and the Replacements with baroque pop verse sections to make a cocktail that's both smooth and gutsy. 'Beverly Kills' kicks off with the 70s soul staple of cop sirens and the hubbub of street chat before seamlessly busting out the slap-bass and loading the listener onto a disco bus - destination? Funky town. It's this makeshift stitching of styles, combined with the pervasive presence of Pink's distinctive vision, that makes Before Today so special.

The Besnard Lakes, The Besnard Lakes Are The Roaring Night

The Besnard Lakes' last album ...Are The Dark Horse was one of the most sensual pleasures of 2007, and as such many of us probably would have been perfectly happy for the Montreal-based band to just poop out a reconstituted version this year, complete with that album's elegant, spidery spirit.

Re-poop they did not, however, and shame on us for being willing to settle. ...Are The Roaring Night is a far more expansive experience than its predecessor, taking the epic template of 'Devastation', one of the few songs on Dark Horse that went really stratospheric, and using it to make an album of soul-scorching post-rock. 'Chicago Train' starts with an orchestral whisper and ends with an electrifying shout; 'Albatross' radiates warmth and light before exploding into an almost epiphanic supernova. The Roaring Night is an appropriate title for a record so epic that it might burst out of your speakers and do battle with a flaming unicorn made of lasers right there in your living room, before giving you a thumbs-up and imploding with the force of a hundred thousand collapsing stars. It's really good, essentially.

Arcade Fire, The Suburbs

So that makes three amazing albums in a row from the officially crowned Kings of Indiedom. This incredible streak is made all the more impressive because the band have (consciously or not) refused to retread old ground, placing each successive release with its own fully fleshed-out world. The Suburbs isn't nearly as flashy as Funeral or Neon Bible, but that's in keeping with the album's exploration of the mundane and the middle-class, the comfortable and the comatose. While by no means sparse, The Suburbs exercises a lot more restraint than its older siblings, constructing quietly desperate vignettes of defeated youth and the empty confection of privileged modern life. Old hat perhaps, but Arcade Fire never fail to separate themselves from the crowd with an abundance of passion and conviction. While there is a lower anthem ratio than some fans might expect, that sense of conviction burns as brightly and as intensely as ever.

Joanna Newsom, Have One On Me

Finally, a Joanna Newsom album we can all agree on. Her earlier albums Ys and The Milk-Eyed Mender are immensely impressive, but tend to split opinion, depending on the listener's proclivity for intricate harp plucking and vocals that occasionally hit a pitch that only dogs can truly appreciate. Despite being a somewhat intimidating triple album, Have One On Me is Newsom's most generous album to date, kind of like a sonic cuddle. The depth of the lyrics and stunning instrumentation is still there; the simpler arrangements simply sharpen the picture to show these virtues with due clarity. Tracks like 'Good Intentions Paving Co.', '81' and 'On A Good Day' are the clearest expression yet of Newsom's giving yet iron-strong vocals, as well as her talent for composition and swirling, Sufjan Stevens-esque orchestration.

Question to ponder: how different would the music world be if Sonic Youth had been called Sonic Cuddle?

Comedy Review: Daniel Kitson, 66a Church Road: A Lament, Made of Memories and Kept in Suitcases

2010-06-26T12:40:00.007+01:00

I've always thought that a good way of judging the quality of a show is how much of its spirit accompanies you home on the Tube, swimming lazily around in your head juices and sticking with you for a while after you slam shut the front door at home.

When I saw The Woman in Black for the first time (aged 12 or so), I spent a night have recurrent fear-aneurisms about vengeful spirit-bitches from the black beyond. When I saw Springsteen on his Magic tour (in a stadium, on my own. Go me), I air-guitared my way home like I was sprung from cages on Highway 9. A good show leaves ghosts of thoughts that take time to fade, like flashbulb motes flaring across your eyes.

Which brings me somewhat unceremoniously to Daniel Kitson, who has been quietly winning crowds over for years with a mix of stand-up routines and so-called story shows, which mix humour with narrative structure, recounting events from Kitson's life and stirring in immaculately worded observations on the strange irregularities of mundane life.

You might have also seen him pop up briefly on Peter Kay's Phoenix Nights series, although he later dismissed the show as "lazy and racist" (on the Phoenix Nights DVD commentary, Kay refers to Kitson only as "the bastard").

It's clear that Kitson shines brightest when telling his own tales, and 66a Church Road is a fine example. In recounting his love affair with a relatively unassuming piece of rented accommodation and his subsequent, years-long quest to purchase it from a colossal clusterfuck of a landlord, Kitson actually delivers a whole lot more.

Possibly the closest touchstone to Kitson's style is Dave Gorman's Googlewhack Adventure, but while Gorman relied on a preposterously dramatic turn of events to keep audiences rapt, Kitson shows a true flair for performance by achieving precisely the same result with considerably less pliable material.

Whether conveying the sheer joy of his favourite full English breakfast ("Nailed it! Nailed it! Nailed it!" he cries, gesticulating wildly at an imaginary plate of sausages and beans) or vividly recreating the highs and lows of his fraught flat hunt, Kitson has the audience alternating between fits of laughter and ravenous silence for a full hour and a half.

The show is broken up by musical interludes (sounded like Iron & Wine to me) over which Kitson's pre-recorded voice plays, while the man himself illustrates the scene with adorably twee home-made models, appropriately stashed away in suitcases strewn about the stage.

But what made the show great, what had me still digesting the spirit of it on the way home, was Kitson's poignant vision of home as a concept, and what that concept ought to be. It's the show's central theme, and throughout, Kitson poetically expands on the idea that home is a repository of memory and the keystone with which we reassure ourselves that those memories won't be lost, because they've seeped into the walls and floors and before we know it they're galleried all around us.

Whether we find home in a building or in the arms of a loved one, the protection of memory - the instrument we use to measure and define the meaning of our lives - is an enduring and endlessly romantic theme. That's the warm spirit of 66a Church Road, and that's what I was thinking about on the Tube home.

ASTRAL NUGGETS: New tracks plucked from the interwebular loom

2010-04-12T16:08:00.024+01:00

This is a track review round-up in which I chew on some of the most exciting new tracks circulating around the web and regurgitate some thoughts directly to the readers, whom I consider my hungry baby birds. It's sustenance mixed with stomach acid, essentially. A salty cocktail, but good. Let's get started.

Gold Panda, 'You' (listen here)

After the miraculous warmth of last year's 'Quitters Raga', which stitched samples of guitar, sitar and sliced-up Hindi vocals into an emotionally gripping patchwork of textures and melodies, London producer Gold Panda might have been feeling the pressure to produce an adequate follow-up. Well, if 'You' is what Gold Panda comes up with when he's under pressure, I propose the motion that he henceforth be forced to write tunes whilst suspended over a pit of ravenous Komodo dragons. 'You' is a refinement of the chopped-up South Asian classicism of 'Quitters Raga', sacrificing a little of that track's emotional pull in favour of a more instant hook and danceable beat. It's a rare breed of sunny driving music that has enough depth to withstand the endless repeat listens foisted upon it by an obsessive like me.

The National, 'Bloodbuzz Ohio' (listen here)

Escape Artist: "OMG! It's Matt Berninger, lead singer of the National! Hey, can you tell us a little about Bloodbuzz Ohio?"

Matt Berninger: "Well, it's kind of like most other National songs."

EA: "So, totally awesome in an earnest way; led by plaintive piano melodies and propulsive drums, with driving guitars heightening emotional tension as the song progresses? And lyrics expressing an intangible sense of loss and frank introspection, delivered in your trademark shellshocked baritone?"

MB: "Uh, yeah."

EA: "Cool! ...Hey, Matt?"

MB: "Yeah?"

EA: "...What's a bloodbuzz? And why does it happen in Ohio? And how did you get there in a swarm of bees? Also, can I be your friend?"

MB: "Oh my God, shut up."

Erykah Badu, 'Window Seat' (listen here)

Erykah Badu is now two-thirds of the way through her New Amerykah trilogy, with part two, entitled Return of the Ankh, released a week or so ago. Thematically, it's all change - out goes the venomous social commentary, in comes spiritual reflection backed by soft synths and ear-nibbling jazz; the hard concrete of the mind traded for the verdant glades of the soul. 'Window Seat' is a bewitching highlight, Badu weighing a yearning for escape against the need for the love of another ("Somebody say come back...I want you to need me"). It's the kind of effortlessly listenable soul music that's easy to define but so hard to master. This is music as spiritual salve.

The New Pornographers, 'The Crash Years' (listen here)

Whistling in pop songs. It's a hard road to walk. There are only a couple of sonic millimetres of difference between the wistful brilliance of Otis Redding's 'Sitting on the Dock of a Bay' and the skull-collapsing, planet-imploding agony of 'Young Folks'. Luckily, with the second track revealed from their upcoming album Together, the New Pornos walk that line with typical grace. 'The Crash Years' has a tremendous sense of momentum, building from a solid template of guitar and rhythm interplay and incorporating so many elements that there seems to be a hook around every corner. To some it's songwriting for the brain-mashed goldfish generation, but to me it's musical confectionery, a song that leads you merrily down the garden path, soundtracked by Neko Case's commanding vocals and the cheerful whistling of ruddy-cheeked Oompa-Loompas nearby.

Deftones, 'Diamond Eyes' (listen here)

So, we've heard two tracks from Diamond Eyes, the new Deftones album coming out in May. The first, 'Rocket Skates', is a sleek atonal beast, all sharp elbows and bared fangs. Second single 'Diamond Eyes' is a more spacious affair. Where 'Rocket Skates' feels like a lunatic screeching off the walls of a padded cell, 'Diamond Eyes' builds a dense cathedral of noise, culminating in a sweeping chorus dominated by Chino Moreno's echoing vocal refrain: "Time will see us realign/ Diamonds rain across the sky". Perhaps the only link between the two tracks is a return to the thick riffs of Around The Fur, Steph Carpenter's guitar presiding over the track in a way not seen since 'My Own Summer (Shove It)'. Certainly, the pounding onslaught of the song's final seconds is one of the most lead-heavy moments in the band's career, which is another way of saying it will blow your teeth out through your anus. It's a tantalising glimpse into what we can expect from the album next month. Rest assured, too, that the band has lost none of its thunderstorm spark after the sudden (hopefully temporary) departure of bassist Chi Cheng following a car crash that left him in a semi-conscious state.

LCD Soundsystem, 'I Can Change' (listen here)

With LCD Soundsystem's new album This Is Happening plump and ready to drop on May 17 (May's shaping up to be a pretty great month for music, isn't it?), leaks are popping up with a frequency that suggests the album has lost elasticity and tracks are simply tumbling out of its butt. While 'Drunk Girls' is exactly the kind of indulgent party banger that an LCD album would feel bereft without, 'I Can Change' feels like it might be more representative of the album's core. In other words, if 'Drunk Girls' is this album's 'North American Scum', 'I Can Change' is 'Someone Great'. Sharp, stripped-down keys are overlaid with a sparkling synth sheen. James Murphy is in contemplative mood here, reflecting on the emotional compromise of a lover stretching to accommodate an infatuation ("I can change...If it helps you fall in love"). It's also Murphy's most confident and consummate performance as a vocalist, his voice sounding more supple than ever, even bending to an impressive falsetto. David Byrne would be proud.

Joker, 'Tron' (listen here)

Tron Legacy, the sequel/reboot of the 1982 cult sci-fi favourite, will be hitting our screens in December. Based on this track, the movie's producers could do a lot worse than hire Bristol dubstep producer Joker to provide the score. Earlier Joker tracks like 'Digidesign' have shown his predilection for an aesthetic that evokes a future constantly shrouded in night, lit only by the flickering luminescence if the inner city. It's a good fit all round. With 'Tron', Joker has downplayed the hyper-bass of previous tunes to experiment with a more mid-pitch sonic spectrum (if you think 'Tron' is bassy, just try 'It Ain't Got A Name' by Joker and TC). The result is a lithe central hook intercut with thrilling diversions. It's a track that more than lives up to its name, and should leave track marks on a significant number of dancefloors, even if we never get to hear it blaring from the stereo of Kevin Flynn's light cycle.

GOD OF WAR III & HEAVY RAIN: Refined past vs. imperfect future

2010-03-31T19:49:00.017+01:00

Last week, like several million other gamers around the world, I had the somewhat jarring pleasure of playing God of War III and Heavy Rain back-to-back. So I thought I'd try my hand at a double review with some cursory commenteering thrown in. Just because my recent posts have been nowhere near confused and scattershot enough. So prepare to be forever trapped in an infinite vortex of unnecessary adjectives, pungent similes and phallic punnery! HAHAHAHA!!!

Ahem. So, God of War III and Heavy Rain. Unlikely bedfellows, I'm sure you'll agree (although after three games I'm fairly confident that Kratos could dominate pretty much anything in the bedroom). God of War III is a slickly-produced action/adventure game set in a highly revised version of Greek mythology, giving players the chance to brutalise all manner of fabled beasts and deities whilst carving their way up Mount Olympus in a gore-soaked journey of merciless revenge. It's also the product of five years of refining a combat system and a fight-puzzle-fight game structure through the previous two GoW titles, not to mention the countless influences it snatches from other games (most notably Japanese hack 'n' slashers like Devil May Cry and Ninja Gaiden). The story of God of War, therefore, is one of brilliant refinement, of taking features that have existed for a while and implementing them in the most seamless, epic way possible. It's what has made this the definitive action series for the Western audience, a crown that's thoroughly deserved.

And GoW III is the purest refinement yet. The combat system, characterised by vengeful protagonist Kratos' wildly swinging chain blades (now called the Blades of Exile), is familiar and comforting like an old quilt, with just enough new hotness thrown in to keep things spicy. The controls are intuitive enough that the player can think tactically about how to react to different situations without having to battle with buttons or spasming thumbs. The balance of the game is similarly well-honed, with chase sequences, platforming and simple puzzles effectively breaking up the slaughter sections.

Some recurring problems inherited from the previous games still occasionally frustrate. I can't count the number of times Kratos awkwardly stumbled off the side of a cliff because of spazzy camera angles and deceiving depth perception. There are also a few too many (ie: more than one) 'arena' sections which pad out gameplay by tirelessly throwing waves of minotaurs at Kratos' bald pate before allowing him to continue.

But all criticisms fade into insignificance during the game's most impressive sequences, the sheer scale of which is genuinely staggering. The game's opening salvo (Kratos scaling Olympus on the back of monolithic Titan Gaia) might hit your eyes like a bag full of sex hammers, but just wait until you experience a later boss fight, in which your enemy's fingernail is the size of a detached house. And despite the occasional platforming hiccups, the team at Sony Santa Monica has done some great work with the in-game camera, which zooms out to paint epic watercolours and back in again to capture all the gory details without ever sacrificing player control. I heard someone say that the game is aggressively directed, and in the case of the game's highlights this is a spot-on description. And by aggressive I don't just mean point-of-view beatings and unflinching decapitation sequences, rather that the camera feels more actively involved in the proceedings than ever before.

While GoW III represents the refinement of a genre to its purest molten core, Heavy Rain is an attempt by French developer Quantic Dream to breathe life into a whole new genre of gaming: the 'interactive drama'. Yes, I too was ready to sniff at this somewhat baroque Gallic description, but I genuinely can't think of a better one. It's basically a CG movie in which the player has control over the outcome of scenes through pressing (or failing to press) buttons at relevant times. Although that makes it sound much more boring than it is. It's an interesting game. An important game, even, and one which will hopefully spark a new wave of mature gaming experiences with which adults can connect. It's just that it's not a very good game.

The story, which follows four unconnected characters (you play them all in various scenes) who are all trying to track down a child-snatching serial killer, is involving if generic (think Zodiac meets Se7en with Saw groping itself in the undergrowth nearby). Dialogue veers wildly from convincing to laughable, depending on how well the largely French cast can manage a US accent and how well the game's director David Cage deals with North American dialect and mannerisms, both of which seem to vary from scene to scene. It's disappointing that a game that has compromised interactivity in order to present itself as a thriller to sit proudly alongside cinema's best offerings has settled for a story and dialogue that fails to break out of the 'good, for a game' category.

However, what the game does excellently is build atmosphere and tension within individual scenes. Quantic Dream has built on lessons learned on its last game Fahrenheit to craft some of the most memorable moments in videogame history. Scenes in which the characters are imperilled are rendered all the more jittery with the knowledge that any of the four characters can die and the story rolls on without them, often towards a more tragic ending. The controls effectively mirror the stress levels of the characters, and tricky actions (picking locks, disarming bad dudes etc) translate into holding down tendon-stretching button combinations that are refreshingly representative.

But on almost all other fronts, the control system leaves a rancid aftertaste. The developers' bizarre decision to control character movement by holding down the right trigger and steering them like a goddamned Panzer tank makes the simplest actions a chore and often leaves the player strafing face-first up and down a wall like an abandoned Asperger's patient. The over-reliance on responding to on-screen button prompts, as is so often the case, means that your eyes are scanning the screen for the next prompt to pop up rather than enjoying the action that's going on as a result of your button presses. Likewise puzzles, which regularly occur under an aneurysm-inducing time limit, too often degenerate into frantically wandering around an environment looking for a prompt to pop up rather than actually coming to a logical conclusion.

No matter how dubious the execution, however, the fact remains that it is Heavy Rain rather than GoW III that will be looked upon in ten years as a landmark release. While Kratos disembowelling his way through the Olympian pantheon trumps Heavy Rain on virtually all counts in terms of sheer fun, Quantic Dream has made a more ambitious game. In fact, playing them back-to-back was a curiously satisfying experience; a 48-hour marathon during which my thirst for new virtual experiences and my sickening bloodlust were both sated. As long as the games industry has the capacity to continue offering polished gems like God of War alongside ambitious experiments like Heavy Rain, I reckon gamers have got a lot to look forward to.

Drive-By Truckers BBC album review

2010-03-16T11:29:00.005Z

The follow up to Drive-By Truckers' incredible Brighter Than Creation's Dark (number 28 on Escape Artist's Top 50 albums of the 21st century) came out yesterday, and it's called The Big To-Do. To find out what old Auntie Beeb's take is on the Truckers' latest slice of Georgia geetar-twang, check out my review on the BBC music website by clicking here.

Head on over to DBT's Myspace page to check out three songs from the album - 'Birthday Boy' (a highlight, rocks like Full Moon Fever-era Tom Petty), 'You Got Another' (forgettable piano balladry, albeit with lovely intro) and 'This Fucking Job' (stomping blue-collar desperation - first line: "Working this job is a kick in the pants").

Red Dead Redemption: Impressions, leading to a conclusion

2010-03-15T14:14:00.016Z

Apologies for the resigned tone of the title above. It's just that I so desperately wanted to use the subtitle "Me So Ornery" for this post, but the dull side of my brain told me that it was a step too far and more than a little racist. So to spite my killjoy brain I went with a snarky title and decided to put the quote in the very first paragraph. In your face, common decency!

So now that I've given you that privileged glimpse into the creative process of a deranged troglodyte, we can take a collective peek at the creative process of a bunch of intelligent, presumably non-troglodyte game developers who are hard at work on Red Dead Redemption, pseudo-sequel to 2004's patchily-received PS2 spaghetti shooter Red Dead Revolver.

While Revolver was a vivid romp through Sergio Leone cliche, taking in a range of evocative (if occasionally jarring) locales and a well-rounded (if occasionally playable) supporting cast, its shonky mechanics and second-rate graphics showed that the developers' imaginations were pistol-whipped by their limitations. The lack of production values was a result of the game's chaotic development. Original publisher Capcom canned the game mid-way through its development, paving the way for Rockstar Games (the powerhouse behind GTA) to purchase the rights in 2002. Rockstar San Diego expanded on the game's existing assets, leading to a product that felt like a standard shooter with extra features and style poured on before release. Needless to say, it was the last-minute Rockstar additions that provided Red Dead Revolver's best moments.

Red Dead Redemption has suffered no such setbacks. It's a Rockstar San Diego joint from top to bottom, and looks set to become the rootin', tootin', shootin'est game ever to set foot in the Old West.

STORY

Players take on the role of John Marston, a former gunslinger who has since hung up his metal to settle with his family. But familial bliss does not an awesome game make, so our man is coerced by the law into taking up arms again to track down and bring in his old gang. It's a journey that will take him across the arid borders of America's southern states and on into the revolutionary breeding ground of Mexico (there are three huge primary areas where the game takes place). So far, so Ford. But Rockstar San Diego have made the interesting decision to set the game in 1908, with the West definitively conquered and the frontier smashed into the sea. And with encroaching modernity comes the technology to grind the old breed of outlaw desperado into the desert dust. It's a fascinating period of upheaval that paved the way for modern America, and it seems that the game will take more from revisionist anti-Westerns like The Wild Bunch and Unforgiven than the classic interpretations that preceded them.

GAMEPLAY

Well, it's Rockstar, so yes it's an open-world sandbox game. If you're anything like me, those terms will elicit a curious mix of excitement and dread. The best open-world games offer players freedom and choice but with enough context to imbue those choices with meaning. Infamous and Prototype were so unappealing to me because they simply presented cities to piss about in, as if that were enough. It's not. But based on Rockstar's spotless track record in this genre (GTA IV is a platinum example of a game that effortlessly integrates player freedom with an overarching story), we have every reason to hope that Red Dead Redemption will follow suit.

At the front end of the experience is the shooting mechanic, buoyed by the Euphoria engine that powered GTA IV's character animation and physics. Any player who experienced that jaw-dropping first moment in GTA IV where Nico is sent flying through his car's windshield after a particularly nasty crash will testify to the engine's power, and based on the promo videos shown so far, Redemption is using it to similar effect. So expect enemies to react uniquely and convincingly when you fill them with buckshot, rather than pre-canned animations (a la Call of Duty) or over-the-top ragdoll physics. Dead-eye targeting returns from the original game, an inspired take on bullet-time which allows advanced players to slow down time to mark separate targets and then watch the carnage unfold as Marston pours lead into the skulls and bollocks of his foes (the only two areas worth aiming at). Expect to see the Quick Draw pistol duel mechanic return too, although this hasn't been confirmed.

As Marston gallops (on some of the most convincing horses yet seen in a game) through dusty towns and border outposts, his actions will be monitored by an Honour system that will see the reactions of common folk (and the long arm of the law) change based on the violence of his disposition. Capturing bandits and stopping off to rescue stranded wagons will see Marston revered as the Batman of the Old West, whilst horse theft, shooting old ladies in the face and single-handedly wiping out small villages will, unsurprisingly, cause hapless townspeople to prolapse in fear at the sight of his horse on the horizon. Don't expect a swift GTA-style police reaction, but consistent lawlessness may result in righteous posses being rounded up and a sizeable bounty being placed on your own head.

As this is Rockstar's first open world game set in a predominantly rural environment, we can't expect the vibrant, frenzied hustle and bustle of Liberty City. But the development team has worked hard to ensure that, outside of the main story, there's plenty for players to aim their peacemakers at. From lively saloons complete with bar games (one of the videos shows a game of skill involving a sharp knife and five tender fingers, like you used to play at school only not with a compass) to treasure hunts complete with hand-drawn maps to side quests aplenty, there ought to be enough to do. I'm particularly looking forward to simply saddling up and heading into the wilderness for a few hours of living off the land (there's a dynamic wildlife system for you to admire and/or slaughter) and enjoying the vistas presented by the weather system and ambient day/night cycle. After the straight lines of Liberty City, Rockstar's proprietary RAGE engine has shown itself equally capable of creating organic-looking natural spaces, from sunlight filtering through weatherworn branches to the warped wood of the ramshackle towns and villages.

THE CONCLUSION

So all the pins seem to be in place for a satisfying gameplay experience. But the real potential of Red Dead Redemption is in its setting. By choosing to set the game in a period when savage wilderness was eroding under the steam pressure of oncoming modernity, Rockstar has given itself a golden opportunity. Just as GTA IV plays on ruthless entrepreneurialism and the cruelties of modern American economics, Red Dead Redemption could make a powerful companion piece, exploring the violence and misanthropy that lies at the dark heart of the American dream. I drink your milkshake, indeed.

Red Dead Redemption is released on Xbox 360 and PS3 on May 21, 2010.

Escape Artist's Top 50 albums of the 21st Century Part 3: The Top Ten

2010-03-06T19:20:00.046Z

10. Fugazi - The Argument (Dischord, 2001)

As engrossingly ear-splitting as hardcore punk can be, it's a genre that has always been constrained by its limitations. After all, it's hard not to become desensitized, musically and lyrically, when the volume dial is permanently switched to maximum. So a permanent hats off to Ian MacKaye, Guy Picciotto and Fugazi for consistently innovating in a genre that's often rabidly resistant to change.

Fugazi has been on hiatus since 2002, the band keeping busy with other projects and MacKaye industriously beavering away with DIY punk label Dischord and generally performing the duties of a DC punk legend. They did leave us with a rather special gift before dispersing to the four punkwinds*, however. The Argument is one of those rare, great punk albums which functions equally as a right-on, chest-beating pogo marathon and as an armchair chin-stroker. 'Full Disclosure' and 'Epic Problem' offer up anthemic, driving choruses for those looking to lose themselves in the squall, the latter such a dynamic piledrive of stunning riffs and guitar breakdowns that if it hits your headphones on the Tube, you're virtually obligated to make a dick of yourself. But beyond the categories in which we've always known Fugazi excel, The Argument pushes and strains to deliver delights rarely offered on a punk record. The smooth licks and handclaps of 'Life and Limb'; 'The Kill''s strangely detached glimpse into ultranationalism and martyrdom, complete with spooky death-rattle denouement; the dual-drum percussion opening of 'Ex-Spectator'. If hardcore as a genre is held back by the constant need to prove something (whether musical, political or lyrical), then The Argument is a classic precisely because it was made by a band who, after 15 years of keeping the faith, have absolutely nothing left to prove.

*Like normal winds, except if you get too close they'll kick you in the crotch and give you a fierce lecture about how many children lost fingers to make your jeans.

9. Tomahawk - Tomahawk (Ipecac, 2001)

In my MOJO piece on this album, I described ex-Faith No More vocalist Mike Patton as "chameleonic". It's a suitable way of describing Patton's hyperactive genre-skipping, his career taking in thrash metal, hip hop, country, folk, jazz and funk, with Patton's elastic voice stretching itself to fit the mood. But I failed to acknowledge that there's something, whether with FNM, Fantomas, Tomahawk, Mr. Bungle or any of the other multitude of Patton's projects, that ties together his performances. There's always a smokescreen of silliness disguising a hint of murder. The particular strain of silliness deviates between records, from Mr. Bungle's absurdist carnival to the flights of pulp fantasy in evidence throughout Fantomas' discography. But no matter the atmosphere, there's always a snake lurking in the long grass.

A loose concept album, exploring the fetid mind-swamp of an archetypal rural serial killer, Tomahawk is the album where this murderous impulse is truly set loose. With his bandmates (comprising a sort of underground supergroup, with members from The Jesus Lizard, Helmet and The Melvins), Patton employs layers of deranged guitar noise, ambient electronics and mad lyricism to create an atmosphere that plays on the common nightmare of dark cabins in dark woods populated by dark, delusional creatures. On 'Malocchio', frenzied buzzsaw guitars accompany Patton's triumphant beast: "And now that I'm standing, nervous organs dangling from you/ I'm blushing like red roses, the earth is my whorehouse. My zoo." The album was recorded in Nashville and it feels like Tennessee's subtropical humidity has seeped into its bones, with 'Jockstrap' and 'Cul De Sac' providing sneering twists on southern rock and bluegrass respectively. The thing that separates this album from all the other experimental novelties, however, is its evocative musicianship and attention to song structure, making Tomahawk at once disturbing and endlessly listenable.

8. My Morning Jacket, Z (ATO, 2005)

Though I would happily defend 2008's oft-derided Evil Urges with fists if necessary, the inimitable glory of Z remains My Morning Jacket's finest moment so far, which, given the quality of the band's back catalogue, buys it a ticket straight into the top 10. Z guides the listener, hand-in-hand, through the songbook of the American heartland, interpreting the varied guitar-driven movements of the 20th century whilst maintaining MMJ's core identity, guided by principal songwriter Jim James' assured hand. So yes, there are soaring chorus lines ('Anytime'), there is slow-burning windswept rock ('Dondante'), and there's the earnest sense of adventure that has seen the band tunnel its way into our heart sockets over the last decade. But we always knew the band could pulverise in that arena. Z introduced us to all the things we had no idea MMJ could do. We had no idea they could execute R 'n' B and Caribbean rhythm so effortlessly as they do on opening tracks 'Wordless Chorus' and 'It Beats 4 U', for a start. And breakout single 'Off The Record' might begin in fertile James territory, all chugging guitars and catchy rhythm, but then it takes an inspired left turn into an extended breakdown that evokes the best of the British psychedelic wig-out and 70s French synth-pop.

So Z extended the band's range and paved the way for Evil Urges' grand experiment whilst managing to be the most concise and economic expression of My Morning Jacket's appeal. And it managed these grand accomplishments without sacrificing any of those classic MMJ moments that fans have come to know, love, and bloody well expect.

Side note: We did it! We got through an entire retrospective review of Z without once mentioning the band's "comfort zone"! Somebody grab the champagne, we're hitting the town tonight!

7. Roots Manuva - Slime & Reason (Big Dada, 2008)

UK hip hop is in rude health today, but 10 or 15 years ago it was floundering in the garage doldrums, suffocated by slicker, more marketable US releases. At a time when the game was pushing the underground out, the British scene reacted by changing the rules. Ditching huge production costs and prioritising artistic vision over courting the charts, UK underground hip hop embraced its own grim version of electronic music, spawning a fertile breeding ground that takes in grime, dubstep, dancehall and above all an almost fetishistic worship of the bassline. Stockwell MC/producer Roots Manuva's Run Come Save Me (not to mention his debut Brand New Second Hand, released in 1999) felt like the first broadside in the British assault. In a genre with such a predilection for aggrandising the drama of working class life, Manuva's revelling in the inanities of life was a refreshing shift towards the ugly truth.

Run Come Save Me was a landmark record anchored by one of the finest hip hop cuts found anywhere ('Witness (1 Hope)'), but Brigadier Smythe improves every time out of the gates, and 2008's Slime & Reason is hands-down his finest work. Manuva's flirtation with dancehall and ragga evolved into a full-blown romance on Slime & Reason, popping out vivid party babies like 'Buff Nuff', 'Do Nah Bodda Mi' and 'Again & Again'. But in between there are refined echoes of the lyrical and musical heaviness on show on 2005's Awfully Deep, delving into broken homes ('The Show Must Go On'), misguided, betrayed youth ('It's Me Oh Lord') and Manuva's ambiguous relationship with God previously explored in 2001 on 'Sinny Sin Sins' (revisited on 'Let The Spirit'). Roots Manuva typifies the rebellious microcosm that's flourishing in London, embracing its own unique heritage and flying in the face of American hip hop's received wisdom. After all, if you can't beat 'em, fuck 'em.

Side note: I once met Roots Manuva on a train at Surbiton. He was nice. I almost pissed myself. Also, the reason I rambled on so much about the British scene and Run Come Save Me is that I wrote a fairly lengthy review of Slime & Reason for Londoners and didn't want to repeat myself. So for a more in-depth, track-by-track affair, check out my review.

6. The Hold Steady - Boys and Girls in America (Vagrant, 2006)

From the first chiming chords of epic opener 'Stuck Between Stations', The Hold Steady's third record hits you look like an ice-cold bucket of distilled awesome. That's not in question. Shredding through 11 tracks of warm, welcoming rock 'n' roll that definitively answers the question of what would happen if Springsteen had he been born 15 years later and joined The Replacements*, Boys & Girls... sees a great, tight rock 'n' roll band at their greatest and tightest. The likes of 'Massive Nights', 'Hot Soft Light' and 'Chips Ahoy!' are musclebound fist-pumpers executed with such conviction and musicianship (replete with exquisite 'whoa whoaaaa' choruses) that it's little surprise that the band owns live venues on a nightly basis.

That's what makes Boys & Girls an excellent record. What makes it a classic is that, beyond the exultation of the first few spins, it continues to reward the listener over months and years. Craig Finn's distinctive vocals, delivering dense reams of prose in a husky half-shout, are the heart and soul of the album, giving the driving riffs meaning and context and elevating them from simple feel-goodery. Much has been made of Finn's literary references, but his lyrics are far more than a list of look-what-I've-read pomp - they're actually refreshingly direct, charting the highs and lows of a cast of fresh-faced young invincibles over a span of half-remembered nights out. Finn creates incredibly poignant vignettes of the young and foolish, bringing a poetry to youthful abandon that never loses sight of the painful difference between the drug-enhanced fantasy and the stark reality of the morning after.

A party album that refuses to forget the resulting hangover, Boys & Girls... mirrors the bittersweet house party experience, providing the initial rush with epic guitar riffs and rousing choruses, then echoing the gradual comedown and dawn paranoia with frontman Craig Finn's studied, lacerating lyrics.

*Let's start a new literary trend of alternative-history music biographies, starting with a story that presupposes Henry Rollins became principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra in the late 80s. Publishers - call me!

5. Erykah Badu - New Amerykah Part One (4th World War) (Universal Motown, 2008)

For most artists, there's a natural barrier between the imagination and the final work. It's the barrier of reality and pragmatism that gradually dilutes that pure vision that exists in the head before outside logic steps in to explain what can and can't be done, to reconstruct and compromise. It's the barrier that all true artists are trying to overcome.

Never has an album sounded so pure of vision than Erykah Badu's New Amerykah. Its 11 tracks take us on an unsupervised, unfiltered tour of Badu's firing synapses and zipping neurons; her lyrics come in hoarse flows that seem to catch melodies incidentally, as if the listener has suddenly become privy to the rhymes Badu whispers to herself when no one's listening. Musically, it's her most varied and fearless album to date, taking in vintage funk samples ('Amerykahn Promise'), neo-jazz ('Telephone'), beat-driven electronic elegance ('The Healer') and caustic hip hop ('The Cell'). But while she collaborated with a host of producers (Madlib, 9th Wonder, various members of the Sa-Ra collective), it's Badu's serene, towering presence that infuses the record through that sensual voice. Her lyrics are an immersive mix of personal, political and spiritual, whether making a case for the all-consuming power of hip hop on 'The Healer', stepping in to the role of resistance leader on 'My People' or lamenting the ravages of drugs on 'The Cell' and 'That Hump'. As is fitting for an album that plays like a direct wiretap into Badu's brain, each track finds her in a different mood or adopting a different persona. On 'Me' we find her contented and matronly, accepting all sides of her being: "Everything around you see/ the Ankhs the wraps the plus degrees/ And yes even the mystery...it's all me". On 'Soldier' she's a zealous firebrand in full-flight, ready to "keep marchin on/ Till we hear that freedom song/ And if you think about turnin back/ I got the shot gun for your back". Perhaps most poignant is her emotional address to lost friend J Dilla on 'Telephone': "Just fly away to heaven, brother/ make a place for me brother". It's a vulnerable, hopeful moment on an record that lays bear an artist's life and soul - a record that demands, and deserves, our full attention.

4. At the Drive-In - Relationship of Command (Grand Royal, 2000)

At some point (usually somewhere around hour three of the Great Led Zep Discussion at age 16), most music geeks get to mentioning "rock 'n' roll alchemy" - that indefinable magic that turns a collection of synchronised components into so much more than the sum of its parts. It's what makes great bands great, and it's the reason that the break-up of At The Drive-In, mere months after discovering their own alchemical miracle with third album Relationship of Command, is such a tragedy. It was all inevitable, of course, with Class As, fracturing creativities and non-stop tour exhaustion all playing their parts in the slow-burn car crash. Not to mention At the Drive-In had to live with the paradox of being determinedly against slam-dancing at shows whilst playing the most unleashed brand of post-hardcore passion that anyone had heard in years. The band now reside in two separate groups (The Mars Volta and Sparta), both excellent but neither quite harnessing the magic that poured out of them via At the Drive-In.

But better to break-up after writing your best album than before, I suppose. And we'll always have Relationship of Command to cradle us through the nights of sobbing and soundtrack our fantasies of (long-rumoured, still unlikely) reunion. ATD-I's best album is simply a force of nature, a maelstrom of guitars and electric energy that must be heard to be believed. From the opening rattlesnake salvo of 'Arcarsenal', the listener is delivered a tsunami-force ultimatum: come with us, or be left behind. Those willing to let go and ride the hurricane are hit with a sonic barrage that rarely lets up (and then only to heighten the next detonation). Vocalist Cedric Bixler (now Cedric Bixler-Zavala) punctuates the whirlwind with intoxicating (and nigh-impenetrable) lyricism covering drug addiction, intercontinental tension, oppression and alien-infested space stations. His wordplay is engaging ("Paramedics fell into the wound like rehired scabs at a barehanded plant, an anaesthetic penance beneath the hail of contraband" is a line worthy of the finest imaginations), but it's his wild, unstudied delivery that ensures every line resonates on a gut level. We might never know the specifics, but Bixler's final words on striding epic 'Quarantined' feel appropriate both as an exploration of the creative process and a suitable epitaph for a band that exploded so brightly at the turn of the century: "A single spark can start a spectral fire".

3. Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago (Jagjaguwar/4AD, 2008)

Anyone who has shown even a passing interest in Justin Vernon's Bon Iver will be aware of the circumstances of For Emma, Forever Ago's recording, which has by now been indelibly inscribed in the annals of folk history. Vernon, following the break-up of his previous band (DeYarmond Edison) and the disintegration of a relationship, still weak from the after-effects of glandular fever, retreated to a remote cabin in the wilds of his native Wisconsin to convalesce. While there, he recorded a set of songs that mixed reflections on relationships past with the wintry natural imagery around him.

I'm usually happy to largely divorce albums from the circumstances of their creation (it seems to encourage a myth-making process that prioritises the cult of personality over music), but in this case the background informs the shape of the songs to such a great extent that it's impossible. Because For Emma, Forever Ago is essentially a one-man therapy session, scored by an unspeakably beautiful guitar/voice interplay and the spectral presence of the forest outside. Through the nine tracks we catch glimpses of his emotional recovery, from the pained remembrance of a lost love on album opener 'Flume' ("Sky is womb and she's the moon"), through the exquisite torture of 'The Wolves (Act I and II)', on which the climactic, clattering percussion might bring to mind Vernon's gibbering demons scratching at the walls of the cabin as he intones a protective mantra in an attempt to keep them out ("What might have been lost - don't bother me"). Throughout, Vernon employs his stunning falsetto, often double-tracked to add texture, as an accompanying instrument as much as a conveyer of words. By the time we reach the serene beauty of final track 're: stacks', Vernon seems to have reached a resolution to cast off grief and live happy in the knowledge that past love is no less real, as long as it's remembered: "This is not the sound of a new man or crispy realisation/ It's the sound of the unlocking and the lift away/ Your love will be/ Safe with me."

2. Deftones - White Pony (Maverick, 2000)

White Pony was the moment that Deftones definitively cast off any nu-metal affiliations (which were always a nonsense - the band so quickly outpaced the nu-metal fraternity that they were probably the first to bang the final nail in that ugly genre's coffin) and effectively rendered any categorisation of the band's sound moot. They're simply Deftones, existing defiantly apart from heavy metal, in a league of their own creation.

Not that they're incapable of liquifying a listener's internal organs with pure molten ferocity. 'Elite' is one of the most vicious metal tracks in existence, Steph Carpenter's guitar shredding at a merciless pace behind Chino Moreno's howling vocals ("When you're ripe/ You'll bleed out of control"). What elevates White Pony from mere sound and fury is a sense of musical and lyrical freedom that often flies in the face of genre expectation (much to the chagrin of the lapsed Deftones fans that never really got them in the first place). 'Teenager', for instance, is a polar counterpoint to the murderous rage of 'Elite', a swaying beat accompanied by a soft Spanish guitar arpeggio and DJ Frank Delgado's ambient electronics. And, somehow, it's still just as much Deftones.

The album, and the band in general, is filled with pleasing paradoxes. But the strange truth is that Deftones are proudly Romantic with a capital R, an updated artery of Gothic literature, melding music and words to revel in the little details. Moreno's lyrics are far more interested in evoking mood than meticulously detailing scenes. And the mood on White Pony is overwhelmingly sexual - even the album's title refers to a dream that supposedly represents sexual discovery. 'Feiticeira' and 'Passenger' form a thematic duo that place characters in cars (one in the back seat, one tied up in the trunk), basking in an imperious sensual energy. It all culminates on lead single 'Change (In the House of Flies)', with its explosive chorus mirroring the thunderous physical metamorphosis described by Moreno: "I watched you change/ It's like you never/ Had wings". As an album, White Pony remains a stunningly complete and shockingly overlooked work of art.

1. Arcade Fire - Funeral (Merge, 2004)

Arcade Fire are a pretty unique proposition, having produced two albums that both deserve consideration as the very best this luminescent century have offered up so far. Both Funeral and 2007 follow-up Neon Bible are unmistakeably conjoined by Arcade Fire's distinctive orchestral arrangement, but separated by the very different atmospheres they create. While Funeral turns grief and recovery into a communal experience, a flowering human fireworks display, Neon Bible takes those melodramatic concepts and places them in a dark vacuum. While the overriding image on listening to Funeral is the emotional hustle and bustle of the masses crammed on top of one another in rows of tenement buildings, Neon Bible brings to mind apocalyptic chanting coming from a lonely barn on a stormy plain at night, far from anywhere.

Although I was tempted to issue a massive "fuck you" to my own rules and crown these two albums as joint champions (especially as they work so well as distorted reflections of each other), I finally had to grow a pair and declare Funeral, Arcade Fire's first epic transmission to the world, my favourite album of the decade. It was the defining album to stray from the Strokes/Interpol trend of lyrical detachment and austere guitars to unabashedly adopt grand emotion and sweeping scope. Since then, many bands have attempted to make such lofty gestures, but none have come close to reaching the sumptuous embrace that Arcade Fire achieved on Funeral.

And what a warm embrace it is. Funeral might have been named on account of the spate of family deaths that the band experienced while recording the album, but this music is anything but funereal. It's a celebration, despite Win Butler and Regine Chassagne's lyrical exploration of the dark recesses of grief and self-deception. Opener 'Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)' is a piano-led slow-burner, culminating in an invigorating guitar/piano freakout and Pixies-esque vocal harmonies. In fact, a large proportion of tracks, notably 'Wake Up' and 'Rebellion (Lies)' end with an extended joyous sing-a-long, accompanied by the band's full range of instruments, including strings, horns, organ, accordion and added percussion. If this album's a funeral, it is undoubtedly in the grand gospel/South American tradition of expressing jubilance for the possibilities of life rather than commiserating the inevitability of death.

'Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)' is the towering centrepiece that crystallises the album's themes and sets the band's musical template. A roaring central riff never slows throughout the song, softening only to be pierced by triumphantly chiming glockenspiel. In using the concept of a power outage to explore the idea of a young generation desperately trying to reignite a fire on which their parents have long since given up ("And the power's out in the heart of man; take it from your heart, put it in your hand"), 'Power Out' also sets out Funeral's manifesto - a passionate expression of the tiny cries of human suffering and joy, ultimately washed away by the enormous clatter of the big picture. While it's always depressing to reflect on the utter insignificance of our lives, Arcade Fire make such a joyously melodic racket that, for all its emotional brutality, Funeral ultimately picks us up, dusts us off and warmly invites us to dance the darkness away.

Comedy review: Tim Key's The Slutcracker live at the Soho Theatre, February 19th 2010

2010-03-04T18:11:00.011Z

Reviewing a comedy gig seems like a particularly futile exercise. It is, of course, impossible to predict whether you'll find something funny without hearing the jokes, and a review can't tell you any of the jokes without spoiling them for you. If indeed you would have found them funny in the first place. All in all, it's like trying to describe a BMW driver without once using the phrase "self-important, overcompensating bumsniffer". Almost impossible, I'm sure you'll agree. However, occasionally indulging in futile exercises is the only way to strengthen your Quixotic Obstinatrix muscle group*, so on with the show!

Now I don't like to make a habit of issuing brash proclamations. They always come back to haunt you like the ghost of that Papa Roach album you once thought would change the world. What I will say is that Tim Key is the future of comedy.

One of the finest comedians to emerge from the group of innovative, Edinburgh-approved performers that have been trickling into the mainstream of late, you may recognise Tim Key from his poetry recitals dotted throughout Charlie Brooker's Newswipe or as the questioneer from the recently-aired comedy quiz show We Need Answers.

But it's clear that The Slutcracker is Key's baby. And what a charming, delightfully malformed baby it is. Ditching traditional set-up/punchline structure in favour of poems (read and analysed almost simultaneously), supported by video clips, music and childishly anarchic physical comedy. It sounds a bit fiddly, but such is Key's control that the show slides effortlessly from poetry to short films to shambling acrobatics in the grand old tradition of larking about.

To quote from Key's poems would be to take them out of their proper context and butcher them most cruelly and inhumanely, so I won't. But the fact that he can fix an audience with that dead-eyed gaze (see image above) and give a description of bollocks being bitten off and elicit laughs rather than screams is a testament to his skill. The secret is in the flightiness of his delivery; mock-seriousness swiftly gives way to tension-relieving affability, often through Key's idle chit-chat with sound man Fletch. It's a mix of surreal inscrutability and rosy-cheeked English chumminess that never errs too far on the side of one or other.

Given the shambolic nature of the show, it's a minor miracle that by the time it ends with a finale that takes audience interaction to a new level (I won't spoil it, but let's just say he almost broke my girlfriend's goddamned wrist), it all seems so complete. Apparently plucking coherence out of chaos is another grand gift that Tim Key can add to the long list.

Tim Key is currently performing The Slutcracker at the Arts Theatre in the West End. This extra run lasts until 13th March.

* The most important of the made-up muscle groups.

Escape Artist's Top 50 Albums of the 21st Century Part 2: 30-11

2010-02-24T11:15:00.021Z

30. Interpol - Our Love To Admire (Capitol, 2007)

Our Love To Admire, Interpol's third album, might contain few tracks to rival the instant ear-grabbing spectacle of the likes of 'PDA' and 'Evil', but after several years of re-listens, the record stands on firmer legs than either of its predecessors against the test of time. Distancing themselves from the dense, anthemic leanings that always drew uncomfortable comparisons with late 70s/early 80s post-punk, Interpol here fully embrace the cold, statuesque songcraft that had previously felt like a calling card the band were hesitant to slip into their collective jacket pocket. The songs are impressive as much for the silences as for the sounds, considered riffs expanding and contracting to achieve that highly calculated impact. That might sound artificial, but album closer 'The Lighthouse' proves that Interpol are never better than when they're softly reeling you in for the knockout blow.

29. Les Savy Fav - Let's Stay Friends (Frenchkiss, 2007)

You know we live in a topsy-turvy world when a band of thirtysomethings can create a sound that's one of this decade's finest blueprints for being young and free. For fifteen years, Les Savy Fav have been innovating the shit out of the art-rock/post-hardcore genres. The band has spent its whole career speeding like a flaming unicorn through styles before moving on to something new and exciting while the scenesters jump on the bandwagon they've left behind and make all the dough. As is proclaimed loud and proud on the band's website: "Missing out on cashing in for over a decade". Let's Stay Friends, LSF's fourth full-length, was worth the six-year wait for fans - a riotous flight of driving guitars and pounding drums with enough whimsy and flair mixed in to upset its punk template. It's a set that puts two fingers up to restraint and dives into songs with gleeful abandon, from the unforgettable, granite-splitting beat of 'Patty Lee' to 'What Would Wolves Do?', which should be mandatory listening for directionless and discouraged youth. Hopefully we won't have to wait another six years for their next album, as 'Pots & Pans' lays out an optimistic vision of the world's Savy future: "Let's tear this whole place down and build it up again/ This band's a beating heart and it's nowhere near its end".

28. Drive-By Truckers - Brighter Than Creation's Dark (New West, 2008)

Three principal songwriters; three guitarists; a broad southern rock/alt-country remit that encompasses a wide range of lyrical moods and musical textures. It's a recipe for a bit of a jam-band disaster, isn't it? And, honestly, Drive-By Truckers, whilst boasting an astonishing talent pool, have often struggled in the past to cram their sheer range into one unified album. They nailed it on Brighter..., though. The duelling vocals and styles of core trio Patterson Hood, Mike Cooley and Shonna Tucker undertake a pretty exhaustive exploration of the best and worst of the Southern spirit (always the Truckers' prime preoccupation), tackling different topics at different tempos, gradually building up an affecting, Springsteen-esque tableau of desperation and humour, triumph and despair.

27. Ben Folds - Rockin' The Suburbs (Epic, 2001)

September 11th, 2001. A tough old release date, that. Especially when you're seen as piano pop's clown prince. Luckily, Folds made a concerted move away from the wise-cracking schtick for his debut solo album (with the notable exception of the title track which, to be fair, is pretty funny) to create a sincere, open-hearted glimpse into middle-class American suburbia. The album's tone and quality is remarkably consistent, pumping out insistent piano-led pop numbers interspersed with emotionally resonant ballads, the redundancy-blues of 'Fred Jones Part 2' being a particular highlight of the latter. Rockin' The Suburbs remains a potent reminder of the heights Folds can scale when he goes for the heart-strings rather than the funnybone.

26. The Flaming Lips - Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots (Warner Bros, 2002)

A continuation of the emotional directness and musical immediacy they so deftly delivered with 1999 masterpiece The Soft Bulletin, Yoshimi is another record by Wayne Coyne and the Lips that grows and grows as repeated listens mesh the music with the listener's imagination. In fact, 'imaginative pop' might be the best description I can come up with to describe Yoshimi (and the wider Lips catalogue). At its heart, the band's tenth release is gloriously naive guitar pop, buoyed by subtle experimentation and anchored by Coyne's unaffected vocal delivery. Screw it, I'll just come out and say it. Wayne Coyne for President.

25. The National - Boxer (Beggars Banquet, 2007)

With 2005's breakthrough Alligator and now Boxer, The National's albums seem to have garnered a reputation as 'growers'. This refers to the tendency for the songs to keep giving over repeated listens, but that shouldn't preclude praise for the immediate impact of the band's bassy intensity and vocalist Matt Berninger's beaten-down, baritone lyricism. I still remember being hit square in the chops by the opening piano chords of Boxer's opener 'Fake Empire'. Throughout the album's 12 tracks, there's such an abundance of melodic guitar/piano interplay and rousing choruses that it's a wonder the BBC hasn't snapped up more National songs to soundtrack emotionally-exploitative montages for its nature docs. Special mention should also go to Bryan Devendorf's superb drumming, which often plays with audience expectations but is always brawny enough to give tracks that essential desk-tapping quality.

24. Sufjan Stevens - Illinois (Rough Trade, 2005)

It's the Sufjan Stevens that you know and love, but more!! Bigger!! Louder!! Longer!! Convoluted song titles!! Exclamation marks!! The second album (after 2003's Michigan) in Stevens' grand, surely-never-to-be-completed project to dedicate an album to each of America's states might seem like a novelty curio, but even on cursory first listen, it's immediately clear that this is a definitive masterpiece and his best work so far. 22 tracks filled to the brim with orchestral swirls, vibrant arrangements and a palpable sense of romance. Stevens draws from the renowned figures, features and musical styles of Illinois, channeling them through his own unique lens to craft an album that is by turns intimate and overwhelmingly vast.

23. Dinosaur Jr - Beyond (Fat Possum, 2007)

Dinosaur Jr didn't have a good 90s. After cementing themselves in the upper strata of the late 80s US alt-rock scene with You're Living All Over Me and Bug, the band's core duo J Mascis and Lou Barlow fell out over Mascis' control freakery, leading to Barlow's departure and the subsequent ten years of diminishing returns on a major label before Mascis euthanised the Dinosaur Jr monicker like some half-starved street dog in 1997. It would have been an ignominious end for such a great band. Luckily, Barlow and Mascis finally put their handbags down in 2005 and set to work on a new record. The triumph of Beyond, therefore, is that the original line-up was able to recapture the fire after over 20 years of huffily ignoring each other. The album takes the best from those original records, as well as Mascis' more structured 90s work, to create a set that sounds as noisy and vital as the early days but incorporating the lessons Mascis and Barlow had learned during their long interim. The result is classic rock song structure played at punk volumes, and arguably the purest distillation of that Dino Jr sound. Clearly Barlow, Mascis and drummer Murph realised that despite the recriminations, they had unfinished business together. And against all odds, it was worth the wait.

22. The White Stripes - White Blood Cells (XL, 2001)

White Blood Cells signaled the moment that Jack and Meg White exploded on to the mainstream music scene, with frantic, drooling write-ups in the music press rapidly degenerating into Heat-esque speculation on the duo's relationship. But their stadium-sized leap into the world's frontal lobes didn't come as a result of a slickly-produced update of their scuzzy garage-rock. All they had to do was write their best and catchiest record to date. Simple. The central riff of 'Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground' simply rocks on a life-changing level; 'Fell in Love with a Girl' has a feverish, deranged feel that perfectly echoes its theme of reckless young lust; 'Offend In Every Way' is giddy mix of early Kinks and Ennio Morricone. The album succeeds so effortlessly because it digests elements of rock 'n' roll from the past forty years whilst never surrendering its own jagged Detroit identity. Also, little known legal fact: if someone nonchalantly announces to you that Meg White's drumming sucks, you have a legal right - nay, obligation - to knock every tooth out of their stupid ignorant face.

21. Dizzee Rascal - Boy In Da Corner (XL, 2003)

In an age when rap has become the new pop and toothless, self-satisfied turd-wranglers rule the charts on both sides of the Atlantic, it's heartening, not to mention utterly necessary, to focus on hip hop's innovators and street gladiators who choose ugly reality over vapid fantasy. Boy In Da Corner is still a titanic record by one of this broad genre's finest talents. It's the record that introduced most of us to Dizzee's scattergun vocal delivery, the MC skipping from bravado ('Fix Up, Look Sharp'; 'Jus A Rascal') to bruised vulnerability ('Sittin' Here'; 'Brand New Day') to gritty street-level observation ('I Luv U') with a hyperactive, breathless pace. The beats are just as special, Rascal and Cage stitching grime/garage/dancehall/rock samples together to create a dexterous collage of sounds that feels authentically scavenged from Bow's clubs and pavements. Despite Dizzee's recent concessions to the T4 crowd, he delivers every time on his LPs, and even if the future sees him seduced by the fame game, we'll always have Boy In Da Corner.

20. Kings Of Leon - Aha Shake Heartbreak (HandMeDown, 2004)

Is it possible to recall Kings Of Leon pre-'Sex On Fire'? It's all a little hazy at this point. Well, there was that first album all the way back in 2003, which was pretty good, if a little unassuming and light on ambition. Oh wait, then there was Aha Shake Heartbreak, otherwise known as the album with which KOL quietly stole our hearts and unzipped our girlfriends' jeans. Displaying a deftness of touch that seemed to surprise us all, the album alternates between barn-dance guitar ruckus('The Bucket'; 'Taper Jean Girl') and gentle Nashville lullabies ('King of the Rodeo'; 'Milk'), all infused with the sweaty sexual energy that the Followills had so clearly been exercising on the Youth And Young Manhood tour.

19. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Abbatoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus (Mute, 2004)

A singularly tough task to pick from Nick Cave's clutch of 21st century opuses (opae?). I was especially tempted to give 2001's No More Shall We Part a glowing recommendation, given the insistence of some writers to reduce that masterpiece to evidence of Cave's old-age softness and "domestic contentment". Still, being the established mathematician that I am, unswerving logic led me to believe that a Nick Cave double album must trump a Nick Cave non-double album. There are other reasons too, though - the fact that it's a perfect summation of a broad and varied career; that Cave's lyrics mix traditional, beauteous sentence structure with anarchic savagery and back-of-the-pub lewdness; that it's Cave's most orchestral, epic work, filled with strings and choirs and guitars and whirling Wurlitzers.

18. TV On The Radio - Return To Cookie Mountain (4AD, 2006)

Three superb studio albums in and it seems there's no stopping TV On The Radio. Sophomore release Return To Cookie Mountain is the star of a very fine litter, a beguiling combination of Desperate Youth's ethereal mystery and Dear Science's dense sound-squalls. Speaking of treading fine lines, the album also expertly charts a midway course between scratchy experimentalism and the immediacy of the head-nodding beats. For that, we can thank producer/sampler/multi-instrumentalist Dave Sitek and drummer Jaleel Bunton. Meanwhile we can thank Tunde Adebimpe and Kyp Malone for the exquisite, powerful vocal harmonies which deliver colourful and evocative lyrics, particularly on single 'Wolf Like Me', which re-casts the lusty male as lycanthropic emotional predator. TVOTR have inherited David Bowie's mantle as the prime purveyors of thinking people's party music. Bowie's vocal contribution to 'Province' may even have served as the inauguration ceremony.

17. Desaparecidos - Read Music/Speak Spanish (Saddle Creek, 2002)

I'm sorry, I can't help it. I don't like Bright Eyes that much. Given that my favourite Bright Eyes album is the much-maligned electronic jaunt Digital Ash In A Digital Urn, it seems I belong to the deformed demographic that prefers the music Conor Oberst plucks out of his butt while resting from his last proper album. With that in mind, I present to you Read Music/Speak Spanish, the first and only album by Desaparecidos, Oberst's collaboration with fellow Omaha songwriter Denver Dalley. Recorded in a week, this raw slice of post-hardcore is a product of Oberst's words and Dalley's powerchords, coming off like a more cerebral Replacements or a meatier Get Up Kids. Elevating the riffery is the bristling anger and surgical insight of Oberst's lyrics, which frantically scratch at the scabs of middle-American cash culture.

Side-note: Read Music/Speak Spanish was the subject of possibly the worst music review I've ever read, in which the writer (for the now-defunct Stylus) spends the first half of the piece comprehensively pointing out all the reasons he should never have been chosen to review the album in the first place.

16. The Besnard Lakes - ...Are The Dark Horse (Jagjaguwar, 2007)

I am as yet unconverted to the genius of Pink Floyd, being that I tend to fall asleep several minutes into each track. As such, I wasn't expecting to fall in love with Canadian duo The Besnard Lakes' second album, which shares a lot of similarities with the languorous psych-rock and prog of the 70s. But ...Are The Dark Horse made me realise that my stumbling block with Floyd isn't a matter of track length or pacing, but aesthetics. I could (and frequently do) listen to the slowly-unfolding beauty of The Besnard Lakes all day. The eight songs (with the exception of 'Devastation', which rocks like almighty fuckery from beginning to end) lull the listener into a hazy rapture by gracefully hiding in shadow before erupting into Technicolour splendour. Album opener 'Disaster' is a particular highlight - I have long harboured the irrational belief that this track should be played at Brian Wilson's funeral, with or without his consent.

15. Spoon - Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga (ANTI-, 2007)

Lean and streamlined like a rock 'n' roll greyhound (seems they used up all their self-indulgence with the album title), Spoon's sixth album is 36 minutes stripped of pomp and frivolity, each song poised to attack. As first track 'Don't Make Me A Target' proves, the essence of Spoon is in the complex interplay of seemingly simple guitar and drum parts, the band exploring all the ways they can play around with and distort a central riff. But streamlining doesn't mean Britt Daniel and co. don't make room for experimentation. On 'The Ghost Of You Lingers', a simple lovelorn sense of longing becomes a spectral masterpiece through pounding piano, static intrusion and Daniel's distant, echoing vocal refrain.

14. The New Pornographers - Twin Cinema (Matador, 2005)

Aah, sweet melodies. Sometimes they don't have to be subverted, reconstructed or experimented on. Sometimes they just have to be fucking sweet. In 2005, accredited melody-meister AC Newman and his army of superstar collaborators (including Neko Case and Destroyer's Daniel Bejar) created a soul-affirming paean to the rippling joy of the unreconstructed hook and the rousing sing-a-long chorus. In the interest of me not repeating myself, check out the Disc Of The Day review I wrote for the MOJO website a couple of years ago for all the adjectives you can eat.

13. Rival Schools - United By Fate (Island, 2001)

Rival Schools might have only brought us one album in their short lifetime as a band, but United By Fate crams in enough rampant riffing to be a meal that replenishes itself every time you come back to it. There's enough sting in the album's tail to hark back to Walter Schreifels and the rest of the band's hardcore punk legacy, but it's mollified by a new sense of soaring melody and a varied pace that makes those fat slabs of guitar noise all the more satisfying when they drop. This is another of the three albums on this list for which I did a write-up for MOJO - have a read, if you're not into the whole brevity thing.

Side note for fact fans: the band and the album took their names from Capcom's Playstation brawler Rival Schools: United By Fate. And people say videogames can't inform wider culture. Tsk.

12. Jay-Z - The Black Album (Roc-A-Fella, 2003)

A massively-hyped album (remember all that guff about it being Jay-Z's last record?) that managed to leave a rabidly expectant fanbase satisfied like happy fat little babies, The Black Album feels like a pretty definitive exclamation mark for Jay's career and the East Coast rap scene in general. From the breezy jazz of single 'Change Clothes' to autobiographical document 'December 4th', the man is on top of his flow on every track. Even more impressive is the way that he marshals the talents of an army of producers and collaborators, incorporating their styles without compromising the unity of the album. Eminem's brooding style shines through on the chorus of 'Moment of Clarity'; '99 Problems' and 'Dirt Off Your Shoulder' are laced with Rick Rubin and Timbaland respectively, but all tracks here are firmly under Jay-Z's bootheel, partly because he made the wise decision to hog the mic, ensuring that it's his voice and his vision that comes through clearest.

11. M83 - Saturdays = Youth (Mute, 2008)

If you're going to name your band after a spiral galaxy (Messier 8 3), you better make sure your music makes a fair reach for the stars, and that your reach doesn't exceed your grasp. Neither of these are a problem for Anthony Gonzales, who as M83 has been pouring pure dream pop into the world like some benevolent white witch for the last 10 years. All of his five albums resonate on some deep romantic level, filled with giddy synths and swelling arrangements, but 2008's Saturdays = Youth seems to have a particular pull for wistful modernites, harking back to an entirely made-up 1980s American golden youth that we've been mythologising ever since the 90s got boring, with John Hughes' (RIP) The Breakfast Club as a new Sacred Text. It's a painfully beautiful record that's filled with the kind of adolescent ache that would seem so easy to romanticise, but is so rarely done well.

COMING SOON - The top ten! Featuring: Two albums with America in the title! Nasty music! Nice music! Alphabetical extremities! Sinny sin sins! Boys! And Girls!

Click here for the first part of the countdown - 50-31

The Wolfman and the death of inspiration

2010-02-19T11:57:00.004Z

If there’s one thing that unites great movies, it’s inspiration. Regardless of feelings about a particular film’s successes and faults, inspiration is always a characteristic that an attentive cinemagoer can spot. It’s the sense of aspiration that drives filmmakers to try something new, to find a different approach or to execute a concept with complete, unabashed conviction. Inspiration by itself is no guarantee of a movie’s quality – far from it – but if there’s a genuine spark of ambition in evidence on the screen, there’s something inherently glorious about that, no matter how the finished product turns out, isn’t there?

Conversely then, there’s nothing more depressing than paying eight quid to see two hours of uninspired cinema. And there’s nothing more insulting than watching a movie that talks to you as a demographic rather than an individual. As Hollywood marketing becomes more and more hyperactive, clicking its fingers in front of our glazed eyes in its attempts to lure us into the cinema, larger numbers of movies seem to be presented to us as a slideshow of features that ought to add up to a movie we’d like. You know, based on surveys and statistics and what we’ve been tweeting over the last six months and the consistency of our most recent bowel movements.

Case in point? The Wolfman, this month’s remake of Universal’s 1941 picture of the same name. Now, to be clear, I haven’t seen the original version (I don’t watch films released before 1990, they reek of old people and death and collapsed livers), so this isn’t a screed about the film’s failure to live up to the legacy of its predecessor. It’s a lamentation at the waste of such fertile subject matter with a movie that feels rushed (it was) and poorly judged. Most unforgivably, the film replaces a consistent vision with a checklist of ingredients that seems to have been thrown together and directed on autopilot.

On a five-point review system, The Wolfman is probably worth two stars – one for imaginative casting and decent performances; the other for the invigorating potency of Hugo Weaving’s mutton chops. Other than that, there’s little to recommend this film. The central narrative is flaccid and predictable (wait, the brooding patriarch with the chequered past and glow-in-the-dark eyes is bad?); the much-hyped effects are unspectacular, with the goofy, undeniably Ferrigno-esque wolf design a particular misstep; and the romance between the two protagonists, central to the pathos of the story, is literally reduced to one scene of idle lakeside stone-skipping.

But all this pales in comparison to the film’s terminal defect. The werewolf legend presents a huge opportunity to create a film dripping with the Gothic atmosphere and veiled threat that flows like a midnight fog from its forested Victorian setting. A palpable sense of foreboding, grainy images of moonlight filtering through gnarled oak branches, a central romance rooted in classic melodramatic tradition – none of these are evident in The Wolfman. Instead we get an overblown score, action scenes that are shoddily directed and drain all the mystery from the film, and scientifically-engineered shocks in place of true horror. The result is a monster movie only a couple of notches above the dreadful Van Helsing.

Maybe this is what happens when a director who has shown true artistic potential (Mark Romanek – One Hour Photo) walks away from a film and is replaced with a studio yes-man who has shown ample technical skill but little vision (Joe Johnston – Jurassic Park III, Jumanji). Maybe this is what happens when delivering a film on-time and on-budget takes priority over cinematic merit. All I know is that I’d rather sit through a hundred Watchmen-esque inspired failures than spend one more minute in the dull company of The Wolfman.

Escape Artist's Top 50 Albums of the 21st Century: 50-31

2010-02-12T17:25:00.026Z

It's easy to look back on decades past and identify neat trends. The 60s was swingin'; the 70s was the disco-addled hangover fuelling the rise of a new kind of angry music; the 80s was the birth of the electropop template still recycled like cheap beer bottles today; the 90s was the earnestness of grunge and its gradual diminishment in the face of popular club culture. These trends are all accurate enough, but never tell the whole story. This is mostly because the whole story is near-impossible to tell.

This list, presented in three parts, shows no neat trends to catalogue the story of music in the past decade. Neither can it tell the whole story. Really, it's just an unwieldy, inelegant list of honest favourites written by someone possessing an impractically wide and naive taste in music.

A quick note - clearly music is subjective, and as such this list makes no attempt to chart the most significant or important records of the decade. I've picked these albums based on two criteria - that I loved them when I first heard them, and that I still love them and feel certain I will continue to love them until they bury my crusty bones. In that sense, the albums are timeless, but not necessarily to you. If you disagree, feel free to comment below. And then go make your own goddamned list.

50. DJ Format - Music For The Mature B-Boy (Genuine, 2003)

The antithesis of gangster rap's accesorized overcompensation that has led to the descent into self-parody of many a great rapper (heard any Snoop Dogg songs recently? Jesus.), Music... is a breezy set of beats that emphasises lyrical playfulness over brash self-regard. Regular DJ Format collaborator Abdominal is a particular highlight, who on album opener 'Ill Culinary Behaviour' casts the MC and the DJ as a fussy couple slaving over beats and rhymes for their dinner party guests.

49. Silver Jews - Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea (Drag City, 2008)

The wry humour of baritone raconteur David Berman has always made up a major component of Silver Jews' sound, but Lookout Mountain... couples Berman's intricate narratives with a lighter sound that veers from chirpy bluegrass to classic rock via the kind of blues that you hear played by old, tired men in old, tired bars. The best kind.

48. Rachel Unthank and the Winterset - The Bairns (Rabble Rouser, 2007)

On an album that feels as much like historical document as English folk record, The Unthanks (as they're now known) interpret old northern ditties and tavern sing-a-longs with a passion and verve that defies the dryness of the initial concept. Especially engaging are the songs that paint a picture of the untold stories of women in centuries past, whether it's waiting on the pier for the return of husbands and sons stolen by the Royal Navy on 'Blue's Gaen Out Oot O'The Fashion' or rebelling against an abusive husband in the only way possible on 'Blue Bleezing Blind Drunk'.

47. Fucked Up - The Chemistry Of Common Life (Matador, 2008)

From the moment that album opener 'Son The Father' explodes into a fiery ball of atomic energy about a minute in, you know that Chemistry... is a hardcore album that's perfectly capable of bending you over and fucking you in the ears. The guitar sound, achieved through overdubbing guitar tracks again and again, is simply massive, especially on nihilist anthem 'No Epiphany'. But read the sleeve notes and you'll see that vocalist Pink Eyes' indecipherable grunts actually represents words. And what wonderful words they are, tackling the science and wonder that drives the world.

46. Bill Callahan - Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle (Drag City, 2009)

Emerging from Smog’s dark cloud with the second album released under his own name, Callahan here is reflective but ultimately sanguine. The album’s true charm lies in the indescribable chemistry between the simple, folksy strings and Callahan’s husky baritone. The lyrics are never less than engaging, a particular highlight being 'All Thoughts Are Prey To Some Beast', which turns psychological turmoil into a compelling natural metaphor.

45. Jay Reatard - Blood Visions (In The Red, 2006)

Although Jay Reatard died last year at the tender age of 29, we can take a little solace from the fact that he was one of last decade's most brilliant and prolific songwriters, building up a songbook in ten years that would be the envy of most musicians on their deathbeds. He also, knowingly or not, spearheaded a revitalised wave of 21st century American punk rock that's more about the unpretentious shared euphoria of loud music played live than political protest. 2006's Blood Visions might be the purest distillation of his wandering spirit - 15 tracks of adrenaline-fuelled melody and distortion, equal parts relentless speed and enduring heart. The album is the perfect introduction to Reatard's signature jagged style, with ample deviations to break the tempo, such as the toe-curlingly thrilling guitar breakdown at the end of 'Oh It's Such A Shame'.

44. Bruce Springsteen - Magic (Columbia, 2007)

When rock stars as monumental as Bruce Springsteen enter into their fourth decade of recording music, there's an unspoken expectation that they'll settle down into a statesmanlike routine of dignified, wordy albums which tell stories and express their socio-political beliefs before they croak and miss their chance. This is a pattern that Springsteen has (Devils And Dust notwithstanding) brazenly defied, never more so than on Magic, the joyous reunion of The Boss and his happy employees the E-Street Band, on which he struts like he did in the 80s, covering the disillusionment and melancholia of the lyrics with the fiery gusto of rock 'n' roll's Duracell icon.

43. Iron & Wine - The Creek Drank The Cradle (Sub Pop, 2002)

While Sam Beam has very successfully added a band and a fuller sound to his folk repertoire in the years between this 2002 release and today, his songs have never been more quietly devastating than on his first full-length album. Each track has a lo-fi, handcrafted quality; the crackle of home recording gives the songs a rustic prettiness that belies the attention paid to song structure and lyrics, which have the purity of expression and timelessness to ensure Beam's place in the hallowed halls of great acoustic songwriters.

42. Metric - Fantasies (Metric Music International, 2009)

A tough call between the warmth of Fantasies and the sterile paranoia of 2005's Live It Out, but warmth tends to win out with me. Fantasies was a startling move towards the mainstream for Emily Haines and co., but one that felt like natural musical progression rather than lusty land-grab. And who knew they'd do arena rock so well? Every moment of the album's stripped-down ten tracks is stuffed to the gills with pulsing guitars and dynamic electronics, making this one of the danciest, most compulsive rock albums of recent years. Tracks like 'Gold Guns Girls' and 'Gimme Sympathy' deserve to be pulverising stadiums.

41. Tool, Lateralus (Volcano, 2001)

Down to its very bones, Lateralus is a record for musical obsessives and audiophile geeks. Even more so than all their other albums. Its 79 minutes are greasy with the fingerprints of near infinite tinkering, a bad sign for most albums, especially those with 10 minute tracks. Fortunately, the overwhelming musicianship of one of prog-metal's most gifted groups simply crushes any concerns about excessive fiddliness. Intricacy is the point of Tool, and they have the talent to pull it off like no other band, from Maynard James Keenan's mountain-moving vocals to Adam Jones' rich layers of guitar. Oh, and you'll struggle to find better drumming on any album, ever. Just listen to album opener 'The Grudge' and put a pillow beneath you for when your jaw drops.

40. The Stills, Logic Will Break Your Heart (Vice, 2003)

Understated and underrated, The Stills' debut album mixes anthemic songcraft with a lyrical atmosphere of crippling anxiety. On 'Lola Stars And Stripes', for example, a wall of guitars shimmers and sparkles while frontman Tim Fletcher bunkers down in anticipation of "next week's chemical blast". It's an album of contrasts, of love married to death, of fear chipping away at hope. It deserved more than it got.

39. The Bug - London Zoo (Ninja Tune, 2008)

London Zoo is the UK capital's angry underside. London is so deeply embedded in the album's DNA that it plays like an enraged mutant that spawned in the city's sewers and now stalks empty Tube stations by night, seeking bloody revenge. It's a furious, thrilling mash-up of all the capital's most deliciously corrupted indigenous/Caribbean subgenres (dubstep, grime, dancehall, jungle) which can instantly fill a space with focussed indignation and spleen-paralysing bass rumble. The Bug (aka Kevin Martin) has filled the record with Grade-A nuclear talent on the mic, including Ricky Ranking, Aya, Spaceape, Tippa Irie and Warrior Queen, but the star of the show is Roll Deep's Flowdan, whose megabass vocal attack adds considerable threat to his three tracks.

38. Band of Horses - Everything All The Time (Sub Pop, 2006)

Have Eddie Vedder and Band of Horses' Ben Bridwell met at some point? If so, did Vedder invoke some scuffed-denim incantation, nominating the band as Pearl Jam's anointed purveyors of open-hearted rock, in perpetuity throughout the universe? If not, I'm disappointed. In fairness, Band of Horses' sound has a more pastoral bent than Pearl Jam's urban groove, but the link remains in the emotional honesty and anthemic melody that courses through the two bands' best work. Everything All The Time, Band of Horses' debut, is a soaring rock album par excellence. Tracks like 'The Funeral', 'The Great Salt Lake' and the Tom Petty-esque 'Weed Party' will make optimists of the most ardent doom-sayers, even if it's clear from the lyrics that Bridwell is hardly a barrel of sunshine, intoning on the chorus of 'The Funeral', "At every occassion, I'll be ready for the funeral".

37. LCD Soundsystem - Sound of Silver (DFA, 2007)

Apparently, James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem fame turned down a writing job on the then-unknown Seinfeld in order to carry on with his musical career. So I guess the best compliment I could give to this album is that, against all odds, he has no reason to regret that decision. While taking the job would have seen him contribute to one of the 90s' best-loved sitcoms, his two albums have cemented him as one of the best producers/DJs/songwriters of the 21st century so far. Sound of Silver saw Murphy refine his lo-fi electronica and work on his lyrics (he often improvised vocals before then) to create an electro album that plays like a classic rock record. While the tone of the tracks veers from playful ('Get Innocuous!') to snide ('North American Scum') to wistful reminiscence ('All My Friends', 'Someone Great'), the songs are united by their warmth and humanity.

36. Flying Lotus - Los Angeles (Warp, 2008)

How can one make such naturalistic, textured music from a laptop full of meaningless wires and circuit boards? Flying Lotus might be the devil. But they say he has the best music and Los Angeles bears out the theory. In fact, the laptop is one of modern music's greatest tools for experimentation, giving people far smarter than me more opportunity than ever to rip sounds from their original context and weave them into something new and exciting. It's just that you have to be really good to make it work. Fortunately FlyLo is very, very good. His crackling beats are so smooth they're almost liquid, recalling the late great J Dilla in their elegance and primal danceability. While The Bug's London Zoo (above) sounds distinctly from London with its cloudy, brooding approach, Los Angeles echoes the cool sheen and otherworldliness of its own namesake.

35. Mono - Hymn To The Immortal Wind (Temporary Residence, 2009)

Has ever an album's title been more apt? Japanese post-rockers Mono have spent their career creating epic instrumental music to render the grand sweep of human emotion against an equally majestic natural background. With titles like 'Ashes In The Snow', 'Burial At Sea' and 'The Battle To Heaven', you know you're in for broad strokes, but Mono does broad strokes better than almost any other group. For Hymn..., the band made use of a 28-piece chamber orchestra, and the marriage bore fruit sweeter than a thousand candy babies. The songs play out like a supercharged concerto, with each track a mini-movement unto itself. It's the soundtrack to that movie which exists in your head but no human 'pon the face of the earth is good enough to direct.

34. The Icarus Line - Mono (Crank!, 2001)

With vicious live shows and an inconsistent roster of band members, The Icarus Line always looked set to follow a template that lead to life-changing live shows, disappointing albums and possibly early deaths, given the habit they had for pissing off the locals. But, wonder of wonders, here they are after more than ten years, still alive and recording. Even if their best album was their first. Mono captures the demented spirit of The Icarus Line's live performances while remaining tight enough to keep a lid on the cacophany of Stooges-esque guitar squalls and songs that turn on a dime. And when these songs turn, they turn nasty. With repeated listens, Mono unfurls like a hideous moth, inviting listeners into a teen noir world where no one escapes unbloodied.

33. Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion (Domino, 2009)

Anyone turned off by the 'experimental' music tag should be exposed to Merriweather Post Pavilion as a perfect example of how avant-garde music can be as accessible and immediate as any well-worn genre. All their albums have a wonderful sense of childlike play, but no other Animal Collective record feels as instantly giving to the listener as Merriweather...,as if the children have finally grown up enough to know how to share their toys. The band retain their idiosyncracies with layered percussion and melodies that drift in and out of focus, but the sea of sounds is tied together with sustained sections of focused euphoria that are as invigorating as running down a hill at full gallop. You can call it electronic music, but this album floats in a hazy space above genre. You've never heard a band sound so free.

32. Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks - Real Emotional Trash (Matador, 2008)

Ex-Pavement frontman Stephen Malkmus has always been a riffer. Not in the heavy metal sense, rather in the sense that in a song, two riffs are always better than one, and 40 riffs best of all. It's a style that has lead to a lot of great, ambling jam albums, and a few that ambled just a little too long and too far. Fortunately, on his latest album with The Jicks, Malkmus might have just struck upon a vision of his musical future, where his endless fount of incredible riffs and licks are serviced by tight but limber rock 'n' roll structure. On the title track, as well as the likes of 'Baltimore' and 'Dragonfly Pie', this tighter structure gives Malkmus long rein to fly free with the riffing, whilst keeping him tethered to a consistent tone. The result? Peaches and cream.

31. Mastodon - Leviathan (Relapse, 2004)

The enduring appeal of heavy metal is that, in its purest form, it has the rippling muscle and steel backbone to commit to the kind of ludicrous concepts that would swallow most other genres whole and spit out a laughable, half-chewed mess. The best metal has an intimate relationship with the ridiculous, executing overblown ideas with such zeal that listeners can surrender to the band's grandiose vision. Leviathan, Mastodon's 2004 sophomore release, is the signature modern example. The music is as immediate and as accessible as proper metal gets - thunderous riffs, layered solos and drumming that by turns complements and rips apart the grooves. But it's also a convincing evocation of a typically monolithic concept: Melville's Moby Dick and the timeless metaphor of man's brittle defiance in the face of nature's might. 'Blood And Thunder', 'I Am Ahab' and 'Iron Tusk' deliver all the bearded-men-spitting-in-the-face-of-death imagery that your loins can absorb, with this lyrical excerpt from the first proving particularly fortifying to the nethers: "Split your lungs with blood and thunder/ When you see the white whale/ Break your backs and crack your oars men/ If you wish to prevail". There are subtler layers too, as the band process influences from the length and breadth of metal as well as southern country and world music to create a sound that's elemental and fascinating but still something that heavy metal can proudly call its own.

COMING SOON - Part two of the top 50 countdown! Featuring: Hip hop! Guitars! Pink Robots! The Secret of The Universe! Beards!