Incredibly, metal band Megadeth is now 30 years old! With a worldwide sales record that tops 50 million copies, one would think that the band would have very little with their 14th studio album. However, from Megadeth’s perspective, perhaps one more stab at commercial acceptance is still on the agenda. Super Collider is reminiscent of 1994’s Youthanasia, where the band incorporated pop melodies into its songwriting to appeal to a wider audience, much to the chagrin of its diehard following. Tracks like Super Collider, Dance In The Rain and the opening Kingmaker are clear signs of this chosen direction. One might argue that this stylistic shift is a creative one and a calculated risk to expand horizons. Cue the country-folk-metal vibe on The Blackest Crow as a good example. Ironically, Super Collider might just be the perfect introduction to Megadeth for new metal fans.
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Music review: Home - Rudimental | 3.5/5
Rudimental is a Brit urban outfit producing electronic dance or club music. The quartet consists of songwriters and producers Piers Agget, Kesi Dryden, Amir Amor (Amir Izadkhah) and DJ Locksmith (Leon Rolle). They came to prominence when their track Feel The Love topped the British charts, but if you’ll be sadly mistaken if you think the rest of the album is just a repeat of that track. With tracks such as the percussive Spoons, the deep Hide, the frenetic Waiting All Night and the delicous More Than Anything (featuring Emeli Sande), it is a great exploration into the various aspects of electronic dance music. However, what makes this album work is also its thorn in the side. Because of its diversity, the album doesn’t always gel as each track goes on. However, Rudimental get vocal help from the likes of Sande, Angel Haze, Sinead Harnett and John Newman, and it’s enough to make you go mental for this group.
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The incomparable Hugh Laurie’s second album continues from where his previous album, Let Them Talk, left off. This time Laurie delves even further into his love for the Southern sounds of the American delta, with a heavy emphasis on jazz and delta blues. We’re talking Jelly Roll Morton, Count Basie, Kansas Joe McCoy and Rosetta Thorpe, to name but four. He also has the help of some talented people called the The Copper Bottom Band, who ably provide the musical backing for Laurie’s drawl. Speaking of singing voices, there’s an appearance by Taj Mahal, and singers Gaby Moreno and Jean McClain do a superb job sharing vocals with Laurie on Didn’t It Rain, with McClain shining particularly bright on I Hate A Man Like You, and Moreno handling the Spanish verses on Kiss Of Fire with aplomb. While Laurie’s vocals quite can’t hold a candle to them, there’s no lack of obvious enthusiasm in his performance - which is a good thing, by the way. And if more people start listening to the blues because they wanted to know what Greg House would be up to next, that’ll be a good thing too.
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Music review: English Rain (deluxe edition) - Gabrielle Aplin | 3.5/5
The Beatles once made a comment about getting a tan from standing in the English rain in I Am The Walrus, which had lyrical imagery that bordered on the fantastical. But the key images that keeps popping up in English Rain, the new offering by English chanteuse Gabrielle Aplin, are - for this reviewer, at any rate - those of pastoral scenes, not unlike the ones featured in artworks by say, Giorgione or Nicolas Poussin, or scenes of the English countryside. The album itself features acoustic guitar-driven songs from the young singer-songwriter that lean towards the British folk tradition, particularly on songs such as the punchy opening track, Panic Cord; the delightly stark and dramatic Salvation; or the pleasant perolation of Please Don’t Say You Love Me. Aplin doubles the entertainment value in this deluxe edition, which features a bonus disc, but the upshot of this is that she delivers an album that, while being somewhat safe, still somehow makes you feel nice and fuzzy inside.
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Sadly, not the reunion of the original Black Sabbath lineup that fans were praying for, since drummer Bill Ward refused to participate on contractual grounds. Brad Wilk (Rage Against the Machine/Audioslave) is a competent replacement but the questions remain. There are high moments of heavy rock excellence on this collaboration among Ozzy Osbourne, Toni Iommi and Geezer Butler. The conservative-baiting God Is Dead? is one for the diehards. Explored further, the lyrics are deeply ironic, but it contains the requisite dark atmosphere. Elsewhere, on tracks like the acoustic Zeitgeist, the hard rockin’ Loner and the grooving Damaged Soul, there are echoes of Black Sabbath’s best early `70s material, but there is something lacking in Rick Rubin’s production, which robs the songs of their potential power. A pity because it all sounds like an opportunity lost.
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I Hate This Place is a Singapore-based electro-pop project that Sean Nerney set up back in 2004. Since 2007, I Hate This Place has had CDs released in Japan and has toured extensively across the Land of the Rising Sun. Despite this, it has remained relatively under the radar at home (notwithstanding a back catalogue of seven full albums). Hopefully, this situation will now change with the release of Closer. With reinforcements coming in the form of singer Gayle Nerva and guitarist Roman Tarrasov, I Hate This Place has delivered an appealing work of dancey, melodic electro-pop. At eleven tracks (including two updated versions of crowd favourites Rabbit Girl and Future Girl Retro Style), Closer is an accurate snapshot of where it stands circa 2013. Songs like Danger and Supernova are radio-friendly poles of extremes in the repertoire — the former being an edgy rocker while the latter is a pleasing ballad. The chemistry of the vocal interplay between Nerney and Nerva is nothing short of mesmerising and Tarrasov’s guitar licks will please the rock set. Fans of Postal Service, Owl City, Lights, Shiny Toy Guns, and Swimming With Dolphins will find much to appreciate here. I believe it’s time for Singapore music fans to get better acquainted with I Hate This Place.
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Movie review: Monsters University (PG,107min) | 3.5/5
SINGAPORE — Making a prequel to a successful film is considered one of the hardest things to do. Double that (plus five) when you’re talking about Monsters Inc, which, in this reviewer’s book, stands as one of the most enjoyable and ingenious animated movies of all time.
It was a monstrous (pun fully intended) hit back in 2001 for Pixar, which raised the animation bar so high with the likes of Toy Story, Finding Nemo and The Incredibles.
So where does the new generation of Pixar film-makers start?
Right at the very beginning. Stepping up to the plate to direct is Cars and Toy Story 3 storyboard artist Dan Scanlon, a brave soul who’s up for tackling the legacy of Sully and Wazowski.
Scanlon knows exactly what the necessary core elements are for a Pixar hit: Hilarious running gags, memorable characters, heartfelt story. And he mostly delivers.
Monsters University works as both a frat house comedy and a coming-of-age tale, recalling all the recognisable Revenge Of The Nerds movie tropes. Our two lovable but obviously flawed heroes aren’t exactly mates when they first meet in university, but they must rally together a team of misfits to win a big competition and keep their dreams alive.
But for all of the plot’s familiarity (it is a prequel after all), extra props must be given to the screenwriters for throwing in some surprising detours on the two “scare-rs”’ journey to Monsters Inc.
Billy Crystal and John Goodman are, of course, more than excellent as they reprise their roles of Mike Wazowski and James P Sullivan, respectively. They continue to do no wrong with their comedic rapport. Helen Mirren as Dean Hardscrabble, the cold-as-ice headmistress of Monsters University is also spot-on, along with a host of A-list voices like Steve Buscemi and Alfred Molina.
It’s a fun outing at the movies, no doubt about it. Yet, there seems to be a little something missing. Perhaps the absence of any human characters for the monsters to play off against (like the awww-so-cute Boo in Monsters Inc) means it lacks the emotional payoff that the first movie had.
That said, Monsters University is still sweet, entertaining and satisfying as far as hard-to-get-right prequels go. It respectfully continues Pixar’s tradition of delivering films that focus on character, mirth and merriment. But like a younger brother, it will always have to stay under the mighty shadow of the superior, timeless classic that was the original.
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LONDON — The first problem you encounter with World War Z, the new action blockbuster starring Brad Pitt, is how to pronounce the damn thing. Should the last letter be said “zee”, to sound like “three”, or “zed”, to sound like “dead”, or “zzz”, to sound like the audience?
Whichever phoneme you plump for, the Z stands for zombie, and the film contains, on a rough estimate, hundreds of thousands of them. It is based on a novel by Max Brooks, son of the filmmaker and humourist Mel, and it follows Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt), a flaxen-haired former United Nations action man who is recalled to the line of duty when a mysterious pandemic turns citizens of various countries into walking, chomping corpses.
Brooks’s novel was a thinly-veiled parable about American foreign policy and post-millennial anxiety, told from several points of view: in fact, it had much in common with Steven Soderbergh’s terrific 2011 medical thriller Contagion. Marc Forster’s film junks the satire and multiple perspectives, and instead recasts the story as an uncomplicated globe-trotting thriller. On one side we have Lane and a roster of temporary sidekicks, and on the other, an inexhaustible supply of the living dead.
What we get is a collection of moderately violent action set-pieces untroubled by humour or broader coherence. Lane travels from Philadelphia (played on-screen by Glasgow) to Nova Scotia via New York, New Jersey, South Korea, Israel and Wales, and almost nothing that happens along the way has the slightest effect on the film’s final outcome. Perhaps this should come as no surprise: Shortly after filming on World War Z was thought to be complete, seven weeks of extra shooting took place in Budapest, which was followed by the writing and filming of an entirely new third act later in the year. Whatever direction the film was originally headed in, someone important obviously thought better of it.
Forster, who directed the Bond film Quantum Of Solace, has done his best to piece together a story from these incompatible parts, but the final product has an elaborate uselessness about it, like a broken teapot glued back together with the missing pieces replaced by parts of a vacuum cleaner.
The Welsh finale, in particular, looks spectacularly cheap, and the screen-stretching vistas and computer-generated hordes from earlier in the movie are nowhere to be seen. In their place is Peter Capaldi, who plays a World Health Organisation director hiding out in a bunker near Cardiff, and when you first glimpse him in an otherwise empty office you wonder if Malcolm Tucker has somehow saved the day by swearing the zombies into submission.
By that point you’re well-primed for such silliness, as many of the film’s key dramatic moments wouldn’t feel particularly out of place on a horror-themed edition of The Thick Of It. In one early sequence, when Lane tries to creep past a crowd of zombies on a military base, his cover is blown when his wife Karen (Mireille Enos) unexpectedly rings his mobile. Moments earlier, an important character trips up and accidentally shoots himself in the head, and you start to question whether the planet might in fact be safer in the hands of the zombies.
At least the film has one neat trick: in the Israel sequence we see Boschian wide-shots of zombie hordes coursing down streets and sluicing over barriers like a great, monstrous flood. This chimes with the footage of swarming insects in the opening titles, and suggests that the film may have once had a point to make before the rot set in. But there’s no heart to be found amid the guts. THE DAILY TELEGRAPH
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Art review: Ambiguous Portrait Of A Cunning Linguist | 3.5/5
SINGAPORE — A picture, the old saying assures us, paints a thousand words. However, the latest exhibition at Ikkan Art International, called Ambiguous Portrait Of A Cunning Linguist, suggests, at least, that it’s not that cut and dried.
The show brings together a surprisingly diverse range of artists and artwork. It’s got big names like Lawrence Weiner and On Kawara, younger artists such as Dawn Ng and Nicola Anthony, as well as the Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia. You might call it eclectic, but given the underlying theme of verbal imagery in art, it’s hard to see how it could be otherwise.
Many of us are used to a gulf between words and images — on this side of the line, there’s literature, and on the other, there’s visual art. It seems like a simple distinction to make, but simple distinctions are rich material for artists to pick at, play with, and re-imagine in all manner of strange and fantastical ways. As the show’s curator, Andrew Herdon, notes, our minds work in both visual and verbal modes, and language allows for a more direct path to think beyond the immediate appearance of what’s in front of us.
As you might expect, there’s a variety of approaches on show. Perhaps the most intriguing, in being a little out of place among fine art, might be the collection of drawings and photographs of Russian criminal tattoos. The drawings range from home-brewed simplicity to florid complexity, and offer a glimpse into the rituals and violence of Russia’s criminal underworld. To an outsider, they might be nothing more than random imagery, but they convey nuanced meanings to the insider — a reminder that language can conceal as well as communicate.
Another type of concealment in language takes the form of censorship, which is addressed to great effect in Glenn Ligon’s The Red Portfolio, consisting of little more than white-on-black printed text. They’re terse descriptions of sexually graphic scenes, originally from a campaign mounted to censor the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe, and now re-appropriated as art in their own right. The difference between the images’ descriptions and the stark lack of those images (similar to the pieces by Tom Gallant on show) generates a cold, anticipatory tension, and free-wheeling imagination of what those scenes might have looked like.
The show’s young artist contingent also includes two photographs from Dawn Ng’s Everything You Ever Wanted Is Right Here series. Short phrases (with a humour akin to urban artist SKL0 or Sticker Lady’s) are cut out of photographs of local scenes — for instance, a collection of security cameras bears the legend, Kind Of Kinky. With its clean design and emphasis on the here and now, it’s hard to shake the impression of looking at a tourism campaign from a parallel universe Singapore.
As a whole, the exhibition offers many ways to think about language and art — some breathtaking, others not quite — an overall impression, as it were, of the ambiguity set forth in the show’s title.
Ambiguous Portrait Of A Cunning Linguist runs until July 27, noon to 7pm, Ikkan Art International #01-05 39 Keppel Road. Closed Sundays, Mondays, and public holidays. Free admission.
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