Tuesday 19th August 2025
Blog Page 1190

The rise of the dead: taxidermy gets a new lease of life

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The Barbican’s current Magnificent Obsessions exhibition examines the artist’s role as collector and curator rather than as creator of objects. Featured in it is Damien Hirst’s collection of taxidermy. The exhibition is fascinating for its elucidation on how our ‘things’ rather than our creations might define our identities – what the objects we collect, value, and hoard, for reasons other than their innate value (I personally have a fondness for crap garden gnomes), say about us. Moreover, this macabre collection in particular is resonant for other, more specific, reasons.

This is because stuffed animals have suddenly become really hot stuff. Taking on a life of its own in London, there isn’t a bar in Bethnal Green that isn’t scattered with a stuffed tiger in a hat or a mounted head or two. You can now also take taxidermy lessons alongside your beau or bestie, taking selfies holding up tiny mouse organs, whilst sipping fancy cocktails with punny names. The grotesque aspect of this trend takes its form in the penchant for anthropomorphic taxidermy in particular; dressing up mice in clothes and posing them alongside other rodents with hats, newspapers and pipes on a park bench in the style of Walter Potter’s triumph of the Victorian bizarre with his kitten tea parties.

A dedicated print publication called #taximag includes an interview with one artist who poses tiny superheroes riding astride stuffed birds, as well as features on a fashion shoot set-designer who likes to incorporate displays of feathers and fur alongside, well, other feathers and fur on human beings. There is also a particularly niche (if you can believe it can get any nicher) offshoot of taxidermy in the prizing of disfigured animals; calves with two heads or cats with wings sewn onto their backs, that have a whiff of the morbidity of The Human Centipede about them. The interest in fashioning or sourcing anatomical abominations taps into a kind of conceited belief in the human power of arranging life; a Frankensteinian revenge on our sense of our own vulnerability to higher powers who, like little boys, treat us like flies and ‘kill us for their sport’.

It would be easy to dismiss taxidermy’s appeal purely because of a squeamishness or proclivity to hipster-bashing. What the classes at Viktor Wynd’s Hackney-based ‘Last Tuesday Society’ museum and bar involve, however, is a realisation of the fragility of life.

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While delicately sliding a scalpel under a mouse’s fur, peeling back its flesh tentatively so as not to rip it, and pulling out organs carefully so as not to rupture them, it would be impossible not to step outside of your jelly-shoes and beanie combo for a moment and consider the wider picture.

Taxidermy becomes an art, rather than an artefact or novelty item, when it makes us view our own condition with a kind of empathetic poignancy. The bedecking of animal corpses with pearls, reminiscent of the bejewelled living tortoise featured in Brideshead Revisited, forces the viewer to ask the uncomfortable question of whether its now-valuable shell will be reused after it dies.

Meanwhile, the artist Casper Grooters’ work with chicks that are sourced from the by-products of an overzealous battery-farm egg industry shows us our own responsibility for thousands of deaths, as most male chicks are thrown wholesale into wood chippers as soon as they are born for their inability to lay eggs. The effect of Hirst’s formaldehyde shark, when you stand facing its open jaws, comes from an unavoidable realisation of the inescapable, and therefore egalitarian, fact of death.

So while you might dismiss the stuffed fox with a monocle staring you down in your local boozer as a mere fad, or a revival of a kind of perverse pleasure in niche, aristocratic pursuits, take a second look at the place where its eyes used to be.

Buried treasure: why do museums hide gems?

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The world’s largest museum of decorative arts and design, the Victoria and Albert Museum, is without a doubt one of the best attempts made to create a completely categorical study of material culture and its socio-political context. It’s one of those beautiful places where no journey to a single object is direct; you have to detour as the corner of something glitters, shimmers or intrigues you into making further inquiry.

The building itself is enough to occupy a good deal of attention; red brick archways and infinitely tall ceilings, gaping hollow cylinders look down on lower floors, platforms and balconies look out over imposingly beautiful displays. Museums should be interactive even when the articles are stowed behind glass, and for me, the V&A does this best.

On recently making one of my every-couple-of-months spontaneous trips to the Big Smog, I came into Victoria Station after what felt like years spent on the Oxford Tube and, despite my best efforts to think outside the box or find a copy of Time Out, I ended up taking a stroll through Chelsea and finding my way to the museum’s Iron House structure in the hope that a dissertation topic may leap at me from its collections.

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I’d intended to go for a leisurely wander, but that morning I’d stumbled upon a book about Victorian dress which opened with a reference to a sampler found in the V&A, “Tucked into a lonely corner of the Textile Room at the Victoria and Albert Museum, a sampler hangs. Quite a few samplers dot the walls, but this one is unique.” The book, Dress Culture in Late Victorian Women’s Fiction, goes on to describe the embroidery, a long, journal-like piece articulating a young girl’s mistreatment in domestic service. No flowers, no embellishments, no repetitive lines of the alphabet or biblical verses like the ones you’d usually find on textiles of this kind. The author, Elizabeth Parker, starts with the line, “As I cannot write I put this down freely and simply as I might speak to a person to whose intimacy and tenderness I can fully intrust myself and who I know will bear with all weaknesses.” The confessional red silk lines conclude with “Oh, God, what will become of my soul.” It may not be the most extravagant item in the museum’s collection, but it was one I was quite determined to lay my eyes on and read in full.

However, the trip to the information desk to locate Elizabeth Parker’s sampler proved fruitless. It would appear that not only does the V&A no longer have a ‘Textile Room’, they’ve moved the sampler off-site to a textile archive. It had be thrown into the abyss to make way for newer acquisitions. Both myself and the volunteer behind the desk were disappointed with the discovery, although I’d like to think I made her day a little more interesting after being asked for the thousandth time where to find the Alexander McQueen exhibition.

I was not exactly surprised. In an age where big museums rely on tourist footfall, overpriced latte and selling expensive postcards in the giftshop, sad little embroideries are not worth the square centimetres they occupy, however educational and enlightening they may prove to be.

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Instead, I visited the temporary exhibition What is Luxury? put on by the V&A and the Crafts Council. The stunning and bizarre are collated in an attempt to answer the staged question by displaying overtly luxurious qualities, such as innovation, passion and expertise in design. Elsewhere in the museum, signs, merchandise and advertising for Savage Beauty, the McQueen show, were everywhere.

The sampler possesses none of those qualities of opulence, but there is still something about it which feels as equally valuable and radical as the extravagant items which decorate the main building’s hallways. Whereas the majority of exhibits present those lives of the historically privileged, this small piece of fabric is a tiny voice representing the other side of nineteenth century society. But it would also be foolish of me to suggest that a museum of art and design has any responsibility to display such visually measly items.

Archiving is a necessary practice for large mu- seums feeling the limitations of space. Most of these buildings were built in the mid-nineteenth century, and they’ve had the best part of 200 years of rapidly changing cultural heritage to add into their permanent exhibitions. Die hard V&A fans will notice when the famous circular ‘Fashion’ exhibition changes the occasional mannequin, or adds new ones in. Presentation styles have also changed over the years: as artists have moved into third dimensional graphic work, so has the strain on space in galleries increased, and old, nondescript pieces have been shifted into the cellar/warehouse/archive education centre. Museum curators have to be so on top of the shifting appetites in taste and consumption that the collection filter has become a colander.

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But none of the harsh realities of museum consumption will change the fact that visitors to the V&A will lose out by not having access to Elizabeth Parker’s embroidery; a piece so unique, so revealing, that the seemingly generic samplers alongside it in the archive are questioned for what they hide beneath their perfectly executed cross-stitch. It aids the reading of material as text, gives a voice to the invisible and proves that not every young woman making samplers was doing so with the intention of identifying herself as accomplished.

Its very pitiful nature makes it incongruous alongside the magnificent silks, beading and jewellery found elsewhere in the building. But for that reason, it remains interesting, and it is disappointing that it can only now be accessed on request. It may be old, but it most definitely should not been left to languish in darkness.

The silver lining is found online, where the museum (like many others), has attempted a full electronic exhibition of their permanent and archived materials. As for me, I may not have found what I was looking for, but I did find a dissertation topic.

Review: The Real Thing

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★★★★★

Five Stars

Sometimes, you walk away from a play with a slight spring in your step. You breathe in the cool spring air and dazedly glide over Radcliffe Square in that state of dreamy awe attended upon stoners and freshers. That’s what Will Yeldham’s production of Stoppard’s The Real Thing did for me. Indeed seeing the smiling faces and spontaneous giggles of the vacating audience, I think they too had a smashing time.

As fun as it was, this was not just a bit of summery feel good frivolity. This was a play as profound as it was uproarious. A play steeped in literary, philosophical and even musical allusion. It’s great achievement was how in addition to presenting intellectual insights, this was much more than a critic’s masturbatory aid. Unlike some Stoppard productions it did much more than celebrate its own cleverness. For at its core was the rather life affirming idea that underneath all the bullshit, even though there may not be a real thing, or any truth, we can still have a jolly good time. I’m tempted to paraphrase this as a sort of English Postmodernity.

Our story begins with another story, in fact one of the plays written by our main character Henry. The basic form of the story will be repeated throughout: a couple meets on the day when one of the couple learns the other has been cheating. This play within a play catches the countenance of them all; a fiction from which none of them can escape. In a fantastic directorial touch, this archetypal story is played out with no stylistic distinction from the rest of the story.

From there we chart the ups and downs of Henry, his wife Charlotte, Henry’s lover Annie, Annie’s husband Max and an obscure ‘political’ prisoner called Brodie. To reveal the subsequent story line would take up too much space that is better spent on the achievement of the cast and crew. But in brief, after the Max’s show, he and his wife host a drinks party at which Henry and his lover decide they better start getting serious about their affair. Soon they do just this, even though Henry and his wife continue to live together. Henry’s lover becomes implicated in the freeing of a ‘political’ prisoner, who was arrested for trying to burn down the cenotaph.  In her noble bid to help his cause, she attempts to get Max to rewrite Brodie’s play in order to get him released. And then all manner of affairs begin.

Any summary won’t do justice the real driving force of the narrative: the wonderful characters. What unites them is there eminent self-awareness, at no point is any subtext allowed to linger. In the space of seconds any one of them can lay any other bare: and they know it. Even this isn’t subtextualised, Max at one points out that there is nothing underneath the various masks everybody puts on. Its like Oscar Wilde meets Derrida-ean deconstruction. Yet in spite of the nihilism, the play retains a warmth and an optimism.  

Responsible for this achievement is the cast and the direction. You can just tell that they were really enjoying themselves throughout and yet not once did they loose control or professionalism. It’s a testament to Seamus Lavan’s characterization of Henry that you come out thinking he probably looks exactly like Henry would look like. What Lavan really manages is the inception like task of intelligently playing an intelligent character that is intelligently written. It is thanks to the ease and panache with which he pulls this task of, that part of the success of the play is derived. For play indeed comes together by unifying Stoppard’s many intertwined narrative layers, from the character of Stoppard’s style to the style of his characters’ characters.

Lavan is most certainly not alone is his excellence. His first counterpart is his wife Cara Pacitti, who assumes a wonderfully entertaining harshness towards him. Pacitti’s venomous but poised commentary to her husband’s life always made a refreshing counterpoint to the dialogue. Henry’s second counterpart is his lover in the form of Daisy Hayes. Hayes has a tough balancing act to play being at once an extremely sensitive and smart character but also clingy and naïve. Her skill in juggling these extremes goes a long way in carrying the momentum of the play in the middle section. Alongside these interchanging lovers we have the poor Max who is married to Hayes’s character. Played by John Dinneen, Max is that poor hapless character nobody takes seriously. As such he is probably one of the few un self consciously funny people in the play. Dinneen really showed of his versatility when, playing one of Henry’s characters and then switching into a completely different personage as Max.  

All of this leaves the largely absent and yet hugely central Brodie played by Daniel De Lisle. De Lisle really resembled Begbie from Trainspotting. Like Begbie, you weren’t too sure how much to laugh and how much to be scared of him. Put him in an Oscar Wilde(esque) play and throw a box of hummus in his face and the results speak for themselves. Accompanying these wonderful performances were two cameo appearances from Maddy Walker as Henry’s daughter and Freddie Waxman as a rival playwright. Walker’s discussion with Lavan about the merits of boiler room virginity and Latin classes has to be one of the highlights of the production. Equally, Waxman’s train carriage seductions really take the idea of theatrical pretension to untold heights (trust me as a critic I know).

All in all, one of the few productions that lives up to the greatness of the text. The result is a warm hearted and uproarious take on the nihilism that results from an age of endless ironic self-reference and relativized discourse. Yet in spite of identifying the emptiness at the end of this deconstruction of the self, the other and the act of love itself; the play makes you glad to be alive. Great stuff.  

Rough sleeping ban scrapped

Oxford City Council has removed the prohibition of rough sleeping from their proposed Public Spaces Protection Order (PSPO), meaning that it will not become a criminal offence. 

The inclusion of a prohibitionof rough sleeping in the PSPO was part of a measure to tackle anti-social behaviour in Oxford’s city centre. However, the Oxford city council confirmed in a statement on 18th  that this section has been removed from the proposal, stating, “The draft proposals to deal with pidgeon nuisance and with rough sleepers who have been provided with indoor accommodation but fail to use it have not been included in the recommendations to the CEB.

“In both cases, the consultation process indicated that an Order of this type was not likely to be the most effective way of tackling these issues.”

This change has been welcomd by On Your Doorstep (OYD), OUSU’s homelessness action group. Freya Turner, chairman of OYD, commented on the result, telling Cherwell, “We at OYD are very pleased that Oxford City Council has listened to our concerns and those of the sector, and has excluded rough sleeping from the PSPO.

“This isbecause activism brought into relief the fact that rough sleeping, which is a product of unfortunate circumstances, should not be lumped together with practices likefeeding pidgeons, which is behaviour that anyone can choose to refrain from.

“Moreover, the PSPO as a piece of legislation was clearly not designed for dealing with rough sleeping, because it was restricted to a particular area – the city centre – and therefore it would have just displaced the homeless people further out of the city, which is not a constructive way to help them and would have made it harder for services to reach them.”

OYD began their campaign against the proposed prohibition on rough sleeping two months ago with a petition on change.org. The petition gathered significant momentum, gaining 72,280 signatures by the time the Council changed its plans. 

OYD successfully passed a motion hrough OUSU securing OUSU support for the group’s stance on the PSPO. Last week also saw OYD campaigning on Cornmarket Street against the criminalisation of rough sleeping.

The Oxford City Council responded to OYD’s opposition in late April, releasing a statement in response to the petition, assuring people, “The consultation process has been widely supported and before any decision is taken, the Council will be looking closely at what residents, businesses and visitors have said.”

Council Leader Bob Price commented, “The propoal has been developed by the Council’s Anti-Social Behaviour team in response to complaints from city centre traders, residents and visitors about a range of anti-social and nuisance behaviour.

“it seeks to provide a clear framework for city centre activities which will maintain the vibrant and active character that we enjoy throughout the year, while dealing efectively with behaviours that could damage the quality of the city centre experience for shopping, eating and entertainment. It will rprovide legal powers for the first time to tackl persistant offenders who cause a nuisance.”

Review: String of Pearls

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★★★★☆

Four Stars

Imagine theatre without Aristotle. Let’s get rid of the constraints that come with time, place and action having to be consistent throughout. Let’s get rid of the convention that characters are of high social standing in tragedy or of low social standing in comedy – in fact, why even bother with having a person as the protagonist at all? And while we’re at it, let’s also scrap the rule of one actor playing one character. I don’t even need to say that male characters, let alone actors, have no place in this theatre. But hold on with your judgment for a moment.

Emily Albery’s production in the Burton Taylor in Week 4 offered some material for thought on this. String of Pearls by Michele Lowe is the story of a necklace. The metaphor in the title is therefore just as catchy as it is pervasive in a 90 minutes play. Originally a present to Beth from her husband, the necklace presents the missing piece in her granddaughter Amy’s wedding. The necklace, as we find out, has in fact made a journey all over America and even to Paris. Whoever get hold of it falls into some trouble and passes it on – sometimes unwillingly and often unknowingly – to another woman, who is to continue the story.

The necklace is the only bit of continuity, a lifeline both for the plot and for the audience. Superficially unrelated monologues are connected only by the reoccurrence of the necklace in another owner’s hands. But ‘owning’ is already a difficult word here, because for the audience the necklace really takes on a life of its own. With a constant deliberate mystery around the women interacting with it, the necklace becomes the lifeline for the audience’s attention. We empathise with it when the pearls are scattered over a hotel room, or when the necklace is cast in the Hudson River. We even feel a bit of catharsis when it is finally united with Beth.

With the necklace’s dominance also comes a new view on the other characters. The small but very good cast of Helene Bonnici, Emma Buchy-Dury, Alice Moore and Alex Worrell handled a total of 27 characters between them. Under the directing of Caitlin Jauncey, they played nicely with the cold and sometimes even disturbing distance that the exclusive use of monologues – occasionally two happening at the same time – created between the women. Scarcity in props and the absence of a background setting was matched by predominantly plain black costumes.

Of course, all this was necessitated by the immense speed with which the events moved from one place and time to the next. One actress immersing herself and the audience into one character and her story, as the other actresses are sitting on stage, arranging hair and props for the next scene, made the theatrical point of the production clearly: We, the audience, are doing the job of putting it all together. We, the audience, have to connect the scenes as if we are connecting pearls, one at a time, all seemingly the same and hopefully coming together at the end. In giving us these individual pearls, Lowe’s style, albeit dominated by narrative, is refreshingly colloquial but not forced. While she largely abstains from derogatory terms or obscenities these achieve some great effects and laughs when comedy is intended.

Constantly switching between the women’s mundane and quite archetypal lives and the deeper connection of the necklace between them, the viewer is occasionally taken aback by a wonderful little scene. But only rarely did the play escape its own bigger picture to create genuine drama within a particular monologue itself, often with the aid of very sensitively chosen music. The highlight in this must be the final story of Kyle, a woman looking after her mother, who is suffering form Alzheimer. The mother’s failure to recognize Kyle as her daughter, rather than the carer, provided for a powerful inter-character relation that was mimetic of the whole play, because the recognition is eventually achieved. Just as it took a long time for the mother to put the events together in her head, the audience’s search for how ‘it all hangs together’ comes to an end as Kyle sells the necklace to Beth’s new lover to be come a present for her once again.

Although it may not have answered it conclusively and in its favour, this production has put to us the question whether a play really needs the strong dynamics individual characters can develop over an evening, or the strong grip of a unified action, which the viewer can’t escape. Whatever our judgment on modern minimalist theatre and no matter how highly we honour our Aristotle, we have to see that it’s not impossible to make a play hang together without the glue of convention. 

Degrees of Stupidity

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Oxford has always provided a home for cunning linguists, and not just within the columns of Creaming Spires. In the past, they brought a welcome hint of the exotic to student life, with their carelessly dropped foreign phrases (“Some vodka? Just a soupçon”, “Your shoes are so zeitgeist”, “Pulling an all-nighter – big essay due mañana” etc.). They had picked up some cool tat and a snappy hair cut from their time on whatever language exchange they had been sent on, and could be seen ostentatiously posing with foreign language newspapers (many of them held the right way up) in cafés all over Oxford.

But the days when the Continent was isolated by fog on the Channel are long gone. Let’s face facts. The world is full of people who speak foreign languages better than language students, and as Herr and Frau Farage remind us, so is the UK. If you want to hang out with students with exotic accents, and funny-sounding phrases, just ask the French PPE student, Mexican physicist or German classicist who is out-performing you in tutorials to drop their flawless English for 5 minutes, and give you a burst of their native tongue. They will smoke their Gauloise or Fiesta with infinitely more aplomb than their ersatz UK equivalents (see how catching that phrase dropping can be) and their complaints about the food, plumbing and British teeth ring with authenticity.

There would be other considerable benefits from getting rid of language degrees. Prominent among them is losing the interminable boasting about what they are going to do on their year abroad, just as the rest of us are rapidly going pale at the looming awfulness of finals and the futile search for a job. We don’t care that they are spending six months yak farming in the Urals, or have secured a secondment to command the Uruguayan navy. It would also spare us the bathetic fall which inevitably follows that bombast when they return after a year away to discover that all their friendship group has moved on, and they find themselves desperately trying to ingratiate themselves with the other zombie-undergraduates such as Chemists and Classicist they would not have been seen dead with 12 months before. So it is au revoir to linguists?

No linguists. It’s goodbye.

PC Music: why the hype?

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“Last week, PC Music launched their fake social media outlet Pop Cube.” If that sentence means nothing to you then congratulations, you probably go to Merton. Let me fill you in. PC Music is a much-hyped music label that rose from tumblr fanboy dungeons to the dazzling heights of The Guardian Film and Music supplement over the course of 2014. Their music, if you haven’t heard it, sounds like 90s pop that’s been genetically fused with a heart emoji. Some people say it’s great. Some people say it’s shit. But everyone’s saying something.

The rise of PC Music was unstoppable. High-concept acts like GFOTY (which stands for Girl- friend Of The Year) and QT caught the attention of journalists early on. Interviews were few and far between, but when they came they revealed bizarre figures that spoke more like teenagers’ text messages than humans.

When the Guardian interviewed GFOTY she was in bed next to a naked man. QT’s first single was framed as the promotion for a fictional fizzy drink. I don’t know if there’s a Guinness world record for ‘highest think piece
to music ratio’, but PC Music are absolutely smashing it if there is.

A vast proportion of the increasingly voluminous discourse surrounding PC Music portrays its over-sugared sonic and lyrical content as some kind of a critique, predominantly of this world where exploitative brands want to be your friend, and Buzzfeed interns want to manipulate your emotions for clicks.

This line of thought runs something along the lines, ‘PC Music is the only relevant musical reaction to the alienated subject in late capitalism,’ and it’s currently being espoused from behind a roll-up and a douche snapback all over the country. If you ever hear it be on your guard: once you hear the word ‘accelerationist’ it is your stern duty to take off your shirt and fight them. However, the idea that PC Music is in some way a criticism of hyper-branded personhood is tempting. “Look,” said PC Music, “we’re launching a social media like we all use, us young people.”

“It doesn’t exist,” they say, “but you can come to our exclusive party and watch us perform from behind a glass wall.” That’s not a metaphor, by the way. They actually performed from behind a glass wall. “Read into it,” they whisper leaning in, “whatever you will.” Equally tempting is the larger idea behind all of this – behind the fake soft drinks, the strange puppet-personas, the non-existent business – which is simply that PC Music is in some way the future. They are unquestionably the most hyped act in music right now. In fact, the bubble of hype surrounding the label is so large, you might begin to worry that if it burst there would be a depression. And what would we do then? Simply wander around in a dustbowl populated only by Sam Smith, Marcus Mumford and Tupac’s hologram, which flickers fainter, ever fainter…

Well, no. I like PC Music (well, I like some of it – I’m looking at you GFOTY). However, these two ideas both seem false to me. Last week they launched Popcube, a fictional multimedia company. “Best thing ever to happen, happens in New York!” said some people. “UK label formed by ex-private school kids throws party in New York with corporate money,” said no one. This is because behind PC music, in the form of Red Bull sponsorship, there is big, scary money.

At which point I ask of PC Music’s roll-up smoking philoso-fans, if they are now in a strict sense branded content, are they in any position to be commenting on the place of branded content? Does doing the shitty thing that you attempt to criticise actually amount to a critique of the shitty thing?

And as for the hype-tsunami? Well, the sad truth is that even with Red Bull’s backing, PC Music is a minnow compared to corporate giants like Sony. Their in-house producers will mimic the label’s trademark sound, and eventually, pop will eat PC Music, and students all over Oxford will listen to the results at bops, blissfully unaware.

Top 5 songs to mourn/celebrate the election result

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1. ‘I’m Blue’ – Eiffel 65

“Yo listen up, here’s a story about a little guy who lives in a blue world.” Perhaps that explains their policies.

2. ‘Red’ – Taylor Swift

However sad you are about the sudden death of the Milifandom, I’m sure Ed is sadder.

3. ‘Yellow Submarine’ – The Beatles

Pretty sure Clegg would like to get into a submarine right now.

4. ‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams’ – Green Day

I don’t think this really needs explaining.

5. ‘Scotland’ – The Lumineers

Bad luck with the referendum #sorrynot- sorry. 

Review: Hop Along – Painted Shut

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★★★★★

Five Stars

Hop Along is a remarkable find. Described as many things, varying from grunge folk to punk rock, they are unlikely to be a band you’ve heard of before. However, this Philadelphian group is driven by an entrancing energy, and their latest album, Painted Shut, is no exception. Lead singer Frances Quinlan has a powerful, rock voice, and this dominates the majority of their tracks. Their style is vaguely recognisable as punk, but taken in a different, whimsical direction.

Each song is an example of refreshingly well-done storytelling, which deflects the attention away from the singer and turns the perspective onto the subject of her tale. For the severity of the themes, which include abuse, poverty and greed, the songs are not desolate, but strangely jubilant. Quinlan’s captivating voice, which can switch between soft and raw in seconds, can lead you through a story of despair, like in ‘Well-dressed’, but leave you with a feeling of hope.

The tracks are full of intriguing but fleeting characters, spread across an unequal land- scape, where “there is nothing more danger- ous than a defeated army heading home”. It is no by means easy listening, demanding your full attention with its intricate stories and cogent emotions. However, if you’re looking for a female vocalist with the intrigue of Courtney Barnett, then Hop Along is an exhilarating choice. 

Review: Tallest Man on Earth – Dark Bird is Home

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★★★★☆

Four stars

Tallest Man On Earth, also known as Kristian Matsoon, is the most earnest and Swedish man in the world. His new album Dark Bird is Home is a reflection of his difficult personal life over the last year, during which he lost a close friend. The album, written during his travels after his album release in 2012, is introspective, but also larger in scale than his previous work, which relied on lyrical tropes for its material.

In the title song, he sings, “There are many ways of sorrow,” and this is certainly an album concerned with sorrow, recuperation and redemption in a way that is reminiscent of the music of Fiorella, maybe even Bon Iver. However, it is also an album about connecting with people, and this is reflected musically. It is the first of his albums to employ instrumentation from other people. Until now, he has simply employed an acoustic guitar and his soulful voice, but don’t worry, the new album is no less direct and moving.

The ‘Dark Bird’ of Tallest Man On Earth has finally spread his wings, and flown gloriously away. This new album will ensure success with old fans, as well as a number of new fans too, and is an excellent addition to the discography of this particularly Swedish, particularly earnest man.