If albums are like nuts, then the self-titled debut LP from the Canadian group Viet Cong is without doubt a Brazil nut – tough to crack, but intensely rewarding with a bit of effort.

For one thing, it is very difficult to categorise or place an album that has so many sonic influences: from the intriguing, listenable noise of ‘Newspaper Spoons’, to the percussive energy of ‘Bunker buster’, and the throbbing, almost mechanical build and euphoric volta of ‘March of Progress’, the album is a mix of moods, sounding at times industrial and post-punk, at others almost like a product of the Australian psychedelic pop revival.

While the song titles seem somewhat bland and deadpan – think ‘Death’ and ‘Pointless Experience’ – the tracks are far from it. The roles of instruments are subverted, with the bass piercing through a six string growl, on top of drums so heavily filtered they sound sampled from a Perc album.

The value of this album, therefore, is very much rooted in its crafting. Without a political axe to grind, or romantic sentiments crying to be released, it is not an album with baggage – despite the death of an ex-band member from a former project.

What is quite clear, however, is an inner conviction and pleasure in the beauty of four people playing in a room. Give it the time, and the effort, and it is an album that will give great pleasure.

How would P Money describe grime to someone new to the genre? “Vibes. Great vibes.” The Oxford stop of the Originators tour was profuse with “vibes”, causing bygone dons to turn in their graves, reeling at the guttural basslines pounding through their historic city walls. I caught up with some of the scene’s makers and shapers to get their thoughts on grime’s growing mainstream appeal.

The presence of these grime heavyweights in a city more renowned for its dreaming spires than Sir Spyro(s) is a testament to grime’s changing audience since the days of its early beginnings on Fruity Loops Studio on old PCs. When grime first burst onto the scene in the form of clashes crackling on pirate radio and eski raves, the deadpan bars of Wiley and Dizzee, and Ruff Sqwad’s bone-chilling instrumentals were deemed fodder for violence and disorder. Now, it’s being steered into the mainstream by ‘German Whip’ and Skepta’s ‘That’s Not Me’, accruing a new following in the process. “This guy’s come to see me from Japan!” P Money exclaims to me, bemused by the dedication of a young fan who’d flown over just to see him perform in Oxford’s answer to Jammer’s basement.

“When I used to go raving as a kid, I had to go through metal detectors and stuff ,” Logan Sama tells me. “There’s none of that now, it’s all trendy kids and students.” I ask the DJ, who pioneered the scene in its early years when MCs like P Money were starting out, why he thinks this is. “They’re generally more open to things.” Although, as he points out, the original audience are also now in their thirties and probably have families. “I’m sure they still like grime, but they’re just not active.”

I ask P Money whether he thinks grime’s voyage into the mainstream is benefiting the genre. “It’s good for any genre. People confuse mainstream with selling out; mainstream just means popular. Like, how many people are singing along now?” he asks, turning to Oxford’s Out of the Blue-cum-More Fire crew. “People said grime was dead, but it’s never been dead. People just lost faith.”

Logan Sama sees the resurgence as part of the cyclical nature of UK’s electronic music. “Everything comes back around. Disclosure brought garage back and now all of a sudden, DJ EZ’s really cool and trendy. Unfortunately people in this country are very quick to be over something, after that initial honeymoon period,” and he suspects grime will have a cool-off period too. 

Not only have some of grime’s originators been re-energised after a period of lying low, but a new wave of fresh talent such as Stormzy and Novelist, grime’s new poster child, has emerged. “That generation’s really interesting to me because we’ve been doing this for twelve years, and they’re seventeen” Logan Sama tells me. “All of their conscious music-listening life, grime’s been in and around their ears.”

But the recent spotlight on producers like Darq E Freaker, whose Cherryade EP was one of label Oil Gang’s biggest hits, has reminded us that grime’s birthday suit is its instrumentals. I ask Freaker how he would define his sound, labelling everything from ‘technicolour’ to ‘chronic’ grime. “Define me as you perceive me,” he says coolly. Freaker tells me he grew up listening to Timbaland, Missy Elliot and Prodigy, and these eclectic influences are pronounced in his genre-blending, transatlantic music, having brought grime to a US audience via Danny Brown.

Despite this, Logan Sama is adamant that the MCs will remain at the forefront of grime’s changing landscape. “I don’t like to say one’s more important than the other. But the MCs are always going to be the focal point because of their personalities and character. They’re driving the culture too.” Big Narstie, who donned a first year’s mortar board at a Wadham after party and posted it on Instagram, is perhaps the best case in point.

There’s an element of nostalgia to Logan Sama’s recollections of early grime. “Grime was really exciting because it had that punk ethos of getting the most out of a limited set of tools, making tunes using whatever sounds were in the keyboard” he tells me. “For me, whenever a new grime producer came out, be it Musical Mob or Terror Danjah, they all had their own sounds. I think that’s been lost a little bit.”

I ask Logan Sama what he thinks about some of instrumental grime’s more ambient sounds from producers like Murlo and Mr Mitch. “A lot of it doesn’t appeal to my aesthetic, but other people like it and I love that width of appeal. That’s why grime has kept going for twelve years.” With hits from fresh new talent like Novelist and Mumdance, and more exciting collaborations in the pipeline, grime continues to grow, ‘1 sec’ at a time.

★★★★★

Five Stars

It was a celebrated play at the 2011 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. One year later the Hollywood Fringe Festival awarded it with The Best International Show award. These haven’t been a bad few years for Richard Parker – a dark, ponderous and hilarious drama about fate and coincidence by Welsh playwright Owen Thomas, who is coming this week to watch his play being performed at the BT.

So the pressure is on. Or it would be, if the opening night hadn’t promised a show that is only going to improve across the week. Poor Player Productions have put together a brilliant piece, which works excellently in the intimacy of the BT, where minimal set and props enable the talent of the leads to come to the fore.

Richard Parker is about the meeting aboard a ship of two identically named men—played by Jake Boswall and Ieuan Perkins—who, despite all they have in common, are in the deepest and most important ways starkly different. One Richard Parker is temperate and modest, the other lives his life according to the dictates of coincidence. The reason for their meeting is known only to one of them but it is soon made clear that the two are irrevocably linked, and that one may have to crush the other in order to survive.

Covering shipwrecks, cannibalism, wasted lives, individualism, selfishness, and destiny, the play is as disconcerting as it is amusing. Do the men come together through choice or coincidence? Is the disturbing denouement following the tantalising twist of the ending down to decision or was it fated? Thomas gives no easy answers; and the idea that “someone, somewhere, is pulling the strings,” is rather less comforting than it might sound.

Do we have an ultimate purpose, determined by the precedent of history?  Is there any escape from that which seems to be ordained for each of us? Just how important are our names and our circumstances? And, perhaps most disquieting of all, if all this can be dismissed as superstition and we do have no purpose—what then?

It is a superb play, superbly performed. Boswall and Perkins are each in utter command of their roles, demanding the attention of the audience in equal measure—no easy feat for a two-person play so dependent on dialogue. The worldviews of the protagonists are comically and cleverly contrasted through a quick, quirky and rapacious script that relies for its effect on exquisitely-timed delivery. Boswall and Perkins are more than up to the challenge.

Director James Watt has pulled it off. Let us hope that next he turns his hand to Thomas’s sequel, Robert Golding. Meanwhile, one might wonder whether it is a coincidence that Richard Parker was also the name of the tiger in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi—another tale about shipwrecks and cannibalism. Did Martel know the eerie history of that name? Something to ask Owen Thomas himself at the Q&A on Friday evening.

So be a nosy Parker and discover Richard and Richard. Richard Parker is on at The BT Studio until this Saturday.

★★★☆☆

Three Stars

Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin have recycled their winning formula for BBC smash-hit comedy, Outnumbered, by partnering two normal-ish parents with three outrageously sharp children, but this time it’s for the big screen. What emerges is a buoyant, credible venture with a good heart and far more laughs than you might expect. Somehow, with little struggle, What We Did On Our Holiday stops itself from trickling over the wrong side of sentimental drool and develops with surprising maturity.

As with Outnumbered, the adult actors learn a script and the child actors are given last-minute sketches about how the scene is going to play out. If there’s ever been a film to demonstrate the erratic and uncharted unpredictability of a child’s mind, it’s this one. Rosamund Pike and David Tennant are Abi and Doug McLeod, a couple whose marriage has reached the end of its tether. They’re always arguing, one of them has had an affair, and now they live in separate houses. Their three children, Lottie, Mickey, and Jess (played with comic bravado by Emilia Jones, Bobby Smalldridge, and Harriet Turnbull, respectively), are aware of the impending divorce, and each seem to be affected by it in bizarre and troubling ways. Jess’ two best friends are a rock and a brick, and she frequently resorts to holding her breath if things don’t go her way; Mickey is obsessed with Viking culture and Norse mythology; and Lottie keeps a private notebook of her thoughts and feelings, including all the lies she’s supposed to be maintaining for her family.

When we meet the McLeods, they are bracing themselves for a trip to Scotland to celebrate the 75^th birthday of Doug’s father, Gordie (a reflective Billy Connolly). Gordie has terminal cancer and isn’t expected to last much longer. He’s currently staying with his son – Doug’s brother – Gavin (Ben Miller) and his wife, Margaret (Amelia Bullmore) in Gavin’s lavish mansion in the Scottish Highlands. Gavin has spared no expense organising a huge party for Gordie, and it’s clear that there’s a tense rivalry between Gavin and Doug, perhaps because of money, but more likely because Gavin gives the impression that his life is simply in much better shape than his brother’s. But there’s a catch. As if getting their three wayward children into the car for the painfully long journey wasn’t enough, Doug and Abi have enlisted their youngsters to cooperate in a little white lie with them. In order to steer clear from any possible upset on Gordie’s last birthday, they don’t want to tell him about their separation. The idea is to appear as a solid couple and family unit for the duration of the stay, and so the children – for once – must try to keep their mouths zipped tightly shut. 

As is always the way, nobody in the family ever listens to the children. They look with innocent eyes as their feuding parents go to war against one another and their dysfunctional family collapses around them. Though separated by some seventy years, only Gordie, carefree and wild in spirit, listens to the children. Only he speaks their pure and simple language. He feels able to confide his own existential fears in their sweet and humble nature. The children don’t need to be patronised or ignored, they just need to be listened to (or allowed to drive the car…). It’s a cheesy message, but Connolly handles a very long and hammy scene with the children on a beach with impressive stamina, bestowing touching (and often vulgar) words of wisdom to his grandchildren, such as “you need to live more and think less”. The kids just want to have fun. They just want to see their family enjoy each other’s company. It soon becomes apparent that the wisecracking and impulsive children may be a huge liability to the whole scheme of hiding their parents’ secrets, but they’re also the best chance of salvaging their crumbling family unit.

Hamilton and Jenkin know that they’re not dealing with the most original of concepts, but that’s okay. The film is in the safe hands of Pike (who has just done the best work of her career in Gone Girl) and Tennant (who is surprisingly strong as a delicate father), but it is Billy Connolly who emerges as the scene-stealer playing the devil-may-care grandfather. Gordie has seen and done it all, and he’s the only character with enough perspective to be able to tell everybody else that none of their petty fights, none of their immature squabbles, in fact, nothing really at all in this life, matters. Pain is transient; life is fleeting. Get out there and enjoy it. It’s nothing we haven’t heard before, but Connolly’s brazen and brash delivery somehow makes it all rather uplifting.

Despite dealing with three pretty heavy D’s – depression, divorce, and death – What We Did On Our Holiday bounces back with the dignified resilience you wouldn’t expect from a typical family film. It often plods into contrived soppiness, but a tight script and unabashed improvisation are on hand to heave it out of the occasional frump. Hamilton and Jenkin were extremely judicious in their choice of child actors, and the film owes its second act to their quick-witted elasticity, even when the plot falls a little thin. It’s refreshing how bluntly some very grave issues are handled, especially the children’s thick skin in relation to their parents’ divorce. The adult talent is underused, but this is the kids’ show, and they make the most of it.

In 2002 The Tolkien Audio Collection was released, containing snippets of the author reading from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy. This 1952 recording of Tolkien feature the author reading the famous ‘One Ring’ poem which forms the epigraph to each of the trilogy’s novels. It is fascinating to hear him pronounce the words of his invented languages – listen to the guttural way in which he rolls the ‘rs’ in ‘Mordor,’ giving the dark land a harsh and foreboding feel. Before speaking these lines in his role as Gandalf in the Peter Jackson movie adaptation, Sir Ian McKellen listened to this recording and strove to imitate Tolkien’s accent. 

As well as an author of fantasy literature, Tolkien was a prolific scholar of medieval English, and was closely associated with Oxford. He was twice pointed Professor of Anglo-Saxon, as well as the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature. The influence of his studies on The Lord of the Rings is huge: Mordor, for example, derives from the Old English word ‘morthor,’ which means murder, and Middle Earth, the setting for Tolkien’s stories, is taken from the Anglo-Saxon ‘middengeard’ – a term they used to describe the inhabitable world. Tolkien single-handedly invented several languages, and it is an immense pleasure to hear these beautiful and alien tongues spoken from the creator’s mouth. 

 â˜…★★★☆

Four Stars

On a black screen, drum rolls develop, building up in intensity. In the first scene, we discover the drummer responsible: Andrew Neiman (Miles Teller) is a first year student at the fictional Schaffer School of Music. It is allegedly the best music school in the country, but that is not enough for Andrew. He will stop at nothing to be a great jazz musician like Charlie Parker. He listens to Bobby Rich religiously, and he spends his spare time practising, occasionally taking a break to go to the movies with his father. It is evident that he has enormous drive and ambition, in contrast with the laid-back attitude of his family, in particular, his father.

The drums stop. Terence Fletcher (J. K. Simmons) fills the door. Emerging from the darkness like a mysterious character out of film noir, it is immediately obvious that he is the one to impress. He is the conductor of the studio band, and a place on there could potentially lead to greatness. It is also immediately obvious that this is a difficult task, and he does not suffer fools gladly. After stretching Andrew to play in double time, he leaves as quickly as he came, seemingly unimpressed. The door swings open again. Surely an offer to play in the band is on the cards? No: he came for his jacket. This is not the film you were expecting.

This is also not a movie about the kindly mentor/protégé relationship. Far from that; it is the tale of obsession with an art, and the means someone will go through to achieve their ambitions. After gaining a place on the band, Andrew is initially ecstatic. Although brutal to his band, Terence seems to genuinely care about him, asking him about his family situation and what he hopes to achieve in jazz drumming. When he allows Andrew to practise ‘Whiplash’ with the band, he pauses at a part where there is a change of rhythm. He turns to Andrew.

“Not quite my tempo.“

These four words will be etched upon your memory having seen the film. Initially gentle, it is clear that this was merely a façade for Terence, the Sergeant Harman of this Full Metal Drumkit. After repeated failed attempts to play the correct rhythm, Terence hurls a chair at Andrew, hurling abuse about his family and slapping him. He is obviously a man who cares so much about art, like Andrew, that he will stop at nothing to achieve great results, even if it means physical abuse and inflicting psychological terror on members of his band. He also has the very best lines. Gazing into the terrified face of Andrew, struggling to hold back tears, he berates: “Oh my dear God – are you one of those single tear people?“

J. K. Simmons is wonderful as the intimidating Fletcher, and it is no surprise that he has mopped up every Best Supporting Actor award in the run up to Oscars season. He delivers his lines perfectly, frequently humorous but always with a malicious edge. However later we also see another, more vulnerable side to him in the film, and both sides are effectively captured by Simmons. In Whiplash, the character he plays is not merely just the head of a jazz band. He also embodies drive and ambition, and is the man that Andrew needs to see him on the way to greatness. The pairing of these two characters is electrifying to see: it is an unhealthy relationship, with both members exacerbating each other’s worst characteristics, but together they can produce something great.

We also cannot forget Miles Teller, who is shaping up as one of the best emerging actors of his generation. Every single scene contains Teller’s Andrew, and although unsympathetic at times in his interactions outside the world of jazz drumming (one notable scene with Andrew’s girlfriend is reminiscent of – and equally biting as – the opening scene from The Social Network), Teller is very effective in conveying Andrew’s feelings to the screen. Watching the film, it is possible to feel the pain, both physically and emotionally, that Andrew goes through, and the contrast between the beauty of the jazz and the visceral reality of drumming.

For a film about music, the soundtrack is exceptional. Even for non-musicians, the film makes it possible to appreciate the hours of practice put into a performance and the pure joy of performing music. The ending scene in particular is quite possibly the best 15 minutes of cinema I have enjoyed for a long time. It is amazing that such a simple scene on paper can evoke such tension and rise to such breathtaking heights, and I defy anyone who watches this scene to not feel the same way.

Whiplash is effective because it tackles age-old themes of aspirations, sacrifices, motivation, and the mentor-protégé relationship, and although many films have dealt with these principles, Whiplash turns much of this on its head and possesses an incredible script and wonderful actors. Compared to the other Best Picture nominees, there is also a refreshing brevity about the film. All the scenes are perfectly structured, and there are none that are excessive or lacking. Feeling self-conscious, perhaps this review has been rushing or dragging, but similar criticisms cannot be levied against Whiplash. It is an interesting, entertaining film with two amazing performances, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.