Californian metalcore band Of Mice & Men’s third album, Restoring Force, seems to aim to reprise the monolithic biblical theme of previous musical statements (2011’s The Flood sold over 125,000 copies). But lead singer Austin Carlile has claimed his musical vision now draws from a strain of nu- metal, courtesy of Linkin Park and Limp Bizkit. So very far from heavy metal’s rough, take-it-or-leave-it charm, this is a tautly constructed set that smacks of studio professionalism. The album is a perfect example of late capitalism’s commodified culture.

Carlile’s main influences were original in the late 1990s, but now seem stale and corporate. The question we must ask is this: how did American rock, from the niche to the mainstream, respond to a post-9/11 world? We have seen how indie rock, so sure of its cynical management of the hype machine, regressed into the comforting sounds of childhood.

One of Of Mice & Men’s members once commented on the band’s name: “The main theme is the American dream…and being self sufficient.” This album is nothing but a new American exceptionalism – another missed opportunity to reclaim rock’s radical power when it is so badly needed.

Menace Beach

Menace Beach release their new EP, Lowtalker, on January 13^th, and it’s going to be a cracker. The chilled-out vocals and aggressive distortion on old track ‘Tastes Like Medicine’ are just what the doctor ordered, whereas B-side ‘Where I Come From’ is sure to please fans of fellow psych-rockers Splashh. But it’s really all about recent single ‘Fortune Teller’; Menace Beach aim to stun with a hazy, veering guitar riff and some serious shoegaze influences. Think My Bloody Valentine crossed with Marilyn Manson and add some serious punk energy. This is the new shit, and it’s scarily good.

Luke Barratt

Banks

Jillian Banks is an LA based artist whose output to date could be called electronic soul; think warm bass, snappy beats and a generally heady atmosphere. This music’s raison d’être is intimacy, both physical and emotional, and Banks has enough skill as a lyricist and singer to do the music justice. Her quiet confessions are delivered as much through vocal nuances as the words themselves, and when the mood takes her she can drip enough desire from each syllable to send shivers down your spine. Having already toured with R&B heavyweight The Weeknd, she looks set to impress in 2014.

Adam Piascik

SOHN

4AD is the place to be at the moment. With the perfect combination of alternative heavyweights like Bon Iver and The National and brilliant newer artists like Grimes and Ariel Pink, it’s the record label all the cool kids are signing to. SOHN is the latest name to be added to their roster, and with his heavier brand of James Blake-esque atmospheric electronic pop, it must be a good move. A masterful recent remix of Disclosure’s ‘Help Me Lose My Mind’ is a studied move sure to expand a burgeoning fan base. Originally from London, he currently resides in Vienna. No UK tour has been announced yet, but we all want to be the first to welcome back our prodigal SOHN.

Luke Barratt

FKA twigs

With her experimental R&B, Tahliah Barnett, aka FKA Twigs, pulls some of the focus on the genre over to the UK. This is ethereal, sometimes haunting music that hooks you in, providing a perfect backdrop for whispered vocals and allusive lyrics. In a year flooded with excellent releases in the genre, Barnett released one of the best R&B tracks of 2013, the mesmerising ‘Water Me’, and while she may be a bit too weird for commercial success, any release in 2014 is bound to be worth your time.

Adam Piascik

Rhosyn

Rhosyn is a 5-piece band led by former Oxford art grad Rose Dagul, who play minutely crafted indie chamber music. Dagul first formulated her project while wandering the island of Anglesey. Last year’s debut EP finally pushed all her talk of landscape into stunningly fashioned soundscape. Standout track “Glass” perfectly captures all of Dagul’s swooning vocals and infectious knack for catchy composition. Rhosyn has established itself as a major force within Oxford’s hideously talented ‘Blessing Force’ collective of musicians. Be sure to catch one of her many gigs in the new year.

Lu Xun

Real Lies

If you’re stuck desperately searching for some 1990s dance music combined with faux-dramatic, vaguely camp vocals and some proper house beats (and why wouldn’t you be?), then look no further. London trio Real Lies managed one of the tracks of last year with ‘World Peace’, and one can’t imagine them slowing down any time soon. The band members insist on being known only by their initials. Mystery is the name of the game these days, in a post-Wu Lyf world, and they’ve got that covered. With last month’s session at the BBC’s Maida Vale Studios under their belt, these guys are sure to start turning some heads soon.

Luke Barratt

My decision to embrace the world of hot yoga post-christmas was met with some hilarity, and quite frankly, malicious disbelief, by friends and family. I am not flexible. The last time I engaged my quadraceps fimoris was squatting in the Gladstone Link to reach the lowest shelf of books. I ended up sitting on the floor anyway. Nor am I of the ‘zen’, ‘dedicate your energies to the person you love’ spiritual persuasion that ‘yogis’ tend to be. But I was beginning to feel like those American kids who forget what being hungry is like – something drastic had to be done.

So I signed up to a twenty day introductory offer at my nearest hot yoga centre and decided to embrace the heat. Hot yoga rooms are heated to 40 C and the heat is supposed to make you more flexible, regulate your appetite, and detox your toxins. The website showed a man with a Herculean figure doing a handstand on his elbows, which was nice. Perhaps strange parts of my body, like elbows and these ‘sit bones’ that kept being mentioned would be imbued with super-human strength.

For my first session, I don an outfit I imagine is appropriate for hot yoga: leggings and a crop top that just screams ‘I do sun salutations in my sleep’. The room the session is to take place in is mirrored and hot, but not steamy. Mats are laid out on the floor, and people are rolling around doing stretches. I don’t know any stretches but I don’t want to be the odd one out, so I flail my limbs around unconvincingly until the instructor walks in. He introduces himself as Mike.  ‘Namaste, Mike’. Mike is topless, heavily bearded and resembles Jesus, if Jesus had a pot belly and could hook his foot around his head. This is his last day before he goes to India for three months to learn from the masters.

We begin with some basic yoga poses: tree pose, warrior two, downwards facing dog. I’m amazed at how difficult it is. Almost immediately I begin to sweat, and as we progress everyone is pouring with perspiration. Each pose has three levels of difficulty, 1 being the easiest, 3 the hardest. I get cocky and transition into position 2, and Mike gently taps me on the shoulder, whispering, ‘I think we should stick to position 1 today.’

It quickly becomes apparent that I am the worst in the class, even the very elderly woman next to me (she doesn’t even have a crop-top combo!) can do the tree pose better than I can. I leave my first session traumatised and on the brink of cardiac arrest. In the changing rooms a woman asks me if this is my first go and I pant the affirmative. ‘You just need to get your ujjayi breaths right!’, she sparkles, ‘it’s easy really.’ I wince politely and internally vow never to come back to this hot hippy hell ever again. However, after I escape into the cool night air, I do feel strangely cleared and light, as if my toxins really have been flushed out. By the third session I’m addicted; I leave invigorated, slurping on coconut water triumphantly. The next session, I am able to do something that has evaded me since I was ten years old. I can touch my toes, even the floor. I weep a sweaty tear, or a tear of sweat, it’s hard to tell. I am Gaia. I am part of the yogi cult. I want go and learn from the masters with Mike.

The next time I go I bump into an old acquaintance. It’s her first go and like most people, she comes out hot and disillusioned. I turn to her and smile benignly. ‘It’s all about getting your ujjayi breaths right. It’s easy really..’

Each performance of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, currently at the Donmar, begins with staff shooing away a heaving returns queue. The crowd’s demographic is evenly split, between white-haired punters who make up the bulk of most matinee audiences, and swarms of teenage girls. The reason for this is Tom Hiddleston, who plays Coriolanus and has previously starred in Thor and The Avengers. Hiddleston gives a stellar performance and his cut-glass abdominals are fully capitalised on by the play’s direction. His torso is showcased in all its blood-stained, sweaty glory in a gratuitous ‘wound-washing’ scene which elicited gasps from the junior half of the audience and prompted my grandfather to comment in the interval that Hiddleston was ‘quite a dish’.

This sexing up of Shakespeare by playing on an existing TV or film fanbase is not unprecedented and and has arguably brought Coriolanus to a younger audience. However, it is interesting to see how such sexing up works differently for women. The decision to cast Birgitte Hjort Sørensen (Katrine in Danish TV series Borgen) as Coriolanus’ wife was probably based on the fact that she has a broad and loyal UK fanbase. Hjort Sørensen’s talent did not survive the transition to stage and her British accent, though good, is not perfect. Her part – one of Shakespeare’s most wooden – entails kissing her husband and crying when he is away at war. As with Hiddleston, the costume department capitalised on her looks, but while Coriolanus’ bare-chested virility was both well-pitched and impressive to a modern audience, his wife was left to totter around in badly fitting four-inch shoeboots and a laser-cut bodycon dress.

While Coriolanus was the picture of masculinity, his wife’s sexy get-up was incongruous and made me suspend my disbelief. Coriolanus was written 500 years ago and it is depressing that the gender roles filled by its characters don’t need to be updated for a modern audience or a modern wardrobe.

As soon as I open the photos, every fibre of my being screams that I should shut down Google Chrome, hurl my laptop into the bin and then set fire to the kitchen. Yet I find myself inexorably drawn back to the Facebook album entitled “LADYS NITE @ SHITTY PROVINCIAL CLUB”.

The image which is seared permanently on my retinas is a tableau of despair and whipped cream. It is impossible to accurately guess the age of the male stripper who fills the bulk of the frame: his hairless torso and barbed-wire tattoo put him in his early thirties, but he has the sagging jowls of a man twice as old again and his cold, fishlike eyes are filled with millennia of misery. He is naked, his penis hanging limp like the last Bratwurst in the butcher’s shop. A canister in his hand, he has evidently just finished covering this (admittedly impressive organ) in Mr Whippy’s Own-Brand Cream. This is night-club photography as reimagined by Francis Bacon; saggy, fleshy, entirely devoid of hope.

As a whole, the album is a Dantean descent into a 21st-century inferno of WKD, inflated condoms and grotesquely veiny dildos. It would be nice to see the night as a celebration of liberated, modern female sexuality, to interpret the dance a nuanced piece of post-modern performance art critiquing traditional notions of masculinity. But the vaguely haunted look in the eyes of the female punters and the palpable despair of the stripper speak for themselves. No-one is being liberated here. It would be a terrible dereliction of my integrity as Culture Editor to name Central Square Nightclub in Newport as responsible for this god-forsaken evening of entertainment, so I won’t. Happy New Year.

★★☆☆☆

Two Stars

To begin by explaining the concept, twenty-five cooks try to impress three judges with just one spoonful of the dish they have put their all into preparing. Each judge can choose just four cooks to join their kitchen and the rest go home. The judges will then go head-to-head in fierce competition.

The pilot episode of this new series opened like almost every other cooking show, with lots of intense music and shots of stressed hopefuls sweating over stoves. Once again we were presented with the idea that cooking is something incredibly dramatic, as contestants declared ‘my life is in this spoon’, tears were shed, and the judges became increasingly vitriolic towards one another. There was also the standard spate of innuendo that seems to accompany all food nowadays, as the beautiful Nigella Lawson, in typical fashion, described James from Shrewsbury’s dish as ‘instantly seductive’ and said ravenously, ‘I really want you’. Despite the initial sense of excitement, however, the show soon became quite repetitive as spoon after spoon was placed before the judges with little to maintain interest apart from the occasional amusing comment from the judges.

The combination of personalities on the judging panel was the same you might find on any reality TV show: the brutally honest, the eccentric, and the mother-figure. Predictably, Nigella couldn’t resist comforting the tearful eighteen-year-old, whilst Anthony Bourdain asserted that he needs to ‘toughen the f–k up’.  Ludo Lefebvre, the surly Frenchman, provided the laughs with his occasional outbursts and indecipherable rants, but in general the show lacked the intensity of MasterChef, the light-heartedness of the Great British Bake-off, and the mouth-watering images of food we all love, leaving it awkwardly somewhere in the middle. Hopefully the next stage will be more engaging… 

Chances are that if you went to the cinema last year, you didn’t see something original. You saw a sequel. Admittedly, it was hard to avoid the second installment of The Hobbit or The Hunger Games, Anchorman 2, Iron Man 3, Thor 2, Despicable Me 2 or Fast and Furious 6 (that’s right, 6) amongst many, many others.

However, as infuriating as this onslaught of sequels can be, to repeat the age-old cinema-purist’s lament against such a glut of films followed by number two or three or six now seems pointless. The lack of original films last year is entirely understandable in terms of the simple economics of sequels. Of the ten highest grossing films of 2013, six were sequels or prequels. Iron Man 3 already has, and Despicable Me 2 soon will, pass that magical one billion dollar mark at the worldwide box office. It’s simple: sequels mean easy money (though I doubt even Universal Pictures executives can believe quite how successful Despicable Me has become).

With critics forever decrying the state of modern cinema, the question I’d pose is what exactly is wrong with sequels? If audiences enjoy them, and clearly the finances reflect that they do, where is the problem? The argument goes that money invested in sequels means less funding available for new, interesting, diverse films that expand the creative vision of Hollywood. After all, where would we be if Citizen Kane had been canned in favour of Dumbo 2? Spending money on existing franchises, just to bag easy ticket sales, won’t necessarily push the boundary of what film can achieve.

But it is a fundamentally snobbish argument, an argument which says cinema is the territory of ‘artists’ and ‘critics’ instead of people who just want to watch a decent movie. Who decides what is creatively significant or not? Few would argue for the high cinematic merit of Monsters University but if people enjoyed it then why should it matter if it is a sequel? 

Furthermore, to say our cinemas have become solely occupied by sequels and franchises isn’t just pessimistic and snobbish, it’s also not true. 2013 saw a number of fantastic original big screen outings. Gravity, hotly-tipped for Oscar success, was not only unlike anything we’ve ever seen before, it was the seventh highest grossing film, a sure sign that audiences will lap up new ideas as long as they are done well. The Wolf of Wall Street, an original Scorsese production starring the ever-bankable Leonardo DiCaprio, is another example of a captivating film that broke the string of summer blockbuster sequels.

What we should hope for now is that the success of original films like Gravity and The Wolf of Wall Street will give studios more confidence to move away from tried-and-tested formulas and venture into the creative unknown. While a reliance on sequels is nothing new in Hollywood, it is also evidently seen as a smart move a post-Credit Crunch mind-set of easy films for easy returns — bums in seats before novelty.

But the fact that the American box office enjoyed its most successful year ever last year, with revenues of £6.6 billion, surely now presents an ideal opportunity for something different to superhero sequels and animated follow-ups. 12 Years a Slave, a sure-fire Oscarwinner if ever there was one, and Christopher Nolan’s newest project Interstellar are hopeful hints that 2014 might be a year of genuine originality at your local Odeon.

But even if they’re the exception to the rule, even if it is a year dominated by franchises, and Captain America 2, The Expendables 3 and Paranormal Activity 5 are more representative of 2014’s film offering, so long as you enjoy them
then who cares? Despicable Me 2 was genuinely funny, Star Trek: Into Darkness was suitably shiny and even Fast and Furious 6 was… bright.

Ultimately, whether this year is a year of unbridled and unprecedented cinematic originality, or whether (more likely) it isn’t, sequels shouldn’t be derided as inherently destructive for Hollywood’s creativity; it’s just that seeing something a bit different a little more often would certainly not go amiss.