★★★☆☆
Three Stars

SOHN – real name Christopher Taylor – is a British musician, but his work is immersed in the traditions and atmosphere of his home in Vienna. His debut album Tremors draws influences from the burgeoning electronic scene in the city while also drawing inspiration from British and American artists. First and foremost, he’s from the James Blake school of electronic crooning, but influences from Frank Ocean and The Weeknd are evident in his soulful musings.

Initial tracks ‘Oscillate’ and ‘Warnings’, released back in August 2012, were impressive, filled with an emotional and a musical maturity that announced SOHN as a future big-game player. Both these tracks are, disappointingly, missing from Tremors. Last year’s ‘Bloodflows’, SOHN’s first release on 4AD, raised him to a whole new level. Where previously the electro had carried his singing, lyrical proficiency now reared its head. Naturally, this huge single couldn’t stay off his debut album, but unfortunately it feels somewhat isolated.

No other track on Tremors has the same lyrical depth, nor is any other track as deftly and subtly put together. One gets the feeling that, overcome by his own brilliance with ‘Bloodflows’, SOHN decided that anything else he did would turn out equally well. But the standard has dropped. Lead single ‘Artifice’ has some excitingly energetic beats, but all of SOHN’s beauty was in his subtlety, and it’s difficult to be subtle when you’re belting out “somebody better let me know my name/before I give myself away” (as cheesy a chorus as you will find anywhere this year) over a made-for-club electro riff. In fact, ‘Artifice’ perfectly exemplifies the main problem with this album. Interesting musical threads are weaved together to form a  coherent and intriguing pattern; the tapestry becomes slightly more complex as the vocals are introduced… and then the H&M-advert-hook ruins everything. And when SOHN does slow down on ‘Paralysed’, he’s forgotten that he’s an electro artist and makes do with a plodding piano accompaniment.

Even the wonderful voice distortion on ‘Bloodflows’ and ‘Oscillate’, which had Taylor’s vocals blend into the sound of a repeating synth in a confusing and wonderful way, is overused to the point of exhaustion. This is not to say that the album is a complete disaster. Most of the tracks have something interesting about them. SOHN’s use of digital effects and distortion is still excellent, and Tremors might even make a fine instrumental album. ‘Lessons’ and ‘Bloodflows’ are still great, and title track ‘Tremors’ makes an impressive ending to the album, epic but understated. However, the lack of imagination in the lyrics and the incredible overkill of Taylor’s ‘haunting’ tone makes for a disappointing overall effect, which is a real pity considering the quality of his early work.

★☆☆☆☆
One Star

The words “Based on a True Story” have often prefixed movies to great effect. In many ways, the awareness of historical counterparts encourages directors and viewers alike to consider not only what happened but to interrogate the how and why behind the narrative, introducing a level of social psychology which made movies like Zodiac, Snowtown and The Imposter so genuinely unsettling. Unfortunately, as in the case of the The Quiet Ones, it seems that the ‘this actually happened’ marketing strategy is increasingly being used to justify lazy film-making.

The movie follows a physics professor Joseph Coupland (Jarred Harris) in 1974 who assembles a team of three students to channel the energy of a poltergeist which seems to be possessing a young girl. The film’s opening sequences at Oxford University are relatively intriguing, with Coupland espousing his theories to sceptical students in lectures before his funds are cut off entirely by the university administration. Harris’ performance begins to touch on a kind of scholarly neurosis and academic hysteria which would make for an interesting playing-field in this genre but, alas, the production company evidently ran out of money to film in Oxford and so our intrepid foursome relocate their supernatural experiments to – that’ right – an abandoned house in the country.

1974 is the same year The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was released. The characters clearly didn’t make an effort to see it, otherwise they’d have thought twice about making camp in an old homestead.

And thus we have the set-up: a creepy child, playing with a creepy doll, in a creepy building – all being caught on camera by main character Brian (Sam Claflin) much of which is relayed to the audience as grainy, hand-held 8mm footage. The extent to which these same plots are recycled nowadays is infuriating, and it comes as a relief for movie-goers when surprisingly original horror movies like last year’s In Fear (A home invasion film but in a car and in real time) grace our screens.

Admittedly however, there is a voracious appetite for these films which shouldn’t necessarily be scorned. The issue with The Quiet Ones, then, doesn’t lie with unoriginality per se but with the general mind-numbing awfulness of its execution. Films like Insidious, The Woman in Black and The Conjuring were very predictable, exploiting obvious horror movie tropes at every possible turn, yet the scripts were fleshed out to be ultimately quite engaging stories. Here, the dialogue is purely expository, and the lacklustre visuals fail to be disguised under the façade of ‘found footage’.

Claflin is a one-note charisma vacuum, Kristina (Erin Richards) is the token beautiful blonde given nothing to say but placed centre stage for pubescent 15 year olds to gawp at, and even Harris (a reliably brilliant actor) struggles to make anything substantial out of his pantomime ‘mad scientist’ role. The only actor I found in any way engaging was Rory Fleck-Byrne, in that he was head-thumpingly annoying. Personally speaking, I couldn’t wait for him to be killed off by a demonic poltergeist. 

The audience I was with seemed collectively irritated. People were checking their phones and, at other moments, there were inappropriate howls of laughter, as when Kristina reaches the end of her tether with the supernatural occurrences and vows to return to Oxford, exclaiming (with no hint of irony) “We’ve already missed loads of lectures!” Every jump could be anticipated by the routine sound design (Quiet -> Silence -> 1, 2, 3 -> BANG), and the repetitive tense/reliefs induced for the viewer felt less like scares and more like an abdominal workout.

As the screening ended, chatter resumed, and the person sat behind me asked her partner about their evening’s dining options. Indeed, not one person seemed to be talking about the movie – as if The Quiet Ones had rudely interrupted their previous conversation. The film made me long for a viewing experience like last year’s Stoker – a head-scratching horror film made chilling not through artificial loud bangs but through aesthetically arresting cinematography and tantalising lead performances.

It continues to baffle me how commercially successful films like The Quiet Ones are. I suppose it’s largely due to how cheaply they can be made. But considering the inflated price of cinema tickets, I’d recommend going to see a movie where the film-maker has put in slightly more effort, and not explained away a poorly conceived narrative by ostentatiously publicising the fact it is “a true story.”

Which it’s not. Obviously.

★★★★★
Five Stars

As interview subjects go, Donald Rumsfeld is a pretty big fish. Holder of the dubious honour of having been both the youngest and oldest Defence Secretary in US history, he has presided over many of the decisions that have shaped our political landscape, perhaps most significantly the Iraq war.

The director, Errol Morris, is also a pretty big deal. His documentary ‘The Thin Blue Line’ is often called the greatest documentary of all time. About two suspects in a murder case, it famously ends with a shot of a Dictaphone playing what amounts to a confession, which Morris had managed to coax out of the guilty party 10 years after the other suspect was sentenced to life imprisonment. It is the only film in history to have altered the course of justice, resulting in the innocent man being freed.

Many came to “The Unknown Known” expecting Morris to pull off a similar feat with Rumsfeld and coax out an Iraq-based confession. But this in not the case. In an ironic twist, we hear that while he was serving in the Nixon administration, Rumsfeld was considered a persona non grata and so sent to work on foreign shores, a move that saved Rumsfeld’s career from the fallout of the Watergate scandal. Unlike Nixon in the famous post-Watergate Frost/Nixon interview, never once does Rumsfeld break down in tears or confess to any possible wrongdoing. In fact, he seems to actively enjoy justifying himself, and not once does his grinning visage betray even the slightest hint of remorse. He tells Morris “I’ll chalk that one up” with palpable glee on its face, after spieling his way out of Morris’ accusation of “all those torture memos”.

Yet, rather than be the film’s shortcoming, Morris turns Rumsfeld’s unfazed performance to his advantage. As Rumsfeld spins his self-justificatory rhetoric, Morris often intercuts imagery or footage that undermines it. At one point, Rumsfeld denies that the US public were ever led to believe Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were connected, just before cutting to footage from a 2003 press conference where Rumsfeld responds to Saddam Hussein’s claim that Iraq had no WMD’s or links with Al Qaeda with the laconic, “and Abraham Lincoln was short.”

More subtly, Morris gets Rumsfeld to read out some of the hundreds of memos, nicknamed “snowflakes”, he recorded during his lengthy career. These snowflakes are then realised in the repeated image of a snow globe containing a miniature Washington monument. Throughout, the monument remains obscured by the snowflakes, only clearing when we reach his final memo that simply states, “the blizzard is over”. This powerful image of language being used to obscure rather than clarify, to bring us further away not closer to the truth, highlights exactly what Rumsfeld and his rhetoric are trying to accomplish.

The extraordinary thing about the film is that it takes this analysis to another level, by suggesting that Rumsfeld himself is caught in this blizzard. The title “The Unknown Known” is the fourth variation on the series of “known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns” Rumsfeld described in a 2002 press conference about the lack of evidence of WMDs in Iraq.

In their original incarnation, the first three were intended to provide rhetorical support for a potential invasion. At the start of the film, Rumsfeld reads out a memo from 2004 that gives his definition of the “unknown known” as, “things that you think you know, that it turns out you did not”. This pretty clearly refers to the faulty evidence they had for the invasion, and seems like a strategy for avoiding blame. But at the end of the film, Rumsfeld admits he got his definition of “unknown known” wrong. Really, it should have been, “things that you may know, that you don’t think you know”. Another way to put this would be, ‘things you knew deep down, but had refused to consciously acknowledge’. The redefinition makes you think once again about the lack of remorse Rumsfeld displays throughout the film, whilst also reinforcing the idea that he really believes the rhetoric he’s spinning.

You come away with the conclusion that this is a man caught up in his own sophistry; in a blizzard so thick, that he will never have to properly consider the consequences of his actions or feel the guilt that would come from an honest introspection. In its own warped way, this is his genius; and in revealing this to the public, Morris has produced an astounding piece of work. 

You may have heard its jazzy rhythms and techno beats reverberating through the stony subterreanea of Babylove or the ecclesiastical expanse of Freud’s. If you were lucky enough to spend Valentine’s weekend at Catz Ball (and if the unlimited free booze didn’t completely rob you of your consciousness) you may have seen one of this genre’s main players, Swing Republic, taking headline stage. It is electro-swing, the latest music craze to hit the world and, a few months later – Oxford. 

Electro swing fuses the fluid sounds of 20s and 30s jazz and swing with the heavy beats of house, hip-hop and electronic dance music. It’s Louis Armstrong meets Swedish House Mafia. It’s Etta meets Guetta.

These two seemingly disparate musical movements may have more in common than one might think. For example, the ‘Lindy Hop’, a staple dance in the swing era is, in fact, an early precursor of breakdance – both were invented as forms of street dance by young African Americans in New York.

Far from being the new kid on the music block, electro swing really traces its roots to the late nineties/early noughties, when there appeared sporadic hits such as Jurassic 5’s “Swing Set”, Gry & F.M. Einheit’s and “Princess Crocodile”. Mr. Scruff’s “Get A Move On” is a tune which I, personally, will always associate with the scene in ‘What a Girl Wants’ when Amanda Bynes inexplicably tumbles off a catwalk.

However, many will agree that the genre really hit the ground swinging with the 2006 album of record label G-Swing. With a self explanatory title, Swing for Modern Clubbing, the songs feature looped extracts of vintage swing intermingled with modern techno. For the first time, the modern clubber could dance to Nina Simone and Duke Ellington.

It was only a few years later – in 2009 – that the genre started to be defined and its name coined, with the appearance of compilation albums such as Freshly Squeezed Music’s “White Mink: Black Cotton (Electro Swing versus Speakeasy Jazz)” and Wagram’s ‘Electro swing’. London Time-Out was quick to sing electro swing’s praises, ecstatically stating: ‘Yes, this really is a new genre, and an exciting one at last!’ 

TOP TUNES:

1. “Suzy” – Caravan Palace

The video for this song features a robot and a flapper having a boogie, which epitomizes electro swing’s fusion of the modern and the neo-vintage.

2. “Kisskiss” – Parov Stelar

In this track the monotony of a looped swing sample is broken by some trumpeted interjections, jazzy riffs and electro beats.

3. “I’ve Got That Tune” – Chinese Man

The opening tune of pure swing reoccurs throughout the track with different electro embellishments, running as an underscore to some 20s-style female vocals infused with contemporary influences.

4. “Bang Bang” – Will.i.am

Arguably the best product of the Great Gatsby OST, this song is an upbeat mélange of jazz instrumentals and synthpop. It contains elements of the Charleston and Louis-Armstrong-inspired lead male vocals.

5. “Swingy Mama” – DJ Farrapo

This track is something of a swing sandwich. It begins and ends with uninterrupted electro beats, which frame a melody of jazz, ragtime and rap.