Whilst John Hopkins is perhaps best known for his mercury-nominated collaboration with King Creosote, Diamond Mine (2011), his solo work has passed largely unnoticed. Having worked with Brian Eno and Coldplay among other big names, he has generally avoided the mainstream glance so far. 

However, his fourth solo album, Immunity is one which has the potential to define the course of electronic music over the next few years. A brave divergence from the more atmospheric, ambiance feel that has characterised his work thus far, Immunity has a whiff of nightlife and a strong dosage of epic bass lines. 

The strongest tracks on the album, such as Form by Firelight, Breathe This Air, or Open Eye Signal, have a steady progression, moving from a calm, peaceful beat, to a full out techno climax – without the listener even realising. Indeed, the real beauty to this album lies in the subtleties of its composition; the way each element, whether synthetic or otherwise, feels like it has been hand-picked and placed gracefully into a musical organism. 

The promotional video released in anticipation of the album’s release, an artistic compilation of magnified footage of crystals and chemicals drenched in colour sums up the whole album; it’s all about the details. 

Whilst it is certain that the length as well as the slow development of the album is almost certainly not appealing to everyone, what we have here is without doubt a masterpiece. As echoes of King Creosote’s voice fade in and out of the delicate, hazy final title track, one feels that Jon Hopkins has gone full circle – ranging from a a calm, subdued opening, to deep, synthetic electro bass rhythms, before returning to an airy, atmospheric finish. 

Much of the album has a certain dark edge to it – a melancholic chord, or a thundering echo sends the listener into an introspective glance, an effect which is particularly poignant thanks to the minimalism of Hopkins’ production. 

In a similar way to the F*ck Buttons’ electro-drone, Jon Hopkins’ Immunity is great study music, inducing a state of calm and concentration in the listener. It couldn’t have been released at a better time of the year. 

How can I begin to describe a film like The Big Wedding? Based on a patronising and insulting premise, with largely un­appealing characters, and very few redeemable moments, it was one of the worst films I have seen. Despite a promising cast, it failed to deliver on all fronts.

A young man is getting married. His adoptive parents have got di­vorced, with his adoptive father now in a relationship with a new woman. But the boy’s biological mother is Catholic and from Columbia, so they have to pretend that the adoptive parents are still married during the wedding, or she will go mad. Obvi­ously. Do filmmakers really still feel the need to peddle stereotypes so outdated and crude? The general tone of The Big Wedding is unfunny and puerile, with several moments where I wanted to cringe and run out of the cinema. Aiming to achieve the success of films like Father of the Bride, which is I suppose why they cast Diane Keaton, it fails as it is utterly charmless and con­trived.

Most of the actors struggled with such a poor plot, despite a few thoughtful details. Katherine Heigl’s performance as Lyla is probably the most convinc­ing, as she plays a woman who is pregnant having previ­ously strug­gled to con­ceive, but it seems quite in­congru­ous wedged between scenes of mid­dle-aged bawdiness.

The wedding itself has the classic film trait of none of the ex­tras at the lunch party actually engaging with the main actors, leaving the audience mildly per­plexed at why on earth so many people have turned up to witness the debacle without any recogni­tion from those involved. The chaos is compounded by the decision of two parents (I won’t reveal which just in case for some bizarre reason you choose to watch this dreadful film) to get married at their child’s wedding. How selfish do you have to be to hijack your offspring’s life with your own pathetic attempt to appease the woman you’ve cheated on? Perhaps the only character I warmed to was the man who caused all the problems through his lie, Alejandro the groom (played in a very sweet manner by Ben Barnes, whom you might know from his role as Prince Caspian in the Narnia films, or as Dorian Gray in Do­rian Gray).

But, although I am loathe to criticise a film so comprehensively, I struggle to find one thing to recom­mend The Big Wedding.

Delia

Lockey

Oxford’s own Lewis Watson started recording YouTube videos four years ago and is now signed to Warner records. Specifically to Oxford, Watson thinks “there’s a real good scene there that’s blossoming and I’m happy that I used it as well as YouTube”. Much like the old gigging circuit Watson honed his craft through his laptop. “Now [he’s] playing to real people”. The intimacy of Watson’s YouTube recording sessions, and the tenderness within his compositions, are being performed to the masses during the festival season, and his upcoming headline tour. “It’s not like reading my diary,” he claims though. “They don’t get specifics”.

Moving away from the solo acoustic act and to a four-piece band setting complete with a girl on keys which Watson has “always wanted”. “As soon as I picked up a guitar I always wanted a band behind me. You grab people with a band, bigger sound behind you.” This is just in time for a hectic festival season where Watson sees himself playing at Glastonbury, Bestival and V, amongst others.

“It’s absolutely crazy to be on the bill,” Watson explains, “we’re playing to grab people who are walking past” and, next to legends such as the Rolling Stones and Elton John “we’re going to have to play the most exciting show we can”.
When asked about whether he considers himself indie or mainstream, he admits, “in a perfect world I’d love a bit of both”. For Watson, an underground success and cult following “enhances the music. It’s a sense of discovery”.

Watson is incredibly appreciative of his fans, claiming it’s still weird to have his songs sung back at him. With a narrative of broken and new relationships having been displayed on It’s Got Four Sad Songs On It BTW, Watson’s songs are about things that “everyone can relate to”. He hopes to showcase a similar tale on his upcoming debut album, “there’s a lot to be said for people to have to listen to the whole record before understanding the record”. Despite his newfound success in the mainstream, Watson is keeping it real. When approached by a crazed fan who wanted a lock of his hair in Australia, he responded, “Chill out, I’m just a person”. Hopefully this sense of musical earnestness and humility will continue.

★★★☆☆
Three Stars

At times in their career, Queens of the Stone Age have sounded like a world-class backing band for a non-existent superstar, and this continues to be something of a problem here. For all the quality of the musicianship, there is something missing.

This is a record built from the bottom up; monolithic slabs of bass and primal backbeats form the bedrock of the album. A bassline of Neolithic simplicity and power saunters in at the start of album opener ‘Keep Your Eyes Peeled’, and against this thunderous introduction then the plaintive vocals of Josh Homme seem curiously unnecessary. This problem recurs throughout the album.
Album highlight ‘My God is the Sun’, for example, is propelled by a ferocious cameo return from Dave Grohl and a writhing bassline which together utterly swamp the vocal performance.

When Homme’s voice is given more prominence, for example on piano-led ‘The Vampyre of Time and Memory’, the result is often turgid and angsty. The record is at its best when it eschews attempts at melodic introspection for heavier numbers, powering out riffs like The Velvet Underground on steroids.
One way the band remedies this shortcoming is bringing in Nine Inch Nails mastermind Trent Reznor and Elton John to take over vocal duties, providing much needed variety. Sir Elton’s piano line bouncing through the riotous ‘Fairweather Friends’ like a drag queen striding through a bar fight is one of the most refreshing moments of the album.

There’s no question about it, QOTSA have really matured as a band; this album is by far their most complex and innovative yet. However, rock music is not always about subtlety. Their earlier albums were unashamed of their simplicity, and it was this which bestowed on them a crude power which is sometimes lacking here.

Like Clockwork… proves that QOTSA are still capable of producing great rock songs, and it is just a crying shame they sometimes lose sight of this simple goal.

Track To Download: My God Is The Sun

A conversation with Afrika Bambaataa is the equivalent to receiving a history lesson in hip hop. The man affectionately known as ‘Bam’ is also regarded as the ‘Grandfather of hip hop’. He is best known for the 1982 single ‘Planet Rock’ which influenced a generation of hip hoppers, and continues to influence today having been ranked 21^st in VH1’s 100 Greatest Songs of Hip Hop in 2008. The song samples Kraftwerk, which resulted in a lengthy legal dispute, and is credited with developing the electro genre, which paved the way for house and trance.

Nowadays, Bam keeps to a lower profile, having collaborating with the Mighty Mocambos and Charlie Funk on various singles over the last year. He is still the head of the Universal Zulu Nation which he set up in the early 70s in the South Bronx and his vision is “just to keep the culture alive and make people enjoy themselves”. The Zulu Nation, which works within the ‘Hip Hop Declaration of Peace’ to promote ‘conscious hip hop’ is about “keeping true to the whole culture, not merely the media dealing with the corporate side of rappers”.

Bam has a number of reservations concerning the “corporate side of rappers” nowadays, and commercialisation in general asking “Why you’re not playing old house music with new house music, why you not playing old rock music with the new rock music?”.

Not known for his rapping skills, having primarily been a DJ and self-appointed ‘master of records’ throughout his career, the influence of the art form is prevalent in his long monologues. Given at high speed, they are hugely entertaining, rhythmic, and above all, impossible to transcribe. His emphasis when discussing house and rock though, and any other music “I don’t care if its hip hop” is to “play the old with the new and the new with the old”. “mix it up all the time, mash it up!”.

As a result of this commercialisation the fifth element of hip hop, ‘hip hop knowledge’ has been relegated to an underground factor, not it’s primary force as it was with Bam’s ‘Planet Rock’, Flash’s ‘the Message’ and Public Enemy’s ‘Fight the Power’ in the early 80s before the development of gangster rap. “If you gonna call a woman a ‘B’ or use the ‘N’ word when there’s music telling you to ‘Fight the Power’ or organised in consciousness, play it all. If you have 24 hours, 365 days, 366 in a leap year, why you can’t play the old with the new, the new with the old and this way people can know where music came from back then, where it is now and where it goes for the future”.

Musically, Bam feels constricted commercially. Whilst some “stations might throw in a little touch of international flavour of music” the knowledge of hip hop has, once again, been relegated to the underground from where it started in the South Bronx where “from chaos comes something that becomes direct for the people so something came to the people there and now from those people it’s stretched to all the people of the world”. In the first instance, hip hop was an Afro-American form, one to create a voice on the periphery which had previously been absent within the ‘burning Bronx’. This was supplemented by the various break-beats Bam deployed with James Brown who “is hip hop” being a key feature morphing into a collection of styles.

Nowadays, “you get people saying I’m a house DJ, I’m a reggae DJ’ it’s like apartheid.” Nowadays, when the world is once again “dealing with so much chaos”, and with the globalisation of hip hop that was enabled by Bam and his Zulu Nation in the 80s, a similar creation could save the fate of hip hop today. In the words of Bam and the Soul Sonic force ‘everyone, just rock it’.

Afrika Bambaataa played at Cellar on June 6th.

Mid-May is a very busy time for the movie industry’s finest. The old, the new and the breaking through descend upon Cannes for one of the most important festivals on the Hollywood and global film calendar. So why is it so important? The Cannes Film Festival is a great opportunity to showcase work from across the world, allowing underrepresented categories a chance to get seen, and giving us a snapshot of what might be popular at the cinema in the months ahead. 2013 saw young romance à la 2012’s Moonrise Kingdom exchanged for flapper girls and hip-hop with Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby kicking off proceedings.

The ‘Official Selection’ contains two main categories. Un Certain Regard features original, less mainstream works whilst the Competition category gives us the most clues as to what will soon be hitting our screens. This is judged by The Competition Jury, comprised of those held in high esteem by the industry powers that be. This year was particularly interesting with director/god Steven Spielberg presiding over the panel joined by Nicole Kidman, We Need To Talk About Kevin director Lynne Ramsay, Life of Pi genius Ang Lee and Django star Christoph Waltz.

So what happened? Despite the buzz around the Coen brothers’ Inside Lleweyn Davis, Ryan Gosling’s latest Only God Forgives, and James Gray’s return to Cannes with The Immigrant, the jury threw a curve ball by awarding the Palme d’Or to Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue is the Warmest Colour. Why the big surprise? This French film is based on a novel which follows the relationship between two lesbian students in Lille. It’s said to be highly sexually explicit and so controversial it is unlikely it will even be shown in Kechiche’s native Tunisia. Coinciding with the legalisation of gay marriage in France, this festival’s jury could be accused of weighing in with a political verdict but perhaps this will be a catalyst for giving cinema a new voice. Eyebrows have definitely been raised. This is far more controversial than last year, when Michael Haneke won the Palme d’Or for the second time in his career with Amour. Not only have Spielberg and Co upset the odds here, they have also issued an invitation to the likes of BAFTA and the Academy award judges to join the debate. But will they?

Unlike last year’s crop of Hollywood productions flooded with big name actors, this year saw a greater mix of Italian, French and even Japanese movies, although the female directors still haven’t quite broken through. Favourite Inside Lleweyn Davis took the Grand Prix, with Oscar Isaac receiving high acclaim for his role as a folk singer in 1960’s New York. This is also worth checking out if you want to see Carey Mulligan sing with Justin Timberlake, which of course you do. One theme that does seem to continue from Cannes 2012 is a keenness to shun the OTT. Soderbergh’s latest Behind the Candelabra failed to make an impact even though Matt Damon (aka Jason Bourne) dons a wig and ridiculous make-up as Liberace’s young lover Scott Thorson. Likewise, Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring has received a mixed response despite opening the Un Certain Regard category. Emma Watson swaps Hermione for hussy in this crime story playing Nicki, a pole-dancing yoga teacher who joins a celebrity-obsessed group of girls in robbing various Hollywood stars. Still distancing herself from the HP franchise, this may finally do for Watson what Cosmopolis did for Robert Pattinson.

Full of controversy, excitement and intrigue, there is never a dull moment at Cannes. The question now is who will prevail at the box office. Soderbergh’s glitz and glitter? The Coen’s folk-singers? Or Kechiche’s young lovers? Only time will tell…

Up the Women is the new BBC Four sitcom penned by Twenty-Twelve and Spaced star, Jessica Hynes. Set in 1910 in a village hall in the Oxfordshire countryside, the Banbury Intricate Craft Circle convene every week to stuff their faces with Victoria sponge and pretend to cross-stitch. But change is afoot. Margaret (Hynes), a deeply intelligent, patient woman who writes love poems about Ovid and makes jokes about Newton’s third law, has been swept up in a women’s suffrage march on a visit to London. She finds it so empowering that she becomes determined to bring the same fighting spirit to Oxfordshire, by proposing to rename the group ‘The Banbury Intricate Craft Circle Frankly Demands Women’s Suffrage’.

Unfortunately, bringing the women’s movement to Oxfordshire is not going to be quite so easy. The megalomaniac matriarch of the craft circle, Helen (Rebecca Front), finds the idea horrifying. ‘Women,’ she says, with frosty determination, ‘should not have the vote. We are simple, weak, emotional creatures.’ Not to mention that all the suffragettes are ‘mannish, flat-footed, bottom-heavy spinsters’. She immediately becomes the founding member of The Banbury Anti-Suffrage League, and takes the ginger parkin with her. Will Margaret be able to convince the rest of the group to fight for their right to vote?

Hynes and Front are fantastically funny as always, but unfortunately the sophisticated characterisation of Margaret and Helen does not extend to the rest of the female cast. Raucous grandmother Myrtle is predatory in her approach to flirtation, Eva’s thick as two short planks and is single-wombedly responsible for maintaining the Banbury population, Emily’s bottom lip juts out so far it could be seen all the way from Kidlington, and Gwen is an ineffectual babbler who (we are reminded every two minutes) has never found a husband.

There’s nothing groundbreaking here, and the humour occasionally falls back on bawdy jokes, made worse by a grating laughter track. Make no mistake: this is a tame sitcom. But as conventional comedy goes, Jessica Hynes has done an admirable job. Up the Women’s quaintness is endearing, its mockery of gender norms gently incisive, and Hynes’s mansplaining-induced grimaces painfully familiar. I am looking forward to seeing the characters and plotlines develop as the series continues. Whoever said feminists don’t have a sense of humour?

★★★★☆

The Sunset Limited, a dramatic novel by Cormac McCarthy (author of The Road and No Country for Old Men, both adapted into feature films), is the story of Black and White (the two characters’s actual names are never revealed). White attempts to commit suicide by throwing himself in front of the Sunset Limited, the train linking Louisiana to California, and Black saves his life and brings him back to her bed-sit where their conversation forms the whole content of the play.

Sophie Ablett and Sam Ereira, Black and White respectively, indicating their skin colour and the social divides deriving from it, create a compelling dynamic through their conversation. At first Black has the upper hand as she quizzes White on the reasoning behind his suicide attempt, and tries to share her religious faith with him. White is a professor and an atheist, and his depression and despair are clear with lines such as “You see what it is you’ve saved!” and “It sickens me to see myself in others.” Ereira’s portrayal of a man on the brink of suicide is convincing and deeply moving. Ablett’s mastery of the deep Southern accent is impressive and unfaltering, and its contrast with Ereira’s smoother accent indicates the class divide and reflects their totally opposite lives, confronting here in the stifling atmosphere of the apartment. White, overwhelmed and irritated by Black’s complete confidence in God and life, attempts to leave at several intervals during the play, and Black stops him, saying she will accompany him to his apartment. Her unfaltering care is explained when she reveals that she helps drunks and crack addicts regularly. She assures White that he “wants what everyone wants, wants to be loved by God.”

The conversation moves in circles, sometimes frustratingly so, but the actors deal with the intensity of the script so well that the over-arching themes come through and the dynamic of the relationship is always clear. Gradually White takes the upper hand from Black, and his professorial arrogance comes out as he flat-out denies Black’s faith, and the strength of Ereira’s explosive performance at the end is such that it noticeably shakes Black’s faith. “I don’t want God’s love”, he shouts, and the door of the bed-sit, as he’s about to exit, becomes symbolic: “Who is out there? I want to rush to nuzzle his bony cheek!”. Ablett makes a great show of Black’s despair, now that the tables have turned and White has exited to his faithless world. The theme of language, running through the play, is picked up again at the end when she confronts God and asks him why he “didn’t give her the words” to convince White.

An intense, confrontational conversation is well played out by the two talented actors, and the stifling space of the apartment is turned into an area of intellectual and cultural exchange. Ablett and Ereira are fascinating to watch, and though the play is necessarily a bit static, the acting makes the most of the space. The Sunset Limited will be showing from Monday to Thursday, at 11 in the morning (for this is the time the action takes place), at the Michael Pilch Studio, on Jowett Walk. The incentive of brunch included with the ticket should not be needed to convince you all to go and watch this new, rare American gem on the Oxford theatre scene.