★★★☆☆
Three Stars

A Day in the Death of Joe Egg starts with a bang and goes on with an onslaught of emotional and intellectual attacks from there. The play touches upon human relationships in almost every conceivable way, familial, friendly, romantic, and does so throughout the play, constantly adding nuances to each as the story progresses. Although, at points, the audience does seem to wonder “How much can I find out about a family in one and a half hours?” This is counteracted by the characters’ monologues – and dialogues, in fact – which appeal directly to the audience. They are emphasising the fact that you are intruding in a voyeuristic way however long you stay, so you might as well stay for the ride.

Which would, indeed, be worth your while. The actors are all extremely competent and bring off their characters with a flair and personal style – notably, Brian (Sam Ward) assuming different roles as his character relives his past. The character of Sheila – played very well by Claudia Hill – is the simple woman but ultimate mother figure. Their friends Freddie and Pam and the late appearance of Brian’s mother, Grace, though the characters are not quite fleshed out, are also worth mentioning in that they achieve what they were supposed to. They add to the chaotic atmosphere being constructed by Brian and Sheila’s emotional breakdown, accentuated by Jo’s physical one.  

The impression of a stable family home, slowly revealing all its wear and tear, is quickly established by an impressive set – probably about as furnished as the BT is going to get – and solid lighting which was not imposing but fully complemented the action onstage. One of the audience’s first impressions is that a lot of work has gone into this production.

Though well-done and with a general quickness and fluidity in deliveries and interactions, it is not completely polished, with a few lines too many lines going astray to be written off as first-night nerves. Thankfully, the cast does not let that affect them, and are able to quickly cover and move on without creating any awkwardness. Strangely enough, the play seems to be constantly trying to be awkward then veering off it into the genuinely thought-out. The beginning which calls for slight audience interaction, freezes the audience then serves to break the ice. When Jo was brought on, I prepared to cringe, but it never happened. Disability done by someone fully able onstage can quickly turn into something offensive and her frequent seizures could easily have been either ridiculous or disturbing. This was certainly not the case at all. Lucy Delaney’s performance was finely-tuned  and understated enough to find the balance between realism and aesthetic representation.

All in all, the emotional back-and-forth and the inability to decide which character to identify with is not for everyone. However, if the limits of people, whether physical, intellectual or emotional, portrayed with subtlety and care are of any interest to you, head to the BT.

★★★★☆
Four Stars

Never before have I laughed so much in a play that I’ve cried. Never before have I seen an audience burst into spurts of applause mid-scene. Never before have I seen a man with an afro as big as Dylan Townley’s. This is all explained, since never before have I been to an Imps production. 

The Play’s the Thing is a heavily improvised tragicomedy, following an entirely new plot each night. Townley and Tom Skelton (who also directed the piece) rely wholly on the audience for the main character’s names, the female lead’s dream, the setting of the play, as well as the focus of their metaphors. Tonight, Patrick and Miranda from the second row gave the characters their names, with an old man at the back choosing the setting of Florence. Metaphors about flowers were cleverly dropped in throughout the piece in the most unlikely of places, with Dom O Keefe at one point shouting, “Although as quiet as a daisy, with this sword I’ll stab you like crazy!” 

However, the most attractive aspect of this play was not the ear lobe humour, tangerine jokes or drunken debauchery; it was the fact that the audience who see this play tomorrow evening will probably not understand a single one of those references. The cast have an obviously close relationship and excellent chemistry, allowing them to play off each other with skill and precision, almost always ending in hilarity for the audience. We become absorbed in the play and the actors, with scripted and unscripted scenes merging seamlessly to create fresh and witty comedy. The idea that Sylvia Bishop can come up with a long soliloquy on her death bed seems outrageous, as is Skelton’s brilliant caricature of a monk, attempting to contact God telepathically through lifting his leg and screwing up his face.

But beneath all the silliness and the jokes, the play was fundamentally rooted in Shakespeare. Archaic, Shakespearean English was used throughout The Play’s the Thing – the cast appearing to relish the “thou”s and “hast”s they threw into their sentences. The core of the play merely highlights the intelligence with which it was put together, and the final, death scene emphasises this with the last character left standing bearing a striking resemblance to Ludovico in Othello.

It was funny, it was clever, it mocked English tutors; go and see it.

Hearing something truly original is a music geek’s greatest high, but it has a rough comedown: the realization that, once what’s new wears out, there’s nothing else quite like it to obsess over. For those of us who’ve played Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d city into submission, there’s always a constellation of influences and collaborators to chart, but there’s nowhere to turn for so much of what makes Kendrick unique: a knack for mimicking the best and caricaturing the worst of two decades of rap; a shape-shifting sense of perspective that rejects boilerplate-rap narcissism in favour of self-probing, ventriloquism, and flights of abstraction; and a fluency in the narratives that propel songs, consolidate albums, inhibit individuals, define generations. Want more of that? You’ll have to wait for the next album.
Until then, try something even better than a substitute: Schoolboy Q’s Habits & Contradictions. Schoolboy Q, real name Quincy Matthew Hanley, is Kendrick’s fellow member in the L.A. rap collective Black Hippy. Technically, he’s Kendrick’s closest competitor; stylistically, he’s Kendrick’s polar opposite. Where Kendrick is socially-minded, coolly candid, and irrepressibly idealistic, Schoolboy’s trapped in his head, puffed up on hot air, lodged in the drug-marinated moment. Kendrick tells stories; Schoolboy clowns around.
Kendrick homes in on the ‘Real’; Schoolboy gets ‘Druggy wit Hoes Again’. Kendrick’s album is intercut with his parents’ voicemails, a one-way conversation tethering him to family, tradition, and security. Schoolboy? He prefers ‘Sexting’.
Whenever Kendrick’s and Schoolboy’s antithetical approaches converge on the same subject, Schoolboy always holds his own. Take ‘Hands on the Wheel’, the most seductive—and sinister—of Schoolboy’s many drug anthems. Egged on by A$AP Rocky, rap’s reigning champion of shallowness, Schoolboy  shamelessly admits to an awful lot of questionable activities, plus one unquestionably awful one (drunk driving). Where Kendrick’s ‘Swimming Pools (Drank)’ could press pause on the drunken present to meditate on family history and the schizophrenic mindset of an addict, Schoolboy’s appetite is unwilling to negotiate: ‘Let’s get stupid high, to where I can’t reply / Love smokin’ dope, I won’t compromise.’
The album’s most surprising moments transmute these superhuman habits into human contradictions, perforating Schoolboy’s blown-up alpha-male persona with pinpricks of real life. On ‘Blessed’, a ballad that revolves around the death of a friend’s son, Schoolboy struggles to console his friend with something more meaningful than money, weed, or empty platitudes. Kendrick, in a motivational-speaker-grade guest verse, preaches redemption, but all Schoolboy can honestly offer is his condolences. When Schoolboy unites this inner realist with his outer party animal, he writes the album’s best track, ‘There He Go’. A day in the life of Q, exuberantly recited over a shimmering piano loop, it’s ‘Empire State of Mind’ for the 99%, or anyone whose 99 problems comprise the chequered fortunes of daily life: betting on
a basketball game and losing, evading your hook-up’s boyfriend then realizing he’s a fan, worrying about money but scrounging enough to swag out your two-year-old daughter. Rapping at his show-offy best, Schoolboy modulates his timbre back and forth between a gritty growl and a hyperventilating, helium-high falsetto. By the time he gets to the hook, he’s breathless, flabbergasted, sounding almost incredulous: ‘THERE HE GO?! SCHOOL! BOY! THERE HE GO?!?’ Even he can’t believe he’s this good.

Dan Smith, lead singer and creative force behind Bastille, has built up a reputation as a perfectionist, partly through the constant delaying of the release of his debut album, Bad Blood, and it’s quickly made clear from talking to him that this is not entirely unjustified. Speaking about the fact that many of his songs will already be familiar to fans of the band, he says that while it feels a bit odd to re-release so much material, they’ve attempted to improve on their previous versions. “We want to
give a good impression to both people who have liked us and people who’ll be new to the band,” Smith says, passionately.
Bastille are indeed gathering momentum, and have just wrapped up a tour supporting Two Door Cinema Club, during which they will doubtless have picked up many new fans. Talking to Smith shortly before the band heads off, he seems very excited, having never done a support tour before, and intrigued by the different experience of playing to “people who potentially don’t give a shit.”
That tour is followed by the band’s own biggest one yet with a whopping 19 dates. The tour has sold out, with over 15,000 tickets bought, something Smith calls, “pretty incomprehensible.” He further explains that Bastille’s music changes during live performances; the songs get “bigger and beefier” live. He likes this; feeling that people who’ve heard the record and come to see the band perform deserve to see some musical progression on stage. The rest of the time, it sounds like Bastille definitely know how to have fun, going out almost every night while on tour and “catching up on films” during the day.
Film is something that Smith has a serious interest in, and he sees many of his songs as having “their own tone and atmosphere.” He also says that many are “like a little scene or a moment of dialogue captured from a bigger story.” The cinematic aspect of Bastille’s music comes across strongly in songs such as ‘Pompeii’, a dialogue between two charred skeletons, victims of the famous eruption of Vesuvius. The song considers the fact that they’ll be stuck in this moment of time forever, immortalized in death, which is an excellent example of Smith’s ability to take a well-known story and use it to say something else as well. He says that when he was writing ‘Daniel in the Den’ he “wanted to write a song about dreams and paranoia and that seemed a really good way to go about it.”
‘Laura Palmer’ is named after the deceased central figure of the David Lynch TV show Twin Peaks, and Smith talks at great length of his love for Lynch and Twin Peaks in particular, saying that “it’s fascinating to see how someone can present an image of themselves as something totally different.” He says a lot more about the show and its influences on him, though he admits that there may be more ideas about Laura Palmer in his head than in the song (“I love it so I can talk about it for hours, sorry!”).
Smith clearly revels in discussing his music and his band, and seems genuinely sad to finish the interview, but, then, he does have a sell-out UK tour to get on with.
Bastille’s debut album, Bad Blood, is released on March 9th. The band play the O2 Academy Oxford on March 22nd.

★★★☆☆
Three Stars

There is no doubting that Eels’ tenth album is a solid effort. It’s well crafted, moving from the gritty defiance of the first track ‘Bombs Away’ through the more tender moments which lie at the heart of this album, and ending with more upbeat tracks such as the simple yet uplifting ‘You’re My Friend’. It’s an interesting, enjoyable listen, but the problem is, you know Eels can do so much better, inevitably leading to a nagging sense of disappointment. The chilling moments of their 1998 album Electro Shock Blues did more than bring me close to tears; they put a shiver in my heart. These moments are entirely absent from Wonderful, Glorious, leaving the listener with a set of fairly understated, snarling, occasionally sensitive tunes. Everett’s coarse singing style is in danger of getting tiresome, though the run of more optimistic songs in the middle, especially ‘On the Ropes’, saves the album from actually doing so.
The softer moments of this album are certainly its strongest, with their quiet optimism and gentle guitar riffs. The rebellious, rough style of much of the album is too guarded to be truly powerful, and the aggressive snarl of the guitars grates on the ears, rather than playing on the soul like his previous work. ‘Peach Blossom’, with its rambling monologues halfway through and blaring sound effects is the low point of the album: aimless, dull and repetitive.
E has had a famously tragic life, so it is perhaps not surprising that his best work is to be found in his more melancholy songs. It is wonderful to hear more upbeat music coming from Everett, if this means he is feeling happier. However, on an entirely selfish level, I much prefer listening to his more tortured, emotionally exposed works. Wonderful, Glorious is a good listen but the overall result is slightly
flat. That said, real sincerity lies behind that gruff voice, and it’s a joy to hear Everett singing a more upbeat tune.

★★★★★
Five Stars

In 1991 My Bloody Valentine released their album Loveless. The creative pinnacle of the shoegaze genre, it is widely regarded as being pretty much perfect. It is the paradigm example of the eternally lauded album, so much so that it has gained an almost mythical status. 22 years later and MBV have now finally released the follow up, m b v. Both the legendary status of its predecessor and the fact that it has been in the pipeline for longer than I have been on this earth make reviewing it a some-what daunting prospect.
It doesn’t help matters that any attempt at describing the music MBV make will be horribly inadequate, inevitably ending up clichéd. In fact you could easily create an automatic MBV description generator by randomly combining adjectives like lush, warm, soft, dream-like, swirling, hypnotic, ethereal, dizzying with nouns like noise, melody, layers/waves/walls of sound, textures, rhythms etc.
The first several tracks serve as an effortless reminder of the sheer beauty of MBV’s unique form of noise. That familiar omnipresent distortion and reverb washes over you; you hear
the searing guitar melodies and completely forget that this album has been 22 years in the waiting. Chronology becomes irrelevant when the music is this exciting. It is quite remarkable that MBV have gone so long between releases, and have come back sounding just as brilliant as when they left off.
The end of the album delivers the clearest point of departure from Loveless, the last two tracks are mind-blowingly weird, intense and difficult. Perhaps they make most sense as some kind of psycho-aural-experiments, almost closer in resemblance to contemporary art than anything conventionally musical. But in an age where so much music is so very boring, MBV’s commitment to producing radically original sounds should be applauded. m b v was always destined to be ‘not as good as Loveless’ and that fate hasn’t been avoided. But what is so much more important is the fact that noise hasn’t sounded this good in a very, very long time.