by Oskar Cox-JensenWhat to do with a post-cancer comeback single, your first in four years? Get a crack songwriting team to pen an innovative, glorious modern classic, hinting at personal trauma? Or nick a so-middle-of-the-road-it’s-pedestrian track from a band too obscure to have a Wikipedia entry?

Obviously the latter. ‘2 Hearts,’ written and produced by London outfit Kish Mauve, is hardly the daring departure it’s been heralded as. Its electro bleeps and whirs are awfully polite and incidental, its structure and backing as simple as could be. And there’s something a little embarrassing about a 39-year-old Kylie singing empty teen clichés about love, especially in such a pouting, coquettish, breathless manner. This is the musical equivalent of your maiden aunt putting on her face, throwing a mink fur over her shoulder and mincing off down the kerb.

It’s also rather good. The melody is too repetitive, too asinine, too easy – in other words, it’s perfect pop. It’s under three minutes – always a bonus. And there’s this amazing, redeeming backing ‘whoo!’ in every chorus that reminds me of LCD Soundsystem.  But it’s neither as brilliant, nor as irritating, as ‘Can’t Get You Out Of My Head.’ Tune.

by Elen Griffiths“I’m losing my memory, saving my face…” is the refrain of KT Tunstall’s newly released single, ‘Saving My Face’. “I’m all out of love, all out of faith,” she sings powerfully, “I would give everything, just for a taste”. For a taste of what though? These predictably cryptic lyrics make this song one of Tunstall’s edgy-yet-mainstream songs, placed firmly in the pop genre by the strong beat and guitar riffs.
Tunstall first broke into the music scene with her song ‘Black Horse and the Cherry Tree’, described by her website as a ‘one-woman blues-stomp,’ which wooed the public with its quirky, folksy lyrics and upbeat pace. By comparison, Tunstall’s new song is disappointingly unoriginal; it sounds much like the other mediocre offerings on her first album.
Yet that is what many listeners will like about it: ‘Saving My Face’ intertwines Tunstall’s very distinctive voice with that strong beat,  predictably crescendoing to a powerful chorus at the end. People who really enjoyed Tunstall’s previous albums will have difficulty finding fault with this track; but it is too similar, and the lyrics too predictably edgy, to really hail it as a new and exciting song.

by Paul BlakeHow to describe The Ironweed Project? Probably safest to call it electronica, but with a big dollup of the blues mixed in. Aniff Akinola (aka Ironweed) has set out to mix the Mississippi Delta with the UK dance music scene, and he’s done a pretty good job of it. Having said that, Ironweed isn’t that revolutionary; there isn’t much in here you couldn’t find in parts of Moby, Groove Armada or Massive Attack. The blues influence is normally limited to a repeated blues-guitar riff, a deep-south feel in the lyrics and the occasional bit of organ or harmonica.

The album starts strong with a jaunty country guitar riff over a background crackle and a monologue describing 1940s Mississippi in Aniff’s wonderfully deep and scratchy voice. Good so far, but it’s the appearance of the electronic drumbeats that let you know you’re in for something more special. The next track, ‘She Wore Hi Heels’, although very good, doesn’t have the same degree of blues influence that sets apart the first track, and rest of the album doesn’t really live up to that initial excitement. Having said that, it’s still very good, albeit in a more conventional hip-hop or electronica fashion. Ironweed shows he can master tunes suitable for clubbing, like ‘Brown Sugar’, or thoughtful techno like ‘All By Myself’. Even the tracks I found most annoying on the album – ‘Boom Boom Clap’ and ‘Lets Swim Like Wales’ – are irksome most of all for the catchiness of their repetitious tunes.

Listening to this album, what I wanted to hear more of was the blues influence that Ironweed is trumpeting as his selling point and that makes him stand out. It isn’t that the blues guitar and monologues about life in Southern prisons make the music better – they just make it more exciting. Lots of people will probably find this music a bit too odd for their tastes, which is a shame. But if you have an open-minded interest in music, a love of the blues or electronica, (or even better all three!) I would definitely recommend giving this a listen.

by Thomas CorcoranHolywell Music Room, 6/11/07“In stuff, there is less stuff than nothing.” Thus speaks Mark R. Taylor, lecturer in Music at Brasenose, in his exposition of the theories behind his composition of a Piano Trio, which was performed alongside the trios of Ravel and Fauré by the Shelley Trio through the OU Music Society in the Hollywell Music Room last Tuesday. We all know the atomic analogies he is alluding to – the nucleus “like a pin-head in a football field in Basingstoke”, the electrons like members of the crowd round the pitch. Taylor has tried to apply these basic theories of matter to music: by attempting to produce a piece of music in which “there is more nothing than stuff”, he hopes that what is there – “the stuff” – should coalesce into a musical form. That is, for about every note of music in the piece, there are five or six bars of silence.
The result? Something unbearable. Taylor asked us before the performance “not to ponder what mindset he was in” when he composed it in 1999; to be frank, I wouldn’t want to, though I would suppose that it was something that somehow managed to encapsulate both “thoroughly demented” and “mind-bogglingly tedious”. Sitting sanctimonoiusly in a conducting position before the trio of pianist Geoffrey Lim, cellist Alice Hyland and violinist Christopher Tarrant, he emphatically signalled to them when to play each note. Without attacking all forms of conceptualist music out of hand, it could be said that this sort of music is to be written, and not performed – at least when I, and anybody else with an ear for aesthetics, is in the room. A continual repetition of notes at long intervals for twenty minutes cannot produce aesthetically pleasing music. I have never fallen asleep in a music concert, but this was surely the closest I have ever, and ever will, come to doing so. But ultimately, I didn’t fall asleep, because this strange sight – of three individuals playing a note, then pausing for about ten seconds, before playing another and pausing for another ten seconds, with utter concentration at this futile task, while a man sitting before them ceremoniously accompanies each note with a sweep of his hands – did not make me fall asleep, but could only make me burst out laughing at the bizarre absurdity of the whole concept.

by Michael BennettI find Sarah minutes after the biggest show she’s ever played. How does she feel? “Everyone always asks that!” she says, and then answers “really excited but nervous at the same time”. Sarah had just headlined the first Top of the Ox, which organizers hope will become an annual event that showcases local talent. Launched early this year, Top of the Ox was a competition in which local artists could submit tracks to be made available on the competition website. Listeners then voted by text for their favorite song. Sarah happened on the competition on the Internet one day and decided to enter. “I had just come out of the studio a couple of weeks before and I thought, I’m going to upload one of my songs just for fun, see what happens.”

Sarah performed on a grand piano with a string quartet as well as drums and guitar, and says she was strongly influenced by her classical training. Keane, Coldplay and Missy Higgins provide more modern influences which show in her winning song (and soon-to-be-first-single), ‘Secret’. Perhaps because of these classical influcences, her style possibly doesn’t lend itself best to live performance. By the time Sarah got to the stage in the 4½ hour event the audience had thinned out, leaving only well-dressed Christ Churchers looking like they’d never been to a gig before. Still, her music certainly is popular, beating runners-up Stornoway by more than a thousand votes. The site’s still up, so you can decide for yourself.

Alternatively, you could wait till February, when her single and video will be released, part of her prize for winning the competition. After recording finishes she hopes she’ll be playing more gigs, though there are no firm plans as yet. Apart from headlining at the Academy and releasing a single, Sarah also won a thousand pounds (the part that probably sounds most exciting to most of us). Sarah told me she’d already spent a lot of the money on the concert itself hiring the grand piano and string quartet, determined to “honour the opportunity.” The rest of the money will probably be spent on a keyboard, ploughing the prize money back into her embryonic career.

She’s still an Oxford finalist after all though, and I asked her how she plans to deal with that at the same time? Apparently, she’s “trying not to think about it!”

by Ann CoatsThere used to be an old record shop down the street where I live. A guy called Jerry owned the place. Drainpipe threads, grey highlighted hair slicked back into a rat’s tail, wizened face, a few days’ patchy stubble, black T-shirt under genuinely faded denim. Jerry loved his music. He had all the vinyl in plastic sleeves, lovingly labelled with a C to A quality system. Blues, jazz, rock, metal, hip hop – all were there in neat rows. Sure, the records were dusty, stained and smelt like a rolled-up rug in an attic, but Jerry and his shop were cool, back in the days when cool was easy, right down to the ancient gig posters on the wall, the slightly sticky floor, and the VHS tapes of long-lost bands lining the wall.
He’s gone now, but Jerry was the pall-bearer for a long-lost purity of faith. His rock-fan routine was in no way affected, the grooves in his records were scratched through excess of playing, not carelessness. His was a deep sense of admiration, of constancy, loyalty. Every note on his tattered copy of Live/Dead he’d studied and assimilated.

Jerry was a fan and a mythmaker, the cause and effect of rock and roll culture. He was as much of an artist as the musicians he listened to; his own arbiter of taste. He had the whole artistic credibility gig down to a T. He wasn’t talking about revolution, it was always love, power and loyalty, and whether these truths are enough. Sure, Oasis love The Beatles, sure the Stones loved Muddy Waters, but what does that actually mean? Loyalty is too often equated with hagiography. Jerry deified his heroes, because he felt, through the private aural experience of listening to a record, that they spoke to him. Like reading books that effect a mood or an atmosphere, the best records create an alternative culture or universe, where everything within that space relates to everything else. The individual becomes involved inside this sphere and this creates the illusion of empathy, in turn powerful enough to give birth to emulation.

This in itself is an inevitable issue, a crisis of influence, that only the best artists can transcend. Back before the press and the critical circle that grew up around the music industry, artists wanted to please other artists. Record labels knew their returns weren’t going to be massive, so their investments weren’t so great. The machinery of TV marketing, magazine placement and music videos didn’t feature. The oft-spat at multinational record companies with their ‘tyranny’ of artistic control is actually a salute to the potential for music to reach Everyman in a way that other art forms have really been unable to do. Music is the ultimate combination of the private and the public experience and changes accordingly. It’s something to enjoy in the comfort of a room as well as in a large, unpleasant venue with thousands of others. No other art form really comes close to the objective power that represents.

Artistic credibility is ultimately a question of control and transcendence, harder to effect in this Internet age. Now the arbiters of credibility are not the musicians themselves, the competition is less between artists for creative leapfrogging, but between record labels for commercial gain. Back in the ‘60s, if you knew the blues and could get a residency at the Marquee Club, that’s all you needed. Now the industry is so bloated, and artistic relevance so convoluted that making the connection is much harder, often nigh-on impossible. The Arctic Monkeys phenomenon was more down to the fortunate fusion of technology with enthusiasm than a conscious effort to define artistic credibility.

Controlling influence and preventing it overriding the musician’s natural creativity is the harder skill. Rock and roll, and latterly rap and hip hop, has always been a way of vocalising power, of representing the psychology of control in a musical language. Rock and roll and blues was an illusory expression of looseness, a freedom within a tight musical structure. Artistic credibility is about sustaining this link between freedom and control, a job harder now as the line between performer and audience is constantly influenced by other parties.

This question of artistic credibility also now faces the inevitable problem of an ever-widening cliff-face of influences. Back in the early ‘60s, if you were cool it was blues you were listening to, along with rock and roll. This made the performer-audience link easier to establish and maintain because their reference points were the same, to the extent that riffs and sequences were swapped and appropriated between musicians with the audience in full collusion and agreement. This created an interlocking framework of musical matrices, where the aural link was clear, cool and elite. Modern pop/rock music has so many contrasting influences that the heady whiff of the past confuses the music. This leads us to the final point about artistic credibility: it only matters if the audience are aware of the reference points the performer is using. If they are not, the comparisons are pointless and irrelevant, a sobering point for Jerry as he dusts down his promo-only copy of Marquee Moon. But this in itself is the outstretched arm between performer and audience and has its roots in the power concept. Knowing the reference point gives you, the listener, power both to feel involved with the band and the extra sense of belonging that community gives the individual.

Jerry might have been in love with his bands, but what he really digs is the power the music itself abstractly represents, the power it gives him as a member of an elite, knowledgeable collective, and the power of identification with another individual, which is, after all, what the truly artistic performer needs and what the audience wants and will pay for. Artistic credibility: it’s just the redistribution of power.

by Phil AherneMetal in its original ‘70s form ran its course through the ‘80s and was overtaken by grunge in the major consumer market. Then that progressed into Post-Hardcore. After the boundaries had been stretched to breaking point, some clever chap had the inspired idea to fuse it with jazz. Thus, JAZZ-METAL was born. A blessing to all, as I’m sure you agree.

One of the first pioneers of jazz-metal was band called The Dillinger Escape Plan. Critics also termed their style ‘math metal’ due to the precision and skill required to combine these two diametric styles. Second album Miss Machine came out five years after their debut, and is an impressive collection of songs, ranging from the incoherent ‘Panasonic Youth’ to the elegantly refined ‘Unretrofied’. The music is layered and dense, and yields to many re-plays. Unfortunately, that does not essentially make it catchy. It is very much an acquired taste – incorporating jazz-chords in grinding thrash is a majestic form of dissonance.

One of the beauties of jazz-metal is its uncompromising nature, and its need to forever express itself in new ways. Thus on DEP’s new album Ire Works, which has just been released, the single ‘Black Bubblegum’ displays the catchy and commercial edge to the style, whilst also pushing it into a more electric/industrial edge. And just to prove that they can still grind and shred, ‘Fix Your Face’ and ‘Horse Hunter’ assert the brutality that characterised the genre.

As their guitarist Ben Weinman asserted on Radio 1, their approach to the new album was to have an ‘empty pallete and empty canvas, just to create.’ Free from constraints and restrictions, jazz-metal is its own monster.

It is a sentiment echoed by Ephel Duath’s 2003 album The Painter’s Pallete. As the band has it: ‘Ephel Duath is the mountain range that defends the kingdom of evil in Tolkien’s masterpiece. The band’s sound is a mixtures of jazz colours, rock-metal thorns and experimental landscapes.’ Ephel Duath are long serving pioneers of the genre, but their lack of widespread success is indicative of the genre’s inaccessibility. The lack of commercial popularity however, does not detract from its achievement, nor the accomplished skill necessary to create such complex music. Greg Puciato lyrically asserts that ‘the paragraph has never been so empty’. Thank goodness that’s not true.

by Emily PackerEver since William Blake declared Milton to be of the Devil’s party without knowing it, artists in all media have relied on exceptional villains to provide a creative jolt to old storylines, and add a certain measure of twisted appeal to their dramatic repertoire. In the world of film, where directors have visual as well as verbal means at hand, some villains become so iconic as to eclipse not only their virtuous opponents, but the movies in which they appear altogether.

The villains that linger longest in the public consciousness – Dracula, Frankenstein, even the Joker – are not so much men as magnificent monsters. They hover before us not as human beings but as collections of visual cues or as personifications of a horrible ideal. For instance, Darth Vader, that hoary old devil of science fiction, once petrified audiences with no more than a face-masking helmet and an unnatural union of man and machine. So famous are Vader’s voice and appearance that his past and his eventual redemption are almost beside the point; when we think of Star Wars’ most famous villain, we think not of his rather hackneyed character-arc but of the heavy breathing, the easily-parodied catchphrases and the inability to retain qualified subordinates.

Yet however enduring these eminent monsters, portraying them in film is often a thankless job; think only of how many tired jokes James Earl Jones must have to endure in the queue at the supermarket. Assignments in villainy that yield more productive careers – and Oscars – tend to be of a more subtle sort; evil that is equally foreign and implacable, but hidden behind an unlikely face. One such face is that of Louise Fletcher’s Nurse Ratched in a much-lauded adaptation of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. In Kesey’s novel, the author’s misogyny flexes itself in a portrayal of mental-hospital warden as lurid, emasculating witch. But the film departs from the book in the inspired casting of an actress who is girlishly plump, superlatively average: exactly the sort of mild, beleaguered professional whom you’d expect to find in the whitewashed halls of a sterile ward. When she halts the rebellious hero in his tracks with a rebuff in that bland, serenely infantilising coo, we perceive just as he does that he is up against an institution incarnate; an ethos of control unassailable by mortal man.

Under the aegis of a Czech director, Nurse Ratched becomes not only a single power-mad official but a symbol for the social oppression perpetrated by Communism and all systems like it. The Nurse belongs, in that capacity, to another popular category of adversary: villain as social diagnosis, bringing to life the disturbing extremes beneath a familiar cultural or national cliché. In American Psycho, Christian Bale, trimmed and buffed to a gym-bland perfection, plays Patrick Bateman, a Wall Street shark so consumed by the quest for money and status that he murders a colleague who one-ups him with a supremely elegant new business card. “Look at that subtle off-white coloring. The tasteful thickness of it,” deadpans Bale, the very voice of helpless envy. “Oh, my God. It even has a watermark.” Bale’s performance transforms a lone psychopath into a rather hilarious satire on a culture that pursues the most exclusive dinner reservations, office stationery, and – at least in this instance – thrill kills simply to escape ennui.

Yet however compelling a Vader or a Ratched or a Bateman, they are ultimately the object of our gaze rather than the agent of it; we marvel at them, but we do not inhabit them. It takes a more recognisably human villain to submerge the viewer in the mind of a fiend. For instance, Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley plays deftly with the viewer’s social instincts by exploring how old class resentments can curdle into murderous rage in the psyche of a scrawny everyman. Mistaken by a shipping magnate for a college friend of his son’s, restroom attendant Tom Ripley lies his way into an all-expenses-paid vacation to Italy to reclaim the errant scion. Having met his quarry and succumbed by slow degrees to obsessive jealousy, Ripley brutally murders the dissolute heir on his boat. Yet as Minghella again and again contrasts our weedy villain with his rich, handsome, leisured counterpart, he summons the latent sympathies of the nerdy, ostracized young exile inside all of us, and we are left with the furtive feeling that the golden playboy perhaps got what he deserved. A villain of the Ripley sort often becomes the film’s most sympathetic protagonist, because he is an outcast in a world of glittering insiders, a man with whom we can easily, though reluctantly, identify. It is very easy to see oneself as a Salieri, for instance, but much less so to imagine oneself a Mozart – so our affinities are at once with the thwarted and scheming mediocrity, not the giggling, filthy-minded imp blessed by the gods.

The Ripleys and Salieris of the world of film are, to me, its most frightening villains. Very few of us will ever have to reckon with Dracula or Leatherface in a dark alley, but each of us might become the prey of a resentful rival, or be tricked by these same vengeful victims into unwilling empathy. The most memorable villainy is in the end that which is closest to home: the dangerous gleam in a neighbour’s eye, the flickering shadow at the end of a dark lane, or the suspicion that even you, in a certain set of circumstances, could somehow find yourself as the black hat.

by Adam BurrowsWoody Allen’s Manhattan has produced one of film’s most memorable and iconographic love scenes. Mary (Diane Keaton) and Ike (Woody Allen) meet at a party and ride home in a cab together. At first Mary plays coy to Ike’s subtle and sharp wit. But soon, his humour wins her over, and their midnight stroll takes them to a bench by the 59th Street Bridge, looking over the river and watching the sunrise. Douglas Brode thinks this scene perhaps the movie’s strongest moment: “In the film’s most unforgettable image, Mary and Isaac grow deeply involved with one another on a wistful New York late-night interlude.” Accompanied by Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch Over Me”, sumptuously photographed in black and white by cinematographer Gordon Willis, the scene is irresistibly romantic.
But behind Ike and Mary’s blossoming relationship, like all other attachments in Manhattan, is a dysfunction which will cause future upset. As the couple come to rest for the scene’s final shot on the river bank, Allen shows his genius for composing a single image which both romanticises and disrupts the moment. The wide-screen format used by Allen in the film allows for the positioning of Mary and Ike to the extreme right of the frame. The industrial towers to the extreme left of the frame disrupt the visual harmony and contribute to the feeling of disjunction about the couple.They appear dwarfed by the magnificent and imposing bridge which dominates the shot.

The characters even comment on the beauty of the city as Ike says “This city is really a great city, I don’t care what anyone says.” But his enthusiasm is met with a harsh rebuke from Mary, who reminds Ike that she has a lunch date with another man later that day.

Mary’s sudden realisation of other personal engagements occurs in the context of what we already know about the characters themselves. Ike is dating a 17-year old schoolgirl, perhaps to overcome the depression of his failed marriage. Mary is the dutiful mistress to Yale, a married man and Ike’s best friend. As characters, they can both be forgiven for wanting to indulge in the romantic sunset, but they must face the reality of their own romantic failures to begin with.

The bridge itself plays a part in Allen’s visual genius. It is not the Brooklyn Bridge of 8mm or the Verrazano of Saturday Night Fever, this is the little known 59th Street Bridge which links NYC to the district of Queens. It is also better known in literary terms as the bridge which links Manhattan to the Valley of Ashes in The Great Gatsby. These may be facts of local and literary knowledge, but they prove that director Woody Allen was not simply placing his tripod in front of any old bridge in Manhattan. Nor was cinematographer Gordon Willis clumsily aligning his shot so that it looked nice and romantic. In the modern contemporary culture of one of the world’s biggest cities, Woody Allen teaches us that romance is a transient thing. Like the New York sunrise, it can be breathtaking, but it also signifies the onset of new problems.

by Theodore JonesAlthough Pinter claims never to have seen the original Sleuth, it is clear that this 2007 remake plays into a complex system of cross-references through which the film defines its adherence to and departure from the classic 1972 model. The most obvious of these is the casting of Michael Caine – the original Milo – who now plays the forever calculating, highly intelligent detective crime writer, Andrew Wyke. Jude Law, doing another Alfie, is cast as the younger, more handsome unemployed artist: Milo Tindle. The film sees the first-time collaboration between screenwriter Pinter, producer Law and director Branagh: one that is at best ostensibly inexperienced and at worst wholly contrived.

The plot is orientated around a battle of the wits – the taking of the older man’s wife by the younger man only represents a superficial first card. Each set of the game is determined by shrewd psychological manoeuvres in which each character attempts to outdo the other. However, brutal physical undertones permeate the unfolding of the action, suggesting a more sinister direction. This dichotomy between the intellect and the physical is the very essence of the Branagh remake. But, by virtue of the Pinter screenplay, it is the overwhelming presence of the physical that determines what is original and novel.

The film has flaws. At times the lines are laboured and utterly unconvincing despite the competence of the actors, whose performances are generally self-assured, even commanding. The physical dualism is often thrown into relief by the presence of the gun – and this serves to rid the plot of a more sophisticated character relation. The brutality of the weapon negates the unspoken compatibility of the actors although in the first two thirds of the film, this does help to emphasise the intellectual battle that is being fought.

Ultimately, the only way the struggle can progress is by one character drawing the other into his confidence. Sure enough, Caine proposes that the two characters live together, assuming a compatibility that has been suggested but seems utterly absurd given the context. Law sidles up to Caine and asks to see his bedroom where the bed, he is sure, is bigger. When they reach the bedroom both lie on the bed and the game is at once as complex as it has ever been, each manoeuvre painfully slow. But we know the stalemate cannot last: Law jumps up from the bed and as he does so breaks the spell. The character refuses to be taken into Caine’s confidence, and since he has manoeuvred Caine into a false sense of trust, he is in the undeniable position of supremacy.

The best thing about Sleuth is the standard of acting, which brings out the sinister chords of the Pinter script and its broad dramatic rhythms beautifully. Caine is coldly calculating, Law is visceral and energetic. Definitely one to watch.