Our reviewers round up the best and worst of this week's single releases. 
Sons And Daughters – Gilt Complex (Dan Rawnsley) *** 
A best of Sons and Daughters should be in the soundtrack to your insanity.  The guitar scratches up your spine and the bass threatens to fracture your skull.  ‘Gilt Complex’ has a place in that best of, but Sons and Daughters have produced two albums of spine scratching brain beating songs.  The sound is tweaked and tightened; it scratches in an oh-so-slightly more pleasurable way, but it’s more of the same.  A stable rather than innovative track, but then again innovation might not have been the aim.  Bonus points for the b-side ‘Killer’, which managed to break my back.  
Willy Mason – Gotta Keep Walkin’ (Charlie Radcliffe) **** 
It is a huge injustice that the implausibly wet James Blunt, nice chap he may be, headlines Wembley Stadium while fellow acoustic strummer Willy Mason is still making do with a support slot on KT Tunstall’s tour. New single ‘Gotta Keep Walkin’’ does not have the infectious tune of his Tunstall collaboration We Can Be Strong or the sing-along factor of breakthrough hit Oxygen, but it still manages to combine adept storytelling with a swirling melody. ‘Gotta Keep Walkin’’ is not Mason’s finest moment, but it still makes Blunt et al look incredibly pedestrian.  
Keane – The Night Sky (Rees Arnott-Davies) ** 
I feel guilty about giving a charity single a bad review, but nowhere near as guilty as how I’d feel if I were to pretend that ‘The Night Sky’ was anything other than a droning mess of self-congratulatory pretension. The opening verse ‘One day I will be / Back in our old street / Safe from the noise that’s falling around me’ eerily captures the feeling of listening to this song. Through strained ears, every now and again I can make out some semblance of a tune, but mostly it’s just noise. But buy it anyway, for charity and stuff…   
Beverley Knight – Queen Of Starting Over (Portia Patel) ** 

Beverly Knight is one of those artists from whom you know what you’re going to get. ‘Queen Of Starting Over’ from Knight’s latest album Music City Soul, is no different to the usual fusion of pop and soul that she has traded in over the years. There is no denying that Knight is a talented soulstress; however, this track does not really do justice to her passionate and flamboyant vocal abilities, failing to take off after a promising opening. The lyrics are repetitive and unmemorable, and the chorus is seemingly non-existent and gets lost amidst a background of southern soul-inspired horns. ‘Queen Of Starting Over’ is no ‘Piece Of My Heart’. Beverley, sorry to say, but you ‘Shoulda Woulda Coulda’ done better!

Photo of Sons and Daughters by Jason Evans.

“It was a feeling of total inertia. I just didn’t want to do anything, not even get out of bed”.  “Everything I used to enjoy seemed pointless”. “I felt very alone.” 

Depression is a serious medical condition. It is not something that you can remedy by ‘pulling your socks up’ or simply ‘getting on with it’.  The causes are complicated and still not fully understood.  In some people it is caused by an under-active thyroid gland which can make you put on weight and feel sluggish and lethargic; other people may experience it as a response to certain foods; and still others become depressed as a symptom of illness. Often though, it has no apparent physical cause. Some experts describe it as a form of ‘unfinished mourning’ following a major life change or a major shock.  And while it is unclear as to whether there is a genetic basis for depression, it seems that some people are more susceptible to it than others.   

As far as Oxford goes, the environment that students are in is one which can be conducive to depression.  It is a very intense place.  Many of us find when we get here that, although we were easily among the most able and talented at school, at university we are suddenly just part of the crowd.  There are other changes too.  The workload can at times seem not only daunting but physically impossible and as a fresher you might be separated from your family and friends for the first time.  Suddenly your old routines and your old support networks are gone.  Even if you’ve been here two or three years already, it can still be difficult to cope at times. It is easy to feel that you are not as successful, as popular, or simply as happy as many of your peers. 

It is important therefore to keep things in perspective: to remember that most people here are not superstars.  They are just like you, and just like you they have low points and times when they feel that they aren’t getting the most out of university.  However, a ‘low point’ is reasonably common amongst most people.  Think of it as the mental health equivalent of the common cold.  It is no fun, but it will pass after a while.  The clinical term ‘depression’ on the other hand, refers to something more serious.    

The main symptoms of depression include: having negative thoughts, feeling extremely anxious, not enjoying things that you usually enjoy, wanting to distance yourself from others, feeling restless and agitated, having difficulty sleeping, feeling helpless, feeling aches and pains with no physical cause, and feeling tired.  There are other symptoms, and people with depression may experience a different number of symptoms, in different combinations.  The way people experience depression is very varied. For some, it can even be a strangely productive period.  One student told me “I sometimes relish those days when I feel depressed. I can wallow in pure selfishness.  I don’t care about anyone or anything else. I do a lot of thinking then.” For others however, depression is extremely dangerous and can lead to self harm and even suicidal thoughts. 

In Oxford there are reasonably good welfare services. OUSU provides counselling services run by trained professional counsellors where most students can get an appointment within a week, there is the student run ‘nightline’ open from 8pm to 8am and each college runs its own welfare system, often with student peer supporters and professional members of staff.  However, the symptoms of depression can mean that it is difficult for people to get help, and students can fall through the welfare net.  A depressed person often lacks the motivation to actively do something about the way they are feeling and may also be less inclined to talk to others than usual.  So it is important that friends and neighbours keep an eye out for each other.  

The good thing is that depression is treatable.  Exercise, for example, is particularly good because it stimulates the endorphins in your brain and also eating a healthy diet, especially one containing oily fish, can help a lot too.  But it is not an easy battle.  Depression is something which feeds off itself and fighting the negative attitudes that it creates is tough.  Oxford does not always provide the best atmosphere in which to deal with this, but the support is there if you need it.  The important thing to remember is that you are not alone.

Employees found misusing internet networking websites like Facebook or MySpace will face disciplinary hearings, it was warned earlier today.Local district councils, such as the Vale of the White Horse and Oxfordshire County Council have already put measures in place to prevent employees from accessing the site, but elsewhere, staff have been warned "we are watching you" as access remains unrestricted.Oxford City Councillor Dr Tia McGregor commented: "Employees have a responsibility not to waste time. I think some people are spending too much time on it."The past five years have seen as many as 21 council employees disciplined on the grounds of internet misuse. Under a revised internet policy, some businesses are allowing networking websites were left open for employees to use, though the changes are being monitored to ensure that workers do not abuse the priviledge, with regular usage reports are being produced to ensure employers are aware of the situation.Thames Valley Chamber of Commerce spokesman Claire Prosser said: "These sites are highly addictive. Businesses are under enough pressure to become more efficient and issues such as this add to their already mounting workload."

A Liberal Democrat leadership contender found his days at Oxford coming back to haunt him this weekend as an article he wrote advocating the use of hard drugs surfaced in a national newspaper.Chris Huhne, who is one of the favourites to take over from Sir Menzies Campbell, waxed lyrical about Opium, Heriod and LSD in a February 1973 issue of Isis magazine, which he wrote while an undergraduate at Magdalen College. The article, which was published under the heading 'Oxford escapism,' presents a beginners guide to a plethora of drugs. Of LSD he says, “Acid is manufactured in the labs and is the only drug which is getting cheaper . . . The considerable number of students at this university who drop acid are well-balanced highly intelligent people . . . if one is able to live with oneself . . . then acid holds no surprises.”But at the weekend the MP for Eastleigh claimed he couldn't remember writing the article, and said, “the views that were [expressed in the article] are certainly not my views as they are at the moment."

It should be noted at this stage that I’m in no position to review this album objectively. I fell in love with Jimmy Eat World the summer I was 15, and have probably played at least one of their albums at least once a week ever since. Fortunately, any idiot knows that music reviews cannot and should not ever be objective – how can you give a detached opinion on something that by its very nature should aim straight for the heart?

Having got that out of the way; Jimmy Eat World are a band frequently misunderstood, who have charted a deceptively varied musical path in their 14-year career. I would quite happily rate each of their last three albums – 1999’s stunning, heartbreaking Clarity, their adrenaline-charged 2001 breakthrough Bleed American, and 2004’s darker but similarly beautiful Futures – ten out of ten. It seemed that when I first listened to all of them, they managed to exactly match my mood and life situation at the time.

Chase This Light is not a ten out of ten album. It’s flawed. Butch Vig’s production is ludicrously over-the-top at times. The lyrics are perfectly serviceable but lacking in the emotional depth-charges they used to deliver (see 23 and The World You Love on Futures, If You Don’t Don’t on Bleed American, or basically anything on Clarity). The album fails to deliver on the signpost marked by the murky, emotionally wrought standout tracks on 2005’s Stay On My Side Tonight EP, and isn’t anywhere near as cohesive as their previous works (especially Clarity – you can probably tell by know that I consider that album to be a landmark work not only in the emo genre, but for music in general).

However, all of those criticisms are based on the fact that Chase This Light isn’t really the record I was expecting, or perhaps hoping for. Taken on its own merits, Chase This Light reveals itself to be, unexpectedly, a pretty awesome album of straightforward pop-rock. Jimmy Eat World have been slowly bleeding away the emo-tag from their genre classification over the course of their career, and Chase This Light is the moment where you realise they aren’t an emo band any more in any possible sense of the word.

The album sprints out of the blocks with first single Big Casino, which sounds absolutely huge (one of the occasions where Vig’s production definitely works). “I’m the one who gets away, I’m a New Jersey success story,” yells Jim Adkins in one of their finest choruses to date. Chase This Light is chock-full of up-tempo rockers, none quite as brilliant as Big Casino but all of them bright, uplifting and endearing.

Let It Happen and Always Be fly by in a flurry of big, OC-friendly choruses (and I don’t mean that as a slur). The energetic Electable is absurdly catchy, enough so that you don’t mind the vagueness of its political slant. Feeling Lucky is essentially a less-good rewrite of Bleed American’s Authority Song, but something about its guileless enthusiasm makes it hard to resist. Most successfully of all, Here It Goes experiments with synths and danceable beats, resulting in a delirious piece of pure pop that beats Hellogoodbye et al at their own game.

The slower moments provide more mixed results but occasionally great rewards. Gotta Be Somebody’s Blues feels out of place here but is still a welcome throwback to the prevailing mood of Futures, all shuffling unease and queasy strings. Carry You and the title track aren’t exactly weak songs, but they tend to collapse slightly under the weight of their own sappiness. Closing track Dizzy, on the other hand, is quite wonderful, a spiralling emotional climax that sparkles and burns like the most perfect October sunset.

All in all then, there’s a hell of a lot to be enjoyed here, so long as you don’t want it to be something it’s not. Maybe they won’t ever match Clarity, but there’s always room for great pop bands and that’s what Jimmy Eat World are at the moment.

**** (4 stars)

by Griselda Murray Brown
 

‘The Journey so Far’ brings together various media and diverse places. Adeniyi’s mainly large scale, colour photographs counterpoise Konstanty’s intimate line drawings. Almost subliminally, they bring each other into relief.

Entering the exhibition space, I was struck by one of Adeniyi’s largest images, ‘mk Adamu’. It is a portrait of an old Nigerian destitute wearing a large straw hat, who, I am told, lives rough on the streets of Lagos, begging for food. Adamu’s face and hat are dead centre, and fill the frame: he looks out, yet resists engagement. The textures of his face are startlingly clear, his skin lined and wrinkled, his chin pierced with stubble of black, grey and white. There is an implicit dignity in his face. Quietly and without pomp, Adamu transcends his social place; his large straw hat becomes symbolic, evoking the haloes of golden light which crown religious figures in European Renaissance painting. The photograph won the ‘Outstanding Achievement in Photography Award’ (2007), from the International Society of Photographers.

Adeniyi was a war photographer for the British Army in Northern Ireland. Next to ‘Adamu’ is a smaller, asymmetrical, black and white portrait of a soldier in London-Derry. His look is intense, his eyes narrowed, but not hostile. The image resists specificity – the soldier’s face is streaked with camouflage paint, the wedge of background is blurry, and all is cast in timeless black and white – he is the ‘universal soldier’, so to speak.

Beside this is ‘Survival’, a colour photograph of a layer of rubbish strewn over grass in Isara-Remo, a town in Nigeria. On first glace, the objects look like strips of cardboard, bits of wood, but they are, in fact, mainly flip-flops. In the absence of a central focus, the eye jumps to the occasional coloured flip-flop, which punctuates the greens and browns. Adeniyi comments: "Isara is a society that just wants to survive for now. Everything in the image could be recycled, but lack of knowledge and the standard of living makes recycling difficult". I felt an uneasy sense of guilt, as though the mass of flip-flops were the remnants, the hangover, of the generic beach holiday.

Round the corner is Konstanty’s work. There is something deeply, indescribably satisfying about his line drawings. They are intricate, delicate, but solid; his lines are perfectly placed. His work has a cartoon quality: facial and bodily features are exaggerated, goblin-like, or grotesquely distorted. In one drawing, a figure squats on the tip of an inescapably phallic creature, as if about to launch into the air. Jack-in-the-box meets sex toy, perhaps. A disturbing sexual theme runs though the illustrations – disturbing, because violent and distorted. Genders are fused, confused, anatomically. What looks like an umbilical cord grows out of the penis of a man into an indefinable beast.

In Konstanty’s work, precision of style jars against shocking, sexual content; a thrilling tension results. As if to enact this artistically, other media is played off the delicate pen. Garish yellow highlighter winds out of the mouth of a half-monster, half-human creature, like some noxious vapour. Flower genitalia are stuck over the mouths of an alien couple having (human) sex; these mouths seem to cry out in a vocal expression of sexual sensation. Georgia O’Keefe’s erotically suggestive flower paintings spring to mind. Konstanty’s work describes the mind in over-drive: its nightmare hallucinations; visions of lurking shadows of the self; sexual ecstasy and torment.

‘The Journey so Far’ is quietly powerful. The work touched an innate, buried sense of western guilt, and of sexual shame and revulsion, within me.

Hertford College issued a warning to its students about fire safety earlier in the week after a student's pyjamas caught fire.The incident occurred when a student left their curtains open during the day. Light reflected off a mirror onto a nearby chair, burning the pyjamas that were lying there.The JCR bulletin reported: "This fire was caused by accident rather than by negligence or design but please be careful."

Our second week pubcast reviews the past week in Oxford drama, featuring an interview with Elizabeth Gray, writer and star of Wish I Had a Sylvia Plath.
Part One: Guardians
Part Two: Greek
Part Three: Wish I Had A Sylvia Plath
Party Four: Interview with Elizabeth Gray
Check back weekly for new episodes!

Jane Burden, wife of William Morris, was honoured with a blue plaque yesterday at St Helen's Passage, off Holywell Street.Burden, who was allegedly born on this road, played muse to many, including Dante Gabriel Rosetti, during her life. She was a mother, a muse, a model and a maker of tapestries.The blue plaque, which is attached to Hertford College, was unveiled on the anniversary of her 168th birthday.

Sarah Fordham unweaves the rainbow of our emotions, and argues that science cannot tell us what it means to be human   What is it that most sets humans apart from all the other organic life forms on the planet? Convinced of our superiority, this is a question we like to ask over and over again. We're physically inferior in almost every single way. Problem-solving? Talk to the Caledonian crows and their tool-making. Self-awareness? Perhaps – but the line is fuzzy. Cats and dogs, for example, react to mirrors in ways that suggest they're self-aware, and chimpanzees have the same concept of mind as a 3 year old child. Emotions? Now you’re talking.   It's the vast spectrum of our emotions that we like to ponder repeatedly in art, literature, and music. Yet science seems to be destroying this particular notion of our existence, by constantly trying to quantify such sublime experiences as jealousy, love, and even happiness.If we deconstruct the physiological and psychological aspects of jealousy, maybe we can acknowledge that technically it is just an adaptive response to aid the survival of the individual within a social group. But anyone who has ever felt full blown, pea-green envy – and I'm guessing that would be most of us – this explanation seems like an oversimplification of the worst kind. In reality, there's something almost transcendental about plotting the tragic accidents that that may befall those hated individuals with more looks, brains and charisma than oneself. There's no data-set that I know of to explain that warm glow that swells up from the pit of your stomach as they play through your mind.The same form of dissection is being applied to happiness. If we actually sit back and ask ourselves: 'what is happiness', we find that even after centuries of laborious analysis, some of the brightest minds in the world still don't know. For us mere mortals, the most accurate answer may as infinitely complex and wonderfully simple as ‘ice-cream’.Why then, have certain parties recently deemed it necessary to propose to several leading diagnostic manuals that happiness should be reclassified as a psychiatric disorder![1] The symptoms of said disorder include a statistically abnormal functioning of the nervous system, with discrete symptoms including cognitive anomalies. Thankfully – as far as the writer is concerned – this proposal was rejected. Because, to be honest, is there  anything more belittling than the idea that most profound joy you ever experienced was nothing more a chemical imbalance? It's like taking all of our ideals and dipping them in pure ethanol.And I shan't begin to bore you with what the experts have to say on love, save that the so-called ‘greatest thing you’ll ever learn’ is no more than a trick of evolution to make us procreate. Well that puts Shakespeare and Donne in their places.Or does it? We may accuse the scientific perspective of being cold and sterile, but perhaps that is slightly too harsh. Some would say that there is a profound beauty in the knowledge that the rush you get at the sight of that special someone really is electricity – coursing through your Sympathetic nervous system at 7 mph – not just a poet's meagre metaphor.Dawkins' book ‘Unweaving the Rainbow’ examines this very conflict between rational and philosophical perceptions of life. The title of the book itself refers to John Keats' despair that Isaac Newton destroyed the beauty of the rainbow by explaining the origin of its colours: the refraction of light. To some it may seem, and to Keats it most certainly did, that this Newton's theories robbed the rainbow of all its mystery, and in the process crushed the infinite potential for human imagination to come up with its own hypotheses. On the other hand, for those in our midst who are so inclined, the true explanation is nothing short of the very embodiment of elegance and grace. Richard Feynman, the physicist, had an argument with an artist friend. The friend claimed that he could find a flower infinitely more beautiful than Feynman could, because Feynman lacked an artistic mind. Feynman found this absurd. He argued that everyone can see the inherent beauty in things: seeing things from a scientific perspective can only add to beauty, not take away: if the petals make him wonder about their mathematical complexity, or the colours make him think about mechanisms of pollination, it can only add to the flower. So it can be argued that the more we know about how and why we feel the way we do, the more we add to our experience of being human, not detract.And yet, something in me revolts. So here’s my point: I can't deny that there's something to be said for asking why people go through such a kaleidoscope of sentiments everyday. But even so I think we can be justified in ignoring the science, just this once, and continue to embrace the idea – however fanciful – that there is some greater power or purpose to existence; that life isn’t just survival and reproduction. Is that asking too much?

What do you think? Has science's insights into the human psyche made our emotions nothing but so many chemical reactions, or has it led us on a new and more exciting journey of self-discovery?

——————————————————————————–[1] http://jme.bmj.com/cgi/content/abstract/18/2/94?eaf
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