Tom Morello is an angry man – and he has a lot to be angry about in these "interesting times".
There are people who do and say awful things in the name of honesty. It can be used as a cover for rigorous appeasement of our own worst impulses, or as a thin veil to disguise needless personal attacks on those around us. With singer-sonwriter John Grant, however, it’s impossible to see it as anything other than a colossal strength.
Throughout his career (Love Is Magic is his fourth album) Grant has marked himself out as one of the foremost lyricists of his generation. His literate approach, peppered with laugh-out-loud humour and a predilection for the dark underbelly of human emotion – and its myriad contradictions.
So, yes, love is magic – but with considerable caveats. On one hand we have the gorgeous, elegantly evocative ode “Is He Strange” with a simple, piano-led form that mirrors the beautiful fragility of the lyrical sentiment: “He was just standing there/He was on an island/In the North Atlantic Ocean/Just minding his own/He was just doing his thing/And in that moment/Everything changed.” The other hand, however, is raised as if to slap a face in “Diet Gum”, an electronically thrumming track in which Grant acts out one side of a lover’s tiff.
Musically, this is the most coherently electronic offering that Grant has yet given us, and quite possibly the funnest and funniest. “He’s Got His Mother’s Hips” is a case in point, “I think Colonel Mustard did it in the billiard room/They say his salsa workshops/Are a harbinger of doom” may well be the best opening to pretty much anything I’ll hear all year.
Never afraid of a good, old-fashioned swear to grab the listener’s attention and convey huge emotion in just a few words, Grant’s crowning achievement comes in the song “Smug Cunt”, which addresses the classless, grandiose ambition of arseholes. “And now you’re just a smug cunt/Who doesn’t even do his own stunts.” How’s that for economy of words?
Only opener “Metamorphosis” sits oddly, but even then, its jarring sense of dislocation could also be taken as the perfect way to introduce a collection of songs so accurately depicting the schizophrenic nature of love – passion’s two sides. Love Is Magic is an album full of questions like this and it takes more than a cursory listen to grasp the answers. Thankfully, it’s research that is hugely rewarding.
Overleaf for the video to "His Mother's Hips"
The straw hat is surely the season’s requisite headgear for great actors embarking on their valedictory screen performances. It was there on the venerable Harry Dean Stanton’s head through much of Lucky, and the great John Hurt makes it his own in Eric Styles’ That Good Night, his last lead film role (his cameo in espionage thriller Damascus Cover hardly counts). As its title, drawn from Dylan Thomas’s famous poem about death, suggests, the whiff of mortality is strong, and so is the sense of a script creaking, dramatic impact sustained principally by the charisma of a master.
“The horizon recedes as we go through life… then a day comes when it stoops receding,” Hurt gives us in opening voice-over, all that old flushness of voice still there, its cadences glorious. He plays Ralph Maitland, a once-eminent British writer now living out his days in halcyon, albeit grumpy style in a perfect Portugese landscape. It seems a practically blessed existence, in the loving care of younger wife Anna (Sofia Helin, unrecognisable from The Bridge), until a hospital diagnosis brings “the ultimate deadline” into his world.
The immaculately urbane Dance spars with the cantankerous Hurt
Selfishness has clearly long been second nature for Ralph, so his determination to die according to his own wishes comes as little surprise. An impetuously urgent call to semi-estranged son Michael (Max Brown) brings up various ghosts, hardly in any healing manner, and results in an ugly family row when Maitland-fils – he’s a scriptwriter too, though of admitted schlock – arrives in the company of a girlfriend (Erin Richards), to whom Hurt’s character can’t resist being gratuitously rude. No calm passing for this “terrible old goat”, then.
And that’s despite Ralph’s having looked into options for euthanasia on the sly, which precipitates the appearance of an elegantly clad stranger – representing a shadowy organisation known only as “the Society”, he has no name, credited only as “the Visitor” – onto the scene. Played by Charles Dance in trademark white linen, the visitor’s responsibility seems to be to assess his client’s wishes. He only gets three briefish scenes, but they give That Good Night much of its brightness, as the immaculately urbane Dance spars with the cantankerous Hurt (pictured below).
There’s at least one nice surprise in that interaction, which is more than can be said of most of the rest of the proceedings. Father-and-son interaction, along the lines of Michael’s accusation, “You were always generous with money, never with affection”, is distinctly formulaic, with Brown limited to playing foil to his father, the mere fact that they are still in contact at all something a surprise. Coupled with Styles’ casually loping directorial style, the female roles come across as little more than cyphers, Helin in particular displaying a blissed-out serenity that’s a million miles from the complexities of The Bridge. Barely a brow furrowed here, in fact.
The irony is that That Good Night treats its subject with, to adapt the Dylan Thomas poem again, far too much gentleness, its sense of whimsy far more pronounced than any hint of rage. Styles has adapted the 1996 NJ Crisp play that was a vehicle for Donald Sinden, adding a tangible luxury of cinematic location that certainly hasn’t toughened the piece up, while composer Guy Farley provides a score that is soupily insistent.
And yet… Hurt’s death at the beginning of this year can’t help giving bravura to his performance, playing as he was in the full knowledge of his own demise (Hurt’s own diagnosis came in 2015). That Good Night hardly delivers what its title appears to offer, but Hurt’s closing recitation of the lines of the Thomas poem is reason enough to see it through to its far-from-bitter end.
Overleaf: watch the preview for That Good Night
I come to this band from the perspective of one who’s only seen the words "YOU ME AT SIX" on endless T-shirts passing in the street. I’m no connoisseur, then. From the cultural detritus that’s wended my way during their 10-year career, they just seemed a band who had no “thing”, no breakout song, no look, no cultural space or loudly impressed belief. Just five normal-looking guys who tour a lot, hard-working meat’n’potatoes rockers (who’d bridle at that cliché).
Releasing albums of re-recordings of an artist’s work is not a new concept, and it’s one that has been done to great effect in the past. Live albums, remix albums, new versions of poorly recorded songs and even stylistic re-imaginings have all been done very well. From the Only Ones’ BBC recordings, Darkness and Light to Massive Attack v Mad Professor’s No Protection and Bob Marley and the Wailers’ Live at the Lyceum, there have been plenty of successful artistic retreads.
It's a little hard to compliment KT Tunstall without seeming a little snitty. Her music is familiar, it's grown-up, it's Radio 2, it's full of lashings of Fleetwood Mac, Tom Petty, The Pretenders, Springsteen, Nashville, Laurel Canyon.
The voice of Jean-Claude Juncker does not habitually turn up on albums. Jessica Sligter's Polycrisis: yes! though features extracts from a 2010 speech by he, the President of the European Commission on “The Dream has Died” and “The State of the Union”.
Atmosphere definitely dominates over narrative in Lucrecia Martel’s fourth film – long delayed, Zama follows almost a decade on from her similarly opaque The Headless Woman – but the Argentinian director offers bracing consolation for some early longeurs in her depiction of a downtrodden functionary hero who is existentially trapped in a crazed colonial world.
Played by Mexican actor Daniel Giménez Cacho, Don Diego de Zama has been festering for years as a magistrate in a riverside hell-hole that must be one of the Spanish Empire’s most far-flung possessions (apparently Paraguay, though geographical location is as loosely defined here as is the 18th century historical setting). If his tricorn hat and crimson jacket must have initially suggested an element of louche elegance, the rot obviously takes its toll on those who remain too long in these parts. It’s manifested in a distracted lethargy, with energy expended between apparently meaningless bureaucratic tasks and desultory engagement within this enclosed would-be garrison of civilisation.
The chaos of 'Zama' seems to be everywhere, and outside time
Beyond it lies the world of the natives, who are presented more as clusters that respond with servile obedience to any random demand than as individuals, and the diversion of a liaison with a local woman has given Zama a mestizo child. But any attachment there is as empty as the lackadaisical (and bruisingly futile) flirtation he carries on with the wife of a senior official. “Europe is best remembered by those who were never there,” she advises, perceptively highlighting the vacuity of society’s rituals copied in a location in which they can only ever be irremediably alien.
Zama’s every petition for relocation – at some stage in the past he has even acquired a wife and children in Buenos Aires, but their existence is vrtually fabular – is met by absurdist rebuttals that evince the particularly Kafkaesque bureaucracy that rules this remote corner of empire. The casual dismissal with which his requests are treated is nothing, however, to the casual brutality that pervades the whole colonial enterprise, in which human ears, supposedly cut from the corpse of a local bandit, are treated as a gambling token. 
An adaptation of the 1956 novel by Antonio di Benedetto, the film’s sense of absurdist confinement in a meaningless world surely recalls the work of the Argentinian writer's contemporary Samuel Beckett, as well as his literary master, Dostovesky. The existential gesture of escape that Zama takes in the film’s final reel changes the visual tone of Martel’s world almost beyond recognition. From the dusty, claustrophobic brown hues that define the settlement, his bedraggled group of adventurers sets out on a sort of Heart of Darkness journey into a luscious wilderness, the deceptive beauties of which disguise dangers lurking both without and within.
Portuguese cinematographer Rui Pocas captures those closing landscapes as almost hallucinogenic in their wide vistas: they seem to shatter any colonial illusion that the European interloper can ever find a place here. Martel is a director for whom sound has always been as important as image – if not more so – and both dominate here over text. Her sound designer Guido Berenblum melds the insistent sounds of nature into an aural fabric of dislocation, made all the more abtruse and disorientating by snatches of human speech that seem to hang in the air, neither dialogue nor voice-over in any traditional form. It’s a crazed sensual tapestry that is completed by easy contemporary guitar duo melodies (from Los Indios Tabajaras) that only emphasise their beguiling anomaly. Martel may compel us to accompany her legion of the lost on their particular 18th century journey, but the chaos of Zama seems to be everywhere, and outside time. Oneirically intense, it’s auteur filmmaking at its most ambitious.
Overleaf: watch the preview for Zama
Wanderer is Chan Marshall’s tenth album in almost 25 years under the guise of Cat Power and it is a thing of haunting beauty that suggests that she won’t be running out of steam anytime soon. Mellow piano and guitar ballads flavoured with Chan’s sultry vocals take in folk and blues atmospherics with a production that is sparser than her 2006 breakout album The Greatest but considerably more lush than the lo-fi freak folk sound of her early tunes on the likes of 1996’s What Would The Community Think?