• Flatliners

    October 12, 2017 - By 

    Right from the get-go, as the opening title and credits roll and the messy CGI effects and warbling audio bites of people talking about near-death experiences nauseatingly assault your senses, you get a sinking feeling that director Niels Arden Oplev (The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo) and writer Ben Ripley (Source Code) have created something terrible. Lo and behold, this new take on the 90s non-classic Flatliners will most certainly join the ever-expanding ranks of atrocious remakes that the Hollywood conveyor belt has, in recent times, been churning out with merciless efficiency. Flatliners tells the story of a group of…

  • The LEGO Ninjago Movie

    October 10, 2017 - By 

    While not quite as surefooted as previous cinematic LEGO outings, this family-friendly romp still offers a colourful dose of inspired lunacy. From the outset, it is important to acknowledge that the Ninjago franchise, albeit hugely popular in its minifigure form, is not as appealing as the Batman universe, yet that in itself liberates the filmmakers to try something a little different. At no point does this addition to the LEGO roster claim to be as subversive or slyly satirical as this year’s hilarious puncturing of the Bruce Wayne mythos nor as a piece of animation does it set out to…

  • Kelela – Take Me Apart

    October 9, 2017 - By 

    Sexual freedom, power, and intelligence have long been attributes that women have been denied, unless they expect and accept a heinous label to come with the package. If a woman is sexually confident, she is only granted said trait within social realms at the risk of being labelled: wh*re. This is an even more troubling reality if such a person identifies as queer. If she’s powerful? She is labelled as controlling. Intelligent? Arrogant. Long has the patriarchy overshadowed and demeaned women and non-binary individuals, categorising them in order to maintain dominance. Kelela challenges all of this on her debut LP Take Me Apart, an alluring piece of…

  • Marilyn Manson – Heaven Upside Down

    October 9, 2017 - By 

    There comes a point, where a shock rocker needs to stop. You can only frighten the mainstream for so long before you assimilate and your face has been bought and sold a million times. Consider Marilyn Manson. In the late 1990s, there was an aura of mystique surrounding him. At the height of his prowess, the man was able to perfectly encapsulate everything that a certain person feared. Here was a sexually promiscuous, androgynous nihilist who spat in the face of God. This was a man about whom a rumour about having surgery to help fellate himself didn’t seem that…

  • Four Tet – New Energy

    October 7, 2017 - By 

      Almost two decades since launching his electronic solo career (alongside his work in post-rock band Fridge) Kieran Hebden – AKA Four Tet – has become something of an icon of the genre. Originally pioneering ‘folktronica’ – a label he was never keen on but which attempts to describe his electronic manipulation of acoustic instruments and samples on early 2000s albums like Pause and Rounds – more recent records like Beautiful Rewind have seen him shift his focus from the bedroom to the club, moving further in the direction of downtempo house, all while working on collaborations with the likes of…

  • Blade Runner 2049

    October 6, 2017 - By 

    1982’s Blade Runner was a melancholic neo-noir as impressive for its shapeless sorrow as for its far-reaching influence on sci-fi design and lexicon. In Ridley Scott, Hampton Fancher and David Peoples’ transformation of Philip K. Dick’s story, anyone with sense and money had escaped “off-world”, abandoning Earth to broken boys and their broken toys, the hazy urban air thick with the defeatism of gumshoe vice noir. The electric sheep of an Art Deco future-L.A., along with their shepherds and predators, drifted along in a kind of dreamworld, where identity and memory had turned fluid and suspicious, thanks to the Replicants,…

  • Joshua Burnside w/ Ports & Little Rivers @ Studio2, Liverpool

    October 6, 2017 - By 

    Liverpool’s Studio2 is an odd sort of a place. It’s on the backstreet of a backstreet, far away from Concert Square, the main strip and the horror of the bottled Beatles, 80s bars and fake paddywhackery of Matthew St. For the non-scousers among you, don’t Google Concert Square – it’s not what you think it is. In fact, if you ever get to Liverpool avoid the place like the bloody plague. And yet here we are, among the carparks, mechanics and those kinds of places that can just afford the rent around here. This little oasis in the middle of…

  • The Mountain Between Us

    October 5, 2017 - By 

    The Mountain Between Us, a disaster-romance directed by Hany Abu-Assad and starring Idris Elba and Kate Winslet, is immediately identifiable as a book adaptation (Charles Martin’s 2010 novel). It feels like a lurid-but-chaste paperback you’d find at a train station reading desk, or on your mum’s bedside cabinet. The cover image would be two handsome lovers, wrapped in ski gear, snuggled up against the warm glow of a cabin fire. In other words, the impression here is not of danger, or life-in-the-balance peril. The only real tension is wondering how quickly they’re going to bang. The mountain, in case you…

  • Kamasi Washington – Harmony of Difference

    October 3, 2017 - By 

    Hip hop was born from jazz. Powerful drum beats from 70s jazz and jazz funk gave early pioneers Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash an abundance of ingredients to create an entirely new style of music composed of their predecessors’ songs. It’s an influence that stuck through the 80s and 90s, and whether it’s J Dilla ’s sophisticated sampling or Notorious B.I.G’s Cannonball Adderly influenced flow, the fingerprints of jazz are all over hip hop. So what happens when jazz is relegated to “music for goatee scratching elitists”, and hip hop takes up the mantle as the art form for black…

  • The Killers – Wonderful Wonderful

    October 2, 2017 - By 

    One of the golden rules of making any playlist is that you should absolutely never ever start the night with ‘Mr. Brightside’. ‘Mr. Brightside’ should not feature anywhere in the first two hours of a night. Since its phenomenal success 16 years ago – which earned it a spot on the Billboard Top 100 to this day – ‘Mr. Brightside’ has been hailed as one of the most popular “peak” songs for any appropriate party, be that a wedding or whatever you’re having yourself. It reaches its maximum potential only when coupled with unsafe amounts of Jaeger at 2am with crowds…