Drenge review: (Just over) a half hour of power

In a year dominated by mega-albums from music’s big names, the self titled debut album by Derbyshire duo Drenge may have slipped under your radar. Despite this, Drenge is a strikingly confident album which stands tall against the likes of The Arctic Monkey’s AM and Biffy Clyro’s Opposites as one of the best records of 2013.

The moment you hear the name, it’s obvious that Drenge is not going to be easy on the ear. And as soon as songs like I Wanna Break You In Half storm out of your CD player like a high speed train on steroids, the album’s tectonic heaviness seizes you and rarely loosens its grip for just over half an hour. The music is often phenomenally heavy for a band that lacks a bass player and features only one guitar, but the melodic strength favoured by other notable two-pieces such as The White Stripes can still be heard amongst the shattering riffs. The stripped down, no nonsense ethic of the band harks back to the early 90s grunge scene, and the lack of lyrical compromise, with themes of animal cruelty and violence, links to scene leaders Nirvana circa third album In Utero. Nirvana is clearly a huge influence, the loud-then-quiet dynamic honed by Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain is widely used, in addition to the fuzzy power chord riffs the band employed to such great effect on the iconic Nevermind. Despite the influence, the music rarely feels derived, with singer and guitarist Eoin Loveless (a remarkably appropriate, and genuine name) providing a unique vocal style and younger brother Rory giving a pounding, explosive performance on drums.     

Despite its uncompromising heaviness, Drenge features intelligent, thematic lyrical content dealing brutally with isolation, suppressed anger and a distain for emotion, particularly love. Indeed, this distain becomes such a theme that the final words of closer Fuckabout: “I don’t give a fuck about people in love/they don’t piss me off they just make me give up”, perfectly link to the opener People In Love Make Me Feel Yuck, bringing the record full circle in a shockingly bleak twist. Fuckabout is actually the antithesis of its title; the only point when the piece really slows down in a raw, acoustic number containing some of the most striking lyrics written all year. It’s by no means the only musical highlight though; 8 minute stomper Let’s Pretend and the brilliantly violent I Wanna Break You In Half are two of the year’s best tracks.

It’s always a shame when excellent albums from smaller bands fail to attract the attention they deserve, and no more so than with Drenge. It’s a brilliantly original and brutal album, featuring some of the best riffs and lyrics written by any band this year. It’s certainly a challenger to Biffy Clyro’s Opposites as my album of the year, and I’ve no doubt that we’ll be seeing a lot more of the brothers Loveless in the near future.

9/10

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug review: A pathetic part two

Adapting a children’s novel scarcely over 200 pages long into three mega-budget movies was always going to be a questionable decision on the part of Warner Brothers, but that’s by no means the only problem with Peter Jackson’s latest trilogy thus far. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug lacks almost everything that made Jackson’s incredible Lord of the Rings so fantastic, and as a film it’s about as close to an insult to J.R.R Tolkien’s iconic works as a movie that cost $225 million to make was going to be.  

Assuming that everyone has seen the first Hobbit anyway, the script jumps straight back into the story as mild mannered hobbit Bilbo Baggins and a company of dwarves continue their quest to take back the treasure stolen from their ancestors by the dragon Smaug. While Tolkien’s book didn’t spend too long dawdling on plot details, it’s immediately obvious that The Desolation of Smaug is taking it’s time, inevitable considering the combined films will clock in at over eight hours long. Individual scenes are gratuitously extended, culminating in the never-ending conclusion, which results in the movie overstaying its welcome by at least an hour. The sublime editing that made The Lord of the Rings coherent is totally missing here, removing all traces of excitement and tension from the affair and resulting in even the book’s strongest sequences becoming dull and predictable. It’s a disappointing mark of a sub-par script combined with lazy direction on Jackson’s part, and let’s face it: a fantasy film on such an obscene budget should not have been boring.

And being too long is not The Desolation of Smaug’s only issue. Character development is near nonexistent due to a reliance on soft jokes and lack of screen time rendering the majority of the twelve dwarves cardboard cut-outs, and the leads don’t fare much better with Martin Freeman’s excellent Bilbo underused and Ian McKellan’s Gandalf largely unseen. This results in total viewer indifference to the fates of the characters, so scenes which ought to wring with emotion become bland and clumsy. Compare this to Boromir’s shocking self-sacrifice in The Fellowship of the Ring and it’s obvious that Jackson has failed to recreate the bond between character and viewer during the transition between The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.

And it doesn’t end there, as even the smallest problems are amplified due to the movie’s underserved hype and weight of anticipation. Cinematography has suffered; yes the aerial views of New Zealand’s mountain ranges are as stunning as ever but an occasional weak shot instantly destroys any sense of atmosphere; with several scenes which look like they were recorded on an iPhone submerged in water making for particularly grim viewing. Even the famed visual effects occasionally stumble, as several uses of magic look rather outdated by comparison to the phenomenally animated Smaug, also an excellent turn of voice acting by the great Benedict Cumberbatch. And a dire attempt to make the tale a little less sexist by introducing an utterly pointless female character seems completely contrived and near idiotic.

The Desolation of Smaug utterly fails to recapture the magic which rendered The Lord of the Rings trilogy three of the best films ever made, and is a colossal disappointment for any fan of Tolkien’s novels. It utterly misses the mark even more than the first Hobbit did, and it’s going to take something very special indeed from part three to save this inferior cinematic trio.

3/10

Strangeways Here We Come review: Is The Smith's final album their greatest work?

Following The Queen is Dead, without a doubt one of the best albums of all time, was always going be a tough job for Manchester quintet The Smiths. Strangeways Here We Come, their fourth and final record released in 1987, was a darker, more subtle piece of music, dividing critics but selling millions. Whether it ended The Smith’s short career with their best album is a debate which continues today, but there’s no doubt that Strangeways Here We Come features some of the best musical moments of the 1980’s.

By the time Strangeways Here We Come was released, The Smith’s had split up after years of tension between legendary singer Morrissey and guitarist Johnny Marr. But while you might expect this posthumous album to leak with the sound of a band falling apart, the record mysteriously represents The Smith’s at their most musically united. The songs are tight and generally short, several clocking in at less than three minutes long, creating a quick and fast-paced experience.  Musically this is the band at their best, with Morrissey’s dark lyrics and Marr’s soft, harmless music violently clashing in principle but creating a deep, rich sound which has been regularly imitated but never equalled.  This is particularly obvious on the album’s lead single, Girlfriend in a Coma, but it appears on the vast majority of the ten tracks in a less blatant form. The sardonic subtlety in Morrissey’s lyrics leads to some of the most striking moments of The Smith’s career, as “I still love you only slightly less than I used to” on Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before quietly mocking traditional ballads, and “If you should die I may feel slightly sad but I won’t cry” on Unhappy Birthday feeling as shocking and surprising as any expletive driven stanza from your run-off-the-mill heavy metal band.

This is not a perfect album however; it may be lyrically stunning but it lacks the charisma and variety that made The Queen is Dead so fantastic. The tension between music and lyrics is overused and becomes predictable in the record’s later stages, making the music less memorable and captivating. It also lacks the range of themes and styles which filled The Queen is Dead, and the overbearingly morbid lyrics and less interesting guitar parts make the album rather samey and forgettable by comparison to their previous effort.

Strangeways Here We Come is still an excellent record with plenty of great moments and some of the best lyrics ever penned. However, its limited themes and musical diversity prevent it from becoming the iconic classic that The Queen is Dead was.

7/10

Carrie (2013) review: A true reimagining or a revised edition?

Why remake Carrie? It’s a question which was doubtless on the minds of every film buff and critic upon hearing the news of the reboot of the Stephen King’s iconic debut novel of 1974. Carrie’s story has been embedded upon almost all aspects of the arts; the book itself; the legendary cult film (and abysmal sequel); even a Broadway musical, so it’s remarkable that no entrepreneurial Hollywood studio has opted to film the inevitable remake until now. But could anything hope to top the perverse, Oscar nominated brilliance of the 1976 original?

Surely the area where this remake truly excels in the casting of its leads, with Chloë Grace Moretz playing the ill fortuned Carrie White and Julianne Moore as her terrifyingly fundamentalist mother Margret. While Moretz, who honed her style playing strongly willed women (notably vigilante Hit Girl in Kick-Ass), lacks the pathetic desperation illustrated so beautifully and pitifully by Sissy Spacek in the original film, she plays the role with an emotional intelligence suggesting a great respect for both the 1976 movie and King’s book. Her performance as the naive girl seen for the first three quarters of the film couples brilliantly with the monstrous presence she becomes towards the conclusion, when she unleashes the kind of confidence and power which stole the show in Kick-Ass. It’s an excellent and intelligent change of direction for a very promising young actress. If Moretz takes an iconic character and makes it her own, Julianne Moore’s Margret is a little too similar to the version Piper Laure portrayed in 1976, but scenes of mental instability and self-harm create a slightly more pitiable and relatable character. It’s unfortunate that the rest of the cast don’t seem to have been chosen as carefully, with bullying ringleaders Chris and Billy in particular lacking the charismatic awfulness exhibited so despicably by Nancy Allen and John Travolta in the original film.

Carrie’s principle failure is that it sticks far too closely to the original film in its scripting. While the 1976 version added various famous sections to the source material, this remake includes them but makes few alterations of its own, a shame considering the various ways in which it could have been updated to the present day. In keeping much of the plot and dialogue the same, the film feels like a movie made in the 1970s transported to the present day, which dramatically damages its authenticity (communal showers in schools and teachers slapping students seem rather out of place in the modern setting). In not keeping up with the present, director Kimberly Peirce has missed an opportunity to update a classic story for a new generation, and consequently this remake feels rather wasted. In fact, aside from the setting, almost the only point in which it is obvious that the film was made in 2013 rather than 1976 is the notorious “black prom” sequence, where modern special effects are employed to gloriously gory effect. And while the film is perhaps more bloody and graphic than the original, it fails to create the atmosphere of tension that made the original so terrifying. Peirce’s direction lacks the ambiance that made Brian DePalma’s film so intense, relying solely on gore rather than mixing the contrasting techniques of hammer horror and building tension.

It’s still an enjoyable film, but 2013’s Carrie lacks the distinctive style that made the original so chillingly tense. Despite superb performances from the leads, the director is so in thrall of DePalma’s Carrie that little is added, and this is more of a revised edition than a reimagining.  

6/10

 

Carrie (1976) review: A gratuitous cinema classic

As a fresh remake of Stephen King’s first novel Carrie hits screens, it’s an ideal time to look back at a film now regarded as a landmark in horror cinema: Brian DePalma’s original. Released way back in 1976 to universally popular reviews, does this supposed classic hold up today against the movies it inspired and the wealth of other pictures based on King’s books?

The story of Carrie White (Sissy Spacek), a social misfit cursed with telekinetic powers, has become so ingrained in pop culture since the publication of the book that it hardly seems worth giving a full synopsis. Spacek is utterly outstanding in the lead role, giving a dark and tearful portrayal of the character unequalled across the genre and deservedly accruing an Oscar nomination. Carrie’s descent  from a normal girl to violent insanity is perfectly illustrated by Spacek, who presents a character confused and terrified by her horrendous experiences. Piper Laurie is also superb as Carrie’s fanatically fundamentalist mother Margret, and Nancy Allen is brilliantly hateable as school bully Chris.

One of the joys of DePalma’s direction is in bringing new life to a story which, although wonderfully written, wasn’t particularly original in the first place. A wealth of innovative techniques are employed to great effect; lengthy scenes in slow-motion build tension to the breaking point; dizzyingly spinning cameras and swift focus changes provide intimacy; and even DePalma’s liberal use of Hammer Horror (including the legendary screech screech noise) feels inventive and intelligent rather than clichéd. The director rarely forgets he’s making a horror film though, adding several jump-scares, notably the notorious ending, and increasing the gratuitous nature of certain scenes.

Having said that, the movie’s best sequence involves the calmer minutes proceeding Carrie’s breakdown. Shots which might have come out of any rom-com are juxtaposed with a swelling, foreboding score (the music is consistently excellent) with culminates with Carrie murderously falling apart, in itself a DePalma tour-de-force. And it’s scenes like this where DePalma and scriptwriter Lawrence D. Cohen hammer home the message that the disaster Carrie caused could easily been averted. And it’s here that you forget that this is a cheaply made horror film about a girl with an impossible power, because Carrie becomes a heart-wrenching tragedy to rival Romeo and Juliet or Macbeth.

It’s not often that a brilliant book is made into a brilliant film, but Carrie is one of those rare occurrences. Through superb pacing and great cast performances DePalma creates a movie that entertains, terrifies and spreads a message on bullying and social isolation all at the same time. It’s almost unarguably the best film to be based on a Stephen King novel, and it remains the horror classic that it became more than 35 years ago. As Jaws irrevocably altered our perception of the ocean, I’ve no doubt that no senior high school prom has been without a worried glance to the rafters to check for a precariously balanced bucket of blood since the release of Carrie.  

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