Music and Opera

The only thing misery loves more than company is a backbeat. While capturing pure happiness surely remains the Holy Grail of any artistic endeavor, the blues is the bedrock of popular music for a reason. Sure enough, as we ready for the clocks to go forward, two albums arrive which could hardly be said to be full of the joys of spring, although they approach personal crisis – and catharsis – in very different ways. It’s The Long Goodbye, the sixth album by Scottish indie-rock band the Twilight Sad, is their first in seven years. During that hiatus lead singer and lyricist James Graham was dealing with his mother’s decline

Covent Garden’s new Ring cycle has reached Siegfried, and once again, you can only marvel at Wagner’s Shakespeare-like ability to anticipate modern preoccupations. Want to talk about the manosphere? Well, here’s opera’s most profound study of the playful, disruptive, world-making energy of the adolescent male psyche. The least interesting thing that you can say about Siegfried is that he’s an impulsive oaf. Well, duh. Have you never met (or if you’re really unfortunate, been) a teenage boy? Wagner could hardly make it more clear. Siegfried’s upbringing has been toxic. He has been isolated from humanity, and his only inkling of love has been brutally transactional. He’s the eternal disposable male,

The title of David Byrne’s most recent album and current tour is Who Is The Sky? The phrase works two ways. Read literally, it has the playful 1960s feel of a Yoko Ono film or some absurdist Fluxus piece; firmly on brand, in other words, for someone as steeped as Byrne in New York’s downtown art lore. Read it aloud, however, and it becomes “Who Is This Guy?,” a more pointed title for an artist who has always seemed – to reference an old Talking Heads song – one of rock’s more slippery people. At the second of two recent Glasgow dates, both interpretations seem to fit. In Talking Heads,

Grade: B In which the foppish Davy Jones figure from the manufactured band One Direction (Zayn Malik being Peter Tork; One Direction didn’t have a Mike Nesmith) sheds the soft-rock pop-lite that has served him so well and goes with what he fondly believes is challengingly funky EDM, a genre which I do not believe plays to his strengths. So what you get is lyrics as fabulously inane as on “Watermelon Sugar” but very little of the pleasant tunes which accompanied that and his many other hits. There are some interesting rhythmic textures for sure, and a surfeit of old-skool playground synths. There is also a surfeit of repetition, a

Bird Grove by Alexi Kaye Campbell is a comedy of manners set in 1841. A portly suitor, Horace, arrives at a respectable house intending to propose to a rebellious and brilliant 22-year-old, Mary Ann. Horace’s father is dying and he must find a bride before nightfall or lose a substantial legacy. This ludicrous but very human situation starts the play. It’s instantly gripping. Mary Ann is in the drawing room being treated for headaches by a French mesmerist along with two wealthy radicals, Mr and Mrs Bray, who encourage her political activism. Her father, Robert, introduces his guests to each other and invites them to stay for tea. This fascinating

This year marks the anniversaries of two of David Bowie’s most compelling and powerful albums: 1976’s Station to Station and 2016’s Blackstar. Given that they are often – rightly – described as Bowie’s crowning artistic achievements, amid severe competition from his other releases, they also have the intriguing fillip that both were originally released in January: a fortunate time for the musician, who was born on January 8, 1947, even if it was also the month in which he finally departed this Earth. Yet the comparisons between Station to Station and Blackstar, which came out 40 years apart, are far more pervasive – and persuasive – than the serendipity of