High Window’s debut album, Benighted & Delighted, has been a long time coming.
You could say Keith Dixon has been working towards it his whole life.
Category: Reviews
Bloc Party: Alpha Games
Bloc Party’s Alpha Games is an album of our times. No, it’s not yet another rumination on the sociological, existential, and mental health impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s not that reductive. Instead, the 12 unflinching tracks carry an underlying sense of discomfort, unease, dread; that low-level feeling surely everybody’s had over the past five years that something’s not quite right. The only relief is provided by moments of despair, outbursts of rage, and sparkles of beauty.
Red Hot Chili Peppers: Unlimited Love
In some ways, Unlimited Love is more than just another Red Hot Chili Peppers release. It’s their first in a decade recorded with producer Rick Rubin. More importantly, it’s their first since 2006 to feature John Frusciante. His replacement, Josh Klinghoffer, is clearly a talented musician. On 2011’s I’m With You, he ably channelled the mercurial guitarist, while 2016’s more experimental The Getaway made him an integral part of producer Danger Mouse’s sonic palette.
Placebo: Never Let Me Go
Everything’s a matter of perspective. Even as Placebo’s 2016 greatest hits album and accompanying two-year world tour reminded fans of their extensive back catalogue, it reminded the band they’d never been about commercial success or nostalgia.
Tears For Fears: The Tipping Point
The road to The Tipping Point was long and (yes) winding.
There were the initial “speed dating” songwriting sessions with flavour of the month hitmakers. There was the fully completed album of wall-to-wall “bangers” all intended to top the pop charts. There was Curt Smith’s disappointment in the results, prompting him to consider leaving Tears For Fears again.
Spoon: Lucifer On The Sofa
The opening 20 seconds of Spoon’s tenth album tell you all you need to know. In-studio banter and the sound of instruments being tuned are universal shorthand for “this music was recorded by people playing in a room together”. And that’s exactly the spirit that the instantly compelling Lucifer On The Sofa embraces.
Steve Louw is a storyteller. From the slow train of 1990’s ‘Waiting On The Dawn’ that “takes us back to the dreams and hopes we had when we were young”, to the restless wanderer of 2008’s ‘The Wind Blows’, the singer-songwriter has created imagery as vivid as the music that accompanies it.
‘Headlight Dreams’, Louw’s first international solo release, is no different.
Good thing IMF agent Ethan Hunt isn’t afraid of heights. He’s already leapt from a speeding train onto a helicopter inside the Channel Tunnel. He’s gone free-climbing up a 600-metre cliff-face. He’s leapt between Shaghai’s skyscrapers. So scaling the outside of the world’s highest building, Dubai’s 163-storey Bhurj Khalifa, without ropes, is all in a day’s work.
The epic action centrepiece of ‘Ghost Protocol’ easily surpasses its predecessors in terms of sheer scale and white knuckle thrills. But – with comedian Simon Pegg in tow to explain how Hunt’s adhesive climbing gloves work (“blue means glue, red means dead”) – the sequence also highlights the differences between the ‘Mission: Impossible’ films.
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John Cleese tells tall tales
John Cleese has been the disgruntled owner of a dead parrot, a lawyer, overconfident (and ultimately limbless) knight, clueless and belligerent hotelier, TV news reader, civil servant at the Ministry Of Silly Walks, zookeeper, cheese aficionado, Roman Centurion, and fruit-obsessed self-defence instructor.
So it’s easy to forget that, as the actual creator of these characters, the self-described “writer, actor, and tall person” is first and foremost a storyteller.
“I don’t want to go home,” admits a clearly elated Bono as U2’s Cape Town show draws to an end. The feeling — echoed by the capacity crowd — is completely understandable: it’s been a shared evening of rock ‘n roll showmanship, political soapboxing, and surprising intimacy.
For all the size of the show — six days to set up; 204 shipping crates of equipment; 32 000 fasteners for the video screen alone — it’s ultimately about the four men at the middle of the 360-degree stage. This spectacle has soul.
Nils van der Linden 