Hillen 2 - What`s Wrong? with The Consolations of Genius

D
war
ALBUM FOCUS
Monday, February 7, 2011 metrolife 13
SINGLES
James Blake:
James Blake
Rastamouse And Da Easy Crew: Ice Popp (EMI)
Cuddly new kids’ TV character Rastamouse (pictured)
fronts this reggae groove (played by some top-notch
musicians). It’s catchy and cute, and the lyrics – ‘Making a
bad ting good’ – form a primary lesson for all the other
singles this week...
Atlas/A&M
The mainstream music
industry has held out for a
dubstep hero for years now –
an act who could make that hip yet murky
genre more approachable and profitable. Hit
triumvirate Magnetic Man cheerfully shrugged
off the burden, while Burial wouldn’t shake off
his pesky anonymity. Now London talent
James Blake releases his debut album on a
major label after establishing his rep for eerie
underground electronica (including CMYK on
the seminal R&S Records). Blake hasn’t
actually requested the vacant ‘dubstep hero’
title but seems too polite or simply lost in his
own imagination to refuse. What he has done is
deliver an album that hasn’t been polished for
commercial consumption, and that’s what
makes it both exciting and confounding.
Blake has been outspoken about his passion
for dubstep club nights, although even his
packed-out live gigs are introverted affairs.
Most new listeners will be drawn in via his
cover of Feist’s Limit To Your Love. That
experimental ballad, lacing piano with strungout frequencies and speaker-juddering
basslines, sounds relatively airy compared to
other tracks, where his fragile vocals sound
Taio Cruz feat Kylie Minogue: Higher (4th &
Broadway)
Don’t accept a lift from strangers! Look what happened to
prime popette Kylie – a duet with Taio Cruz, a bizarre car
commercial/video, and she’s skidding across the highway
to Autotune hell.
Eric Prydz: Niton (The Reason) (Data/MoS)
Don’t be tardy! The latest stomper from Eric ‘aerobics
workout’ Prydz will sound amazing at approximately 3am
on a heaving dancefloor. In the cold light of Monday
morning, however, it’s a tense, nervous headache.
like they’re going to shatter. He makes slivers
of soulful beauty emerge from the electro
gloom on The Wilhelm Scream and offers
mutant harmonies on Measurements.
His intimate songs are strewn with interesting
pre-dubstep references (Laurie Anderson,
Arthur Russell, Tipper’s FUEL Soundsystem),
though he’s also as likely to grate as fascinate
(I Never Learnt To Share’s whiny refrain). The
limit to mainstream love remains to be seen but
Blake definitely did it his way.
Arwa Haider
Bryan Ferry: Alphaville (Virgin)
Don’t forget your clean underwear!
Roxy Music’s mature smoothie
sneaks out a solo tune during his
outfit’s UK tour. Classically
unruffled, like a very sensible pair of
pants.
Neon Trees: Animal
(Mercury)
Don’t eat the mouldy stuff! ‘Take
a bite of my heart tonight,’ sings the
Neon Trees’ frontman. If that’s anything
like his band’s punk pop ditty, it will taste
of day-old meh.
Arwa Haider
BOOK
O: A Presidential Novel by Anonymous
Simon & Schuster, €17
London lend the works an unsettling,
purgatorial air. Hillen felt compelled to
include such imagery after the death of
a friend, Miriam Hyman, who was
blown up on the bus on Tavistock
Square on 7/7.
Her death not only brought the
reality of the ‘war on terror’ home
to him, it led him to examine the
official accounts of events, particularly
the attacks on the Twin Towers, for
inconsistencies. ‘If you accept 9/11
was some kind of inside job then
your world view shifts dramatically.
When people are confronted with
uncomfortable truths they either
become more questioning or they
blot them out. I’m trying to make
those notions digestible, yet funny
and complex.’
Thankfully, you don’t have to be a
dyed-in-the-wool conspiracy theorist
to enjoy Hillen’s work. Even if you
accept the received wisdom on 9/11
there’s something unsettling and
compulsive about these collages. ‘It
was Aristotle who said: “It is the mark
of an educated man to be able to
entertain a thought without accepting
it,” says Hillen. ‘I’m trying to
encourage people to prepare to have
their world-views challenged. That’s
the challenge for any artist.’
What’s Wrong? The Consolation Of Genius
runs until Mar 10, The Oliver Sears Gallery,
29 Molesworth Street D2. Seán will give a
talk on his work in the gallery tomorrow at
7pm. www.oliversearsgallery.com
This imagining of Barack Obama’s future re-election
campaign, with its gimmicky anonymity, was almost
certainly never going to be much good as a novel. The
only prospect was that the author’s alleged first-hand
experience of Obama and Washington, DC, would give
it bite and raise it above most political potboilers. But
the President makes only rare appearances throughout the sedate plot.
It’s a suspiciously Hollywoodish romance between O’s campaign
manager and an ambitious reporter. Alas, a potential election-turning
scandal becomes a cautiously crafted non-scandal, in keeping with the
novel’s benign presentation of US politics, which owes a lot to The
West Wing’s squeaky-clean world of honourable public servants. There
is no conflict, and no literary value – in fact, it’s too bland even to be
annoying.
Robert Murphy
DVD
GAME
Bambi
Disney, U, €24
They don’t make
them like this any
more. Which is a
real pity, because
Bambi is dripping
with an innocence and sense of
wonder that has become
refreshing once again amid the
current wave of wisecracking, pop
culture-referencing, talking animal
cartoon characters. Digitally
restored for this Diamond Edition
release, the film looks better than
ever. Almost 70 years on from its
original release, Bambi retains its
magic because it manages to be
uplifting, tear-jerking and
terrifying at the same time. ‘Man
was in the forest’ remains one of
the most ominous pieces of
dialogue in film history. But
Bambi is ultimately brilliant
because like its most memorable
character, perpetually happy
bunny Thumper, it has buckets of
heart. It’s a film about growing up,
finding friends and enduring pain
– everything all the great Disney
classics are based on. Extras:
introduction, featurettes, games.
Ross McGuinness
Dead Space iPad, €7 (also
available on iPhone/iTouch, €4.70)
The Dead Space franchise has
quickly become synonymous
with quality and innovation, and
while the mobile version may be
relatively small, it proves to be a
fine game in its own right. Rather
than attempting to squish the
original Dead Space into a bitesized morsel of on-the-go
gaming, the developers have tried
to capture the essence of the
corridor-crawling alien-outbreak
nightmare aboard a doomed
spaceship and then layered the
gameplay on top. Controls are
excellent and the combat is
framed so the action mirrors
what the touch-screen demands
of you – slicing off limbs with
the slide of a finger feels natural
in a way it probably shouldn’t.
While every effort
has been made to
make the game
leaner and
more direct,
the signature
Dead Space
eeriness
remains.
Steven Fox