The Darkness review – retro rockers are still in acrobatically high spirits
Hawkins has never misplaced his desire to peacock in front of an audience, and yet his acrobatic high spirits do appear to be supercharged at an interesting moment in the group's long career. Fresh from becoming a side quest for Taylor Swift's legion of fans due to her admiration of their 2003 hit I Believe in a Thing Called Love – a song dispatched here with undimmed bombast – the Darkness have a new record out shortly that, if Hawkins' pumping of the faithful for pre-orders is to be believed, might return them to the top of the charts.
But they are a different band to the one that achieved the same feat with their blockbuster debut Permission to Land more than two decades ago and perhaps all the better for it. With budgets slashed and venues smaller there is less reliance on, or desire to reach for, stadium rock spectacle tonight. In its place is something honest and homespun as Hawkins banters and saunters while his brother Dan, dressed like Johnny Ramone but holding things down with the beautiful reliability of Malcolm Young, riffs hard on Mortal Dread and Barbarian.
In opposition, though, is a mix that's coruscatingly loud and absolutely unforgiving. It ruins Rock and Roll Party Cowboy and The Battle for Gadget Land, a couple of intriguingly spiky new songs, and is equally dismissive of Growing on Me, a banker from the old days that's rescued at the last when Hawkins, spotlit in a neckerchief and retro-futuristic jacket like Doc Holliday fronting Sparks, peels off a head-spinning solo. Really, that's the magic of the Darkness in miniature – when the wheels seem sure to come off, they find a way to rattle on.
The Darkness are on tour in the UK until 29 March
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
6 days ago
- The Guardian
Hit horror Weapons doesn't have a deeper meaning but that's OK
For years now, horror fans and critics have grown increasingly and understandably impatient with the tendency of genre films to orient their scares toward a clearly conveyed central metaphor. The real monster in these movies is parenthood, personal trauma or that old horror-movie standby, grief. Writer-director Zach Cregger is no stranger to this line of thinking; his 2022 horror movie Barbarian is very much a spooky-creature-in-the-basement movie for the #MeToo era. Now Cregger has returned with a movie that may well stymie anyone who has been trained by the last decade to search for an easy-to-track allegory within their viscerally depicted fears. His new movie Weapons has received mostly rave reviews and positive audience response. But at least a few critics and fans are pivoting from complaining about obvious metaphors to ask … is that all there is? Is Weapons actually about anything? (To further delve into this question, of course, we'll need to go full spoiler mode, so if you want to see the movie and haven't yet, turn back now.) The movie certainly alludes to plenty of hot-button issues. It springs from a chilling premise: one night in a small town, 17 children from the same third-grade class wake up at 2.17am, leave their houses, and disappear into the night. Parents are understandably distraught, and in looking for someone to blame seem to land on the students' teacher Justine (Julia Garner), who is as puzzled and disturbed about this as anyone else. When Archer (Josh Brolin) angrily demands to know what was 'going on' in his missing son's classroom, convinced that Justine must have played some role in this tragedy, there are unmistakable echoes of social panics in an era where parents feel empowered to dictate what their children learn about at school. The fact that the movie's school shutters, then must reopen before the disappearance is solved or its pain is at all healed recalls Covid-era school closures. And when Archer has a dream where he sees a giant AR-15 materialize in the sky above the town, it seems like an obvious reference to school shootings that have devastated so many classrooms over the past quarter-century. Or is it? Cregger actually says no. I co-host a horror podcast, and in our interview with the film-maker, he unequivocally said he was not thinking of school shootings when he wrote the movie. For him, that's not at all what it's about. (Though he did stress that he welcomes people's interpretations, and in fact wanted to make something with that kind of flexibility.) He wouldn't say precisely how he personally interprets the story, but he has mentioned repeatedly that it was something he started writing out of – hey! – grief, even if the movie itself may be more ambiguous as to its thematic aims. This leaves Weapons open to the charge that it's not about much of anything – that it's all great hook and solid technique in service of a thrill ride where some stray inspiration from Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia is more superficial homage than thematic link. The real question, though, is how bad of an offense this is supposed to be. Plenty of great horror movies are principally concerned with the visceral experience of watching them in the dark, rather than the talking points or takeaways they might hand over to the viewer in broad daylight. Subtext shouldn't have to be plainly visible at first glance. Indeed, some of the skepticism over Weapons seems to stem from the fact that it turns out to be … a horror movie. The children in the movie are enchanted by a witch. The movie doesn't say whether she's always been a witch, or has turned to witchcraft in the face of a debilitating illness. But that's why she takes control of these children, and various other adults at her convenience: to sap their life force, attempt to heal herself, and, in the meantime, use her control to make her victims do her bidding. So yeah, pretty witchy stuff, and her comeuppance has the gory satisfaction of a Brothers Grimm story fed through a powerful amplifier. That wild, almost fanciful ending may strike some as reductive, especially when its first half plays more like a dark mystery like David Fincher's Zodiac, or at least Seven. But is the spectacle of brainwashed children being turned against their older captor and ravenously destroying her so devoid of opportunities for interpretation? It's not even that Weapons is demanding a lot of work from the audience – and that might be exactly what rankles some about it. Most of what happens in the movie is unambiguously explained; it's the meaning that's left up to the audience, and maybe some sense an incongruity between those two approaches. That's a fair-enough critique, as is a thoughtful consideration that concludes none of the movie's interpretations hold up to much scrutiny. But it's hard to fault Cregger for making a horror movie that is more concerned with its own scary, twisty immediacy than its optics as a social critique. At the same time, maybe the discourse over the meaning of Weapons suggests that the eye-rolling about 'metaphorror' has been overblown, too. Countless horror classics could very much be described as driven by metaphor. Some are murkier or more interpretative than others, but having a central idea and conveying it clearly isn't a marker of hackdom. It's just something that some hacky movies have done, often directly imitating very good ones. Think of Get Out, which may have been thornier than it was given credit for, but still has a trackable central conceit that's not exactly obtuse; then think of heavy-handed Get Out knockoffs like Antebellum and Blink Twice with too much visible effort and too little inspiration. Jordan Peele himself followed a path not unlike Cregger's when following up Get Out; his movies Us and Nope are immediately engaging visceral experiences with more allusions and evocations than clear signaling of a central metaphor. They may be more successful in that realm than Weapons, but then, that's true of most movies when compared with Peele's output. It's the prescriptiveness – give us a meaning, or kill all metaphors – that goes against the nature of horror in general. The combination of the concrete and slippery is what makes horror such a compelling field; there may not be a genre better suited to blurring the lines between reality and a heightened dream state. There's no single correct way to have a nightmare.
The Guardian
6 days ago
- The Guardian
Hit horror Weapons doesn't have a deeper meaning but that's OK
For years now, horror fans and critics have grown increasingly and understandably impatient with the tendency of genre films to orient their scares toward a clearly conveyed central metaphor. The real monster in these movies is parenthood, personal trauma or that old horror-movie standby, grief. Writer-director Zach Cregger is no stranger to this line of thinking; his 2022 horror movie Barbarian is very much a spooky-creature-in-the-basement movie for the #MeToo era. Now Cregger has returned with a movie that may well stymie anyone who has been trained by the last decade to search for an easy-to-track allegory within their viscerally depicted fears. His new movie Weapons has received mostly rave reviews and positive audience response. But at least a few critics and fans are pivoting from complaining about obvious metaphors to ask … is that all there is? Is Weapons actually about anything? (To further delve into this question, of course, we'll need to go full spoiler mode, so if you want to see the movie and haven't yet, turn back now.) The movie certainly alludes to plenty of hot-button issues. It springs from a chilling premise: one night in a small town, 17 children from the same third-grade class wake up at 2.17am, leave their houses, and disappear into the night. Parents are understandably distraught, and in looking for someone to blame seem to land on the students' teacher Justine (Julia Garner), who is as puzzled and disturbed about this as anyone else. When Archer (Josh Brolin) angrily demands to know what was 'going on' in his missing son's classroom, convinced that Justine must have played some role in this tragedy, there are unmistakable echoes of social panics in an era where parents feel empowered to dictate what their children learn about at school. The fact that the movie's school shutters, then must reopen before the disappearance is solved or its pain is at all healed recalls Covid-era school closures. And when Archer has a dream where he sees a giant AR-15 materialize in the sky above the town, it seems like an obvious reference to school shootings that have devastated so many classrooms over the past quarter-century. Or is it? Cregger actually says no. I co-host a horror podcast, and in our interview with the film-maker, he unequivocally said he was not thinking of school shootings when he wrote the movie. For him, that's not at all what it's about. (Though he did stress that he welcomes people's interpretations, and in fact wanted to make something with that kind of flexibility.) He wouldn't say precisely how he personally interprets the story, but he has mentioned repeatedly that it was something he started writing out of – hey! – grief, even if the movie itself may be more ambiguous as to its thematic aims. This leaves Weapons open to the charge that it's not about much of anything – that it's all great hook and solid technique in service of a thrill ride where some stray inspiration from Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia is more superficial homage than thematic link. The real question, though, is how bad of an offense this is supposed to be. Plenty of great horror movies are principally concerned with the visceral experience of watching them in the dark, rather than the talking points or takeaways they might hand over to the viewer in broad daylight. Subtext shouldn't have to be plainly visible at first glance. Indeed, some of the skepticism over Weapons seems to stem from the fact that it turns out to be … a horror movie. The children in the movie are enchanted by a witch. The movie doesn't say whether she's always been a witch, or has turned to witchcraft in the face of a debilitating illness. But that's why she takes control of these children, and various other adults at her convenience: to sap their life force, attempt to heal herself, and, in the meantime, use her control to make her victims do her bidding. So yeah, pretty witchy stuff, and her comeuppance has the gory satisfaction of a Brothers Grimm story fed through a powerful amplifier. That wild, almost fanciful ending may strike some as reductive, especially when its first half plays more like a dark mystery like David Fincher's Zodiac, or at least Seven. But is the spectacle of brainwashed children being turned against their older captor and ravenously destroying her so devoid of opportunities for interpretation? It's not even that Weapons is demanding a lot of work from the audience – and that might be exactly what rankles some about it. Most of what happens in the movie is unambiguously explained; it's the meaning that's left up to the audience, and maybe some sense an incongruity between those two approaches. That's a fair-enough critique, as is a thoughtful consideration that concludes none of the movie's interpretations hold up to much scrutiny. But it's hard to fault Cregger for making a horror movie that is more concerned with its own scary, twisty immediacy than its optics as a social critique. At the same time, maybe the discourse over the meaning of Weapons suggests that the eye-rolling about 'metaphorror' has been overblown, too. Countless horror classics could very much be described as driven by metaphor. Some are murkier or more interpretative than others, but having a central idea and conveying it clearly isn't a marker of hackdom. It's just something that some hacky movies have done, often directly imitating very good ones. Think of Get Out, which may have been thornier than it was given credit for, but still has a trackable central conceit that's not exactly obtuse; then think of heavy-handed Get Out knockoffs like Antebellum and Blink Twice with too much visible effort and too little inspiration. Jordan Peele himself followed a path not unlike Cregger's when following up Get Out; his movies Us and Nope are immediately engaging visceral experiences with more allusions and evocations than clear signaling of a central metaphor. They may be more successful in that realm than Weapons, but then, that's true of most movies when compared with Peele's output. It's the prescriptiveness – give us a meaning, or kill all metaphors – that goes against the nature of horror in general. The combination of the concrete and slippery is what makes horror such a compelling field; there may not be a genre better suited to blurring the lines between reality and a heightened dream state. There's no single correct way to have a nightmare.
Daily Record
6 days ago
- Daily Record
Ozzy Osbourne's six-word dig at Taylor Swift after being asked if he was a fan
Late rock icon Ozzy Osbourne was an unlikely fan of Taylor Swift, but he couldn't resist making a dig at the pop star during a resurfaced interview Before his tragic passing on last month, Ozzy Osbourne revealed his feelings about pop star Taylor Swift. During an interview at the 2014 Grammys, the self-proclaimed Prince of Darkness quipped a hilarious statement about the singer. Black Sabbath legends Ozzy, Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler scooped the Best Metal Performance award for God Is Dead. Whilst chatting to journalists after taking the top gong, the discussion took an unexpected turn. "You said you were a big fan of Taylor Swift," Butler joked. "Yes I did," Ozzy replied. "Yes, I am a big fan of Taylor Swift." Then he leaned forward and quipped: "Who the f**k is Taylor Swift?" The remark was clearly lighthearted, and Swift would go on to rule 2014 with her blockbuster record 1989, which stormed the Billboard 200's number one position for 11 weeks and boasted three chart-toppers including Shake It Off, Blank Space, and Bad Blood. This comes as Taylor has today unveiled her brand new album alongside a striking image, as reported by the Mirror. Of course, Ozzy wasn't completely oblivious to her achievements back at the time of his comments. In reality, he had already encountered the pop royalty and had praised her enormously. That encounter surfaced later that year when Taylor appeared on The Talk. Sharon Osbourne recalled the moment her, Ozzy, and their daughter Kelly crossed paths with Taylor during a shopping trip in LA. Sharon recalled Ozzy being captivated by her as she quoted him saying: "Finally, out of all the young, new artists, I've finally found one that is a true superstar." Sharon went on: "He said he'd never met anyone that had the aura that you have, because your aura is one of elegance, and just pure, just genuine talent. And he said that you were like Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, all rolled into one." Sharon then flipped the question back: "Now, what do you remember about my Ozzy?". The singer responded that his lovely comments were "the sweetest thing" and mentioned how reserved he appeared during their meeting. "He was too busy gazing at you!" Sharon joked. The Black Sabbath icon passed away on July 22, at the age of 76, with Sharon and children by his side. In his final years, Ozzy had been fighting poor health, which he had discussed openly, but had remained committed to reaching Villa Park for his last show just days before his death. Meanwhile, worldwide sensation Swift announced today on Thursday, August 14, the launch of her new album after weeks of rumours. The chart-topper made an appearance on a podcast alongside her partner, Super Bowl winner Travis Kelce, and his sibling Jason, with more than 1.3 million viewers watching the live broadcast. Despite being famously private and rarely giving interviews, the Bad Blood singer has shared some details about her upcoming album set to be released in October. The new record, penned during her Eras Tour and recorded in Sweden, will comprise 12 tracks, including a duet with Sabrina Carpenter. Discussing the album, Taylor revealed: "This album is about what was going on behind the scenes in my inner life during this tour, which was so exuberant and electric and vibrant."
