Poor Creature: All Smiles Tonight review
Poor Creature comprises three musicians expert in heightening and managing atmosphere: Landless's Ruth Clinton, Lankum's Cormac MacDiarmada plus live Lankum drummer John Dermody. Their debut album steeps cowboy songs, Irish ballads, bluegrass and other traditional songs in a misty, playful lightness that somehow also carries an eerie power. Bury Me Not is a 19th-century American song about a dying sailor desperate not to be buried at sea, and Clinton delivers its lamenting lyrics with a bright, shining innocence. MacDiarmada leads Lorene, a rolling, country ballad by Alabama duo the Louvin Brothers, with a similarly soft, brooding magic. Singing as a boy desperate for a letter from his beloved, despite clearly knowing he's being ghosted, the song's melancholy slowly rises as voice and guitar mesh together.
Preprogrammed beats from a Hohner Organetta (a mid-century table-top organ), the wails of an Otamatone (a 21st-century Japanese synthesiser, shaped like a musical quaver) and a theremin add childlike, hauntological flavours to much of this music. Meat and muscle are also built into Hicks' Farewell, a Doc Watson song fed through a sturdy wall of shoegaze, and propulsive highlight, The Whole Town Knows. Within Clinton and MacDiarmada's dense harmonies, Dermody's drums and the track's cacophonous final minutes, you sense folk rocketing somewhere poppy, wild and new.
A folk duo who also work in cabaret, performance, and installation art, Lunatraktors collect together six years of collaborative work on their new compilation, Quilting Points: Invitations and Open Calls 2019-2025 (self-released). A loud mix of salvaged songs, archival fragments, chaos and energetic ideas, its most intriguing tracks are the Korg-propelled 'Oss Girls, inspired by the Padstow May Day song, and The Truth of Eanswythe's Bones, a twisted choral epic inspired by the discovery of a skeleton of a 7th-century saint. Clàrsach (Celtic harp) player Grace Stewart-Skinner's Auchies Spikkin' Auchie (self-released) is a moving, textured exploration of the stories and dialect of her north-east Highlands harbour village, Avoch, mixing her playing with field-recorded conversations, fiddle, double bass and drums. Toby Hay's gorgeous New Music for the 6 String Guitar (The State51 Conspiracy) also further confirms him as a warm, 21st-century heir to the string-bending genius of John Fahey.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Metro
3 minutes ago
- Metro
Netflix reveals major TV return for unrecognisable Peaky Blinders legend
When Cillian Murphy and Netflix combine, it's usually a match made in heaven. The Oppenheimer star has been a firm favourite with audiences since he first depicted Tommy Shelby in Steven Knight's Peaky Blinders back in 2013. But now, the streaming service has released the first-look images at the 49-year-old Irish actor as a headmaster at a last-chance reform school. The reinterpretation of Max Porter's Sunday Times bestseller, Shy, is set in the mid-90s and chronicles a pivotal day in the life of Steve (Murphy) and his pupils. The trailer also shows Shy (Jay Lycurgo), a troubled teenager, who wrestles with his impulse for self-destruction and violence. Wake up to find news on your TV shows in your inbox every morning with Metro's TV Newsletter. Sign up to our newsletter and then select your show in the link we'll send you so we can get TV news tailored to you. The film, titled Steve, will premiere in select cinemas on September 19n before it is officially released on Netflix on October 3. Elsewhere in Steve, Emily Watson, Tracey Ullman, Simbi Ajikawo and Roger Allam also star. Speaking to Deadline, Murphy – who won an Academy Award for Oppenheimer – said he has been a huge fan of Porter's writing. 'Max gave me that book in a proof edition before he finished it, and again it just broke my heart. 'They're the sorts of things I love as a reader and as a performer, so I really wanted to do something with him.' Reacting on social media, several fans shared their excitement for the new project. @Web3Alex_ said: 'Cillian Murphy and Jay Lycurgo teaming up for a 90s reform school drama makes STEVE sound like a gripping mix of grit and heart.' @RolandNorbertB added: 'Cillian Murphy AND a 90s England setting? Yeah, I'm watching this day one 🎬🔥' @TheCinemaura also said: 'That's going to be massive. I like Cillian Murphy.' Meanwhile, @krisfitt commented: 'Babe wake up academy award winner Cillian Murphy is on Netflix.' Directed by Tim Mielants, the film has writer Porter attached as an executive producer. It will also premiere next month at the Toronto International Film Festival. Got a story? If you've got a celebrity story, video or pictures get in touch with the entertainment team by emailing us celebtips@ calling 020 3615 2145 or by visiting our Submit Stuff page – we'd love to hear from you. MORE: Animation smashes Netflix record in days becoming second most-watched film MORE: 'I thought Love Is Blind UK season 2 was cursed – but I was wrong' MORE: 'I hate modern dating after hosting one of Netflix's biggest ever shows'
Daily Mail
3 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
JOHN MACLEOD: Sturgeon clawed her way to power but it's the whine of a victim that drips from Frankly's tawdry pages
Had I eagerly shelled out £28 in advance for a copy of Nicola Sturgeon 's memoirs, I'd now be inclined to cut up rough. Frankly's juiciest bits have been sprayed with abandon everywhere this week – interviews graciously granted; studios regally toured – to the point that today, on official publication, must feel like hurtling joyously downstairs of that cold and frosty morning to find someone has opened all your Christmas presents. And such chunks; and such gobbets. As if the sometime First Minister had rolled onto The Jeremy Kyle Show and told all. Like those magazines of the TV ChitChat order you glimpse in passing at the shops. Shrieking headlines like 'My Dad left my Mum – for my boyfriend!!!' Before even the silky dustjacket is in your hands, even before said autobiography falls open with that exquisite whiff of printers' inks, you already know Sturgeon thinks she may be non-binary. Who does not rule out, some day, a relationship with another woman. That, as a quivering Scottish Parliament newbie, some rank man kept sidling up to her to snigger about a coarse – and, indeed, apocryphal – nickname. Yet Sturgeon, heedless of the no-smoke-without-fire brigade, throws it out there again, amidst much other titillation. She has, no doubt, decades ahead of her to look back and wonder why none of her Pan Macmillan editors – eagerly egging her on – raised a hand gently to breathe, 'Whoa…' And thus Nicola Sturgeon is left sprawled out there on the reputational beach. Not in the thoughtful, statesmanlike company of, say, Thatcher or Mitterand, Garret Fitzgerald or Charles de Gaulle. Much more in the tawdry, brackish he-bwoke-my-necklace waters of Harry and Meghan. And even the late Queen, come to think of it, is betrayed by Sturgeon. There is an unwritten rule that conversations with the Sovereign are not repeated. Especially her exchanges with ministers. All in Elizabeth II's circle knew that she only welcomed tittle-tattle from her closest personal servants – pages, her dresser and that; those she saw every day. Yet Ms Sturgeon quotes the Queen at some length, declares – improbably - that Her Majesty 'loved a bit of a gossip' and wanted details of the racked Alex Salmond. Some, too, have wondered aloud why, given the fraught state of Scottish publishing, Sturgeon rolled all the way down to London town to spill such beans. Surely money was not a consideration for our sometime National Mammy? And there are oddities. Sturgeon, it seems, cares far more about the rights of trans-identifying men in her deathless prose - she devotes pages and pages to it - than about the cause to which she has supposedly devoted her life. Scotland's independence, meriting nothing like as many paragraphs and barely a tenth of the passion. The pages of Frankly, too, are strewn with factual errors: silly mistakes, easily checked. One instance will suffice. Recalling when Covid-19 rolled in like a tsunami, Sturgeon hyperventilates, 'We moved more quickly than the other governments to ban mass gatherings and close schools.' Actually, Sturgeon's general approach was slyly to ascertain what ministers in Whitehall were about to do – and then announce it first. And Scotland's schools closed their doors on Friday 20 March 2020 – the same day as every other school across the United Kingdom. Almost the saddest aspect of Sturgeon's autobiography is her obsession with Alex Salmond – longtime friend, a colleague through decades, a mentor at critical moments. Until they fell so spectacularly out, from 2017, like jostling barons at a Shakespearean court. Bloated and bitter, Salmond died last October at some conference in the Balkans. That recent demise – and broken hearts left behind – might, you think, have signalled some Sturgeon caution. On top of three incontestable facts: Salmond in 2019 won a civil court case, with costs and damages, against the Scottish Government. M'luds concluded that it had treated Salmond 'unlawfully,' in a manner 'tainted with apparent bias.' A year later he was acquitted of all charges – by a majority in each instance – of criminal offences against womn, this by a majority-women jury under a presiding female judge, Lady Dorian. And, a year after that, the relevant Holyrood committee concluded that Nicola Sturgeon, First Minister, had in the course of this tacky episode misled the Scottish Parliament. Indeed, giving evidence to that committee, there were extraordinary lapses in the Sturgeon memory: one can but congratulate her, half a decade on, how much her grasp of events has improved. In Frankly, she now goes after her late patron like a studs-up Emily Maitlis. As early as 1989, Sturgeon confides of some internal party episode, she had 'doubts.' During the independence referendum, she now and then questioned Salmond's judgement – though privately, of course; always 'privately.' Which did not prevent Sturgeon's 2004 plot with him to trick Roseanna Cunningham out of the SNP's deputy leadership, joyously leading the Nationalist charge at Holyrood (Salmond then was marooned in the Commons), holding high office under him for seven years and great prominence in that independence campaign. Salmond was buried on October 29 yet she is yet fixated on him, even after his two-nil triumph in the courts, her own censure by her Holyrood peers and when, as a woman far more important once murmured, some recollections may vary. Like Holmes and Moriarty, and as far as Nicola Sturgeon is concerned, she and Salmond must be roped together for always, tumbling down the Reichenbach Falls of history. The sometime First Minister gives little thought to the other women, Roseanna Cunningham apart, slighted or brutalised as Sturgeon surged through the decades to become great. She has always howled down the obvious comparisons with Margaret Thatcher, apt as they are. As to what her surrogates did to, for instance, Johanna Cherry and J K Rowling – well, silence is golden. Or, perhaps, just yellow. And then, working the phones in 2023, briefing her useful idiots in the Scottish media, watching complacently as the Scottish Greens joined the pile-on against Kate Forbes. Twisting her faith and background – a Free Church launched, you know, in a radical stand against despotic landlordism – till leadership-candidate Forbes was suitably painted as the sort of crazy Pentecostal from the Appalachians who dances with snakes. But saddest of all is how self-demeaningly, Nicola Sturgeon does down herself. This was our most cultured and best-read First Minister since Donald Dewar. A girl without advantage or contacts from an Ayrshire new town who spurned the most obvious (and the laziest) vehicle for ambition – the Labour Party – and who refused to sit at the back of the bus and shut up. By hard, hard work and against daunting odds – it took her four draining bids to win Glasgow Govan – Sturgeon clawed her way to power. Was not ashamed to reinvent her image. Impressed civil servants in every brief she held. A fearsome debater; a tough political operator. Swept to the SNP leadership, at the last, unopposed. A woman with a delicious sense of humour, at her peak beset everywhere for selfies. Who sold out the SECC Hydro faster than Beyoncé and would win eight national elections on the trot. Yet all, inexplicably, that drips through the pages of Frankly is the whine of a victim.
Telegraph
3 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Word ‘Jewish' ripped from comedian's posters at the Edinburgh Fringe
A comedian has claimed the word 'Jewish' was burned from posters advertising her Edinburgh Fringe show. Earlier in the festival Rachel Creeger had one show cancelled over alleged staff concerns about potential security risks. Ms Creeger was offered the chance to perform at another venue, Hoots, and posters were put out advertising her show, Ultimate Jewish Mother. The word 'Jewish' appears to have been deliberately burned on outdoor posters, rendering the 'Jew' illegible. She posted on Instagram: 'Overnight, vandals burned out the word Jew out of the signage outside my lovely venue. I am not going to let this break me, but I am not going to lie, it's a tough day.' The vandalism marks the latest in a string of controversies at the Fringe, amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict. In July, Ms Creeger and Philip Simon were set to perform at the Whistlebinkies venue in Edinburgh. However, they claimed they were informed that their gigs would be cancelled after bar staff at the venue expressed fears of feeling 'unsafe'. It was claimed that the concerns were raised after an announcement that the venue would receive extra police supervision amid continued worries over the safety of Jewish acts. Days later, having found an alternative venue, Mr Simon was cancelled again, barred from the Banshee Labyrinth pub because of alleged 'rhetoric and symbology' linked to Israel. One reason cited by the venue for cancelling his show, Shall I Compere Thee in a Funny Way?, was his attendance at a vigil for people killed in the 2023 Hamas terror attacks. He said of the incident: 'I am still processing the concept that in 2025 I can be cancelled just for being Jewish. In the meantime, I will still be at the Fringe for my one remaining children's show and continue to investigate possible alternative venues for both of my cancelled shows.' It is understood that the alleged vandalism has been reported to Police Scotland.
