★★★★☆


Four Stars

Rae Morris’ press release assures me that the Blackpudlian songstress is “following her incredible year touring the UK and Europe in 2012” with visits to major cities across the country. The venues she is to play are named with the gravity and urgency of a Royal Navy recruitment advert: Hebden Bridge, Newcastle, Glasgow, You Live, You Move, You Grow, You Fight. Rae Morris, I am assured, is making significant movements.

It is a shame, then, that From Above, the title track of her debut EP, seems to eschew any signs of progress or meaningful development. Doleful piano chords, lifted wholesale from a tearful X Factor montage, do little to illuminate Morris’ moon-eyed emotional sloganeering, redolent of a less quirky – less quirky – Ellie Goulding. Despite repeatedly noting a need to “open up her heart“, Morris gives us nothing arresting, nothing rousing, and really, nothing at all. The song’s lack of discernible structure, rather than giving it freedom, renders it hopelessly one-paced; feeble drum breaks and spidery, irritating riffs, too, are tangibly inorganic.

This single is not so much flat-out awful as uninspiring, and Rae Morris might yet move on to better things. The road is long.

It’s half way through the holidays. You’ve already caught up on sleep and friends. It’s far too soon to start working again. You’re now bored and poor.

Cherwell brings you the answer. We’ve put together a to-do list of the top art exhibitions to see in London this Easter.

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Light Show

Light Show is a collection that showcases sculpture and installation art that experiments with light. The gallery promises to create atmosphere: immersive environments that play with colour and aim to challenge our experience of light. The exhibition features artworks created from the 1960s by 22 different artists. Several of the works have not been seen for decades and have been specially recreated.

Hayward Gallery, Tickets from £11. Until 6^th May.

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David Bowie Is

David Bowie is being revealed in his full splendour for the first time at the V&A. The exhibition promises to explore Bowie’s status as an icon and innovator. It tracks Bowie’s road to stardom, the constant changes in his style, and charts the rise and fall of Ziggy Stardust. There are over 300 objects on display including set designs, album artwork, costumes, handwritten lyrics, and Bowie’s own instruments. If it proves anything, it is that David Bowie was constantly reinventing himself.

Victoria and Albert Museum, Tickets £15.40. Until 28^th July.

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Manet: Portraying Life

The exhibition now showing at the Royal Academy is the first retrospective of Manet’s portraits. It establishes his status as a key impressionist figure, and an important influence on early modern art. Unlike many artists forced to paint on commission, Manet was mainly able to choose models from among his friends and acquaintances. The galleries display more than 50 paintings which cover a fascinating cross section of 19th century bourgeoise Parisian society.

Royal Academy of Arts, Tickets from £15.00. Until 14^th April.

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Dorothy Iannone: Innocent and Aware

Dorothy Iannone is famous for her erotic, psychedelic art. This exhibition showcases her vibrant paintings that both celebrate sex and challenge sexual and gender stereotypes. Her free-love aesthetic recalls Indian erotic art while creating a personal narrative of sexual and spiritual fulfilment. Iannone, a self-taught artist, has been painting since the 1960s. Now, at the age of 80, she is just as graphic and unashamed in her portrayals of sexuality.

Camden Arts Centre, Free! Until 5^th May.

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Becoming Picasso: Paris 1901

This exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery demonstrates the extraordinary achievements of Picasso in the year 1901. It was his breakthrough year in which he painted up to three canvasses per day in a bid to become the greatest painter in Paris. Picasso enjoyed a successful show with one of Paris’s most important art dealers Ambroise Vollard. But it was also a turbulent year for him in which his best friend, Carles Casagemas, committed suicide. This had a profound impact on his work. The exhibition focuses on the artist’s figure paintings but also contains a collection of essays by leading and emerging art scholars.

The Courtauld Gallery, Tickets £6.00. Until 26^th May.

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Man Ray Portraits 

This major photographic exhibition is devoted to Man Ray and features more than 150 vintage prints. Spanning his career in both America and Paris, this is the first major retrospective of the artist’s photographic portraits features work from 1916 and 1968. The exhibition includes familiar faces such as Ava Gardner, Pablo Picasso, James Joyce and Salvador Dali. It also seeks to explore Man Ray’s revolutionary photographic techniques such as solarisation and his early experiments with colour.

National Portrait Gallery, Tickets £12.00. Until 27^th May.

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Lichtenstein: A Retrospective 

This exhibition in the Tate features 125 works by American pop artist Roy Lichtenstein. Famous for his use of dots and comic strips, Liechtenstein is an old favourite. This show includes key paintings such as Look Mickey (1961), lent from Washington’s National Gallery of Art, and the monumental Artist’s Studio series of 1973-4. There are also little-known pieces on display such as Lichtenstein’s early abstract expressionist paintings and his art nouveau-inspired sculptures.

Tate Modern, Tickets from £14.00. Until 27^th May.

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Poster Art 150: London Underground’s Greatest Designs

This exiting exhibition is part of the celebrations marking the 150th anniversary of the London Underground. Starting in 1908, with the Tube’s first graphic poster commission, the collection brings together 150 iconic poster designs. It features a range of well-known pieces and some hidden gems. A vote is being conducted for the most popular poster.

London Transport Museum, Tickets from £15.00. Until 1st October.

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George Catlin: American Indian Portraits

This exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery is the first major European exhibition of George Catlin portraits since the 1840s. Catlin, a Pennsylvanian-born artist and writer, spent the 1830s documenting the way of life of the Native American Indians. He later created an ‘Indian Gallery’ which toured America and Europe. This collection of more than 50 of his portraits is one of the most evocative and extensive records of an indigenous people ever made.

National Portrait Gallery, Free! Until 23rd June.

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Ice Age Art 

This groundbreaking exhibition features the world’s oldest known sculptures, drawings and portraits. Created during the last Ice Age, these masterpieces are between 40,000 and 10,000 years old.

Although they are made of mammoth ivory and reindeer antler, these works are far from primitive. These artists experiment with light, perspective and movement.  They demand to be considered in relation to their modern counterparts, and are presented alongside pieces by Henry Moore, Mondrian and Matisse. The exhibition demonstrates that the basic human desire to communicate through art has not changed. In fact, creativity and expression have remained remarkably similar across thousands of years.

British Museum, Tickets £8.00. Until 26^th May.

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Schwitters in Britain 

This is the first major exhibition to examine works from the British period of Kurt Schwitters, one of the major artistic figures of European modernism. Forced to flee Germany when his work was declared ‘degenerate’, he arrived in Britain as a refugee in 1940 and remained until his death in 1948. The exhibition includes over 150 collages, assemblages and sculptures, many of which have not been shown in the UK for over 30 years.

Tate Britain, Tickets from £10.00. Until 12^th May.

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Sebastião Salgado: Genesis

This exhibition showcases the work of the photojournalist Sebastião Salgado. He dedicated his time to discovering and documenting landscapes, wildlife and communities around the world that have been untouched by modern life. The collection displays 200 black-and-white photographs showing tribes still living by ancient values, and landscapes that demonstrate the awesomeness of nature.

Natural History Museum, Tickets £5. Until 8^th September.

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George Bellows: Modern American Life 

This is the first retrospective exhibition in the UK of the work of the New York artist George Bellows. A realist painter, Bellows was fascinated by the urban landscape, technological advancements, and the anonymity of modern life. This exhibition displays over 70 works of art covering his short career between 1905 and 1925.

Royal Academy of Arts, Tickets £8. Until 9^th June.

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Life and Death: Pompeii and Herculaneum 

The British Museum is now displaying over 250 artefacts from Pompeii and Herculaneum – items buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. This major exhibition includes both recent discoveries and celebrated finds, most of which have never been seen outside Italy.  

British Museum, Tickets £12.50. Until 29^th September.

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Souzou: Outsider Art from Japan 

This exhibition displays over 300 examples of Japanese outsider art. The works, which include ceramics, textiles, paintings, sculpture and drawings, are by 46 artists, all of whom are residents and day patients at social welfare institutions on the main island of Honshu. The aim is to challenge the myth of outsider art as being solely reflective of the interior mind, and to explore the creative release of visual expression for artists for whom verbal or written communication is challenging. Different sections of the exhibition explore various approaches to creating art. In ‘Language’ there is a diary of hieroglyphics; ‘Culture’ includes beautiful copies of postwar movie posters; and ‘Representation’ and ‘Relationships’ feature surreal sculptures of fruit made from dense aggregates of small ceramic rabbits.

Wellcome Collection, Free! Until 30^th June.

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Treasures of the Royal Courts 

This celebration of 500 years of exchange between Britain and Russia chronicles the close relationship between the English monarchy and the Russian Tsars. It displays the magnificence of the courts of great rulers from Henry VIII and Elizabeth I to Ivan the Terrible and the early Romanovs.

The exhibition holds more than 150 objects, from royal portraits, jewellery and luxury goods to processional armour and heraldry. At the heart of the show is the beautiful English and French silver given to the Tsars by the British royal family, which is on exclusive loan from the Moscow Kremlin Museums in celebration of 500 years of Anglo-Russian exchange.

Victoria and Albert Museum, Tickets from £8.00. Until 14^th July.

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“I focused on stimulating the dorsal nerve of the clitoris and felt the erectile, spongy tissues dilate in response to parasympathetic nerve action. Acquiring a working knowledge of anatomy could be such fun. I hoped the examiners would set a question on this in the next exam, because I was sure I would excel…“

Upon reading this passage, one might assume it is taken from a bad romance novel whose author has a penchant for precise scientific descriptions of sex scenes. Actually, the author of this… startling quote could be the tutor you see every week.

Clear a space on your bedside table, for a new genre of literature has emerged; ‘LabLit’ is the name given to fiction that is dedicated to the portrayal of scientific culture and concepts. The latest to contribute to the rapidly growing genre is a highly respected British university professor. Said professor has started a new series of ‘adult fiction’ that he hopes will make readers ‘appreciate that scientific research can be both fun and iconoclastic’. The author wishes to remain anonymous, which, after reading the first raunchily ‘scientific’ chapters of A Professor’s Tale: Adolescence to Adultery, seems advisable.

The author, ‘A. Professor’, aims to entertain the reader with amusing stories that incorporate scientific theory effortlessly and painlessly; he maintains that the novels are a combination of real-life stories, personal experience, fiction and scientific research. Whether this synthesis has been particularly painless is debatable. For as the above quote illustrates, LabLit may be painful to read for all the wrong reasons. 

Five novels have been written, with the next installment, A Professor Lives To Tell The Tale, due to be published in May 2013. The stories track the adventures of professors and students, and are intended to be both entertaining and educational. The author argues that ‘life is too short to be reading textbooks; it’s far more fun to create a character and put him or her in awkward situations to illustrate why science is important’. So, medics and science students, cast away your dusty tome of ‘Gray’s Anatomy’ or whatever you all read, and replace it with the A Professor’s Tales series. In the novels, science collides with girlfriends, divorce, career problems, and the major issues that face today’s society, such as the difficulties women face in reaching the top of academia and the financial strain that students face. What more could you want from a fictional genre? Well, if you want to know ‘the pressures that medical researchers are subject to’ and ‘how they manage to relax between and during long haul trips to the next scientific conference’, spending £1.92 on a kindle copy of Adolescence to Adultery might be the best £1.92 you ever spent. Yes, £1.92!

The author, who is the editor of an international journal as well as being actively engaged in scientific medical research, was inspired to write LabLit fiction after being shocked by ‘the poor level of scientific knowledge shown by the general public’ towards a range of scientific developments, and their ‘apathy about the implications for themselves’. Thus the novels aim to provide a good story that simultaneously allows one to gain an insight into scientific principle and application. According to the author, they are a ‘must for anyone who remembers their student days fondly, who will soon set out to university, and for those who work in science, medicine or academia’.

If a synthesis of sex and science is your cup of tea, order one of the five titles now. And if one day this LabLit series appears on your reading list, you would do well to do a little more research on your professor’s current writing projects. Yet something tells me that no one will be quoting A Professor Gets Down To Business in their essays or science reports.

Feeling bored? Are you festering somewhere in the provinces feeling insecure about your future and wishing, in spite of yourself, that you were back in Oxford and about to do collections? If so, this one’s for you. The opening track has Steve Albini shouting about arson and living and dying in the same crappy town, and it’s bound to cheer you up. If that doesn’t work, then Meth Teeth’s (RIP) ‘Unemployment Forever’ will, I’m sure, help you see the bright side.

Stick around till the end for the second single off Mikal Cronin’s sophomore album, ‘MCII’, which comes out in May on Merge Records. It sounds great.

Bring Me The Horizon have come a long way since Count Your Blessings, their debut album released in 2006, and Sempiternalmarks a brave leap for the Sheffield five-piece.

The opening electronic beats of ‘Can You Feel My Heart’ are an indicator of what is to follow throughout this album – a more mature, melodic sound which experiments with new musical elements. With the absence of Skyes’ guttural screams and the rawness predominant in much of their earlier music, comes a more refined sound, showing off the young frontman’s increased vocal range. This is evident in ‘And The Snakes Start To Sing’, which creates a sound very different to what we are used to hearing from BMTH, but no less effective in its power and delivery. This creation of more intimate, cohesive melodies makes their music more accessible and adds the potential to win over many new ears.

However, although they have grown as a band, BMTH have by no means lost their aggressive energy. Oli Sykes’ powerful vocals persist with emotionally charged lyrics such as the opening line to the latest single, ‘Sleepwalking’, “my secrets are burning a whole through my heart” and more familiar, expletive-ridden cries in ‘Antivist’, a high-tempo song more comparable to their earlier material. From the anthemic choruses of ‘Shadow Moses’ and ‘The House of Wolves’ wielding chants that one can imagine being echoed enthusiastically amongst a live crowd, to the powerful, balladic ending and my personal favourite, ‘Hospital For Souls’, Sempiternal offers a diverse yet consistent collection.

The move away from the piercing deathcore sounds of their earlier material is by no means sudden, since their third album, There Is a Hell, Believe Me, I’ve Seen It. There is a Heaven, Let’s Keep It a Secret,released in 2010, introduced elements of synth, clean vocals and even choir vocal samples. However, Sempiternalgoes a step further to create an entirely new sound for the band, drawing on a number of electronic influences, which help to create a somewhat euphoric sensation. Earlier this year the band saw the departure of guitarist Jona Weinhofen and the addition of keyboardist Jordan Fish, a change which arguably reflects this new music style.

Whether Bring Me The Horizon’s new sound has anything to do with their recent move to a major record label – the Sony Music Entertainment subsidiary label, RCA – is debatable. Undoubtedly Sempiternal marks a progression for the band towards more mainstream hardcore rock. The real question is whether this will disappointment the longstanding fans, myself included, who, back in 2006, fell in love with the brutal thrash metal riffs and high-pitched screams/throaty growls of ‘Pray For Plagues’, or whether the band’s development will be seen as a necessary endeavour, a ‘coming of age’ as such (and a relief to our eardrums!).

In my opinion, although it is sad to see BMTH surrender to more mainstream metal, they have not lost the raw energy that we love, just refined it and this album represents a significant and welcome progression for the band. 

Although you may not be aware of Josh Kumra yet, you soon will be. With a killer voice, soulful and silky smooth, displayed on his hit single collaboration ‘Don’t Go’ with Wretch 32, Josh now moves to his own solo project with the release of Good Things Come to Those Who Don’t Wait on April 22^nd.

Whilst talking about collaborating with Wretch 32, Josh found it remarkably easy, having just gone for a meeting with the rapper and coming out with what would become the finished track only “a few hours later.” He then went on to collaborate with Emile Sande on ‘Helicopters and Planes’ which became his first proper single, with [from press release] a “soulful sound which connects the chart-topping re-work of ‘Don’t Go’ to the more acoustic-leaning album to come.”

So, amongst this amalgamation of a hip-hop/acoustic cross-over, where does Kumra fit? When asked, he says he’s “most comfortable with a guitar in his hand and an emotional song to fit.” Amongst all the production on some of the songs on the album, Kumra maintains that “if it doesn’t sound good on an acoustic, it doesn’t make the album.”

This sense of emotion in his songs leads Kumra to citing examples such as ‘Fool to Cry’ by the Rolling Stones on his press release and, when asked about yesterday evening’s line-up release, was naturally happy about the Stones inclusion. With early inspiration coming from the Stones and, amongst others, Eric Clapton who his dad built some furnishings for one time, Kumra spent evenings reminiscing about gigs his father had been to and discovering his record collection, citing the unplugged album by Clapton, Tracey Chapman and a U2 gig at Wembley as particularly memorable. His inspiration may have originally come “straight from his dad’s music” which can be felt in the soul of Kumra’s voice, the songwriting nuances and emotion carried through his music but he is definitely an artist of today.

Throughout the interview, he uses the word “vibe” a fair bit and, right now, is loving that “vibe” of his early inspiration coming through artists such as Ben Howard who he highly praises for Every Kingdom, comparing it to the aforementioned Chapman and arguing that there’s “not a bad track.” His other listening at the moment lies with Gary Clark Jr. (who’s been hailed as a “modern day hendrix”), early Black Keys albums and even Americana.

Kumra’s diversity, throughout his listening and songwriting life, is both reflected in his songs, and the modern mainstream, which we also discussed with Scott Mills. “Whilst the poppy stuff is always around, there’s lots of diversity and ‘feel-good folk vibes’ are breaking through.” 

Hopefully Kumra will be the next ‘feel-good vibe’ breaking through. For him, it’s “all about the music” and, with a big month ahead, including the release of his debut album, this philosophy seems to be working well. He also soon flies to Milan to tour with One Republic to 8,000 people, is playing festivals such as Boardmasters in Newquay where he is due to headline one of the stages and says that all of that will “hopefully lead to a headline tour”. Although big things, big venues, and big audiences that Kumra “gets a buzz from” seem to be on the horizon, he is still “down to earth” and doesn’t shy away from an intimate setting: “that’s where you see if a song works, whether the emotion’s there.”