Despite the amazing availability of television online, at locations both legal and illegal, the box set is making a comeback. The Guardian recently launched a ‘Box Set Club’, and sales keep rising: from the nostalgia of rewatching old Frasier seasons to the excitement of a spanky American drama you’d otherwise have to track down on an obscure Sky channel, we can’t get enough. We want TV on our own terms, and we’re bored of squinting into our undersized laptop screens. Enter the DVD.

In my mind, television is the purest form of procrastination. It is the truest, harking back to an age when we didn’t even know what procrastination was, we just knew that the natural thing to do when returning from school was switch on the kids channel and be sucked in to that unnaturally shiny world.

Now, with the advent of iPlayer, 4oD and other on-demand resources, we can watch snippets of television whenever we like. A Peep Show here, an episode of Africa there; it all addsup. However, there is an alternative to procrastaTV which feels oddly guiltless, and that my friends, is the box set.

Buying a box set is like the procrastinator’s version of putting a downpayment on a Ford Focus. It is a commitment, you have made an investment, and sitting watching 40 hours of West Wing suddenly has a greater meaning. You have a project, much like taking up a new hobby or completing your degree.

It is pre-meditated viewing, designed for those who missed something the first time round, those who’ve read an insightful article about the moral integrity of [insert-gritty-drama-here] or for those who insist on blogging a review of every single episode.

It is no coincidence that their popularity is on the up during a time of Big Important Dramas. They are often American, extremely well crafted and they just look bloody cool. As do their boxes. Whoever thought of spreading out the logo of a show across several DVDs was a genius. It means I have to complete the set. I have to have every series of House.

American drama in particular has dominated in recent years, and its continued success can be seen in the recent revival of shows such as The Sopranos, Six Feet Under and The West Wing on Sky Atlantic. They are still being talked about, compared to, sourced from, and thus people continue to buy them years after their airing.

One of the reasons shiny American drama like The Wire is so engaging is that it’s completely alienating. With highly paced colloquial language, grit-cop jargon and no flashbacks or catch-ups, you’re required be completely engaged for five whole series. These slow-burning, novelistic dramas require a satisfying sort of dedication, meaning the payoff is far greater at the end. It takes a while, but on the upside my inner voice is now that of a Baltimore drug dealer.

It’s not just the old favourites that are having a boxy renaissance; semirecent shows that you might have missed by a whisker are everywhere at the minute. Super-meta-sitcom Community has a huge cult following, appealing to those who like TV and those who are very aware of the fact that they like TV. Equally, shows that haven’t even finished, such as Breaking Bad, are being snapped up quicker than crystal  meth on a street corner. 

For me, buying box sets is part of my television-enthusiast vanity complex, the part that knows every character history of House and watches The Wire without subtitles. I’ll be out of a loan before Trinity.

The increased online presence we all now engage in is hard to avoid. If you wanted to, you could probably track the average Facebook or Twitter user’s day-to-day life to a degree where you remembered their whereabouts better than they did – and yet it’s hard to say that you’d ‘know’ the person any better than if you spoke to them for five minutes face to face.

Our online ‘personalities’ and their legacy is the subject of the return of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror this week, and it’s good to see that the efficacy of the format hasn’t been dulled by the success of the first run: if anything, its dystopian vision of a future dominated by the intrusive technology that we now take for granted has sharpened.

Though relatively simple, Be Right Back delivered a taut, clear and effective hour of television, raising complex questions about our relationship with social media and, by extension, one another. This episode imagines a world in which a lost loved one could be approximated by their online presence – tweets, videos, Facebook photos, Skype calls – and examines the fallout from such a decision.

The early stages of this system don’t feel so far from reality – a sort of simulated Artificial Intelligence already exists on phones, and even the idea of online presence after death already exists (in the form of the faintly sinister liveon.org). As the plot progresses, though, things become more outlandish – the technology seems to take something of a leap – and initially I was concerned that this might be implausible. Yet the early stages of the premise were close enough to life to allow for a little leeway in its development, and
grounded performances from Hayley Atwell and Domnhall Gleeson as
couple Martha and Ash help to sell the more sci-fi elements of the plot.

There was no violence or shadowy conspiracy determined to use the online information for its own ends. The action was largely limited to a rural cottage, and contained within a small cast: less about the big shocks, Be right Back brought a build up of unease as the emotionless approximation of the dead Ash subtly tried to mimic his late self’s mannerisms and speech patterns, in a manner that constantly wavered on a line between sweet and deeply
unsettling.

Overall, Be Right Back is a great little traditional science-fiction parable
that overcomes the drawbacks of the genre by grounding the story firmly in a human interaction that we can all relate to. You can fully expect these
same sentiments to be expressed again by my robot simulation hours after my death.

40? Sadly not: this is 140 minutes of monotony. I wish I could defend the king of the Frat Pack, but director Judd Apatow has offered audiences a self-indulgent mess with little to laugh about. Perhaps I’m too young to appreciate all of its
humour, but, at its core, This is 40 is too meandering and dull to be even entertaining, let alone funny. This comedy-cum-autobiography traces the foibles of a Los Angeles couple, Debbie and Pete, approaching their 40th birthdays. Starring Apatow’s wife, Leslie Mann, and his pet collaborator, Paul Rudd, This is
40 takes us through a fraying marriage and the neuroses of hitting middle age.

In an effort to make the best of what they have, Debbie and Paul vow to exercise more frequently, eat healthily, and improve their relations with their two daughters, Sadie and Charlotte, played by Apatow’s off-screen daughters (shocker!).Although the film deals with sitcom staples – a moody teen, a sex-starved couple – Apatow fails to deliver the laughs.
This is 40 plays on a flurry of ‘firstworld problems’ and consumer habits, but instead of making light of banal difficulties it offers up screaming matches. At one point Pete and a fellow husband begin to discuss how wonderful widowhood might be and it all gets decidedly gloomy. Two terrible fathersin-law, an estranged John Lithgow and freeloader Albert Brooks, are thrown into the mix to make matters even more depressing.

For those familiar with Apatow’s 2007 hit, Knocked Up, the characters Debbie and Pete might ring a bell. Their marriage formed the sub-plot to Katherine Heigl and Seth Rogen’s refracted boy meets girl set-up. As a sequel, This is 40 aims to bring our attention back to Debbie and Pete with more laughs and awkwardness. However, as a main storyline, it’s really difficult to care about their lives.

This is 40 plays out like a series of unwitty anecdotes. It’s not so much the directionless plot that’s bothersome, but the missed opportunities. Much more could have been made, for instance, about growing older in LA, where ageing naturally is almost taboo. It’s also unfortunate that some of the best comedic talents of recent decades – Jason Segel, Chris O’Dowd, and Melissa

McCarthy – have just bit parts. The cast itself is like an Apatow fan club. Yet, they’re missing his schoolboy humour to play with. If you don’t manage to drift off towards the end of This is 40, there’s no reward. You’re simply left with the realisation that this film, from the producer of the hilarious Superbad, is a drawn-out, humourless, mess of a comedy.

In mid-October 2010, as the UK geared up for the country’s coldest December in over 100 years, an English/Spanish band burst onto the scene with a Star of Love, a folktronica album guaranteed to put the feeling back in the British public’s toes. With joyful, upbeat vocals and fantastically energetic synth, tracks like ‘In the Summer’, ‘Plage’ and ‘I Love London’ evoked the atmosphere of the Spanish summer in an English context. Traditional Basque instruments surged through the electronic sounds to forge a wonder-filled unstoppable force of pure happiness. Despite the ice on the roads and the chill in the air, Crystal Fighters were delighted to invite the whole of the UK to “come to the plage with me”. The album encouraged listeners to maintain their optimism in the face of the weather, and thousands of fans braved the cold to get to the band’s sold-out headline tour of the UK.

They may be French instead of Spanish, and owe their sound more to Phoenix’s guitars than Crystal Fighters’ txalaparta (a wooden xylophone-like percussion instrument played by two people standing face-to-face), but Concrete Knives’ newly-released debut album, Be Your Own King, is guaranteed to make the sun rise in your soul. Just look how blue the sky is on that album cover! Oxford’s a cold place this time of year (and most times of year as far as I can tell as a first-year) and there are few better ways of warming up than turning up the central heating, wrapping yourself in a rug and dancing around your room to this friendly bunch of Frenchmen.

Opening track ‘Bornholmer’ sets the tone with frantic use of bouncy electronic melodies and a desperately infectious beat accompanied by earnest and optimistic vocals. Even without lyrics ‘Roller Boogie’ is the most unstoppably summery song on the album, veering at will between sleepy tunes which conjure up images of sunbathing in the back garden to delightfully energetic electro riffs which will instantly transport you forward to that festival you’re so looking forward to. Yes, there’s not a whole lot of variation – most of the songs are quite simply fun beats leading inevitably to a hook-heavy chorus – but the album is full of enough relentless energy to sustain it through to the end. Just. Musically it’s not a particularly thoughtful album, but it’s just what you need to break the wintry apathy and get that smile back on your face.

This year the London Underground celebrates 150 years since its first line, the Metropolitan Railway, was opened in 1863. Turner Prize winner Mark Wallinger has joined a long line of artists such as Tracey Emin, Henry Moore and Man Ray who have contributed their work to the tube platforms. The London stations have helped to inspire a vast range of art, design, literature, film and music, from Javier Bardem’s Bond villain being chased through a train by Daniel Craig in Skyfall to Gerry Rafferty’s classic 1970’s song ‘Baker Street’.

Mark Wallinger’s Labyrinth is the tube’s largest ever art commission and forms part of the on-going Art on the Underground program. The project involves the installation of 270 black enamel works, one for each station, which are made of enamel and similar in appearance to tube signs. Each tube stop will have its own unique labyrinth design and the entire process will be complete by September.

For Wallinger, this is an unprecedented opportunity for a huge number of people to appreciate his work. Four million people pass through the Underground every day and about a billion people use it each year. The trains also travel the equivalent of 90 round trips to the moon every year. It is quite a different undertaking to his previous projects, which included wandering around in a bear suit in Berlin for ten days and his Turner Prize winning ‘State Britain’ which reconstructed the peace protester Brian Haw’s Parliament Square tent.

Part of the aim of Wallinger’s project is to create order out of the confusion of the tube. He explains that the labyrinth design echoes the daily journeys that commuters make; despite the chaos of the rush hour, almost everyone is following a prescribed route.

The designs also share a resemblance to brains, which Wallinger suggests reflects the state of mind of people travelling on the tube. He has praised the fact that people feel comfortable enough to fall asleep on strangers and evokes an environment of goodwill amongst the passengers.

The works are intended to be unobtrusive, something for people to glance at as they make their way to their destination. From the positive reception so far, it seems as if the project will be a success for the London Underground; the main problem that Wallinger may encounter is indifference, despite the number of people who will be passing by his work.

The Evening Standard newspaper recently conducted an experiment where the famous violinist Thomas Gould spent an hour busking in Westminster station, and only 35 out of 2000 people actually stopped to listen to him play.

However, hopefully the scale of the project will encourage more passengers to appreciate art, even if only for a brief moment on their stressful and cramped commute home.

★★★★★
Five Stars

Cave, having reached his fifty-fifth birthday, may be considered part of ‘rock royalty’ to use clichéd term, an ‘elder statesman’ if you like, but this is definitely not reflected in his own musical creativity, even if he may be showing a few more wrinkles on the cover of the Seeds’ latest release than the bands debut From Her To Eternity in 1984.

In the album’s press release Cave notes that “if I were to use that threadbare metaphor of albums being like children, then Push The Sky Away is the ghost-baby in the incubator and Warren’s loops are its tiny, trembling heartbeat.” It appears that Cave’s phrasing is as evocative as ever, both in a lyrical and musical sense, and his subject matter is as relevant as ever.

From the opening notes of ‘We No Who U R,’ supported by the bass of Adamson, gliding effortlessly below the expansive texture, Push the Sky Away is presented as an epic, which is entirely accurate. The sonorous quality of
Cave’s voice reminds me of Leonard Cohen, even Jonny Cash in ‘Jubilee Street’, released as a single last year. As with Cohen and Cash, the maturity in Cave’s voice suggests experience, a man who has lived life and has a story to tell. This is successfully achieved without becoming preachy.

Whilst these references may suggest an album that is out of touch with the modern era, the songwriting remains free, rhythmic and melodious throughout, comparable to Alt-J, Dry the River and similar newcomers. Here,
Cave employs a developed style whilst maintaining a modern edge. It is almost social and cultural suicide to criticise Cave, his albums have consistently attained five star reviews, but this album is genuinely listenable throughout. The tension created by Cave is met by frequent moments of relief, such as in my personal favourite track ‘Mermaids’, with the refrain of “all the ones that come, all the ones that go”, hopefully Cave is here to stay.

★★★★☆
Four Stars

Foals’ third studio album sees the five-piece embrace an altogether poppier and more epic sound than their previous two outings, helped along the way by veteran producers Flood and Alan Moulder. The fact that the duo have worked with acts such as U2 and Foo Fighters gives us a clear indication of the anthemic, arena-filling sound that Foals have set out to achieve in Holy Fire.

And boy do they achieve it, as emphatically exemplified by the album’s second track and lead single ‘Inhaler’. The slow build-up acts as a smokescreen, causing the listener to be completely unprepared for what follows. Yannis Philippakis’ vocals transform from a delicate falsetto at the beginning of the song into a roar as the song explodes into a frenzy of Pendulum-esque proportions. It seems funny to think that such a colossal song was borne out
of a dainty jam played by the band in between songs at gigs, which is testament to both the producers’ and Foals’ scope for imagination.

The next track ‘My Number’ is equally catchy, aided by its wonderfully simple lyrics – “You don’t have my number, we don’t need each other now” – and while it’s true that the album doesn’t regain the same heights of hysteria as
‘Inhaler’, this is not to say that it diminishes in quality or listenability. ‘Everytime’ continues in the same vein as ‘My Number’ with its instant hook and memory-friendly lyrics, while ‘Late Night’ and ‘Out of the Woods’ are altogether more downbeat affairs, yet majestic nonetheless, and perhaps serve as Holy Fire’s two most heartfelt moments. Moreover, the intricate blend of gentle guitars and strings in ‘Milk & Black Spiders’, coupled with emotive, sing-along lyrics will make it a sure-fire crowd favourite, as will the fast-paced ‘Providence’.

Though the album does tail off somewhat at the end Holy Fire is on the whole a very enjoyable, listenable and well-produced album, and certainly more grandiose than their previous two albums. With Holy Fire, Foals are staking their claim to be a credible player in the big league of indie rock. On this basis, it would be foolish to dismiss them.