Welcome to The Manchester Review's critical blog, a lively review hub which takes the temperature of - and sometimes sets the agenda for - the contemporary arts in Manchester, the UK and beyond.
June 10th, 2010 posted by Jo Nightingale
When my other half told me he’d spotted a Modernist sculpture exhibition I didn’t know about in the city, I thought he was just trying to impress me. Quite where he’d glimpsed it was another matter, but then the foyer of one of Bruntwood’s city centre office blocks isn’t an obvious location.
Although Dawn Rowland is [...]
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Article tags: Dawn Rowland
May 30th, 2010 posted by Ian Pople
Jill Bialosky’s first publication in the UK, consists of substantial selections from her three US collections. The first of these, The End of Desire, consists mainly of pitch-perfect narratives of childhood and growing up. Bialosky moves between her own life and those of her mother and her two sisters, and gathers details of the domestic [...]
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May 25th, 2010 posted by Jo Nightingale
So the sequence of expanded Cure re-issues has finally reached Disintegration, for many the band’s defining album. As a long-term fan I never quite saw it that way; my favourite album was, and is, ‘the one no-one else likes’ (The Top). As time’s gone on, though, ‘the one that first got me into them’ has [...]
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Article tags: disintegration, the cure
May 17th, 2010 posted by Jo Nightingale
I should admit to a certain bias when it comes to seeing The Charlatans, this being my 19th time. But they were a decade into their career before I caught on, when they made a giant indie disco of the 1999 Leeds Festival, so a whole gig from 1990’s Some Friendly era is still a [...]
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May 14th, 2010 posted by Jo Nightingale
There’s something not quite right with Bradford Cox. Tonight specifically, I mean: what begins with a late start and some fairly surreal musings ends with the sound-tech lining-up receptacles for a threatened up-chuck by the front-man.
The last time I saw Deerhunter make their waves of big noise it was in broad daylight, in the afternoon [...]
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May 14th, 2010 posted by Robert Mitchell
So where does the God of Love hang out? Apparently in the company of middle class intellectuals, heartbroken widows, middle aged adulterers, devoted mothers and alcoholic stepsons with tangled oedipal issues to work out . . . he hangs out in the motorcars, kitchens and living rooms of Middle America, a local which, for [...]
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May 4th, 2010 posted by Ian Pople
reviewed by Edmund Prestwich
Shanta Acharya was born and educated in India, gained a doctorate from Oxford and was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard. She has written a book on Emerson, three books on asset management, and five volumes of poetry. This new collection reflects both the breadth of cultural reference and the rather privileged perspective [...]
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April 30th, 2010 posted by Jo Nightingale
I first visited Hebden Bridge 20 years ago, and was captivated by its gothic remoteness and Victorian charm. Its plethora of book, record and junk shops didn’t hurt either, and I’ve been drawn back to the town every year or two since. If it hadn’t been so distant from jobs, family and friends I would [...]
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Article tags: hebden bridge, jez lewis, shed your tears and walk away
April 8th, 2010 posted by Simon Haworth
This new anthology from Bloodaxe, edited by Roddy Lumsden, is their second such offering in recent months, arriving hot on the heels (in poetry terms) of their last, Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century (September, 2009); that anthology concentrated on newness and this one in many ways is no different, aiming to introduce [...]
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April 5th, 2010 posted by Nicholas Murgatroyd
If there’s some bad news for art lovers who haven’t been to London recently, it’s that there’s less than a month left to see the Arshile Gorky retrospective at Tate Modern. The good news is that there are seven weeks left to see its partner exhbition, Van Doesberg & the International Avant-Garde.
The Gorky exhibition is [...]
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Article tags: arshile gorky, de stijl, tate modern, van doesberg