melancholy

The “Yu” of the title of this solo debut is multifaceted Belgian producer Bolis Pupul’s late mother, who died in 2008. She was from Hong Kong, and after her death in a road accident Pupul began investigating his neglected Chinese ancestry. Completely Half, one of this beguiling record’s lead tracks, wrestles with the intricacies of identity – he’s “100% 50%” – all the while merging European-heritage electronica with echoes of Chinese pop. Tracks such as the instrumental Spicy Crab ram home Pupul’s signature contradiction:…

Nuri Bilge Ceylan makes long films, by movie standards, but short ones by Russian literature standards. HT Image There may be no filmmaker more consciously working in a novelistic tradition. The Turkish director counts reading “Crime and Punishment” as a formative experience. His Palme d'Or-winning 2014 film “Winter Sleep” adapted a pair of Chekhov short stories. But regardless of any direct correlations, Ceylan's films — colossal, existential, talky — reach for (and often attain) an enveloping vastness that…

Sadness Sets Me Free is, by his own estimate, about the 25th album from Gruff Rhys, if you include his work with Super Furry Animals and all of his various side projects. As with so much of what has gone before, it’s a finely balanced mix of melancholy and joy: heavy subjects and a lightness of touch. They Sold My Home to Build a Skyscraper – about cultural spaces being razed to make way for luxury flats – is a case in point, its downbeat lyrics (“They floored my people down with sandpaper”) at odds with its gloriously…

Future Islands are best in yearning banger mode. Although their 2020 album, As Long As You Are, brought instant classic For Sure, it was often dismayingly downbeat – melancholy unrelieved by the consolation of rhythm. Luckily, People Who Aren’t There Anymore is better at dragging its tears to the dancefloor.Here are grownup, weighty ruminations on devotion, sacrifice, separation and Covid, but The Tower and King of Sweden are also perfectly constructed pop. Iris smartly repurposes a 70s Nigerien funk beat, while Deep in…

A cantankerous, unpopular teacher, Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti); a bright, abrasive student, Angus (Dominic Sessa); and Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), the school’s head cook and a recently bereaved mother, find themselves forced to spend the winter holiday together in an otherwise empty New England elite academy in Alexander Payne’s terrific, bittersweet throwback to the classic American cinema of the 1970s. It’s Payne’s finest film since Sideways (2004), and like it features a superb Giamatti performance as a stubbornly…

This strange, melancholy film from Japan effectively makes the (unfashionable) case against euthanasia: that old people won’t want to be a bother or appear selfish and so will feel pressured into accepting state medicide. Director and co-writer Chie Hayakawa imagines a future in which Japan, burdened with an ageing population, proposes a supposedly voluntary but actually insidiously coercive arrangement called Plan 75, in which citizens of 75 years and above can sign up for an easeful death in return for 1,000 dollars…

The Weeknd’s My Dear Melancholy, dropped five years ago today, and to mark the occasion, the artist dropped new merch and a vinyl edition of the record.“One of my favorites,” he said on Twitter.In addition to the already sold-out vinyl, there’s multiple t-shirts, crewnecks, and hoodies with either the album cover design or an “MDM” logo, ranging from $45-$120. There’s also a trucker hat available.Meanwhile, the artist is gearing up for another leg of his After Hours Til Dawn Tour, as it makes its way through Europe this…

The poet laureate, Simon Armitage, has written a new poem which pays homage to spring, in celebration of World Poetry Day.Plum Tree Among the Skyscrapers is the first in a collection of poems inspired by blossom and commissioned by the National Trust. Its publication marks the beginning of the Trust’s annual blossom campaign, in which the charity will vow to bring blossom back to landscapes across the UK by planting 20m trees by 2030 to help tackle both the climate and nature crises.The collection, which will consist of…

At times during Michael Bracewell’s new novel the mood becomes so elusive, the change of scene so abrupt, that you start to wonder whether you’ve missed some vital bit of information a few pages earlier. It’s like bedtime reading: that absorption in the story just before you nod off, only to pick it up the next morning and wonder “Who’s this character?”, or “Did I know about that?” The tenor of Unfinished Business feels dreamlike, fragmentary, except that the writing is also exact and alert, anchored very particularly in…

There are popular franchises, and then there’s Harry Potter. The Wizarding World has entertained the public for decades, starting with J.K. Rowling’s novels and growing into an eight-film movie franchise, theme parks, and even stage plays. But the movies will always have a special place in fans’ hearts, partly thanks to the great performances given by the cast. Although there was a time when Harry Potter’s Alan Rickman was hit by “day-long melancholy” while working on The Prisoner of Azkaban.Late actor Alan Rickman…