Scott Bradlee's Postmodern Jukebox. Wellington. 2 September. Shed 6

Created by Scott Bradlee, the rotating collective of Postmodern Jukebox has spent the past few years amassing more than 450 million YouTube views and 1.9 million subscribers, performed on “Good Morning America,” topped iTunes and Billboard charts and played hundreds of shows to packed-house crowds around the world.

Scott Bradlee's Postmodern Jukebox. Wellington. 2 September. Shed 6

Created by Scott Bradlee, the rotating collective of Postmodern Jukebox has spent the past few years amassing more than 450 million YouTube views and 1.9 million subscribers, performed on “Good Morning America,” topped iTunes and Billboard charts and played hundreds of shows to packed-house crowds around the world.

The Groove Book Report: A Burglar's Guide to the City - by Geoff Manaugh

Encompassing nearly 2,000 years of heists and tunnel jobs, break-ins and escapes, A Burglar's Guide to the City offers an unexpected blueprint to the criminal possibilities in the world all around us. You'll never see the city the same way again.

Quotes from the book: 

“Architecture is the “magic of four walls,” he writes, referring to its power to fundamentally transform how certain crimes are judged and how their perpetrators can be sentenced.”

“For the burglar, every building is infinite, endlessly weaving back into itself through meshed gears made of fire escapes and secondary stairways, window frames and screened-in porches, pet doors and ventilation shafts, everything interpenetrating, everything mixed together in a fantastic knot. Rooms and halls coil together like dragons inside of dragons or snakes eating their own tails, rooms opening onto every other room in the city. For the burglar, doors are everywhere. Where we see locks and alarms, they see M. C. Escher.”

I've been putting this off because there are two types of reviews that I like to write: those where I loved the book and want to sing its praises, and those where I really despised it and can't wait to tear it to pieces. When a book is just mediocre ... well.  Who cares? Despite the cool concept and very neat cover, I’m afraid this is one of the latter.  

Like with many I could say that it's not really the book's fault. It didn't entirely meet expectations.  My idea was that the book would be more fantastical, an unstoppable wave of analyses of actual burglaries with diagrams and granular detail on the planning and equipment used and how the cops eventually caught them etc.  Perhaps tales of fraud, etc.  Art theft.  Diamonds and gold heists.   Secret papers and spy thriller plots.  What an opportunity. 

Sadly there are few of those expected moments in the book and when they did they felt flaccid compared with what I imagined would be in there, and instead we’re were surrounded by unending pages of discussion about the act of going through a wall instead of a door, or what the legal definition of burglary is, or anecdotes about riding in a police helicopter in LA and seeing old television film sets.  

I was hoping for a jewellery theft as per The Pink Panther movies, perhaps.  A daring thief on a retractable line lowers down to a triggered floor to snatch the booty.  Sadly, no.  Instead of creative capers, we get mundane stories about police ride-alongs and interviews he conducted. This book would better be titled, "My experiences researching a book about burglary."

Throughout there's just too much chatter and analysis and not enough legends and good narrative.  A great deal of space, for instance, is given to the world of hobby lock pickers and the author's own efforts to learn the skill. At the end of it all he informs us lock picking is irrelevant because burglars don't bother with picking locks, they force entry or find other means of getting into a building. Then why include this information at all?

When actual crimes are mentioned, they are given brief space and left me wanting more details. It felt as if more time was spent explaining the fictional plots of films and books than of real-life crimes.

 

I really wanted to give this book a higher rating. I heard Manaugh interviewed on NPR and was looking forward to the book. It needed to be shorter, by at least a 25%. If it had been, I would have given it 5 stars. The information was delivered well, it just needed to be tighter. He should shop for a better editor.

New Music on Groove

Groove has new music on its playlist.  Here's what we've loaded up.

THE WANING CRESCENT - JOSIENNE CLARKE AND BEN WALKER

Josienne Clarke & Ben Walker will release their debut album for Rough Trade, ‘Overnight,’ on October 14th, 2016. The album which is self-produced, follows their Rough Trade debut, the ‘Through The Clouds' EP, which was released earlier this year.

‘Overnight’ is their most ambitious record to date, focusing on Clarke’s extraordinary voice and lyrics, and Walker’s prodigious guitar-playing and arranging; the album features panoramic orchestration by an eclectic core of acclaimed musicians, including strings, horns, piano, double bass, and drums. The twelve songs – ten originals and two covers - recorded almost entirely live at Rockfield Studios in Wales - serve as a snapshot of the endless cycle of night into day and back again, morning light, into dusk, into black midnight, into greying dawn, and on, and on.

The album’s lilting first single, “The Waning Crescent,” is almost an answer in ballad form to the portrayal of the moon in traditional and popular music as a soothing, confessional, companion (i.e. “Blue Moon”). Coming at the darkest and stillest point in the album, the song – like the moon – brings a reassuring lightness.

Clarke explains, "I started to think about if I was the moon, what I might think and feel, and what the moon might sing back,” adding, “I’ve given it a slightly whiny, self-pitying quality because it’s whimsical and a bit funny.” 

Click the player to listen to Groove or find us on http://tunein.com/ (download the apple or android app groove is under 'groove 107.7 fm'

New Music on Groove

Groove has new music on its playlist.  Here's what we've loaded up.

THE WANING CRESCENT - JOSIENNE CLARKE AND BEN WALKER

Josienne Clarke & Ben Walker will release their debut album for Rough Trade, ‘Overnight,’ on October 14th, 2016. The album which is self-produced, follows their Rough Trade debut, the ‘Through The Clouds' EP, which was released earlier this year.

‘Overnight’ is their most ambitious record to date, focusing on Clarke’s extraordinary voice and lyrics, and Walker’s prodigious guitar-playing and arranging; the album features panoramic orchestration by an eclectic core of acclaimed musicians, including strings, horns, piano, double bass, and drums. The twelve songs – ten originals and two covers - recorded almost entirely live at Rockfield Studios in Wales - serve as a snapshot of the endless cycle of night into day and back again, morning light, into dusk, into black midnight, into greying dawn, and on, and on.

The album’s lilting first single, “The Waning Crescent,” is almost an answer in ballad form to the portrayal of the moon in traditional and popular music as a soothing, confessional, companion (i.e. “Blue Moon”). Coming at the darkest and stillest point in the album, the song – like the moon – brings a reassuring lightness.

Clarke explains, "I started to think about if I was the moon, what I might think and feel, and what the moon might sing back,” adding, “I’ve given it a slightly whiny, self-pitying quality because it’s whimsical and a bit funny.” 

Click the player to listen to Groove or find us on http://tunein.com/ (download the apple or android app groove is under 'groove 107.7 fm'

Jonathan Crayford is at it again.

Teaming up once more with the same killer rhythm section on the critically acclaimed Dark Light (2014), Jonathan Crayford returns with another beautiful album. Recording again with engineer Mike Marciano at Systems Two Studio in New York, East West Moon takes the concentrated minimalism of the previous release a step further, this time with an even greater impressionistic spaciousness.
Jonathan composed the music for East West Moon while living in Berlin. The title is a comment on enmity and commonality, with 'East-West' denoting opposing positions and boundaries, and 'Moon' denoting that which is commonly shared, unpossessed, and freely available.
"It's a marriage of two hemispheres," says Jonathan. "East-West refers to the vast differences we think we see and feel between each other, our different cultures and approaches to living. We are perpetually in conflict over our take on life and someone else's. We form groups, and we want to be identified with the group, but we also want to be individuals. We look out at other groups and say 'Oh, that's a different group, but I'm not part of that, I'm in this group'. But we also see ourselves as 'different' from others in our group, so we have this perpetual fight with who or what we think we are and what we are becoming, which is always in change. Berlin is still haunted by the separation of 'east' and 'west'. People still live with the residue of that in their lives, which I found quite surprising."
"The moon has been meaningful for me for years, as it is for all of us. We can all be different, but we all share the moon. We all share the need to breathe. Instead of holding fast to our presuppositions, we need to look beyond philosophic intransigence and formulate a way forward that is devoid of conflict."
”On this album I tried to dig deep. If you’re not facing your own vulnerability, fragility, and bullshit, then you’re not really writing. It’s a bit like, if you haven’t fallen off a bike then you haven’t really ridden. I put so much work into these pieces, and it was hard some mornings to face another day of self-doubt, but that’s what it takes – those are the depths, but of course you also have wonderful heights. The pieces on this album are all about being alone – we share that aloneness, but we experience it alone.”

Link to Rattle Records

It's Harry Potter's world. Fast-forward 19 years.

When we said goodbye to Harry, Hermione and Ron at the end of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the magical trio were sending off their own children to Hogwarts. Now, a new play picks up where the series left off: The Cursed Child is the eighth Harry Potter story.