Aurelia Butler

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    Oasis Live Review: The Gallaghers Reunite, Their Songs Still Stomping and Wounds Still Healing

    The British band, a showcase for the intoxicating but toxic chemistry of the brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher, performed for the first time in 16 years.It was a few songs into Oasis’s first concert in 16 years and — despite the heavy anticipation, the rabid fan attention, the relief of simply seeing the Gallagher brothers walk onstage together, Liam’s left arm draped over Noel’s shoulder — there was something still tentative in the air at Principality Stadium in Cardiff, Wales, on Friday night. A crowd of 62,000 fans was vibrating, and cheering and singing along, but still waiting for license to rage.Liam, the band’s frontman and the punchier of the two brothers — Noel, the songwriter and guitarist, is far more dour — seemed to sense the dryness.Turn around, he told the audience. Find someone and throw your arms around them. Hold them tight, he said. Then the band finally located its detonator.That was “Cigarettes & Alcohol,” from its mighty, snarling 1994 debut album, “Definitely Maybe.” The guitars started at maximum sleaze, and Liam began singing the lyrics — about all the fun ways to tune out when life gets boring — with real brio. The crowd, especially down on the stadium floor, began ecstatically hopping in place in little rugby scrums, then erupted out of them as the band peaked at the chorus. Finally, everyone had shaken off their nerves.The New York TimesFor around two hours, Oasis — perhaps the most meaningful and popular British band of the 1990s, and certainly the rowdiest and most fun — toggled back and forth between masculinist ecstasy and a sometimes fumbling search for it in a frills-free and dogged performance. At times, it was pure triumph, the grandest pub singalong fathomable. At other moments, it was a ramble in the dark.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Oasis Starts Its World Tour With Cardiff Concert

    Liam and Noel Gallagher put aside their brotherly rivalry to play the first date of their band’s long-awaited comeback tour in Cardiff, Wales.They had waited 15 years for this moment, and they couldn’t believe it was happening.Dressed in bucket hats, Adidas tracksuits and other ’90s looks, a boisterous crowd gathered on Friday at the 75,000-capacity Principality Stadium in Cardiff, Wales, to witness one of the unlikeliest reunions in rock music.Oasis was back.For two hours, at least.Around 8:15 p.m. local time, Noel and Liam Gallagher, the two stars of a band whose anthemic hits include “Wonderwall” and “Don’t Look Back in Anger,” swaggered onstage, putting aside decades of brotherly war.Liam had his arm around his older brother’s shoulder, and as the phrase “The Great Wait Is Over” flashed on screens at the back of the stage, the pair strode forward, holding each other’s hands skyward.The ringing chords of the group’s 1995 track “Hello,” which features the refrain “It’s good to be back,” wafted over the crowd, kick-starting a 41-date sold-out world tour that includes two concerts at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J.After an opening filled with fraternal joy, the brothers soon reverted to type. For the rest of the set they stood about 30 feet apart and barely glanced at each other. Liam, 52, wearing a black rain jacket, clasped his hands behind his back as he sang upward toward the microphone. Noel, 58, dressed in a blue shirt, stared at his guitar in concentration.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Kesha Seeks a Chaotic Love, and 9 More New Songs

    Hear tracks by Foo Fighters, Ethel Cain, Tyler Childers and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Kesha, ‘Red Flag.’Now that Kesha’s lawsuits and record-company contracts are in the past, her first independently released album, “. (Period),” doubles down on her persona as an unruly, thrill-seeking party girl who wants what she wants. In the peppy “Red Flag,” she welcomes chaos and complication over boredom. “I need a certain kind of chemical / It’s dangerous and unforgettable,” she sings, with an edge of Auto-Tune. The track revs up a combination of synth-pop pulsation and hand-clapping trance buildups, an adrenaline rush of romantic disaster.J.I.D. featuring Eminem, ‘Animals (Pt. 1)’The Atlanta rapper J.I.D. — born Destin Route — zooms through a barrage of syllables in the virtuosic “Animals (Pt. 1).” It’s a breakneck boast that juggles rhyme schemes and percussive flows with casual precision: “I’m good at my job / It’s not a walk in the park ’cause I’m in a metropolis / I’m lost in a thought but escaping the darkness.” J.I.D. is confident enough to split the track with a past master of enunciation and internal rhymes, Eminem. He pivots the production from eerily electronic to orchestral, without lessening the beats per minute or syllables per second.Foo Fighters, ‘Today’s Song’“Today’s Song,” the first new Foo Fighters song since 2023, starts as an elegy, then explodes into an exhortation to persevere. “Two sides to a river,” Dave Grohl sings as drums and power chords come crashing in, and, later, “We’ll drown in the middle / Which side are you on?” It’s the band’s latest earnest, uplifting hard-rock anthem, and despite a few rhyming-dictionary lyrics, the feeling comes through.The Reds, Pinks and Purples, ‘What’s the Worst Thing You Heard’The Reds, Pinks and Purples, from San Francisco, merge the 1960s and the 1980s at their most dejected. They share the ringing picked guitars of folk-rock with the bitter tunefulness of the Smiths and the Go-Betweens. On their new album, “The Past Is a Garden I Never Fed,” the song titles are a checklist of pessimism, from artistic careers to life choices: “The World Doesn’t Need Another Band,” “You’re Never Safe from Yourself,” “No One Absolves Us in the End.” In “What’s the Worst Thing You Heard?,” rising chords disguise dimming expectations; “I know we’re going to crash,” Glenn Donaldson sings, unconsoled by a brisk beat and a pretty guitar pattern.Ethel Cain, ‘___ Me Eyes’In the new single from Ethel Cain’s album due in August, “Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You,” she sings about a troubled fast girl from a small town, potentially a romantic rival in the album’s narrative. “She’s got her makeup done and her high heels on,” the singer observes. “She goes to church straight from the clubs / They say she looks just like her mama before the drugs.” The track’s pulsing synthesizers echo the 1981 Kim Carnes hit “Bette Davis Eyes,” which Cain has covered on tour. But unlike the casual seductress in that song, Cain’s character grows tearful behind her bravado. “They all want to take her out / But no one ever wants to take her home,” Cain wails in a surge of sympathy.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Faces Not Just a Sentencing, but a Host of Civil Cases

    The music mogul, convicted on lesser charges at his federal trial, has been accused of sexually assaulting people in dozens of suits. He has denied the allegations.The federal trial of Sean Combs ended on Wednesday with the media mogul acquitted on the most serious charges, but while Mr. Combs remains in jail and awaits sentencing for charges of transporting prostitutes, he also faces ongoing civil lawsuits.There are more than 50 lawsuits accusing him of sexual abuse, the majority of which are based in New York. The accusations date as far back as the 1990s and include allegations of druggings and rapes, often at parties. The plaintiffs are a mix of men and women, and at least a dozen say Mr. Combs sexually assaulted them when they were minors. Many of the suits were filed anonymously.In a statement following the verdict, Erica Wolff, a civil lawyer who represents Mr. Combs, said the outcome helped prove “what we have been saying about the civil cases since day one: they are all fabricated attempts to extort windfall payments from an innocent man.”“Mr. Combs never sexually assaulted or trafficked anyone,” she said. “From the beginning, we have vigorously defended against the civil plaintiffs’ made-up claims with full confidence that Mr. Combs would prevail in the criminal case, and he did.”But now the question becomes whether evidence from the criminal case could find a way into the civil suits in ways that could affect their outcomes. Mr. Combs was acquitted of sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy during the criminal trial, but he was found to have engaged in transportation to move escorts over state lines for the purposes of prostitution.Still, there was a lot of testimony that he was repeatedly violent to a former girlfriend and used drugs in sexual situations.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    How to Escape a T-Rex in ‘Jurassic World Rebirth’

    The director Gareth Edwards narrates a harrowing sequence from his film.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.Don’t you hate it when you’re trying to escape by raft from an island riddled with dinosaurs and you manage to wake up a sleeping T-Rex in the process?That scenario becomes one of the signature moments in “Jurassic World Rebirth,” the latest in the long-running dino thriller franchise.In the scene, a family becomes trapped on an island where the setting is lush and the creature threats are plentiful. One family member, Teresa (Luna Blaise), finds a raft but also encounters a certain snoozing theropod nearby. The raft, per the instructions written on the side of it (seen in a close-up shot), must be opened on land.“This was something we added in the edit,” Edwards said, narrating the scene and discussing the close-up, “because we did a test screening and the audience was just like, why would you inflate it in front of a T-Rex?”Next, the filmmakers used the opportunity to make a dino disappear before the viewers’ eyes. The T-Rex is in the background of the shot, but then is hidden from view once the raft inflates on its side. When the raft gets turned flat in the water, the dinosaur has disappeared. “You sort of get this David Copperfield moment,” Edwards said.In discussing where the sequence was shot, Edwards said, “What you’re looking at is two main locations. One is in Thailand and it’s really actually a lake. We use it as a river, but it’s this big lake within a quarry. And then, once the rafting begins proper, it becomes this location in the U.K. called Lee Valley, which was essentially built for the London Olympics in 2012.”Only one of these locations was warm.“In London, in the rapid section,” Edwards said, “it’s freezing cold. And the actors, they were very tolerant, but we had to do take after take after take as you can imagine. And slowly through the day, I could see the look in their eyes. They wanted to kill me.”Read the “Jurassic World Rebirth” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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    Superhero Movies Dominated the Box Office, but Not the Top 100 List

    The notable exceptions — “The Dark Knight” and “Black Panther” — stood out among the many sequels and spinoffs.Any way you look at the last 25 years in film, there’s no denying that superhero movies have been a vital part of 21st-century big screen entertainment. Many refer to the release of “Iron Man” in 2008 as the official kickoff of what would become the moneymaking engine that resulted in a steady stream of blockbusters, sequels, phases and cinematic universes unto themselves. And yet “Iron Man,” and most of its successors, plucked from Marvel and DC Comics alike, are conspicuously absent from The New York Times list of the 100 best films from the 21st century so far, as voted on by influential directors, actors and other notable names in Hollywood.For some, this may not be at all surprising. Audiences will buy tickets to the next Marvel movie, and perhaps even enjoy it for whatever combination of cinematic spectacle, fan nostalgia and actual solid filmmaking it offers, but many would be more loath to grant it the prestige of a top film.But it’s also worth considering how years of oversaturation of superhero stories on movies and TV have worn on even the most loyal fans, causing superhero fatigue and casting a shadow over even the acclaimed films that have come out of the genre. It’s difficult to consider the individual merits of films that primarily serve as cogs in the larger wheels of their franchises.Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight,” which along with “Black Panther” is one of the two superhero movies that made the list, is acclaimed for bridging the gap between prestige filmmaking and comic book material. It doesn’t hurt, too, that the film looks the part of your typical award-winning drama, with a grim, realistic tone and showcasing well-loved serious actors like Christian Bale and Gary Oldman.“The Dark Knight” and “Black Panther” are prime examples of the idea that there can be more to superhero movies than camp, spandex and CGI. The two stand out for their nuanced philosophical musings: “The Dark Knight” questions the line between chaos and control, and the significance of the hero as a symbol of justice in a world where justice is not always synonymous with law and order.And “Black Panther” was not simply the first major Black superhero film of the century, featuring Black leads, Black culture and a beautiful Black utopia, but an examination of how the diaspora created a rift between Black Africans and African Americans. And both films starred now-departed actors giving career-defining performances: Heath Ledger and Chadwick Boseman.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Lawrence Power Wants You to Pay Attention to the Viola

    Lawrence Power’s instrument has been overlooked throughout its history. He has made a career of changing that.Hector Berlioz’s “Harold in Italy” is full of wandering. In his memoirs he wrote that, through this symphony with viola obbligato, based on the mood of Lord Byron’s poem “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” and inspired by the composer’s unfruitful time in Italy, he sought to make the viola “a kind of melancholy dreamer.”The violist Lawrence Power has spent his whole career playing “Harold in Italy.” But, he said in an interview, he has always been “completely uncomfortable and just confused by the whole piece.” It’s essentially a symphony, but completely different from a conventional one, with a viola solo part that drifts in and out of the action. Berlioz “obviously had something in mind to have the viola separate from the orchestra,” Power said, guessing that the composer “had something theatrical in mind.”In a dramatized performance of “Harold in Italy” with Aurora Orchestra at the Southbank Center in London late last month, Power leaned into that wandering, theatrical spirit, something that has also become a hallmark of his recent work. After whistling the piece’s idée fixe, or recurring theme, while strolling from a raised platform amid the ensemble, Power recited searching sections of Berlioz’s memoirs and wandered through the auditorium, playing sections of the obbligato part with a distant, slightly aloof expression.This is just another idiosyncratic project by Power, somebody who has championed the viola for the past 25 years, with a particular focus on new work. He’s not alone: Viola soloists often have to become champions for their instrument, which has been underappreciated throughout its history.“There’s no defined idea of what a viola is,” Power said.Kalpesh Lathigra for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More