JOE GILL speaks to the Palestinian students in Gaza whose testimony is collected in a remarkable anthology
Latest editorial
Album Reviews: Martin Frawley's Undone at 31, Cass McCombs' Tip Of The Sphere, and Lily & Madeleine's Canterbury Girls
MARY CONWAY delights in a rarely performed comedy that recalls a Britain we remember in our bones
JEAN ROBERTS appreciates the way traditional panto can be remodelled into critique of the academy schools system
MARY CONWAY is riveted by a superbly crafted glimpse into the soul of a cast-off US star
MARIA DUARTE is swept along by the cocky self-belief of a ping-pong hustler in a surprisingly violent drama
STEVE ANDREW recommends a lively and often moving guide to once vibrant spaces that have been abandoned or swept away
GEOFF BOTTOMS appreciates the local touch brought to a production of Dickens’s perennial classic
Martin Frawley
Undone at 31
(Merge Records)
★★★★
ON HIS first solo record Australian singer-songwriter Martin Frawley breathes new life into that pop music staple, the break-up album.
Having formed the now defunct indie band The Twerps with his new girlfriend Jules McFarlane, the relationship — and Frawley, it seems — came undone when he was 31.
With its Dylanesque drawl, intensely personal lines and twee instrumentation, opener You Want Me? is so good it threatens to overshadow the rest of the broadly chronological song cycle. Other tracks examine problem boozing, “meeting the parents” and the inevitable crash of the relationship with McFarlane.
Similar stories
New releases from Ibex Band, Lucy Dacus, and Various Artists
New releases from Nadia Reid, Manic Street Preachers and Mathias Eick
New releases from Mary Chapin Carpenter, Julie Fowlis, Karine Polwart; The Weather Station; and Sam Amidon
New releases from Bridget Hayden and The Apparitions, Michael Kiwanuka, Arild Andersen