Anwen Crawford is the Monthly’s music critic and the author of Live Through This.
Articles by this author
Jess Ribeiro’s ‘Kill It Yourself’ and Sui Zhen’s ‘Secretly Susan’
Highway or driveway
Jess Ribeiro’s new album, Kill It Yourself, is like an American road trip with a detour via Melbourne, where she is based, or maybe via Perth. The pace is languid, and the mood is...
On the broad-sweep feminism of Laurie Penny
Style matters
Laurie Penny is a 28-year-old English feminist, author of four books, and a contributing editor at The New Statesman, which might be called Britain’s centre-left newspaper or its...
Icon as exhibit at ACMI’s ‘David Bowie Is’
Hallo spaceboy
Having travelled for nearly 5 billion kilometres to the outer limits of our solar system, the New Horizons space probe sent back its first data from a fly-by of Pluto on 14 July...
‘What Happened, Miss Simone?’ dir. Liz Garbus
Black fire
What Happened, Miss Simone?, a new feature-length documentary on Netflix about the life and music of America’s most defiantly unclassifiable popular performer, begins with footage...
Grace Jones at Vivid, Carriageworks, Sunday 31 May 2015
Keeping up with the Jones
Grace Jones is sui generis. Madonna, Lady Gaga, Rihanna: none of them are imaginable without Jones having gone before, melding pop music, high fashion and theatrical spectacle....
Punk and gospel influences combine to make the personal political on Algiers’ self-titled debut
Raised voices
Late in April, as protests grew in Baltimore over the death of an African-American man, Freddie Gray, who died after sustaining a severe spinal injury while in police custody, a...
Morrissey at Vivid Live, Opera House Concert Hall, Tuesday 26 May
True to you
Nobody loves Morrissey more than Morrissey does, though his fans do try their hardest. “His fans”: who am I trying to fool? There’s a man standing three paces away from me in the...
Sufjan Stevens at Vivid Live, Opera House Concert Hall, Friday 22 May 2015
A bathetic display
I leant forward in my seat when, two-thirds of the way through his lengthy set at the Sydney Opera House, Sufjan Stevens played ‘Casimir Pulaski Day’, his most beloved song. I was...
Brett Morgen’s ‘Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck’
Perfect hindsight
Nirvana headlined Britain’s Reading Festival on 30 August 1992, at the height of Nevermind mania, and the first footage we see in Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, a new HBO...
Róisín Murphy ends an eight-year absence from pop with ‘Hairless Toys’
Secret diva
Róisín Murphy has all the characteristics of a great pop star, except fame. She’s got the poise, she’s got the voice – a light, supple contralto, which she can bend from seductive...
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‘Buried Country’ by Clinton Walker
In Clinton Walker’s Buried Country: The story of Aboriginal country music, Bob Randall observes that Aboriginal people like himself could relate to the stories of loss in American...
Alex Ross Perry’s ‘Listen Up Philip’ and Noah Baumbach’s ‘While We’re Young’
Boys to men
Alex Ross Perry’s Listen Up Philip and Noah Baumbach’s While We’re Young are films about young male artists who become involved in difficult relationships of patronage with older...
Frédéric Tcheng’s ‘Dior and I’ reviewed
Deep pockets
Fashion, like architecture, is an art form that we cannot disengage from no matter how indifferent (or even antagonistic) we might be towards it. We all have to get dressed, we...
Sufjan Stevens’ ‘Carrie & Lowell’
Minus the trimmings
Why don’t I hate Sufjan Stevens? He plays the banjo. He plays the oboe. His stage shows have included hula hoops and cheerleaders. He has yet to meet an encyclopaedia entry that...
Courtney Barnett’s ‘Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit’ and Darren Hanlon’s ‘Where Did You Come From?’
Particular visions
I don’t think Courtney Barnett would mind me saying that her album makes a great kitchen listen. Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit, to be released on 23 March,...
Beyoncé, Beck and an opportunity missed at the Grammys
Take the crown
An album of frank sexual expression, written by a woman, is still a rarity in popular music – even more so when the woman in question is also a mother. Beyoncé’s fifth, self-...
‘No Cities To Love’: The triumphant return of Sleater-Kinney
Start together
People were cheap,” writes George Packer in his book The Unwinding: Thirty years of American decline (2013). “They’d never pass up a rock-bottom price.” Packer is writing of...
In review: Roger Knox, The Aurora, Sydney, 25 January 2015
Black country
Roger Knox
The Aurora
25 January 2015, Sydney Festival
When Roger Knox walks on stage, tall, broad and dapper, I think he’s wearing a paisley shirt. Then the lights go up and...
