Long Island’s Danny Rocco aims pretty high with his debut The Future is Now, going beyond the staid and routine songs his peers have been churning out. Unfortunately he doesn’t always reach the intended heights. The acoustic strumming, singer songwriter (backed by the band End the Stars) starts the album of with the strongly original, addictive title track “The Future is Now,†but the rest of the album tries, and…
At 75 and with a legacy as a national musical treasure already firmly cemented, you’d think Willie Nelson would at least take a little time off to relax. On average, the prolific cowboy churns out at least two or three releases a year. This year looks to be no different.
Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan has somehow stumbled on that rare combination of a fantastically gripping story, the perfect cast and excellent writing. Not since The Sopranos have all of the elements for a truly great TV drama series come together so quickly. The series centers around Walter (played by Bryan Cranston), a brilliant scientist, now stuck teaching chemistry to apathetic high schoolers in Albuquerque and worrying about day-to-day bills.
Once you get past the fact that Roberto Escobar sees his brother more as a Columbian Robin Hood rather than one of the most barbaric, nefarious drug lords… well, ever, The Accountant’s Story is actually a pretty fascinating read that’s incredibly difficult to put down once you’ve started reading.
It’s kind of hard to feel sorry for the music industry crying about low CDs sales, when a solid band like Kaline is churning out records on its own, while stale, paint-by-numbers groups simply ape the sound of mediocre bands that came before them and are rewarded with record label deals.
Much like the first season of Arrested Development, HBO’s cult comedy Summer Heights High is wildly cherished by those few lucky enough to have somehow stumbled across it, meanwhile try and describe the premise to anyone unaware of the show and chances are the blank stare will remind of just how small that cult surrounding the show actually is right now.
An anthology about relationships written by guys sounds about as appealing as…well talking about relationships with guys. But thanks to a stellar list of authors – heavy on comedians like Jon Stewart, Patton Oswalt, Stephen Colbert and Will Forte – and the comedy-prone topic of getting dumped, makes the task that much more compelling. The essays are offered as lessons of sorts, far from practical, but extremely funny nonetheless.
Listening to Death Cab for Cutie’s first proper release, 1998’s Something About Airplanes, there is little indication that the band would someday be headlining major festivals, churning our records for a major label and pretty much adding a touch of indie cred and respectability to mainstream radio stations. It’s not that the songs are not good, in fact for the most part they are just as beautiful as the latter…
Judging from the news coverage, you’d think Slumdog Millionaire and Benjamin Buttons were the only two movies nominated for Oscars this year. While those two movies have been sharing all the ink, thanks to genre hybrids and amazing special effects, the subtly stellar and so far grossly underrated Frozen River manages to get by solely on fantastic acting and a strong character driven storyline.
Mining influences as varied as the Beatles (before they discovered LSD and meditation), Buddy Holly and power poppers like Milk N’ Cookies, Central Pennsylvania’s The Tamboureens sound like just about nothing being released today… and that’s a very good thing.
