For their second full length, Philly power pop band The Fleeting Ends seems to have dug deep into the crate of vinyl for inspiration pulling out everything from XTC and The Features to Cheap Trick and Material Issue – never a bad combo. The result, Our Eyes Are Peeled, is quite impressive. Songs like the strings-laced “Operator” and the slow-build goodness of “Poor Gloria” highlight a band that’s found…
I don’t care if you don’t know your Megadeth from your Metallica, your Fates Warning from your Mercyful Fate, it’s certain that you’re gonna lose several hours to The Merciless Book of Metal Lists. Yes. it’s that good. Complied by former music A&R rep Howie Abrams and music writer Sacha Jenkins, the book is a fantastically entertaining look at all things metal – from logos and t-shirts to bands, list…
While Game of Throne’s King Joffrey has become shorthand in describing TV villains, Kelsey Grammer’s Mayor Tom Kane – from the Starz series Boss – is arguably just as evil and just as much fun to watch. The mayor’s dementia – diagnosed in the first season – has done little to temper his nastiness. Along with his wife (Connie Nielsen), he still plays puppet master with the state’s politicians from…
The Iowa music scene was pretty diverse in 1995. Sadly, the band a majority of the world most commonly associates with the music scene there is Slipknot, the ridiculous costumed metal kids whose shtick is only rivaled in goofiness by the Insane Clown Posse. It’s strange to imagine then that a gimmick-free band, with actual musical talent like The Nadas, was formed in the same year just 30 miles apart.…
Not to be confused with the just-released memoir by Arista Records legend Clive Davis (The Soundtrack of My Life), Don Silver’s slim, paperback memoir covering much of the time he worked with Davis is actually a far more interesting read. Yes, Davis admits to his bisexuality and battles with Kelly Clarkston in his autobiography, but Silver is far more revealing about just how much of a jackass his former boss…
There are very few modern musicians whose life is as well documented as Bob Dylan. There are libraries filled with biographies on the man and his own memoir is split into three separate planned books (Volume One has already been released); the big screen movie of his life I’m Not There, featured everyone from Christian Bale to Cate Blanchett playing the troubadour; and there have been countless concert films and…
Pantera seemed to come out of nowhere in the late 80’s with Cowboys From Hell, a rather apt title summing up these Texas-bred good ole’ boys with a penchant for blistering metal and plenty of booze. Though to be fair, they’d been at it playing and recording since the early 80’s – taking the punk rock DIY path of self-releasing – it just took the music world and the larger…
Though there are certainly many devastatingly sad aspects in the starkly beautiful How to Survive a Plague – the documentary about the early stages of the AIDs epidemic in the U.S. and the origins of ACT Up and TAG – it is also refreshing to see just how more compassionate we have become in this country in comparison. The Oscar-nominated film follows a group of gay men and lesbians…
Anders & Kendall may be a new band, but it’s comprised of a duo of music vets: Anders Parker, a solo artist and also former member of the Indie experimental band Varnaline, and Kendall Meade from Sparklehorse, Mascot and a handful of other groups. Wild Chorus, their debut, is a beautiful, bordering on precious (but not quite there thankfully) collection of nearly a dozen mellow, brushed drum, melody-drenched folk rock…
In a coincidence of sorts, the indie movie Collaborator, about a playwright caught up in his own personal drama actually plays out very much like a play itself, with a keen focus on dialogue helping to ramp up the tension. The lighting in the final, violent scene even comes off like a stage show and you are almost waiting to hear the audience gasp. The small, but very…
It’s not surprising that HBO’s Veep is heavy on DC insider jokes considering it was created by the same team behind the brilliantly funny political movie In the Loop. Thankfully, in a time when approval ratings for politicians are in the basement, it found a big enough audience that the network offered it a second season. The show centers on Julia Louis-Dreyfus as the vice president, quickly realizing she holds…
The wildly successful Storage Wars starts to show some signs of stress with Volume 4: show regular Dave Hester (aka the asshole) was arguing about his contract so he is missing from most of this season as they try out various replacements (none of whom are as interesting as Hester). This season they also start to experiment with horribly obvious product placement (before I open this storage unit, let me…
The Dallas-based six-piece Home By Hovercraft is a family affair, comprised of husband and wife duo Seth Magill (vocals/tuba) and Shawn Magill (piano/vocals /xylophone) and Seth’s sister Abbey Magill (Step Dance) and yes, if they are listing a lone dancer as a band member you get a pretty good idea of what to expect; Somewhat pretentious pop music masquerading as experimental art rock. The band is described as…
I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if Lincoln Barr’s record collection stopped sometime in the late 70’s after the first couple of Elvis Costello albums came out and Big Star’s Sister Lover hit the racks… and there ain’t anything wrong with that. With his laid back vocal delivery over strong power pop melodies Barr and the rest of the crew in Red Jacket Mine (no idea where that name…
There are very few contemporary writers like Sam Lipsyte who can mine the dark side so deftly for laughs, so thankfully he didn’t take too long to follow up 2010’s stellar The Ask with another book. Three years later, Lipsyte is back with Fun Parts, a collection of short stories very much in the same vein as his earlier efforts. This baker’s dozen of stories covers everything from geeks being…
What a long strange trip it’s been over the past eight season for Nancy Botwin and clan. From a young suburban widow and mother of two selling weed in her upper middle class neighborhood to pay the bills, to the wife of a Mexican politician/drug lord and back to a widow selling weed, the protagonist of the dark comedy Weeds was numbingly stupid with her decisions, but it made for…
Amazingly, the team behind HBO’s brilliant Game of Thrones managed to make the second season as thrilling as the first. The Stark family – the closest thing this series had to the Cleavers – is scattered across the territories with their patriarch now dead, and their frenemies the Lannisters are a little scattered as well, with war between kingdoms sending some off to fight. Meanwhile the creepy, little, evil boy King…
Detroit: An American Autopsy is a not only a fantastically addictive read about how corruption and incompetence is killing the once majestic city of Detroit (ok majestic may be a stretch), but also manages to showcase a fearless, ballsy style of reporting that is almost nearly extinct as well thanks to the new face journalism, partisan to a fault and concerned about little more than click-ability. LeDuff’s life story…
In his brilliant debut of short stories, Jim Gavin manages to humorously cover a cross-section of sad men – of all ages – going mindlessly through the motions of life, some with hope, many without. The collection would be sad if not for Gavin’s knack for pointing out the humor in the mundane. The characters in the six (and a half) stories in Middle Men, cover everyone from an ambitious…
Thirty-three years after the made-up autobiography of the late Monty Python comedian Graham Chapman was first published, the movie adaption is finally out on DVD in Python’s trademark quirky style. The animated movie will be hilarious to Python fans, but likely little more head-scratchingly odd to those who never got into the troupe. It includes narration by Chapman himself (courtesy of a taped reading of his book prior to his…