When Athens’ favorite sons R.E.M. released Life’s Rich Pageants in 1986, the rest of the world finally got a peek at what the college rock crowd had been raving about for years. Four albums into it, R.E.M. had their strongest commercial success with Lifes Rich Pageant, a foreshadowing of what was to come with the impressive succession of follow ups (Document, Green, Out of Time and Automatic for the People).…
SPOILER ALERT! To get the big unanswered question out of the way up front, don’t count on a Husker Du reunion any time soon. “Beyond my personal reasons for not looking back, a Husker Du reunion would surely tarnish the history of the band,” front man/guitarist Bob Mould writes in See a Little Light. In his exhaustive new bio, Mould – co-founder of the highly influential Minneapolis indie punk group…
Washington state’s The Riffbrokers have managed to find a way to sound completely timeless. They play “rock” without any unnecessary prefix needed to describe their sound and as a result they could have recorded their latest (Every Pilot’s Blinded By the Sun) in the studio right next to Tom Petty when he was working on Damn the Torpedoes in ’79 or they could have just as easily been playing with…
Not since The Big Chill has a drama so deftly relied on music to serve as its own character in a movie. The emotional indie, The Music Never Stopped, is based on a true story by neurologist/researcher Oliver Sacks (the doctor who also inspired the book and eventual movie “Awakenings”) about a father (played flawlessly by J.K. Simmons) who uses music to connect with his son (Lou Taylor Pucci), hospitalized…
After a bumpy couple of seasons, the long-running HBO series finally gets back into its groove with the seventh and second to last season. This season finds actor Vincent Chase (Adrian Grenier) between movies, hooking up with porn star Sasha Grey (essentially playing herself) and getting addicted to booze and Cocaine. His hangers on have each found their own lives, Eric (Kevin Connolly) managing other actors; Turtle (Jerry Ferrara) pitching…
Matthew McConaughey may have just found his ticket out of the romantic comedy ghetto. Lincoln Lawyer, based on the wildly popular Michael Connelly novels, centers around the somewhat sleazy defense attorney Mickey Haller who works out of his Lincoln Continental (get it?). Don’t worry, Haller (played deftly by McConaughey) is a loving dad, gets along great with his ex-wife and has just the right amount of charm to make you…
American TV audiences have a problem saying goodbye… well, let me clarify, American TV show producers have a problem saying goodbye as evidenced by how often they keep the shows on life support long after all of the story lines have been exhausted and the audience has moved on. Though NBC’s ER happens to be a big exception to that rule. By centering the show around a revolving cast of…
Nick Cave is right up there with Leonard Cohen and the late Jeff Buckley as being one of those musicians everyone claims to love but if you look purely at record sales all three still hover closer to cult status rather than international superstars…which is far from being a bad thing (unless you have to pay a mortgage). If you’ve been resolving to actually listen to Cave versus just nodding…
A hybrid of fact and fiction, Bob Pfeifer’s latest is an impressively original look at secret societies and International corruption in the courtroom, all tied into the real life trial of Amanda Knox. The story is cleverly told through journal entries, interviews and news reports and centers around a hush-hush society of international celebrities called The Strangers (everyone from Dave Grohl and Woodie Allen to Sean Penn and the fictional…
Along with having quite possibly the best named backup band in the recent history of rock, Glenn Tilbrook, the former front man of the influential UK pop rock band Squeeze, is also a fantastic pop music song writer. Live in New York showcases this better than just about any of his albums. Coming across relaxed and humble in a small New York club, Tilbrook and his band run through nine…
