Reviewed by Declan Tan From Shotgun Stories writer/director comes a second feature on small town America, another portrait of troubled family which despite its flaws, reaffirms Jeff Nichols’ potential to become an independent cinema mainstay. Michael Shannon is Curtis LaForche, a family man in anytown, Ohio, father to a recently deafened girl, husband to Samantha […]
Dan Fante: Fante: A Family’s Legacy of Writing, Drinking and Surviving
Reviewed by Declan Tan Opening with the familiar visions of snow from the likes of Wait Until Spring, Bandini and Dago Red (‘Bricklayer in the Snow’), Dan Fante kicks off, like Svevo and Arturo of his father’s novels, buried in an image of purest white. But this is a damned and dark tale, swirling in […]
Dark Loft: Dark Loft (self-released)
Reviewed by Eric Saeger Comprised of big-deal sidemen who’ve been involved with everyone from Alicia Keys to The Drifters, this project makes arena-rock that should be palatable to Minus the Bear fans, which is not to say that there are that many curveballs here, but the band’s retro-ness does exhibit the notion of a plan […]
Vince Mendoza: Nights on Earth (Horizontal Records)
Reviewed by Eric Saeger Someone has to be responsible for the orchestral backgrounds provided to Sting and Björk… wait, it’s this guy, who did an LP of originals with the London Symphony in 1997 titled Epiphany, and has since been busy working with the small-potatoes mentioned above. This time the composer swivels toward the jazz […]
Suraya Sadeed with Damien Lewis: Forbidden Lessons in a Kabul Guesthouse
Reviewed by Amanda Simms Suraya Sadeed’s memoirs begin with a dramatic recollection of smuggling $35,000 across the Afghanistan border beneath a burkha in 1998. What follows is a blend of autobiography, the history of the post-Soviet Afghanistan, as well as the development of her charity, Help the Afghan Children. Fleeing to the US after the […]
We Need To Talk About Kevin
Reviewed by Declan Tan Lynne Ramsay’s deranged adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s equally deranged novel (which Shriver quite garishly lauds on the film’s poster) is a decent stretch of film that concentrates more on the director’s ambition than it does on the novel’s. The result is a sometimes over-stylised but darkly entertaining genre-mix of gallows humour, […]
The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn
Steven Spielberg’s big missed opportunity. Reviewed by Robert O’Connor. WARNING: may contain spoilers! Two goats are sitting on a back lot in Hollywood, chewing on cans of film. One remarks “This is terrible!” and the other one says, “The book is better.” A few weeks before his death in 1983, Hergé signed the movie rights […]
Camille Bloom and the Recovery: Never Out of Time (self-released)
Reviewed by Eric Saeger I dunno, Scandal meets zzzzz, um, huh, something or other, and at some zzzzzz points there’s cello, like a bunch of shapeless ’80s-pop B-sides had a polite outdoor Chardonnay-tasting and Perfect Circle were throwing Nerf balls at them from the bushes. Bloom, a Washington state native (if I’m reading the random-factoids […]
Brite Futures: Dark Past (Turnout Records)
Reviewed by Eric Saeger Jeez, man, the way this album was described, I was expecting something that wasn’t completely mediocre – “Abba pop with chainsaws”, I think it was. Instead, we get the remains of Seattle band Natalie Portman’s Shaved Head worrying away at the too-optimistic sounds of Los Campesinos and all those crappy Bowery […]
Tequila Tales: An Anthology of Short Fiction
Reviewed by Declan Tan The Tequila Tales anthology (edited by Millie Johanna Heur and Roy Anthony Shabla) is an eclectic mixture of genre, style and content that unites a well-published group of writers on the single and divisive subject of, yes, tequila. All of the work has in some way been licked by the liquid […]
Mapping the Wilderness: An Interview with Alexi Zentner
Set in the harsh forests of the Canadian wilderness, Alexi Zentner’s debut novel, Touch, draws upon mythology as well as literary convention. Dan Coxon finds that its author is rooted in the power of traditional storytelling. Portrait by Laurie Willick. For a debut novel, Alexi Zentner’s Touch has already earned a startling number of accolades, […]
Duda Lucena Quartet: Live (self-released)
Reviewed by Eric Saeger With a pro PR effort breathing new life into its perceived relevance, Brazilian jazz guitarist Lucena’s late-2010 live collection (mainly comprised of Latin classics such as ‘Corcovado’) will reach many more ears, and deservedly so. This is further proof, not that any was needed, that Latin guys just cold own chill-guitar. […]
Obadiah Parker: The Siren and the Saint (self-released)
Reviewed by Eric Saeger Famed for his apologetic, unplugged cover of Outkast’s ‘Hey Ya’, Obadiah Parker is the adopted name of Phoenix busk-rocker Mat Weddle, who apparently popped in at the Howard Stern show, I’m assuming to talk about his addictions (now that Stern’s on pay-radio, isn’t it hilarious watching him squirm while trying to […]
Heart-Set Self-Destruct: Of Nightmares (Soundmine Musicworks)
Reviewed by Eric Saeger This Chicago neo-hardrock four-piece has a tough nut to crack, mainly because they do stuff correctly. They’re equal parts Gravity Kills (the on-the-phone-patch hollering part), Offspring (the singer’s a dead-ringer when in normal mode) and Avenged Sevenfold (the riff part), in other words they’re pretty much the perfect prescription for white […]
Steve Aylett: Lint The Movie
Reviewed by Declan Tan Until recently, the promise of Steve Aylett’s £750 foray into feature-length film productions had seemingly been wandering desultorily around the Internet for quite some time, indulging in some shallow vanishing since 2009, popping up here and there on blogs, before triumphantly reappearing for its premiere in Brighton earlier this year. Followed […]
Iron Maiden: From Fear to Eternity: The Best of 1990-2010 (EMI)
Reviewed by Pedro Blas González Iron Maiden is an apocryphal rock band. Their sound is not easily classifiable as straight rock. This alone makes their style rather unorthodox among rock bands. Only a handful of other rock groups before them have gone their same route, what used to be called Hard Rock: Black Sabbath, AC/DC, […]
Malefice: Awaken the Tides (Metal Blade Records)
Reviewed by Eric Saeger Despite the fact that the words “awaken the tides” look like they came together by way of a heavy metal album title randomizer (I know, I know, by “tides” they probably mean “legions of downtrodden blue-collar dudes who’ve finally had enough of The Man’s oppression and are about to, um, I […]
Gothsicles: Industrialites and Magic (Wtii Records)
Reviewed by Eric Saeger This Chicago duo-or-however-many-some invented Tosh.0 for the goth scene before there was a Tosh.0. They can be forgiven, then, for fixating on old NES games and internet memes the way twelve-year-old boys worship virus-riddled free-porn sites. Singer Brian DarkNES (that right there is an adorable little jab at Skinny Puppy, in […]
TV Eye: True Stories: Kissinger and House
You wait all season for a misanthropic, sociopathic doctor, then two come along at once. Jacob Knowles-Smith reviews Around the turn of the last century, events both natural and unnatural conspired to shed the giants of the 19th century, such as Queen Victoria and William McKinley. In our new century, however, assassinations being less frequent […]
100 Artists’ Manifestos – From the Futurists to the Stuckists: Selected by Alex Danchev
Reviewed by Ben Granger 1. The purpose of politics is to inspire art. The only useful thing it has ever achieved When Marshall Brennan argued “The Manifesto is remarkable for its imaginative power… It is the first great modernist work of art”, he referred specifically to The Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels. While the […]
Forty Winks: Bow Wow (End Sounds)
Reviewed by Eric Saeger Every six months or so some foreigner finds my eclectic, willy-nilly output and assumes I’d be super-psyched to receive a big-ass stack of random LPs from their country. Poland, Belarus, Singapore, whatever – they’re always big stacks, CD-case-inserts written in foreign languages all crimped into thin plastic sleeves to save on […]
Correatown: Pleiades (Another Room Recordings)
Reviewed by Eric Saeger As a Californian, Angela Correa routinely winds up on TV and movie soundtracks (Ugly Betty et al, the vocal double for Darlene in Dewey Cox), which is something to envy unless you factor in the conformity that’s required to succeed in such pursuits. Her surf-dream-pop band’s first full-length (she’s done shoegazier […]
Samiam: Trips (Hopeless Records)
Reviewed by Eric Saeger The eighth album and third Hopeless Records release from this Berkeley, CA punk crew finds them relaxed in their age but not hurting for slam-dunk old school emo melodies. Matter of fact, there are countless newer bands who would have made one of half these tunes into the showpiece track of […]
The Marvelous Captain Fawcett
Robert O’Connor enters the madcap publishing empire of Wilford Hamilton Fawcett, home of Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang and Captain Marvel during a golden age of comics Captain Billy’s Wild Creation The musical The Music Man is chock-full of references to the American Midwest and the America of 1912, especially in the song ‘Trouble’, sung by […]
Christopher Hitchens: Arguably (Atlantic Books)
Reviewed by Jacob Knowles-Smith The critic, wrote H.L. Mencken in his Prejudices, “makes the work of art live for the spectator; he makes the spectator live for the work of art”. If we take this as a fair and desirable definition of a critic; which, Mencken continues, results in “understanding, appreciation, [and] intelligent enjoyment”; then […]
