// Category Archive for: Current Faves

Music Review: Ty Segall, Emotional Mugger

By Less Lee Moore

American nightmare, guilty generation / fingers on the pulse of their parents’ alienation / from the history, histories of Western civilization
–Ty Segall, “California Hills”

There was a 1987 SPIN magazine cover story on David Bowie called “What Next, Put Together Man?” and while I can’t recall the article’s content exactly, that question has lingered in my brain ever since. At the time I was only just beginning to grasp the depth and breadth of Bowie’s shape-shifting abilities, and it took me years to fully understand the significance of that particular query.

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Music Review: Tortoise, The Catastrophist

By Jeffery X Martin

There’s a sense of playfulness on the new album from Tortoise, The Catastrophist. It feels like listening to a card trick. Let’s call it “sleight of ear.”

Mostly an instrumental band, Tortoise comes on as Nintendo-core. The keyboards have that glorious 8-bit sound, but then the drums start and the guitar comes floating in like the backwash of a canyon echo. Almost imperceptibly, the music has moved from Bowser’s Castle to some place far more ethereal.

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Music Review: Your Friend, Gumption

By Melissa Bratcher

Your Friend’s follow up to 2014’s self-recorded EP, Jekyll/Hyde, is richly textural and gorgeously produced. Gumption is enigmatic, with much to unpack. You can listen to the layers and loops, you can listen for Taryn Miller’s fascinating vocals, you can close your eyes and let the waves of sound wash over you. It’s an immersive, intriguing album.

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TV Review: The X-Files Episode 2, “Founder’s Mutation”

By Jeffery X Martin

MILD SPOILERS AHEAD

Boy, do we do things to screw up our children. Some of that can’t be helped; we’re only human, after all. But what if your child isn’t only human? The second episode of Season Ten of The X-Files, “Founder’s Mutation,” is all about the kids.

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Music Review: Lycus, Chasms

By Tim Murr

I don’t know if “beautifully arranged” is a phrase often applied to funereal doom metal, but it certainly applies to the new album from Lycus, Chasms. The four long tracks that make up Chasms play like a four-part symphony of despair at the death of the world.

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Mexican Wrestling Sensation Lucha Underground: A Primer

By Sachin Hingoo

I’ve always been fascinated by pro wrestling’s ability to tell a story in a non-traditional way. Mixing elements of a stage play, a circus, and a TV show, along with the fact that there are usually no traditional “seasons” makes for some potentially great and potentially horrendous narratives that are equally entertaining to me. Lucha Underground, however, is unlike any other wrestling product that I’ve seen.

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Blu-Ray Review: I Am Thor

By Tim Murr

There is no good reason Thor weren’t bigger than KISS. Oh, sure, there were reasons, but not good ones. Starting out in the body building world before moving on to rock and roll, Jon Mikl Thor made a name for himself with feats of strength and great stage presence. His first serious foray into rock as Thor was a glam classic (Keep The Dogs Away, 1977). It should have been huge. It was not.

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Movie Review: One Floor Below

By Sachin Hingoo

The most cursory viewing of Radu Muntean’s One Floor Below reveals a very banal, uninteresting portrayal of a man who does nothing, and frankly, that’s the point. Examining the Romanian thriller beneath the surface, however, provokes some hard questions about what it means to exist in society and the responsibility we have to each other in times of tragedy and danger.

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Music Review: Cait Brennan, Debutante

By Melissa Bratcher

When Sloan’s Jay Ferguson was writing “Waiting For Slow Songs,” he may have been writing about Cait Brennan, but didn’t even know it. “‘Cause you write the saddest songs / turn around and make it a singalong / the heart scratch melody / means there’s more than this for you and me.” Cait knows a heart scratch melody and knows how to swaddle a sad song in the prettiest, most glorious melodies and harmonies, and make it furiously catchy. I’ve had Cait Brennan’s Debutante on my iPod for quite a while now and every time one of the tracks pops up, I immediately need to rewind and hear it again. Simply put, Debutante is the kind of record that artists dream of recording. It’s been a long time coming.

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Music Review: Sonya Kitchell, We Come Apart

By Melissa Bratcher

Sonya Kitchell began her recording career in 2006 when she was 17 years old, which is impressive enough to note. Better yet, after her debut, Words Came Back To Me, Kitchell diversified by recording an EP of string quartets, collaborating with Herbie Hancock on The River: The Joni Letters, playing at Montreaux Jazz Festival, the Newport Folk Festival, and winning two Grammys (for The River: The Joni Letters, and Tedeschi Trucks Band’s Revelator). She’s a woman of many parts and a rich wellspring of talent.

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