// Category Archive for: Current Faves

Brand New Track From Mall Walk, “Sleeping In Shifts”

By Less Lee Moore

Mall Walk is a funny name for a band that takes their music pretty seriously. The trio of Nicholas Clark (drums), Daniel Brown (bass), and Rob I. Miller (vocals, guitar) hail from Oakland, CA and have a post-punk vibe, angular guitars, and the kind of addictive hooks that are like catnip for me.
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Music Review: Peeling, Rats In Paradise

By Tim Murr

Singer/guitarist Annabelle Lee (ex-Mexican Slang) describes Peeling’s debut EP, Rats In Paradise, as being “about shedding past traumas, transcending pain and finding a way out,” she says. “It’s too easy to become disillusioned; I want to create catharsis and release.” Well, congratulations on succeeding. Rats In Paradise is a wonderfully realized collection. The four tracks, “Magic Eye,” “Leisure Life,” “In The Sun,” and “Wet Nurse” feel very similar to Las Vegas Story-era Gun Club. Even Lee’s vocals remind me of Jeffery Lee Pierce at his most reserved.
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Music Review: The Legal Matters, Conrad

By Melissa Bratcher

What happens when you take sugary Teen Beat harmonies, marry them to chunky guitar tones, and then throw in grownup lyrics? You get a timeless power pop treasure that instantly feels like a classic. On their second album, Conrad, Detroit band The Legal Matters have crafted songs of love and loss and wrapped them in sunny sweet melodies with just the right amount of ache.
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Movie Review: Observance

By Sachin Hingoo

Do you ever feel like you’re about to get sick, but the actual sickness takes days or even weeks to manifest itself? Observance, a new film by Australian director Joseph Sims-Dennett, made on a microbudget and which received acclaim at Montreal’s Fantasia Festival, taps into that unsettlingly suffocating feeling of disease in a major way.
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Blu-Ray Review: Tenebre

By Tim Murr

Tenebre is Italian horror master Dario Argento’s return to the genre he helped create with a style and vicious edge rarely equaled even by himself. In it, American thriller author Peter Neal (Anthony Franciosa) steps off the plane in Italy and into a mystery straight out of one of his own books, literally. A killer is using passages from his newest book, Tenebre, to commit vicious murders and apparently attempting to impress Neal by sending him clues after each murder. In classic Giallo style Neal becomes an amateur detective trying to solve the murders himself.
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TADFF Movie Review: Trash Fire

By Sachin Hingoo

In his third feature, Trash Fire, Richard E. Bates taps into very visceral discomfort and revulsion in so many ways that it’s disorienting, but uniquely, he largely does it with dialogue rather that with traditional scares or gore. At the same time, Bates mixes in an undercurrent of his particular brand of black humor to ensure that you’re laughing at the most inappropriate situations.
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Music Review: Tim Buckley, Lady, Give Me Your Key

By Melissa Bratcher

We live in wondrous times. Tim Buckley has been gone since 1975, and yet, here we are in 2016, with never before released Tim Buckley material coming from Light In The Attic Records on October 21. How is it possible?
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Music Review: Kadhja Bonet, The Visitor

By Melissa Bratcher

Kadhja Bonet’s debut, The Visitor, is timeless and otherworldly; pulling the lucky listener into a spacey, jazzy world of poetic lyrics and Bonet’s stunner of a voice. It’s a bit psychedelic, it’s definitely jazz influenced, and it’s a cinematic type of soul that no one else is making.
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Music Review: The Flat Five, It’s A World Of Love And Hope

By Melissa Bratcher

The Flat Five’s debut album, It’s A World Of Love And Hope, is perfect antidote to the weird awfulness of 2016. Full of exquisite, goosebump-inducing harmonies and ear-worm melodies, it’s a vacation on vinyl (or digitally, as you do). The songs lull you with prettiness and then… you listen to the dryly hilarious lyrics. It’s the perfect marriage of those two factors and endlessly relistenable.
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TV Review: Empire S3 E01, “Light Into Darkness”

By Sachin Hingoo

The life of a Lyon is never easy. Constantly hunted, often abused, and subjected to the threat of confinement. When Season 2 of Empire wrapped up, the Lyon family was in shambles. Hakeem (Bryshere Y. Gray) and Laura’s (Jamila Velazquez) fairytale wedding was broken up by a gun-toting, fight-starting, wasted Shyne Johnson (Xzibit) and Anika (Grace Gealey), still carrying Hakeem’s baby, was subpoenaed to testify against patriarch Lucious. In order to avoid this, Lucious (Terrence Howard) decided to hijack poor Hakeem’s wedding and force his whole family, including Cookie (Taraji P. Henson), to watch him marry Anika, a woman he clearly despises since she can’t testify against him if they tie the knot. Cookie finally swore off Lucious for good, but this predictably lasted about one minute because he’s just that charming. More on that later.
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