Steins Gate Complete Series Do an internet search on the greatest anime series of all time and undoubtedly Steins Gate is going to pop up in your results, and rightfully so, because as far dramatic pacing, twists and turns, and sheer shit hitting the fan, this series has a lot of it. Also, it’s loaded with hard sci-fi elements of time travel, which in my book, only makes a show better. There’s a trick to watching Stein’s Gate and...
Albums like these are both exciting and scary to review at the same time. Exciting because I love Thelonious Monk. Seriously, I don’t know much (or anything really) about jazz, but I do know that nothing sticks to me quite like his music. It’s scary to review an album like this exactly because I am NOT a jazz guy. I guess you could say I’m a punk. I prefer drums, bass, guitar, and vocals. I just don’t have the...
Hallucinations Oliver Sacks The great thing about Oliver Sacks’ books is that one always comes away feeling enlightened after reading them. Hallucinations is no different. While Sacks is known mostly for his books covering a variety of neurological illnesses, painting a vivid picture of what life must be like for these patients, Hallucinations focuses on only the one condition. And therein lies the problem with this book: maybe it’s just too narrow of a scope. While Sacks must be commended...
What is Anarchism?: An Introduction 2nd Ed. by Donald Rooum, Andrej Gruba?i?, and Vernon Richards Lord knows we need more books dedicated to bringing Anarchist ideas to the masses, and one thing that’s appealing from Donald Rooum’s What is Anarchism is how inviting it looks at a glance. First of all, it’s slender but not comically so (about 150 pages), and the chapters are organized to address very important and specific questions, like Approaches to Anarchism, and Anarchism and Violence....
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the vinyl reissue of Naveed by Our Lad Peace. Now with the benefit of hindsight, it is genuinely incredible when one considers how many classic bands just seemed to materialize from nowhere on the streets of Toronto in the first half of the 1990s. That might sound like an overstatement to those who came along later, but it’s true; bands like The Tragically Hip, the Headstones, Gorp, 13 Engines, The Morganfields, Thrush...
Bracket Hold Your Applause It’s a wonderful world we live in where Bracket is still fighting the good fight and putting out records even though the songs they bring to the world are heavy in content. Seriously, Bracket songs can get rocking and sad as hell at the same time. But then again, this band has always been an underdog that’s full of surprises. Most people know Bracket as a FAT band, but that’s only part of their history. They...
How to Write About Music: Excerpts from the 33 1/3 Series, Magazines, Books and Blogs with Advice from Industry-leading Writers by Marc Woodworth (Editor), Ally Jane Grossan (Editor) Now let me stop you before you way anything. I know what you’re thinking: a music website reviewing a book about how to write about music? Preposterous, right? What are you as the reader supposed to take from a book like this? Well, just listen for a second… As someone who spends...
Cowboy Bebop The Complete Series Welcome to our series of anime shows which we will be covering for the next few weeks. Whatever your opinion of the genre, the fact remains that anime (or Japanimation in general) is a fantastic medium for storytelling. In many ways the genre has been ahead of western television because it seems like anime series have always understood that you can tell a more complex story over the course of many episodes. On the...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the California Heart LP by Great Apes. It is often said that the mastering process required to present music on vinyl (instead of CD or mp3) is part of what really changes the overall experience of the format (above and beyond the obvious physical contact made between stylus and vinyl), but that still doesn’t exactly explain the difference a listener will discover between a digital copy of Great Apes’ newest album, California...
RASL by Jeff Smith Jeff Smith has made a permanent fan out of me against all odds. I’ve only read his book Bone, but what an epic tale that was. And Bone is far from being a perfect story, but that’s just the kind of impact the book can have on people. Smith creates worlds full of interesting and complex characters and the man knows how to move the plot along. Also, I read Bone in the original black-and-white format...