review

Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 1 What can I possibly say about Star Trek that hasn’t been said already. If you don’t know what it is, get a clue and get on board. I was very late to the party but have gone very deep. Star Trek is a warm fuzzy place I don’t think I’ll ever want to leave. For a franchise that has done so much over so many years the idea of a Lower Decks show...

Project Hail Maryby Andy Weir I love me a good sci-fi book. Especially hard sci-fi. And Andy Weir’s books are definitely hard sci-fi. I was a fan of the Martian mostly because of the engaging and fun story, but also because Weir asks his audience to think. I had high hopes for his new book Project Hail Mary, and it certainly delivered, but I wasn’t prepared for just how much thinking this book was going to make me do. One...

Kent State: Four Dead in Ohioby Derf Backderf Take a really good look at this book and know that to look into Derf Backderf’s Kent State is to look at the real potential in comics. I used to drink the cool-aid just like everyone else and thought that comics meant Batman and Superman, or even worse, just DC or Marvel. But eventually I put on my big boy pants and realized that comics are just a form of expression and...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Head of the Household LP by Birthday Ass. I remember when I first started listening to indie rock, underground rock and other sorts of music which were a little left-of-center in nature, and it wasn’t always easy. In fact, it was often sort of a gamble; in the days before the internet, there were occasions when you didn’t know exactly what you were going to get, and you just sort of...

Authority(Southern Reach Series Book #2)by Jeff VanderMeer Chalk Annihilation up to one of those books that was loaded with potential and was unsuccessfully adapted for the big screen. It’s a shame too, because few books are as intriguing, spooky and downright chilling at that first Annihilation book. It’s such a gripping rich story that the cliffhanger ending (almost literally) eggs the reader to keep reading. I don’t know if the Southern Reach Trilogy was originally intended as such, but I...

Spencer Burton Coyote (Still Records/Dine Alone) I confess that I was not paying complete attention to the music initially, the first time I threw Coyote on to review it. I figured it would be easy; I put it on and started washing dishes – but I didn’t actually get any dishes washed. In fact, before the second song on the album, “Memories We Won’t Soon Forget” had finished playing, I had stopped moving completely – even that early, all I...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into PWR/UP by AC/DC. For basically the last thirty-eight years, AC/DC has tried a few different things and taken a few different turns to try and grow up (or age up? Or act their age?) with limited success at most. Every time the band has tried to move forward from the callous one-liners and double entendres that first helped to make them famous (Flick Of The Switch was the first occasion), AC/DC has...

Stalin: Passage to Revolutionby Ronald Grigor Suny How much has been written about Stalin since he came to power? The man’s history has been written, reanalyzed, and re-written over and over again so much that’s it’s hard to imagine anything new can be said about the guy. However, we always hear about how new documents are uncovered when the soviet archives were opened and the past decades, scholars have taken this opportunity to reevaluate the big figures in Soviet history....

The Dirty Nil Fuck Art (Dine Alone Records) Rare is the band which knows precisely who they are and actually celebrates that identity rather than asking listeners to excuse it. There’s a certain spark in the music made by bands like that – Alice Cooper Group had it, as did Dead Kennedys, Eagles of Death Metal and Green Day – and The Dirty Nil steps up boldly to prove that they’ve got it with their third album, Fuck Art. Of...

Paul Leary Born Stupid (Shimmy-Disc/Joyful Noise) When guitarist Paul Leary suddenly reappeared contributing guitar performances to The Melvins’ twentieth album, Hold It In, as well as contributing some songwriting to the project about six years ago, it felt like a shocking development. Not that Leary had vanished or retired or anything, the guitarist was simply busy with other endeavors; he developed a band or two of his own (Honky was great) as well as doing production work – so his...