Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond (Folio Society edition) This book has been lingering in my mind for quite some time now, and I’ve been putting it off for as long as I can remember. Not helping are my friends who’ve tried reading the book, who tell me they had to put it down halfway because it was just too dense and not what they were looking for. But now, after finally reading...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Dirt LP by Yamantaka // Sonic Titan. In this age of post-modern songwriting and culturally blended musicianship, finding something which is truly striking and unique in its composition, performance and presentation is rare but, as Yamantaka // Sonic Titan proves on its third album Dirt, not impossible. This time out, the Canadian Noh-Wave behemoths offer offer listeners their first great breakthrough document of both sound and style; over the course of...
Justice League In many ways, the DC movies never stood a chance. I don’t know what started this ever-increasing snowball of hatred towards their movies: maybe it was a lack of faith in its leader Zack Snyder, maybe it’s just brand loyalty to Marvel, or maybe the DC movies just got off to a bad start. Whatever the case, the DC universe is the franchise people seem to love to hate. And this, quite honestly, is a...
Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Reveals About Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz I’ve been hesitant to jump on the bandwagon with books like Freakonomics, which claim to have an alternative take (read: the REAL take, maaaan) on how to interpret our lives. But, Everybody Lies just might have converted me. In this book, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz (SSD, for short) uses something very simple, our Google searches, to explain human behavior. What we mostly learn,...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Choke Cherry Tree LP by Ben Miller Band. The catch, when any band attempts to infuse a time-honored sound and style with new energy and fresh inspiration, is that they often lose sight of all the reasons why and how that form worked in the first place. While the heart and hopes might sound enough, the results often feel as though someone has tried to weld the fins from a ’57...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Loner LP by Caroline Rose. I have to confess that, as soon as I began listening to Loner – the new full-length album by Caroline Rose – I realized that everything I thought I knew and expected from the singer was incorrect. My first contact with Rose was with the song “Yip Yip Yow” from an NPR live performance, and that was enough to get me looking around for other music...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Recreational Hate LP by Lemuria. The coolest thing about the moment after a new album gets released, people begin to find it and it proves to really connect with them in a popular way is that time seems to stop for a minute and everything the band did prior to the release of that album becomes a footnote. From the moment that record breaks the band into the popular consciousness, all...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Meet King Leg LP by King Leg. The beauty of working in a pop culture-identified medium like pop music is that, while the music does initially have finite appeal as ‘new music,’ the basic structures and forms can easily be revisited, re-purposed and re-presented as often as new artists are willing to rediscover them. Any music can be reborn with the power of belief Take King Leg’s new album, Meet King...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Certified edition of Oooooooohhh… On The TLC Tip by TLC. From a historical standpoint, it’s always remarkable to observe how and when a dynasty began. Take TLC, for example; to date, the group comes second only to The Supremes in regards to how far their influence reaches on both musical and cultural levels. That statement is made here with no hyperbole at all, it is just a FACT. The group’s sophomore...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Water Records vinyl reissue of the Album – Generic Flipper LP. In music, as is the case in chemistry, the most important element is the one that ultimately provides the catalyst which sets everything else in motion. In chemistry, for example, the right combination of sulfer, charcoal and saltpeter can still remain perfectly inert but, when a spark gets added to that mix, the results are explosive; the aforementioned chemical compound...