Products don’t always live up to their advertisements, but Aloe Blacc’s Lift Your Spirit holds true to its promise. Blacc’s innovative third album dips into multiple genres and realizes its promise of lifting listeners’ spirits through an upbeat mix of classic and novel sounds. Tending towards simple and iconic subject[Read More…]
Arts & Entertainment
Keep up to date on local art, new albums, and everything entertainment-related.
Pop rhetoric: Keeping it real at concerts
It’s hard to explain why you do it. Why, at some point during a concert, you will feel the need to pull out your phone—with its lackluster picture and video-taking ability—and snap a picture or a 30-second video that doesn’t do the artist any justice whatsoever. Sure, part of it[Read More…]
SSMU building gets an art attack for Nuit Blanche
There aren’t many places—the Tribune’s Arts & Entertainment section being excepted—where one can find visual art, performance art, interactive art, and live music all together at McGill. In order to reconcile the lack of a formal fine arts program at the school, each year the Arts Undergraduate Society’s (AUS) Fine[Read More…]
Eastern premises serve Wes Anderson well in The Grand Budapest Hotel
The central characters in Wes Anderson’s films have always had a deep and inextricable connection to the places they love: Max Fischer had Rushmore; Royal Tenenbaum had the house on Archer Avenue; Steve Zissou had his ship, the Belafonte. Despite their usually roguish natures, these connections hint at some kind[Read More…]
Tokyo Police Club—Forcefield
These indie rockers from Newmarket, Ontario have had some time to craft their indie-punk sound and style since their first full-length album, Elephant Shell, was released in 2008. It’s for this reason that it comes as a surprise to hear that on latest release Forcefield, Tokyo Police Club go lighter[Read More…]
Karmin—Pulses
After rising to global fame through their YouTube channel, the band Karmin—made up of couple Amy Heidemann and Nick Noonan—was signed to record label Epic, released a string of EPs and, finally, debuted their first full-length LP, Pulses. Characterized by a unique image, Heidemann’s seemingly unparalleled rapping style, and Noonan’s[Read More…]
Deep Cuts: the sounds of April
April Come She Will Artist: Simon & Garfunkel Album: Sounds of Silence Released: January 17, 1966 The light flurry of fingerpicked guitar that opens this track is a sonic representation of the feeling that comes over you when you realize for the first time that winter is truly over. Although[Read More…]
McMorrow remains calm during Post Tropical storm
Dublin-born singer-songwriter James Vincent McMorrow has been gaining positive critical attention for his latest album, Post Tropical, but when I talked to him, he was just another guy standing on the side of the highway. “Something exploded in the engine,” McMorrow explains, chuckling softly. “I’ve just been standing outside like[Read More…]
FOKUS Film Festival gets hearts racing with robust reels
It was only fitting that to arrive on time last Friday to the FOKUS Film Festival, I had to re-enact one of the great last-minute dash scenes in movie history. The moment my class ended at 5:55 p.m., I was zooming through the Milton-Parc area doing my best Ferris Bueller[Read More…]
Pop Rhetoric: You can’t handle the truth—unless it’s handled properly
The first time I listened through Benji, the latest offering from Sun Kil Moon, I was wandering around Macdonald Campus trying to find a place to get a coffee. I’d finally figured out where I could buy one when the sweet organ at the beginning of “Jim Wise” came on.[Read More…]
