If the title alone doesn’t give it away, it only takes a cursory glance at the tracklisting to know Hello Sadness isn’t going to be the feel-good album of the year. Not that Los Campesinos! have ever really been all sunshine and rainbows—they have a knack for putting biting lyrics[Read More…]
Arts & Entertainment
Keep up to date on local art, new albums, and everything entertainment-related.
Down with Webster: Time to Win, Vol. 2
When it comes to Down With Webster, a party ain’t a party without red cups. If you’re not familiar with the band by name, there is no doubt you’ve heard one of their previous hits; Canadian radio loves them. The energetic six-man group comes through with their sophomore album Time[Read More…]
Lou Reed & Metallica: Lulu
Lou Reed is a strange fellow, so nobody should be surprised that Lulu would be a characteristically bizarre release. But who knew that a joint effort between Metallica and the former Velvet Underground legend could be so poorly executed? The album opens with the line, “I would cut my legs[Read More…]
Mother Mother wants you to pay attention
Todd M. Duym Vancouver indie-rock band Mother Mother released their third album Eureka earlier this year, and have just concluded a European tour and summer festival circuit. The band consists of brother and sister duo Ryan (guitar and vocals) and Molly Guldemond (vocals and keyboard), plus Jasmin Parkin (keyboard and[Read More…]
A cultish heroine
jojonews.com Making a film that deliberately attempts to confuse its audience can be a tricky thing. Not only is there the risk of repelling (or simply boring) viewers, but the incoherence can overwhelm the purpose of the trickery. Fortunately, first-time director Sean Durkin was able to avoid most of these[Read More…]
Building health from the ground up
See footnote. Our environment has a deep impact on our mental, physical, and emotional health. A new exhibit at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) called Imperfect Health: The Medicalization of Architecture explores the numerous ways in which this truism has, and could, manifest itself in the arenas of structural[Read More…]
To be or not to be Shakespeare?
If Shakespeare didn’t write any of his plays, who did? That’s the scenario of Roland Emmerich’s newest film, Anonymous. The film pits Shakespeare the person against Shakespeare the bard, but barely scratches the surface of the complex history of Shakespeare and his works. Based on the Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare[Read More…]
Sunparlour Players: Us Little Devils
Us Little Devils seems like a name too deviously coy for a band that’s named after their hometown’s sunny climate. Yet Sunparlour Players’ latest release is certainly not lacking in contradictions. Within a scant 36 minutes, listeners are dragged through a disorienting mixture of frenzied, eclectic, pop-rock Canadiana. What results[Read More…]
Difficult to explain, easy to like
Sometimes authors face a chasm between the critical and the consensus. Last year Johanna Skibsrud won the Scotiabank Giller Prize for her debut novel, The Sentimentalists. Critics praised the book for its poetic language and complex themes, though many readers disagreed. Some found the work overwritten, and the storytelling murky,[Read More…]
The men who knew too much
alliancefilmsmedia.com alliancefilmsmedia.com Surviving Progress, as the name suggests, is a film that questions our understanding of progress by pushing viewers to see progress as a movement that threatens humanity, rather than as positive advancement. The documentary, based on Ronald Wright’s best selling non fiction book A Short History of Progress,[Read More…]
