Arts & Culture

TEST SPIN | Sorority Noise — YNAAYT

By |

Sorority Noise’s March 2 release — YNAAYT — is almost entirely composed of stripped-down songs from their 2017 release You’re Not as _____ as You Think. Many bands have released essential demo, remastered or acoustic albums. Some present wholly new takes on fan-favorite songs. Others let listeners peek behind inside the recording process and hear the band play around with yet to be finished tracks. YNAAYT doesn’t provide any such insights or revelations. It feels rushed and underdeveloped, lacking new melodies and interesting ideas.

Arts & Culture

COLLINS | The Oscars Matter. They May Suck, but They Matter

By |

With the Oscars approaching, I’ve committed myself to watch every Best Picture nominee. I’ve already watched six. I’ll happily make it through the next two on my list — The Shape of Water and Phantom Thread — and force myself through The Post. No knock on Steven Spielberg and his cast. I just tend to have a hard time getting into historical films.

Many viewers seem to regard awards shows with something between amusement and derision, and with good reason.

Arts & Culture

GUEST ROOM | Stay Cool, Stanley Uris

By |

On Sept. 8, The Forward published a column by Noah Berlatsky titled “Stephen King’s ‘It’ Shows Hollywood Still Has a Jewish Problem.” You don’t have to tell me twice that anti-Semitic tropes still run rampant in Hollywood. But I was surprised that Berlatsky argued that It proved this point. In It, Pennywise the Clown faces off against a ragtag band of lovable outcasts — the fittingly named “Losers Club.” Among the misfits stands Stanley Uris, a Jewish tween in what seemed to be an almost entirely Christian town. I could relate.

Arts & Culture

TEST SPIN: Kitty — Miami Garden Club

By |

Miami Garden Club is the kind of album that makes you want to wake up at 2 p.m. and spend the rest of the day playing Animal Crossing and taking selfies in your Calvin Klein underwear. Kitty’s been laying the groundwork for such an album for a while. In her earlier tracks, the Daytona Beach-based rapper mixed goofiness and sadness with occasional glimpses of stark honesty. She’s at her most evocative dropping lines like, “You apologize to me when I see you do a line, but like/I’m open-minded and it’s fine/I don’t do that shit but I don’t really mind it.” But with tracks like “Give Me Scabies” and “Ay Shawty: THE SHREKONING, ” Kitty long fronted her tumblr tongue-in-cheek detachment over her vulnerability. I first fell in love with Kitty’s “Florida.” Over a shimmering beat by Hot Sugar, Kitty spins out emo hometown angst.

Arts & Culture

TEST SPIN: Kurt Riley — Tabula Rasa

By |

Kurt Riley ’16 is, first and foremost, an optimist. Riley’s imaginative blend of rock, blues and theatricality always gazes forward, hoping for a more enthusiastic and less cynical future. While Riley took on the persona of an alien king to critique humanity from the outside on his 2016 release Kismet, Riley and his band have come back to earth on 2017’s Tabula Rasa. With his distinctive style of “21st century rock,” Riley turns to problems that have been all too pertinent throughout the past few years: a sense of helplessness in a massive political system, a news cycle filled with depressing stories and growing malaise. Yet, Tabula Rasa, with all of its forward-looking anthems, begins on a decidedly somber note.

Arts & Culture

TEST SPIN: Japandroids — Near To The Wild Heart Of Life

By |

Sometimes you can judge a garage rock album by its cover. Rock duo Japandroids have long opted for short, punchy album titles. The duo made their 2009 major label debut with the decisively named Post-Nothing, followed it up the next year with the similarly bold No Singles, a compilation of their limited-run EPs and then released Celebration Rock in 2012. Japandroids’ titles underscored their music: unadorned, fuzzed-out, straight-to-the-point rock tracks about Vancouver, traveling around and awkward love in your 20-somethings. As such, the title of the duo’s 2017 release — Near To The Wild Heart Of Life — signaled a change to longtime listeners.

Arts & Culture

Spinning Singles: Joyce Manor, “Last You Heard Of Me”

By |

Nine days remain until Joyce Manor release their fourth LP, Cody. In the six years since their 2010 Split with Summer Vacation, the pop-punk/emo quartet has matured in a familiar trajectory. The group toned down the blunt twenty-something angst of their 2011 self-titled debut, added in power-pop motifs and continued putting out unpretentious vignettes through 2012’s Of All Things I Will Soon Grow Tired and 2014’s Never Hungover Again. “Fake I.D.,” the first single off of Cody (slated for an October 7 release), resembled the Brit pop-inspired “Heated Swimming Pool” far more than any of the group’s latchkey SoCal musings. I freaked a little when I first heard it, to be honest.

Arts & Culture

Spinning Singles: Green Day, “Still Breathing”

By |

No one is going to blame you if you spaced out for Green Day’s 2012 three-album, 37-song outpouring ¡Uno!, ¡Dos! and ¡Tré! The trilogy called into clear relief the inherent contradiction in the trio’s 2009 21st Century Breakdown. Green Day’s broad brush, lite manifesto take on politics was both far too milquetoast to seriously listen to as political punk, but too sincere and ideologically weighty to reward casual listening like fellow aging punks Descendents. The band kept 21st Century Breakdown and American Idiot’s big budget production and streamlined production for ¡Uno!, ¡Dos!

Arts & Culture

Kanye West’s Buffalo Dystopia

By |

8:12 p.m.: We arrive in Buffalo. Jack bought a pass online that lets us park in a clearing under a bridge. A sign bolted to a cement support lists the rates — $75 daily maximum. It’s dark and we’re in a half-awake state from driving on Western New York backroads into fading light. 8:19 p.m.: We walk to the First Niagara Center.

Arts & Culture

Spinning Singles: PWR BTTM, NAO

By |

“New Hampshire” — PWR BTTM 

PWR BTTM is a pretty unilateral band. A great and unashamedly unilateral band, but one-sided all the same. Frankly, there are only so many types of sounds a guitar-drum rock duo can concoct, and it’s not like PWR BTTM, even at their best, have been bounding through any boundaries, sonically. Ugly Cherries was remarkable more for what it was (a thrashing, vulnerable paean to queerness and what it can mean in all its iterations) than for how it sounded (pwr chords and pwr vocals that both, in turn, skidded from blared to whimpered with the click of a distortion pedal). As I heard it, their last album’s noises were auxiliary, secondary to and supporting the inescapable choruses, bleeding confessionals and brash, almost gaudy humor that stood at the top of the soundpile.