We've got issues.
Behind every great writer hides an asshole. Dostoyevsky was a religious freak with a gambling problem. William Burroughs plinked a slug through his wife’s forehead. Faulkner guzzled a half-gallon of rye every day before noon. Shakespeare only willed his wife the spare bed. I’m far from a great writer, but I sure can be an asshole sometimes. It’s true. Maybe you should stop reading this. Continue reading
With R.E.M. having disbanded last year, it would appear that Wilco now stands pretty well unchallenged as the greatest American rock band. Since rising from the ashes of seminal post-punk country/folk/rock pioneers Uncle Tupelo in 1994, this Chicago-based band has released a series of albums that continues, with each successive drop, to challenge, confound, frustrate, mystify and amuse its fans. Continue reading
There are a lot of reasons I shouldn’t like Breathe Owl Breathe. They sound a bit like Jack Johnson meets Feist in a hookah lounge. They have all the hallmarks of easy-goin’ adult contemporary indie-folk. But there are things going on beneath the surface that set Breathe Owl Breathe apart from the “tailor-made-for-Starbucks” scene. Continue reading
Like an international sweat fest of nostalgic pleasure, Dengue Fever is better suited as a warmer-upper than a cold. With a gruff, garage-rock spangle slathered in funk, this L.A.-based band welds ’60s Cambodian pop to a surfboard and floats it out to sea. Founded in 2001 after a trip to Cambodia, Ethan and Zac Holtzman met a Cambodian-native lounge singer named Chhom Nimol, a star in her home country, who could sing and write songs in Khmer. Continue reading
Like that one ramshackle, half-collapsed barn you pass on the highway year after year, the music created by veteran Minneapolis band The Jayhawks is timeless — in a fragile, verdigised, sepia-toned, windblown, authentically American melancholia sort of way. Their sweetly bittersweet sound, all honeyed harmonies and landlocked blues and melodic rustic reverie, is like a soundtrack caught gorgeously between a hymn to our better selves and an elegy to how we’ve fallen short. Continue reading
Back in the 1970s, one of the major bands leading the welcomed revival of Celtic music was Planxty, a group that recreated the original energy in what could have been musty old tunes and forms and thereby revitalized Irish music. Singer Andy Irvine incorporated Eastern European elements into the band, and he later co-founded another all-star Irish band, Patrick Street, which he continues to front. Continue reading
The play’s refrain echoes over the audience, as though repeating the words enough times will make it true: “Make it so life ain’t printed on dollar bills.” Continue reading
The dirty streets of London crawl with vermin and their lousy human counterparts. Victorian England is a great place to get rich, a terrible place to be poor and the perfect place for Charles Dickens’ imagination to run wild with an orphan in search of hope. Oliver! The Musical is more than memorable songs like “Food, Glorious Food” and “Consider Yourself.” It is a dark, Dickensian story. A successful production takes skill, bravery and a heap of children. Continue reading
Just how bad is Exploding Love, the play? It is so miserably and flatulently bad, in fact, that it’s nearly inconceivable Exploding Love, the actual current LCC student production directed by Michael Watkins, could not also be bad. We’re talking inevitably, ineluctably bad, as in lipstick-on-pig bad. Not just ungood, but bad. Awful. Continue reading
Click any image to view the complete Beats Antique gallery. All photos by Rob Sydor. Continue reading