- Album Review: Foxygen’s We Are The 21st Century Ambassadors Of Peace & Magic
Posted on 07 Feb 2013 in Music
Just in time for Valentine’s Day, here are songs that celebrate life instead of mourning love, and do so with aplomb.
- Album Review: Wooden Wand’s Blood Oaths of the New Blues
Posted on 22 Jan 2013 in Music
The listener is held in suspended emotional animation, waiting for a push in one direction or another, but destined to be disappointed in that regard.
- Album Review: Andre Williams and The Sadies’ Night & Day
Posted on 02 Jan 2013 in Music
Andre Williams spits out his philosophy against a background of organs and supporting vocals that evoke a blend of both haunted house and gospel house, spirits and the spiritual.
- Album Review: Crystal Castles’ III
Posted on 13 Dec 2012 in Music
After a high-pitched intro reminiscent of the entry into a horror film, the bass explodes into pulsing heavy distortion as gratifying as a welcome plot twist. Vocals blur into a winsome crackle of low and high notes that can only be experienced as emotional entreaties rather than explicit ones. As sense of the song is jettisoned, there is ascension into a state of pure rhythm.
- Art Review: Graphic Design: Now in Production, The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
Posted on 19 Oct 2012 in Art, Art & Design
Lovers of advertising, of the internet and interactivity, of reading and the media, sit back and prepare to be amazed; you’re in capable hands here, and this is the good stuff. Graphic Design: Now in Production is a tour de force of some of the boldest graphic design work out there, ranging from 2000 to the present.
- Album Review: Passion Pit’s Gossamer
Posted on 30 Jul 2012 in Blog-Music, Music
But like hunting for proof of Nessie or Bigfoot, these moments of inspiration that you took a smudgy photo of in your excitement vanish all too quickly, and you are left wondering if anything exciting actually happened at all.
- Album Review: Dirty Projectors’ Swing Lo Magellan
Posted on 20 Jul 2012 in Blog-Music, Music
We can never rediscover the true weirdness of the 1960s psychedelic movements without abandoning our own prohibitive – and inhibitive – self-awareness.
- Art Review: Gustav Klimt: The Magic of Line, The Getty Center
Posted on 14 Jul 2012 in Art, Art & Design
Fans of animation will feel at home here – this is an exhibit all about the communicative potential of the human form. Lovers of anatomy will relish charting Klimt’s evolution of translating the human form into the linear form.
- Album Review: Hot Chip’s In Our Heads
Posted on 09 Jul 2012 in Blog-Music, Music
dancing in the summer seems masochistic. Yet In Our Heads by Hot Chip may very well inspire the unsuspecting listener to engage in precisely that dangerous, sweat-inducing activity.
- Album Review: Fiona Apple’s The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do
Posted on 21 Jun 2012 in Blog-Music, Music
Yet there is power in childishness, and strength in it as well – there is innocence inside of it, and precociousness – and the petulance and raw emotion of a wounded child can strike more sincerely at the chords of the heart than the tantrum of an emotionally-constrained adult ever will.
- Album Review: Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros’ Here
Posted on 06 Jun 2012 in Blog-Music, Music
This is the music of firepits and families, and tells the story of the everyman trudging through this similar, yet often surprising world.
- Album Review: The Shallows from I Like Trains
Posted on 26 May 2012 in Blog-Music, Music
If ever there was a soundtrack for a party held on the oil-drenched shore of a Malibu beach house in Blade Runner, this is it.
- Album Review: Iggy Pop’s Après
Posted on 18 May 2012 in Blog-Music, Music
To those unacquainted with Iggy Pop’s vocals let it be known that they are not merely idiosyncratic, they are bewitching – a feast of aural mesmerism that groans, quavers, and wavers with bass-driven emotion.
- Album Review: Nick Waterhouse’s Time’s All Gone
Posted on 08 May 2012 in Blog-Music, Music
There is the distinctly unnerving sensation of both familiarity and newness; the sound of another era that growls, glows, and swings all at once while creating something fresh that was never there before.
- Album Review: Rufus Wainwright’s Out of the Game
Posted on 07 May 2012 in Blog-Music, Music
Underneath the skin of the music there is the pulse of the long car trip, songs that tell stories casually and with the easy rhythm of dotted white lines whipping by along the asphalt.
Follow the California Literary Review on Twitter: @calitreview
