Eventually, even re-reading back issues of the Herald gets old, which is why the A&E Editors have decided to give you a guide to summer, lest you find yourself midway though summer’s journey, the right road lost. Follow these simple guidelines to ensure a successful time this June, July, and August.
Tattoos
Didn’t land that internship at …

RL Burnside and Junior Kimbrough are about as prolific as it gets. But despite their foundational role in the evolution of the blues, their style—known as “Hill Country Blues”—was barely recognized until Robert Palmer released his 1992 documentary Deep Blues about the region’s unique blues traditions.
Matt Joseph, PC ’12, the student responsible for bringing RL …

Until the late 1960s, Commons doormen denied entry to any student not wearing a sports jacket and tie. Now you can eat there in the scruffiest of sweatpants. And you can be a girl and go here. You can even be a girl, go here, and eat in Commons while wearing the scruffiest of sweatpants. …

Since a very young age, I have been a huge fan of soul music. My parents raised me on the soundtrack to The Commitments, a classic film about a struggling Irish soul band. The Blues Brothers is on my “Favorite Movies about Music” list. Marvin Gaye is my favorite vocalist, and “Ain’t No Mountain High …

It’s odd and ironic that the new gold standard for an indie band’s success is how often their singles get played in car commercials. Case in point: Pheonix’s “1901,” Holy Fuck’s “Lovely Allen,” and Modest Mouse’s “Gravity Rides Everything,” The most iconic was Honda’s 2010 advertisement for the Civic Hatch, which showcased Honda’s engineering and …

I hadn’t heard of Tune-Yards either. I wrongly thought, for the first few songs of
w h o k i l l, that the singer was a man. Tune-Yards, however, is really Merrill Garbus, a female multi-instrumentalist whose first concert venue was a Montreal sidewalk. Her newest album is a ten-track interrogation of sex, sound, and …

Half-thriller, half-bildungsfilm Hanna is strange, occasionally funny, and generally entertaining. But it lacks that element of surprise so necessary to successful thrillers; while it begins imaginatively, the film gradually declines into the dull norm, consigning itself to the ranks of the merely good, rather than the truly great.
Director Joe Wright, whose past projects include Pride …

“For the lawyer as well as the soldier, there is an equally imperative command. That duty is to shelter from injustice the innocent, to protect the weak from oppression and, when necessity demands, to rally to the defense of those being wronged.” At the end the trial of Mary Surratt, the first woman ever executed …

A lot has changed since 2009 when Animal Collective released their album Merriweather Post Pavilion. When the album was released, it quickly became a hit within a distinct yet amorphous community of fans. It had jams like “Summertime Clothes” and “My Girls”: jams to which, I’ll admit, I still get down. For those of you …

On April 14, William Shatner released the track list for his newest album Searching For Rocket Man.  Captain Kirk pays homage to his outer space roots on this production, which will include covers of such tracks as David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” The Police’s “Walking on the Moon,” and The Byrds’ “Mr. Spaceman.”
William gets a lot …

Layers of shimmering guitars, unconventional song structures, military march-style drum beats, and a whole fucking lot of tremolo. I could try to describe the sound of Explosions in the Sky, but anything I write would be inadequate, an over-simplification, too generic. For over ten years, the Texas quartet (three guitars and a drummer) has been …

For some reason, the alternative band from Brooklyn, TV on the Radio, has slipped under my radar of hipster shit to listen to and pretend to like. Upon listening to their newest album, it occurs to me that this is because they aren’t god-awful. Nobody bothered to tell me how great TV on the Radio …

Brit-rock influenced indie bands from New York are a dime a dozen. That said, there are very few that can put out a record quite like The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart; from the earliest releases in their catalog, TPOBPAH have explored a very familiar sound—that is, ’90s alt-rock—and, in the process, have somehow …

Bulldog Days is a scary time for all of us. Not only do over 1,000 confused, sometimes awkward, sometimes drunk 17 year-olds swarm campus, but (and this is even scarier) Yale’s overzealous extracurricular groups come out in full force with fliers and free food to recruit these impressionable prefrosh. Prefrosh: You’re new here. Follow the …

“Don’t ever write a check with your mouth that you can’t pay for with your ass.”
By the time a character in Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch offers this piece of advice, the film is already on its long slide downhill. It was clear by then that what sounded like an interesting movie concept ended up being …

Many filmmakers seek to profit by adapting successful works of fiction—Jurassic Park, Harry Potter, and most recently, Twilight. Likewise, adaptations of more classical works of literature are nothing new. There’s no reason to expect that the films of this genre would stray from the form that worked so well in Pride and Prejudice (2005). What …

Do you ever find yourself sifting through the Arrested Development pages on Netflix, bemoaning the fact that you’ve thoroughly exhausted the short-lived show’s two, ahem, “three”—seasons? Ever wish that Adult Swim’s inane sense of humor had a little more mainstream appeal, or that The Office hadn’t run out of jokes in the third season? Do …

The English department, with support from the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism at Yale, arranged a talk this past Thursday with A. O. Scott, the New York Times’ chief film critic, on “Criticism outside the Classroom. “ Scott has created a reputation at the Times not only for quality, thorough film reviews, but also for a …

“This is my life,” Lil’ B “The BasedGod” ad libs at the beginning of the title track of his most recent self-released mixtape Illusions of Grandeur. He pronounces it “granger.” There is no distinction between his rap and his life. Even 50 Cent, who insists on the reality of his persona, maintains some distance from …

The advent of the Internet has irrevocably changed the face of the music industry; indeed, with the simultaneous—symbiotic, really—development of online music stores and piracy, it has become easier than ever for unknown bands to generate widespread interest even before they release any material. (Witness the rise of the buzz band: all blog hype, no …