Forever immortalized (for better or for worse) by the 2004 film Garden State, The Shins have returned with Port of Morrow. The music landscape has changed a lot since we last heard from The Shins: Today’s up-and-coming groups seem to canonize bands like Animal Collective and Beach House more than, say, Spoon (and the “trendiest” …
The James Murphy/David Byrne talk this past Tuesday was the first two hours since Spring Fling that the majority of off-campus students were on campus. Hosted in the Yale University Art Gallery by the Yale School of Art and moderated by musicologist John Schaefer, the talk put two of the most iconic artists to ever …
We Need to Talk about Kevin is profoundly fucked up. Not just because it’s about a young psychopath, the “family” around him, and the high school massacre he orchestrates. It’s fucked up because director Lynne Ramsay is fucking demented.
Deliciously so.
Experiencing Kevin (because you experience this film, stumble out of the theater with it, brood on …
I was immediately skeptical when I learned that an ’80s cop drama was being rebooted by the guys whose only previous film was Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (Phil Lord and Chris Miller). The project seemed like another example of Hollywood cashing in on a dead franchise. Color me surprised when 21 Jump Street …
Last Sunday, rapper and activist Immortal Technique came to Toad’s. The Herald sat down with him to discuss his thoughts on his work, Afghanistan, Rick Santorum, and hip-hop culture.
Yale Herald: All right, so how you feeling? You got a show in like, 10-15 minutes?
Immortal Technique: The show starts in 10-15 minutes. I always bring a …
Parastrophics, the first Mouse on Mars album in six years, starts out with four minutes of colorful squiggles transcribed to audio—as it turns out, writing about this band quickly becomes an Impressionist exercise. But when opener “The Beach Stop” gives way to “Chordblocker,” the German duo show they’ve moved beyond the clever knob-twiddling of their …
Antonin Baudry, cultural counselor at the French Embassy in the United States, wrote in the catalogue of the exhibition “Ron Agam: Recent Works” that “for Ron the circle is not so much the expression of an aesthetic belief as a metaphysical one: it expresses the notion of infinite, the idea of defying time, defying death.”
Ron …
This Means War is an ode to senselessness. It poses as a comedy, but it’s really just an entertaining absurdity.
The plot revolves around two CIA agents, FDR (Chris Pine) and Tuck (Tom Hardy), who sabotage one another in hopes of winning the woman they love, Lauren Scott (Reese Witherspoon). While this sounds like the universal …
On first listen, School of Seven Bell’s latest release, Ghostory, seems breathy, textured, and ethereal—i.e., no different than their previous work. And while for School of Seven Bells, crafting hazy, liquid electro-pop is almost second nature, too much atmosphere can drown any actual music. On Ghostory, the band includes some subtle, vital changes that keep …
Nicolas Cage. The man with an avian haircut and a permanent expression of constipated confusion. He’s publicly regarded as a joke of an actor, the apotheosis of cinematic rock bottom. YouTube videos like “Nicolas Cage Losing His Shit” and “Not the Bees” highlight the man’s tendency to overact wildly. At this point, whenever my buddies …
Reign of Terror certainly isn’t the worst album in the world, but it is arguably the worst-named record in recent memory—for a few reasons. Sleigh Bells’ newest album, released on Tues., Feb. 21, follows up on the group’s growing mainstream success, a unique feat given its “noise pop” origins within the indie music community. Although …
It is no coincidence that the YSoA symposium “Is Drawing Dead?” (Feb. 9-11) coincided with its ongoing exhibition, “Massimo Scolari: The Representation of Architecture, 1967-2012.” This exhibition, which runs through May 4, succeeds in physically communicating the need for drawing in the architectural process; the layout of the gallery, which moves from sketches to structures, …
If you see Safe House, you will do so for one irrefutable reason: Denzel Washington is a certified bad-ass. In the end, that is reason enough.
Nothing about Safe House is particularly innovative. It’s a CIA thriller filling the vacuum left by Matt Damon’s departure from the Bourne franchise, the kind of film that keeps you …
Translations, the Yale Dramat’s spring main-stage, is one of the most thought-provoking plays I’ve seen on campus in a while. Written by Brian Friel and directed by Lauren Keating, Translations manages to invoke the undying struggle between change and tradition, the transformative power of wild romanticism, the poisonous effects of ignorance, the inescapable potency of …
Post-Internet. It sounds like the latest trend in a culture that likes to add post- to everything: post-race, post-hipster, post-postmodernism. So, when Claire Boucher, the Montrealer known as Grimes, describes her new album Visions as “post-Internet” in an interview, it’s natural that we’re inclined to laugh. But one listen reveals that post-Internet is perhaps the …
Yale may suffer from an overabundance of music. The average Yalie’s e-mail and Facebook are regularly flooded with invitations to acapella shows and symphony orchestras, and roughly 90 percent of Yale students seem to know how to play the piano. Still, all of this technical skill hasn’t resulted in a particularly vibrant music scene. In …
About a year ago, as I obsessively searched for bootleg videos of London DJ Kode9 performing Burial’s unreleased material on tour, I stumbled upon 30 seconds of “Ashtray Wasp” and cried. It was just too beautiful. Last Saturday afternoon, Hyperdub records digitally released Burial’s Kindred EP, including “Ashtray Wasp” as one of two B-sides. Although …
In his latest release, Paul McCartney is neither original nor exciting. But considering that that was the point—he calls it “an album you listen to at home after work, with a glass of wine or a cup of tea”—Kisses on the Bottom is a beautiful, delicate success.
Made up almost entirely of less-recognized works from the …
On each wall is a picture frame, empty but for a small, gravestone-shaped recording device in the center. When pressed, each mechanism plays a “sound memory.” If you enter the room on a busy day, you’re overwhelmed with noises: the racket of a Fourth of July parade, the squawking of a canary, the jingling of …
110 straight minutes of back-to-back Oscar-nominated live action short films left my head spinning—in a good way. The screening is a rapid-fire emotional roller coaster, condensed and packaged perfectly for short attention spans.
The series of five begins with Pentecost, a cheeky Irish comedy that finds a fresh way to make fun of the Church. A …