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LATEST ARTICLES - PAGE 221

Review: The Alchemist Cookbook

Nathan Hall

A man lives alone in the woods with his cat, attempting to use alchemy to summon the devil and create riches for himself. Plotwise, that’s about all there is to Joel Potrykus’ The Alchemist Cookbook, a film that I find hard to organize thoughts on. Much of what I like about it lies just beyond the grasp of my ability to verbalize, possibly because what I enjoyed so much in the film doesn’t quite feel concrete, and might more come from the feeling the film captures. This is a film with an aura, and for a film that deals so much with the implied, or presences more felt than seen, the balance is an accomplishment for Potrykus.

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Review: Yellowcard – Yellowcard

Yellowcard
Jason Tate

With goodbye comes reflection. This reflection is often bittersweet as it drifts between that which has filled us with joy and that which has caused us pain. There’s a cauterization of once open wounds that necessitates a search for meaning in the steps that led us here. And it’s within this reflection that we try and attach understanding to our history. Why does saying goodbye make us feel this way? What is it about this specific action that leads to an emotional cluster-fuck? A perceptible and undeniable bond between love and sadness? I keep asking myself these questions as I prepare to say goodbye to one of the best bands that ever came from our music scene. A band that has soundtracked my highs, soundtracked my lows, and has been a constant musical mirror to the love, and sadness, that life has brought. As I walk into this realization, I can’t help but reflect on just how many of my goodbyes have been punctuated by a Yellowcard song. Goodbye to friends, goodbye to family, goodbye to relationships, goodbye to states, goodbye to innocence, goodbye to youth. And with that I realize that I don’t want to become numb to goodbyes. I want them to sting. I want them to hurt. I want the goodbye to be a remembrance of everything that led to that moment. Yellowcard’s final self-titled album is that pinprick. It’s that puncture against the consciousness that reminds me why I listen to music, it’s the melodic pull that has dominated my life for all these years. It’s between this intense feeling of familiar and new that I find the closing Yellowcard album lays itself to rest.

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Review: Countless Thousands – You’re Goddamn Right

Craig Manning

I don’t review anywhere near a high percentage of the albums that land in my inbox. Largely, this fact is due to sheer, raw statistics. I get dozens of promos a day, most of them from artists I’ve never heard of. I don’t even have time to listen to the majority of them, let alone put pen to paper and give each album a fair, in-depth write-up. Believe me when I say that I wish I did have that kind of time.

With all that said, though, even I couldn’t resist giving Los Angeles rock band Countless Thousands a review, and their music was only one of several reasons. Between one of those eye-catching band names that pulls you in right away, a funny, tongue-in-cheek album title (You’re Goddamn Right), and an intriguing RIYL that included names like Against Me!, The Clash, and Ted Leo & the Pharmacists, these guys won my attention in a way that few unknown bands ever do with a promo email. Add a serious master class in bio writing, which casts the four band members as a “show choir reject,” an “East Coast jazz legend,” a “cosplay nerd,” and a “Civil War reenacting drum geek,” and I was ready to write half the review before I even pressed play.

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TWIABP – “Body Without Organs”

TWIAPB
Jason Tate

The World is a Beautiful Place… have released their new song, “Body Without Organs,” with all proceeds from the track going to the ACLU.

While this track didn’t seem to fit on Harmlessness, the feeling it evokes seems more appropriate to recent times. The artwork for the song [by Dylan Balliett] depicts a modern-day Terracotta Army being torn down. It’s unsettling to see the voices of positive change in the community around you get drowned out within a world of dated and regressive ideals. In an effort to help make those voices of change heard, we’re permanently donating all the Bandcamp proceeds from this track to the non-profit and nonpartisan group the ACLU.

You can pick up the song on Bandcamp.

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Review: Moonlight

Moonlight
Nathan Hall

No one is any one thing. Our identities have history, they are shaped by what is always inside us and how we react to external influences, two storms constantly colliding in our hearts and minds as we find and mold ourselves throughout our lives. In Moonlight we take that journey with Chiron, and it is a dynamic, beautiful, frustrating, achingly bittersweet arc. It is a black film that celebrates blackness by being thoroughly and dynamically black. It is a film about a man’s coming to terms with his sexuality and how it informs his masculinity in nuanced, layered ways. It is a human film, filled with complicated joy, paralyzing pain, and all the in-between. It is a remarkable coming of age film that evokes the classic imagery and sound of foreign arthouse works, but contextualizes those familiar notes in American blackness. The film brings to life a black experience that is allowed to be nuanced, human, and tenderly sexual. Barry Jenkins lifts each character up in empathy and actualization; even when it utilizes familiar archetypes they are contextualized in the entirety of Chiron’s experience magnificently. Moonlight is a stunning work.

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Review: Two Tongues – Two Tongues Two

Aaron Mook

Before I started writing this review, I felt the need to revisit both Say Anything’s album from this past January, I Don’t Think It Is, as well my subsequent review of the album that I wrote for AbsolutePunk.net. This was a surreal experience, partially because of my own disdain for the album but more so because I spoke with Bemis about the aforementioned review. Following its publication, we had a (very pleasant) dialogue about my review, Bemis’s music and art criticism in general, and all things considered, it proved to be a thought-provoking and productive conversation.

What you must understand is just how much Say Anything’s music has meant to me over the past decade. Even now, at a time in my life when I find myself returning to the band’s later output less and less, it’s easy to trace a thick black line from my tastes today to the year I discovered In Defense of the Genre, and subsequently …Is a Real Boy. At the time, my 13-year-old mind had never heard something quite so complex, so unique as Bemis’s knack for musical arrangement and lyrical phrasing. They were my favorite band for years, and the release of I Don’t Think It Is in January, my review and the discussion surrounding it, left me questioning my growing musical tastes, platform, and the very purpose of music reviews in the Age of Streaming.

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