Fall Out Boy’s “From Under the Cork Tree” will always be my first idea of high school. (And I am definitely disillusioned. Where is the hierarchical high school and relationship system that Fall Out Boy romanticized for me?) However, disentangling themselves from their breakout punk rock roots, (emo rock for those teens of 2003) Fall Out Boy’s “American Beauty/American...
After the success of “Group Therapy,” I was excited when I found out that Above & Beyond had come out with a new album called “We Are All We Need.” But instead of being greeted with the skipping trance beats I had come to love from “Group Therapy,” I was instead quietly ushered into the album with dreamy, seafoam...
It was somewhere between the dream sequence about losing touch with your inner child and the “hilarious” scene involving the protagonists’ clumsy first-time attempt to use cellophane tape that I realized that “Paddington” wasn’t for me. Mind you, this has much more to do with me and much less to do with the film itself. It has a well-rounded...
When it comes to classical music, I would categorize myself under “uncultured swine,” as most of my exposure is from either car commercials or switching to the wrong radio station before I had a car stereo with an AUX input. I’ve always had a resistance to immersing myself in classical music because of my misconception that all orchestral pieces...
Director Michael Mann’s latest movie has come out, with promises that the former hand behind “Heat” would be able to spice up Hollywood with a new crime thriller (I tried very hard to avoid a pun using the word heat). With such a pedigree, I took my seat in the theater already shaking with excitement over the idea of...
Known for opening discussion on masculinity from his Westerns to war films, Clint Eastwood continues this discussion in his recent film “American Sniper,” a biopic focused on Chris Kyle or “the most lethal sniper in U.S. military history” — as both Kyle’s autobiography and the Pentagon claim. Played by Bradley Cooper, “American Sniper” follows Kyle’s military career, from his...
While the calendar clearly marks us as in the dead of winter, something about the weather just doesn’t add up. Where are the biting winds we usually associate with winter? Since when did winter consist of me seeing 70s and 80s on my weather app? I even heard from Riverside residents that there was snow on top of the...
Four years after their last release, Guster has dropped back into the alternative music scene with their seventh studio album, “Evermotion.” Having produced the record partly under Nettwerk, their independent label, it makes sense that Guster would experiment and create a sound quite different from their earlier discography. While any artist should, indeed, be entitled to a bit of...
The year 2014 was a big year for 21-year-old Meghan Trainor. The newcomer burst onto the scene with her smash hit “All About That Bass,” a retro-styled, upbeat track that quickly rose to the top of the charts. Basking in her newfound success, Trainor decided to enter the New Year with her debut album, “Title.” Full of fun and...
Honestly, I had trouble figuring out what to say in this review. “Payback” is a low-key episode of “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” one that I doubt I’ll remember in the months to come. While “Beach House” didn’t have a lot of plot, it was memorable because of its attention to character. “Payback” doesn’t have a lot of plot either, and on...