Fans of reggae music made their way to the Barn Wednesday night to enjoy the sweet melodies of Daniel Bambaata Marley, the multitalented grandson of the legendary Bob Marley. Despite being given a start time of 7:30 p.m., the doors didn’t open until 8 p.m., leaving me and a few others left to wait outside the venue. Almost an...
The cinema is often filled with two types of movies: trendsetters and trend followers. The former is rare, the latter abundant. Looking at the list of movies of the past and upcoming months, it is clear that some of the most popular and therefore profitable trends are superheroes, the undead, huge battle sequences and imperfect protagonists who make questionably...
Japanese video game designer Shinji Mikami is a name that all survival horror fans recognize. He has been called the “master of survival horror” after the success of the “Resident Evil” franchise, which redefined the genre with its ‘tank’ control scheme and its focus on rationing limited resources. Mikami further cemented his reign with the 2005 release of the...
I am not a fan of jazz. Well, I should clarify — while I don’t inherently dislike it, I have never come to fully appreciate the genre or any of its multitudes of subgenres. So when the jazz band BadBadNotGood was announced to headline the free opening night of the Barn series this year, I met it with a...
If you’re still reeling from the fact that you were unable to witness the greatness that is Childish Gambino at UCR’s 2014 HEAT music festival that never happened, I have a nice surprise for you. After hinting at the possible release of new music earlier this year, Donald Glover, aka Childish Gambino, shocked fans with the sudden release of...
“Alien: Isolation” is a survival horror game by British video game developer Creative Assembly. You play as Amanda Ripley, daughter of “Alien” franchise protagonist Ellen Ripley. Amanda ventures with her team to Sevastopol, an android-manufacturing space station holding a flight recorder of the “Nostromo,” the ship her mother was stationed in before she went missing. She finds herself stranded...
Some things are better left unknown. When you go digging for the truth you might uncover something far more daunting. “Gone Girl,” the psychological thriller directed by film veteran David Fincher encompasses all the aesthetics that make films compelling and sticks to the basics. The film never tries to break new ground. Instead, it meticulously crafts itself into a...
The music industry has faced its fair share of death over the years. Whether it’s the loss of musical pioneers like hip-hop producer J-Dilla, the death of musical platforms such as the album, or the death of a genre, death is a subject that constantly recurs in music. It is the mystery we all wonder about, but can be...
Too messy for mainstream rock and alternative and too tame for punk, Iceage’s new album “Plowing Into the Field of Love” is one that can’t be easily placed into any subgenre of rock or alternative music due to the variety of elements and instruments used in each track. “Plowing Into the Field of Love” gets across that it is...
Let’s start off with this: I never thought Weezer got as gut-wrenchingly terrible as many critics and fans did. Extremely inconsistent? Yes. Most of their albums in the past 10 years have had a couple of good tracks surrounded by filler and mediocrity, as if frontman Rivers Cuomo was writing on autopilot. When I first heard about Weezer’s new...