After the searing portrait of the French crime world and the lurid look at a life corrupted in 2010’s A Prophet, it seemed only natural that writer-director Jacques Audiard would follow up with a relationship drama about an underground MMA fighter (Matthias Schoenaerts) and a killer whale trainer (Marion Cotillard), so it should surprise no one…
I have Houston promoter Hector Del Valle to thank for my first exposure to The Bright Light Social Hour; he brought them from Austin to Houston for the Daniel Johnston 50th birthday party concert. I was actually there to see my friends…
It’s a weird bit of irony, to me, that Modest Mouse no longer sounds like Modest Mouse. Over the past few years, they’ve lost that rambling, shambling, feet-shuffling, smart-but-shy-about-it charm they displayed on The Lonesome Crowded West…
First off, let’s not sugar-coat this: this isn’t for everybody. I guarantee that the first (and only) reaction a lot of people will experience when they hear Emmure’s Slave to the Game is going to be to twitch uncontrollably…
Once upon a time, somebody sent me a CD. I was a little reluctant to give it a listen at first, honestly, because at the time it seemed like I’d been inundated with folky female singer/songwriters, and hey, it sure looked like yet another one of those…
A very music-savvy friend of mine once commented that he thought the secret agenda behind the whole Chicago post-rock wave of the late ’90s was to make jazz palatable to indie-rock kids. After listening to Sunrise and Ammunition’s Tesseract…
The time: two years before the Civil War. The place: the deep south. The person: Django (Jamie Foxx), a slave being slow-walked across to auction in Texas. Or at least, he was, until his band is stopped…
For some bands, the only real goal they have in mind, ultimately, is the music equivalent of The Big Score. They want the mythical perfect record deal, where somebody’ll just throw money at them to make music, and they never have to worry about working again…
It doesn’t seem like it’s been nine years since Peter Jackson and company delivered the last of the Lord of the Rings films, but after making forays off into other films for a time, they are back to deliver…
As a precursor to this review… I was completely unfamiliar with the term “steampunk,” and only just read about it when researching Rush. Now that I know what it is, I can see how they would be interested in such fantastic designs. In a nutshell, steampunk deals with a futuristic vision using only items of the distant past…
Some things just can’t be resisted: koalas, M&Ms, re-runs of Doctor Who, and yes, one of my favorite bands in The Whole Freaking Universe doing an album of Christmas songs. Admittedly, if done badly, this kind of thing generally…
There was a time when I was really, really into politics; I had a lot more time on my hands back then, both because I worked for a slow-moving Big Evil Company that didn’t give a damn what I did at the office, so long as I made my deadlines…
Whoa. Alright, so I may have been listening to Omotai’s brand-new album, Terrestrial Grief, just a little bit too loud. Final track “Yuri” just marauded and destroyed its way to the end, and now I’m just sitting here…
There is so much music out there these days that I find myself having to limit what I listen to and what I buy, because it’s expensive and because I just don’t have the time to listen to everything. Sometimes it will take me years of hearing about…
Hollywood has been making movies about itself almost as long as it has been around, but The Director (Anthony Hopkins) never thought he’d be the one on the wrong end of lens, with all of his flaws…
With each release, it’s starting to feel like Austin instrumentalists My Education are drifting further and further away from where I’d had them initially pegged — namely, as a spacerock band, more than anything else, in the same vein as fellow Texans Explosions in the Sky or Co-Pilot. Skyward-pointing guitars, swooping melodies, spacey drones…
Believe it or not, the songs on The Wiggins’ latest full-length, The Myth of Man, are pop songs. Trust me on this; once you scrape away the noise and grime and work your way past one-man-band…
Alright, wow. That’s pretty much what flew through my head the first time through The Manichean’s long-awaited full-length LOVERS, and after further listens, it’s still what rattles around in my brain. Sure, I’ve liked the band’s…
When listening to a Blue October album for the first time, I always like to get a feel as to what exactly the emotional state of Justin Furstenfeld is, so as to see how the songs reflected will sound. The majority of Blue October’s music has been…
Sometimes, simple works best. That’s what I’m liking the most about the new 7-inch from Houston outfit the Hell City Kings; there’re no gimmicks, no hyphenated genres, no quasi-ironic synths, nothing but plain old, straight-ahead rock…
It’s funny, but Glass the Sky’s self-titled debut EP manages to pull of a neat trick, against all odds. Over the course of six tracks, the band does an impressive balancing act, teetering on the line between serious and playful, and they make it work in both worlds…
The fact that Title Fight formed in 2003 has a lot to do with why their latest album, Floral Green, reminds me of high school. I’ll ignore the fact that these guys were in sixth grade at the time (and that I was already well into my college years) and move on to say…
Caught wind of this band completely by accident a few months back and was utterly enthralled by their debut Moxy Kid EP, to such a degree that I found myself compelled to listen over and over and over again, skipping right back…
A lot has been written about Abraham Lincoln in the nearly 150 years since his death, to the point where you have to wonder if there is anything that hasn’t already been said. After nearly a decade of trying, Steven Spielberg‘s…
Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington) may not be much — not much of a husband, not much of a father, probably not much of a friend — but he’s a great pilot. When he’s forced to prove it by landing a crippled jumbo jet…
If nothing else, Counting Crows needs to be awarded points simply for staying around for this long. After their megahit single “Mr. Jones,” people were quick to write the band off as a one-hit wonder, although throughout the years…
Until just six short years ago, Bond films were familiar and comfortable like an old chair, as each iteration tried to out-Goldfinger the previous one. There would be a couple of Bond Girls with ridiculous names; a briefing with Q…
The first time that I heard Snow Patrol’s “Chasing Cars” on the radio, I thought that it was all right, but nothing to really write home about. In some ways, I thought it might have been one of those radio-rock-lite bands that already existed. If I had found out…
I never thought I’d say it, but after listening to new album Peel It, I think Houston-spawned noise-punk nomads Indian Jewelry may just be mellowing out. Just a wee, tiny bit, mind you, and “mellowed out” for this quartet…
Houston-born filmmaker Jonathan Caouette creates a touching take on the road trip movie in Walk Away Renee, the sequel to his lauded 2003 documentary Tarnation…
Eddie Vedder’s Ukulele Songs is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. It is, in fact, simply Eddie Vedder singing along to a ukulele. However, when you listen to this, you will come to realize the music doesn’t quite…
Madonna occupies a very special place in my heart. It’s a place where a lovesick 15-year-old boy dreamt of a perfect, unrealistic love. At 15, I was the prince of infatuation and unrequited crushes. The number one infatuation was a crush on a girl named…
Sometimes, you miss things; it can’t be helped, y’know? Only so much time in the day, only so much musical headspace to fill in. That’s pretty much the reason I was nervous about the new album from Why?, Yoni Wolf’s onetime…
I’ve heard plenty of political punk tunes over the years, but not many that state their case quite so baldly or defiantly. Of course, nobody’s ever accused Boston punks Street Dogs of being shy…
More than anything else, it was singer/guitarist Jeff Klein’s voice that first sucked me into Preachers, the new full-length from Austin band My Jerusalem. The guy rumbles and moans like he’s stolen and swallowed up all the best…
Two Saturdays ago, a much-needed cold front swept through Houston and greeted beloved Georgian Ernest Greene to Fitzgerald’s. Two years after releasing his exquisite debut, Within and Without, Greene returned to Houston…
“I know it seems as if we’ve been sitting on the couch eating Twinkies for the past seven years, Houston,” a bittersweet Shirley Manson exclaimed to her faithful fans. If you wanted to see the ball-busting, heart-throbbing, and hair-raising Garbage…
Why is it so hard to make an effective horror movie? Shouldn’t we know what it is that scares people? What scares us? Actually, we know exactly what scares us, or what will easily scare us. The problem is…
Sometimes it just feels like no one is on your side. Well, okay, I did get a photo pass and free ticket to the show, so that’s something. But here’s the thing: as long as I’ve been going to House Of Blues, they’ve had a photo pit…
In 1979, the Iranian people and the Revolutionary Guard overthrew the Shah of Iran and his government, long considered puppets of the US, and took control of the country. When the Shah was granted asylum by the US, a wave of protests swept the country…
