That's My Dad.

I am in church. I am furious. I am utterly lost. This is WU LYF.

WU LYF is a progressive band from Manchester, England who have struck a chord within the independent music world this year for creating a bold, overwhelmingly epic of an album, all while functioning under a devious veil constructed by themselves. They’ve refused to put themselves out there: concealing as much information about themselves and their artistic inhibitions as possible, testifying the post-modern generation of mass information and technology. WU LYF is a rare example where the artist’s context structures their own music.

Aside from their weighty anti-presence, the remarkable feat is their debut album Go Tell Fire to the Mountain.

This album is a vision; a dream. It’s a gathering of our youth, mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. Under the power of the music, they fall subject to their own internal fire and subliminally are being told to go tell it to their mountain; a symbol of the ultimate hurdle in our lives. WU LYF acts as a force that acts ubiquitously, collecting in all our generation’s spirit and raw anger and have brought it inside a church. The album itself was recorded in a church and uses an organ as a primary instrument, a tactic that gives their sound a grander and more powerful effect. Throughout the album, WU LYF keeps everything at a constant. The energy is rampant and very dignified, the guitars and drums provide a successful experiment sound that serves as product of their message’s own creativity and harshness.

What Go Tell Fire to the Mountain makes me think of is an expressionist preacher who is telling us to serve our fury to the world.

Go riot in the streets, start a revolution and face history dead in the eyes and become a part of it, this album says.

The most important song on the album, Dirt, is that message in explicit form. The album’s structure works as an almighty build-up of how we emote and then points us to the door outside and demands us to do something for ourselves on this song. Dirt is the soundtrack of our riots. Dirt is our generation’s response and reason for the physical and psychological chaos in London this year.

The source of all of this sonic power comes from the vocals, a seriously unusual and jagged voice filled with an insurmountable amount of anger and passion. It screeches and yells, grabbing our attention by the throat and delivers thoughts like medicine in an asylum. It’s certainly an acquired taste, one that has its potential for polarizing opinions, yet WU LYF’s purpose and message reveals itself with such articulation that it lacks any room for misinterpretation.

Go Tell Fire to the Mountain is an epic for our angry youth. It is a daring piece of music more adventurous than you’d think. Take part of the revolution. Listen to WU LYF.

This album was my dad.

Glee is a television show about the intertwining stories of various students and teachers around a glee club in high school. It’s a show that explores and examines the underdog story and what it really means in our lives. A show with a heart, with an affection for entertainment, with a personality. A show that really cares for you.

This is not the show Glee wants to be. This is not the show Glee should be.

Creator Ryan Murphy is a gold mine of an artist. He testifies the stereotype and makes a new one out of the opposite end of the spectrum.

Let’s make some of the most trusted doctors, plastic surgeons, and see what they’d be like corrupt. 

Let’s stick it to this “High School Musical” depiction of teenagers nowadays and make it heartless.

Glee was thought up as a dark comedy that built a new formula for young adult media; filled with subject matter of quirkiness overlapping with controversy. The scripting was scathingly clever, unlawfully sadistic and terrifically edgy. The performances were brand new and charmingly smart, especially the concept of using song; a true homage that did the postmodern Moulin Rouge trend a serious justice. All of this proved itself in spades as refreshing and inventive for the show.

That was the first twelve episodes of season one. 

There on out, Glee evolved into something it was supposed to be: a high school show. The reason dark comedy can’t succeed constantly in a young adult environment is because it’s not entertainment anymore. It’s difficult to produce rough material for such a fragile demographic and scenario. It can’t keep doing this to you, it must entertain. It needs balance. It needs a heart. 

This is what Glee’s purpose became. To use the foundation Glee has created and the ripples its produced through the media for a better purpose. They had their fun and games, but they can teach you something with this now. Glee evolved to something with more of a purpose and devolved as a show. It traded in talent for a soul. 

Throughout the entire second season, we are greeted with a string of episodes. Not a continuous show, just a string of individual episodes. Each episode seemed to approach a certain shade of adolescent conflict; characters deal with issues aggressively targeted to the viewer. It knocks on the fourth wall, but is too polite to break it. Before we know it, Glee turned into a multi-faceted public service announcement.

Glee made it a high priority for the characters story-lines to apply to its demographic; relentlessly tugging on your heart strings for a certain emotion. Half of the main cast fall under a certain common minority and that gets used as a vehicle of empowerment, respectively. Glee initially used this concept for elements to play around with raunchy storytelling. Previously, the delivery on the show created plots that never phased anyone; it didn’t matter if teen pregnancy, inter-racial relationships or homosexuality were conflicts of interest. From the second season, any issue out of the norm was approached with a highly sensitive, “touchy-feely” manner that inadvertently brings more attention to it and gives room for more conflict in modern society. Glee failed to realize the best thing they had going for them: their lack of sensitivity towards minorities made them feel more normal; if Glee’s demographic fell under the effects of the show, there would be less prejudice in our world. It’d be keeping the show’s integrity and maintaining itself as a positive influence. 

What happened?

Glee became over-confident. It let its good nature shine and chose to neglect the show majorly; nit-picking is unnecessary. The popularity overpowered the wits of the show and now, we’re back to square one. The stereotype of the young adult is back. The youth of the nation’s centerfold has had its sophomore slump.

What are going to see next? A show with brains or smiles?

Which is more of value? Which can be executed better? 

This season was not my dad at all. 

An ode to unreliable narrators. 

I’ve always loved con artists. There’s a true appeal to the stylization of the simple art of lying and glamorizing its execution in film. I Love You, Phillip Morris is a snappy tale that refuses to deny that truth is, in fact, stranger than fiction. Based on a true story, we go deep into Steven Russell, a multi-faced and flawed con man embodied by Jim Carrey. Careful now, Carrey loves surprising his audiences with his stealthy variety in choice roles; this isn’t Liar Liar by a long-shot. Alongside is the love of his life, Phillip Morris, played by Ewan McGregor; whom he happens to meet in jail. Two brilliant performers progressively construct a dynamic together that brings this story home; it’s not just humor produced between the two of them, but some of the most vulnerable and sensitive performances seen from both Carrey and McGregor.

I Love You, Phillip Morris is a highly entertaining farce that plays with narrative style like matchsticks. It’s an endless streak of humor at work as we see Steven Russell constantly shift from one elaborate hoax to another faster than a chameleon on cocaine. This isn’t the super-hyper Jim Carrey mode, its fantastic pacing and direction at work that never drops the ball in the film. It’s refreshing to see the film take some of the weight for once and let Carrey act rather than him being the over-strained powerhouse of laughs.

McGregor’s role here grows to be rather under-rated, even within the film he doesn’t get the credit he deserves. While that fits the story, since I Love You, Phillip Morris is a rampant biography on Steven Russell, Phillip Morris ends up coming off as one of the most interesting motifs seen in a comedy. This is pitch-black humor, however, and McGregor fits his character and its given under-mined nature perfectly; creating this rather effeminate appeal to Morris that drives up the charm of their relationship and gives the film its necessary head check. 

Like many con artists searching for themselves, their hearts are in the right place and their persistence is unprecedented; that’s what I Love You, Phillip Morris is. An absolute treat loaded with funnier concepts than most works of fiction.

This film was my dad. 

Just because we like soda, fried chicken and mashed potatoes, doesn’t mean they’re preferred blended together in a smoothie.

Director Zack Snyder should be ashamed of himself on this one. The so-called “visionary” behind films like 300 and Watchmen has developed his most recent film, what seems like his passion project, Sucker Punch.

Claimed as a “critique on geek culture’s sexism”, Sucker Punch is a multi-layered experimental action-drama that revels inside a fantasy taking place in someone else’s fantasy taken place in someone else’s reality. It behaves as a product of feminism combating an overly exaggerated vile representation of society and claims to empower all of us from within. 

The truth is Sucker Punch is a demeaning and horrifically constructed film that abuses the presence of its female cast, mesmerizingly idiotic script, usage of modern music and symbolic over-the-top action sequences. The approach Snyder takes with this film comes off as shallow as the limit goes; erasing all traces of credibility of the crafty spiritual significance the film bases itself on. There are clever concepts in this film that can be admired individually, yet the construction of Sucker Punch crumbles so quickly that nothing positive can be taken from it. 

Snyder truly got in touch with his inner eleven-year old geeky child self on this one and created a film that actually abuses the usage of background music, making it feel like a mediocre Youtube fan video that combines film clips to their favorite songs every step of the way. Action sequences successfully accomplish to mimic moments found in video games, yet no respect is given to the film at all, making it feel like Snyder going off on arbitrary tangents since he feels like the room for it was available.

Sucker Punch is an ideal product of messy film-making. It gets lost within itself and forces you to get lost in order not to find the scattered flaws. Instead of being a product of its own culture, it becomes a blasphemous mess of sexist, ignorant and weak storytelling.  

This movie is like a casserole made by your younger brother and the family dog.

Face the polarizing question: Did you like The Notebook? 

While we have naysayers and fans alike, the response majorly comes inspired from personal taste. I was looking forward and rather excited to my first viewing of The Notebook and to break down this infamous king of romance films from the past decade. 

Very few elements can be tended to with a film of this nature, and so it limits itself to engaging with the characters. Shamefully enough, characterization of lovers Noah and Allie was managed horribly, which grew to be the fatal flaw of the film. We start with first love, the youthful stage, an area of the film that proceeded to be a shameless and gleeful montage of cute highlights and romantic gimmicks that didn’t really shape a unique human couple, but a picturesque pair that we all can fawn over and relate to on some relative degree. Initially, things were so briskly paced that these people didn’t have time to catch a moment’s breath to show us who they really are. Even classic fairy tales have more character study values than this. And that’s what it tried being; an adult fairy tale. All throughout, the film relies on its heavy event and time based story to flesh out these characters, and that approach just doesn’t work for a story like this. We aren’t experiencing these events alongside these lovers, we are being told a story and the foundation laid out for it was poor. Even if we start to see these people on a deeper level, it still never comes full circle. Nor does it even bother to give us something to cling on to, aside from the universal similarities of love; that is cheap film making. It’s certainly not as bad as many other films of the genre, but for the lack of time and care the writers and director gives the characters, it only gives room for the cheap trick of winning your hearts over through a collection of fanciful moments and that isn’t fair to the viewer.

Thankfully, the cast supplied an array of performances that colored in the story beautifully to the proper satisfaction a story of this caliber required. Not to mention strikingly rich and mesmerizing photography that illuminates this love story better than most. Looking at the film as a whole, The Notebook sincerely needed more time to breathe and simmer for it to cross through three different eras of a love and to properly let us in on the flesh and bones of this story, because this adaptation is ripping viewers off. It’s a film too small to be an epic and too grand to be an ordinary romance.

On the core story, however, The Notebook is a well deserved tale of iconic romance, quintessential and heartbreaking, enough to linger in our generation’s hearts.

It’s like Nicholas Sparks is showing us this beautiful black and white photograph of couple from a past generation perfectly in love. He bring us in touch with our core human emotions as he explains them and then lets us watch him burn away the photograph; slowly watching the fumes and ash pile up, taking the place of what once was beauty.  

This film wasn’t my dad, but a giddy teenage girl too excited to articulate her thoughts.

If you were in an empty room with a camera, could you take a masterful picture? If you were in an empty room with a saxophone, a set of microphones and a single take, could you make a masterful album?

The genre of jazz is a kind man. A man that offers you stories that keeps your body inside the atmosphere of a smoky club and your soul outside to see the stars; he offers to show you the beauties of the world and often, he isn’t even talking.

Colin Stetson is not that man. He is the jazz that seeps inside your veins and kills you. His single instrument will tie up your senses into knots inside yourself and leave you to implode. There is an intrigue to be taken from his album New History Warfare, Vol. 2; an atmosphere created too disturbing to understand.

As a multi-reedist, Stetson recorded this entire album live in single takes without usage of modern sound editing to produce effects, instead using over 20 microphones in a single room to produce gigantic sounds that could swallow you whole. The tracks feel incredibly spiritually-driven and contribute many new concepts for the avant-garde. New History Warfare, Vol. 2 is a limit-breaking work that pulls more daunting stunts than many could try for.

In its magnitude of technical achievements, this album sets an example for its own genre. The album functions on a continuous stride that occasionally is interjected by spoken word artist Laurie Anderson, its an effect that fleshes out this album as a whole more than just individual parts. Doing so strengthens Stetson’s work and dramatizes the highs and lows of the life his instruments carry. The highest point on the album is when My Brightest Diamond’s singer Shara Worden comes in on the song Lord I Just Can’t Keep From Crying Sometimes; a song so powerful that it gives the emotional impact of a phantom looting your happiness away in your sleep. If jazz were being murdered by its biggest fan, this is what it would sound like. 

This album is my dad. 

What sets apart the art within the organized strips of a comic book from the frame within a film? What dimension is it that sets things apart? 

Director Robert Rodriguez slips us all a drug. Something that makes everything beautiful and monochromatic. We are under a spell and we see only exactly what Rodriguez wants to show us. We are stuck in Frank Miller’s Sin City, a vicarious fantasy colored in with dreamy ultra-violence explored through picturesque film-noir. It’s a drop dead visual rendition of reading a comic book that no one ever thought of.

What can I even say about the visual shaping of this film? It’s a landmark of invention in film. It can never be done again either. Sin City can rightfully hold its ground as a brilliant experiment in conventional film-making from the past decade. A dream team cast providing performances that conquer every corner of Frank Miller’s work teamed with a set of directors who refuse to let even a spec of the comic books be neglected result in a wonderful combination. 

The themes of persistence and going through mountains of evil to strike with the thread of good within play out explicitly. Sin City’s atmosphere caves in on you, much like it does on the characters. You begin to understand the tyranny of its world, why the carnage exists; it’s like being poked and prodded by a massive satirist who questions your own world. That’s the effect these comic books want to give you and that’s what you get. 

The biggest success of this comic book rendition is not just in the visual style, but in its striking ability of capturing the jaded and horrific purity the series is based on. It makes it the ultimate focal point throughout the film and never takes its eyes off it.

In the head of Frank Miller, everything is disappearing and only blood needs color.

This film was my dad.

What makes the past so appealing that we can never help ourselves to bring it back and relish the imitation? 

Greet yourself to Craft Spells; something of a sweet lo-fi mix between M83 and Freelance Whales. Craft Spells are certainly a group of quiet and polite folks in love with the concept of meshing the sounds of the past to the nightlife they see around themselves. The art in living in the yesteryear, sonically, and creating a stylish reinterpretation is harder than initially perceived; however that’s where Craft Spells falls under.

Idle Labor is a night out on the town. It’s going to your friend’s house party on a Saturday night and walking the streets on downtown at 4am, everything’s bright and no one’s on the roads. There’s that intimate quality paired with an enormous beauty designated to please the masses. That’s what Craft Spells aim for and you can sense it too; you will love Craft Spells for this. 

Unfortunately where these guys fall flat on is how they execute their dreams for our ears. The overall finished product results in a major and continuous muck of sound, with layers that interfere with one another messily instead of the desired effect of melodies being lost in the daze of things. It all comes off unappealing, uneven and occasionally dull. The synth side to this record works as the foundation, yet isn’t fleshed out or as vibrant as it should be to combat the low-fi quality; a challenge that Craft Spells put upon themselves without really approaching. Idle Labor drags due to the lack of ambition found in an otherwise creative concept. 

Not all things function poorly in the world created in Idle Labor, many qualities stood out and took their respective space to breathe. Certainly the lyricism found on this record supplies the ample sweetness and kind sincerity that makes Idle Labor’s lovable personality. Its stand-out track After the Moment is a blissful highlight of this record; a song where it feels like Craft Spells got their thoughts together, straightened their postures and let all the sonic layers flow seamlessly down a long and magnificent road filled with a stunning nightlife, exuding a bouncy, down to earth experience that takes you to a more enjoyable place in your head.  

Through a poorly produced album, Craft Spells will really need to smarten themselves up and bring an edgier element to their jam for a more polished and stronger product. Their good intentions will stay may stay in your hearts, but their lazy sound won’t stay in mine.

This album wasn’t my dad, just another hipster at the party with not much to say.