day : 30/12/2014 17 results

Tohpati Ethnomission – Save The Planet Album Review

With a deep understanding of both his local musical roots as well as the global pool of exploration and utilizing a collection of exotic instrumentation, the 11 songs here constantly surprise and captivate the listener. Calling it jazz-rock-fusion severely understates the synthesis of styles here. The guitar is often the lead instrument and its effect on the overall sound is great but it’s the percussive elements underpinning the songs that give the tracks so much impact. With the ...

Interstellar Movie Review

Environmental disaster is coming and our days are numbered on Mother Earth. Unfortunately the world is also consumed with an incongruous mixture of hyper-cynicism, conspiracy and hopeless optimism: living day to day, hoping for the best, shunning technology; existing in a perpetual state of damage control, rather than seeking new horizons. In the words of traumatised ex-test pilot, Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), we have become caretakers rather than explorers and pioneers. In what appears to ...

Bob Dylan: The 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration Album Review

Helping to celebrate Dylan’s then 30 years in the recording business was a collection of powerhouse friends as well as a few artists somewhat new to the scene. The line-up was also not so genre specific, so Country legends Johnny and June Carter Cash, Kris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson shared the stage with newbie’s (at the time) like Eddie Vedder, Sinead O’Connor and Tracy Chapman. The common denominator was the songs by Bob Dylan. Well-known tracks are everywhere but along side ...

Augie March 2015 Australian Tour

This very welcome news was swiftly followed by the announcement that the band had quietly been creating a fifth studio album, Havens Dumb, in Hobart and Melbourne over the preceding three years. The band’s return to the live stage came in the form of playing at Howler, a few streets away from the scene of their first-ever show sixteen years earlier, in Brunswick Victoria. They ended up doing five nights in a row by popular demand. It was indeed a triumphant return, with the band in ...

Whiplash Movie Review

Every now and then a film comes along that reorganizes your mind in regards to the obtainable level of acting performance. It forces you to raise the bar in your mind and reassess how powerful the art form known as acting can be. The film Whiplash provides just such an example. The story of a young prodigy musician joining a demanding music school and running headlong into its most obsessive teacher becomes the canvas on which actors J.K. Simmons and Miles Teller paint one of the most ...

Myths And Legends – GoMA Cinema Summer Festival Program

A companion program to 2014’s ‘Fairytales and Fables’, ‘Myths and Legends’ continues to explore the powerful relationships between classic folklore and modern cinematic storytelling, incorporating renditions and reinterpretations of classic tales, as well as contemporary accounts that translate mythic metaphors into unexpected genres, such as film noir, science fiction, adventure, drama, romance, comedy and the western. The program features the epic battles of classical ...

Xavi Reija – Resolution Album Review

In what other world would a drummer’s album be completely void of percussive grandstanding? This isn’t to say Catalan drummer Xavi Reija doesn’t show off some impressive chops, it’s just that pocket groove in the outstanding feature here. Reija has pared back his band to a power trio format this time out and they live up to that lofty name, not by overstatement but by a process of subtraction. By removing as many superfluous notes as possible, the end effect puts sharper focus on ...

Pop to Popism Exhibition at Art Gallery of NSW

‘Popular, witty, sexy, glamorous’ – pop art exploded onto the cultural scene in the 1960s. The pop artists rebelled against ‘high art’ to embrace the new world of advertising, television, film stars, pop music and consumerism. Pop art shocked many but inspired even more. This summer, re-live the pop revolution as Pop to popism takes over the Gallery. Spanning three decades from the mid 1950s to the 1980s, the exhibition traces the origins of pop art, its heady high period ...

Fury Movie Review

It's the cold hard truth of the matter, verbalised by hardened veteran, Don ‘Wardaddy’ Collier (Brad Pitt), in an effort to annul the peacenik ideals of Private Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman), a typist clerk ordered to serve behind enemy lines in Nazi Germany. And it is the thesis for the film as we follow the titular American war tank and its occupants: damaged, battle weary individuals jammed in the middle of history in the making; protecting the world against the Nazi threat at great ...

Kingswood 2015 Australian Tour

Faster than a thundering bass line and bolder than a crescendo of drums, the band have announced a huge nation-wide tour, from iconic capital city venues to taverns’ off the beaten track to an all ages show part of the Mordialloc Food Wine & Music Festival, starting on January 22nd. There’s been nothing small about the Melbourne band since their inception, and certainly not since their debut album “Microscopic Wars” was released earlier this year. The album Storming into the ...