Month: January 2016

Concert review: Anthrax

Posted on by Eric

Anthrax - 2015

Newport Music Hall, Columbus, OH – January 27, 2016

People enjoy and continually return to live music for myriad reasons: they love its immediacy, its intimacy, or, by contrast, they are overawed by spectacle, or love the near unmatchable feeling of being one among many, sometimes among thousands, united in a common passion. Some want to hear a recording they’ve always loved duplicated perfectly on stage, while some explicitly desire to see it taken in new and unexpected directions. Some thrive on the inherent intensity that happens whenever a band is operating in high gear. Some want to literally bounce off of every person they can, while others internalize the music and move in their own deliberate and inimitable ways. Underlying everything is the simultaneous sense of renewal and strengthening of an already powerful bond between artist and listener, quite likely forged far away from the stage, often under the most personal of circumstances. Continue reading “Concert review: Anthrax” →

Steelers Thoughts #12 (1/18/16): House Money

Posted on by Eric

broncos

The 2015-16 Pittsburgh Steelers season was one wild ride – silly, sublime, heartbreaking, exhilarating – full of adversity and transcendence, rewards and regrets, devastating injuries and edifying teamwork, on field potential both realized and left dangling, tantalizingly unfulfilled…in other words, a football season. The clock finally struck midnight on Pittsburgh’s fairy tale playoff run at Denver’s Sports Authority Field at Mile High – one of the league’s few truly authentic and historic home field advantages – and the Steelers’ golden coach grudgingly turned back into a pumpkin, though the men remained men and not mice. I think those men left everything out there on the field. They have exceedingly little to hang their heads about today, and reason for real optimism going forward. Continue reading “Steelers Thoughts #12 (1/18/16): House Money” →

David Bowie: An Appreciation

Posted on by Eric

bowie-david-bowie-348995-800-1268

To a self-trained and finely conditioned amateur musicologist like me, Greatest Hits albums have always been the music industry’s signature cop-out, a sort of mercenary placeholder designed to reward artists (or, more often, record companies) for minimal work ethic or creativity while, in effect, also encouraging and congratulating nascent fans for their insufficient curiosity or incomplete devotion. A “real” fan – went the considered reasoning, since adjusted, of an unnamed critic who, full disclosure, shamefully counts a couple dozen or more such hits compilations among the several thousand albums he owns – would surely already know, love, and possess all those songs from their original releases. Even if the record company made the artist tack one new song onto the end in order to justify the record’s purchase by completist dead-enders, it’s most likely a “hit” of substandard quality Continue reading “David Bowie: An Appreciation” →

Movie review: “The Hateful Eight” (2015)

Posted on by Eric

hateful

“Move a little strange, and you’re gonna get a bullet. Not a warning, not a question…a bullet!”

The first one-sheet poster I recall seeing for Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight was wondrous in its stark, throwback simplicity. It depicted a lonely stagecoach being drawn by a team of six horses across a forbidding, bone white landscape, scrubbed clean of any other hint of terrain save a cabin in the distance. Instead of wagon treads in the presumed snow, the coach trailed a great wash of fresh blood behind it. The end. Interested? I sure was. The mercurial director has, of course, long exercised a singular gift for turning the straightforward into the convoluted, and, by the same token, for instilling sense, order, and gravity onto the hopelessly labyrinthine. It all depends on your perspective. Continue reading “Movie review: “The Hateful Eight” (2015)” →