22 items found for your search. If no results were found please broaden your search.
(10/19/18 9:47pm)
Nicole Chung’s debut memoir, “All You Can Ever Know,” is a work of magnificent empathy. Its title comes from a phrase that she heard repeatedly while growing up — born to recently immigrated Korean parents and adopted by white Oregonians, she was raised to believe that the story of her adoption was somewhat sad, but ultimately a divine inevitability. She was simply told that her birth parents “thought they wouldn’t be able to give you the life you deserved,” and her Catholic adoptive parents viewed Chung’s arrival into their lives as the result of God’s grand plan.
(10/04/18 4:54am)
Tracy K. Smith’s latest collection, “Wade in the Water,” is a work that illuminates American life with piercing care. It’s a slight departure in scope from Smith’s previous collection of poetry, the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Life on Mars” — in accordance with its title, which is drawn from a spiritual that was supposedly used as a guide for fugitive slaves on the Underground Railroad, this book is more willing to submerge itself in the earthbound world and all its attendant, all too tangible injustices.
(09/20/18 2:48am)
To call any work of literature “epic” is to invoke a highly-loaded category — it’s a description that seems largely reserved for discussing the great deeds and anguish of exalted men. Yet it’d be difficult to describe Crystal Hana Kim’s sweeping, multigenerational debut “If You Leave Me” as anything but. The story opens on Haemi Lee, a 16-year-old girl coming of age in a refugee camp during the Korean War, and ultimately follows her life as she becomes caught between her childhood friend Kyunghwan and the overtures of his older, richer cousin Jisoo.
(04/12/18 4:05pm)
“It’s like ASMR,” one girl in the audience whispered, dazed and vaguely incredulous, halfway through Yo La Tengo’s first set at the Jefferson Theater on Sunday night. In any other world, likening a famed indie rock band to a sensation that’s perhaps best known for the ability to induce sleep wouldn’t be a good thing. But Yo La Tengo is a band that’s always seemed to exist in a different, kinder and slightly more magical world.
(04/12/18 4:21am)
It’s about 20 minutes before the show is supposed to start, and Maria DeHart, Lona Manik, Susan Grochmal and I are enthusiastically discussing milk and pickle juice. The table we’re sitting at in The Southern Café and Music Hall is strewn with fast food wrappers — the last hour or so has felt increasingly hectic, and I’ve practically inhaled a divinely greasy takeout burger and fries in the time it’s taken to watch the last piece of equipment get hauled into the venue. I’m vaguely aware that I probably should have started the interview 10 minutes ago, but the sheer earnestness of this conversation has made me suddenly invested in knowing what fluids to drink before a performance. I learn that Selena Gomez, of all people, swears by drinking pickle juice — additionally, Manik thinks there’s something inherently off-putting about milk’s slimy consistency, and I’m inclined to agree.
(03/22/18 5:19am)
For indie-wannabe kids who came of age during the late aughts and early 2010s, the name Matt and Kim might conjure up a sudden rush of nostalgia. The duo, vocalist and keyboardist Matt Johnson and drummer Kim Schifino, have been known for their intoxicatingly cheery, electronica-flavored pop tunes and equally energetic stage performances for almost a decade. Even when listening in 2018, the syncopated beats of their 2009 single “Daylight” still feel like the sonic equivalent of sunshine.
(12/21/17 2:39am)
Warning: The following review contains spoilers for “The Last Jedi.”
(11/17/17 5:11am)
“Feel my feet above the ground / Hand of God, deliver me,” croons Sufjan Stevens, like a modern-day mystic, over one of “Call Me By Your Name”’s moments of true, all-consuming bliss. It’s both a literal and metaphorical ascent — at this point in the film, freshly-minted lovers Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and Oliver (Armie Hammer) are breathlessly climbing the Apennines — but there’s also a wondrous sense of revelation in seeing the world’s vastness around them, knowing that they don’t have to behave like they’re being watched here, that they don’t have to rein in their devotion at all. It’s a fleeting climax, an ascent that feels all the more brilliant because it’s so achingly temporary.
(10/12/17 5:33am)
For all its slick futuristic trappings, the heart of “Blade Runner 2049” is something like a fairytale. The long-awaited new chapter to Ridley Scott’s 1982 original returns to the brutally vast, rain-blitzed megalopolis of Los Angeles 30 years later, and the titular blade runner is the stoic Officer KD6.3-7 (Ryan Gosling) — K for short. Like Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) in the first film, K is tasked with hunting down and euphemistically “retiring” older rogue replicants — the bioengineered androids created to serve as convenient labor for humans.
(08/22/17 2:07pm)
WARNING: Spoilers follow for “Game of Thrones” up to season seven, episode five, “Eastwatch.”
(05/16/17 3:29am)
Even during One Direction’s heyday as a glossy, well-coiffed hit machine in the early 2010s, it was clear that Harry Styles had been anointed for something greater. The formerly mop-haired heartthrob was the group’s most charismatic figure, racking up PR-friendly flings with American starlets and evoking comparisons to a young Mick Jagger. The five-piece British boy band has since disbanded on an indefinite hiatus, freeing its members to pursue respective solo projects. Yet Styles’ self-titled debut seems curiously old-fashioned for someone aspiring to modern pop stardom — not containing any guest features from trendy vocalists, nor even lip service to the kind of dancehall, R&B or EDM-inflected beats that characterize today’s Top 40.
(03/01/17 6:31am)
“Thirty-one, and depression is a young man’s game,” lead vocalist Gareth David laments on the discordantly peppy track “5 Flucloxacillin” — one of the catchiest numbers from Los Campesinos!’ latest album, “Sick Scenes.”
(02/24/17 4:40am)
It’s hard to imagine anyone pulling off a catchy, funk-tinged pop song about a 3D-printed tumor. But that’s exactly what Swedish singer-songwriter Jens Lekman does on “Evening Prayer,” a grooving, doo-dee-doo-laden number featuring countrywoman Loulou Lamotte that describes his attempts to reconnect with a friend recovering from cancer.
(02/20/17 5:48am)
“Curse that motherf—ker who would spit upon another's body,” PWR BTTM declared to cheers at The Southern Café and Music Hall Wednesday night. The line came from “Big Beautiful Day,” the first single off the queer punk duo’s upcoming album “Pageant,” and seemed emblematic of the set as a whole — fearless, earnest and sometimes blissfully profane. The Charlottesville show was the band’s first since announcing their latest album — due this May from Polyvinyl Records — and that newness seemed to fill the band and audience alike with a sense of anything-goes confidence.
(02/08/17 4:03am)
“The Lure” is the best Polish rock opera about cannibalistic mermaids you will see all year. Helmed by director Agnieszka Smoczyńska and set in a fever-dream version of 1980s Poland, the film tells the story of two sisters — Silver (Marta Mazurek) and Gold (Michalina Olszańska) — who leave the sea behind in order to pursue discotheque stardom. Despite this whimsical premise, the film’s DNA owes less to Disney than it does the most macabre parts of the original Hans Christian Andersen tale. Smoczyńska’s mermaids are sharp-toothed sirens hungry for human flesh, and their struggle to adapt to earth-dwelling life inevitably results in tragedy.
(01/31/17 3:17am)
“Nothing Feels Natural” is the title of Priests’ first full-length album, but it’s also a statement that could express the current state of the nation in the first few days of the Trump administration. For the last few years the Washington, D.C.-bred punks have garnered local acclaim for their feverish live sets, biting lyrics and fearless indictments of neoliberalism alongside expressions of general millennial malaise. “Art is inherently political,” lead singer Katie Alice Greer said in a recent Rolling Stone interview, and here Priests makes it clear that even within our private lives, politics remain inescapable.
(12/06/16 4:05am)
It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to call Lucy Dacus’ rise meteoric. The Richmond native’s February debut album “No Burden” — a warm, vital and frankly confessional work of folk-tinged rock recorded in less than a day — has earned a spot on countless music publications’ yearly best-of lists. She signed with legendary indie label Matador Records this past June. Since then, she’s had no time to rest since touring has kept her on the road, and yet she’s already working on her follow-up album and she opened for the NO BS! Brass Band alongside Angelica Garcia at the Jefferson Theater this past weekend.
(11/21/16 2:24am)
Halfway through the set, at least three people in the front row were in tears. The sheer emotional impact of Mitski’s presence was a testament to her power — she’s the kind of performer who can invoke a sense of near-spiritual camaraderie within crowds. In addition to her musical prowess, she’s also fluent in the language of 21st-century fan engagement, active on social media and known for making a conscious effort to provide a safe space at her shows. For the largely young and diverse audience who came to see her at The Southern last Thursday night, Mitski’s voice was a vital affirmation of themselves amidst uncertain times.
(11/09/16 2:19am)
During its Virginia Film Festival screening at the Violet Crown Cinema Friday, “The Love Witch” seemed at first glance like a throwback in all senses of the word. Its sumptuous set design emulates the visuals of 1960s Technicolor flicks, and its occult and erotic subject matter seems to be plucked straight from pulpy paperbacks and exploitation features. Its titular heroine, Elaine Parks (Samantha Robinson), is a young, freshly widowed witch whose apparent sole ambition is to make men to love her. Much like Elaine, the movie itself is an artful seductress. The film draws on visual and thematic language of traditional erotic horror in order to satirize the genre’s characteristic misogyny. This classic homage has a distinctly feminine twist.
(10/13/16 2:21am)
Pop-punk is no longer relegated to the realm of teen angst. Coming off the heels of acclaimed 2014 third album, “Never Hungover Again,” Joyce Manor’s latest release finds the band moving past adolescence and into arrested development. “Cody” draws on the band’s usual concoction of emo despondency and punk frenzy to satisfying effect — but in tackling the material anxieties of growing up, it also moves into more uncharted territory.