Jul 27, 2011
Music
Web Exclusive
Pittsburgh duo 1, 2, 3’s debut album, New Heaven, dips into a wide range of influences pulled from the last decade’s worth of independent rock. It’s nice to see a band use 10 tracks as a way to try out 10 different musical ideas.
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Jul 27, 2011
Live
Comic-Con
Comic-Con 2011
Comic-Con 2011 Day Four
Doctor Who
The first Comic-Con appearance for current Doctor Who stars Matt Smith (The Doctor) and Karen Gillan (Amy Pond) packed out Hall H, the biggest room at Comic-Con, on the last day of the convention. Some fans came in costume, many were armed with their light-up Sonic Screwdrivers, and at least two homemade Dalek costumes were spotted. The audience clapped the iconic Doctor Who theme just before the panelists took the stage to tease the second half of the show’s sixth season, which Smith revealed returns to BBC America August 27.
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Jul 26, 2011
Music
Web Exclusive
On their third album, Skying, The Horrors have completely shed all the goth trappings that originally defined them. While their sophomore album, Primary Colours, was a bold step out of the gloom with its shoegaze textures and Krautrock rhythms, Skying sounds like an entirely different band.
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Jul 25, 2011
Live
Comic-Con
Comic-Con 2011
Comic-Con 2011 Day Two
The Walking Dead
“I was of the mind that it was never going to be a TV show, because it’s so dark,” said Robert Kirkman, creator of The Walking Dead comic book series that was adapted into the critically acclaimed AMC TV series, one of the biggest and best reviewed cable series of 2011. At the panel in Ballroom 20 the producers teased and cast season two, which debuts October 16. We also have the trailer for season two.
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Jul 25, 2011
Music
Web Exclusive
Little Dragon has never suffered from a lack of confidence. For their last two albums the Swedish trio has felt like a representative of dangerous soul, slipping through slinky space-aged R&B, topped by singer Yukimi Nagano’s seductive whisper.
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Jul 23, 2011
DVDs
Charlie Chaplin
Regarding his father, Charles Chaplin, Jr. once wrote the following: “Their destinies were poles apart. One was to make millions weep, while the other was to set the whole world laughing. Dad could never think of Hitler without a shudder, half of horror, half of fascination. ‘Just think,’ he would say uneasily, ‘he’s the madman, I’m the comic. But it could have been the other way around.’”
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Starz, Fridays, 10/9 Central
Jul 22, 2011
TV
Web Exclusive
The episode kicks off with Torchwood vets Jack Harkness (John Barrowman) and Gwen Cooper (Eve Myles) on the run, alongside captor-turned-cohort C.I.A. agent Rex Matheson (Mekhi Phifer) and green-at-the game analyst Ester Drummond (Alexa Havins). Thanks to “Miracle Day”—an event a few days earlier where mankind ceased to die, the human race is in chaos: half morning the loss of their souls, the other half falling into Dionysian excess.
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Jul 22, 2011
Music
Web Exclusive
For all the reductive adjectives typically used to describe They Might Be Giants—“quirky,” “weird,” etc.—their songs are always rooted in their own realities. A drum-playing worm sounds perfectly normal when described by John Linnell, and why wouldn’t The Replacements have a song called “We’re The Replacements?”
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Jul 21, 2011
Music
Web Exclusive
Crystal Antlers are capable of amping up the volume without losing focus, which is displayed on their sophomore full-length, Two-Way Mirror.
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Jul 20, 2011
Music
Web Exclusive
Breaking away from her full-time gig as singer of the experimental art-pop band The Fiery Furnaces, with sibling and bandmate, Matthew Friedberger, Eleanor Friedberger proves herself a worthy artist in her own right throughout Last Summer, her solo debut.
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