Album Review: Thrice, Major/Minor, 2011 Vagrant Records Major/Minor is the seventh full length from Irvine, California based quartet Thrice, produced by Dave Schiffman in LA who had previously worked with the band as an engineer and mixer on the albums Vheissu (2005) and Beggars (2009) respectively. In their thirteen years together Thrice have been uneasy […]
Archive | September, 2011
Stephanie Bolster, A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth (Brick Books)
There is a tension at the heart of Stephanie Bolster’s wonderful new book. That tension is between the title with its huge inclusiveness and the contents of the book which is often, though not exclusively confined to zoos and their analogues. Bolster’s new collection is based around a central conceit of the zoo as a […]
Metronomy: 21st September 2011, The Cockpit, Leeds
If Metronomy are disappointed at having missed out on the Mercury Prize to P. J. Harvey, they fail to show it in this frenetic, joy-inducing set. From the chugging guitar and swelling keyboard of hypnotic opening track ‘We Broke Free’, it’s clear that this band that started as a one-man outfit recording in a bedroom […]
René Magritte, The Pleasure Principle Tate Liverpool
Tate Liverpool’s new exhibition of René Magritte’s paintings and photographs is titled The Pleasure Principle after one of his paintings, but the idea of pleasure is one that permeates every work in this stunning exhibition. For it would take a particularly stony-faced gallery visitor not to break out into a smile at some point in […]