The lights were dimmed in the Esch-Hurvis room of the Warch Campus Center on Wednesday, April 16 as the audience awaited the spoken word performance of critically acclaimed poet, Buddy Wakefield. Freshman Malcolm Lunn-Craft spearheaded the operation to bring Wakefield to campus with the help of SOUP and Professor Keith Pitts, Set Design and Staging…
Iggy Azalea’s sophmore album complete success
Azalea’s sophomore studio release is an impressive demonstration of her rap and compositional abilities. The album is composed of mostly solid standalone tracks. Azalea delivers lyrically and pairs most of her raps with impressive backing melodies. Further, her use of guest artists is on point throughout the album, and the collaborations often foreshadow new chart…
“The Weird Sisters” provides a delightful, Shakespeare inspired read
While the title of Eleanor Brown’s “The Weird Sisters” instantly evokes pictures of the three haggard crones from Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” Brown’s three sisters, three women in their 30s from a tiny Midwestern college town, are decidedly less imposing, and Brown’s story is definitely more of a contemporary fiction than a Shakespearean fantasy. The sisters do,…
“The Grand Budapest Hotel” continues Wes Anderson’s film legacy
Audiences who loved Wes Anderson’s “Moonrise Kingdom” and “The Darjeeling Limited” are sure to be delighted by “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” which, in my opinion, felt like a lovechild between the two. I was moved by a love story and enchanted by a depiction of a faraway land. The plotline of the film is a…
Contemporary ensemble Roomful of Teeth wows with their vocal prowess
Anybody who thought that the contemporary music audience consisted of roughly five people was not in Memorial Chapel on Wednesday, March 5 night when the cutting-edge vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth blew listeners away with their extended vocal techniques, mastery of the voice and modern repertoire. Roomful of Teeth was founded in 2009 as a…
“American Hustle” succeeds through impressive visuals and character studies
“American Hustle” has been in theaters for a while now and unfortunately lost all ten of its Oscar nominations. However, despite its lack of success at the awards ceremony, this movie is worth your while. Written by Eric Singer and David Russell and directed by Russell, “American Hustle” takes place in the late 1970s and…
Phantogram’s album “Voices” is centered around heartbreak
I have listened to the entirety of “Voices,” Phantogram’s newest album, and have reached the conclusion that they decided to make an album dedicated to breakups and heartaches. Despite that, their third album is an enjoyable combination of good melodies and straightforward lyrics. While Phantogram suffers slightly from the curse of The Killers, that of…
Nelson does “The Da Vinci Code” better in “Rex Mundi”
Pity Arvid Nelson. He got there first. Dan Brown’s “The DaVinci Code” came out in 2003 and got the millions of copies sold and the movie version, even though both renditions of the story were terrible (except for Paul Bettany as Silas, of course). Arvid Nelson’s comic series “Rex Mundi” started in 2003 and faded…
Famed guitarist St. Vincent releases eponymous fourth album
Annie Clark, more commonly referred to by the stage name St. Vincent, is an eccentric, brilliant musician who is one of the most inventive guitarists around. Her self-titled fourth studio album is an absolute masterwork to add to her three previous phenomenal albums. A grungy work of loud guitar, brilliant vocals and massive changes of…
Comic artist Brosh releases new collection
If you don’t already know about Allie Brosh, you should. Her famous blog and webcomic “Hyperbole and a Half” is one of the funniest and most honest depictions of the vagaries of everyday life to grace the internet. After a long period of silence on her website, last year Brosh published a collection of her…