My Own Little World

If you're around my age, there's a pretty good chance that  Finding Nemo  was a part of your childhood, and there's also a good chance that you really enjoyed it both then and now. It is an incredibly heartfelt and emotionally rich story that just happens to be incredibly well-animated. It also stands quite well on its own. So, naturally, when Disney announced that they were making a sequel entitled Finding Dory , I was more than a little skeptical of how they were going to proceed. Finding Nemo  to me was so self-contained that there wasn't much of anywhere to go with the story. I mean, I know that Pixar has done some good work with sequels before, but they've also misfired big time (anybody else remember Cars 2  or Monsters University ?). Thankfully, Finding Dory  definitely fits into the better half of Pixar's filmography. It is surprisingly engaging and a natural progression of the first film's story, and also has some of the best animation Pixar h...

Kings Kaleidoscope is one of the rare bands in Christian music that isn't afraid to do whatever they want. Looking at their discography makes this plainly obvious. In addition to recording church-focused worship music (most of it from their days at Mars Hill Church in Seattle), they have also created what I cite as one of the most game-changing albums in all of Christian music, their full-length debut Becoming Who We Are . It combined the sonic complexities of the incredibly dense indie rock created by bands like Broken Social Scene, The Polyphonic Spree, and Arcade Fire with incredibly poignant, heartfelt, vertical lyrics. Here's the question, though: how do you follow that absolutely perfect, widely acclaimed monstrosity? Well, in Beyond Control , Kings Kaleidoscope has given us the answer, and I don't know if it's the one that everyone (especially me) was expecting. You see, one of the things I loved about Becoming Who We Are  is its sonic density and complex...

Whenever a lead vocalist of a band I love releases a solo side project, the results are always very interesting. Jon Foreman of Switchfoot has released a lot of solo material recently that is so different from what Switchfoot does as a band, yet it still works incredibly well. On the other hand, you have other people like Dustin Kensrue of Thrice who remain mostly unchanged in their solo material. In other words, it's interesting to see where the visible heart and soul of a band goes in its spare time. Enter Zach Bolen, frontman of the band Citizens & Saints. After two studio releases of indie rock with a worship slant, he's ready to release this set of nine tracks to the world after 12 years of writing and polishing. The question is, how did it turn out? Honestly, this is one of the coolest sounding albums I've heard all year. 1001  is definitely a departure from the more electronically-tinged work that Bolen did with Citizens & Saints, and it's also ...