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 ...

In looking back over my posts, I realized that I've never really dived into what my favorites of everything are. Yes, it's fairly easy to see from my reviews where my tastes in film, TV, and music lie, but I wanted to talk specifically about my favorites of pretty much everything. These lists outline my favorites from different genres of music and movies, as well as some more specialized lists. First up is a tough one: my top ten favorite albums of all time. This particular list is actually quite fluid, so there's no guarantee that I'll feel the same way in a month, much less in a year. That being said, at the time of this writing, these are my ten favorite albums in my library. 10. Revolver  - The Beatles (1964) The Beatles' first inclusion on this list is definitely not their last, but it made me fall in love with the Fab Four in high school. Revolver  was a transitional period for the band as they moved from their poppy origins towards a more psychedelic ...

Let's be honest: there's no reason for me to actually review this album. Oasis's seminal masterpiece has been acclaimed by so many different people that it's almost ineffective to say anything good about it anymore. I generally don't like to write reviews of albums that have had more than their fair share of reviews. Yet, there's this feeling that I get every single time the beginning of "Champagne Supernova" comes on that is just an incredible sensation, almost like I'm entering another world. It's an incredible piece of music and one of the most memorable album closers of all time. It's a seven minute song that just feels so much more compact and reasonable because of Noel Gallagher's songwriting and (yes, I'm being entirely serious here) his and Liam's vocal delivery. Granted, as I'm writing this review, I realize that I'm probably very under qualified to be writing anything about Oasis or (What's the Story)...

Over the past several years, music has been undergoing a return to roots at the same time as it has been going forward. Folk music is back in the limelight, with groups like Mumford and Sons and solo artists like Vance Joy and Sufjan Stevens providing a renaissance of sorts to the genre. Of course, besides the countless radio singles Mumford has brought to the table, The Lumineers are probably the best-known group in this new folk revival, with their smash hit "Ho Hey" from their debut self-titled album. However, recently a question has arisen within this group of artists: where do we go from here? Many of these bands it seems have two choices: stay the same or go to a different genre. Some listeners are having a little bit of folk fatigue, it seems, so artists are being forced to consider which direction they should go. Now, The Lumineers' first album was a little bit of fresh air even within its own genre because of its incredibly bare-bones recording techniques...

As I've been binge-watching recently, I began to wonder why I didn't talk about it on here at all. There's some really cool gems that people might not know are on Amazon Prime or Netflix, and I want to let people know what I think of them. So, welcome to Chronicles of a Binge-Watcher, the story of a college student with way too much time on his hands. In this first installment, I will cover an HBO show that I've now watched completely twice in the past year: The Newsroom . I first heard of this show through its opening scene which has more or less become an internet sensation. In it, Jeff Daniels's character Will McAvoy, a popular cable news anchor, is asked what makes America the greatest country in the world. His response caught me more than a little off-guard, and I think you'll see why if you watch it. It is without a doubt one of the most honest moments I have ever seen on American television. In fact,  watch it here  before reading the rest of this po...