Dark City feels hopelessly indebted to The Matrix, and yet it predates The Wachowski’s sci-fi phenomenon by a year. Both films have a particular feel, very much of their time, a mix of exaggerated ‘40s noir and cyberpunk aesthetic of the video games of the time. They each begin in medias res, leaving a first-time…
Decimation – the Roman tradition of killing one in every ten men as punishment – is not only a key event in this episode of Spartacus: War of the Damned, it’s an appropriate title for a brutal, violent episode, an hour-long slog through blood that leaves you feeling unclean afterwards. As I discussed after the…
In the middle of a brilliant season, it’s telling that a melancholy, drifting episode like “Video Games” is easily the weakest episode so far. It’s certainly not a terrible episode, shifting from the usual setting of New York City to the quieter, pastoral regions upstate. There’s a gentle, half-asleep feeling here, and this is reflected…
Music festivals are usually a carefully planned calendar event: I decide very quickly whether I’m going to attend, then pick up tickets pre-sale. The 2013 Soundwave festival didn’t grab my attention when the lineup was announced: a handful of bands I liked but too few to justify forking out $200. Fast forward six months to…
The first band of the day (well, after hearing a couple songs from Mindless Self Indulgence, who I knew nothing about) was The Vandals, one of the first punk bands I listened to back when I got into the genre in my teens. Early in the day, the moshpit was sparsely attended, which meant that…
The next band was Gallows: I’ve seen them live twice before – at Taste of Chaos in 2008, when I knew nothing about them and was impressed by their combative energy, and at Soundwave in 2010, (now a fan) where I spent their ferocious, uncompromising set in the eddies of a turbulent moshpit. However, those…
I found my way to Sleeping with Sirens next, purely because a student had recommended them. They were pretty much what you’d expect for a band recommended by a teenage girl – emo popcore, with members more interested in their hair than playing their instruments. That said, their song “Trophy Father’s Trophy Son” was a…
Technically I spent the next hour watching Paramore, but I can’t say I was paying that much attention. Instead I took about twenty minutes to fight my way into the “mosh,” finally located my friends, and then chatted with them. I’m not even sure if I’d heard a Paramore song before seeing them, and they…
As Blink-182’s curtain dropped, the ground opened up in front of us and where there had been a milling crowd of festival-goers there was suddenly and surreally a dark chasm. There was nothing to do but to charge forward with everyone else; I can remember little about the first two songs other than being trapped…
The rest of the night was unsurprisingly anticlimactic. I caught a few songs from The Offspring, who were looking old: a gathering of crotchety uncles banging out pop-punk tunes. They started well with “It’s All I Want” and “Come Out and Play,” but I quickly realised that the only way I’d hear “Self Esteem” was…
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