Arts & Entertainment
The latest arts and entertainment highlights, previews, reviews, music and film features and opinion pieces from The Skinny writers.
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MusicPelican - What We All Come to Need
What We All Come to Need could be construed as an assuming title. When ascribing the idea of necessity to one’s own project, one risks abject failure, ... Read more »| 21 Oct 2009 -
MusicThe Hidden Cameras - Origin: Orphan
By all means applaud the ambition, just don’t expect it to have any substance Read more »| 21 Oct 2009 -
Music
Omar Rodriguez-López - Xenophanes
The solo work of Omar Rodriguez-López can vary wildly from sheer noise (see Despair) to records considered as Mars Volta releases in everything but n... Read more »| 20 Oct 2009 -
Music
Espers – III
If any genre of music epitomized the late 1960s it was psychedelic folk. The meeting of acoustic guitars and trippy boundary pushing seems rooted in those fe... Read more »| 20 Oct 2009 -
MusicDaniel Johnston - Is And Always Was
Iconic outsider artist upgrades from the bedroom to the studio to pleasingly excellent effect. Read more »| 20 Oct 2009 -
MusicPelican: Movement for Change
With the weight of the future bearing down on them, can Pelican change gears and run with the big boys of post-metal? Read more »| 20 Oct 2009
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Music
Yo La Tengo: Popular People?
They've been around for years yet the critics continue to fall for Yo La Tengo with every new release. The New Jersey trio are prolific, achingly cool, but somehow not quite 'famous'. Ira Kaplan ponders mainstream success, alternative career paths and the death of music journalism. Read more »| 20 Oct 2009 -
Books
Magazine: The Biography by Helen Chase
“Magazine were always a connoisseur's choice”, claims guitarist John McGeoch in this vigorous account of their short bittersweet career. As the l... Read more »| 20 Oct 2009 -
Music
Melvins - Chicken Switch
There is nothing you could dance to on this ‘remix’ album, not a single person with a ‘DJ’ prefix on the tracklisting. Instead, the M... Read more »| 20 Oct 2009 -
Music
Asobi Seksu - Acoustic At Olympic Studios
Acoustic reworkings aren't often worth the effort, either too similar to their original incarnations to warrant the additional labour or misguided and ill-f... Read more »| 20 Oct 2009 -
Music
Le Reno Amps - The Stand Off EP
Le Reno Amps nail their colours firmly to the mast of 'clever irony' with EP opener The Stand Off, a self-aware alt-country/indie mash-up that sounds like S... Read more »| 20 Oct 2009 -
FilmNovember Film Events 2009
It’s the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, and to commemorate this event the Filmhouse in Edinburgh is showing a mini-season, The Fall o... Read more »| 20 Oct 2009 -
Music
Miike Snow - Miike Snow
Stepping blinking into the spotlight come Scandinavian über-producers Bloodshy and Avant (with singing friend Andrew Wyatt) fresh from covering themselv... Read more »| 19 Oct 2009 -
Music
Keser - Robo_Ghost
If Martin Hannett had lived to see 2009, I’m sure he’d have loved to produce an album like Robo_Ghost. As it happens, Keser have done a pretty go... Read more »| 19 Oct 2009 -
Music
Fortune – Highway EP
If, like the real world, music has its localized commodities, then what you expect from a French export is effortless cool and – in the past decade at ... Read more »| 19 Oct 2009