黄 嘉 維

This album is good. It’s really fuckin’ good. It’s what indie pop should always sound like. The Brooklyn-based Shakes should find itself with a younger-skewing audience not unlike that of Vampire Weekend.

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The Hazards of Love takes, I repeat, takes several listens free of distraction to truly appreciate. On first listen, it really seems like it’s meandering with nary a climax in sight. Many – that cannot be stressed enough – listens later and I got the rock opera album concept. This is probably going to play great live.

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Solid animation with enough jokes aimed at adults – Stephen Colbert finally gets to be president and look for a shout out to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth – to keep from being a complete bore. Otherwise, nothing really spectacular about this one. It should be noted that I did not see this in 3-D though it’s hard to see how that would have really made for a marked improvement.

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There’s a beautiful minimalist quality to the backing guitar, piano, and other instruments, lending greater weight to Nadler’s beautiful voice. I suspect this will make the year-end list of best albums.

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We absolutely loved Neko Case’s last album Fox Confessor Brings the Flood to death so to say that Middle Cyclone is just as good is no small praise. Though you can definitely save yourself some time by skipping the final 30 minute plus track – you’ll know why once you’ve listened to the album all the way through once.

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Though their best days are seemingly behind them, I still don’t get what all the hate on U2’s last few albums are about. They’ve been around forever – if you didn’t like them 20 years ago, you probably won’t start liking them with No Line on the Horizon. Fine, I get that. Stop ragging on them just because it’s fun to do so. That said, this isn’t their best album and Bono’s still a preening douche but Edge’s guitar work continues to wow.

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It’s been a long time since I’ve read the original source material so I didn’t walk into seeing Watchmen with baggage. Even without making the comparison, the film adaptation of the Alan Moore classic is lacking and that’s taking the fact that the film is over two and a half hours. The first hour dragged and by the time it got good, I’d almost stopped caring. On a positive note, the technical aspects of the film were pretty good.

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I spent a wonderful long weekend with some college friends on the east coast of Florida for some spring training. Like any trip we take, what was primarily a baseball trip was ostensibly a beer trip as well. Not that there’s anything wrong with that at all.

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We’re off for a long weekend in Florida, checking out spring training at Mets and Nationals camps. There’ll be one post going up on Friday chronicling the party at the Captain Lawrence Rosso E Marrone release. See you all back here on Monday!