* This post originally appeared on writringbar.com * The Words, a new movie which opened in theatres Australia-wide on October 11 starring Bradley Cooper and Jeremy Irons, is the latest in a long line of movies that feature writers, real or imagined, as the main characters, or have writing Continue Reading
Music
Music review: “Feed Me Diamonds” by MNDR
MNDR, an electronic music duo that sprang forth from New York in 2009 when Amanda Warner and Peter Wade got together to make down and dirty dance music, but which essentially functions as a solo vehicle for Ms Warner, have released an album of some of the finest synth-laden Continue Reading
New song from Loreen, winner of this year’s Eurovision Song Contest
Yes the woman who won this year’s Eurovision song contest and could well be Kate Bush’s long lost Swedish cousin, is readying an album for launch, Heal, which is scheduled to drop on October 24. In the meantime, we have a new single, “Crying Out Your Name” Continue Reading
ABBA news: Agnetha’s back!
Once an ABBA fan, always an ABBA fan. It’s a truism that I fought for years for some reason but have come to embrace wholeheartedly as I have realised that you can take a boy quite a way from the 1970s and his ABBA obsession but you can’t take Continue Reading
Adele is happy to let the “Skyfall” on her
I am a reent convert to the Bond franchise it has to be said, and much of my new found enthusiasm for Bond, James Bond, has much to do with the actor now playing him, Daniel Craig. Lest you think it is a physical attraction only, I will acknowledge Continue Reading
Music review: “Human Again” – Ingrid Michaelson
Love is a complicated, messy, sometimes elevating, often troubling thing. At least that’s the impression you get from Ingrid Michaelson whose new album, Human Again, is filled with songs that tell of love’s power to trap, beguile, empower, and hurt in equal measure. But lest you think it another Continue Reading
My unexpected love affair with “Pop Asia”
It all started one otherwise uneventful Sunday morning a few weeks ago. Wanting something to watch after Insiders (a national political program on Australia’s government-funded ABC network that features a moderator and three journalist discussing the week in federal politics) had run its course, and I was waiting for Continue Reading
Music review: “The Spirit Indestructible” – Nelly Furtado
I threw The Spirit Indestructible onto my virtual iPod turntable with the sort of enthusiasm that can only be generated by a six year wait for a follow up to 2006’s chart-smashing Loose. (Yes Mi Plan, her Spanish-langauge album, arrived somewhere in the middle of that interminable wait but Continue Reading
Is it beginning to look a lot like a Sufjan Stevens Christmas?
Sufjan Stevens, who once declared he would record an album themed for each of the fifty states of the USA before deciding it was too ambitious a goal for even an artist of his prodigious talent, may, and it’s an italicised may with more hedged bets and caveats than Continue Reading
Music review: “The Truth About Love” – Pink
Pink is one ballsy in-your-face rock chick with enough sass and attitude to fuel several small cities. But she’s also warm, earthy, sweet, sentimental and unflinchingly honest in a way that few artists of her calibre are. And it’s the fusion of all those qualities that make her one of Continue Reading