Why 'The World Is A Beautiful Place...' Is My Favorite Band Right Now, and Why They Should Be Yours Too

The World Is A Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid To Die (yes that is their name) have been one of the bigger names to rise out of the indie emo/midwest emo/what have you resurgence of the last few years. User score aggregator Rate Your Music lists their 2013 LP Whenever, If Ever as the fourth best emo album of the half-complete decade. The World Is (as I will henceforth refer to them) aren't the first band by any means to explore soft/loud dynamics in emo; basically this is what almost all the emo bands are doing right now, switching back and forth between slow mediative twinkles and screaming choruses. I have mixed feelings on the movement as a whole (I still prefer late 90s emo) but I would argue that The World Is do it better than most. The epic climaxes aren't as forced (but as album closer Getting Sodas proves, they're certainly there and hit like tsunamis), and the ambient post-rocky sections are both more interesting and less self-serious. They're a fun band no doubt, but also one that knows how to ache, as emo bands like to do. But none of these reasons are quite why I'd like to recommend them to you so highly, as I do now after seeing them live at The Demo in St. Louis this last Friday night.

Diving Headfirst Into the Abyss That is David Lynch's Brain on a Whim One Thursday Afternoon

DISCLAIMER: I don't know if I really "get" visual art, nor do I know much about it, so just know that I don't know what I'm talking about.

During class today I was reading the Daily Pennsylvanian, when I came across a review of David Lynch’s The Unified Field, his visual art exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA). 

Defining Albums of Freshman Year

Alrighty kiddos, so my colleague Carter and I had been kicking around this idea of writing about the albums that defined our freshman years of college. Well, I liked the idea so I am going to be stealing it. Freshman year was an interesting time for me, and I feel like I created some pretty strong associations with the albums I was listening to. Freshman year my music taste evolved a lot, probably more than any other time. For the first time, indie rock started to replace punk as my “bread and butter” music genre. I also got into some classics like The Idiot, Daydream Nation, and Remain in Light, but those albums didn’t really create a strong connection to anything for me. Sorry Carter, but Sound of Silver didn’t make the cut for me either. “Someone Great” is still an incredible song, though.

Freshman Year Albums, A Retrospective

This is an article on the albums that were the most dear to me my first year of college. They aren't necessarily the best records I heard (though they're certainly among them), but rather those defined freshman year for me. They are roughly in chronological order of when their influence was most pronounced. Collectively they tell the story of my year pretty well. The lyrics are also YouTube links if you're into that.

Honorable mentions

A Journey Through Punk Rock

As an angsty teenager, I spent much of my time listening to music. And of course, most of that music was punk rock. I've somewhat gravitated more towards the indie rock and hip-hop genres in recent years, but punk was my first love, and probably the genre of which I have the most knowledge. So, I felt inspired to make a guide to essential punk, for my friends or whoever reads this blog (so for my friends) (have I made that joke on here already?). Anyway, here are what I consider to be the 100 essential punk rock albums. There may be some that you wish were on here, and my response to that is that I either don't like the album or haven't heard it; my knowledge is not exhaustive. And some of these may not be 100% pure punk but they're close enough and plenty essential to get a taste of the spectrum of the genre. It was hard to make a cutoff of what would and wouldn't be considered punk. I didn't want to make the guide too narrow, just a list of typical 3-chord late 70s stuff. I did my best to maximize both breadth and depth in this. Anyway, I'll break it down for you into sections so it won't be too intimidating. The sections may have some overlap, and they aren't perfect, but I tried to divide it up in a way that made sense and didn't make any one section too long.

Landry's Top Thirteen Films of 2013

2013 was an exceptionally strong year in film, so much so that I think every film on this list would be a top film in an average year, and the whole top five could be any other year's Oscar winner. It was a year of dramas, most historical, many intense, which marked a shift away from the more fanciful 2012. It was a strong year for films that dealt with race issues, but a relatively weak year for gender issues in film. Anyways, here's my top thirteen films of 2013.

Bomb The Music Industry! (And Action Action) (And Refused) (And Born Against) Are Fucking Dead.

So, last night I saw my favorite band play for the last time ever. Well, some of you may know that I refer to several bands as my “favorite band”. Bomb the Music Industry! is one of them. Last night was their final show, at the Warsaw in Brooklyn. Bomb has had several “last shows” over the last year or so, but this one was for real, or at least we think. It was made out to be a bigger deal than the previous ones, and Jeff even tweeted that he spent a couple of hours crying in public the night before the show. Although this was Bomb’s night, the show had a stellar lineup of openers. Opening for BtMI! were Laura Stevenson (member of Bomb), Michigan power-pop-punks Cheap Girls, and Arizona folk heroes Andrew Jackson Jihad. After waiting for nearly an hour out in the frozen Brooklyn tundra, the doors finally opened.