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.
Saturday, November 22, 2014
Saturday, November 1, 2014
Diving Headfirst Into the Abyss That is David Lynch's Brain on a Whim One Thursday Afternoon
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).