Though I was otherwise up to my Adam’s apple in cleaning, painting and other coordination involving a distant house, I still had a couple contributions go up this week at Spectrum Culture.

First, I had a new film review, covering a horror flick from the director of Splice. I selected this because a certain member of my household always welcomes a new cinematic excursion into horror, even though they often disappoint. That was certainly the case in this instance, although I’ll admit that it had a promising enough premise that a few changes could have made it into something interesting. A key bit of recasting would have helped a lot.

In the music section, I reviewed the new outing from Au Revoir Simone. This one I actually wrote while down in Florida. I was sitting on a barstool, lamenting the assignment (which–fair’s fair–I took upon myself) when my stalwart drinking buddy pish-poshed my expressed inability to figure out what to write. “Just say they’re a band that knows how to read sheet music,” he sardonically advised, giving me the lead sentence to the piece. The rest of it fell into place nicely from there.