Trivia Answer of the Day: “From Collier, Who Wants to Make You Jollier”

This weekend, I’ll participate in The World’s Largest Trivia ContestTM. I’m a little preoccupied with preparations for that, including some significant travel. To provide some sense of the madness of minutiae that dominates my mind this week, I’ll return to … Continue reading Trivia Answer of the Day: “From Collier, Who Wants to Make You Jollier”

Spectrum Check

My efforts for Spectrum Culture this week began with an incredibly difficult movie to write about: Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color. The movie is so densely inscrutable that any attempt to summarize it (or even more daunting, to speculate on its meaning) is practically doomed to failure. I feel I did all right, but I’m actively looking forward to writing on what appears to be a fairly simple documentary for this coming week. On the music side, I wrote about the new album from Caitlin Rose, which is very solid. Though I didn’t make this comparison in the review, it reminded … Continue reading Spectrum Check

One for Friday: Urge Overkill, “Sister Havana”

Though I like to think my musical tastes have diversified somewhat in recent years, two decades ago there was no surer pathway into my preferences than big, proud electric guitars. The Chicago band Urge Overkill was already on my radar for that very reason by the time they released their major label debut, Saturation, in 1993. Their prior effort, The Supersonic Storybook on Touch and Go, was championed by CMJ, the college radio trade publication, and I returned to it fairly regularly across my last few semesters as a student at the station. But Saturation, officially released just a couple … Continue reading One for Friday: Urge Overkill, “Sister Havana”