New Music Revue: Seafair show promise with The Querencia

Seafair The Querencia (Independent) 3.5/5 Cleveland-based six-member indie-rock ensemble Seafair show promise with their sprawling 13-track album The Querencia. Developing a sound similar to early Paramore, Seafair lend an extensive classical background to fill out tracks, creating a cinematic soundtrack to rural life in Ohio. The album’s production is clean, with each melody easily isolated […]

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New Music Revue: Husky use Australian suburbs for powerful inspiration on Rucker’s Hill

Husky Rucker’s Hill (Nevado Music) 4/5 Inspired by Australian suburbia, Rucker’s Hill is a tempestuous indie-rock EP that will tug your heartstrings. Upbeat vocals with a hint of melancholy drive abstract chord progressions, reminding one immediately of The Shins, with nostalgic and bittersweet lyrics similar to Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs. The album is refreshingly honest […]

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New Music Revue: Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten explores the lost rock and roll of Cambodia

Various Artists Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten: Cambodia’s Lost Rock and Roll (Dust-to-Digital) 3.5/5 This soundtrack to the film of the same name documents the history of rock and roll in Cambodia: it ain’t pretty. Cambodian rock musicians have been killed for being rock musicians, making both this album and the documentary fascinating and important looks […]

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Lit Matters: Umberto Eco and the power of learning

“To survive, you must tell stories,” wrote Umberto Eco, an Italian scholar and novelist best known for mind-bending intellectual thrillers like The Name of the Rose. Eco, born in 1932, is a titan of 20th-century intellectual history and continues to make scholarly contributions to a boggling array of disciplines; his personal library includes some 50,000 […]

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Langford-based film studio aims big with new production

Just over a year ago, a dream was put into production. Alexander Panagopoulos and his team over at Langford’s Ragnarock Studios wanted to create a film project to get their company up and running. They had developed a story set in ancient Greece, and, as a fan of action movies like 300 and having Greek […]

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A look at two perspectives on Victoria’s sewage controversy

On Tuesday, May 12, a formal debate on the subject of sewage was held at Camosun’s Lansdowne campus. But it’s nothing new: Victoria’s sewage controversy has been stewing for nearly two decades. The last few years have seen things intensify, with plans, counter-plans, and failed proposals stacking up at the Capital Regional District (CRD) to […]

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Open Space: Never neglect the written word

“Readership is at an all-time low.” These aren’t just words that editors and writers see in their nightmares: if we’re not careful, they could become the fate of our society. So what’s going on with reading these days? A huge problem seems to be what people are reading. Different demographics are given different things to […]

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