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Graduation Speech Maintenance Required (Black Numbers) 4/5 “Getting lost in the music” is the perfect way to explain what happens when spinning Graduation Speech’s new five-song EP, Maintenance Required. The EP is a great way to get the day started, to pass time waiting for the bus, or to get re-energized during a work break. Maintenance […]

Millennials suck and germophobes can start carrying their weight in garbage in today’s society: I was sold listening to Jim Jefferies on his Night Talker Tour as he strolled through Victoria and stopped at the Save-on-Foods Memorial Centre on Saturday, November 16. As an aspiring comedian, it’s immensely helpful to see a professional work the […]

The comforts of our daily lives may hinder many of us from seeking anything beyond our conventional ways of living. With a career in capturing thrilling moments, Squamish-based extreme filmmaker Bryan Smith chooses a different path. Searching for the globe’s wildest locations, he captures impressive athleticism among the remarkable landscapes of remote locations left untouched […]

It’s been over a decade since leaving the band Lillix, and in that time Vancouver’s Louise Burns has established herself as a great songwriter in her own right. She proved this on Friday, November 8, when she hit the stage at Lucky Bar the day after releasing her fourth album, Portraits. When the doors opened, […]

Billy Bishop Goes to War is a fictional retelling of the real-life exploits of a WWI fighter pilot. RJ Peters portrays Bishop, and 17 other characters, and his stage presence is explosive. Gabriel Macdonald delivers an equally robust supporting performance, along with piano accompaniment to their frequent duets. Although produced by a small theatre, incredible […]

Local director Alan Penty has adapted British playwright Patrick Hamilton’s 1929 play Rope by mainly staying true to its structure, and he does it well, with the production examining just how dark humanity can be. It’s what I like to call a “back-seat thriller”: the audience is never jump-out-of-their-seats frightened—instead, eeriness claws at us throughout the […]

I’ve been an appreciator of the theatrical arts for as long as I can remember, and I have a habit of picking apart and analyzing shows even when I’m not reviewing them (much to the chagrin of those near and dear to me). Yet, after seeing Shakespeare’s Othello at the Phoenix Theatre last night, I have […]

Exhumed Horror (Relapse Records) 4/5 Exhumed, the death-grind legends from San Jose, California, are back with their seventh full-length studio album, Horror. Horror will satisfy the cravings of fans of brutal music. Horror contains 15 tracks, each as scary as the album title. Each song depicts scenes coming out of a slasher horror movie, with titles such […]

Missing is an opera set in Vancouver’s downtown eastside and on Highway 16, also known as the Highway of Tears; it tells the story of missing and murdered Indigenous women, and, according to Stó: lō mezzo soprano Marion Newman, that’s a story that needs to continue to be told. “Probably [Missing is] one of the operas that […]

A boisterous jaunt from start to finish, Blue Bridge Theatre’s The 39 Steps is a must-see piece of theatre. Patrick Barlow’s satirical adaptation of the classic Hitchcockian thriller of the same name manages to create real suspense while pulling big laughs from the audience from the moment it starts. The idea is that the entire cast […]