review

For today's Playlist entry, EW's new arts intern Mariam Wahed reviews Brightblack Morning Light's Motion to Rejoin. In this week's issue, Jeremy Ohmes wrote a preview of the concert that is much more forgiving than Mariam's, but since she's under 21 her dismissal will have little impact on BBML's 21+ show at Sam Bond's on Oct. 8. In either case, here's another take on this album.

Brightblack Morning Light (a.k.a. Eternal Despair)
Busy looking for meaning in life? Your fruitless endeavors stop here.

Exhaustion. Suffocation. Death by heat and prolonged thirst — a miracle first granted only after a journey through all the states of depravity in between. They left me stranded in a vast desert, engulfed by taunting mounds — no, impenetrable walls — of sand. My lungs no longer make an effort to inhale. Organs collapse. I watch from afar as my body deflates and the empty skin casing melts like candle wax into the cracks of the keyboard …

Brightblack Morning Light is worse than Dracula. Song after mind-numbing song will suck all the life and energy out of the room before the final track savors its last, infinite second of demonic triumph. After ten minutes of begging the first track to end, I glance at my playlist only to find that I have already finished listening to the first half of the album.

Ahh, a sip of caffeinated beverage is the only ticket to revival (other than pressing pause and delete). I need to reawaken all the senses that the monotonous, flat sound of Motion to Rejoin has deadened. I feel like a huge lump of lead. I just want to crawl in a corner and hide from all the miserable images that this music evokes within me: nightmares of searing summer heat, segregation, broken glass, thugs hassling bums for a day’s worth of work, spare change and switchblades, heat waves broken by jalopies and an eternity of the Great Depression.

“Nobody wants oppression. You don’t need oppression.”

Well, Brightblack Morning Light, you might be right about that, but your new album is the worst state of mental oppression I have experienced since kindergarten English drills (imagine a five-year old German with no friends and no means of communication). — Mariam Wahed

Brightblack Morning Light and Warning Broken Machine play at 9 pm Wednesday, Oct. 8, at Sam Bond's. 21+. $6.

The audience at Sasquatch: Day One. Already looking tired and a bit drug-addled.

Since I should’ve but didn’t request a press pass to this past weekend’s Sasquatch Music Festival (mostly because of ethical qualms, right? Right?! Or did I just blow $140 for nothing…?) I’m going to keep this short and sweet. Just the highlight and the lowlights, ma’am. And a bunch of quick notes. [Day two into writing this blog post — written from home, mind you — I realize the above paragraph makes no sense at all, but I’m keeping it. — Chuck]

Read the entire post (and hear bootleg snippets and full songs) by CLICKING HERE.

When I have the time (i.e., Thursdays, when the paper's out and the merry-go-round hasn't quite cranked up for the next week), I like to read theater blogs, news and reviews from Other Places. Like, you know, LONDON. (Drool!)

Here's a quote from Matt Wolf on The Guardian (UK)'s theatre blog:

Critics are also expected to deliver pronouncements that are valid for all time, which makes a nonsense of the complex relationship any of us has to the art in our midst.

(Read more of my theatrical/critical musings after the jump.)