They Just Seem a Little Weird

Always Tomorrow is the culmination of the last ten years of Best Coast front person Bethany Cosentino's life, seeing her stand back from the past decade of the band's existence and taking stock in where she's been and who she has become. It's an album full of intense personal discovery amidst a whirlwind backdrop of global tours, heartbreak, newfound sobriety, dark thoughts, immense joy, giving a f, not giving too many fs, substances, boredom, public personas, and gratitude.

After the awesomeness that was Spreading the Disease and Among the effing Living, Anthrax really set the bar pretty darn high. They had established a unique, heavy, and humorous thrash formula that they used to put out some of the best songs of the genre…

The All Seeing Eye (ASE) by Dan Harlan is a method to gather any piece of information written secretly by a spectator on a piece of paper. Before I watched All Seeing Eye, I couldn't help but be skeptical–From the trailer, it just seemed like all the other methods that enable the performer to ascertain secret information from a folded paper. After I watched Dan Harlan's instruction, I was pleasantly surprised with his original additions!

The concert works of film composer Nino Rota, best known for his scores for the Godfather trilogy and for a long series of films by Federico Fellini, have increasingly often been finding space in classical recording catalogs. Here's a nicely recorded rendering of Rota's two numbered symphonies, virtually unknown until perhaps the turn of the century, issued on a major British label, Chandos. Both are attractive pieces that could be profitably programmed by any symphony orchestra. They were composed in the 1930s, when Rota was as much American as Italian; he won a scholarship to the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia and studied there for several years. Both reflect the French neo-classic trends that flourished in the U.S. between the wars, and, although Rota sounds nothing like Copland, you do experience in these works an evocation of what annotator Michele Rene Mannucci aptly calls "landscape in sound." Each work is in the conventional four movements, with a slow movement placed second in the Symphony No. 1 in G major and third in the Symphony No. 2 in F major.