After three years, 5 Seconds of Summer have released their third album titled ‘Youngblood’. The band quickly rose to fame after opening for One Direction on their world tour and they have spent years working non-stop, going from touring straight into the studio, releasing their sophomore album ‘Sounds Good Feels Good’ one year after their self-titled debut album. Continue reading “Youngblood by 5 Seconds of Summer – Review”
Even those living under the sturdiest rock will remember when in 2013 the sounds of Ylvis’ “The Fox” hit the charts; mixing a comic sensibility with the most recent pop-sounds and blending those with homages to genre-tropes of old, the band had a successful run for about two years before fading into obscurity – till now!
On August 12th, 2014, a free teaser for a mysterious game by unknown developer 7780s Studio popped up in the PlayStation Store. Ambiguously titled P.T., it appeared to be a regular horror game from an indie developer. The first users playing it, however, were confounded: rather than traditional horror, they were faced with a repeated loop of the same hallway over and over again, puzzles that seemingly had no solution, all the while being stalked by a ghostly apparition (afterwards lovingly nicknamed ‘Lisa’) who seemed to not only provide the occasional jump scare, but seemed to affect the system of the game itself. So what was P.T? What made this a horror game that is still being discussed today? And how did it transform the horror video game genre?
“It doesn’t sound good, you know: three priests living on an island as a sitcom. If I’d heard about it, I’d hate it.”[1] Graham Lineham, the co-creator of the Irish sitcom Father Ted confesses, slightly apologetically. Nevertheless, twenty years since the last episode aired, its legacy lives on, from the unforgettable protest slogan “Down with this sort of thing” “Careful now” which still finds its way on signs in protests on NHS cuts, freeing Julian Assange, and the 2010 visitation of the Pope in London, to an Irish band covering the famous My Lovely Horse song. What The Young Ones did to British comedy, Father Ted did to Irish comedy: in an almost punk-rock way, it kicked against the corseting idea of Ireland as a backwater – a remote, tranquil hinterland defined by cosiness and harmlessness.
At the beginning of the year, I was asked to write a short introduction on myself to be used on the Writer’s Block website. Honestly, I don’t know how people are able to condense their entire person to less than three sentences and still manage to make themselves sound even remotely interesting. Instead, I just figured I could mention some of my interests and then proceed to write about those. Looking back at the little Writer’s Block archive dedicated to my ramblings, however, I noticed a gaping hole in the subject material (and no, I am not talking about my failure as of yet to write an entire piece on my love of Ice Tea). I have written about films, I have written about video games, I have written about memes, but never about the ultimate combination of the three: the utter meme that is the video game movie.
Civic is the newest and second official EP released by the four-piece Amsterdam band Jagd. The band has been busy for around three years, in which they won the Q’s Best Award, the Amsterdam Pop Award, toured the nation for 30 shows in the Popronde, and have started off 2018 on the bill of the prestigious Noorderslag Festival.
For a second and final time, we take some time to get to know a few singer-songwriters.
Continue reading “Dutch-language Singing And Song-Writing – Part 2”
