Reviews
Alanis Morissette (Finally) Celebrates 25 Years of Jagged Little Pill in Montreal: Review, Video, and Setlist
Like so many other highly anticipated world tours, Canadian singer-songwriter Alanis Morissette had to wait an extra two years to finally mark 25 Years of Jagged Little Pill — or if we’re being pedantic, 27 years. After kicking things off in Europe, the Ottawa native began the North American leg of the tour in her hometown on July 10th before performing at Montreal’s Bell Centre two days later. (Get tickets to the rest of her upcoming dates here!) Although the night started with harmonica blazing to album opener “All I Really Want,” the rest of the evening in Montreal didn’t flow exactly as the Jagged Little Pill recording. The 48-year-old, with the same athletic stage-hopping zeal from her youth, played the entire album mostly out of order, with a few other hits such as “Uninvited” and “T...
Mad Cool Festival 2022 Recap: Five Days of Sunshine and Songs in Spain’s Capital City
It’s been three years since Madrid has been able to host Mad Cool Festival, the multi-day music festival in the Valdefuentes neighborhood of Spain’s capital city. With the event finally making a grand return in 2022 from Wednesday, July 6th to Sunday, July 11th, not even temperatures crossing over 100 degrees each day could keep the crowds from flocking to the grounds. One thing about Mad Cool is that it very much lives up to its name; the crowd for the fest, incredibly welcoming and friendly, really and truly loves music, and the dynamic lineup always boasts something for everyone — especially this year. Indie fans were able to delight in rising bands and solo artists, while fans of legacy acts like Metallica showed up in droves. Pop fans weren’t left out either; each day offered at least...
Netflix’s Resident Evil TV Adaptation Stumbles by Serving Two Timelines: Review
The Pitch: Taking on a new installment in the sprawling Resident Evil media franchise is a daunting task. Since the groundbreaking survival horror video game was released in 1996, there have been more than a dozen games that provided source material for six Milla Jovovich-starring films, three animated movies, and a CGI Netflix series. With such a rich backstory to pull from, Netflix’s new live-action series, simply titled Resident Evil, centers around one of the franchise’s most memorable villains, Albert Wesker (Lance Reddick), while creating a new set of characters around him. In 2022, Wesker moves his twin teenage daughters Jade (Tamara Smart) and Billie (Siena Agudong) to the sterile corporate housing of New Raccoon City to be closer to his work for the nefarious Umbrella Corporation ...
Circle Jerks Celebrate Group Sex and Wild in the Streets in New York City: Recap, Photos + Video
The legendary Circle Jerks finally made their way to New York City on Thursday night (July 7th) for a two-night stand at Irving Plaza following a number of pandemic-related postponements. The pioneering hardcore-punk band more than made up for the delay, delivering a 33-song set while headlining a bill that featured fellow veteran acts 7Seconds and Negative Approach. Originally, Circle Jerks had planned to hit the road in 2020 to celebrate the 40th anniversary of their iconic debut album, Group Sex. After playing a smattering of shows in 2021, the band kicked off a proper North American run in February, only to have it curtailed when frontman Keith Morris contracted COVID, forcing the postponement of the remainder of the tour, including the NYC dates. In addition to founding Circle Jerks, ...
Better Call Saul’s Mid-Season Premiere Proves That Compelling Prequels Are Possible: Review
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for Better Call Saul, Season 4 Episode 8, “Point and Shoot.”] After tonight, the number of remaining Better Call Saul episodes can be counted on one hand, and “Point and Shoot” does an exquisite job of making clear why that is so simultaneously exciting and sad. While it’s yet to be seen if one of TV’s great artistic achievements will fully stick the landing, the beginning of the show’s final run of new episodes packs an entire season’s worth of stress into its slightly extended runtime, while also continuing to deliver the kind of nuanced, character-driven moments which make the show so unforgettable. It’s a pretty remarkable achievement given the nature of the series, which jumps back and forth occasionally in its timeline but for the bulk ...
The Rehearsal Confirms Nathan Fielder Is a Comic Visionary: Review
The Pitch: Comedy has long mined the rich vein of desire running within most average citizens for fame — or at least some kind of recognition. That yen for the spotlight is what allowed ’60s duo Coyle and Sharpe and modern day bellower Billy Eichner to turn “man on the street” interviews into improvised gold and fed the creation of far too many prank shows. It’s also a craving that Nathan Fielder has spent the last decade twisting to absurdist ends, both on his acclaimed Comedy Central series Nathan For You and in his behind-the-scenes work on shows like How To with John Wilson and Sacha Baron Cohen’s Who Is America? In each one, everyday people willingly put themselves under the eye of a TV camera, often revealing too much of themselves in the process. The results are either damning, hear...
Stranger Things Season 4, Part 2 Serves Up Oversized Blockbuster Cheese for the Fourth of July: Review
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers through the Season 4 finale of Stranger Things, “The Piggyback.”] The Pitch: This year’s super-sized season of Stranger Things felt, if anything, a confirmation of Netflix’s confidence in the series — marking it as their true blockbuster tentpole, the thing to keep people subscribing amid price hikes and a nagging sense of doubt in their catalog. The first seven episodes (all nearly feature-length) set up our rapidly growing set of chess pieces along four branching storylines: Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) and her attempts to get her powers back, Joyce’s (Winona Ryder) quest to get Hopper (David Harbour) back from Russia, Mike (Finn Wolfhard) and crew fleeing from the authorities in California, and the kids of Hawkins facing down a sp...
The Princess Review: The Raid By Way of Tangled, With a Kick-Ass Joey King
The Pitch: What if there was a princess — only she’s not like a regular princess, she’s a cool princess, meaning she can do crazy fight moves, which no one expects because she’s a princess? Girl power! If you’re thinking this sounds a bit like a hacky Matrix-referencing scene from the movie Shrek, you’re right. It does. And Shrek was far from the first or last movie to spoof princess tropes. At this point, Disney has been deconstructing and reclaiming its own fairy-tale princesses for multiple decades, growing from the shallow parody of Enchanted to the multifaceted reimagining of Frozen or Moana. Over this same period, the Disney kingdom has expanded, to the point where it now owns the formerly grown-up movie studio 20th Century Studios (formerly Fox), who have produced their own princess...
What We Do in the Shadows Glides By on Vampiric Charm in Its Fourth Season: Review
The Pitch: When we last left the Staten Island mansion of What We Do in the Shadows in Season 3, the house felt a little emptier — Nandor (Kayvan Novak) had just departed for his “Eat, Prey, Love” (sic) tour of self-discovery, and Nadja (Natasia Demetriou) swanned off to England in a wooden crate to join the Worldwide Vampiric Council, with Guillermo (Harvey Guillén) in unwitting tow. Laszlo (Matt Berry), for his part, chose to stay behind, not least because the dead body of Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch) gave way to a new, childlike form (also Proksch, pasty round adult features grinning eerily atop a child’s body), which he had to take care of. Cut to a year later, and all that potential energy is lost: All Nandor got from his tour was an erstwhile friendship with a nice family from ...
France’s Hellfest Was One Helluva Festival, Featuring Metallica, Nine Inch Nails, and Many More: Recap, Photos + Video
Editor’s Note: The massive 2022 edition of Hellfest took place in Clisson, France, over two weekends, with seven days of performances from many of the biggest metal and hard rock acts in the world. Heavy Consequence photojournalist Raymond Ahner was on hand for the second weekend (June 23rd-26th), where he captured pics of Metallica, Nine Inch Nails, Scorpions, Ministry, Alice Cooper, and many more acts. See his recap and photo gallery below. After canceling the 2020 and 2021 installments due to the ongoing pandemic, Hellfest returned in 2022 in a big way, with not one, but two completely jam-packed weekends, featuring many of today’s biggest metal and hard rock bands on the planet. When the massive lineup was announced last year, it almost seemed impossible that something this big could b...
Westworld Season 4 Review: A Welcome Fresh Start With Some Big Ideas to Explore
The Pitch: The third season of Westworld did not have a lot of luck on its side — specifically, the timing of its premiere could have been better, as March 15th, 2020 was not an ideal day to launch a new season of a TV show which, over the course of eight episodes, became a tale of society nearly descending entirely into apocalypse. But even since the first season, Westworld has experienced a lot of critical scrutiny, especially as the narrative has drifted further and further away from its original Michael Crichton inspiration of disaster at a high-tech amusement park for the ultra-rich. (Funny how Westworld literally is a response to one of Jeff Goldblum’s iconic quotes from another Crichton adaptation: “If Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don’t eat the tourists.”) So wh...
The Obi-Wan Kenobi Finale Pushed Our Exhaustion With Prequels to the Limit
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers through the season finale of Obi-Wan Kenobi, “Part VI.”] Sure, it’s a metaphysical impossibility in the real world (for anyone outside of an X-Files episode), but it’s still a good thing that none of us know for certain how our friends and family are going to die. It’s the kind of knowledge that would hang over every interaction, make us wonder if every decision they make is one which will bring them ever closer to their ultimate fate — it’d be hard to connect with your friends and family, if you knew how they were all going to die. It might make it hard for you to care about what happens to them. Which brings us to the season finale of Obi-Wan Kenobi, an action-packed hour of television where all of its major climaxes had, for a Star Wars fa...
