Reviews
Everything Everywhere All At Once Is A Lot, and That’s a Good Thing: Review
The Pitch: Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) has lived a life of quiet, overwhelmed lament. There are so many things she could have done, so many hers she could have been. Instead, she’s a middle-aged owner of a failing laundromat, with a miserable husband gunning for divorce (Ke Huy Quan’s Weymond), a withdrawn daughter (Stephanie Hsu’s Joy), and an increasingly frail father (James Hong’s Gong Gong) who doesn’t yet know that his granddaughter is gay. It gets worse: It’s tax season, and their unsympathetic IRS auditor (Jamie Lee Curtis‘ Deirdre) is breathing down their necks. As if that weren’t complicated enough, the IRS office becomes a battleground for the fate of the multiverse as Evelyn learns that she’s the only one who can stop a multi-dimensional agent of chaos named Jobu Tupaki fro...
Labyrinthitis Is All About Destroyer Having Fun
Destroyer’s latest album, Labyrinthitis, started out as a dance record. It would have been “just like Donna Summer’s greatest hits,” frontman Dan Bejar explained in the album’s press materials. The Vancouver-based indie-rock outfit hasn’t exactly shied away from grooves before, but Bejar often suffuses those grooves with his own sardonic twist. It creates a set of expectations that Destroyer rarely strays from, refining their music à la Beach House or The War on Drugs, contemporaries who are often tagged with the “consistent” label that signifies unsurprising greatness. Now, with 13 albums under its belt, Destroyer is a legacy act, and Bejar has largely stuck to his formula of satiric lyrics and new-wave sonics that fans are well familiar with at this point. But that doesn’t mean he can’t ...
Consequence’s 2022 SXSW Party at Brooklyn Bowl’s Family Reunion: Recap + Photo Gallery
It seems like we’ve been saying “live music is returning” for a year now. For a moment last summer, it felt like it was fully back before a fall variant threw everything out of whack again. There’s honestly no knowing whether another hold is on the horizon, but if there’s a sure sign concerts are back with a vengeance, it’s the return of South by Southwest. After being forced into a second virtual iteration last year, the long-running music conference and festival returned to Austin last week to once again bring together artists, fans, and industry figures for a celebration of all things live music. We at Consequence couldn’t have been more ecstatic to be part of the activities, reteaming with Brooklyn Bowl and Relix for the third “annual” Family Reunion at SXSW. Taking place on Friday, Ma...
Weezer Go Vivaldi-Rock (?) on SZNZ: Spring EP
For a band still very much defined by the crunchy alt-pop of their very first album (and by the departures from that sound on their classic follow-up), Weezer has used its unlikely second and third decades as a band to practice a surprising amount of eclecticism. For Decade Two (roughly 2003 through 2013), this translated to never knowing whether a Weezer song would be pop-rock bliss or appalling disaster, leaving only the certainty that any given album would have at least several tracks’ worth of each. But since 2014 or so, the band has seemed less defiantly scattershot in their experiments. Their albums still come out at a steady clip, but they feel more sonically and thematically cohesive — without sacrificing their playfulness. Appropriate for its debut in a season of blooming, the ban...
SPIN at SXSW: The Lemonheads Reignite Austin With It’s a Shame About Ray Performance
Not gonna lie: we kinda missed SXSW, traffic, lines, free-flowing human chaos and all. SPIN hosted a number of raging day shows throughout the years, but for SXSW’s return, we had to come back with a real-deal official showcase at Stubb’s. And who could be more official than The Lemonheads? Evan Dando and company ripped through their classic 1992 album, It’s a Shame About Ray, as the party’s marquee feature, and even if at least half of the audience hadn’t been born by the time they initially broke up, Dando’s youthful warble still filled Stubb’s vast gravely lawn. One could probably hear Dando and the rest of us “Raaaaaay” from the Capitol less than a mile from the venue. Nearly three decades later, the one-two punch of “Bit Part” and “Allison’s Starting to Happen” still goes for the punk...
Bridgerton Tries to Add Some Substance to Its Decadent Style in Season 2: Review
The Pitch: When it premiered in December 2020, Netflix’s Bridgerton provided plenty of steamy romance and escapism, both of which were in short supply as the world prepared to enter the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Season 1 of the lush period drama, adapted from Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton book series, followed Daphne Bridgerton (Phoebe Dynevor) and Simon Basset (Regé-Jean Page), the reluctant Duke of Hastings, as they went from co-conspirators to marrieds, setting Regency-era London ablaze. Their exploits, and those of the rest of the ton, were chronicled by the acerbic (and anonymous) Lady Whistledown, whose influence at times rivaled that of the Queen (Golda Rosheuvel). The second season follows the tradition of Quinn’s books and shifts the focus to a different Bridgerton: this ti...
Atlanta Season 3 Is the Best Sort of Television — Something Truly Unique: Review
One downside of the modern age of television is that it’s now not uncommon for some shows to take more than a year to return with new episodes. In the case of Atlanta, which debuted its second season in 2018, that wait was longer than most, but those four years were truly worth it. The Donald Glover-created series, returning for Season 3, remains as ethereal and shocking and fascinating as ever; having screened the first two installments, it’s a thrill to know that eight more are coming to engage and confound us. This will be a short review, because revealing too much about the first two episodes of the season feels like it would do a disservice to everyone involved, including the audience. But if the first two seasons of Atlanta did anything — hell, if the first few minutes of the Atlanta...
Windfall Review: Netflix Thriller is a Thin Exercise in Hitchcockian Style
The Pitch: A man (Jason Segel) breaks into a well-furnished California vacation home; he rifles through the drawers for cash and valuables, eats fruit from their lush orange grove, and pisses in their shower. But just as he’s about to leave, the couple to whom the house belongs — a snotty tech CEO (Jesse Plemons) and his wallflower wife (Lily Collins) — return home early and catch him in the act. Rather than break out into violence, though, a curious game of negotiation begins: What does the man want? Why did he pick this particular guy’s home to rob? And just what will it take to make him go away? This One Goes Out To…: We’re two full years into the COVID-19 pandemic now, which means we’re still dealing with the surfeit of small-scale, isolated thrillers facilitated by the restr...
Rosalía’s MOTOMAMI Is a Hell of a Bilingual, Multi-Genre Ride
In late 2018, Rosalía captivated audiences with El Mal Querer, her breakthrough album where she gave flamenco music a modern pop twist. Since then, the Spanish singer-songwriter has performed around the world and expanded her sonic palette. In her follow-up, MOTOMAMI, she changes lanes and subverts her pop and flamenco roots with global sounds like reggaeton and bolero, all while reflecting on her newfound fame. Those who wanted another full flamenco affair like El Mal Querer might be disappointed, but MOTOMAMI is an exciting detour where Rosalía flexes her seemingly limitless artistry across 16 tracks. MOTAMAMI is split between an aggressive MOTO side and a vulnerable MAMI side. Rosalía rips into the album with the scorching “Saoko” — in which she interpolates “Saoco” by Puerto Rican regg...
SXSW Review: Richard Linklater Goes to the Moon, But Keeps Things Grounded in Apollo 10 1/2
This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 SXSW Film Festival. The Pitch: Anyone and everyone who was alive in the summer of 1969 likely knows where they were when they saw the first men landing on the moon on their television screens. But for young Stan (Milo Coy), his experience was a li’l different. Turns out, months before the iconic trip, the suburban Houstonite was approached by a couple of NASA suits for a once-in-a-lifetime mission. You see, due to an engineering blunder, they’d built the lunar module juuust a bit too small for an adult astronaut. So they needed a kid. And Stan, of course, is the perfect candidate. Related Video This didn’t happen, of course; it’s the stuff of childhood reverie, and adult Stan (Jack Black), who narrates, establishes early that he was a “fabuli...
SXSW Review: Under the Influence Interrogates the Addictive Escalation of David Dobrik
This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 SXSW Film Festival. The Pitch: Out of the great, grand entertainment experiment that is YouTube, David Dobrik is easily one of the platform’s greatest successes. Leveraging his devil-may-care attitude and penchant for increasingly ambitious or invasive stunts, Dobrik quickly became a multi-millionaire on a level most non-movie stars would never enjoy, with six-figure sponsorship deals, 18 million subscribers, and a cadre of fellow sex-and-booze-loving daredevils (colloquially known as the Vlog Squad) whose boats his rising tide would also lift. But the same sensationalism that fueled Dobrik’s success would also be his downfall (inasmuch as one of the richest kids on YouTube, with a cultish zoomer following, can fall). In 2021, he suffere...
SXSW Review: Tony Hawk Keeps His Distance in Skate Doc Until the Wheels Fall Off
The Pitch: The secret to Tony Hawk’s success is his willingness to fail. When we first see him in the opening minutes of Sam Jones’ doc Until the Wheels Fall Off, we see exactly why: The skateboarding titan, still the face of the sport even in his fifties, tries and tries again to pull a 900 — the borderline-impossible skate trick he miraculously pulled off at the 1999 X Games — only to eat shit on each attempt. His body slams into the wood with concussive force every time, occasionally hurting enough to make him scream in pain. And yet, he gets up and tries again. What fuels someone like Hawk to keep sacrificing his body for the chance at a twice-in-a-lifetime flip? Over the course of two hours, Jones interrogates this question, charting Hawk’s youth as a child skating prodigy, his d...
