Nine is a musical of the worst kind — the kind that takes itself too seriously.

In 1972, the group gave their first effort the ambitious title of #1 Record. It fully showcased the band’s influences as well as the blossoming songwriting of both Bell and Chilton. “Thirteen” and “In the Street” were to become favourites but, despite the album’s apparent hit power, it failed to make an impact.

The Toronto-based group Spiral Beach is an acid trip with instruments.
The band’s sound, if it ca be described at all, is a collaboration of indie rock and punk.

No longer will Compton, Calif., be known for habitual crack epidemics, gang turf warfare and drive-by shootings. Pour Habit are about to become huge in punk rock.

The music contained Left of Zero’s latest album is uniformly beautiful, accessible and lush. Three tracks long, it creates an appropriate introduction piece for new listeners to the Toronto band.

High school is one of the most trying milestones in a person’s life. Throw a few hundred adolescents into one building and you have a prime example of survival of the fittest. No television show depicts this hellish milestone quite as accurately as Freaks and Geeks, the short-lived NBC series produced by Judd Apatow.

Teenage Fanclub is actually still a band, which makes it a little weird (perhaps unkind?) writing about them in a section called “From the Vault.” They’re even still writing the straightforward power-pop numbers for which they were momentarily famous. Although they have released some electrifying hits since, they have never made an album as powerful, perhaps even esoteric, as 1991’s Bandwagonesque.

The goal for my summer reading was to read as few academic texts from June until August as possible.
I accomplished that by reading David Eddings’s first cycle. I had just started Pawn of Prophecy when news reached me that David Eddings had passed away.

As the summer of 2009 draws to a close, it leaves behind a memorable movie season filled with financial successes and critical failures.
Though interspersed with gems like Up and District 9, the summer was dominated by big action blockbusters: X Men Origins: Wolverine, Star Trek, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Terminator Salvation and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. (I could include Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince in this, but that ended up being a romantic comedy.)

There are few people who would dare revise the history of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Luckily, Quentin Tarantino is not afraid to get his hands dirty.

The 46-year-old director of such films as Kill Bill and Pulp Fiction is at it again with his latest film Inglourious Basterds. Whereas his previous efforts have been homages to crime, martial arts and blaxploitation genres, war films are a sacred genre of film few have dared to mess with. Tarantino handles the genre with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer…

Montreal metal gurus Derelict came ripping through town at the end of May, slaying an audience of intense metal-heads at Walker’s Nightclub with their exuberant but deadly brand of extreme music.

Though based in Montreal, Derelict have more than one Saskatoon connection. Impressively, they have managed to steal one of Saskatoon’s best psych-rock drummers, all the while getting their music released on the Saskatoon label Somnambulist Sound (run by Skot Hamilton of The New Jacobin Club and Adolyne).

The first book in Robert J. Sawyer’s new trilogy is different than anything he’s ever written.
Wake deals with taking a scientific leap of imagination, watching as the World Wide Web gains consciousness. But that’s not where the difference lies; Sawyer’s books are always imaginative, fresh and engaging. The difference is in the characters.