The Wake

The new release by Atlas Sound, nee Bradford Cox, has one song that’s going to garner a lot of attention. “Walkabout,” a collaboration with Noah Lennox of Animal Collective fame, is a big-beat summer anthem that goes past feel-good and into brain candy. The real story here, though, is neither catchy singles nor star power; it’s the way Cox’s songwriting and arranging abilities have improved since his last record. The songs all …

Read more →

The Seward neighborhood is bound on the north by I-94, on the east by the Mississippi River, on the south by 27th Street East, and on the west by Hiawatha Avenue. It’s an interesting place; a mixture of industrial grey and lush green. Matthews Park shares space with a factory row, the Hexagon butts up to empty lots full of broken …

Read more →

1. was a dark room so thick with human, filled with bodies rotting, twisting, grotesque, not dead but sweating out the humanity in the middle of the summer

2. is a figure departing, opening the front door, cruel heat trap that should be open but for the sake of propriety, left closed

3. is the hand on the wallet filled with money stolen from grandmother’s purse, a bill so large that it’s measured in time; …

Read more →

Coffee shops, it seems, were the first against the wall when the recession-panic hit. In the past few years, coffee shops and other small-scale eateries have been closing left and right. It’s particularly tragic because of the nature of these establishments; locally owned and operated businesses not only provide a homegrown alternative to obnoxious/rapacious chains and provide the …

Read more →

Albums like Crack the Skye are very troubling. They aren’t good, so you won’t get the satisfaction of hearing a new masterpiece by one of you favorite bands, but they also aren’t bad for any easily identifiable reason. You can’t just say “they sold out” or “their new drummer sucks.” You have no choice but to maybe, just maybe, acknowledge that somebody’s run …

Read more →

What, exactly, is in our water? That ages-old mystery may have some disturbing answers. A study by CHEM trust has found that the presence of feminizing, or gender-bending, chemicals in the water supply may be altering U.S. wildlife populations.

These chemicals are also referred to as endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) or “hormone disruptors” because of their ability to “de-rail the body’s chemical messenger system.” Effects of exposure …

Read more →

If there was some kind of zodiac for the music world, it would be a very messy affair. There would be little continuity from year to year and little to no thematic unity inherent in the transition from, for example, 2007—the year of the adventurous electro-pop­­—to 2008—the year of the Californian noise bands. However, 2009 would have a very clear title: the …

Read more →

After 14 years, a string of three melodramatic concept albums and the cultivation of an increasingly unhinged live show, Cursive have become as contentious as they are pretentious, attracting fans, detractors and bemused passersby in equal measure. And now, three years after the mostly disappointing Happy Hollow, we have Cursive’s new album, Mama I’m Swollen, an effort that will most likely please fans …

Read more →

Wal-mart. I hear the word and my mind reels with the force of a thousand objections shooting to the surface. When it comes to Sam Walton’s infamous big-box nightmare, my brain is stockpiled with sensory and numerical data detailing exactly why we should be dismantling those big blue buildings brick by brick. This is no doubt facilitated by my ability to actually walk into a Wal-Mart, wrinkle …

Read more →

The University of Minnesota announced on Feb. 9 that the graduate school would undergo a reorganization, effective fall of 2010. According to the U, the reorganization is a way to cut costs. With the current economic woes the country is facing and the state’s higher education budget cuts, it may seem like a good idea to cut costs wherever possible. Especially if, as the University claims, this reorganization …

Read more →

Do you remember Bitburg? Well, technically, I don’t either – I wasn’t born yet – but that’s why god gave us that internet. In May 1985, then-president Ronald Reagan accepted an invitation to commemorate the 40th anniversary of V-E Day by visiting a military cemetery near Bitburg, Germany. The problem was that there happened to be a bunch of SS soldiers interred there, Nazi war …

Read more →

Art by Lucy Michelle

Any hack creative writing instructor will tell you that an effective storytelling technique is to start at the end of a story and work backwards. So I’ll tell you this: In 1932, Jonathan Selwyn became the mayor of Deadwood, South Dakota. He was a great man; an honest broker who refused to back down.
He stood up to criminals of all stripes and refused to take injustice sitting down. More than anything, he wasn’t afraid to …

Read more →

A man walks out of the Brian J. Coyle center and is shot to death in broad daylight. His body sits in the unseasonable heat with nary a sheet to cover it for hours. It sits long enough for his mother to come and see it. The police start suspecting “gang violence” before the blood has even dried on the pavement. Finding a suspect is out of the question as this becomes the third mysterious …

Read more →

Photos by Matt Miranda and Scottie Tuska

D-day. Convention week. September 1st-4th. Republican Christmas. Call it what you will, the atmosphere in St. Paul that week was truly bizarre. Amongst the commotion surrounding the MSNBC Free Speech Stage® a Tucson cop buys himself a hocked McCain-Palin T-shirt. A man in a suit claims to be McCain’s second choice for VP. A group of antiwar feminists decry the nomination of Sarah Palin and a group of radical …

Read more →