Alt. american group fox feather show poignant resilience despite painful circumstances with their new music video for “End Of My Rope,” which will be released on February 17. The single was released in the fall of 2021, earning a reputation as a fan and band favorite at that time. The video tells the story of a woman at her breaking point who defies adversity with electric confidence; for co-writers Carly Ricks Smith and Laura Stratton, “the lyrics come from a place of deep betrayal and pain, fleshed out after years of trying to make it work in an industry that too often objectifies and belittles women.” Foxfeather filmed the video for this feminist anthem to Gold Hill at the Gold Hill Inn in Colorado in collaboration with Kreation Films.

The video takes place in an old-fashioned tavern that gleams with western charm. As lead singer Carly Ricks Smith deals with frustrating interactions between annoying men at the bar with a fearless moxie, she eventually finds herself supporting a group of fearless, empowered women who are ready to fight back. “I’m vicious, this is a warning,” Ricks Smith sings in the chorus, foreshadowing the epic of the video in a climactic scene capturing the bite of a woman who has endured her limit of abuse. The co-writers sat down and wrote “End of My Rope” in a stroke of poetic irony, which for them is often when they create their best work. After a particularly difficult year of transition, including big changes in the band’s lineup, Ricks Smith and Stratton felt discouraged and disheveled. The video for “End of My Rope” captures that same feeling and takes back control of an awkward narrative with courage and grace.

Learn more about the fox feather:

Foxfeather is a sultry alt-Americana band founded in 2013 in Boulder, CO. Beginning with a lyrical foundation and bolstered by powerful blues-rock instrumentals, Foxfeather’s unique sound captivates his audience. Songwriters Carly Ricks Smith and Laura Paige Stratton met in high school, connecting over their shared love of music. The duo began writing together in 2005 and have been creating material and fronting their band for the past 7 years. Foxfeather is extremely proud to be an advocate for women in art and business, and strives to motivate and empower other women and allies through song. The band is a local staple in the Colorado Front Range and also tours nationally.

In 2014, with the help of engineer Justin Roth from Fort Collins, the band released their first EP, lack of moon. The six-song collection caught local attention, with The Marquee declaring that “the band is brimming with talent” and “Carly Ricks Smith has a spectacular voice that falls somewhere between the folk soprano of a young Joni Mitchell and the Rachel Price’s jazz-heavy range of Lake Street Dive, as powerful as it is delicate.

Foxfeather returned to the studio in 2016 to record and release his self-titled, full-length album, Foxfeather. Together with producer Jagoda from New York and engineer Jay Elliott from IntroVertigo studios in Boulder, the band created this dark and dark album. The album features a collection of songs that explore the gray areas of life, whiskey, love and death.

2018 saw the release of a four-song EP collection, Come and Get Me. The band again worked with Jagoda and Jay Elliott, but split the process between IntroVertigo Studios and Fox Run Studios in Boston. Smith and Stratton were able to show off their versatility through this project, with all four songs showing the breadth of their vocals and songwriting abilities.

Foxfeather is set to release their new album in 2022 via PS Audio and Octave Records. The full album, titled “The Nature of Things”, features the band’s current lineup and additional musicians Kate Farmer (backing vocals), Eric Moon (organ/synthesizer), Eben Grace (pedalist/guitar) and Oliver Jacobson (violin) . The album was recorded at PS Audio Studios in Boulder, CO, Animal Lane Studios in Lyon, CO, and The Barn in Longmont, CO. Producer extraordinaire is Eben Grace, and engineering wizards are Jay Elliott and Gus Skinas.

Over the past five years, Foxfeather has captivated audiences with their unique and sultry songs, sharing stages with The Gasoline Lollipops, Lee Fields and the Expressions, Yonder Mountain String Band, Woodbelly and Andrew Bird. Their songwriting and performances are influenced by a wide variety of artists, including Brandi Carlile, Bonnie Raitt, Margaret Glaspy, Ani Difranco and Stevie Nicks. The band’s current lineup includes Carly Ricks Smith (vocals, songwriter/songwriter) Laura Paige Stratton (guitar, keyboard, songwriter/songwriter), Blake Smith (lead guitar), Mark Dabrowski (bass guitar), and Jay Elliott (drums and percussion) . ). The group prides itself on using its voice to embolden and rejoice in both the fragility and the power of humanity. With an expressive instrumental tone, powerful vocal melody and harmony, and a passionate performance, this band is ready to win your heart.

Before he started trying to sell us something, there was suspicion that Ye was trying, well, to sell us something. Twitter and TikTok comment struggled to understand why would anyone wear so many Balenciaga, as he has spent the last few months doing. Rumors abound: that Ye has a piece from every Demna collection in a warehouse-studio in Southern California; that he has all the shoes of all sizes and distributes them to visitors; that he cleaned up the Balenciaga section of Dover Street Market and that they had to call the brand’s headquarters to get more as soon as possible. None of this can be confirmed (although on Monday afternoon, he was captured by paparazzi to keep a T-shirt with a reworked logo for the specialty store titled “DONDA STREET MARKET. But to think that Ye – or Demna, for that matter – is orchestrating a series of paid celebrity outfits in order to get us to… buy more Balenciaga? is to ignore the goal of this bizarre and unprecedented creative collaboration. In a world of proclamation and truth, Ye states that he can fully find himself by relying on or interacting with someone else. This is total and utter dedication to uncompromising aesthetics – a seamless visual reset. That’s part of why Ye continues to shop at all Balenciaga stores: the acquisition is part of the work of art.

(Who knows how or why Ye and Fox really hooked up, but what I love about the relationship is how classic she is compared to the contemporary definition of a female come-upper. She worked as a dominatrix in high school, made art, created a fashion line, and then won a role as a character based on herself in a controversial arty film. It’s a very mid-century, Marilyn Monroe-ish pipeline that’s slightly seedy to medium cerebral compared to today’s influencer path, and it was fun watching the TikTok set, which passed the last few years cultivating celebrities for whom fame is exclusive to the platform, having to scramble to find out who someone was.)

Perhaps no fashion brand has ever been more in tune with its time as Balenciaga is with it – both diagnosing and exacerbating our fascination with the mediocre, the boring and the ugly, and create a cottage industry of pseudo-academics on Substack and TikTok that callously calls “the hyperrealist” and Marshall McLuhan quotes into the mini-microphone, clutching his clip between acrylic fingernails. One of Demna’s ambitions over the past year has been to propel her fashion brand and vision to places where haute couture usually struggles to connect. That’s Ye’s tenure as well, albeit from a more populist perspective, an $ 80 hoodie. So it’s only natural that seeing all these clothes on all of these actors involved in this dramatic celebrity divorce leads people to see some sort of “conspiracy.”

Of course, the catch is that nothing at Balenciaga is “natural” – not its materials, its marketing, its fashion shows – and of course, it is also the brand that has dabbled the most successfully. metaverse. He delights in the artificial; he considers authenticity as impossible, even irrelevant. Coco Chanel once said that Cristobal Balenciaga, the singular Spanish couturier who founded the house that Demna now runs, was “the master of all of us”, explaining that his designs, which were puzzles in fabric of volume and minimalist tailoring. , were simply in their own echelon beyond other couturiers of the Golden Age. Late last year, I watched a theater filled with hundreds of fashion editors – jaded and fickle people who pride themselves on pretending to be intellectuals – give Demna a standing ovation after watching her episode of The simpsons, and now I see him dressing Kim and Kanye (and Julia Fox!) Demna is also the master of we.

Ultimately, there is no plot, only wild and sprawling ambition. As the video “Heaven and Hell” is only the last project to be demonstrated, the dynamic between Demna and Ye is based on painting with the broadest and most obvious features: God, light, redemption, sin, love, marriage , Putin (?!). As much as social media and Gen Z have made style a central part of popular culture, fashion isn’t as important or essential as any of those things, and the project Ye seems to have in mind is: eh well, what if it is? Ye’s mission, and Demna’s too, has been to push the boundaries of what is close to our hearts and how well we listen to what things should look like. Bring the avant-garde, whatever it still is today, into popular culture. Or rather to make popular culture strange, to make people think– or more importantly, feel something – where their eyes are most likely to be.

Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc is a cult classic game that gained notoriety in the West thanks, among other things, to an online game that served as the first entry point for the English-speaking series. It was officially released in English on PlayStation Vita three years later, and is finally making its way to Nintendo systems for the first time on Switch. It’s a game that I have a lot of complex feelings about first playing in 2021, and unfortunately that’s only made worse by the fact that the Switch version has some pretty clear issues that betray one the cheapest, laziest port jobs I’ve ever seen.

For those unfamiliar with Danganronpa is a visual murder mystery novel with a limited cast of recurring characters. It opens on the first day of school with freshman Makoto Naegi preparing for his first day at Hope’s Peak Academy, an elite high school where every student is an “ultimate” – someone who is the best in a particular talent. Upon arriving, Makoto discovers that the school is not what it appears to be, and he and fourteen other Ultimate students have been trapped in a sadistic game led by a mechanical teddy bear named Monokuma.

Monokuma explains that they will be forced to spend the rest of their lives at Hope’s Peak and that he will only allow someone to escape if they kill another student and get away with it. Of course, once the murder has occurred, the surviving students must retaliate in a class-action lawsuit where they try to determine the identity of the murderer, known as “the blackened”. If they succeed in uncovering the blackened, the criminal will be executed. If they fail then black escapes and everyone other is executed instead.

The gameplay is divided into three phases: school life, investigation and class tests. During school life, you’ll spend a lot of time watching the main story cutscenes and spending time with your favorite characters to get to know them better. Once a body has been discovered, the investigation phase begins as you examine the crime scene for evidence and roam the rest of the school for leads.

Class Trials are Danganronpa’s bread and butter, and this is where the gameplay really shines and sets it apart from other murder mystery games. Rather than a simple testimony where you can carefully cross-examine one character at a time, class trials are defined by non-stop debate where everyone tries to say their peace about events at the same time. The nonstop debate takes place in real time and is actually a kind of first person shooter as well; the evidence you have gathered is described as “truth bullets” and you must shoot the correct truth bullet at a conflicting statement.

Careful aim and timing are important, as irrelevant chatter from characters around the room (called “white noise”) will physically appear on screen and interfere with your balls. Since all of this happens in real time with an actual timer, the emphasis is on being able to quickly uncover the mystery on your own under pressure. This encourages the player to really pay attention to the details of a case instead of wasting time flipping through each piece of evidence only to suddenly spot a contradiction.

There are also two mini-games that appear in Class Trials: Hangman’s Gambit where you answer a question by quickly knocking down the right letters, and Bullet Time Battle which is a bad paced game. None of these mini-games are very good, Hangman’s Gambit tends to be hilarious, and Bullet Time Battle is incredibly frustrating to the point that I’m pretty sure the beat timing isn’t programmed properly. Fortunately, these mini-games are rare, with each appearing only once per try on average. I think it’s telling that the sequel, Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair, drastically changed how these two minigames work to the point that it literally calls a whole new minigame “(Improved) Hangman’s Gambit” .

But in a visual novel, nothing is more important than the story, so let me dig a little deeper into Danganronpa’s tale than usual. The greatest strength of the story is that the whole game takes place with the same core of characters. Unlike most mystery murders where new characters are introduced to fill the necessary roles with each successive case, Danganronpa’s recurring plot offers unique opportunities to make each case important to those who pursue it. Each character is blessed with being more developed than what you’re used to seeing in this genre of a game, and the fact that the murderer is still someone you’ve spent time with and learned to knowing increases the stakes of each mystery. . The victims are not anonymous people, and the killers are people you have learned to trust.

In addition, the circumstances of each murder were never really straightforward. It’s hard to go into detail without spoiling the story, but there was always a certain plot twist that made each case go beyond a simple question of “this person killed this other person.” “. The compelling plot threads and character motivations that slowly unfolded over the course of the game gave me a sense of urgency to see more, and once the game really kicked off I had hard to let go despite the problems he may have had.

And boy, did he have any problems.

Danganronpa’s writing seems to have a hard time managing the flow of information to the player, and I was often frustrated with what the narrative decided was worth focusing on. A major reveal towards the end of the game is heavily foreshadowed to the point that I’d be really shocked if someone came to the end without predicting it. You will be predict this revelation before it happens.

But when the reveal moment finally arrives, the focus is on the shock of the reveal itself, and a true half hour of dialogue is spent solely on getting the in-game characters to take the reveal at face value. So much time and energy is wasted in getting the characters to draw conclusions that you, the player, have made hours There is, then when someone finally asks what it all means – a question you’ve undoubtedly been asking yourself for a long time – they’re just told it doesn’t matter and the game doesn’t bring it up anymore. never.

Danganronpa’s characters have a terrible habit of not asking questions that any sane person would ask, inadvertently making moments that could have been clever as mistakes. A particular part of the story is about learning new information from the victim’s dying message, but this twist comes with the problem that there is no explanation for how the victim knows this information. The message itself doesn’t make sense, and there’s no reason the victim said it, and none of the surviving characters fix this, making it seem like a hole. in the plot although a big reveal much later in the game provides a reason the character knew this. This is an intentional foreshadowing, but because no one seems to be asking the questions a sane person would ask, it sounds like a mistake.

No character suffers from this problem more than Makoto himself. Since he’s the character from the point of view, everything that happens in the story is filtered through his thoughts and actions, and he’s pretty slow to take in. He never perceives any of the omens the game spoon feeds you, and sometimes he will actually resist looking at certain things during an investigation in order to prevent the player from discovering something the writers aren’t ready to. whatever you know.

I vividly remember a time when the characters were all looking for a missing person, and I was sure they were in a nearby storage room. Upon arriving in the storage room, Makoto found that the door was locked and he just noticed that it was “strange” and that he would not question her further. When I gave up and left the room, I ran into another character in the hallway who told me the missing person had been found in the storage room. A good point of view of the character should help the player to notice the details of the story, but the main character of Danganronpa spends more time actively holding the player.

So what’s up with the Switch port? Well, somehow there are some pretty significant framerate issues both when walking around school and during classroom practice. The framerate in practice gets especially bad towards the end of the game, as white noise begins to fill the screen more aggressively, making it difficult to properly aim your truth bullets. I know technically that’s the whole point of white noise, but I felt that hurting game performance wasn’t how the developers wanted to increase the difficulty.

It’s pretty weird that a port of a PSP game is struggling on Switch, but this version also happens to be based on the Anniversary Edition released to mobile devices in 2020, and some pretty big issues are being inherited from it. A strange lack of care has been taken to the new section of the character gallery, and the vocal lines are tagged with captions that appear to be generated from speech recognition software. “Lies will get you nowhere” is labeled “the lie will make you known” and “I refuse to vote” becomes “I protect the vote.” ”

Things get worse in the actual game script where there is a bug that simply causes any dialogue line with a percent symbol to fail to load. The dialogue stops where the symbol would be and skips the rest of the text box altogether until you move to the next line, making some conversations completely unintelligible. This bug also exists in the mobile version of the game, and based on current YouTube playback of the iOS version, it still has not been fixed. The only conclusion I can come to is that either this version wasn’t tested from start to finish or they just didn’t care to fix such an obvious and critical bug in two different versions of the game. .

I find it hard to sum up Danganronpa in terms of whether I like him or not. Its overall structure, both narrative and gameplay, is inventive and unique to the point that it feels fresh even a decade after its original release, but I’ve spent a lot of time with the game feeling frustrated and disappointed. Despite this, I was constantly obliged to return to it over and over again; I didn’t want to let go, and as of writing this review I’m already two chapters away from its sequel. It’s a game that, in my opinion, fails to reach its potential in any important way, but it also manages to overcome its own failures thanks to its strong sense of style and ingenuity.

Unfortunately, I have much less conflict over the quality of the Switch port in particular. While none of the issues are significant enough to really prevent someone from enjoying this game, the fact that such fundamental issues from a previous release have not been addressed makes it difficult to justify this release against the others. I think it’s worth looking and trying Danganronpa for yourself, but I can’t recommend doing it while playing a port of the poorly performing mobile version on Switch.

Realizing big ambitions and singular visions in DIY fashion seems to be a yardstick for Dahl, 26, who started Sloppy Jane 11 years ago as a high school student in Los Angeles. A boyfriend at the time gave her a Roy Orbison CD which was so well loved it was scratched to the point that a peak in “Only the Lonely” distorted. It was both scary and inspiring: “I said to myself: ‘This is what I want to do musically’, something that has the highest and the lowest, which enters and leaves lucidity, where it is. is like that beautiful, unraveling thing, ”she said a few weeks ago in another interview in Williamsburg, this time at Bar Blondeau.

Rather than seeking formal training, Dahl opted for autonomy. “Ideas are the things that are important,” she said. “You just need to walk around and trust yourself.” So she had her day on the Los Angeles punk scene, and in 2015 released Sloppy Jane’s debut EP, “Sure-Tuff,” six high jinks rock’n’roll songs starring Phoebe Bridgers, l Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter who has been friends with Dahl since high school on bass.

After the EP’s release, Dahl began work on the band’s first full-length album, “Willow”. She wanted not only to base it on a narrative theme, but also to extend beyond the bass-drums-guitar sound when performing the songs live. Dahl recalled that Bridgers told him, “Go get your orchestra. So after recording “Willow” in Los Angeles with Sara Cath, Dahl traveled to New York in 2017 and found Nardo, Wollowitz, Rothman, Brennan and others. With the band she wanted in place, she released “Willow” in March 2018.

The opening musical passage of “Madison” references the final piano outro of “Willow,” starting where the other ends, but the two albums differ. Musically, where “Willow” is more of an alternative rock opera, “Madison” is a wall of sound with more pop leanings that cuts across a range of emotions – the elevation of “Party Anthem”, the delightful weirdness of the sans. lyrics “Bianca Castafiore”, the melancholy of “Wilt”. And thematically, where “Willow” talks about “numbness” and “touching but can’t feel,” “Madison” talks about “loneliness” and wanting someone who is just out of reach, Dahl said. “It’s like you’ve figured out how to have these feelings, but you have nowhere to put them.”

ShooterGang Kony doesn’t do street rap per se. The subjects and moods of his albums include recollections of calling friends while incarcerated and an all-seeing attitude reminiscent of the Jacka. It’s not enough for Kony to rap about what happened on the streets, he talks about the effects it has had on his family. Kony and a handful of other Bay Area rappers use biting humor that makes you wince with every punch and straightforward criminal tales with a world weary message.

Over the 2020s Reverend of Red Paint, Kony was seriously trying to make this kind of touching music. This record’s “A Sinner’s Story” was a thread that Caine from Menace II Society would have told, a story about the street murders and the snitch, an edifying tale as much as a song the block would play. On his latest album, Starshooter, Kony is less concerned with the cheering. It’s better that way ; Kony is more relaxed and nonchalant this time around. He still has the rugged voice he shares with fellow Bay Area rapper Mozzy, but Kony floats with the mindset of a veteran who’s already proven himself. On “Up2Date” – a duet with Lil Bean from San Francisco – Kony makes blatant reviews like, “I’m going to send your little brother home as a gesture.” Bean’s hook is awesome, a classic bay sound that makes the voice feel like it’s blocked by a light wind.

Yet despite his more moderate demeanor, Kony remains one of the West Coast’s deadliest writers. It’s incalculable how much better the Sacramento Kings would be if they played his songs before the denunciation. “We all have the glocks, it takes one to leave you headless” is one of those lines from this album that shows Kony’s ability to make a threat sound like a polite proposition. The production, which uses the moody and creepy beats typical of the Bay Area, is a great juxtaposition to Kony’s confident and regal flow.

Kony is at his best when he makes you look at humanity in the darkest of situations. “I never knew him but they call you your father’s son”, on “Glizzy Over Rugers”, is a line that not only talks about life without a father figure, but also about feeling like a descendant of a lineage. Everyone expects you to represent the way they did. If Kony wasn’t a soldier who was first sentenced to probation before being in high school, the pressure to go out on the streets would have defeated him. He went through the wringer and it shows in his music, even when he’s having fun. For him, the joy is being able to tell you street stories to entertain you. Now that the pain has subsided, he flexes.

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