Still Plenty of Passion

The Hold Steady – Thrashing Thru The Passion

That’s right. It’s 2019 and I’m still writing about The Hold Steady.

Which does bring up the question: at what point do you give up on a band you loved in college who might have passed their expiration date? Well, I find this happening less and less these days, considering streaming makes casual listening incredibly easy, which is exactly the kind of listening perfect for an old favorite of yesteryear. Meanwhile, the bands that never really mattered to you that much will fade regardless, while the ones you truly loved will have gained enough of your trust that you’ll continue listening to them into your dreaded thirties. Continue reading →

Center of Attention

Sleater-Kinney – The Center Won’t Hold

Sometimes, you just wish the art could speak for itself. But alas, we live in a time where that rarely happens. This especially comes to mind when talking about Sleater-Kinney’s latest, The Center Won’t Hold, which ended up being the last album recorded with drummer Janet Weiss before she exited the band prior to the album’s release. So while listening to it, one can’t help but take into consideration whether the new sounds explored on the album caused a rift in the band’s, well, center. Then when you also take into account that Weiss was injured in a potentially career-ending car accident last month, it feels as though a bit of a gray cloud hangs over The Center Won’t Hold. Continue reading →

The Pick: A Face In The Crowd

After ringing in this new podcast by reviewing Olympus Has Fallen, this week we’re talking about a movie that’s a little less, well, dumb. A Face In The Crowd saw legendary director Elia Kazan and writer Budd Schulberg teaming up once again after the success of On The Waterfront. As we discuss, A Face In The Crowd didn’t make quite the same splash as that classic, but now feels more and more ahead of its time with each passing year. We’ll also discuss the merits of Andy Griffith’s larger than life performance, the early rise of television, and try to get to the bottom of what exactly Vitajex is.

The Pick: Olympus Has Fallen

Ever since Top Ten Thursdays ended back in 2016, we here at Mildly Pleased have been a bit inconsistent with our podcast output. With this new show The Pick, we hope to change that. It seems doubtful we’ll do this show every week, but I think we could strive to post one every week we don’t post a Rokk Talk or some other show of ours. Anyways, the format is pretty simple. Each episode, one of the three of us will pick a movie to watch for any arbitrary reason, and then we’ll talk about it in-depth as we figure out whether it was pick-worthy or not. In this “trial run” episode, we talk about Olympus Has Fallen, the first movie in what is now an inexplicable trilogy, due to this week’s release of Angel Has Fallen. Continue reading →

The Bald and the Boisterous

Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw

I’ve had a bit of trouble settling on a verdict for Hobbs & Shaw, the first(?) Fast & Furious spin-off film. On one hand, it is a very silly, over-the-top buddy cop action movie. On the other, it seems like the product of a bunch of bad decisions that just had to be followed through on because: money. It’s a movie where Dwayne Johnson pulls a helicopter out of the air, like Captain America. It’s also 135 minutes long and feels like it. Is this too much of a good thing?

Continue reading →

Rokk Talk Ep. 21: Woodstock

Fifty years ago today a bunch of hippies got high, slid around in the mud, and listened to Country Joe and the Fish… Or so we thought! Turns out there was more to the story. A festival was had Wood-something? Well apparently they made a movie about it and John and Colin watched it. Not only that, but they watched the long-ass edition. Check it out and hear what they had to say.

R.I.P. David Berman

This one’s particularly hard for me to process.

As you may have noticed, I just reviewed Purple Mountains, the fantastic self-titled debut from David Berman’s new band earlier this week. The album’s only been out for about a month, but it’s already become one of my most listened to albums of the year as well as one of my favorites. I’ve just been listening to it constantly, because the lyrics are so god damn funny and wise and raw, where you know that the person writing them was clearly brilliant but also in a lot of pain (hence, my not-so-subtle review title). Continue reading →