Reviews
Bon Jovi Kick Off Spring 2022 Tour in Omaha: Photos, Recap + Setlist
Arena rock is a genre of music that will never die, as long as crowds convene inside hockey arenas around the country to sing along to our favorite anthems from our favorite artists. That’s exactly what took place when Bon Jovi kicked off their 2022 tour in Omaha, NE at the CHI Health Center on Friday, April 1st, for their first public in-person concert since the pandemic started. Ione, a singer from Sioux City, IA, was the contest winner of the opening slot for the Omaha tour date. With a full backing band — two guitar players, a bassist, a drummer, and a keyboardist — Ione filled the arena with her soulful voice, reminding one of ‘70s singer-songwriters like Linda Ronstadt and Stevie Nicks. She emitted a free-spirited energy on stage, and captivated the audience with her pure, unadultera...
The Bubble Tests Positive for Tone-Deaf Tedium: Review
The Pitch: It’s 2022, which means that we’re now getting the kind of movies that weren’t just filmed during COVID, but conceived during it (see also: Soderbergh’s Kimi, Doug Liman’s Locked Down). For Judd Apatow, that meant a long, hard look at the ways that mainstream studio filmmaking has adjusted to the times: masks aplenty, social distancing, and the much-vaunted “bubble” of fully quarantined people who are trapped together until, well, all this stuff is over. And that’s the environment under which the latest entry in the hit blockbuster franchise Cliff Beasts, Cliff Beasts 6: The Battle for Everest: Memories of the Requiem, is to be made, says the film’s producers (including Peter Serafinowicz and Kate McKinnon). But of course, throwing a group of temperamenta...
Dom Deshawn Weathers the Storm on Tale of Two Seasons
Dom Deshawn’s latest album Tale of Two Seasons captures the almost helpless feeling of passing through the seasons, undergoing a change that you can’t control but is happening all around you. Like last September’s Maintainin’, the project emerges from the Columbus rapper–born Dominique Mattox–processing personal struggles within the larger global catastrophe of the COVID-19 pandemic. Deshawn captures this still-new struggle with isolation through the process of moving from fall to winter, with recent struggles of heartbreak and loneliness giving way to new opportunities for growth. Through the candor of his verses and the visual sharpness of his music videos, Deshawn’s music reflects on the many seasons of his own creative journey. Deshawn started rapping at age 18 after music overtook a p...
Morbius Review: Maybe It’s Time for Sony to Give Marvel Back Its Toys
The Pitch: The first trailer for Morbius, the newest effort by Sony Pictures to hold onto the Marvel characters to which it still owns the rights, originally premiered in January 2020, in anticipation of its planned July 2020 premiere. That premiere didn’t happen for, y’know, reasons, but in the literal years since, new trailers for the film have continued to appear online and in theaters, with one of them buttoned by a reasonably funny joke: Its central character, in full monster face, growling “I… am… Venom!” at a thug, then abruptly shifting to a smile to say, “I’m just kidding! Dr. Michael Morbius, at your service.” That moment didn’t just name-drop a previous Sony/Marvel collaboration, but showcased a clever reversal on expectations, not to mention star Jared Leto doling out some very...
Marvel’s Moon Knight Review: An Odd, Perhaps Inessential, But Often Fun Ride
The Pitch: When Moon Knight viewers first meet Steven Grant (Oscar Isaac), he’s a simple man living a relatively simple life in London, working a menial job as a museum gift shop employee and struggling to connect with the people around him. While a bit of an odd duck, personality-wise, Steven has a good heart but a big secret: He keeps experiencing missing time, waking up in strange locations no matter how hard he tries to stay awake or chain himself up in his sleep. The cause for these lapses, as we soon learn, is that Steven shares his body with an entirely separate personality — that of a man known as Marc Spector, who’s caught up in some complicated business involving a golden scarab, a cult leader named Arthur Harrow (Ethan Hawke), and as we eventually come to discover, the modern-da...
Oscars 2022 Review: Well, That Was a Hot Mess
“There’s, like, a different vibe in here.” So remarked host Amy Schumer towards the end of the 94th annual Academy Awards, after an emotionally exhausting night that did deliver a lot of surprises. Perhaps not the kinds of surprises that anyone watching was hoping for, because as the show creeped past the three-and-a-half-hour mark, what was striking was how the Oscars managed to make the handing out of actual Oscars feel like an afterthought. In the minutes before the Oscars began this year, the vibes were not great due to the controversial choice to eliminate eight categories from the live broadcast (instead handing those awards out an hour before the official ceremony started, and then editing the winning acceptance speeches into the show later). In concept, an idea which might trim som...
Daddy Yankee Makes His Claim as the G.O.A.T. of Reggaetón in Legendaddy
After setting the reggaetón genre ablaze with “Gasolina” in 2004, Daddy Yankee is getting ready to hang up the nozzle. With news of his impending retirement from music this year, the Puerto Rican icon released his final album, Legendaddy. Across 19 tracks, Daddy Yankee reasserts his position as the King of Reggaetón while collaborating with the new generation of stars that he inspired, like Bad Bunny, Myke Towers, Sech, and Natti Natasha. He also celebrates how global the genre has become with artists like Lil Jon and Nile Rodgers. Legendaddy is an impressive amalgamation of reggaetón’s legacy and present with Daddy Yankee at the helm. In the quirky “X Última Vez,” he’s joined by Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny. Backed by computerized beats courtesy of Tainy, the reggaetón dream team trad...
Soul Glo Turn In a Landmark Hardcore Album with the Political and Personal Diaspora Problems: Review + Stream
In the roiling summer heat of 2021, Philadelphia hardcore act Soul Glo took to their practice space to record the 12 songs that would form Diaspora Problems. The material was conceptualized over a five-year period and harnessed in true punk fashion, under tumultuous and budget-conscious conditions. In many ways, Soul Glo have followed the tried-and-true punk trajectory, gradually building a fanbase via touring, DIY releases, and EPs. It’s culminated with the band inking a deal with storied punk label Epitaph Records, home to legends such as Bad Religion, Rancid, Social Distortion, and many more. But Soul Glo are far from your average hardcore band. With predominantly Black band members, the band is inherently distinguished among a scene long dominated by whiteness — a topic Pierce Jordan d...
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...
