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Spectacular story

Tharp is the author of such bestsellers as Falling Dark, Knights of the Hill Country and Badd. With the release of the film adaptation of his critically acclaimed novel The Spectacular Now, Tharp doesn’t consider himself a young-adult writer but hasn’t strayed too far from the genre. “I became interested in writing about young adults […]

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5 WTF Facts About Justin Bieber

1. The spelling feature of the layout program Adobe InDesign does not recognize “Bieber” as a word. It does, however, suggest “babyish” for a replacement.   2. Bieber employed a full-time “swag coach” to teach the teen “different swaggerific things to do.” On a related note, the U.S. Department of Labor calculates the current unemployment […]

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Who is Is/Is?

Photo: Alexander Uhrich Female-fronted shoegaze outfit armed with a punk-rock sneer and swagger? Raucous ’90s alt-rock revivalists touting surf-rock melodies? Beach House boasting an edge and a litany of distortion pedals? It’s hard to say what Is/Is is, exactly, but the Minneapolis outfit appears to be that way for a reason. “The first songs that […]

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Mumford’s the word!

Guthrie is one of only five cities in the world — three in the United States — that will host the tour. The mini-festival will span two nights, with Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros performing Friday, Sept. 6. Other confirmed featured guests are Alabama Shakes, The Vaccines, Willy Mason, Bear’s Den and Half Moon […]

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The Typist — Midwestern High Life

It gets sprayed all over the place, in fact. Matt Moran’s desperate punk hollers; his messy, confessional-to-the-occasional-point-of-embarrassing lyrics; his band’s well-coordinated, super-loud melodic rock arrangements all sound so much like a release, at times vindicating, at others reaching for (and grasping) the anthemic. Every song on the sardonically titled Midwestern High Life, is a rock […]

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The Dead

Your expectations for greatness, however, should be tempered. Despite a few surface tweaks, “The Dead” is just zom-business as usual. Shot and set in the West African desert, the film’s hero is U.S. Air Force Lt. Murphy (Rob Freeman, “Saving Private Ryan”), the lone survivor of a plane crash now stranded in a wasteland that’s […]

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Land of the Lost

Lost Lander founder Matt Sheehy spends a lot of time alone, out in the wild. It’s his job, actually. The Alaska native is employed as a forester in his newly adopted home of Oregon, and it gives him a lot of time to think. Consequently, his music is similarly cerebral, if not also romantic, in […]

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Let’s be Frank

Frank Smith of Austin, Texas, is an enigma, being that it’s not a person, but a band. Naturally, front man Aaron Sinclair has had to deal with a good bit of confusion concerning the name. “I have been called Frank by people before,” Sinclair said. “That always gets a little weird.” There’s not — nor […]

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