Author Archives: Claire Brunswick

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds: Live From KCRW

by Claire Brunswick on
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Not long after the release of the hauntingly ethereal album, Push the Sky Away, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds recently took us by surprise with the release of Live from KCRW – recorded in April, 2013, before a small studio audience at KCRW’s studios in Santa Monica. The album departs from the heavy guitar sounds and hammering pace of earlier works like Murder Ballads, stripping down atmospheric sound in some of the band’s lesser known songs and seducing us with its soulfulness, emotion and haunting melodies, purveyed through the pure sound of instruments such as the piano, violin, vibraphone and organ.

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Frozen: The Snow Queen Touched by the Hand of a Disney Princess

by Claire Brunswick on
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In Disney’s Frozen, the audience is introduced to a world that wields both the darkness of Hans Christian Andersen and the almost ‘unbearable lightness’ of the Disney Princess world, where characters spontaneously burst into song, though thankfully, they possess voices such as that of the inimitable Idina Menzel, the voice of the Snow Queen. The film is at once a feminist manifesto (i.e. sisterly love comes before romantic love) and a deeply romantic story, espousing the value of slow-growing sentiment based on truly knowing, understanding and complementing one’s other half, rather than on the typical Disney princess ‘love at first sight’ scenario. READ MORE.