SOUNDTRACK: REINA DEL CID-“The Cooling” (Tiny Desk Contest Runner-Up 2015).
Last week, a Tiny Desk Contest winner was announced. This week, All Songs Considered posted ten runners up that they especially liked. And I want to draw extra attention to a couple of them.
I know very little about these bands, so I don’t know if this is Reina del Cid’s normal band or what. But I love the sound of this orchestral chamber pop. There are plenty of chamber pop bands, but there’s something about the melody of this song that works so perfectly with the strings.
There are seven people in the video (Reina is the singer). I love the way the song starts out with some pizzicato guitar and slowly building violin strings. I also love the starts and stops that the song has–very dramatic. And it all works so well with Reina’s voice which doesn’t soar or hit super high notes, rather it is just powerful and strong and very pretty (even when she does an occasional mmm mmm).
When the song builds to its climax, the violins switch to pizzicato and the drums grow louder. It’s quite lovely and I’d like to hear more from her (them). I gather that the new album is coming out in May!
[READ: February 19, 2015] Axe Cop Volume 2
I enjoyed Axe Cop Volume 1 so much I couldn’t wait to jump into Volume 2. But something was different.
This book was made for Dark Horse as a three issue arc. It’s in color and it’s all one long story. Ethan is super proud of it, and I think he should be, it’s pretty impressive that he and his brother (now aged 6) were able to come up with such a huge story.
But I found that like the longer stories in volume 1, I got a little bored by the end of this book. Indeed, I let Clark read the first book (it was placed in the YA book section, but I figured if it was written by a 5-year-old, my nine-year old could read it). He liked the first book but only gave this one a few pages before he gave up. He likes Ask Axe Cop best too.
A bad guy planet starts looming closer and closer to earth. Axe Cop is planning to go explode it but (and this part I really liked) the normal cops have come to arrest him for not being a real cop and for chopping everyone’s head off. So he has to fight real cops. But since he’s a good guy he can’t hurt the real cops, so he uses faint bullets. There’s some wonderful throwaway lines like the cops yelling “real cops don’t have dinosaurs” as they flee.
I think the part that confounded my appreciation of the book was the crazy number of bad guys. I realize of course that the plot is secondary, but there were just so many thing to keep track of (it must have been hard for Ethan to keep it all straight).
And yet each time I felt like I wasn’t really enjoying the book, something great would happen. Like they would go back to dinosaur times or to uni-smart world (a planet with a unicorn horn).
I am torn about the fact that every time someone gets splashed with blood they turn into that creature. It’s so funny (and so wonderfully six years old) but it’s a bit exhausting. And yet the transformations are very funny (thanks to Ethan’s art) like Bear Cop (who eventually becomes President Zombie Bear Cop).
But then there’s also some awesome images like the evil red-headed woman who is riding a gorilla who is riding a lion, and that’s what I love from Axe Cop–something an adult would never think of.
The end of the story is so awesomely juvenile, so hilariously childish I had to read it aloud to the family. And I laughed about as much as Axe Cop did. The fact that the final panel states “Axe cop thought it was so hilarious…he couldn’t stop laughing)” really brought home how funny this series can be.
So while I didn’t love this book, there was plenty that I enjoyed a lot of. Perhaps if I read it in installments rather than as one long story I would have appreciated it more.
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