Doctor Who, Kill The Moon. Television Review. B.B.C.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *

Cast: Peter Capaldi, Jenna Coleman, Hermione Norris, Samuel Anderson, Ellis George, Tony Osoba, Phil Nice, Christopher Dane.

Space for so long has been a conversation of banality to many, the interest in what lurks, glides and happens beyond our own atmospheric layer is not as awed as it was during the great Space Race or during the early use of the Space Shuttle programme. The Sun and The Moon seemingly as remote now as it was to ancestors who prayed to them as deities.

Doctor Who, Kill The Moon. Television Review. B.B.C. full post

(469 words, estimated 1:53 mins reading time)

That Trivia Game (PS4). Game Review.

Liverpoool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

That Trivia Game is a quiz game available for download from the PlayStation Store for the PS4. The game is the first quiz game to release for PS4 and with it being a quiz game it will naturally receive comparisons to the Buzz Quiz games that released exclusively on PS3 and PSP, so the question must be asked of how it stacks up in comparison to the Buzz Quiz games.

That Trivia Game (PS4). Game Review. full post

(2512 words, estimated 10:03 mins reading time)

Tony O’Neill, Buddha In A Hat. Book Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

It could be considered one of the hardest aspects of writing poetry, to deliver a series of poems with an incredible thought, a deftness of the well placed word, whether it rhymes or not, bulging with humour and with the ability to make a reader understand that the poem is asking you to be scathing of a world that seems to have no time for the craft and also demands that you must question the wound that appears. It is a hard task to pull off, many a great, perhaps arguably legendary poet fails at the attempt but for Tony O’ Neill and his recently published collection of poems under the title of Buddha in a Hat, all these demands that a poet places upon their mental agility are met.

Tony O’Neill, Buddha In A Hat. Book Review. full post

(514 words, estimated 2:03 mins reading time)

Zoe Schwarz Blue Commotion, Exposed. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

It is the measure of a great talent that you can listen to an album that has been recorded somewhere in deep dark confines, where lights flash on and off and with no discernable pattern emerging except for those who understand these things and for whom the rest of us may as well be watching a futuristic science fiction film starring William Shatner. The music that is later heard from your C.D. player is one in which you can imagine fully having been painstakingly, lovingly and thankfully captured frame by frame, song by song and each bead of sweat that falls seductively from each of the musician’s brow able to tell its own tantalising story.

Zoe Schwarz Blue Commotion, Exposed. Album Review. full post

(440 words, estimated 1:46 mins reading time)

Liverpool Sound and Vision: The Saturday Supplement, An Interview With Laura Benitez.

Laura Benitez and the Heartache’s biography says, “If you love Americana and Classic Honky-tonk, uncensored and unpolished, you’ll love this band!” It is a statement that is hard to ignore and easy to understand. Even on this side of the Atlantic where the genres have not flowed into the mainstream hearts of music lovers as they arguably should have done, the music that Laura Benitez and her musicians have produced is something tangibly infectious and instantly enjoyable. So much so that the album, Heartless Woman should be seen as a classic in the making, as real a piece of Americana as you could hope to hear and shines a lantern deep into the heart of what makes the country so fascinating and beautiful to be involved in.

Liverpool Sound and Vision: The Saturday Supplement, An Interview With Laura Benitez. full post

(1324 words, estimated 5:18 mins reading time)

Hellion, Karma’s A Bitch. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

You could be forgiven for thinking that Hellion had disappeared into the 21^st Century ether. Like many of their compatriots and contemporaries from what now seems like a time in which has been dwarfed by the subversion of music as a television entertainment procedure for advertising revenue rather than expression of deep down and dirty demands from a disenfranchised society, Hellion haven’t really hit the sweetest of spots in the genre of late.

All that should change with the release of their mini album, the outrageously good Karma’s A Bitch which is out this October.

Hellion, Karma’s A Bitch. Album Review. full post

(464 words, estimated 1:51 mins reading time)

Clybourne Park, Theatre Review. Unity Theatre, Liverpool.

Liverpool Sound & Vision Rating: * * * * *

Cast: Liam Tobin, Judith McSpadden, Paida Mutonono, Richard James Clarke, Chris Jack, Simon Hedger, Samantha Meisner.

Said&done have come back to the Unity Theatre with Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park, a play set in America in the 1950s and then later on in 2009. The play was originally written by Norris as a response to Lorraine Hansberry’s, A Raisin in the Sun, and looks at race relations in America over the last fifty years. Set in a fictitious Chicago neighbourhood, Russ and Bev are all ready to pack up and move on having sold their house to a coloured family, but very quickly learn how things really are in a society still not ready to move on with the times.

Clybourne Park, Theatre Review. Unity Theatre, Liverpool. full post

(355 words, estimated 1:25 mins reading time)

Gone Girl, Film Review. Picturehouse@F.A.C.T, Liverpool.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

Cast: Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike, Neil Patrick Harris, Tyler Perry, Carrie Coon, Kim Dickens, Patrick Fugit, Casey Wilson, Missi Pyle, Sela Ward, Emily Ratajkowski, Kathleen Rose Perkins, Lisa Banes, David Clennon, Scoot McNairy, Boyd Holbrook, Lola Kirke, Cyd Strittmatter, Leonard Kelly-Young.

The female of the species is more deadly than the male, when it comes to Amy Elliott-Dunne, you don’t get much more deadly, you don’t feel the need more to make sure you never meet someone like them for if you do, you will be devoured, spat out and left to rot and it will be all blamed upon you.

Gone Girl, Film Review. Picturehouse@F.A.C.T, Liverpool. full post

(755 words, estimated 3:01 mins reading time)

Juno And The Paycock, Theatre Review. Playhouse Theatre, Liverpool.

Niamh Cusack in June and the Paycock at the Liverpool Playhouse Theatre. Photograph by Stephen Vaughan.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10Cast: Niamh Cusack, Des McAleer, Neil Caple, Jonathan Charles, Louis Dempsey, Donal Gallery, Maggie McCarthy, Aoife McMahon, Robin Morrissey, Maureen O’ Connell, Fionn Walton.

When you have nothing, you can only go one way, unless of course life conspires against you so much that all your efforts, all the trials you have endured come back to haunt you and you end up with less than you could have imagined.

Juno And The Paycock, Theatre Review. Playhouse Theatre, Liverpool. full post

(554 words, 1 image, estimated 2:13 mins reading time)

Doctor Who: Signs And Wonders. Audio Drama Review. Big Finish.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Cast: Sylvester McCoy, Sophie Aldred, Philip Olivier, Amy Pemberton, Jessica Martin, Warren Brown, Jemma Churchill, Rory Keenan.

There are times, admittedly as rare as a Gallifryian rocking horse needing to excuse itself to go to the toilet, when the most manipulative of all the incarnations of The Doctor is just that little too calculating for his own good, that’s when the listener knows that they are in for a really decent ride of a story line with the Seventh Doctor and perhaps it is fitting that long standing writer Matt Fitton is the deliverer of all the problems heaped upon Hector, The Doctor and Ace in the very cool audio drama, Signs and Wonders.

Doctor Who: Signs And Wonders. Audio Drama Review. Big Finish. full post

(656 words, estimated 2:37 mins reading time)