E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG BY TODD SWIFT

DIG Pop is what I call it: Dreamy Indie Girl Pop.  Basically, the genre, or sub-genre, requires very little but a female vocalist, some indie guitar or synths, or both, some moody orchestration with a lush, dreamy and/or retro tone, with some haunted lovelorn lyrics - in short, dream-pop with a girl's voice.  It is ironic that while the likes of the NME keep calling for the second coming of a great Manchester guitar band (okay, a third or fourth coming, after Joy Division, The Smiths, and Oasis), the true great music of our time, in terms of pop, is being made by women.

I would say that DIG Pop began more or less with The Cocteau Twins; and reached a sort of early apex with Mazzy Star a few decades back.  However, it has never really gone out of fashion, and the last few years have seen The Jezabels, Beach House, Dum Dum Girls, Best Coast, Warpaint, Tamaryn, 2:54, CHVRCHES, I Break Horses, Fauns, Still Corners, September Girls, Cults, Tegan & Sara, and many others, exploring th…

The North End of the Possible
Andrew Philip
Reviewed by Jennifer Wong

Published by Salt, Andrew Philip's second collection, The North End of the Possible, is a bold experiment of form and persona. Through the eyes of the enigmatic character MacAdam, we approach familiar environments and scenarios in a new light, and explore the realms of our unconscious. Conjuring a futuristic, surreal landscape with a delightfully lyrical narrative and adventures with form, Philip's poetry offers a completely new take towards modernity: a world of estrangement, ambivalence and bottled-up emotions.
One of his most exciting poems in the collection, '10x10', derives new meanings from wedding anniversary gifts, exploring the idea of intimacy, ageing and the knowledge of the future:


Our younger heads, cast in bronze by a friend,
may occupy a prominent spot beside your Dutch vase,
prevailing over the tinpot fears of aging
as we recall fondly the days of cheap paper,
inexpensive cotton and less he…

NEIL GREGORY REVIEWS

Orchestra & Chorus by J.T. Welsch(Holdfire, 2012) and The Gallery by Christopher Jackson(Poetry Salzburg 2013)
With Orchestra & Chorus, his third pamphlet – after Orchids (Salt, 2010) and Waterloo (Like This, 2012) – American-born poet, musician, playwright and scholar J.T. Welsch presents a poetry suffused by voices from the past.
A glance at the contents page is enough to see the extent of the intertextuality that drives this collection: bookended by the sequences of ‘Orchid’s Want (I-IV)’ and ‘Orchid’s Name (I-IV), titles such as ‘Hymn for Akhenaton’, ‘Petrarch on Mt. Ventoux’, and ‘The Tiresias Letters’ point to a poetry drawn from myth and literary tradition. Welsch assimilates and appropriates literary precursors with skill, and frequently with wit, as in the playfully oxymoronic title of ‘Epithalamion Shotgun’. The message is orchestra loud, and repeated in chorus across all 28 pages of this short, but rich, pamphlet: there can be no writing without read…

As another great season of ten perfectly-crafted episodes of The Bridge (yet another great Scandinoir) ends, leaving Saga in the rain with great responsibility on her shoulders, and some life lessons still to be learned, Eyewear welcomes this reflection by brilliant American writer Steven Timberman on Sherlock’s strange, surreal, and off-putting third series.

BBC’s Sherlock reimagining has always been an odd duckling. In it’s first two series Moffat and his team created a Sherlock Holmes that slotted nicely between complete fealty to the source material and entirely abandoning the spirit of the original stories. Moffat’s Sherlock stood out – both from the original stories and the endless imitators currently clogging up the television. And then Sherlock took two years off. Cumberbatch became Assange and Khan, Freeman went to Middle Earth, and Moffat hopped in the TARDIS for a while.
After watching Sherlock’s first three episodes in two years, I felt discombobulated. There was still plen…

This review first appeared on the international e-zine Various Artists
Review: The Boy from Aleppo who Painted the War by Sumia Sukkar (Eyewear Publishing, 2013)
With its relentless accumulations of violence and random atrocity, it’s tempting to think that, from time to time, Sumia Sukkar is pushing at the bounds of plausibility in this, her debut novel. Even the briefest of surveys of the video footage which continues to emerge from the conflict in Syria, however, suggests that the mutilations, torture, street executions and other horrors described and/or alluded to in the narrative are no exaggeration. As we are reminded throughout, in fact, the tragedies endured by the main characters constitute only part of a much larger story in which an entire country is being torn apart for reasons which, to many, remain chillingly unclear.
The central narrative of The Boy from Aleppo…, then, revolves around and is, for the most part, narrated by the eponymous boy: a teenager with Asperger’s calle…

EYEWEAR'S FILM CRITIC ON A FILM THAT PEOPLE WILL BE DISCUSSING FOR DECADES TO COME, DESPITE, OR BECAUSE OF, ITS HEDONISTIC VIM AND STARK LOOK AT BANKING CRIME. Martin Scorsese delves into a territory not completely unfamiliar to him, but perhaps at a level of rambunctiousness, vivacity and also repugnance that reminds us how great a director he can be. There is certain material that beckons his cinematic technique and knowledge that puts him on a pedestal among his contemporaries. In every regard, American Hustle looks like an ITV soap in comparison to The Wolf of Wall Street. The film tells the true story of Jordan Belfort, a wholly unlikeable character that due to incisive and bombastic screenwriting and editing, by Terrence Winter and Thelma Schoonmaker respectively, we are happy to watch for three hours. While we certainly are not rooting for Belfort, we are fascinated by what the abomination will do next.
Leonardo DiCaprio plays Belfort absolutely fearlessly, something all too …