1. Coldplay—Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends (Parlophone)

At a time when we’ve all got hundreds of papers to write, thousands of exams looming on the horizon and millions of grad school applications to turn in, the last thing we need is a film that rubs in one person’s happiness in our oxygen-and-endorphin-starved faces like Drano into a gushing wound.

The past is a teacher, a shaper of things to come.

Think the family next door is perfect?

This summer, the alternative band Tickle Me Pink released their debut album Madeline.

Take a double-shot of gin, shake it with a good-versus-evil dichotomy, pour it over a rock-solid myth of British imperialism and you’ve got the biggest film franchise ever.

I interrupted Neville Quinlan—the NQ of NQ Arbuckle—in the midst of a chilli lunch.

From an encounter with dolphins to a run-in with drug-sniffing dogs, Plants and Animals stayed true to their name during their first North American tour this fall.

On August 7, 1974, with the help of a few accomplices, an optimistic, puckish young Frenchman named Phillipe Petit strung a tightrope wire across the 200-foot gap between the World Trade Centre buildings and spent 45 euphoric minutes “dialoguing with the sky”—almost half a kilometre above the ground—until forced to stop by the police who threatened that he would be plucked off the wire by helicopter.

Mysterious in name, Snowblink seems to allude to intricate meanings as some sort of reflection of the band’s penchant for complex and eerie melodies.

Even though Benjamin Nelson rides a very bright, very orange bicycle around the streets of Kingston you probably don’t know him or even his name.

For a young company devoted to creating theatre that is both ecologically sound and thought-provoking, Chaos Theory Theatre Company’s decision to perform Vern Thiessen’s Einstein’s Gift as their second ever production is particularly apt.

Attack in Black are known for their literate and genre-crossing take on rock and roll.

Man, are pornos ever great!

When Woodhands front man Dan Werb informed me we would have to wait a few minutes for drummer Paul Banwatt to conference into our phone interview, I’ll admit I had a moment of anxiety about a potential awkward silence ahead.

We each have a personal and collective history compiled in our memories made up of things like old novels, embarrassing baby clothing and dusty records playing songs of times past.

The artwork for the Cold War Kids’ latest album has a skeleton on the front.

The Bicycles are coming your way and, to paraphrase Freddie Mercury, you should forget all your duties and be there Saturday night at The Grad Club.

When I walked into the Journal house to get cozy with indie-rock musician Matthew Barber, I brought two hot chocolates.

My affair with Queen’s Drama, like most of my affairs, has traditionally been torrid at best and abysmally anticlimactic at worst.