Overrated/Underrated: Saying goodbye to ‘The Nightly Show’ and Olympic streaming woes
UNDERRATED
“The Nightly Show”: Larry Wilmore, we hardly knew you — at least in the context of late-night TV now that this “The Daily Show” counterpart has been canceled by Comedy Central for, among other things, failing to generate enough “shareable content.” Though Wilmore’s show wasn’t perfect, particularly with its uneven track record for correspondents, his perspective during this goofy election year existed nowhere else. However, if we’re lucky, this will yield another show where celebrities will sing and dance for our Facebook amusement.
Ed Harcourt’s “Furnaces”: Somewhat easy to lose in the shuffle amid a brief glut of indie-leaning singer-songwriters in the early to mid ’00s (Badly Drawn Boy, Josh Ritter, etc.), Harcourt has taken a welcome left turn with this album, which features alt-rock era producer Flood and Warpaint drummer Stella Mozgawa. Unafraid to sound ugly, murky or unhinged, “Furnaces” is built on dark electronics and growling, fuzzed-out guitars that offer ample room for Harcourt’s voice to veer between aching or anthemic, spinning haunted stories such as the elegiac “The World Is on Fire.”
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OVERRATED
Twenty One Pilots: The band that resulted when a 311 CD was left in the sun and it congealed into some discarded Imagine Dragons demos, this Ohio duo mixes rock, reggae and something like hip-hop into a polished sound that pairs well with millennial anxiety (the grating “Stressed Out”) and theoretically edgy superhero films (that’s them with some 100 million views for their video from the “Suicide Squad” soundtrack). For all the emoting, it all sounds devoid of humanity, which explains their rise while every other so-called rock band has otherwise vanished from the pop charts.
The Olympics on the Internet: Though we’re on record as firmly in the tank for the athletes and global competition that comprise any given moment during the games, now that the sun is setting on Rio it’s time to recognize that it’s no longer 1992. Though rights agreements may say otherwise, the Olympics don’t belong to a cable company (or the network one may own), and while NBC cameras are everywhere, its streaming app crashes and is a nightmare to navigate. Is a redesign paired with a $30 fee for online access to live and recorded broadcasts too high of a bar for Winter 2018?
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