Ethan Essner - The Tufts Daily

Arts

MJ Lenderman is carving his own indie rock legacy with ‘Manning Fireworks’

By Ethan Essner | October 8

The indie rock genre has split into a plethora of spheres. The introspective lyrics and driving rhythms are standard qualities of an indie album. In essence, it has become a more mainstream style — and seemingly broken away from its narrow identity during the 2000s. It’s been a transformative period for the indie scene with many fine takeaways, but what it desperately lacked was an album elevating and fusing the classic identities of the indie albums from previous decades.

Columns

Shut Up and Play the Noise: Yo La Tengo’s ‘And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out’

By Ethan Essner | September 24

Rarely does a band manage to write a collection of songs that cohesively exemplify the entire thesis of an album. Hoboken trio Yo La Tengo gracefully accomplished such a feat on a plethora of occasions. But the tangible gloom of the 2000 album “And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out”is perhaps the greatest display within the band’s catalog.

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Arts

Geordie Greep’s ‘Holy Holy’ is a gratifying work of sound and vision

By Ethan Essner | September 5

As his reputation suggests, former Black Midi frontman, Geordie Greep, has always had a knack for channeling noisy percussion and fuzzy guitar feedback to create a beastly sound. His jarring progressive compositions are only overshadowed by dramatic vocal delivery. Each song can be compared to some theatrical climax one would witness on a Broadway stage. His voice is full of emotion and vibrancy, comparable to a Frank Zappa level of sonorous whimsy. His new work, “The New Sound,” will be his first solo album independent of Black Midi following the band’s announcement of an indefinite hiatus.

Arts

Senior Profile: Carl Svahn brings his love for art, journalism to the Daily and beyond

By Ethan Essner | May 18

Carl Svahn entered Tufts as a first-year in the fall of 2020. With classes held online and COVID-19 restrictions in full effect, Svahn, like many others in his grade, felt isolated, so he began looking for ways to connect with his classmates. A comic book lover, he spent time at Kamikaze in Davis Square, which is where he learned about the opportunity to pursue journalism with the Daily.

Columns

Harmonies in the Limelight: A ‘Dancer in the Dark,’ forever dreaming of singing and dancing in the light

By Ethan Essner | April 5

Lars von Trier emerged as a filmmaker who experimented with intertwining the avant-garde and melodramatic. He and Thomas Vinterberg penned the Dogme 95 manifesto, which outlined a new generation of art house creativity. It called for all camerawork to be handheld, denounced superficial action and prohibited optical work and filters, amongst other rules. Independent films after the 1995 conception of the Dogme 95 movement, especially those from von Trier, were not all strictly a part of the movement but remained mostly inspired by its goals and guidelines. “Breaking the Waves” (1996) is a prominent and majestic example of the style in action. “Dancer in the Dark” (2000) is possibly the strangest example, while also being one of the most remarkable.

Arts

Sufjan Stevens’ ‘Illinoise,’ or, how to enamor an entire audience with hymns and ballets, or, the war for morality, state and sanity, or, an ode to the unabashed joy of being alive

By Ethan Essner | March 27

Such a view is the place from where singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens looks out at a world — cold and complex. It’s full of joy, peril and an untellable delicacy. Bordering Lake Michigan is the heartbeat of the Midwest, Illinois, a place of superheroes, zombies and forsaken love stories. In 2005, Stevens peered at the prairies and penned a 22-song mammoth of an album. It’s a collection of tunes that transcend the term ‘album’ as they fashion the experience of an ‘epic.’ The album reads like a grim, romantic and, at points, sardonic comment on the rich culture of Illinois with the ever-so exclamatory title of “Come On! Feel the Illinoise!”

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Arts

‘Stop Making Sense’ hasn’t lost its luster

By Ethan Essner | March 5

David Byrne walking to the tip of a stage with a six-string and fashioning a world of the utmost rhythm and beauty is one of the most perfect sights. His band, Talking Heads, steadily crafted one of the most organically listenable catalogs in American music history.

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Columns

Harmonies in the Limelight: The waltz, the tragedy and the craze of ‘Annette’

By Ethan Essner | March 1

There’s a satisfying exhale one makes when they experience something that differs from the artistically cliché. With musical cinema, the accepted, and rather trite, notion of what such a film should look like has developed and transformed immensely in the 21st century. Nowadays, there is an infinite ...

Arts

A message from our assistant arts editors

By Annika Pillai, Ethan Essner and Jennifer May | February 22

To celebrate the Daily this week, the Arts section’s new assistant editors describe their experience with the Daily and what it has meant to them.

Arts

Harmonies in the Limelight: Dances, drugs and ‘All That Jazz’

By Ethan Essner | February 16

“It's showtime, folks!” This is Joe Gideon’s morning mantra — reassuring himself that every day would be as indelibly entertaining as the last. Whether or not any performance is on the docket, to Gideon, protagonist of “All That Jazz,” the whole world is a stage. He lives in a setting ...