A&E

The Verve — "Forth" By Resham Parikh The Verve has made its comeback. With its new album "Forth," the band has redefined itself and its...

You'd be hard-pressed to find a movie with as much hype surrounding it months before its release as "The Dark Knight." Just when you think the superhero genre has been played out and must rely on witticisms and humor such as in "Iron Man," Jonathon and Christopher Nolan deliver a quite humorless three-hour epic that explores social order and stability more than gunfights and feats of superhuman abilities.

With eyelids pressed tightly together, Thao Nguyen crooned into the microphone while her lips trembled underneath her strong voice. With her left hand, she placed delicate, small fingers across the neck of her guitar, while her right hand slammed a drumstick across the strings.

There is little that Broken Social Scene hasn't done. It has released three albums that are all uniquely blissful and arguably have as much staying power as any band in modern rock not named Radiohead.

Listening to The Hold Steady's fourth album "Stay Positive," one cannot help but draw comparisons to rock predecessors like Bruce Springsteen & the E. Street Band. And while some critics find The Hold Steady's unapologetically classic rock sound to be a blatant rip-off of music from a bygone era, this reviewer begs to differ.

"Guitar Hero: Aerosmith" fails to rock the gaming world as Neversoft's endless sequels roll out.

Imagine band paraphernalia being peddled out of a car trunk, the perfume of familiar beverages in the air and a chocolate box assortment of "scene kids," scruffy plaid wearers and token "you don't look like you go here"-ers, mildly rocking out on a Tuesday night as the sun set. All this at UC Irvine. Who would have expected such a thing?

Sometime in the near, but distant future, the Earth will be filled with trash and the waste built up over the years by humans and monopolizing companies. All human life has evacuated to a spaceship run by robots that excessively feed, entertain and think for them. Meanwhile, back on Earth, trash collectors are hard at work to rid the planet of all its garbage so that humans can return in a timely five years. Unfortunately, this supposed five-year plan has extended to 700 years, and while humans have long forgotten about life on Earth, all the trash collectors have rusted away or shut down, except for one.

When Chris Martin isn't on a crusade for the betterment of mankind, he plays in a little band called Coldplay. His band makes music that will solve all your problems, or at least repeat them for you with a pretty little backdrop.

The game industry rarely sees gems that can be classified as masterpieces. "Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots" is, unquestionably, one of those scarcities.

As record sales have been steadily declining since the birth of file-sharing programs around the turn of the millennium, it's no secret that the music industry is in a dire position. Coming face to face with the reality that older, traditional models catered toward selling a mass number of records aren't quite working anymore, records label are desperately trying to find new ways to bring in revenue. But this past week has been an anomaly of sorts for the record industry and has given label executives renewed optimism that record buyers still exist.

Reviews: Beck's "Modern Guilt" and Sigur Rós' "Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust"