“When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That S— Gold”
Rhymesayers
2008
It’s great when the promo copy of an album you’ve been waiting months for shows up at the radio station, and it turns out to be good. It’s even better when it exceeds your expectations. Atmosphere have always been a verbose duo—their rapping is explosive and in-your-face. “Lemons” isn’t. Most of their music on this album isn’t sampled. Plenty of live drums and bass, and some emotion-evoking acoustic guitar and jazz piano drive this album in a minimalist way. Listening to the album in a friend’s car led me to say, “this album is like The Whitest Boy Alive of hip-hop.” Atmosphere have calmed down and made an album that makes you think and feel. Every word, chord, note and beat is a testament to the power music holds over the listener.
— Brian Smith
Old school Spanish animator Cyril Pedrosa flexes his cartooning muscles in “Three Shadows,” his debut black-and-white comic from the marvelous First Second Press, which specializes in European imports. The book is a fatalistic adventure that pits a father torn from his idyllic, pastoral life by inevitable forces. Pedrosa’s gorgeous, moody dry-brush illustrates his struggle with a vast, complicated world and the turmoil in his own heart in order to save his young son from three ever-present, grim figures bent on taking him away. The reader is given flashes of several lives without resolution, painting a world of people who care for, disregard and generally take advantage of one another. A desperate mother and daughter are turned away by a corrupt official, a ship’s boson worries about his jacket and a slave stages a bloody mutiny, all acting as an unsentimental backdrop to the heartbreaking central story arc about the struggle against the inevitable and loving the brief life we have. “Three shadows” represents the best of the spectacular comics scene in Europe, storytelling with grace, power and a deep emotional core, told with breathtaking simplicity in the images.
— Michael Jewell
Bacchus Wine Lounge
There’s a new bar in town and it’s blowing the bars on Congress Street right out of the water. Bacchus Wine Lounge is a slightly upscale bar situated at 102 E. Liberty St., right under the monstrous Drayton Tower. It has a cool mix of black leather and steel, and serves 45 different types of wine by the glass, everything from basic Cabernets to Veuve Clicquot champagne, as well as the usual mix of beer and liquor. Unlike most of the other bars in Savannah, this one isn’t saturated in smoke, everyone dresses comfortably but well (most had the whole New York, dress-in-all-black thing going on), and you don’t have to stand five people deep at the bar yelling out drink orders hoping you’ll get one 10 minutes later. They even have an oval screen hanging down in the middle of the room playing chapters from the TV series “Planet Earth,” so you can watch things fly and fight and feed while you chill out.
— Stephanie Saunders
