Pack News

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March 14, 2014

Nebraska Wesleyan University

Issue 120
nwupacknews.com

Sweet Sunday night at the

Ashlee McDonald > Photo Editor

So a man walks into

a bar with a turd in his
hand and says to the
bartender, Look what I
almost stepped in, joked
a vocalist in the opening
act while her bandmate
tuned her guitar, making
the crowd laugh and setting the scene for a fun,
playful musical night.
Dear Herman, a tenpiece band including lute
guitar and cello, played
last Sunday night, March
16, as an opening act for
the duo Dresses. Lead
vocals for Dear Herman
are sung by two sisters
who are just as soft spo-

ken and kind as their

songs lead you to believe.
Singer Crystal Davy spoke
to me about being in a
band with her sister Melissa Taylor, saying, Singing with my sister has
brought us closer. Music allows us to tell our
story and we enjoy telling it together. The duo
performed
melancholy
songs with a hauntingly
sweet harmony between
vocalists, but their act
was lifted by playful banter and an overall relaxed
performance.
The nights main act
was a pair from Portland,
Oregon. Dresses played
with a similar sound to

Florence and the Machine or Ingrid Michaelson.

Female
vocalist
Timothy Heller started
out playing ukulele covers and reached out to
her now-bandmate Jared
Maldonado after hearing
some of his music online.
Shortly after that they
started to write and perform together, and the
pair has been working together for two years now.
Their melodically connected voices and strong
drum line had the whole
bar swaying and tapping their feet, including
a group that was full-out
dancing throughout the
show. Their voices com-

plement each other very

well and I would love to
listen to them more, but
I would not watch them
again. They lacked stage
presence, Reveille A&E
editor Taylor Pospisil said
of the duos performance,
the first on a tour to promote their new album
Sun Shy.
While the band had a
great set and the voices
meshed well, the group
didnt have much stage
presence and were somewhat boring to watch:
more crowd integration
and involvement would
have helped the show.
Lead singer Timothy also
seemed shy and filled

with nerves as she took

the stage, often wrapping
her arms around herself
as she sang. Her bandmate Jared was connected to the songs and his
guitar, playing with passion and expression, but
he still didnt have full
command of the room.
Both bands had the
Bourbon
filled
with
sounds everyone should
check out. Dear Herman
will play a few more local
shows and can be found
on Facebook, and Dresses albums are available
on iTunes.

"A Midsummer
Nights
Dream"
is visually stunning!
Ethan Ness > Writer

The Wesleyan Theatre Department has

provided quality and innovative performances
of Shakespeares work
for over a decade under the direction of Jack
Parkhurst and Roger
Cognard. A Midsummer
Nights Dream, which
opened on Thursday,
March 13, kept the tradition going strong with
a performance that was
both theatrically and
emotionally
satisfying.
Under the dramaturgy
of Dr. Roger Cognard, the
performance became al-

most an entire reimagining of the Bards original work.

A battle scene, not
found in the original
script, had been added
to the beginning of the
show. The scene was
strong in setting the
tone for the political
themes that subtly underscore the rest of the
show. Puck, the famous
sprite and assistant to
the fairy king, served as
a narrator for this production, and was played
to the hilt with malicious glee by Cameisha

Artists to watch for:

ducer from Brooklyn.

Bombs and Bottles is
a work of only his creation, which he started
to develop in 2009. His
most recent album titled Tonight has been
called a cohesive set
of songs that paint a
picture of a night on
Ashlee McDonald > Photo Editor the town; from getting
Harrison
Zafrin, ready all the way to
otherwise known as the end of the night
Bombs and Bottles, is by MTV.
an up-and-coming re- A unique mix of eleccording artist and pro- tronic beats and beautiful melodies has cre-

pathetic in his role of

Bottom. The rude mechanicals as a whole
were a wonderfully tight
ensemble,
and
their
(awful) performance of
Pyramus and Thisbe at
the finale left the audience in hysterics. To be
sure, Midsummer was
another worthy entry
to the long line of Wesleyan
Shakespearean
performancesproving
that some dreams never
die.

Cotton.
The changes worked
quite well, overall, although there were a few
instances that showed
that
Shakespeares
words, although flexible,
can be bent to the point
of breaking. (An attempt
to re-envision Titanias
ill-favored romance, for
example, seemed only to
leave the audience bewildered.) As an overall
piece, however, the show
was extremely strong
and, visually, it was absolutely stunning. Each
scene transition was

marked by brief dance

vignettes, and the choreography, done by Staci
Merritt, was highly professional. The graceful,
balletic dances ended up
setting the tone of the
entire night. The lighting
and scenery were highly
evocative and created
an atmosphere that was
undoubtedly magical.
Also of particular note
were Dustin Sutliff, who
was utterly convincing as the swaggering
Demetrius, and Wade
Mumford, who could be
both arrogant and sym-

ated a sound that is

the perfect soundtrack
for any Saturday night.
Zafrin told MTV in a
2012 interview, When
I create my records I
leave room for experimenting with different
sounds. My music is
always evolving from
record to record. I start
with a base electronic
sound and incorporate
elements of many subgenres. This provides
me with the freedom
to create something

new, unheard, and different.

The record Tonight
led to placements in
television shows such
as The Pauly D Show,
The Real L Word, Scrubbing In, and Teen Wolf.
With such success in
its early years, Bombs

and Bottles is bound to

take off.
You can find Zafrins
music on the band
website, bombsandbottles.com. Go ahead and
give them a listen and
let us know what you
think by tweeting us @
NWUREVEILLE.

Contents:
News: 1-3
Opinions: 4-5
Arts & Entertainment:
6-7
Life: 8-12

Horoscopes: 13
Comics: 13
Business: 14-15
Politics: 16-17
Weather: 18
Sports: 18-20