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Phosphorescent: Certainly the booking I’m getting asked by friends to sneak them in the most, this is an easy highlight of the city’s first big music fest of 2025.
A big indie band in the big-beard, early millennium era of Palace Music, Iron + Wine, etc., the band’s majordomo Matthew Houck hit a definite height with the impossibly wistful Song for Zula, a magical example of something being perfectly sad and energizing at the same time — a little like love.
Opening up, local heroes The Hearts, who just released their best album yet, and the pairing in this setting will make for probably the dreamiest moments of this downtown adventure fest, which continues through Sunday.
Saddles of the Silver Screen: Meanwhile, over in the wonderful world of the Winspear, Enrico Lopez-Yañez conducts the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra in this energetic trail ride through the music of the great cinematic westerns!
Yellowstone, The Lone Ranger, Annie Get Your Gun, Silverado, The Magnificent Seven, High Noon, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and many more thrilling themes will be backed by singer Tyler Hamilton and both All Points West Chamber Choir and Greenwood Singers.
I would say dressing up in western tack is pretty appropriate here, though you would be asked to leave your horse at the door. Three concerts too, yee haw!
Nope (2022): Jordan Peele has quickly ascended to the Hitchcock-Cronenberg level of innovation and pathos in his three films, Get Out, Us and Nope — the last of which is a brilliant examination of the pursuit and avoidance of being seen, down to its antagonist essentially being a giant camera that eats people alive.
Truly unnerving, this one’s definitely worth staring at on the big screen if you missed its initial run.