Sean Fennell

3 weeks ago | floodmagazine.com | Sean Fennell

Where do we fall on Pavement, culturally? I mean, they’re still cool, right? If they are, is it despite or because of their longstanding place as slacker icons to a certain type of indie-rock lifer? Even if Pavement is still cool, has liking—even loving—Pavement become just a bit lame? Or are they only a decidedly uncool person’s idea of a cool band, rendering them lame by association? I love Pavement, even if it is easy to imagine the worst guy in the world sharing that opinion.

3 weeks ago | floodmagazine.com | Sean Fennell

Sufjan StevensCarrie & Lowell [10th Anniversary Edition]ASTHMATIC KITTYSincerity can be such a turnoff—especially our own. Think of an old diary entry, an expulsion of feeling, raw and unmediated. It’s never easy to return to such a thought, no matter how real it felt in the moment, or how far it feels from our present.

1 month ago | floodmagazine.com | Sean Fennell

In the comedy of Tim Robinson, one of two things is usually true: You have one of Robinson’s many characters—oftentimes some form of sad-sack everyman—enduring the perils of a world he doesn’t recognize, or the mundane universe we all acknowledge as normal is interrupted by Robinson as a man for whom even the simplest of human interactions seems helplessly complex and ripe for chaos.

1 month ago | floodmagazine.com | Sean Fennell

There’s a fine line between poetry and nonsense, a line that filmmaker Joel Potrykus has made a point of straddling for years. His films—which include his 2014 breakout Buzzard and, most recently, 2018’s Relaxer—often revolve around angry, disillusioned, immature men circling the drain of their own psyches. Men of not only arrested development, but development on death row, awaiting complete annihilation.

2 months ago | xpn.org | Sean Fennell

Indie-folk is a soft genre with the power to move listeners. Unfortunately, it is also a genre that, in my experience, gets a bit of a bad rap. At its worst, indie-folk can lean a little too far into Starbucks-core background music for its own good. But that is simply the tip of a very large iceberg, the one percent of a style worth exploring much more deeply.