Mountain Views News          Saturday, June 14, 2014

Mountain Views-News Saturday, June 14, 2014 
B2 ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT Mountain Views-News Saturday, June 14, 2014 
B2 ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT 
SEAN’S SHAMELESS 
REVIEWS: 


By Sean Kayden 

BROKEN RECORDS 

“Weights and Pulleys” is the third LP from Scottish folk infused indie 
rock group, Broken Records. The six-piece band has often been compared 
to Arcade Fire, The Editors, and the raw intensity of Bruce Springsteen. 
The similarities drawn from those bands are rooted within the anthemic 
songwriting Broken Records overtly display. The band’s known for swapping instruments during 
live performances that consist of a violin, a cello, and an accordion as well as standard equipment. 
While Arcade Fire has consistently changed their music styles (for better or worse) and catapulted 
into a mainstream rock act, Broken Records keep plugging away with their solid yet reliable sound. 
On the contrary, the band is honing in on their trademark sound with “Weights and Pulleys,” which 
marks the band’s first LP in four years. 

A record such like this is all about what’s in the live performance. There is so much raw, passionate 
energy with nearly every song. Broken Records 
are storytellers that tell deep and richly crafted 
stories. The band has developed a well-rounded 

Artist: Broken Records 

signature resonance. This ultimately provides 

Album: Weights and Pulleys 

them with the essential ingredients to ignite 
their unique tales on fire. From powerful Label: J Sharp Records 
drumbeats, to swirling guitars, and lead singer’s Release Date: May 19th, 2014 
Jamie Sutherland’s brooding vocals, “Weights 
and Pulleys” has a series of highs and lows, but 
no matter where you’re floating in life, you will 
be rapt with all you hear. “Winterless Son,” the best track on “Weights and Pulleys” is too good. It’s 
infused with Springsteen’s uncompromised passion, but it completely intrigues as a Broken Records 
original tune. The arena type rock song will lift up any tired mind that lives a humdrum existence. 
“You’ll Be Lonely (In A Little While)” is absolutely enthralling. The final stretch of the song has the 
group rocking out but with all that is going on, you’re still heavily pulled in. After forty minutes, 
I was ready for another listen. “Weights and Pulleys” may not be groundbreaking, however, I was 
deeply fixated on nearly everything I heard. 

“So Long, So Late” is another solid gem with dominant arrangements and dynamic song writing. I 
believe “Weights and Pulleys” consistency works to the group’s advantage. Instead of having a solid 
single or two with the rest of the songs disappointing after that, Broken Records have crafted a 
piece of work that carries more weight than most rock albums released this year. It’s richly layered, 
uplifting, reflective, and charming to the fullest. “Weights and Pulleys” exhibits a lot of depth and 
good-natured song writing that fans of folk rock, indie rock, and anthem type rock tunes should 
congregate and experience one of the finest rock records of the year. 

Grade: 8.8 out of 10 

Key Tracks: “Winterless Son,” “So Long, So Late,” “You’ll Be Lonely (In A Little While), “I Won’t 
Leave You In The Dark” 

Jeff’s Book Picks By Jeff Brown 

HARD CHOICES by Hillary Rodham Clinton 

Hillary Clinton’s inside account of the crises, choices, and challenges she 
faced during her four years as America’s 67th Secretary of State, and how 
those experiences drive her view of the future.“All of us face hard choices 
in our lives,” She writes at the start of this personal chronicle of years at the 
center of world events. “Life is about making such choices. Our choices and 
how we handle them shape the people we become.”After her 2008 presidential 
run, she expected to return to representing New York in the United States 
Senate. To her surprise, newly elected President Obama, asked her to serve 
as Secretary of State. This memoir is the story of the four extraordinary and 
historic years that followed. .By the end of her tenure, Secretary Clinton had 
visited 112 countries, traveled nearly one million miles, and gained a truly 
global perspective on many of the major trends reshaping the landscape 
of the twenty-first century, from economic inequality to climate change to revolutions in energy, 
communications, and health. Draw-ing on conversations with numerous leaders and experts, 
Secretary Clinton offers her views on what it will take for the United States to compete and thrive 
in an interdependent world. An astute eyewitness to decades of social change, she distinguishes the 
trendlines from the headlines and describes the pro-gress occurring throughout the world, day after 
day. Secretary Clinton’s descriptions of diplomatic con-versations at the highest levels offer readers 
a master class in international relations. A great piece of history. 


HOLLYWOOD TOUGH (Shane Scully Novel) by Stephen J. Cannell 

Detective Shane Scully is back in the good graces of the department, hailed as a hero after bringing 
down a deadly gang of rogue cops . At a glamorous Hollywood party with his wife, Alexa, Shane 
over-hears a famous producer make a remark about the strange deaths of his two ex-wives. Is he 
serious or merely joking around ? This becomes more than just police business, because the party is 
to celebrate the engagement of the producer to Alexa's closest friend. Shane begins to look into this 
heavy-hitter's past. At the same time, he becomes aware of a high profile wiseguy's attempt to control 
Hollywood's unions. He initiates an elaborate sting operation to draw the starstruck wiseguy into 
revealing his real purpose for coming to L.A. Tough, streetwise Scully, who thought he'd seen just 
about everything, is astounded by the distorted egos and total insanity of the movie business, and 
while he struggles to keep his sting operation from spinning out of control, he and Alexa find 
themselves and Shane's teen-aged son, Chooch, involved in something much bigger, something that 
puts all their lives on the line. 

SUSPICION by Joseph Finder 

A new novel from the N.Y. Times bestselling author and "master of the modern thriller." When single 
fa-ther Danny Goodman suddenly finds himself unable to afford the private school his teenage 
daughter adores, he has no one to turn to for financial support. In what seems like a stroke of 
brilliant luck, Danny meets the father of his daughter’s best friend, who also is one of the wealthiest 
men in Boston. Galvin is aware of Danny’s situation and offers a $50,000 loan to help Danny cover 
his daughter’s tuition. Un-comfortable but desperate, Danny takes the money, promising to pay 
Galvin back. What transpires is something Danny never imagined. The moment the money is wired 
into his account, the DEA comes knocking on his door. Danny’s impossible choice: an indictment 
for accepting drug money that he can’t afford to fight in court, or an unthinkably treacherous 
undercover assignment helping the government get close to his new family friend. The drama 
ensues!! 

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55 YEAR OLD FAR SIDE OF THE MOON MYSTERY SOLVED 
THE WORLD AROUND US 
The Man in the Moon appeared when meteoroids struck the Earth-facing side of the Moon creating 
large flat seas of basalt that we see as dark areas called maria. But no “face” exists on the far side of 
the Moon and now, Penn State astrophysicists think they know why. 

“I remember the first time I saw a globe of the Moon as a boy, being struck by how different the far 
side looks,” said Jason Wright, assistant professor of astrophysics. “It was all mountains and craters. 
Where were the maria? It turns out it’s been a mystery since the fifties.” 

This mystery is called the Lunar Far-Side Highlands Problem and dates back to 1959, when the 
Soviet spacecraft Luna 3 transmitted the first images of the far side of the Moon back to Earth. 
Researchers immediately noticed that fewer “seas” or maria existed on this portion of the Moon 
that always faces away from Earth. 

Wright, Steinn Sigurdsson, professor of astrophysics, and Arpita Roy, graduate student in astronomy 
and astrophysics and lead author of the study, realized that the absence of maria, which is due to 
a difference in crustal thickness between the side of the Moon we see and the hidden side, is a 
consequence of how the Moon originally formed. 

The general consensus on the Moon’s origin is that it probably formed shortly after the Earth and 
was the result of a Mars-sized object hitting Earth with a glancing, but devastating impact. This 
Giant Impact Hypothesis suggests that the outer layers of the Earth and the object were flung into 
space and eventually formed the Moon. 

“Shortly after the giant impact, the Earth and the Moon were very hot,” said Sigurdsson. The Earth 
and the impact object did not just melt; parts of them vaporized, creating a disk of rock, magma 
and vapor around the Earth. 

“The Moon and Earth loomed large in each other’s skies when they formed,” said Roy. 

The Moon was 10 to 20 times closer to Earth than it is now, and the researchers found that it quickly 
assumed a tidally locked position with the rotation time of the Moon equal to the orbital period of 
the Moon around the Earth. The same real estate on the Moon has probably always faced the Earth 
ever since. Tidal locking is a product of the gravity of both objects. 

The Moon, being much smaller than Earth, cooled more quickly. Because the Earth and the Moon 
were tidally locked from the beginning, the still hot Earth—more than 2500 degrees Celsius—
radiated towards the near side of the Moon. The far side, away from the boiling Earth, slowly 
cooled, while the Earth-facing side was kept molten, creating a temperature gradient between the 
two halves. 

This gradient was important for crustal formation on the Moon. The Moon’s crust has high 
concentrations of aluminum and calcium, elements that are very hard to vaporize. 

“When rock vapor starts to cool, the very first elements that snow out are aluminum and calcium,” 
said Sigurdsson. 

Composite image of the lunar farside taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter in June 
2009. Note the absence of dark areas. Image: NASA 


Aluminum and calcium would have preferentially condensed in the atmosphere of the cold side of 
the Moon because the nearside was still too hot. Thousands to millions of years later, these elements 
combined with silicates in the Moon’s mantle to form plagioclase feldspars, which eventually moved 
to the surface and formed the Moon’s crust, said Roy. The farside crust had more of these minerals and 
is thicker. 

The Moon has now completely cooled and is not molten below the surface. Earlier in its history, large 
meteoroids struck the nearside of the Moon and punched through the crust, releasing the vast lakes of 
basaltic lava that formed the nearside maria that make up the “man in the Moon.” When meteoroids 
struck the far side of the Moon, in most cases the crust was too thick and no magmatic basalt welled up. 

******* 

MERCURY PASSES IN FRONT OF THE SUN, AS SEEN FROM MARS. NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover 
has imaged the planet Mercury passing in front of the Sun, visible as a faint darkening that moves 
across the face of the Sun. The observations were made on June 3, 2014, from Curiosity’s position inside 
Gale Crater on Mars. 

This is the first transit of the Sun by a planet ever observed from any planet other than Earth, and also 
the first imaging of Mercury from Mars. The observation by the telephoto camera of Curiosity’s two-
eyed Mast Camera instrument is available at http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/video/?id=1309 

You can contact Bob Eklund at: b.eklund@MtnViewsNews.com.