Month: March 2021

This morning, BBC Radio 1 hosts Scott Mills and Chris Stark finished their 24-hour LOL-A-Thon, a benefit event from Comic Relief that ended up raising £507,089 (around $700,000) for the cause. They crammed a lot of activities into their time on the air, including a series of “Unexpected Song Challenge” performance, for which they tasked artists to bust out a cover that’s, well, unexpected.

Among the participants was Finneas, who sat in front of a piano and turned Britney Spears’ classic “Oops!… I Did It Again” into a lovely ballad.

The hosts were overwhelmed by the response to the event. Stark wrote, “Thankyou so so much. I’m so happy that together we could raise so much money for @comicrelief. Your support has been unreal. I’ll never forget this. Thankyou x.” Mills also noted, “Half a million pounds raised for @comicrelief! Thank you so much! We never imagined we would raise this much money, especially during this time. You are all amazing!! Happy birthday @Chris_Stark time for some sleep!”

Meanwhile, Finneas has a big weekend ahead, as he and his sister Billie Eilish are up for a handful of Grammys. “Everything I Wanted” is nominated for Record Of The Year, Song Of The Year, and Best Pop Solo Performance, while “No Time To Die” is nominated for Best Song Written For Visual Media.

Check out Finneas’ cover above.

It’s usually pretty cool when a rap act gets a collectible that isn’t just the standard T-shirt, vinyl, or non-fungible token version of their sex tape. For instance, there are a lot of nice vinyl toys out there for legends of rap like The Notorious BIG or Run-DMC, and some newer rappers have even gotten in on the action, like Rico Nasty. The latest act to commemorate a musical moment with a piece of beautifully-molded plastic is Flatbush Zombies, who teamed up with Incendium to offer a pack of frankly awesome action figures celebrating the fifth anniversary of their debut album.

The set interprets the trio as five-inch figures with 10 points of articulation and personalized accessories based on the David Nakayama-designed cover of 3001: A Laced Odyssey. Only 3,001 of each figure has been made, ensuring their collector’s item status someday down the road — without a password or undue negative impact on the environment, no less. Yes, that was another shot at NFTs because I think you’re all nuts for spending millions of dollars on computer code.

Incendium CEO Llexi Leon credits the project to Flatbush Zombies’ “incredible aesthetic,” and calls it “a blast to revisit David Nakayama’s incredible artwork to their debut album and bring the trio straight off the page for our latest release.”

You can check out the set here.

In 2018, Nico Walker published his debut novel that he’d written in prison, Cherry, the semi-autobiographical tale of an unnamed narrator who, like Walker, became a decorated medic during the Iraq War, abused opiates to treat his PTSD, and then turned to robbing banks to support his habit. This backstory is relevant because the full context of how this story came to be has a natural arc, one that the Russo Brothers’ movie adaptation doesn’t entirely deliver. It’s a big, beautiful tragedy that offers alienation without much edification.

Cherry the movie, with script by Angela Russo-Otstot and Jessica Goldberg, uses a bank robbery as a framing device. We see our narrator, played by Tom Holland, robbing a bank, and then rewind to discover how he got there. Returning to 2003 for chapter one (the story is broken up into five chapters, introduced in title cards) we meet a bright, middle-class Ohio guy whose biggest issue seems to be that he feels too deeply. “It’s not that I’m dumb to the beauty of things,” Holland narrates, over a shot of Fall leaves, “it’s just that I take all the beautiful things to heart, and then they fuck my heart till I about die from it.”

From Kurt Cobain’s stomach pain to James Frey’s “pain pain pain pain” to half of Naked Lunch, that the addict is uniquely attuned to the world’s beauty and cruelty has long been a staple of the recovery memoir. Cherry is so otherwise unique to its time, place, and protagonist that it’s a little disappointing to see it built on this same stock foundation.

Yet the purplish prose does fit the Russo Brothers’ romantic, maximalist approach, utilizing every trick in the cinematic toolbox — slow-motion, voiceover, needle drops, changing aspect ratios, impressionistic landscapes and cartographic overhead establishing shots. In a year that’s given us a surfeit of ultra-Important Dramas based on plays, composed of static shots of drab interiors, the Russo Brothers’ bright, bold, unabashedly cinematic pulp is refreshing. They’re trying hard to make this look pretty and not trying to disguise it. “A film that’s nice to look at” is a basic goal too often overlooked.

One day during English class at their unnamed college, Holland’s character meets Emily, played by Ciara Bravo, his college crush cum white whale turned tragic attraction, who wears a small white ribbon around her neck as a choker like a human Christmas present. After initially blowing it, Holland’s character woos her while rolling hard on ecstasy at a party. He cries after they have sex for the first time and she deadpans, “I guess I have a thing for weak guys.”

Cherry certainly has that whiff of the overearnest about it, which will probably be enough to earn it negative reviews. But this is, after all, a movie about young love, and Bravo is brilliant, the perfect mix of idealized innocence and wry cynicism, a perfectly overwhelming and irresistible attraction for our naive narrator.

While the characters don’t mention the setting much, Cherry is firmly grounded in time and place. It isn’t strictly about rust belt dysfunction, at least not in the way that Holland’s last (and fantastic) performance as a wide-eyed Ohioan in The Devil All The Time was, but decaying American Empire is Cherry‘s ever-present backdrop. The screwed-up side characters, these orphans of a failing system, are some of its best bits. Expert weirdo Michael Gandolfini and Forrest Goodluck with a wonky eye play two of Holland’s delinquent friends. Michael Rispoli from The Deuce gets a memorable cameo as a drunk ex-con at a restaurant, who keeps babbling about no one having the balls “put a gun to the guy’s head and BLOW HIS BRAINS OUT,” before our protagonist drives him home.

Stylistically, Cherry is a joy to watch. It’s dynamic, vivid, gorgeous, and it moves. Eventually, it moves to a weird place, but before it does, most impressively, it feels like young love. That young love inspires bad decisions, and those bad decisions lead to bad situations, and those bad situations lead to more bad decisions. This inexorable downward spiral is poetic and tragic, but maybe a little too slick, in a way that turns the trauma it seeks to describe into surface clichés. The characters start to lose agency as they stumble from one worst-case scenario to the next, and somewhere along the line, Cherry stops feeling like a tale and starts feeling like a cautionary tale, something you tell kids to keep them from trying drugs or joining the army.

Cherry perhaps doesn’t dig deep enough, such that even at two hours plus, something about the ending feels rushed or false. The epilogue, shot in slow-motion montage set to swelling strings, feels like an attempt to substitute style for real resolution in a way that the rest of the movie tricks don’t. It manages to feel paradoxically like they’re yadda yadda-ing through the last bit, but also doing it really slowly.

Still, even if Cherry isn’t a ringing success in the end, it’s hard not to feel like the Russo Brothers were at least attempting something special here. And this ambitious creative failure is worth its weight in modest successes.

‘Cherry’ hits Apple+ March 12th. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.

The Grammys are coming up this weekend, and aside from awards being handed out, the other major component of the show is the performances. Taylor Swift is among the artists participating on that front, and while she is remaining mostly tight-lipped about her upcoming performance, she did share one detail about it.

In a teaser video, Swift said, “The one thing I can tell you about my Grammy performance that isn’t highly confidential is that my Grammy performance includes my collaborators Aaron Dessner and Jack Antonoff, which is really exciting, because this has been an adventure that the three of us have gone on since the very beginning of quarantine and lockdown. And, you know, we’ve only gotten to be together in the same room once. And so, this is really awesome to get to be together with them again. We’re quarantining in the same house for the whole week, we’re tested every day, so it’s just really exciting, honestly, to play music with your collaborators. That’s something that I will never, ever take for granted again.”

Swift has a number of nominations this year, including a pair of them in the major categories: Folklore is up for Album Of The Year and “Cardigan” is up for Song Of The Year.

Before Steven and Ian can jump into the latest all-mailbag episode of Indiecast, they must address the story of Mumford And Sons temporarily parting ways with their banjo player Winston Marshall after he came under fire for praising known right-wing agitator Andy Ngo in a social media post. Mumford has killed one of his sons.

This week’s mailbag is the most interesting collection of listener comments yet, with a wide range of questions. Topics covered include the sexism that is inherent when classifying music by genre, critical re-evaluation of under-appreciated records, and British press lauding post-punk acts like Fontaines DC and Idles.

In this week’s Recommendation Corner, Cohen is plugging the new self-titled LP from Boston quartet Really From. Hyden, on the other hand, is enjoying Heaven And Holy, the latest from Painted Shrine, the collaborative project of Jeremy Earl (Woods) and Glenn Donaldson (Skygreen Leopards, The Reds, Pinks & Purples).

New episodes of Indiecast drop every Friday. Listen to Episode 29 on Apple Podcasts and Spotify below, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts here. Stay up to date and follow us on Instagram and Twitter. We also recently launched a visualizer for our favorite Indiecast moments. Check those out here.

After teasing the plan last week, HBO Max is moving ahead with its plan to offer a lower subscription price through an ad-supported plan that will launch in June. The new plan, with a price point currently under wraps, will be presented to investors as part of the burgeoning streaming service’s aggressive push to bring in more new subscribers after the May 2020 launch. The service picked up steam in December when the simultaneous theatrical and streaming release of Wonder Woman 1984 nearly doubled its subscribers. That hybrid release strategy, which has stirred up considerable controversy amongst filmmakers like Christopher Nolan and Denis Villeneuve, put HBO Max so ahead of schedule that it’s now raising it subscriber target for 2025 to 120 to 150 million. Via Deadline, which reports word from AT&T:

The new subscriber target is a significant bump from the range of 75 million to 90 million initially put forward by the company in October 2019. As of the end of 2020, it was at 41.5 million when combined with traditional HBO. The number of subscribers to HBO who had activated their HBO Max subscriptions stood at 17.2 million.

Clearly, HBO Max is liking the number it’s seeing thanks to Warner Bros. releasing its entire 2021 film slate on the streaming service, and the new lower price plan is sure to attract more users. “If we can wake up and use price and be able to kind of invent and do things elegantly through advertising to reduce the price of the service, I think that’s a fantastic thing for fans,” WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar told investors last week.

(Via Deadline)

Back in 2019, BTS’ dedicated fanbase, the ARMY, held out hope that the South Korean group would be recognized for the then-upcoming 2020 Grammy Awards. Given what the “Bangtan Boys” have to offer — a culturally-transcendent combination of popularity, artistry, and musical facility — seeing them listed among the honorees would have been apropos. However, their omission from the nomination pool prompted their followers and fellow artists to voice their disdain. (Collaborator Halsey wrote on Twitter, “BTS deserved many nominations…the US is so far behind on the whole movement.”)

Instead of The Recording Academy opting for a deja vu moment, fans of the skilled septet were able to breathe easy when the 2021 nominations were announced last November. BTS is named alongside Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift and more as nominees in the Best Pop Duo/Group Performance category, thanks to their song “Dynamite.” If they win on March 14, they will be the first South Korean group to achieve this feat. (In 1992, coloratura soprano Sumi Jo became the first South Korean artist to win a Grammy, followed by record engineer Byeong Joon Hwang in 2015.) A foreign act with this particular mainstream nomination — especially one with a pull as strong as BTS — is colossal. Win or lose, there are multiple factors bolstering the moment’s gravity.

Based on investigations into obstacles faced before the implementation of The Recording Academy’s Diversity & Inclusion Task Force in 2018, “marginalization of certain ethnicities into specific roles [and] music genres” was a major issue not long ago. Since then, several Asian-American musicians have been honored by the Recording Academy. R&B musician H.E.R, who proudly identifies as half-Filipina, has won two Grammys and is up for three wins at the upcoming ceremony. Jhene Aiko, who is of Japanese descent on her mother’s side, has three 2021 noms, including Album Of The Year. Korean-American electronic/hip-hop deejay Tokimonsta was nominated for the Best Dance/Electronic Album award in 2019.

Yet, the Grammys’ acknowledgement of artists native to East and Southeast Asia, like BTS, Blackpink, BIGBANG, and 2NE1, has been few and far between, despite their documented success, unparalleled popularity, and obvious musical and performance skills. Given K-Pop’s saturation of the western market within the past few years — from BTS’ reign over the Billboard charts, to Blackpink’s 2019 Coachella performance, to collaborations with Grammy-winning artists like Lady Gaga and Cardi B — ignoring these artists would mean the Academy is ignoring the progression of music’s direction.

But it’s clear that there are still implicit reservations from the Academy with honoring these acts. “Dynamite” is a huge hit — it debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, was listed as one of 2020’s best songs by several outlets, and has been featured in major brand campaigns. It’s also the band’s first entirely English song. When BTS, who are unapologetically true to their roots, garners recognition for their talents at this level only after the dilution of their culture, it shows that there is still so much work to be done. Especially given the xenophobic, anti-Asian hate crimes occurring throughout the world as of late, it’s important to The Recording Academy to support artists regardless of their assimilation to our culture in order to fit our levels of “comfort” with theirs.

Outside of what BTS’ nomination and potential win could do for the future of Asian artists, this victory would also be huge for boybands in general, who are often cast out from Grammy consideration. Judging by the unclear standards of what Grammy voters gravitate to sonically and artistically, one may infer that the Academy’s palate is too “dignified,” rendering boybands’ catalogues somehow unworthy of consideration.

’80s and ’90s boybands such as New Kids On The Block, Backstreet Boys, and N*SYNC have never won at the Grammys, despite nominations earned during the height of their reigns. Additionally, One Direction was never considered for any Grammys, yet former member Harry Styles is up for three awards this year as a solo entity. Does the popularity of boybands negate appreciation for their artistry? It shouldn’t, especially since popularity and talent are not mutually-exclusive entities. If rewarding — hell, even nominating — a boyband is a stab at the Grammys’ credibility, the Academy may want to take a look into the past (and present) at some of the nominees, winners, and snubs of the annual event, and then think about what (or who) is truly diminishing their credibility. (Additionally, nominating boybands for Grammy Awards could potentially help The Grammys’ decreasing ratings, which have seen a steady decline in recent years.)

All things considered, the fact is that there’s only a one-in-five chance that BTS goes home with a win on Sunday. If they go home empty handed, there really is always next year. This major loss also wouldn’t cancel out their impact, which exceeds musical, cultural, racial, and even economic barriers. (They’d also be in good company, as Queen, Bob Marley, and their collaborator Nicki Minaj have significantly influenced music and culture without Grammy gold of their own). Although, that’s not to say a win wouldn’t be just as sweet. The group’s Kim Nam-joon — known by his stage name RM — mentioned in an interview that winning a Grammy Award would be “the final part of the whole American journey.”

Regardless of The Recording Academy’s need for continued growth and diversity, BTS’ 2021 Grammy nomination opens the door for a firmer understanding of the magnitude of foreign musical acts outside of our American bubble. While a potential win would prove BTS’ supremacy of the global music landscape, their impact will always resonate, and has undeniably shifted the tides for years to come.

Irish whiskey is an interesting beast. It’s very unique — triple distilled and often a blend of grain and malt spirits — while somehow still feeling familiar to lovers of other whiskey styles. Some Irish whiskeys taste like a bridge between Ireland and Scotland. Others seem to span Ireland and Kentucky. Of course, there are plenty of Irish whiskey expressions that speak for themselves and feel truly one-of-a-kind, but you’re still dealing with recognizable flavor notes.

To help you better understand the wide-ranging style that is Irish whiskey, I decided to blind taste test 12 distinct bottles from around the Emerald Isle. Yes, several of these are from Midleton Irish Distillers. That distillery is very hard to get away from when it comes to Irish whiskey. That being said, I tried to make this as wide-ranging and complete as possible. I even included a Poitin (Ireland’s answer to a white dog or un-aged whiskey).

This blind tasting is very simple. It’s all about the taste. Yes, some of these bottles have an advantage because I know them well, but I haven’t really tasted them side-by-side like this before — a blind taste test is always good for suprises.

Let’s get into it!

Part 1: The Taste

Taste 1:

Tasting Notes:

There’s a dark chocolate note that leads to clear vanilla and toffee. This feels very sherried with notes of holiday spice and nuts leading towards an almost cedar note. The end is creamy and smooth.

It’s really nice.

Taste 2:

Tasting Notes:

This greets you with a fragrant perfume next to rum-soaked oak. There’s a fruitiness that feels like … banana? A light maltiness dominates the taste with hints at rummy spice and rum-soaked raisins.

In the end, my note was “nice and light.”

Taste 3:

Tasting Notes:

Woah. This is a departure. You’re greeted with a wet leather that’s almost like raw steak (it reminds me of Buffalo Trace, actually). That gives way to maltiness and vanilla that builds towards vanilla ice cream with a touch of spice and dark chocolate malt.

This is, by far, the most interesting dram so far.

Taste 4:

Tasting Notes:

This opens with a spicy stewed apple that leads toward Maraschino cherry stems. The taste is so soft with hints at nuts, Christmas cake spice, and dark fruits with a touch of black pepper. The end is surprisingly short but full of spice and apple peels.

This is very good. I want more.

Taste 5:

Tasting Notes:

Ah-ha! A little smoke. Hello, Connemara. The smoke here is earthy — like a light, wet moss — with hints of apple pie underneath. The taste is honey-laden, with a crisp smoke reminiscent of a cold fall day and wet leaves burning. There are clear vanilla and dark spice notes under the smoke.

In the end, this was a really nice change of pace and surprisingly subtle, for a peated whiskey. Would it stand up to a Scotch from Islay? I’m not so sure. It’s light.

Taste 6:

Tasting Notes:

This is thin on the nose and palate. There’s a note of spicy rum that’s slightly woody and vanilla-forward. The end is malty more so than anything else, with a hint more of rum raisins, rum-soaked cellar wood, and a wisp of dry tobacco leaf.

This felt thin and a bit … singular.

Taste 7:

Tasting Notes:

This opens with a clear dose of Christmas spices, nuts, and red berries with a dash of creamy vanilla. The taste is sherry plum that’s almost jammy and spiced with cloves and cinnamon. The end is long, velvety, and full of that sherry.

Classic.

Taste 8:

Tasting Notes:

Wow! Apple candy dominates the nose on this one. It’s almost like a bright green apple Jolly Rancher. The taste veers completely away from that vibe, with a dark chocolate maltiness with hints of creamy honey. The end is short but sweet with a return to that apple candy.

Was this aged in apple cider barrels?

Taste 9:

Tasting Notes:

Apple again. But this time it’s more muted and kind of like apple cores or seeds with a malty edge. The taste is like malt grains soaked in an egg custard with a touch of vanilla and nutmeg. But it’s really those malts that come through, with a slight alcohol burn and a mineral water feel.

This is unaged whiskey, so it’s no surprise it’s very malty.

Taste 10:

Tasting Notes:

This is spicy/sweet like stewed pears with a touch of vanilla pod. The vanilla is super creamy and that spicy stewed pear note carries on in the taste with dry cedar end and a touch of tobacco chew and buzz.

This is the good stuff!

Taste 11:

Tasting Notes:

You’re greeted with the clearest sense of pencil shavings with a hint of the lead in there. That refines to a dry pine note next to a slight dried floral note and some citrus pith. The spice gets woody like cinnamon sticks or clove buds next to a sweetness I can’t quite put my finger on.

This is really interesting and enticing.

Taste 12:

Tasting Notes:

There it is! Citrus, wet malts, and super light. Hello, Jameson. I missed you. There’s light vanilla to the body with a hint of spice and sherry oak. The end is short and sweet and leaves me wanting more.

It’s surprising how thin this is, compared to everything else.

Part 2: The Ranking

12. March Hare Poitin (Taste 9)

ABV: 40%

Average Price: $30

The Whiskey:

This unaged whiskey is 100 percent malted barley. It’s produced according to a century’s old recipe and cut with local water to cool it down and make it drinkable.

Bottom Line:

I mean, was anything else going to be last? It’s not that this is undrinkable in any way. It’s just not for me and tastes like a distillery smells. Not a bad thing, if you’re into it.

11. Jameson (Taste 12)

ABV: 40%

Average Price: $30

The Whiskey:

This is a classic Irish whiskey. Triple distilled. Blended from barley and grain whiskies. Aged for at least four years. That makes this the gold-standard of entry-point Irish whiskey.

Bottom Line:

I couldn’t get past the thinness of this dram today. I really liked it, it just didn’t stand up to the other tastes.

10. Bushmills 10 Single Malt (Taste 8)

ABV: 40%

Average Price: $50

The Whiskey:

Northern Ireland’s Old Bushmills is a legendary distillery. This whiskey is very similar to a Scotch single malt, in that it’s 100 percent barley whiskey that’s aged in a combo of ex-bourbon and ex-sherry. It’s then vatted, proofed, and bottled in Bushmill’s iconic square bottle.

Bottom Line:

It was really hard to get beyond that apple candy note. It was very saccharine and stayed on my senses for a while. Still, I can see how people love this for exactly that aspect.

9. Teeling Small Batch (Taste 6)

ABV: 46%

Average Price: $40

The Whiskey:

Teeling was the first distillery to reopen in Dublin after nearly a century of tough times for Irish whiskey. The craft distillery ages its juice bourbon barrels before transferring that whiskey to Central American rum casks. Those barrels are then batched, proofed, and bottled in Teeling’s big, dark bottle.

Bottom Line:

This felt like a very entry-level whiskey. There wasn’t a lot of “there” there, but it still tasted like something worth sipping in a highball or in a cocktail.

8. Tullamore D.E.W. Caribbean Rum Cask Finish (Taste 2)

ABV: 43%

Average Price: $30

The Whiskey:

While a lot of Irish whiskey touches on bourbon and sherry oak, Tullamore takes that a step further by adding in some rum oak. This expression is finished in Demarara rum casks for a final nuance of flavor and depth.

Bottom Line:

I didn’t know where to place this. It was tasty and malty but sort of got lost in the shuffle. I definitely want to revisit it but maybe more as a cocktail mixer.

7. Jameson Black Barrel (Taste 1)

ABV: 40%

Average Price: $40

The Whiskey:

This is Jameson’s take on double barreling. The whiskey is first matured in old bourbon barrels. That juice is then transferred to another bourbon barrel that’s been doubly charred with a deep alligator skin char. Those barrels are then batched and proofed all the way down to 80 proof.

Bottom Line:

I went back and forth on this being in the top three or not. It really stood out but just didn’t shine as brightly as the next whiskeys on this list.

6. Powers John’s Lane (Taste 3)

ABV: 46%

Average Price: $70

The Whiskey:

This is a classic Irish whiskey. The juice is aged in a combination of ex-bourbon and ex-sherry casks for at least 12 years. Those barrels are then married based on their distinct flavor profiles to create this special whiskey.

Bottom Line:

This is where things get interesting. This really stood out early and remained in my thoughts as I tasted the other whiskeys. That says something. It’s unique and very easy to drink.

5. Connemara Peated Single Malt (Taste 5)

ABV: 40%

Average Price: $45

The Whiskey:

Connemara is Ireland’s answer to peated single malt from Scotland. The base of Irish barley is malted with local peat, adding a distinctly Irish terroir to the whiskey.

Bottom Line:

This was such a nice departure. It was smoky, for sure, but really light and subtle. I’m curious to taste test this against some peaty scotch now.

4. Roe & Co. (Taste 10)

ABV: 45%

Average Price: $35

The Whiskey:

This distillery was opened in the old powerhouse on the Guinness brewing campus. The whiskey is built with Guinness craft at its base. It’s then aged in ex-bourbon casks before those are married, proofed, and bottled.

Bottom Line:

Did this benefit from being tasted directly after the unaged whiskey? Maaaaaaaaybe. It’s still really well crafted. I tried it again a while later and it stood up as a solid on the rocks sipper.

Final answer: I stand by it ranking so high.

3. Method And Madness Single Grain (Taste 11)

ABV: 46%

Average Price: $70

The Whiskey:

This is Midleton Irish Distiller’s craft whiskey venture. The single grain spirit is matured in unused Spanish oak and old bourbon casks. That’s small-batched and proofed with that soft County Cork water and bottled in a throwback art-deco bottle.

Bottom Line:

Goddamn, this was interesting. This is one of those sippers that feels really unique to what it is and nothing else.

2. Redbreast 12 (Taste 7)

ABV: 40%

Average Price: $68

The Whiskey:

Redbreast 12 is a classic example of Irish whiskey. The juice is aged for 12 years in both ex-bourbon and ex-sherry oak. It’s then batched, proofed, and bottled in an iconic stubby bottle.

Bottom Line:

This is a real quality sip of whiskey, in general. On this tasting, it reminded me of a really well-made bourbon in the ten to 12-year range.

1. Red Spot (Taste 4)

ABV: 46%

Average Price: $140

The Whiskey:

This is a highwater mark of Irish whiskey distilling and blending. The whiskey is aged for 15 years in a combination of ex-bourbon, ex-sherry, and ex-Marsala casks. The spirit is then married and proofed down to a very approachable 92 proof.

Bottom Line:

There was just no getting past how beautiful this whiskey tastes. It’s complex yet welcoming. It’s subtle but bold in its flavors. This is the whiskey that, by far, I want to revisit immediately.

Part 3: Final Thoughts

I have to say, ranking basically ten through three was really hard. I went back and forth a lot. Each dram had its own unique moments that enticed me. All of that being said, the top two were super clear from the moment I tasted them.

I was surprised classic Jameson ended up so low. But, in the end, it was the lightest and offered the least in the taste department against all these other whiskeys.

I was also pleasantly surprised by Roe & Co. It’s a very approachable whiskey that keeps popping back into my mind, even a day later. I’ll definitely be trying it in a few cocktails as St. Paddy’s nears.

On the one-year anniversary of the COVID-19 outbreak officially being deemed a pandemic (yay?), every living former-president appeared in an ad encouraging Americans to get vaccinated — every living former-president except one. Try to guess who! “Maybe his invite got lost in the mail… because he destroyed the postal service!” The Late Show host Stephen Colbert joked during Thursday’s episode. “Ol’ 45 was left out of the POTUS PSA party, but he did put out his own statement about the vaccine.”

In a pathetic (even by his standards) statement, Donald Trump wrote that he hopes “everyone remembers when they’re getting the COVID-19 (often referred to as the China Virus) Vaccine, that if I wasn’t President, you wouldn’t be getting that beautiful ‘shot’ for 5 years, at best, and probably wouldn’t be getting it at all. I hope everyone remembers!”

Colbert called the statement “unbelievably sad” and “pathetic” and wondered “how did we even find out about this statement? He can’t tweet this stuff! Did he just print it out and staple it to telephone poles around Palm Beach? He might as well have just released ‘Ex-prez will take credit — and teach you guitar!’ We banned him from Twitter. Can we ban him from paper? Is that possible?” You can watch the clip above.

Nearly a week after Piers Morgan bashed Meghan Markle over her Oprah interview, the fallout continues, and this latest development has to do with Piers being very happy to have the support of Tucker Carlson and Sharon Osbourne. Piers had already thanked his haters and doubled down on his refusal to believe Meghan after she admitted feeling suicidal during her time with the British Royal Family. She had also revealed that an unidentified member of the Windsors had made racist remarks about her and Prince Harry’s son, yet Piers remained unconvinced, even storming off live TV and leaving Good Morning Britain after being called out for his one-sided beefing.

Sharon Osbourne, however, empathized with Piers. The Talk host tweeted, “I am with you. I stand by you. People forget that you’re paid for your opinion and that you’re just speaking your truth.” Piers replied, “I love Sharon Osbourne because she always stays true to herself. She knew she would get abused by the woke brigade for tweeting this.” Sharon then defended Piers on The Talk, where she clashed with co-host Sheryl Underwood, who questioned why she was giving “validation or safe haven” to Piers’ racist remarks. To that, Sharon declared that her own tears were validated because “I very much feel like I’m about to be put in the electric chair because I have a friend, who many people think is a racist, so that makes me a racist?” she added. “What does it gotta do with me?”

Well, the backlash was fierce, and Sharon has now apologized for what she now realizes were insensitive remarks about race while essentially saying that she “panicked, felt blindsided” and said the wrong thing.

“After some reflection, after sitting with your comments & sitting with my heart I would like to address the discussion on The Talk this past Wednesday. I have always been embraced with so much love & support from the black community & I have deep respect & love for the black community,” Osbourne wrote. “To anyone of color that I offended and/or to anyone that feels confused or let down by what I said, I am truly sorry. I panicked, felt blindsided, got defensive & allowed my fear & horror of being accused of being racist take over.”

To that, This Is Why I Resist author Dr. Shola Mos-Shogbamimu — who initially clashed with Piers on Good Morning Britain earlier this week when all of this chaos began — has come for Sharon. While accusing Sharon of “weaponizing your whiteness & White woman’s tears with such arrogance,” Shola is advising Sharon to publicly apologize to Sheryl, too.

The Talk should feel pretty awkward today. And yes, all of this began after Piers Morgan decided to whine (among other things), “I wouldn’t believe Meghan Markle if she gave me a weather report,” thereby prompting over 41,000 complaints about on-air violations of “harm and offense” rules. Piers Morgan, spreader of chaos.