Review

Swans and Chelsea Wolfe made my two favorite records from last year, and now I’m heading out to see them play a show together.

First time I’ve been frisked at a music venue in NYC. Makes me kinda homesick for Philly.

You know, I bet female musicians just love it when their male fans shout marriage proposals at them onstage.

Loosely based on a true story, The Sapphires is a musical comedy which follows a group of singing Aboriginal Australian women on their 1968 rise to fame. Destined to languish in racially marginalized obscurity in their homeland, the group’s fortunes turn when they’re discovered by alcoholic has-been Dave Lovelace (Chris O’Dowd), who shifts their focus from country/western to soul and lands them a successful audition to perform for the troops in Vietnam.

Based on that… See more →

This is a decent hardcore record – raw, energetic, and full of bile – but there’s nothing distinctive about it, which is disappointing, given the involvement of Daughters alum Lex Marshall. Still, if you’re in the mood for a quick hit of throat-punching hardcore that sticks to the playbook, you could do a lot worse.

To intellectually understand what Colin Stetson does, or to see or hear a recording, won’t prepare you for his incredible live performance.

Go away, Justin Vernon. Just… C’mon, just go away. People are trying to make good music here.

I make no demands of Billy Bragg to return to the fiery protest songs of his youth, but he sounds so world-weary on this album, it’s kind of disheartening. Whether he’s waving off the very notion of progress (“No One Knows Nothing No More”) or confessing that he has nothing left to say (“Goodbye, Goodbye”), his lyrics and their delivery often sound utterly defeated. However, glimpses of his fighting spirit (“There Will Be a Reckoning”)… See more →

Enjoyable enough, to be sure, but almost every song overstays its welcome. A pop album with an average song length north of seven minutes is overconfident even for a juggernaut like Justin Timberlake.

Just got tickets for pretty much the best possible seats to see @lowtheband at @NyseC in March.

Oh, just seeing my favorite band (@lowtheband) with my favorite person (@ChamberMonster). No big deal.

Great room. Great sound. Great set list. Great band. My eighth @lowtheband show in eleven years was the best one yet.

Another excellent @wussymusic show last night. So nice to see great music performed with such honest joy.

Everything happening musically in the verses is way too similar to Metallica’s “Phantom Lord” to be a coincidence. Plagiarism or homage? (I’ve always had the same questions about the similarities between Metallica’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and Angel Witch’s “Angel of Death,” which came first. I suspect homage in both cases.)

A noir as classic as they come. Drink every time Fred MacMurray strikes a match with his thumbnail.

Of all of last year’s films I didn’t get to see during their initial release, Compliance was among those I most lamented missing. Its premise was pure, ludicrous pulp – things spiral horribly out of control when a prank caller posing as a cop convinces a restaurant manager to detain and strip-search an employee – yet it was said to be more of an understated indie drama than a gimmicky Hollywood thriller, and the critics… See more →

Is there a more gleeful song about statutory rape? Wait, don’t answer that.

There are a few good ideas in here, but far too much sprawling, self-indulgent experimentation to recommend this album. However, assuming the band had to get this out of its system in order to later find itself on the excellent The Besnard Lakes Are the Dark Horse, then I’m glad Volume I exists. But I probably won’t listen to it again.

During a recent discussion about karaoke, I confessed that one of my favorite songs to sing when it’s available (which is more often than you’d think) is “Too Drunk to Fuck” by the San Francisco Bay Area punk legends Dead Kennedys. Virtually no one is expecting to hear it, and it elicits precisely the sort of slack-jawed amusement and/or horror I like to see in a karaoke audience.

My friend Tyler, who was a Bay… See more →

I only saw 32 new movies in 2012, and while plenty were good, none of them particularly blew my mind. With a few exceptions, I steered clear of big budget studio fare and stuck mostly to documentaries and unassuming indies. There were several critical darlings of different shapes and sizes that probably would have made my year-end list if I had gotten around to seeing them, but I didn’t. From what I did see, I… See more →

On the early Rush albums, Geddy Lee sounds kind of like Janis Joplin.

When it appeared in 2007, Paranormal Activity was arguably the best entry in the “found footage” horror sub-genre since that category was kickstarted by the immense success of The Blair Witch Project in 1999. A sort of Blair Witch for the YouTube era, Paranormal Activity capitalized on social media’s self-surveillance culture and applied it to things that go bump in the night, telling the story of a young couple who decided to investigate their home’s… See more →

Horror director Ti West is known for employing a persistent, slow-burning tension in his films, which I admire in principle, but in practice it hasn’t always worked out. His last feature, House of the Devil, was defined by tension built around what we knew and the protagonist didn’t: her babysitting clients were extremely unsavory characters. How it would end was unclear, but there was no question that she would be subjected to a harrowing ordeal… See more →

Maybe because Yanqui U.X.O. didn’t really do it for me, I never really pined for new GYBE material after they went on hiatus. And that makes the unexpected appearance of this stellar album ten years later all the more pleasant a surprise.

There is little I enjoy quite as much as spending an entire afternoon in a movie theater, so I often lament the fact that I missed out on the heyday of the double feature. Of course, in this day and age, I’m able to curate my own double (or triple, or quadruple) features in the privacy of my own home, which I do often. I might watch a string of sequels, a pair of films… See more →

I recently saw the band Swans live for the second time. They were promoting a stellar new album (The Seer) which essentially encompasses all of the varied and challenging music that bandleader Michael Gira has made under a few different monikers over the last thirty years. In the two years since I saw them last, I had gotten to know their oeuvre better, and coming to this show with a more educated ear paid off.… See more →

To begin with, I have no small amount of reverence for Roger Corman. Untold hours of my youth were spent in front of a 13″ television that screened the most outrageous low-budget horror movies my local video store had to offer. Aside from the cheap thrills provided, there was something inspiring about their scrappy production values: a sense that limited resources and skills need not obstruct one’s dreams, and that a creative endeavor’s ostensible shortcomings… See more →

I hope this means we can look forward to a 25th anniversary edition of Weird Al Yankovic’s Even Worse next year.

The transition between “Back Where I Belong” and “Sea Lungs” sounds kind of like a dystopian sci-fi re-imagining of Van Halen’s “1984.”

For a 6:30 p.m. show with five bands on the bill and no food for sale, you might want to reconsider your “NO RE-ENTRY” policy.

Thrill Jockey anniversary show last night was the most eclectic I’ve seen in ages. I loved Future Islands fans being made to endure Liturgy.

While I’m still probably not going to be a fan, holy crap does that Future Islands singer guy own the stage.

I’ve been following Mike Birbiglia’s work for a few years now, which means I’ve heard this story several times before. Sleepwalk With Me had its origins in his stand-up act, which morphed into a one-man show, which became a book, which has now been adapted into a film. It’s a good story deserving of all these media, but it is still best told onstage with a microphone.

Birbiglia is a gifted storyteller, heartfelt and free… See more →

Apropos of nothing, I’ve decided to watch all of Disney’s theatrical animated features in order of release date. Since Wreck-It Ralph’s release in November will bring the grand total up to fifty-two, it will take me exactly one year to watch them all if I do one film per week.

The marathon began tonight with 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, a film of such tremendous historical significance that it’s almost impossible to… See more →

The only thing keeping this from being another uninspired, cloyingly sentimental throwback synthpop record is the over-the-top vocal theatricality. The borderline ridiculous vocals lend it a peculiar honesty that makes it a more engaging listen, but it is otherwise so reliant on its well-worn retro template that I’m not sure I’ll be back to listen again.

Tonight, my glasses spent about twenty seconds on the floor of a crowded and rowdy Bowery Ballroom. Then they were returned to me, unharmed.

Scowling crust punk girl who just walked past the line for the Wussy show: “Is Cher playing tonight?”

There’s a good story in here somewhere, but unfortunately this documentary about former Hole drummer Patty Schemel doesn’t seem to have much faith that it can reach very far outside Hole’s fan base. A lot of narrative polish it might have employed for the sake of the rest of us is eschewed in favor of making sure the fans get to hear about every last moment behind the scenes (and making damned sure everyone knows… See more →

I can appreciate doing a cover that’s a nod to your roots, but compared to the original Buzzcocks version, this is really limp. If they had to do it, it would have made a better B-side than an album closer.

This is such a great, soulful performance of a beautifully devastating song, and then the idiotic audience deflates the whole thing by clapping along like trained monkeys.

The “Daughters of Triton” cutoff haunts me. How would Ariel have continued the song? Get on it, fan fictioners.

Though he occasionally rises above it, Wes Anderson’s real great talent is in actively, counter-intuitively preventing an emotional connection between character and audience. I have never seen anyone work so hard to undermine his own ostensible goals. In spite of the delight his twee aesthetic elicits from his fan base, Anderson’s characters tend to be lifeless props populating meticulously constructed dioramas which were designed to be admired from the outside.

If being emotionally impenetrable truly… See more →

It is an election year, and as our president and other political incumbents across the country dust off their dirtiest tricks to retain their posts, so too do our returning regional air guitar champions. Of our first six cities this year, only Portland and Boston are sending new blood to the finals, and neither of their winners from last year returned to defend their titles. So as we pulled up to Washington, DC’s legendary 9:30… See more →

Boston’s air guitar faithful assembled at Brighton Music Hall on Friday night. They came to talk loudly over the judges’ commentary, and they stayed to marvel at performances that were by turns inspiring and reviling.

The air guitarists of Boston have long toiled fruitlessly in the glittery shadow of four-time champ McNallica (Erin McNally), whose charisma and fire was insurmountable even on the rare occasion she faced a worthy challenger. But with McNallica’s retirement came… See more →

There are two things that make New York City one of the toughest markets in US Air Guitar:

1. The staggering amount of top tier talent, both local and imported, and
2. The Daily Show’s Jason Jones, whose commentary has reduced all but the most thick-skinned competitors to quivering heaps in the backstage bathroom.

Alongside ACLU lawyer Ben Wizner and music biz free agent Leigh Lust, Jones returned on Thursday night to his perch in the… See more →

The Duke of Nothing’s gravelly tough-guy vocals are just the sort of thing you’d expect from a band like Turbonegro, which makes me appreciate former singer Hank von Helvete even more. I hadn’t realized it before, but his shrill, somewhat nerdy exuberance had a lot to do with what elevated this band beyond the sum of its parts.

Best song title of 2012 so far? I think so.

A little star-rating math:

Sergio Leone’s overall command of the medium has us beginning at four stars. Alas, his palpable misogyny throughout the film shaves off the fourth star. Toward the end, we lose most of the third star with the reveal of a plot twist that bears the odd distinction of being both predictable and thoroughly implausible. The remaining sliver of that third star is melted away by the bewildering prominence of Ennio Morricone’s… See more →

I’ve never been more than a casual GBV fan because their discography is too huge and uneven to sift through. In all my scattered listening over the years, I never realized how many great songs they made, even though I recognized most of the stuff on here. And I guess that’s exactly what a best-of collection is supposed to do. So, bravo, Matador!

In the late 1980s, two recent college graduates in San Francisco began making audio recordings of their elderly neighbors’ loud, drunken arguments, eventually amassing over fourteen hours of material. If you find that material fails to transcend momentary amusement, the ensuing story will follow suit. As the recordings become a phenomenon throughout underground tape-trading networks and spawn albums, comic books, theatrical productions, and feature films, the cult obsession over such a mundane artifact grows ever… See more →

It just occurred to me that this is Van Hagar’s attempt at a Beatles song.

The Fly is iconic for its premise, but its execution leaves much to be desired. It tries to turn a typically feathery 1950s nuclear family idyll on its ear with a scientific experiment gone horribly wrong, but ultimately only reinforces the status quo with a wholly undeserved happy ending. With the hero trapped unnoticed in plain sight, and the heroine taking the fall for his murder, the story is ready to end on a note… See more →

It is not unheard of to make an album defined almost entirely by extreme dynamic shifts, but it can be difficult to make it work. The problem with this album isn’t necessarily that metalcore and drone require mutually exclusive moods, it’s the trouble of getting them to dovetail well, and the mechanically alternating sequencing here prevents that from happening. The odd tracks float and the even ones stomp, and as soon as you get to… See more →

This song was first recorded in 1998, intended for Quicksand’s third album, which was never completed. I’m surprised it didn’t wind up on the first Rival Schools album (as “So Down On” did, also from those Quicksand sessions), since it would have been right at home there.

Ken Burns was still finding his voice in 1985, and with Reagan in office, PBS was even more inclined than usual to document its federal benefactor through a few layers of gauze. So it’s not shocking that two thirds of The Statue of Liberty borders on peacetime jingoism, but it is disappointing. I had been hoping to learn about the marvel of engineering and diplomacy that was the statue’s origin, and I did. But in… See more →

Um holy shit Refused.