Review

I usually scoff at remasters, preferring that musicians just let their original documents stand, warts and all, rather than engaging in technology-driven revisionism every ten years or so. But I have to admit they did a nice, unobtrusive job here with the Smiths catalog, cleaning things up without interfering with the spirit or balance of the original recordings. The one piece that does sound markedly different is Rank, the live album, whose new mix sounds… See more →

All @mSutters ever wanted from an @AndrewWk show was a bloody nose, and now I have given it to him.

Going into Crips and Bloods: Made in America, I was concerned that it would just be a sensationalist exposé on LA’s two most notorious gangs. But I was pleased to find that it has a genuine curiosity about its subject, which extends beyond the violence and traces the roots of African-American marginalization from the early twentieth century to present day. It is often a bit too stylish for its own good, and I wish it… See more →

Nearly twenty years later, it still blows my mind that this album was Primus’s commercial breakthrough. Not just because it is (still) the most bizarre, least accessible thing they’ve released, but also because it is a genuinely unsettling permutation of their sound. Primus’s efforts before and after touched on a variety of moods, but at the end of the day, the band was always best described as “quirky,” if only for lack of a more… See more →

For no good reason, I pretty much left Larsen for dead in 2003. I’m so glad to see they’re still making worthwhile music that is very much their own. The cryptic tension at the core of their sound is now tempered with moments of relatively conventional beauty, which makes for a more dynamic and engaging record than Rever, where I left off all those years ago. Some songs drag a bit, and others demand your… See more →

My new favorite Drake lyric: “In this bitch all drinks on the house like Snoopy.”

The original get-off-my-lawn anthem.

Dat Politics are at their best when their laptops speak for them, but vocals have had an increasing presence in their shrill digital attack ever since 2002’s Plugs Plus. The vocals work to great effect when they are approached as just another element to be sampled and rearranged for rhythmic or textural effect, but when employed in the service of actual lyrics or melody, Dat Politics’ vocals aren’t up to the task (Gaetan C. Collett… See more →

When I first heard that most of these songs had their origins as castoffs from David Lee Roth’s original tenure with the band, I rolled my eyes. But after hearing the album, I realized what a smart move it was. With Dave back in the fold after nearly thirty years (though sadly not Michael Anthony), dusting off old, unused songs was the closest they could come to picking up where they left off at the… See more →

For some reason, it’s only every few years or so that I remember how great Meshuggah is. I guess that would explain why I never picked this one up, which was a mistake since it is easily the best thing they’ve done since Chaosphere. Obzen is a great example of what Meshuggah does so well: ridiculously complicated, dense metal whose bludgeoning, mechanical constitution belies the very human energy that delivers it. Stellar stuff.

The Swedish hardcore band Refused took a few years to get great, and shortly after it did, it imploded. Given its incendiary legacy, fans might expect fireworks from this “documentary” about the band’s final days and rather abrupt end, and sporadic live footage does offer a taste of what all the fuss was about. But for all Refused’s unique energy, its breakup story is pretty standard – the tour’s not going well, somebody has a… See more →

You don’t need to know anything about chess to enjoy Bobby Fischer Against the World, but you may well want to learn more about the game after you’ve seen the film – if you don’t take it as a cautionary tale.

Bobby Fischer’s story is a true American tragedy, and possibly the twentieth century’s most fascinating example of the tenuous divide between genius and madness, as this film makes abundantly clear. The pacing is a… See more →

Much of Life During Wartime initially led me to believe it was a postmodern prank whose genesis took this form: “What if I made a sequel to Happiness? God, what a pointless, stupid idea. I’ll do it!”

As Michael Haneke’s Funny Games charges audiences with being complicit in the real-life violence they flock to see fictionalized on screen, Todd Solondz’s Life During Wartime seems to make a mockery of the compulsion to drag new and… See more →

One of Thin Lizzy’s biggest and most recognizable strengths was always its twin harmonic leads, and they’re all but abandoned on Thunder and Lightning. From that angle, Lizzy rookie John Sykes’s guitar hero grandstanding says he isn’t a team player, but it’s hard to deny that his superhuman soloing is the most engaging aspect of the album. This isn’t close to Thin Lizzy’s best or most representative work, but it’s not its worst, either.

I need to revisit this album and Shades of a Blue Orphanage once in awhile to remind myself why I don’t own them. These are very humble beginnings for a band that would a few years later become mind-blowingly fantastic.

PSA: The essential Thin Lizzy (studio) albums are the middle five. They are, in chronological order: Fighting, Jailbreak, Johnny the Fox, Bad Reputation, and Black Rose: A Rock Legend. If these don’t do anything for… See more →

Virtually every aspect of Evile’s music is copied directly from late ’80s Metallica. I don’t fault them for it – I’d rather hear a faithful reproduction of something great than a mediocre stab at something original. However, though their instrumental chops are on par with Metallica’s, their songwriting skills are not. Pretty much everything on here is instantly forgettable.

The extraordinary devotion Bill Cunningham has for his work means that any film about him is worth a look, but it’s a shame this one is not a more illuminating portrait. Amiable though he may be, Cunningham has made a career out of being an observer rather than a participant, and his years behind the lens have trained him well in the art of evasion. No one interviewed in this documentary seems to know anything… See more →

I’ve lost count of how many times this record has saved my life.

There were at least two high profile odes to testosterone of the pull-the-superhuman-war-hero-out-of-retirement-for-a-suicide-rescue-mission variety in 1985: Rambo: First Blood Part II and Commando. Both traffic in the big, loud, and dumb of 1980s Cold War action tropes. But only Commando is actually fun, because it has the good sense not to take itself so seriously.

Each of Arnold’s one-liners in Commando is a winking acknowledgement that this is high octane escapism, a celebration of wanton… See more →

Somehow, the ridiculous anarchist drama club monologue in this song doesn’t sink the whole album.

Apparently the myth of the American sleepover is that its volume can rise above a whisper. This film tries so hard for understated adolescent authenticity that it forgets those first tentative steps into adulthood tend to be just as clumsily vibrant as they are furtively awkward. For a story that spans several nocturnal teenage gatherings on the last weekend of summer, it is remarkably – and fatally – sedate. I have no lack of patience… See more →

Surely no one was more disappointed by Sarah Palin’s absence from the 2012 presidential race than Stephen K. Bannon, the director of this two-hour campaign commercial.

The Undefeated is a chore. With “tell, don’t show” as its storytelling mantra, it chronicles Palin’s public works in her own words (using excerpts from her audiobook) and the words of the people who helped her. And there are so, so many words, all of them black or white,… See more →

Someone left $20 in the ATM, so I’m getting paid to see Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter and The Sadies tonight. I like this arrangement.

When music is great, there’s nothing better.

Believe the hype about Fucked Up’s live show.

I’ve been a casual Japancakes fan for about ten years, and a more-than-casual My Bloody Valentine fan for a bit longer than that, and somehow I only just discovered this album today. It sounds exactly like you would expect a Japancakes version of Loveless to sound, and the occasional pleasant surprises it mines from those familiar melodies make it a worthwhile listen. But I don’t think anyone can argue that covering a work as singularly… See more →

Let’s get this out of the way: I am not a Kevin Smith fan. He has always seemed more interested in hiring actors to recite his own self-consciously profane monologues than in creating living, breathing characters, and the results are reliably tedious.

For the most part, though, Red State avoids Smith’s usual pitfalls and just lets Michael Parks work his villainous magic. Parks plays a fringe fundamentalist Christian preacher in the mold of Fred Phelps… See more →

Following Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon on a week-long drive through the sights, sounds, and tastes of the northern English countryside, The Trip is equal parts tour documentary, buddy movie, and road trip flick. But more than anything, and in spite of its many laughs, it is a poignant meditation on aging.

Ostensibly playing themselves, Coogan and Brydon are a juxtaposition of insecure and self-possessed, of serious artist and happy-go-lucky entertainer. Their differences are sussed… See more →

A lot of foley artists and sound designers in the ’70s and ’80s seemed to have this fetishistic preoccupation with footsteps. In any scene where people were on the move, the soundtrack focused on footfalls to the exclusion of all else. The foley was produced with what I’m guessing was a maximum of three different kinds of shoes (loafers, heels, tennis shoes) on two different surfaces (asphalt, linoleum-tiled concrete). Despite being thoroughly unconvincing, it dominated… See more →

The Crazies arrived in 1973, five years after George Romero’s auspicious debut (Night of the Living Dead) and five years before his masterpiece (Dawn of the Dead). As a low-budget doomsday thriller, it lands directly between those two films as well, making great use of what he learned from Night’s confined space (paranoia, a winking cynicism, and subtle but devastating irony) while sketching out in long form what he would later condense into Dawn… See more →

Remember when Nirvana exploded and every major label scrambled to sign any band they could find that was even remotely similar? Well, if The Sixth Sense is Nirvana (and given how quickly M Night Shyamalan squandered whatever goodwill his breakout hit engendered, I hesitate to draw the comparison), then The Others is Bush.

The themes, tone, essential plot points, and even the color palette are all lifted directly. To its credit, this is not immediately… See more →

Phil Lynott really came into his own as a songwriter in 1975 with Thin Lizzy’s fifth album, Fighting, and his precipitous decline began just five years later with Chinatown. His first solo album, Solo in Soho, arrived that same year, and like that album, this one has its moments, but it’s mostly bland and painfully dated. For completists only.

When I recently finally saw the first Hostel, I was surprised by how fun it was. Eli Roth’s first feature, Cabin Fever, had not endeared him to me, and that plus Hostel’s reputation for being a torture porn standard-bearer alongside the idiotic and gimmicky Saw films had done little to persuade me. But I had to admit Hostel was competently made and showed both the reverence Roth has for his influences and the glee… See more →

The Michael Bay of indie rock. If it is possible to mean that in a nice way, I don’t.

Context hurts this record. Would I have enjoyed it if it was made by a bunch of pissed off twenty-somethings in 1980? Possibly. But I know it was actually made by a bunch of pissed off forty- and fifty-somethings in 2010, and that just makes the whole thing feel like a mid-life crisis, or worse, arrested development. I’ll give credit where it’s due: Keith Morris’s vocals have every bit of manic energy and fury they… See more →

If there had been a Shudder to Think album between Pony Express Record and 50,000 BC, it would have sounded like this.

A spacious, ethereal departure for Besnard Lakes, much of which borders on ambient. This type of atmosphere can be found on their long-players as well, but there it’s tempered with other textures and tempos. Isolated as it is on this EP, it makes for a less compelling listen.

Holy moly, that guitar solo.

Staff at a new venue giddily pulled us off the street for the final moments of a Fred Frith performance. I ❤ Brooklyn. roulette.org

What is it about punk rock jocks five times your size that makes them think it’s cool to throw you into a pile of chairs?

Time for Tombs to blast the residue of this crappy day off me. @ Studio at Webster Hall gowal.la/c/4p8TJ

Holy shit, Tombs was fucking fantastic. A sound like theirs can easily turn into a murky mess live, but they brought it to terrifying life.

To my Philly people: I’m not saying I hadn’t been to an R5 show in ages, but the last time I saw the sound guy, he was clean shaven.

Today’s agenda: 1. Drive across the desert with @essl and @VictoriaMia. 2. yfrog.com/h0bjeifj

Indio’s Motel 6 is currently dirtbag central. We are home.

I'm at The Big 4 Festival in Indio, CA gowal.la/c/459Fh

A N T H R A X

S L A Y E R

For some reason, Twitter didn’t want you to know about M E G A D E T H and M E T A L L I C A .… See more →

Thin Lizzy without Phil always seemed like a bad idea, but holy hell am I glad I saw them tonight. He’s gone but certainly not forgotten.

By all means, bring your identity-starved girlfriend accessory to the metal show and clutch each other all night like junior high is ending.

Mixed feelings about Godspeed You Black Emperor tonight. Iffy setlist, but great to hear them live and insanely loud again after so long.

Tonight I danced my ass off to a live Dismemberment Plan set for the first time in seven years.

Feeling pretty sorry for those of you that didn’t see Man or Astro-man and Dex Romweber Duo on the tour they’re wrapping up tomorrow.

I became a fan of Mike Birbiglia after hearing a handful of his stories on This American Life and The Moth. But before I could get around to checking out one of his albums or seeing one of his performances, Sleepwalk With Me was published, so I picked it up expecting great things. And in some ways, it is great. Just not quite as great as I expected.

In the AV Club interview that persuaded… See more →

My earplugs were no match for Swans.

As expected, seeing Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter was worth every penny of that overpriced Sunn/Boris ticket.