Review

I got into Shudder to Think just as they were splitting up, and I couldn’t make it to any of the dates on the short reunion tour they did ten years later. So this live album – culled from those reunion shows – is bittersweet for me, since it demonstrates conclusively what a fantastic live band they were. Also, if you’re new to Shudder to Think, the set list here is a great overview of… See more →

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.

House of Cards, Season 1: Good, but too problematic to be great. Several fresh conflicts primed for Season 2, but I’m not sure I’ll be back.

House of Cards, Ep. 13: The cat-and-mouse thing seems prosaic, and the church soliloquy was ridiculous, but this was a hardworking finale.

House of Cards, Ep. 12: I wonder if Palin would have happened if McCain was pals with Major Dad.

House of Cards, Ep. 11: Boundaries are what make a game engaging. Now I know Frank’s game has none. I’ll finish as a completist, not a fan.

House of Cards, Ep. 10: Decent cliffhanger. I’m curious to see Frank deal with serious fallout for once. Claire’s Rumspringa, not so much.

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.

House of Cards, Ep. 9: Kill Bill, Vol. 3: Menopause. Leftover from Ep. 8: “Russo 2014: He’s better than nothing!” I’m losing interest.

House of Cards, Ep. 8: Frank’s past is boring. Is anyone not trying to get in Claire’s pants? And: A Philly accent isn’t that difficult.

House of Cards, Ep. 7: Still don’t see what boning Zoe gets Frank. Glad we’re finally digging into Doug. I dig Doug. When does he sleep?

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

House of Cards, Ep. 6: Have to admit, the reminder that Claire is stone-cold landed pretty hard. But Frank’s win struck me as inelegant.

House of Cards, Ep. 5: Extramarital logistics. Old media dying. Lobbyist slap fight. Russo, sympathetic minus s-y-m. Busywork episode.

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.)

House of Cards, Ep. 4: Those are some of the ugliest uglies ever to bump. Who will play Gozer?

House of Cards Ep. 3: Frank is more compelling on defense than offense. I’m skeptical that Russo’s redemptive struggle will be affecting.

House of Cards Ep. 2: Real-life cable news clowns play themselves as the vulturous shitheels they are. Meta-cynicism!

House of Cards Ep. 1: Spacey and Wright’s unified smugness is pretty off-putting, as are Spacey’s fourth wall shenanigans. We’ll see.

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.