Review

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.

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 →