Review

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.

This… is BULL SHIT!!

Next time I am in a bad mood, remind me of tonight, when Cynic played the entirety of Focus, in sequence, a few feet away from me.

“Why did Red Hot Chili Peppers go ‘Under the Bridge’? There was a plate of shit there that they wanted to jack off into.” — Neil Hamburger

Last time I saw Faith No More, I didn’t know how to make a web site, and Limp Bizkit opened. Tonight’s was a better show for a better time.

Tonight's Futureheads setlist distribution: The Futureheads: 7, Area EP: 1, News and Tributes: 2, This Is Not the World: 3, The Chaos: 7.

The crowd here is reminding me of why it took me so long to bother checking out The National. — at House of Blues gowal.la/r/dNa

There are not enough dicks in the universe for House of Blues to suck.

Judas Priest toured through the summer of 2009, celebrating the 30th anniversary of the seminal metal album British Steel by playing it live in its entirety every night. Now fans can celebrate too by playing live versions of all nine tracks from the album in Rock Band!

Could Judas Priest’s landmark British Steel be the most metal album in history? Let us examine the facts. To begin with, the cover depicts either an ordinary man’s hand… See more →

Tonight, a handful of coworkers and I will lead a fully orchestrated Beatles sing-along with the Boston Pops. bso.org/bso/mods/perf_detail.…

"Sing onstage with the Boston Pops" has been added to the to-do list and checked off.

If it takes a Wednesday night metal show with five bands on the bill to prove I’m not really a grownup, so be it.

Has it really been twenty years already?

I still have that 90-minute cassette whose A-side contained my first copy of Megadeth’s Rust In Peace. Though I had already cut my teeth on other metal bands, I was wary of Megadeth at first. Their name alone seemed to embody everything that was supposed to be frightening and dangerous about heavy metal, and this particular 14-year-old Catholic boy was slightly less interested in rebellion than he was… See more →

Melt-Banana didn’t play the Devo song you loudly demanded throughout the show, but my only disappointment is that you’re still breathing.

Baroness was really great tonight, but they would have been better if I hadn’t started drinking at 3pm. They should work on that.

Having never seen any of the Saw films, I thought it would be a fun experiment to start with Saw VI, the most recent installation, and see what I could piece together of the previous five films based on my familiarity with other long-running horror franchises. This idea presupposed that the Saw series had the same general lack of serialization of, say, the Friday the 13th series, whose twelve installments were really bound together only… See more →

There were empty seats at the Múm show tonight. I wanted to fill them with people I care about.

Good conversation with @iamrumz and @jyllish. Good set from Besnard Lakes. Good night.

In this sixth and final Thin Man film, the party is over. None of the fun of the series’ early films remains. We could always count on Nick and Nora to gracefully navigate the mysteries that fell in their laps with wit and aplomb (and of course a healthy dose of liquor). Above all else, it was their surefootedness and levity that made them endearing. Song of the Thin Man abandons these traits, setting them… See more →

First stadium concert in a long time. I can’t believe there are people who experience live music exclusively this way.

AC/DC has disproved my theory that I couldn’t be thoroughly entertained by a band playing a quarter mile away. Sad we missed Anvil, though.

They Might Be Giants are great, but there’s not enough snark in the solar system to adequately describe their audience.

I owe Eric Pope a beer for convincing my tired ass to stick around for Peelander-Z. Holy hell, what a show.

Big sound problems for Crippled Black Phoenix tonight at Great Scott. To be fair, they’re probably not used to dealing with 8-piece bands.