Bonnaroo
Cleans Up Its Act
Best Friends Forever:
Inside the Psychedelic Indie-Soul of
Broken Bells Broken Social Scene Multi-Player Post-Rock
Urban Farmer and Real Genius
Will Allen
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> green mind 6 Bonnaroo The Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival tries to become a zero-waste zone 8 Green Mind News Mountaintop removal mining, bicycle wars in Washington and more
> music
> movies
12 Will Allen The ex-basketball star wants you to join the urban agriculture revolution
18 Japandroids Breakout Vancouver duo blurs the line between pop-punk and noise-pop
46 Gary Oldman Why can’t one of the best actors of his generation catch a break?
14 D.I.Y. Fix a bike flat in 10 easy steps
20 Flying Lotus L.A. beat-head Steven Ellison reinvents electronic music
16 Moby The DJturned-pop icon’s new book on veganism isn’t very filling
may 2010 | ISSUE 1
22 The Playlist After reggae: A brief history of dancehall 24 Tracey Thorn 27 Far 28 Morning Benders 38 Broken Social Scene The Canadian collective returns after a five-year absence with another postrock epic 42 Album Reviews 64 Michael Bolton meets Lady Gaga Yes, you read that right
48 Short Fuse Reviews of new DVDs including Avatar, The Road, and more 50 Michael Haneke The strangely visceral films of an Austrian arthouse legend 52 The White Ribbon Something is very wrong with this picture, but what is it? 53 Crazy Heart A Q&A with the director of the Oscar-winning redemption story 54 New Releases CDs and DVDs hitting stores in May
32 Broken Bells
James Mercer from the Shins and Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton team up to make a short, sweet and spacey album of indie-soul
may 2010 COWBELL
3
> from the editor If you’re a music fan of a certain age,
chances are good there’s at least one music magazine you miss dearly. Maybe it’s Rolling Stone from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s; or the NME and Smash Hits in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s; or Spin and Melody Maker in the late ‘80s. Very different magazines, very different eras, but two things defined them all: their range and their passion. They didn’t limit themselves to any one genre. They didn’t ignore the mainstream in favor of a blind allegiance to the underground, and likewise they didn’t ignore left-field music just because it was unknown. But most importantly: the writing crackled. You picked up each new issue to find out about new music, but you also wanted to see what the writers had to say about that music. You reached the back cover and felt like these writers were truly excited by what they were writing about. Whether they were talking about records or movies or politics, the writers wanted to share that thrill, they wanted to get readers engaged. These magazine reflected a whole world of music and ideas. They weren’t just a list of this month’s hot indie albums, a cheat sheet designed to fill some empty iPod space. Cowbell wants to revive the spirit of those gone but not forgotten music magazines. We want to create the same sense of community, and leave readers with the same excitement we feel when we hear a great record for the first time. Cowbell thinks music writing matters. We want to provide an antidote to the idea that word counts need to shrink, that only certain records are worth covering. We want our readers to be entertained and informed. You can pick up Cowbell every month and know you’ll be getting something other than a buyer’s guide. We might start arguments, but we’ll never resort to glib snark. Cowbell will cover essential new sounds wherever we find them, whether they’re on the pop charts or hidden in someone’s basement. But when you grab a new issue you’ll find more than music. Cowbell’s writers will also explore movies, books, and the world beyond pop culture. Issues like environmental activism and sustainable living will be covered with the same informed, enthusiastic take we’ll bring to music. You’ll be introduced to urban farmers, indie directors, musicians-turnedauthors—whatever we have to share that month. Cowbell wants music to once again feel like a crucial part of that whole world of art and ideas. Because it’s not just the writing that matters. Music matters. It can be silly fun. It can affect people’s lives in profound ways. And sometimes what seems at first like silly fun can have the most profound effect. If you think too many magazines have forgotten that music can entertain and move people, well, Cowbell might just be for you.
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it up FEATURING “THIS AFTERNOON” ON TOUR NOW!
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5
greenmind
sustainable living in pop culture and beyond
No Impact, Man Bonnaroo continues its quest to become the greenest rock festival in the U.S. by Scott Orwig
6
Cowbell MAY 2010
N
othing captures the inherent excess of rock music quite like the big
summer festival, and over the past decade, few festivals have been bigger than Bonnaroo Music and Arts. Attendance has grown exponentially since the first Bonnaroo in 2002. This June, upwards of 100,000 fans will load up their cars and descend on Manchester, TN, for four days of live music, veggie burritos and herbal refreshment.
And when they pack up on Sunday night, those 100,000 fans will leave behind a massive carbon footprint and literally tons of waste. Ironically ,given the festival’s yearly expansion, Bonnaroo’s waste output is fast approaching a number that would shock even the most casual sustainability advocates: zero. “The main venue could—and it’s a big ‘could’—but it could be a zero-waste area, because everything is recyclable or compostable,” says Laura Sohn, the festival’s year-round sustainability coordinator. In her four years working for the festival, including the last three as sustainability coordinator, Sohn has seen Bonnaroo grow from an upstart jam-band
gathering into a preeminent American music festival and model for sustainability programs. Last year, Sohn and an army of 400 volunteers made for the greenest Bonnaroo yet, collecting over 130 tons of recycling and creating about 30 tons of compost. Sohn chalks up 2009’s impressive haul to an increase in manpower. “Last year we tripled the amount of people at waste collection stations,” she says. “And tripled the amount of compost collected.” This year, Bonnaroo plans to add an additional 100 volunteers to man the collection stations. Bonnaroo’s sustainability issues can’t be solved by volunteers alone. The sheer number of attendees who drive to and from Tennessee each summer live photo by C. Taylor Crothers
has the biggest carbon impact of all. “Given where the festival is, there isn’t a lot we can do to mitigate that,” Sohn says. Organizers provide a shuttle from Nashville International Airport to the festival site and encourage attendees to carpool, but the vast majority of concertgoers inevitably end up stuck in traffic, engines idling and air conditioners set on high while waiting to enter the gates. Still, conscientious attendees can choose to offset these inevitable emissions by donating to Bonnaroo’s greening initiative when purchasing their tickets. Last year, 40 percent of all ticket buyers chose to contribute. On site, Sohn sees a great deal of preventable waste produced by vendors. She’s already done her best to eliminate the scourge of every modern concert, festival or sporting event: overpriced, disposable plastic water bottles. In past years, Bonnaroo has recycled up to three tons of PET (polyethylene terephthalate) bottles, but the festival recognizes that even when recycled, disposable plastic bottles require massive amounts of time, energy and money to safely process and reuse. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own reusable water bottles—or purchase Bonnaroo-branded recycled aluminum bottles at the festival—and
utilize the free water stations scattered across the concert site as part of Bonnaroo’s Bottle-Less Water Program. From left: Booker T and The festival has also incorporated forward-thinking susthe Drive-By tainability strategies, like requiring vendors to use comTruckers entertain postable plates, cups and cutlery made from corn, and col100,00 of lecting cooking oil to be processed into biodiesel. their closest friends; “On site, most of the waste we produce is from the venvolunteers dors,” Sohn says. “Building the compost pad on site has done help keep Bonnaroo a lot to increase our collection because it doesn’t get lost in clean; festival the shuffle.” attendees For 2010, the festival’s organizers are strongly encouraging pitch in vendors to purchase locally- and organically-grown products from farmers in the Manchester area, in an effort to cut carbon dioxide emissions and reduce fuel consumption. “Starting last year, we gave [vendors] a list of local farms that they could contact,” Sohn says. “This year we’ve found a farm 30 minutes from the site.” But she also notes that, “Because of the scale, it can be tough for small farms to meet the demand.” So far, Sohn says, the vendors, like the concertgoers, have been receptive to the measures being taken by Bonnaroo to make the festival greener. Despite its origins as a hippie-ish affair, Bonnaroo’s musical lineup has diversified in recent years, incorporating indie acts such as Animal Collective and mainstream rock bands such as Pearl Jam and Nine Inch Nails. As the lineups have become more varied, crowd demographics have shifted accordingly, making the festivals’ sustainability accomplishments even more impressive. No one would be shocked to learn that Phish fans share a commitment to recycling and composting, but a crowd of nihilistic Trent Reznor devotees? It seems that as Bonnaroo’s lineup has become more mainstream, so have attitudes regarding sustainability. “I think that, in general, the population is becoming more and more educated about the sustainable decisions that we need to make,” Sohn says. “People are receptive. They want to see that the festival is making these kinds of decisions, and so I think every year it becomes more important to our patrons that we’re making those decisions.” In under a decade, Bonnaroo’s organizers have found ways to turn the summer music festival—once a monument to waste—into a force for good. Each year the festival becomes larger, and potentially less sustainable. Yet each year Bonnaroo improves and expands its greening initiatives. Perhaps 2010 will be the year that Bonnaroo makes its most important environmental impact yet: none at all. MAY 2010 Cowbell
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/green_mind
On Top of Old Smokey
Appalachian citizens win a victory against reckless strip-mining processes
M
ountaintop removal mining” means exactly
that. Mining companies locate coal-rich mountains, load their peaks with explosives and hit the detonators. When they’re finished, the mountain is effectively flattened, the coal makes for easy-pickings and the surrounding wilderness becomes a toxin-rich environment thanks to the pesky poisonous waste produced by strip-mining. Naturally, mountaintop removal is good for mining companies, saving them both the time and money involved in digging through hundreds of feet of mountain rock. For the people who live in the shadow of these mountains, however, the despoiled landscape, especially the local water supply, can lead to disease, displacement, loss of income and the destruction of whole communities. Citizens in Appalachia have been fighting the uphill battle against mountaintop removal mining for decades now. Strip-mining was born in the 19th century, and as mining technology improved, even-
tually leading to mountaintop removal mining, the environmental impact only worsened. And governmental regulatory agencies with the power to slow—or halt—the destruction have been sluggish to act, despite the long-
time public outcry. But a recent decision by the EPA—to finally force strip-miners to properly dispose of their waste, rather than simply to dump sludge in nearby rivers and streams —is only the first step in a long-delayed process to reform the strip-mining industry. And the policy change is, unfortunately, limited to just the Appalachian region as of press time. Mountaintop removal, and other less-than-safe strip-mining methods, continue in other coal-rich regions around the country.
Love Your Mountain
More information on the fight against mountaintop removal mining can be found at ilovemountains.org, an advocacy site featuring an interactive map listing mountains that have already been destroyed, along with those that are still under threat.
black diamonds
Black Diamonds: Mountaintop Removal and the Fight for Coalfield Justice is a 2006 documentary by Baltimore filmmaker Catherine Pancake that features interviews with Appalachian residents affected by strip-mining, along with some eye-opening footage of mountain removal techniques in action. You can watch the trailer, and learn how to purchase a DVD copy, by visiting blackdiamondsmovie. com.
Changing the landscape: The after-effects of mountaintop removal mining
8
Cowbell MAY 2010
The Battle Over the Bicycle Bikers should have a voice, says Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood
B
icyclists are sometimes seen as the luna-
tic fringe among Washington transportation lobbyists. After all, bikes already get a thin strip of pavement to share with two-ton vehicles, and most neighborhoods have, you know, sidewalks. Isn’t that enough? Not according to Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, who probably didn’t expect to stir up a shitstorm among his colleagues last month, when he decided federal, state and local transportation agencies should finally take bicyclists and pedestrians into account when it comes time to draft budget proposals. “Today, I want to announce a sea change,” LaHood wrote on the D.O.T. website in March. “People across America who value bicycling should have a voice when it comes to transportation planning. This is the end of favoring motorized transportation at the expense of non-motorized.” According to the D.O.T.’s official press release, “Legislation and regulations exist that require inclusion of bicycle and pedestrian policies and projects into transportation plans and project development. Accordingly, transportation agencies should plan, fund and implement improvements to their walking and bicycling networks, illustration by bruno guerreiro
including linkages to transit.” At the state level, LaHood suggests “key recommendations” to local officials—such as keeping walkways and bike paths cleared of snow—and asserts that the D.O.T. itself is “integrating the needs of bicyclists in federally-funded road projects” and “discouraging transportation investments that negatively affect cyclists and pedestrians.” Green-minded citizens in favor of alternative, non-motorized transportation hailed LaHood, while transportation industry insiders and LaHood’s fellow Republicans complained that the plan will divert federal and state attention (and cash) away from the upkeep and improvement of roads and highways. Still, LaHood’s “key recommendations” remain just that for the moment; state and local governments are free to ignore them at will.
the fast lane
The full D.O.T. policy statement can be read at dot.gov/affairs/2010/ bicycle-ped.html. But Ray LaHood’s personal announcement can be found at Fast Lane (http://fastlane.dot.gov), his official blog, where the Transportation Secretary offers smart, sometimes impassioned looks at issues affecting U.S. transportation. We also defy any science fiction author to come up with a world weirder than one where “Transportation Secretary,” “blog,” and “impassioned” show up in the same sentence.
“
This is the end of favoring motorized transportation at the expense of non-motorized.”
—Ray LaHood, Transportation secretary MAY 2010 Cowbell
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/green_mind An oceanfront view: We could be seeing a lot more oil-drilling rigs soon
Drill Away (Until It All Dries Up)
L
ast month, the Obama Administration announced a
Obama framed his decisurprising, and not at all heartening, change in its en- sion in terms of finanergy policy. Despite his campaign trail commitment cial stability: Given the economic and political to alternative and renewable energy sources—and costs of relying on forhis GOP opponents’ bullish advocacy for increased eign oil, new sources of fossil fuel drilling at home—President Obama gave domestic oil and natuaway thousands of miles of American coastline to big oil. ral gas will decrease According to the New York Times, we’re talking hundreds the vulnerability of our energy supply. of millions of acres of ocean here. Yet, clean energy adWith Obama lifting longstanding bans, oil com- vocates point out that domestic drilling can only be panies will now be able to erect offshore oil and seen as a short-term fix to a long-term problem. No gas drilling rigs along the East Coast, the Gulf of matter how much fuel is available to be drilled in US Mexico and the Alaskan coastline. Oil execs, and waters, even these new reserves will eventually be certain factions of the Republican Party, are undertapped, leading us right back to a dependency on standably pleased. But costal residents and envi- foreign sources. ronmentalists—many of whom had already argued President Obama’s plan still hangs on one big publicly against the plan as it began to take shape— question mark: money. Depending on the size of weren’t the only voices of dissent, with Republican the deposits in the targeted areas, it may not be and Democratic officials serving the affected areas cost-effective for oil companies to even bother with quick to point out the damage such widespread depreliminaries like assessing the environmental and velopment might do to local ecology. geologic impact of new drilling rigs. And oil-hungry The negative environmental impact of this new Americans with long commutes shouldn’t expect plan will inevitably pose a planet-wide problem, smaller family fuel budgets any time soon. If the troubling whether you live in Dubai or Delaware, derricks do indeed go up, analysts suggest it could Monte Carlo or Miami. So, it’s fair to ask about be over a decade before the first drop of this new the benefits of this plan to extend our reliance on domestic oil finds its way to a barrel. dirty fuel sources like oil and natural gas. President 10
Cowbell MAY 2010
power trip
The debate over fossil fuels versus alternative energy sources is frequently boiled down to a CNN-friendly sound bite, but it’s impossible to explain how America became addicted to oil, and how we might be able to detox, in 50 words or less. Amanda Little’s Power Trip (Harper, 2009) offers an erudite but quick-moving history of America’s reckless habits when it comes to fuel consumption. But even as Little goes indepth on the environmental, economic and political damage done, Power Trip looks at the steps being taken, some small-scale and some radical, to turn the U.S. into a nation that runs on renewable fuel.
Drive More for Less, or Just Drive Less?
C
ash-strapped drivers will (eventually) get some-
thing of a break thanks to updated fuel-efficiency and emissions regulations for all new U.S.-made cars, light trucks and SUVs. At the moment, each state operates under its own local regulations, but the new rules apply nationwide. And they’re nonnegotiable. ¶ Beginning in 2012, the EPA and the Department of Transportation will roll out the new regulations over four years. For drivers, this means walking into an American car dealership later this decade and walking out with a new car that gets around 35 miles to the gallon and spews significantly fewer greenhouse-related pollutants into the air. The EPA and D.O.T. didn’t shy away from discussing the dangers of global warming as they related to the
new regulations. But they also made sure to point out that drivers’ checking accounts would benefit as much as the atmosphere. The Obama administration framed the EPA/ D.O.T. decision in terms of relieving the recessionera pain of high oil prices. While the new regulations won’t lower the per-barrel cost of domestic and foreign oil, they will keep drivers from filling up quite so often. Designing new engines and altering assembly lines won’t come cheap for automakers. Some of the proposed price tag—more than $50 billion according to some estimates—will be passed onto consumers, and the new regulations could initially raise the price of a new vehicle. Will American drivers pay more up front for a car that will save them money over the long haul? Or will sticker shock—and gas prices that could go anywhere in the next six years—increase the groundswell of support for new and improved mass transit systems?
m e ta l
mayhem Avantasia
THE WICKED SYMPHONY
Sick of it All
BASED ON A TRUE STORY
Cathedral
THE GUESSING GAME
TRIPTYKON
EPARISTERA DAIMONES
unleashed
AS YGGDRASIL TREMBLES
MAY 2010 Cowbell
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/green_mind Compost remains the great cause in Allen’s life. He views the process of taking waste and turning it into soil, “black gold,” as the key to developing vibrant local food systems in our worn out urban centers. Oh, and you’ve gotta have worms. Last month, Allen was the keynote speaker at a Philadelphia conference on composting, where he decided to dress it up—a hoodie with the sleeves intact. Cowbell grabbed a few minutes with Allen after his talk, wrangling him into a quiet corner of the auditorium. Fortunately, he came willingly. Dude is huge. You’re very into growing greens. Lots of greens.
Compost Rock
Urban farmer and MacArthur Grant recipient Will Allen on the importance of greens, worms and more / by Lee Stabert
E
verything about Will Allen is big. The pro basketball
player turned urban agriculture iconoclast has hands like baseball mitts, and arms like tree trunks. His normal uniform—jeans, baseball hat, hooded sweatshirt with the sleeves removed—only serves to emphasize the power of his gentle, hulking presence. ¶ In 1993, after leaving a job in the corporate world, Allen purchased the scant two acres in northwest Milwaukee that would become Growing Power, his urban farm. He immediately started growing, inviting people from the neighborhood to get involved and share in the bounty. Thanks to creative use of space, innovative sustainable farming practices, and Allen’s zealous commitment to compost, the farm has become stunningly productive—a paragon of high-yield urban agriculture and community activism. In 2008, Allen was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant. 12
Cowbell MAY 2010
We grow 159 different varieties of vegetables, a little bit of everything. But in the winter time, because of the heat factor and the light factor, greens are the easiest to grow. But as we add more renewable energy to our system—and are able to use more artificial light—we’re gonna get into warm weather crops like tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers. There’s big opportunity there. Not everybody wants to eat seasonally. You know it’s hard to convince people to rely on potatoes, carrots and root crops. We’ve kind of spoiled ourselves. People don’t can anymore. People want fresh stuff, so it’s important for us to grow a broad spectrum of crops year round. You talk about compost on a large scale, but what would you tell an urban apartment dweller? What can they do?
You can actually compost anaerobically [without air] in a simple five gallon bucket. All you need is some carbon—newspaper, magazines—to mix in with your food waste. If you’re single, it would probably take a month or more—unless you were a ferocious eater [Allen laughs]—to fill up that bucket. The best food waste is 20 percent solid, so it’s gonna shrink. The carbon absorbs all the moisture and it starts to break down in the bucket. Say over winter, you collect three buckets, you’ll have quite a lot of stuff. Then you can either take it somewhere or combine it with neighbors and set up a little program. If you have enough friends and everyone donates, it’s amazing how much you can collect just by setting up a little compost co-op with friends. When the springtime comes, find a little spot in someone’s backyard. Your compost will already be well on its way. In two months you can start growing.
A lot of people would worry about the smell.
You just need a bucket with an O-ring gasket. They’re easy—not like the old days. You can go buy one at any paint store, or somewhere like Loews. They keep the smells inside. Absolutely no smells! Unless you leave drippings hanging down in the bucket or something. [Allen laughs] You can decorate them, get a white one and paint it or put little decals on it. The press has obviously been a really powerful tool for your message; I first read about you in a New York Times Magazine feature. I think there’s a big shift in public perception going on—from “sustainability” being sort of a hippy-dippy yuppie thing to being a broader movement. As a person of color, running a really diverse organization, you’re harder to pigeonhole.
Even though I don’t talk about it a lot, I think that has been one of the big changes. Because I am a person of color, I think it has probably made a lot of people more comfortable talking about these issues. When I first started doing this, I’d go to meetings and I’d be the only person of color for many, many years and that’s changing now. We need to dismantle a lot of the racism around the food system, in terms of redlining in communities, with grocery stores not wanting to go in and funders denying funding. Most of the people in organizations that are doing [urban agricultural] work are doing it in people-ofcolor neighborhoods. We need to do things in a very multicultural way. We can’t just do it by slamming people into the ground, we need to do it, you know, the way we’re doing it—through action, through projects, and bringing everybody to the table and discussing the problem up front, not trying to slide it under the table and pretend it doesn’t exist.
If there’s one policy change that a local government can make, what would it be?
There’s several. They need to change policies on composting, on beekeeping, and allow citizens up to four chickens in their backyard—not roosters, but layers. Beekeeping is something that is very wonderful to do. And every city government needs at least one person that works with community gardens and community farms—a liaison between politicos and the people that are doing the work. In Milwaukee, I can almost do anything. The government may not have money to give you, but they won’t stand in your way when you have a good idea. They look at Growing Power as an asset to the city. We’ve brought in millions of dollars to the city of Milwaukee and they know that. I think we can create thousands of jobs with this new kind of farming, with urban agriculture. Just think of all the categories of jobs: you’ve got installers, carpenters, plumbers, truck drivers, accountants, electricians, aquaculturists, planners, architects. In a rural area, you don’t need these jobs. Industrial agriculture gets rid of jobs; the machines do everything. This is hand work, it’s communal work, which is important and fun for all of us, all the generations, from little kids to school-age kids to teenagers to college kids. Everybody is involved. Now politicos are involved, corporate companies send their associates to volunteer and corporate companies have foundations to supply some of the money. We also need reporters and publicity people, because one of things that we haven’t been able to do is be proactive and get the word out. All of these wonderful projects are hidden away. We need the public.
A smiling Will Allen thinks about the power of worms.
I think being a person of color in a forgotten urban area has also brought you a lot of attention. I mean, it’s a great story: You’re in Milwaukee!
Milwaukee, I think, is now the urban ag[riculture] capitol of the world, or close. The largest urban ag small farm conference ever held will be in Milwaukee this September. We don’t go out there and tell people, “Here we are as an organization! We’re going to come into your community and change the world.” We get invited into communities. We don’t ever go out there and solicit work. We built this center in Milwaukee that people came to see, then they went around the country and told other people. So, if you come and you like what you see there, then go out and tell ten of your friends, that’s how you build a revolution. Photo by Josh B. Bryan
MAY 2010 Cowbell
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/green_mind /d.i.y.
d.i.y.
by will dean
How to Patch a Tube
S
o you’re riding along, minding your own business,
maybe humming a tune, and suddenly every push of the pedal takes ages, and people are walking past you. Unless you have some kind of heart condition (in which case, please seek medical attention), your tire probably popped a flat. Don’t fret, though: Flats are quick and easy to fix with the right tools.
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Cowbell MAY 2010
supplies ■ ❑ ■ ❑ ■ ❑ ■ ❑
bike patch kit pump wrench (optional) tire tool (optional)
illustrations by j.p. flexner
1. First, you’re going to have to remove your wheel from the
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bike. If your bike is newer, it should have quick release wheels. These have a lever on one side and a cap (a little cone-thingy) on the other. Flip the lever, which should take some effort, and turn it until the wheel is loose. The wheel should be easy to take off. If you have an older bike, the wheel might be attached by nuts. You should carry around an appropriately-sized wrench if this is the case, or an adjustable one. Use the wrench to take the nuts off, put them somewhere safe and take the wheel off. 2. Next, you need to remove the tire. You can do this with
your hands, or use a tire tool (they come in sets of two) and wedge it between the rim and tire. Lever it up and push the tire away from the rim. Leave the first tool there and use the other one in the same way a few inches away. Continue doing this around the tire, pushing the tire away from the rim while leaving the original tool in place. You can also use your hands and work the tire off the rim, but it’s harder. 3. Remove the tube from inside the tire, but use the
valve as a marker so you know where the tube was (so you can find anything lodged in the tire that might have caused the flat). 4. Look at the tube to see if there are any obvious
punctures or bits of metal protruding. Fill the tube with air and listen for a hiss of air escaping. 5. Feel along the entire length to detect any air coming out. Once you’ve found the hole, let the rest of the air out of the tube. 6. Scuff up the rubber around the puncture with the little piece of sandpaper or rough metal in the patch kit. 7. Apply the glue to a space bigger than the patch you’re
going to use. Each kit comes with a few different sizes, and if your puncture is small, you can cut up patches to make them last longer. The most important point is to make sure the hole is entirely covered. 8. Once the glue is dry, press the patch onto the glue and
hold it there for a few minutes. Use a book, or something heavy and flat, to apply even pressure. While you’re waiting, check the tire for anything (metal, glass, rock, etc.) that could have caused the flat. Look especially hard around the part of the tire that corresponds to the puncture on the tube. 9. Put the tube back in the tire and pump it up to test for
leaks. Let the air back out and put the tire back on the rim, and make sure that the tube isn’t pinched between the tire and rim. Use your hands to put the edges of the tire inside and use the tire tool (if you have to) to put the last sections on by wedging the tire tools against the rim and lifting the tire onto the rim. 10. Put the wheel back on the bike and reattach it. With quick
release tires, don’t just spin the lever until it’s tight; spin it until it’s just starting to get tight and then push the lever over until the opposite side is showing. It should be easy until the lever is perpendicular to the bike; then it gets progressively harder. Some quick releases become easy to push after they are most of the way over, so don’t worry if it’s really hard, then gets really easy. If you’re using nuts, tighten one side part of the way, then the other, and alternate until they are both snug and the wheel is evenly situated on the frame (i.e. no tilting to either side). Make sure the brakes are not rubbing against the wheel, then pump up the tire to the recommended pressure, which should be listed on the sidewall of the tire. MAY 2010 Cowbell
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/green_mind
Lean Pickings Moby’s new book on veganism will leave you unsatisfied / by S cott Orwig
V
eganism is polarizing. At times resembling a re-
ligion as much as a diet, it is a lifestyle that few understand and even fewer commit to. In his introduction to Gristle: From Factory Farms to Food Safety, dance music pioneer and outspoken vegan Moby lays out his case for choosing veganism in the bluntest terms possible: Moby loves animals. Moby doesn’t want animals to suffer. It’s a simple philosophy, and it grounds Moby’s veganism firmly in the realm of “personal choice,” making it more palatable to anyone who might actually feel threatened by the subject. Co-edited by Moby and Global Animal Partnership director Miyun Park, Gristle is a collection of short essays on the impact of meat consumption and production, its contributors range from a vegan tri-athlete to John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods. At little more than 130 pages, Gristle is essentially a pamphlet, presenting just enough talking points for a cursory discussion. At best, it provides an adequate jumping-off point for the curious, rather than Gristle: From a reader looking for a more in-depth treatment. It Factory Farms is an easily-digested introduction to the issues that to Food Safety is available will likely be purchased by those interested in or now from New already practicing veganism, quickly read and then Press passed on to a less-informed friend. Gristle is most effective when focusing on the frequently horrifying world of factory farming, devoting individual chapters to the industry’s effect on human health, animal welfare, workers’ rights and the environment. Readers unfamiliar with terms like “live hangs,” “manure lagoons” and “spent” cattle will be shocked by the deplorable conditions present in many commercial farms, and those already aware will be reminded why their activism is necessary. Less compelling are the personal essays. While ironman tri-athlete Brendan Brazier’s accomplishments are impressive—vegan diet or no—his chapter on the health-related benefits of veganism offers little beyond refuting the idea that a plant-based diet is detrimental to athletic performance. More objectionable is Sara Kubersky and Tom O’Hagan’s case for raising a vegan child. Impossibly smug, Kubersky and O’Hagan undermine an otherwise reasonable discussion on the high levels of dioxins in mass-produced meat and dairy products by going out of their way to embody the sort of 16
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pushy, sanctimonious stereotypes people associate with vegans. The pair’s credentials don’t necessarily inspire confidence, either. He’s a music blogger; she runs a vegan shoe store. Don’t worry—she “studied nutrition.” Moby’s attempt to educate people on factory farming should be applauded, but the question remains: is this really necessary? These issues have been discussed before, in greater detail, by the likes of The Ominvore’s Dilemma author Michael Pollan, and more recently novelist Jonathan Safran Foer with 2009’s Eating Animals. There’s no doubt that Moby and Park’s hearts are in the right place. Both share a genuine commitment to animal welfare, and would surely feel vindicated if their book put just one person on the path to veganism. But Gristle finds them preaching to an already likeminded audience, one well-aware of just how detrimental factory farming can be. It’s a noble effort—one that frequently touches on compelling and important issues—but ultimately Gristle provides readers with little to chew on.
photo by danny clinch
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may 2010
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/music The two men of Japandroids make enough noise for four or more
Breaking Out
From hometown obscurity to international acclaim, Japandroids refuse to turn it down / by Jess Harvell
M
aybe it all began when Elvis decided he had to get the hell out of Tupelo or die trying, but much of the best rock has been fueled by a certain desperation. Sure, you form a band for kicks, but you also want to be heard. You make a joyful racket for your own pleasure—maybe along the way you even attract some likeminded hometown weirdos—but in the back of your mind, you can’t help wondering if that’s it. The same venues, the same crowd, every night. Forever. 18
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“We’d never even had so much as an email in two and a half years from anyone wanting to help the band in any way,” Japandroids singer-guitarist Brian King says. “We weren’t really going anywhere, at least not for the amount of time and effort and money and energy we were putting in.” After toiling in regional-scene obscurity for a few years, and selfreleasing a handful of EPs collected on this month’s new No Singles, the Vancouver duo decided to call it quits. So, as a last-hurrah, King and drummer David Prowse scraped together the funds to record Post-Nothing in 2008. They played what they thought would be a few valedictory shows in support, finally attracted interest from a label (Polyvinyl) and quickly learned that passionate geeks with web publishing software can rescue bands from certain doom overnight. It helped that Japandroids squeezed those two years of frustration—and excitement—into PostNothing’s eight songs. “In some sense, it’s a little cliché,” King admits. “Young band sings about their hometown and wanting to get out of it.” But few recent albums have captured the thrill of having nothing to lose quite like it. King’s in-the-red guitar playing hides sharp melodies in roaring distortion—like a young Bob Mould minus the folkie aspirations—while drummer Prowse attacks the kit with the kind of caffeine-jitter physicality that makes it easy to miss his wit. The songs are filled with everyday worries—missed chances at hooking up, getting stuck in a dead-end town— but they’re sung with an intensity that makes them sound life-or-death crucial. Plenty of bands can do loud-and-hard, though, and in a post-emo era swarming with slick, sterile whiners, “intensity” and “feeling” come cheap. What makes Japandroids special is how they manage to be both heartfelt and playful. Their sound hearkens back to the early ’90s, when indie and punk didn’t feel quite so far apart, and bands could vent their woes while still poking a little fun at themselves, all photo by andy mueller
Young, Loud and (Sometimes) Snotty
“
We have a band motto—to play every show like it’s the last one we’re ever going to get to play.”
—Brian King
without making it seem like cynical ironic shtick. Japandroids’ songs are dead serious and funny as hell. Even when the subject matter might lend itself to moping, the lyrics are full of little vocal exclamations-as-hooks, “oh!”s and “yeah!”s and “whoa-oh!”s that might be the band’s excitable take on bubblegum’s “la la la”s. On the road during a tour that began in the summer of 2009 and won’t end until autumn of this year, King still talks about his band’s rapid, web-fueled rise to indie acclaim with a certain disbelief. “Every week there’s something happening that’s totally surreal,” he says. So, if Post-Nothing and No Singles buzz with the energy of a first-time band stoked because someone other than their pals might finally take notice, well, that’s because Japandroids really are that band. “We would have written [PostNothing] right away if we’d known how,” King says. “But when we first started playing... neither of us had ever sung before. I had to learn how to sing and play guitar at the same time, which when we started I found really difficult.” King’s too modest about the band’s abilities, even when discussing the early days. No Singles already displays the kind of natural chops that made PostNothing the catchiest, if noisiest, punk album of the last few years. “We’re often labeled as a ‘noise-rock’ or ‘noise-pop’ or a ‘noise-something’ band,” King says. “But I think that’s much more a factor of the circumstances, how we were recording in those days, not some aesthetic or design.” King’s answer is in earnest, but from a fan’s perspective, it might seem like he’s missing the point. The distortion sometimes obliterates the lyrics, but it gives the band’s hooks a much-missed rough edge at a time when the “punk” has been all but dulled right out of “pop-punk.” Two years after deciding to bag it, a band that had barely toured outside of its native Canada is now
Noise-pop, garage rock or plain old punk? Whatever genre they do—or don’t—fall into, here are three more bands to check out if you’re smitten with the sound of Japandroids. Hüsker Dü, New Day Rising Combining punk noise, bubblegum hooks and sappy emotionalism, 1985’s New Day Rising is the perfect midway point between the furious psychedelic hardcore of Hüsker Dü’s earlier years and the more polished Beatles/punk amalgam of the Minneapolis trio’s last three albums. Co-songwriters Bob Mould and Grant Hart tackled such seemingly un-punk topics as apologizing for being a crappy boyfriend, while the occasional blast of no-bullshit hardcore proved the band could still flatten slam dancers when the need arose. (SST, 1985) Jawbreaker, Bivouac Literate and adventurous, San Francisco’s Jawbreaker were the ’90s pop-punk band that should have escaped their cult. Reared in the world of all-ages matinee shows and DIY venues, the trio knew how to whip up a teenage audience, but frontman Blake Schwarzenbach was just as comfortable referencing San Fran’s beat poets (in his lyrics) or UK shoegazers (in his guitar playing). Bivouac, the band’s second album, contains most of Jawbreaker’s best songs, including all-time mope-punk anthem “Chesterfield Kings.” (Tupelo/Communion, 1992) McLusky, Does Dallas Japandroids cover McLusky’s “To Hell With Good Intentions” on No Singles, and though the now-defunct Welsh trio wasn’t exactly underheard, they still deserve to be more widely heard. Unlike the earnest, heart-onsleeve boys of Hüsker Dü and Jawbreaker, McLusky’s spazzy, bass-heavy punk spluttered with sarcastic anger and bad jokes at their own expense. Winking hard enough to need an ophthalmologist’s care, McLusky presented themselves as crotch-thrusting rock gods, gave their songs titles like “The World Loves Us and Is Our Bitch” and beat their instruments as if selfseriousness was a terminal disease. (Too Pure, 2002)
booked for a full slate of big-time festivals across Europe. “We’ve just chosen to embrace every possible opportunity,” King says. That means staying on the road for the time being. The ruckus King and Prowse kick up live—the do-or-die, full-body abandon—suggests they haven’t forgotten that their band looked to be finished just a few years ago. “We have a band motto,” King says. “An ethos? Whatever you want to call it—to play every show like it’s the last one we’re ever going to get to play.”
No Singles, a compilation of the band’s two out of print pre Post-Nothing EPs, hits stores May 11 from Polyvinyl
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The Wildstyle
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Flying Lotus rewrites IDM’s rulebook on Cosmogramma / by Michaelangelo Matos
teven Ellison is a man of many talents—a 26-year-old multi-instrumentalist as
comfortable behind a piano as his turntables; a beat-maker who’s written music for Cartoon Network; an “electronic” musician who just happens to be the great-nephew of avant-jazz legend Alice Coltrane. And over the last five years, he’s released three albums, seven EPs, six singles and numerous DJ mixes that have helped to redefine IDM, a.k.a. “intelligent dance music,” a.k.a. tricky techno for headphones. Recording as Flying Lotus, Ellison serves as a kind of central connector, with a sound that channels a number of modern musicians: spaced-out soul acts like Erykah Badu; knotty hip-hop beatmakers Madlib and the late J Dilla; tweaked laptop artists such as fellow Californians Nosaj Thing and Ras G; the spooky dubstep of English producer Burial; and the avant-garde bass mutations of Glasgow’s Rustie. Not to mention that Flying Lotus tips his hat, frequently and explicitly, toward his great-aunt, whose billowing harp propelled some of the wooziest music ever proffered in the name of jazz. That Flying Lotus’s music encompasses all of the above, with ample room to spare, is one thing. That he sounds utterly like himself—that once acclimated, you can pick a FlyLo track out of a DJ mix featuring a bustling lineup of like-minded artists—is what makes him remarkable. Ellison has an expansive sense of space. His rhythms twist playfully, and his melodies mutate before your ears without seeming shapeless. On the new Cosmogramma—Ellison’s second album for Warp, the Sheffield, England label that all but birthed the idea of IDM—he gives us his shapeliest music yet. 2008’s Los Angeles used oddball production touches as primary compositional tools. Rather than mere decoration, the whooshing envelope filter pedal on “RobertaFlack,” usually deployed as a special effect for a guitar or keyboard, actually finishes the track off with a solo. Los Angeles took psychedelic disorientation as a first principle, like waking up to find the walls changing color and thinking, “Whatever.” Cosmogramma, on the other hand, knuckles down. It’s less ostentaSteven tiously out-there, more focused and Ellison is linear, but still free to stretch and on a night drive to wander at will. This is ostensibly the future an “electronic” album that can shift of techno photo by evan hurd
into a bebop-jazz trio breakdown, and have it sound as obvious and natural as a big bass drop, a sticky synthstring pad, or any familiar techno trope. Cosmogramma’s focus fits its status as an event album, and possibly a crossover hit—not for nothing does Thom Yorke make an appearance here. Given that Radiohead spent much of Kid A taking cues from the Warp catalog, Yorke’s guest spot is a kind of divine payback. Because both he and his host know what’s good for them, the singer’s appearance on “. . . And the World Laughs
with You” is treated simply as an element among elements, a cameo rather than a star turn. Given that FlyLo’s music is so busy—the perfect soundtrack for the densely packed cityscapes of Blade Runner, if that noir classic was remade to include day-glo grafitti murals by Lisa Frank—that’s apt. So is the sense that Cosmogramma secures FlyLo ‘s status as both a scene figurehead and a singular talent on an auteurist bender. Yet Ellison’s hand is steady and his sense of scale surprisingly human. Even as the beats and keyboards flutter and skid, they sound like they’re reaching out to the listener as much as the stars. In a very real sense, this is fusion—a word his great-aunt surely would have recognized. Cosmogramma hits stores May 10 from Warp Records
FlyLo has an expansive sense of space. His rhythms twist playfully, and his melodies mutate before your ears without seeming shapeless.
We ♥ L.A.
The Flying Lotus sound might be singular, but he’s only one of a new generation of Los Angeles beat-makers helping to reinvent the sound of the international electronic underground. —Michaelangelo Matos
Ras G, Brotha From Another Planet The South Central-based elder statesman of the L.A. beat scene, Ras G would be crucial for running the Alpha Pup label alone. (Brotha From Another Planet is a co-release with Flying Lotus’s Brainfeeder imprint.) Thankfully, he’s also one of the city’s first-rate producers, with a penchant for flagrantly synthetic timbres (the rubbery “snares” on the aptly titled “Astrohood,” for instance) and rhythms that take J Dilla’s stutter-step drums as a first principle. If you want to hear just how cosmic Ras G can get, the splashing synth shimmer of “Shinelight” will transport you to that other planet, pronto. (Brainfeeder/Alpha Pup)
Nosaj Thing, Drift
As his moniker suggests, 25-year-old Jason (spell it backwards) Chung is palpably cornier than his slightly older confrere Flying Lotus. Drift is more of a straight IDM album than anything FlyLo’s released. But it’s often pretty, thanks to Chung’s sense of how to set loops against one another. “1865/Bach” and “IOIO” are fizzy and slinky, with scattering beats piercing through thick keyboards, while “Light #1” and “2222” sidle old-school synthesizers against more modern rhythmic ideas. Chung isn’t all the way there yet, but on Drift you can hear a bright, bold future ahead of him. (Alpha Pup)
Shlohmo, Shlomoshun Deluxe At just 19, Henry Laufer is one of the youngest members of a notably young scene. Sometimes his laptop music is pretty obvious; the title “Dead Pixel,” unfortunately, doubles as a review of the track itself. But on tracks like the fluttery “Hot Boxing the Cockpit,” bird tweets and synth shards, sub-low-end and upright-bass groans, and tense, snapping, dry drum programming traverse the space between J. Dilla’s Donuts and the turn-of-the-’00s Tigerbeat6 crew with flair. Good remixes by collaborators. like Fulgeance and Low Limit add extra showcase value. (Alpha Pup)
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/music / the_playlist
►
Dancehall the_playlist
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The journey from Kingston curio to global phenomenon / by Jess Harvell
as and Damien Marley haven’t made it easy on themselves. This month
they share equal billing on Distant Relatives, perhaps the highest-profile collaboration yet between a US hip-hop icon and a Jamaican dancehall legend. The duo has described the album as both deeply personal and expressly political, a multi-genre mash-up of hardcore beats from Queens, Trenchtown and the whole of Africa. And they’re looking for a hit. That’s not exactly a Billboard-friendly sales pitch at a time when hip-hop can almost be mistaken for dance-pop. World-devouring R&B starlet Rihanna may fill her songs with dancehall slang and her videos with Jamaican iconography—and suddenly millions of tweens are crooning “come here, rude boy” at their bus stops and birthday parties—it it’s been a while since an actual rude boy like Marley (or a rude girl for that matter) scored a true smash north of the Caribbean. Like reggae before it, dancehall doesn’t get widespread radio or video play in America. The mini-boom sparked by Sean Paul’s success earlier this decade now seems like another case where radio programmers decided they needed a little novelty to spice up their playlists. (See also: Shabba Ranks, Shaggy, Beenie Man.) That’s a shame, because the airwaves are always more interesting when dancehall’s around, even if that just means U.S. musicians ripping 22
may 2010
off (or “paying homage” to) their Jamaican peers. For nearly three decades, Jamaica has been the bleeding edge when it comes to improbable beatmaking, combining the history of reggae, hip-hop’s low-end theories and the disorienting programmed rhythms of post-techno dance music. But despite its renown among geeky laptop-producers worldwide, dancehall isn’t “experimental.” It’s music for block parties and pop singles, full of theatrical voices that make U.S. hip-hop sound downright monochromatic. If you’ve got any interest in the (increasingly rare) moments when rhythmic innovation meets slick and catchy songcraft, then dancehall’s for you. But Jamaican labels have been pumping out singles by the crate-load since the early ’80s. Confronted with literally dozens of artists and thousands of songs to choose from, where does the newbie start? This month’s Playlist offers five crucial dancehall albums that trace the genre’s rapid-fire development from obscure reggae offshoot to the planet’s premier source for futuristic thrills. illustration by tim gough
THE ROOTS
Various Artists, From Dubplate to Download / Greensleeves (2007) You don’t need to invest in a box set to get yourself up to speed here. Though it comprises the output of just one label—along with VP Records, Greensleeves more or less controls the international dancehall market—there’s no better one-stop introduction to the genre than From Dubplate to Download. No mean feat when you realize the compiler had to
THE CLASSICS
THE CROSSOVER
built from a handful of bleeps. It’s thrilling while you listen, and a little disorienting after the fact, like a compilation that starts with Mahalia Jackson and winds up at Timbaland before you even realize it. All that, plus more hooks than your average Now That’s What I Call Music compilation.
Bounty Killer, Down in the Ghetto / VP (1995)
Sizzla, Black Woman and Child / VP (1997) The MP3 may have revived the worldwide market for singles, but Jamaican audiences have always preferred their music in intense three-minute doses. The simple fact is that there’s only a handful of great dancehall albums out there. The best dancehall is still usually found on CD compilations and underground mixtapes hawked at tiny specialty stores in Caribbean neighborhoods. But these two albums are keepers, more than worthy of your precious iPod space. They’re both
experiments in simplicity, stripping dancehall back to its three key ingredients: beats, bass and voice. But especially the latter: It’s Bounty Killer’s gruffer-than-gruff gangsta baritone and Sizzla’s wracked soul-singer croon that captivate most here. Down in the Ghetto’s backing tracks are slow, spacey and synthetic, often sounding like techno played on a sluggish turntable as Bounty Killer gives Rastafarian righteousness (sample song title: “Defend the Poor”) the visceral
punch of hardcore hip-hop. Plenty of rappers have tried to pass themselves off as R&B singers, usually with disastrous results regardless of their country of origin, but Sizzla’s Black Woman and Child offers one of the few success stories. He’s got a painsoaked tone reminiscent of Marvin Gaye, plus some of the most impassioned, politically-charged rapping this side of hip-hop’s early ’90s golden age.
Various Artists, Ragga Ragga Ragga 2003 / VP (2003) The turn of the millennium might have been dancehall’s golden age. Gone were the minimalist drum machines that characterized the genre in the ’90s. As dancehall artists finally took the world stage en masse, however briefly, producers responded to the spotlight not by going conservative, but instead by unleashing beats (called “riddims” in Jamaica) that just got odder and odder. Dance-
THE FUTURE
squeeze the arc of dancehall’s 25-year-plus history into just two discs. From Dubplate flows like a great mixtape from an in-theknow friend, but it’s also a history lesson disguised as a greatest hits collection. Structured chronologically, you can hear the warm, live-band sound of classic reggae slowly become an off-kilter funk
hall singles suddenly sounded more like something you’d hear in a Middle Eastern souk or a UK acid house club. 2003’s edition of the yearly Ragga Ragga Ragga compilation is a neat summary of the most exciting—and sonically weird—12 month span in dancehall history. Elephant Man’s “Nah Lick” is a good case in point: the drums have more to do with tribal music
than anything you’d expect to hear on a 21st century pop record, and the main hook sounds like the squeal of a tea kettle on boil. As crossover trends go, this might have seemed like a strange one. But as unpredictable as the beats got, dancehall still offered as much (if not more) funk as its American competition, with choruses that stuck in your ears like classic bubblegum.
Busy Signal, Loaded / VP (2008) Where does dancehall go when it’s already been probing the outer limits of sound for years now? There’s a general consensus that the genre hit critical mass in terms of outlandishness some time around the middle of the decade. In the last few years, things have calmed down a bit, with a surge in retro Bob Marley-style reggae, and dancehall producers looking back to their pre-digital sonic roots.
It’s tough to get a handle on the state of dancehall when you’re a few hundred miles from its epicenter, but on the evidence of Loaded, one thing’s clear: Jamaica still has the market cornered when it comes to bonkers beats and befuddling rhymes. Busy Signal’s awesomely goofy mic moniker already makes it clear that he’s a playful oddball who loves a good gag, and just trying to mentally keep up with his flow as he
leaps across tunes like “Wine Pon Di Edge” is enough to leave you winded. Meanwhile Busy’s producers throw in everything from John Carpenter soundtrack shivers to delicate electronic ambient music to menacing recreations of ’90s rave. It’s hard to hear the evidence of any genre-wide downturn here. Loaded makes dancehall sound as full-of-possibilities as ever.
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Detail Work
Tracey Thorn’s lyrics cut to the heart on Love and Its Opposite / by Maura Johnston
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T
racey Thorn sits in the drawing room of a lower Manhattan hotel, where a fire roars even though the temperature outside has broken the 90 degree mark. She’s talking, as so many people do these days, about the microblogging service Twitter, where she is a quick, funny presence, disseminating 140-character messages about her children and the British singing competition The X Factor. Earlier in the day, she used her account to note the absurdity of operating a fireplace during a heat wave; it’s unknown if the operations office at the hotel saw her missive.
“The reason [Twitter] has come to ing single “Missing” hit number two life and turned into what it is, is beon the Billboard Hot 100. cause we’ve all realized that we’re fasIn 2002, EBTG went on hiatus, parcinated by just keeping up with the detially so Thorn could concentrate on tails of everyone’s life,” she says. “My raising the couple’s children. (Thorn and Watt have three, including a set ears prick up when someone tells me a little detail about something that’s of 12-year-old twins.) Woods, a collection of dancefloor confessions happened. So, I love reading other that featured the glimmering “It’s people’s silly details.” All True” and a pulsating cover of Love and Its Opposite, Thorn’s Arthur Russell’s “Get Around to It,” third solo album, is full of telling lyrical details, though “silly” isn’t exactly was a standout in 2007, grounding its the right adjective to beat-driven abandon describe them. “Devin stark, emotionally astating” might be a honest lyrics. It probetter choice. The alvided Thorn with the bum’s 10 unflinching momentum to release I suddenly songs tackle long-term her second solo album relationships (“Late in four years.; work thought: in the Afternoon,” in on Love commenced Actually, I which familiarity with shortly after Woods a lover’s body brings was released. can have on insecurity) and “I realized at the a wedding their dissolution (“Oh, end of [recording Woods], I don’t want the Divorces!,” casting that’s none of to just stop now and a wary eye at friends’ those things. breakups). It’s sharp let another five, seven and weary by turns, years go by,” Thorn I wore a as Thorn’s voice soars recalls. Thorn called green dress— British producer Ewan and cracks. Above all, it’s a very human rePearson, who had also green’s cord. worked on Woods, supposed to The album comes and the pair traveled three years after its to Berlin to lay down be unlucky. predecessor Out of the a few tracks together. There were Woods—and 28 after A few of those early Thorn’s first solo efsessions appear on four guests. fort, A Distant Shore. Opposite, including her cover of “You Are Between Shore and No music, no Woods, Thorn kept a Lover” by the Hunpoems, no busy with Everything garian group the Unbut the Girl, her colbending Trees. nothing. And laboration with long“I kept going back to it was perfect. Berlin, but sort of with time companion Ben Watt, releasing 11 long gaps in between,” Absolutely albums and reaching she says. “Sort of three perfect.” a commercial peak in or four months of not —tracey thorn 1995, when the brooddoing anything, and may 2010
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then I’d go back for about three days and do a bit more, and then another four months, and not do anything. It took ages to make the record, but actually, with just a few days of recording here and there.” Despite its extended birthing process, Love is a quick listen at under 40 minutes, full of emotional gut-punches and rich with lyrical minutiae in a way that recalls the most wrenching fiction of Lorrie Moore. “Singles Bar,” which chronicles a visit to a meat market by an uncertain woman who’s been waxed and painted for the occasion, aches with loneliness and hope. “Hormones” chronicles the door-slamming clashes between a pre-menopausal woman and her pre-pubescent daughter. And leadoff track “Oh, the Divorces!” is a startling opening statement—“Who’s next, who’s next?” the song begins, with Thorn’s rich alto mimicking the cadences of a town crier—particularly the way its lyrics quickly turn brutal. “The line in ‘Oh, the Divorces!’ that people always quote at me is the ‘afternoon handovers by the swing,’ which seems really specific,” Thorn says. “But actually, everyone goes, ‘Yeah, that’s exactly what happens! You end up in these awful things where you have to pass the kids back and forth between you.’ Instead of saying, ‘Oh, it’s so sad when people split up and they have to support the kids back and forth,’ if you just locate it in one time, in a little image...” “Divorces” caused some fans to wonder if Thorn was using the song as a bit of autobiography. But as it turns out, Thorn and Watt were married last year, with the announcement coming shortly after mixing on Love wrapped. “A 27-year engagement may seem cautious to some of you,” Thorn deadpanned on her MySpace blog. “But I think in these uncertain times, it is as well to be sure of someone before you make any rash commitments.”
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As it turned out, the songwriting process helped Thorn sketch out her feelings on the subject. “Long White Dress,” the second track on Opposite, was written before Watt and Love and Its Thorn tied the knot. A dissecOpposite hits stores May 18 tion of the anxieties brought on from Merge by the wedding-industrial comRecords plex, the song captures Thorn’s personal trepidation . “It was a song I’d been planning to write for years,” Thorn says of “Dress.” “I’ve had some of those lyrics lying around for years in a notebook. Little odd lines from it. And it really is true that as a child, I really did have a paranoid dread of the idea that you had to get married. But it was to do with being a child, and having this sort of desperate sense of the importance of romantic love, and how being a part of it was going to be a play in my life. And yet, at the same time, a sort of dread of romance.” Shows like Bridezillas, and the eruption of brideworship in pop culture, have corrupted the very ideal of love in Thorn’s view—though the trend did provide Love and Its Opposite with its title, at least inadvertently. “I think one of the things I thought was the opposite [of love] was the whole fantasy romance and very specifically the pomp of the bride, which has become even more fetishized these days,” Thorn says. “I do think that’s the opposite of love, which should be, in a way, a very personal and private thing. Also, it’s so not about one day. That one day means nothing in the context of a potential life together, which is going to encompass all sorts of ups and downs and loads of crap that life’s going to throw at you.” So, Thorn turned the gilded notion of the “dream wedding” on its hairsprayed head: “I suddenly thought: Actually, I can have a wedding that’s none of those things. I wore a green dress—green’s supposed to be unlucky. There were four guests. No music, no poems, no nothing. And it was perfect. Absolutely perfect.” And the path from uncertainty to your own sort of perfection might just be the album’s arc. “Swimming,” inspired by an email exchange between Thorn and Nashville singer-songwriter Cortney Tidwell, ends the sometimes desolate Love on a note of faith. “Right now we are just keeping afloat, but soon we’ll be swimming, swimming,” Thorn sings, her voice washing away in a wave of reverb and electronics, offering a glint of hope as sharp as light off a blade.
of earnest, anthemic hard rock that blew shit up real good on 1996’s Tin Cans With Strings to You and 1998’s Water and Solutions. But the lark amazingly became a rock radio staple, and soon “every slimy major label person was coming around and wanting to sign us, probably [thinking] the band was 22 years old,” according to Lopez. Far win the horse race after all with powerhouse Vagrant won the lottery, and Far began assemcomeback At Night We Live / by Andrew Bonazelli bling their fifth proper full-length, At Night We ther than sucking, what do Alien Ant Farm, Limp Live. Matragna’s versatile, unmistakable voice—he was the heir apparent to Chris Carrabba’s bedroom Bizkit and Orgy all have in common? They all made emo troubadour act after leaving to pursue a solo catheir names on goofy covers—respectively “Smooth reer under the Onelinedrawing moniker in ’99—anCriminal,” “Faith” and “Blue Monday.” (Note: au- chors a smorgasbord of tunes both unlike anything thor is just gutlessly pandering and thoroughly en- Far has offered (the bittersweet title track, a love joys the Orgy canon, covers and originals.) Covers letter to comatose Deftones bassist Chi Cheng) and were, sadly, a totally viable means of getting your band no- joyously familiar (the fist-pumping chorus of “Give Me a Reason”). ticed in the late ’90s. This contrasts with the phenomenon “There isn’t a definite [Far] sound because I think of respectable outfits tossing off a cover late in their career we go all over the place,” Lopez reckons. “‘Give Me (Pearl Jam’s “Last Kiss,” Local H’s “Toxic”), then enjoying a Reason’ was actually the first song I wrote, and I didn’t really like it all that much because I felt that a surprising renaissance/reevaluation. it sounded too much like a band trying to sound like Add Sacramento-based melodic rockers Far to Far. And I didn’t really want that, because everything we’ve ever done, I’ve althat roster. Defunct for nearly a decade, frontman ways felt like we tried to do something different from the last thing we did. I Jonah Matranga, guitarist Shaun Lopez, bassthink the album represents that.” ist John Gutenberger and drummer Chris Robyn Although Far are moving slowly out of the gates this time—no videos or tours started hanging again in 2008 with the intent of are planned other than a few festivals—the one certainty is their weirdly endurdiscreetly playing out under pseudonym Hot Little ing influence on the latest wave of emo. Pony. Lopez assembled a fake MySpace page, and— “What they used to call emo was Sunny Day Real Estate, Rites of Spring and needing a song for the player—the boys knocked out Promise Ring, a whole different thing,” Lopez notes. “Now emo’s dyed black hair their just-fuckin’-around (yet way hammering) and tight pants and Hot Topic Mötley Crüe shirts. It reminds me of the early rendition of Ginuwine’s salacious 1996 hit “Pony.” ’90s. When bands like Korn were coming out, I felt like before they were calling Rife with laughable equine metaphors for doin’ it, it ‘nü-metal,’ people were calling it ‘hardcore.’ Call it what you want, but that’s “Pony” ran counter to Far’s, oh, entire back catalog definitely not hardcore.”
Ponying Up
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New Vibrations The Morning Benders go on a studio odyssey with Big Echo
by Jess Harvell
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isteners reared on early-to-mid-’90s indie came to accept—and in some
cases love—its cruddy-by-necessity production values. The distant-sounding drum tracks, the “malfunctioning microphone” quality of the vocals, the thin trebly guitar riffs, the power-pop simplicity of the songwriting--that was indie rock for a good long while.
It’s a sound that never quite died, of course. From No Age to Vivian Girls, Wavves to Times New Viking, plenty of young indie acts continue to pay homage to the genre’s grotty pre-digital period. But it’s now possible to achieve the multi-tracked richness of ’60s and ’70s rock production for a price that would have seemed impossibly low 20 years ago. So it’s no surprise that the last decade has seen indie rock bands running wild with the studio’s possibilities. Plenty of adjectives will pop into your noggin during your first listen to Big Echo (Rough Trade), the new album by The Morning Benders. “Unadorned” will not likely be one of them. “We wanted to cram
everything in there,” Morning Benders frontman Chris Chu says. “Happy and sad, dense and light, hi-fi and lo-fi.” An ambitious plan for a band that hadn’t previously made much of a fuss when it came time to roll tape. After forming in 2005, The Morning Benders released one album (2008’s Talking Through Tin Cans) and a slew of EPs, doggedly building an audience through small-club touring. A melodicist at heart, Chu wrote the kind of classic power-pop tunes that translated effortlessly from CD to stage. “I used to be almost ‘anti-production’ before,” Chu says. “I thought over-producing was the most evil thing you could possibly do to a song.” photo by matt jacoby
True to Chu’s less-is-more dictum, the Berkeley, CA-based band’s early records were a long way from the digitally-tweaked-to-death sound of 21st century radio rock. But his “anti-production” rule began to crack between albums. “I would find myself writing songs with tones and textures and arrangements in mind, waiting to be worked out in the studio,” Chu says. “The idea of production and the way things sounded in the studio became completely intertwined with the songwriting process.” The result was Big Echo, poised between the Technicolor playfulness of ’60s psychedelic pop and the muted, wistful turn the genre took as the downcast ’70s loomed on the horizon. Think of the later Beach Boys records, where the promise of nonstop beachside fun gives way to the realization that adulthood always catches up with you when you’re not paying attention. Or the trajectory of Big Star --the happy-sadness of puppy love becoming the desolation of real-deal heartbreak. The MBs’ new studio-based songwriting process was aided by Grizzly Bear’s Chris Taylor, who acted as mixing-desk guru during the Big Echo sessions. “It was wonderful for me because [Taylor] is not of the mindset that mixing is just the process where
you turn stuff up and turn stuff down,” Chu says. “We actually got our hands dirty and re-crafted a fair amount of the sound.” For proof, just listen to the layered arrangement on “Promises”—which spins a Big Echo is deliriously dense web of little in stores now hooks that Brian Wilson himfrom Rough self might have been proud of— Trade or the spaced-out way the band uses reverb on “All Day Daylight.” It’s all a long way from the recorded-in-one-take thrift of Guided by Voices. What unites The Morning Benders with East Coast peers Grizzly Bear is less a shared sound—the MBs are far less austere—than a love of atmosphere. Taylor may have recorded Big Echo in a former church, but the album doesn’t invoke cathedrals so much as the great outdoors, specifically a seaside resort once the vacationers have packed up and the season’s gone a bit chilly. Like a lonely day on the boardwalk, you almost expect to hear seagulls crying and the tide lapping the shore. Call it “cinematic,” if that oft-overused term doesn’t make you cringe. Like a director purposely fading a film’s print to create a dreamy, laconic mood, Big Echo’s reverb-heavy production amplifies the drowsy feeling of songs like “Hand Me Downs.” It’s not so much a party album as an album for the morning after the party, when you find yourself walking home alone, headphones on. Fittingly, a sense of loss, of an old life slipping away as you try to hold onto the good times, runs through Big Echo. “I can’t help thinking we grew up too fast,” Chu sings on “Promises,” which sums up the album’s mood as well as any one line could. For all his newfound willingness to experiment, Chu seems less interested in using the studio to tart up his arrangements with special effects, and more as a way to juice his songs’ emotional impact. “It was important to me that you could put on the album, no matter what mood you are in, and there will be something there that you connect to or that affects you,” he says. “Hopefully in a different way, each time.” And at a time when even album-rock stalwarts like Radiohead talk about moving to single-serving downloads, Big Echo is designed to be played, and replayed, straight through. It opens big, simmers in the middle and builds to a shameless, stirring climax in its last few tracks. “I write music with the LP format in mind,” Chu says when asked about the impact the album-era had on him as youthful music fan. “I love having records to hold. I love having what I’ve had for years, and that I feel ownership over. It’s a really special thing.”
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Ubiquitous popsmiths James Mercer and Danger Mouse craft lively new slang as Broken Bells
BY JESS HARVELL
may 2010
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tudio collaboration” is a phrase that strikes fear into many listeners’
hearts, and often with good reason. It conjures images of two famous dudes spending a week on a label-funded vacation, breezing through an album’s worth of songs and billing the eventual hodgepodge as an All-Star Event. Sure, every now and again we do get a career-defining record, a future classic. But more often than not the results sound like something designed to pay the bills between tours. “We just wanted to write songs together,” Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton says when asked about the genesis of Broken Bells, his collaboration with James “frontman for the Shins” Mercer. “It was more about having fun and just seeing where we could go musically.” So fans should breathe easy, because the duo’s self-titled debut is about as far from a cash-grab as possible. It was recorded on the sly, funded outof-pocket and labored over because the two loved working together. It’s the next step in Burton’s short but aesthetically restless career as a producer and songwriter, and a subtly radical departure for Mercer, still best known for the Shins’ more traditional brand of rock. In fact, Mercer and Burton would prefer if you didn’t call Broken Bells a “collaboration” at all. “Originally it was, Maybe Brian will produce something I’d write,” Mercer says. “He came up with the idea of just forming a band.” And somehow, despite the fact that Burton and Mercer began working together in early 2008, they kept the news of their new band from almost everyone (especially music biz insiders) until the fall of 2009. “I would fly down to L.A. every other week or so and stay for a bit,” Mercer says. “We would go in the studio, pick up an instrument and try to come up with something. We’d just do that day in and day out. Probably within an hour on the first day we had a song sketched out and recorded to where you could sit there and hum along to it.” With its pleasantly disorienting glaze of psychedelic studio effects, and rhythms that sound like R&B-tinged lullabies, Broken Bells is a definite departure from Gnarls Barkley’s arena-filling pop-funk and the sing-along friendliness of the Shins. It’s also a Top 10 hit, which is both odd and not so odd. On the one hand, Burton aptly describes it as a “sad spacerock record,” not usually the sort of thing that manages to escape the orbit of college radio. On the other hand, both Mercer and Burton are no strangers to the pop charts, both having crossed over to a mainstream audience while pretty much just doing what they want to do. Broken Bells is an album made by two of the 21st century’s more unexpected stars, chafing at the idea of repeating themselves, who decided to ditch all expectations (from labels, fans, journalists, whoever) in hopes of doing something new. 34
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Detour to your New Life
The beginning of a decade is often a strange time for pop music. Old trends are still hanging around long after their sell-by date. The bands that will later come to define the “sound of the decade” may have yet to even release an album. The charts are in flux; listeners are hungry for something new. Both Mercer and Burton managed to sneak into pop’s consciousness at precisely the right moment. (The Shins debuted in 2001 with Oh, Inverted World; Burton released his first widely available album as Danger Mouse, Ghetto Pop Life, in 2003.) The turn
of the millennium found the music industry in greater disarray than usual; the web just beginning to assert itself as the place to learn about new music and the place to hear new music. It also happened to be another of those early-decade down-times for pop, a brief window when all sorts of curiosities managed to snag listeners’ attention just by being themselves. So after the wearying machismo of nü-metal, a nice-guy indie-pop band had the chance to make a dent. And few listeners in any decade would have been able to resist the oddity of a DJ who dressed in a mouse costume and had the gall to use the Fab Four as raw material. The Shins and Danger Mouse were still the kind of acts you had to turn to the internet to discover. But the market for new music wasn’t quite so fragmented as it would become later in the decade: Internet success still meant the chance of reaching a mass audience. In 2003, Burton was kicking around the fringes of the underground beat-head community. He was known as an inventive, up-and-coming producer thanks to a handful of collaborations with low-profile indie rappers, but he wasn’t expected to start collecting award show statuettes any time soon. Then he decided to press up some copies of a curious remix project, a small-run CD of mash-ups he’d put together to test his own studio skills, and his fortunes changed in a mouse click. Released in early 2004, Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album quickly became the biggest left-field success story of the year, a meeting between some long-dead Beatles and a then-retired Jay-Z. Burton took 1968’s The Beatles (a.k.a. The White Album)—pinpointing a Ringo snare crack here, a stabbing guitar riff from John there—and crafted dizzying new beats for JayZ’s supposed swan song, 2003’s The Black Album. Uploaded to the internet, emailed from friend to friend, The Grey Album was the emblematic album of the early MP3 era: the massive hit that didn’t make a dime for its creator. (Though in this case, given the sticky copyright issues involved, that was probably a good thing.) “We were all Beatles fans and that’s how we heard about Brian,” Mercer says. “[The Grey Album] had sort of been the ambient music in the backstage area on [the Shins tour]. There was the novelty factor; I don’t think Brian would deny that. But also it’s a pretty ambitious idea... I remember listening to it and thinking, What in the hell? Did he get secret tracks or what?” Mercer and Burton met six years ago in the land of Hamlet and Lars Ulrich. Burton was DJing the may 2010
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Roskilde Festival, a pan-genre revel held every summer in Denmark since 1971. Danger Mouse was enjoying a very strange, very 21st century sort of fame thanks to the quasi-legal success of The Grey Album. At the beginning of the year, Burton had been a virtual unknown outside the world of indie hip-hop. Now he was taking the stage at a European festival that draws around 100,000 people per year, all thanks to an internet-distributed bootleg. The Shins weren’t doing too badly themselves in 2004; you could even buy their two albums in your local record store. The band had formed in New Mexico around the turn of the millennium, signed to a rapidly diversifying Sub Pop and moved to the Pacific Northwest, the spiritual home of catchy indie-pop with a melancholy edge. The Shins’ oldschool indie sound—wistful melodies, bouncy basslines, Mercer’s melodic but defiantly unslick regular-dude yelp—was nowhere to be heard on rock radio at the time. It attracted a surprisingly large audience of sensitive kids who felt alienated by meathead rap-rock and the deathless grunge ballad. Blogs and webzines meant it was possible for a band like the Shins to build a national— even international—fan base much faster than in the old days of endlessly crisscrossing the country on small club tours. But 2004 was also the year Garden State—Zach Braff’s unctuous film adaptation of Rick Moody’s novel about post-adolescent ennui—turned the Shins from a well-regarded Portland indie-pop act into the infamous “band that will change your life.” The band’s morose-butcuddly romanticism became catnip for film and TV producers who needed to score the climatic kiss between two teenage outcasts. The indie-world success of 2003’s Chutes —Brian Too Narrow, further boosted by the Shins unexpected turn as backing band for the year’s biggest indie romantic comedy, brought the fivesome to Roskilde that year. Broken Bells would have never come to pass if Burton, a fan of Chutes Too Narrow, hadn’t ducked backstage to offer the Shins and their songwriter a friendly “hey.” “We were new to touring in Europe and he was new to touring in Europe,” Mercer says. “It was just cool to... experience the festival with somebody else who was in that enthusiastic mode when you’re just starting out and getting a bit of attention. We ran around together and saw a bunch of performances. I remember we saw Morrissey, the first time I’d ever seen him play.” After Roskilde, things began moving very fast for Burton. Digitally reanimating the Beatles proved to be his backdoor into the legit music industry. He produced 2005’s Demon Days for Damon
Albarn’s high-profile, high-concept Gorillaz, shared duties on the Rapture’s unfairly neglected 2006 sophomore album Pieces of the People We Love, and went into the studio with his friend, the late Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse. But if “Danger Mouse” is now a household name, it’s because of Gnarls Barkley. The high points of Burton’s collaboration with fellow Georgian Cee-Lo are well known: a No. 1 hit in the UK, a No. 2 hit in the US, a Grammy and Rolling Stone’s single of the decade, all for 2006’s “Crazy.” If anyone had thought of Burton as “just” a producer, the go-to guy to make alt-superstars sound more interesting, the cross-generational success of Gnarls Barkley proved him to be a songwriter, one whose hip-hop-influenced, pick-and-mix approach to pop history allowed him to connect with old Motown fans as much as their Beyoncéloving grandchildren. Burton and Mercer kept up their mutual appreciation for each other’s music from a distance, occasionally running into each other on the road. It would be four years from that first meeting before either had the time to commit to a new project. “At one point I asked him if he would remix something of ours, but he was busy touring,” Mercer says. “We never talked about writing songs together. I wasn’t even thinking about that at the time; I was too busy concentrating on Shins stuff.” As underground rock became noisier and more experimental as the decade dragged on, the Shins’ accessibility became a virtue in the eyes of many ’80s and ’90s indie fans who felt excluded from the acid-jam party. They wrote songs, for instance, a comforting thing when your point of reference was the power-pop of the Replacements rather than the industrial freakitude of Nurse With Wound. Their burton third album, 2007’s Wincing the Night Away, amazingly debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard album chart, kept from the top spot by teen R&B perverts Pretty Ricky. A band that would have likely been a college kid secret in another decade was competing with millionaire entertainers, but Mercer wasn’t so eager to capitalize on this odd turn of events. “After doing Wincing the Night Away and touring quite a while, a year and a half or so, I just felt like the idea of going immediately in to do another record...” Mercer pauses for a moment. “[Writing and recording Wincing] had been such an arduous process. It always kind of is for me, I think. Just looking at the blank page. I wasn’t ready yet. I wasn’t in the mood to do it, and I often don’t do things I’m not in the mood to do.” Thankfully, Burton was there to offer a new opportunity, open-ended studio time and a place to crash.
We joked about not knowing sometimes who wrote what line. We’d listen to the songs and I really wouldn’t know. It would sound so much like something I’d think or say, and the same thing with him.”
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Maybe We’re Crazy… Probably
In 2008, Mercer got on a plane, flew to Los Angeles and began experimenting with his pal, no pre-writing or rough drafts allowed. “We wanted to go in from scratch,” Burton says. “Every day we would go in and write songs together and record them, and come back to certain songs over the course of about a year.” Broken Bells retains that sense of daily discovery. You get the feeling many songs were built around happy accidents, guitar melodies from Mercer that might have been lost forever if the tape hadn’t been rolling, or an unexpected sound coaxed from a synthesizer because Burton happened to hit just the right buttons. Chuck Klosterman first compared Burton to avant-pop überproducer Brian Eno in a 2006 New York Times profile, but Broken Bells sounds like the first album where he had the time to adopt Eno’s strategy of ditching traditional songwriting in favor of instudio messing around. “I had never worked collaboratively with someone in the way that we were doing it,” Mercer says about the off-the-cuff Broken Bells sessions. “As soon as you have something that sounds cool, you record it... sometimes if you’re sitting there with the guitar, there’s just something about the way you’re [playing] that maybe an hour later you will no longer be doing it exactly that way.” Broken Bells became more about shaping these fleeting moments into full-fledged songs than chasing a particular sound. “We talked about bands we liked and we listened to music [together],” Mercer says. “But we didn’t then go ‘oh, we should have a band that’s a combination of these things.’” The lack of definition also allowed the two to stretch beyond their comfort zones; it’s hard to imagine the disco-diva falsetto Mercer deploys on “The Ghost Inside” showing up on the next Shins record. Still, Broken Bells does have a very particular mood. “James and I both have a lot of range; we can do a lot of different things,” Burton says. “Some of that still comes across, but it wasn’t really important for us to show that.” It’s a subdued record; the jangle-pop hooks of the Shins surface rarely. (Though check the breakdown on “Vaporize” if you really need that Shins fix.) It’s also frequently gorgeous, in an understated sorta way: Another band might have spun an entire arrangement around the swooning string section that opens “October.” Like many of Burton’s projects, Broken Bells nods to ’60s pop (and its production values) without trying to achieve a dull fidelity to a long-gone style. Funk trumpets swimming in druggy reverb, a Stax Records backbeat anchoring a sea of electric organ, orchestral arrangements that sound like carnival music: Burton and Mercer seem to be aiming for that late ’60s moment when rock and soul didn’t seem so far apart, when the Temptations were turning on to acid rock and guitar bands fried on various mind-altering compounds still bought Smokey Robinson records. This is not to say that Broken Bells sounds dated. Like the Beta Band, perhaps the closest contemporary comparison to Broken Bells, the duo’s crafted a particularly modern mix: hazy ’60s pop meets confessional ’90s indie rock with the snap of new millennium R&B. “There’s songs we didn’t use on [Broken Bells], that didn’t quite fit the album we thought had developed as we were making it,” Burton says. The duo’s surplus is another sign the band is far from
over; there’s already talk of a second Broken Bells album, despite the fact that their debut is still in the “New Releases” rack. One thing about bands in comparison to one-off collaborations: The music always sounds richer, the product of shared life experience, when artists have spent time together outside of the studio, for better (when you can sense the camaraderie on the album itself ) or worse (all those tour van horror stories). Burton and Mercer weren’t retiring to separate hotels at the end of each working day; they were sharing meals, swapping personal histories and trading enthusiasms. “That was definitely a big part of where a lot of the [album’s] subject matter came from,” Burton says. “We got to really know each other while we were making the album.” The traditional division of labor quickly fell away. “Even stuff that [Mercer] wrote, lyric-wise, I still felt very connected to it,” Burton says. “We joked about not knowing sometimes who wrote what line. We’d listen to the songs and I really wouldn’t know. It would sound so much like something I’d think or say, and the same thing with him.” The blend of personalities and approaches means Broken Bells can’t be easily squeezed into ad copy: “the Shins produced by the guy from Gnarls Barkley.” Audiences have embraced the album, despite its obvious difference from the duo’s previous work, but for the band, test-marketing was never an option. Broken Bells had to be an album they’d both be happy to have lurking in their discographies. “You don’t know where it’s going to wind up,” Burton says. “You know if he likes it a certain amount, and you like it a certain amount, then other people probably will, too. But first thing’s first.” A smart plan: The market’s a lot different now than it was when the Shins skirted No. 1, just three years ago. Tailoring your music to meet the needs of the mythical mass audience is a fool’s errand in a world where former million-selling acts are happy with a fraction of that. For now, Mercer and Burton are happy to explore the possibilities of a working band—writing, recording, touring—after 24 months of long-distance album-making. Burton has foresworn outside production jobs, for the time being at least, in order to focus on more hands-on collaborations like Broken Bells. Mercer says there will be another Shins album, but given his commitment to Bells (and family life), it’s still uncertain when he’ll be able to grab a few quiet minutes to begin writing. “My life is much richer now than it was five years ago,” Mercer says. “And that’s terrific. But it does slow down the pace of my ruminating in my bedroom with a guitar in my hands.” And after so many months of fussing, the Broken Bells songs are ready for the road. The band’s tour begins this month, and unlike the costumed spectacle that is a Gnarls Barkley concert, the Broken Bells stage show is stripped down, an attempt to capture the sound of the album. “There is a song that we might speed up just a little bit,” Mercer says. “We do have the freedom to add a little bit of energy if that’s what the evening’s calling for. At the same time, we’re not trying to ‘sell it.’” Despite sold-out gigs, TV appearances, a hit record released by a multinational corporation and the baggage of past successes, Broken Bells are sticking to the “no expectations” philosophy they instituted back when no one even knew they existed. It’s probably the sanest way for anyone to retain their enthusiasm for the important stuff—like making music. may 2010
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may 2010
No One to Blame
Broken Social Scene hold no grudges on Forgiveness Rock Record / by Matt Sullivan
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round the turn of the millennium, Toronto was home to a robust art-rock scene, one that was just beginning to attract notice from outside city limits. In February of 2003, Ryan Schreiber, editor-in-chief of thenburgeoning webzine Pitchfork, posted a review of a nondescript-looking record from a goofily named Toronto collective. Schreiber claimed to have simply plucked an album from Pitchfork’s vault of unopened CDs, and his enthusiastic missive stood in stark contrast to the site’s reputation for cynicism. He championed the band’s “unfiltered creativity and kinetic energy,” claiming, “I wish I could convey how they’ve made just exactly the kind of pop record that stands the test of time.” These days, the “Pitchfork Effect,” the internet-wide ripple of interest that follows a positive (or negative) review on the site, is an accepted fact, but the site was an unexpected kingmaker in 2003. Within weeks, You Forgot It in People by Broken Social Scene was the biggest album on the web. That same year, BSS won a Juno award in their native Canada for Alternative Album of the Year. If Schreiber really did come across You Forgot It in People at random, he hit paydirt. It’s an album that tugs in a million different directions—from anthemic guitar rock to haunting ballads and psychedelic freakouts to vaguely surf-y post-rock—and somehow never flies apart. Listening now, it’s easy to hear it as one of the key indie albums of the early 21st century. But back in 2003, it would have been impossible to guess that an obscure, partially self-released record, from a band whose only previous output was an innocuous ambient album, would go on to figure so prominently in all those best-of-the-decade lists. Pleasant but ultimately forgettable, that first Broken Social photo by dave gillespie
Scene album, 2001’s Feel Good Lost, also provided the template for the band’s best music. Feel Good Lost began as a small-scale project between BSS founders Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning before expanding to include an unwieldy list of contributors from the Toronto rock scene, an incestuousness that would come to define Broken Social Scene. On a given song, the collective’s membership might swell to include anywhere from eight to 18 musicians, a rotating cast drawn from bands like Stars, Do Make Say Think and Metric. “People come first,” BSS member Charles Spearin says of the band’s collaborative mentality. Songs begin with “a group of people we want to work with,” rather than a list of instruments they need people to play. That sort of collectivity requires compromises and concessions. Personalities are bound to clash. Facing the expectations generated by your surprise hit doesn’t help matters. And over the last decade, Broken Social Scene, with their admirable “just a group of friends making music together” mentality, have struggled to outrun those expectations, overcome internal (and external) tensions, and hang onto the anything-goes freedom that produced the still-startling You Forgot It in People. [ ►] may 2010
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/music is just so unreal.” It would have been a good time to silence the naysayers with a quick, solid fourth album. Instead, Broken Social Scene disappeared for almost five years. Well, sort of disappeared. The Brand Indie Reign
Broken Social Scene spent 2004 crisscrossing the globe, selling out clubs and releasing an entire album’s worth of B-sides and outtakes entitled Bee Hives. But at some point the band was going to have to prove that YFIIP’s success wasn’t a fluke. By Drew’s own account, producer and occasional BSS contributor David Newfeld became obsessed with the idea of topping the band’s breakthrough album. “It got kind of complicated,” Spearin says of the recording sessions with Newfeld that yielded Broken Social Scene’s 2005 self-titled album. “He has a very strong personality... It got to be very tense.” He’s quick to dismiss any lingering tension between the two camps, but Broken Social Scene proved the band (and producer Newfeld) wouldn’t be satisfied with just reproducing their previous album. Where YFIIP was a meticulously crafted amalgam of wildly different rock subgenres, Broken Social Scene sprawls, crowding every available corner of sonic real estate. Though instrumental post-rockers made a virtue of excess long before Broken Social Scene arrived, the collective’s third album marked the point where a “we jam econo” philosophy gave way to “bigger is better.” The album contains some of Broken Social Scene’s most popular songs, but it’s also less immediate than You Forgot It in People. Songs like “It’s All Gonna Break” were slow to come together in the studio; according to Spearin, a version was even scrapped while recording YFIIP. The band built and rebuilt the Broken Social Scene material so many times that they seemed to sacrifice some songs’ memorability. And Broken Social Scene did prove to be more divisive than its predecessor. The album’s messy jam-style songs were either ambitious or aimless, depending on who you asked, and the clumsy stab at rap-rock on “Windsurfing Nation” was obviously a nonstarter for many BSS fans. But some of the criticism aimed at the band seemed less a Broken Social Scene backlash than a backlash against hype itself, the idea of a young band being deified on the basis of a single album. With his band’s success obviously accelerated by the internet’s taste-making muscle, Drew began to distance himself from his benefactor. “Pitchfork is just so silly,” Drew told webzine PopMatters at the time. “The buzz that it generates 40
may 2010
It seemed a difficult, divisive third album couldn’t stem fans’ desire for new Broken Social Scene material. Thanks to an ever-growing cache among indie rock fans, the collective’s members began to benefit individually from BSS’ absence, though none would equal the success of Leslie Feist. For a band that had appeared to come together organically, divorced from commercial concerns, Broken Social Scene’s sometimes-singer would become one of Apple’s secret weapons. During Broken Social Scene’s five-year blackout, the collective became something of a brand itself. The band’s founders have recorded one solo album apiece, released under the banner of “Broken Social Scene Presents.” Kevin Drew’s Spirit If... and Brendan Canning’s Something for All of Us do indeed function as surrogate BSS albums. Both feature the same familiar cast from the main collective—and sound an awful lot like Broken Social Scene. But according to Spearin, who played on both albums and helped produced Drew’s, the songwriting process is markedly different when a BSS member goes solo. “When you’re working in a band like Broken Social Scene, then it’s all about leaving space or protecting other people’s ideas and creating sort of an
photo by norman wong
entity unto itself,” he says. While the other members of Broken Social Scene got to call the shots in their various outside projects, Drew and Canning had focused solely on the collective. The founders’ solo albums offered them an opportunity to work outside of the compromises necessary in a formal BSS release. Something for All of Us gives the impression that Canning exercises greater influence over the band’s eclecticism, and their more epic compositions, and Spirit If... firmly establishes Drew as Broken Social Scene’s hopeless romantic. But Drew probably doesn’t have to do much coaxing to get the rest of the crew to pin their hearts on their sleeves. Consider the collective’s proclamation that “We hate your hate,” printed inside the Broken Social Scene album jacket. Or the accompanying press material for the band’s first new album in half a decade: “Forgiveness Rock Record is, like all Broken Social Scene albums, a record driven by love.” You Are Forgiven
“It represents wanting to put an end to the blaming and resentment and start fresh—personally and politically and spiritually,” Spearin says of Broken Social Scene’s long-awaited Forgiveness Rock Record. It’s the kind of utopian rhetoric one comes to expect from a band with cult-like tendencies. “There’s some serious problems in the world,” Spearin says. “And we’re not going to be able to handle them if we’re fighting with each other.” As modern hippie-talk (or political sloganeering)
goes, that sort of hope-and-change idealism can be easily dismissed as vague or naïve by cynics, but the band has clung to it since their inception. Broken Social Scene’s sincerity is genuine, though the band might just take what they do less seriously than you’d think. The closing track on Forgiveness Rock Record is called “Me and My Hand,” and it’s likely about what you think it ‘s about. “We did a week of jamming and wrote about 30 songs,” Spearin says of the lead-up to Forgiveness Rock Record. The songwriting/jamming process continued when they got to Tortoise member John McEntire’s Soma Studios in Chicago. As with each previous Broken Social Scene recording session, there was a wealth of extra material left over, some of which will be compiled into a 10-track EP of mostly ambient selections that will accompany early copies of FRR. According to Spearin, many of the album’s lyrics were improvised in-studio, conveying a mood or state of mind rather than any concrete message. But when asked about “Texico Bitches”—which joins “Handjobs for the Holidays” and “I’m Your Fag” as Broken Social Scene songs as infamous for their titles as their music—Spearin turns a bit elusive, claiming that Drew would be the guy to ask. But he does offer that in the song, “bitches are not women, and it’s more political than you’d think.” A suitably vague response from band known for its cryptic utterances, even when going political. Thankfully, the song’s hooks speak loud enough for themselves. Forgiveness Rock Record retains the epic scope of Broken Social Scene, but returns to the polished and tightly arranged genre-hopping fans expected from the band five years ago. Listeners are kept guessing as BSS bob and weave from bombastic anthems (“World Sick”) and breathy near-ambient dreamscapes (“Sentimental X’s”) to string-laden ballads (“Romance to the Grave”) and unadulterated Pavement worship (“Water in Hell”). “I think the sequence on this record really tells a story,” Spearin says. “Once you get into it, it really seems to go on a journey.” It’s the layers and layers of studio trickery and electronic textures that tie the album together; songs that would feel wildly different in isolation seem to flow out of each other. Forgiveness Rock Record succeeds in the same unlikely fashion as the band itself. It emerges from a rocky brush with too-much-too-soon success, effortlessly blending an array of sounds (and personalities) that might seem at odds with one another on first glance. They may have already given us one decade-defining album, but Forgiveness Rock Record is all the proof you need that Broken Social Scene are in it for the long haul.
may 2010
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New Life, Break Away
With their bassist still fighting through a coma, Deftones land a surprising knockout
O
n November 4, 2008, Deftones bassist Chi Cheng sank into a coma after a car accident in
Santa Clara, CA; the band’s future became a hot topic of discussion. As of this writing, Chi remains hospitalized in a “minimally conscious state,” according to the fundraising website oneloveforchi.com. Deftones ceased work on Eros, the album they were recording at the time of the accident, and Chi’s bandmates have held benefit concerts to help cover their fallen comrade’s medical expenses.
Deftones 8 Diamond Eyes [Reprise]
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After scrapping Eros, the band brought in former Quicksand bassist Sergio Vega and cranked out Diamond Eyes in two months with producer Nick Raskulinecz (Foo Fighters, Velvet Revolver). Which isn’t to imply that the band’s sixth full-length is a toss-off. In fact, it’s easily one of their best. Deftones mastered the glorious art of huge choruses long ago, and they deliver here in spades. The title track (and album opener) sets the bar ridiculously high with thick, grinding verses that recall 1995’s Adrenaline and vocalist Chino Moreno decanting a spellbinding refrain. It’s the kind of white-hot jam that demands the psychotic repeat-
play treatment, and it’s not alone. “CMND/CTRL” offers another bruising, Adrenaline-style rumble, with Moreno almost rapping the verses, while Vega, drummer Abe Cunningham and keyboardist Frank Delgado help propel guitarist Stephen Carpenter’s beefy-but-smooth dissonance into the stratosphere. And it’s onward and upward from there: “Beauty School,” “Prince” and “Sextape” are kaleidoscopes of slow-burning atmosphere driven by Vega’s pulsing low-end and Carpenter’s custom eight-string oscillations. “Rocket Skates,” a track already released as a free download, is a roaring riff-monster in the photo by 13th Witness
tempestuous vein of 1997’s “My Own Summer (Shove It),” with a chorus (“Guns! Razors! Knives!”) that threatens to become a new fan favorite. Diamond Eyes closes with the hypnotic downtempo dyad of “976-Evil” and “This Place is Death,” twin exercises in triumphant understatement. If and when Cheng emerges from the other side, he just might approve. — J. Bennett
CocoRosie 6 Grey Oceans [Sub Pop]
CocoRosie fans have been patiently waiting for a return to form since 2003’s La Maison de Mon Rêve, and here it is. Grey Oceans is an obstinately lo-fi album born of wanderlust and produced in friends’ bathrooms. Sisters Sierra and Bianca Casady display a little more restraint than usual on Grey Oceans, and the result is an uneven, but ultimately rewarding, travelogue of the pair’s experiences recording on-the-fly with musicians on four continents. Elements drawn from hip-hop and electronica give the album some subtle 21st-century touches, but the Casady Sisters take more inspiration from their grandparents’ generation. “Smokey Taboo” sounds like Billie Holiday cooing over tabla drums, and “Lemonade,” anchored by a simple piano chord progression, is equally spectral and winsome. It’s a fine counterpoint to 2007’s confounding and overly slick The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn. Even the lyrics—a sore point for non-fans—feel restrained. — Nick Green
Evelyn Evelyn 8 Evelyn Evelyn [Eleven]
Does it matter if an artist actually exists, so long as the art itself exists? That’s the question posed by Evelyn Evelyn, a band purportedly comprising conjoined twins Lyn and Eva Neville, but most likely the work of Amanda Palmer (one half of Dresden Dolls) and accomplished accordionist Jason Webley. The short answer is “no.” Just like The Blair Witch Project scared audiences out of their wits even after it was revealed to be a brilliant ruse, Evelyn Evelyn create songs so genuinely charming that it doesn’t matter if the sister act is a hoax. The strongest hint that Palmer and Webley are running the show? One of the “sisters” sounds like Palmer and the other sure sounds like a dude. The other giveaway is the high level of theatricality that characterizes Palmer’s other projects. Rich with humor, the songs describe the possibly fictional twins’ kooky existence. From the jaunty, Fats Waller-esque “Have You Seen My Sister Evelyn” to the dreary lamentation “Evelyn Evelyn,” the duo (whoever they are) craft a tale that Tim Burton could easily turn into a tragic yet uplifting Claymation film. And though the burden of life as an Evelyn is made clear, there’s still plenty to celebrate. After all, they do have a lot of friends. “My Space” even features the unlikely combination of Weird Al Yankovic, Tegan and Sara, and Frances Bean Cobain. — Jeanne Fury
David Cross 6
Bigger and Blackerer [Sub Pop]
David Cross sings! OK, he sings once, at the top of his new album. “Opening Song (The Sultan’s Revenge)” is a mock-cabaret tune that somehow becomes a cosmonaut-and-astronaut joke. It’s deliberately corny, but that’s about all the showbiz Cross has in him. Bigger and Blackerer immediately veers into darker territory, like heroin addiction, culminating in a vignette where Cross, so wasted that he craps himself in public, pins the blame on his dog: “Ollie, what are you doing? Stop jumping up on my back and shitting on my pants.” Cross is on more righteous ground with his trademark political material, mocking Tea Party rhetoric (Obama as “a Muslim Nazi”) and slamming anti-health care reformers: “The more I watch them I think, Wait a second. You know what? I don’t want you to have health care. I want you to die. I want less of you and more of me.” If that doesn’t seem, well, funny per se, that’s the problem. Cross hectors more than he illuminates. Even if you agree with everything he says, it can grow wearying. —Michaelangelo Matos
may 2010
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LCD Soundsystem 9
Mike Patton 9
[Parlophone]
[Ipecac]
This Is Happening
LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy is a master of momentum. The band’s strongest songs seem to start at a whisper, slowly growing more and more insistent until they become revelatory. There’s no better example of Murphy’s skill than This Is Happening’s opening track, the nine-minute “Dance Yourself Clean.” The beat builds tension slowly, gathering subtle sonic additions, until the synth finally comes charging in, giving the mind (and the body; this is dance music, after all) a jolt of unexpected pleasure. Murphy has taken you somewhere, led you by the nose, and he didn’t even need to ask permission. The rest of the album has a similar feel, though tracks like the wildly fun “Drunk Girls” offer a more straightforward breed of dancepop verve. With Murphy’s maturity as a songwriter comes both a sly sense of humor and a talent for understated emotionalism, continuing on from LCD’s transcendent second album Sound of Silver. “What You Need,” This is Happening’s excellent closing track, examines dance floor escapism over an infectious little groove, with Murphy acknowledging that it’s the difficulty of the outside world that often makes the euphoria so intense. —Lee Stabert
Melvins 9
The Bride Screamed Murder
Mondo Cane
We’ll be first in line to say Mike Patton has his hand in too many projects. Just because the guy’s a self-styled hermit and free to follow through on every random idea that pops into his head, well, it doesn’t mean that he should. Which is why it’s surprising that Patton’s newest record, Mondo Cane, is worth a long listen. Utilizing a full orchestra, superbly conducted by Aldo Sisillo, Patton runs through 11 Italian pop songs from the ’50s and ’60s. That’s it. No remixes, or unconventional bells and whistles. These are polished and expansive versions of classic songs you’ve probably never heard. And while Patton uses his unmistakable voice (and fluency in Italian) to bring the songs back to life, he never tramples them. Patton’s sardonic and off-kilter sense of humor has soured some of his past output, but the most enjoyable aspect of Mondo Cane is the respect he affords the music. While the vocals are occasionally a little randy, they’re always in context, and in character. The songs themselves are skillful and emotive slices of pop that range from melancholy ballroom numbers to sweeping ballads to thundering party rock. With Mondo Cane, Patton gives a patina of respectability to music his fans might have otherwise overlooked. And he may yet turn a few Italian pop fans into noise-rap aficionados. —Shane Mehling
[Ipecac ]
When the Melvins released (A) Senile Animal back in 2006—their first album as dual-drummer four-piece—the contributions Jared Warren and Coady Willis (a.k.a. young metal duo Big Business) suggested another one-off Melvins experiment. With The Bride Screamed Murder, the band makes it obvious that their twodrummer, four-man lineup hasn’t been some tangential project. This is the Melvins, and they’re as good as they’ve ever been. Like the two studio albums before it, The Bride Screams Murder has a vested interest in showcasing the whole two-drummer thing, but it feels more natural and more subtle now. Seemingly re-energized, the band hasn’t stuck to the slow tempos on which they made their name. Lead track “The Water Glass” opens with a classic Melvins stoner metal riff before shifting course into a sound that can only be described as “cheerleader meets military march.” “Evil New War God,” is every bit as menacing as title implies, and “Inhumanity and Death” is perfect for high-speed Camaro racing. But the band still finds time to get slow and weird. “My Generation?” is a bizarro take on the Who classic that depicts a generation of cough-syrup-trippers rather than the tweakers of the original. Tough-to-pin-down closer “P.G. x 3” demonstrates Warren and King Buzzo’s perfectly matched voices. Happy 25th anniversary, Melvins. —Matt Sullivan 44
may 2010
Minus the Bear 6 Omni
[Dangerbird]
Well, it looks like we’ve hit the point where the universe converges and indie rock absorbs everything that came before it and genre-bending stops being interesting in and of itself. Not to say that Minus the Bear’s Omni isn’t interesting or enjoyable—it is—but the novelty of stacking your squeedly-squeedly-dee synths over your prog guitar noodles over your earnest vocals has sort of worn off since the Seattle outfit released their first EP almost a decade ago. Lead single “My Time” finds the band exploring the late ’80s dad-rock revival, mining that Depeche Mode/Hall and Oates sound that will be dominating the backyard barbecues of fauxhemian enclaves all summer long. Because nothing is hipper than copping style points off your pops. Again. Maybe we’re caught in some sort of space-time loop where the Police and 90125-era Yes are in fact the same band, and just masquerading as Minus the Bear to throw us off the scent. Or maybe Minus the Bear have just decided to give up on being clever (where are the funny song titles?) and are trying to find a place in the center consoles of soccer-practice-bound Subarus everywhere. —Sean L. Maloney
Solex vs. Cristina Martinez & Jon Spencer 7 Amsterdam Throwdown, Kingstreet Showdown! [Bronze Rat]
You don’t just go picking a fight with husband-and-wife duo Jon Spencer and Cristina Martinez. As veterans of disastrous, delicious punk bands Pussy Galore and Boss Hog, the duo’s earned a reputation as being one of the hottest, baddestassed couples in rock. Between Spencer’s heaving blues-rock and Martinez’s razor-sharp tongue, well, let’s just say the odds are stacked heavily against the opposition. And that’s probably what Dutch electro whiz Solex (a.k.a. Elisabeth Esselink) was counting on when she jumped in the ring. Known for her ability to grab musical scraps and weld them together with tons of panache, Solex takes these hellcats to the mat and shoves ’em around. Amsterdam Throwdown, Kingstreet Showdown! drips with sexy, blues-y swagger—typical Spencer/Martinez—but Solex spins the songs into deeper, weirder dimensions. Daft poetry trades jabs with electro squelches, sounds snatched from city streets, and the fat, sweet energy of ’70s funk. “Dog Hit” features hypnotic eastern influences and ringing telephones; flutes and horns add a breezy charm to “R is for Ring a Ding Ding”; and “Aapie” struts through an urban jungle in a gold lamé loincloth. Put James Bond and Captain Kirk in gowns, send both of them to the prom with Judy Jetson, and this the sound to which they’d get down. “Everrythang about you so crazy baby!” Spencer howls on “Racer X.” “Faster, faster, faster!” Martinez answers. This throwdown/showdown’s going into extra rounds. —Jeanne Fury
Stone Temple Pilots 3 Stone Temple Pilots [Atlantic]
Stone Temple Pilots return with a selftitled album that closes a 10-year hiatus. A 12-track grab bag, Stone Temple Pilots leaves the listener with the bad taste of a decade’s worth of rock detritus disguised as “new” songs. We should stress here that the STP of Core and Purple produced great records; their sound was at least novel for the era. What STP offers now is a self-referential nod to their former glories, and a tribute to the ’90s rock pantheon. You can hear influences ranging from Gin Blossoms to nü-metal woven into songs that sound cohesive taken one at a time, but feel confused when taken as a whole. The production on Stone Temple Pilots is undoubtedly topnotch, all layered choruses and endless effects. Unfortunately post-Velvet Revolver Scott Weiland sounds like an insane parody of his less-than-sober self. Weiland recorded in complete isolation from the rest of the band, perhaps explaining the curious absence of any album-wide consistency. (Something the band apparently views as a strength to go by recent STP interviews and press releases.) Stone Temple Pilots proves that bands break up for a reason. In a more utopian world, a band like STP would be a nostalgic memory. Instead they’ve entered the future as a band stuck in the past, hastily attempting to revive their already secure legacy. —Justin Smith
may 2010
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A Waste of a Wasteland The Book of Eli, or why Gary Oldman can’t get a break / by Jonah Gruber
T
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his is how it might have happened. A producer reads The Road after hearing that it was going to be turned into a movie: “This book is really about the state of Christianity after the Apocalypse... I think.” He looks over the box office totals for features with Christian themes in the past three years.
may 2010
At the top of the list is the entry for Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. “$370,000,000!” he yells, spilling his highball all over his black Eames knockoff. “What if The Road wasn’t about two people trying to survive, but about a Christian guy who had the last copy of the Bible and a sword, hacking people to pieces while saving the souls of wasteland pagans?” This isn’t an idea, it’s a revelation. Three weeks, two directors and 11 screenwriters later, The Book of Eli goes into post-production. Denzel Washington wanders through over-stylized digital scenery. Men try to kill Denzel Washington, but Denzel Washington isn’t going to die easy. He has a sword and a Bible. Before he kills people, he whispers something into their ears that echoes the wisdom of the Old Testament. You know that bar scene in On Deadly Ground where Steven Seagal beats up that redneck and then enlightens him on the essence of being a man? The Book of Eli is like that scene, but repeated for two hours. “We can’t just have this movie be about a guy who kills people and has the last copy of the Bible,” the Hughes brothers decide after reading the eighth draft of the script. “We need a bad guy who wants the Bible!” says Hughes One. “Why?” Hughes Two says. “Because he’s the devil?” says Hughes One. “That’s good enough.” says Hughes Two. “Who’s going to star in this P.O.S.?” the producer thinks. But again, as if the project were guided by some holy light, the voice of revelation wells up illustration by gluekit
from deep inside him. “Donna,” he says to the intercom, “get me Oldman.” Gary Oldman finds his way into a lot of awful
movies, yet we always see him shine. The conniving
congressman Shelly Runyon in The Contender gave Oldman a chance to flex his evil muscles. A supporting actor Oscar nom should have been in the offing, but Oldman’s chances were dashed in the year of Gladiator and the impression its Big Box Office left on the Academy. In Hannibal he was seriously creepy as Mason Verger, wearing his disfigured face like a Judas Priest fan’s dream circa 1985, but he was stuck with a story that tried too hard to scare when there was nothing actually there. And yes, there was his award-worthy performance in Sid and Nancy, but it was 1986, a time when people seemed to be obsessed with coming to terms with Vietnam and tying two generations of Sheens together in the kind of overreaching drama we’ve come to expect from the Oscars. So, we got Platoon. Oldman’s winning performances are obscured by the mediocrity of the film that carries them, or by monolithic successes released that same year, or maybe just bad luck. It may also be the case that Oldman is cursed: a good actors who stars in bad movies designed solely to win trophies for their stars. Sometimes a piece of rotten fruit can be hard to shake off, as was the case with Immortal Beloved, which saw, in addition to Gary Oldman, many of Europe’s most talented actors trying to tread water on in awful story written around an excellent premise. photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
Oldman’s winning performances are obscured by the mediocrity of the film that carries them, or by monolithic successes released that same year, or maybe just bad luck. (How could you screw up a movie about Ludwig von Beethoven?) So where does Oldman go from voice-acting roles in videogames (a shameful waste of his talent)? The fact that everybody agrees that he is a revered actor who deserves something is reason enough to start placing bets. Easter Sixteen is a good number to throw your chips on next year. It will star Oldman as socialist rebel James Connolly in the 1916 Easter Rising, complete with a drawn-out execution sequence. All the ingredients of a great film are there, all the conflicts and sacrifices necessary to promote an actor to the role of Oscar winner are in place. There’s forced weight loss, there’s political controversy, there’s liberal sentimentality. There are plenty of reasons why Oldman should take his gold statuette next year, but as we’ve seen before, there’s always something lurking in the wings to rob him of a glory that is rightfully his. Let’s all hope that when he finally gets one, it’s not for lifetime achievement.
The Book of Eli will be available June 15 on DVD and Blu-Ray from Warner Bros.
may 2010
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/movies/short fuse
by Andrew Bonazelli Tetro
Francis Ford Coppola is a living legend, but that longawaited return to form that will yield the next Apocalypse Now or Godfather? Not happening. Which is not to say Tetro isn’t endearingly ambitious; it takes classic themes of loyalty, brotherhood, creative passion and unrequited love and, well, goes kinda apeshit with them. DiCaprio lookalike Alden Ehrenreich heads to Buenos Aires to find his long-lost recluse of an older brother. The ever-entertaining Vincent Gallo plays the title character with more reserve, maturity and inner turmoil than he’s ever exhibited. While Tetro’s conceit is simple—their father is a world-renowned conductor, and Gallo flamed out trying to write the play that would cement his place in the family’s artistic lineage—Coppola’s execution is unhinged operatic madness. In Stores May 4 Lionsgate
Tooth Fairy
Avatar
Before you get all excited, know that this version has zilch for extras and is not in 3D. And yes, the latter is the only reason to get excited about James Cameron’s latest all-time box office dominator. We could crap on JC’s cupcake all day, but there’s simply nothing new to say about Avatar at this point. As a begrudging compliment, how about the concession that, at the very least, this film is a tribute to visual storytelling. Well, the parts with the floating mountains, not the part where Giovanni Ribisi explains the entire plot to characters who are already participating in it via one of the worst expository monologues ever scripted. Okay, that didn’t go well. Whatever. This is one of the few dork movies that appealed to everyone, which means everyone is a dork. In Stores Now 20th Century Fox 48
may 2010
Well, the Rock has officially blown it. He was Schwarzenegger’s heir apparent—the Governator even showed up in the beginning of The Rundown to formally pass the torch. But The Scorpion King, Doom and the Walking Tall remake were both critical and commercial disappointments (don’t get me started on Southland Tales), so surprise—now he’s just muscled-up everyman Dwayne Johnson, kid-tested/mother-approved star of Gridiron Gang, The Game Plan, Race to Witch Mountain and now this disaster. And really, let’s not begrudge him his opportunity to make bank. He and his handlers noticed an empty niche and filled it. But any movie called Tooth Fairy in 2010 needs to be a FEARnet horror movie starring Clint Howard in the title role. We don’t make the rules—we just enforce them. In Stores May 4 20th Century Fox
The Road
People are goofy. They’ll read the shit out of an unremittingly bleak, minimalist study of post-apocalyptic familial bonds (Oprah’s stamp of approval goes a long way, sure), but aggressively avoid the movie. Then they’ll parrot the consensus of critics who claim that the novel is “unfilmable,” a strange accusation, since Cormac McCarthy’s 2006’s pageturner is so startlingly visual. After No Company for Old Men dominated the Oscars, this should have been another hit adaptation for the author, but no dice. It wasn’t for lack of trying, with Proposition director John Hillcoat behind the lens, a feral, emaciated Viggo Mortensen occupying the role of the fiercely protective lead, and supporting character sketches given ample life by Robert Duvall and Charlize Theron. In Stores May 25 Sony
Daria: The Complete Animated Series
Here’s a fine, underrated show that MTV actually did right by, affording five full seasons, despite its chronic inability to find an audience. Daria was, you may recall, the bespectacled, derisive smartass classmate of Beavis and Butt-Head. In this spinoff— co-created by Glenn Eichler and Susie Lewis Lynn—she naturally got much more room to roam, although mostly in the form of straight girl reacting to the endless horror that entails being a teenager. The writers played with archetypes well, from the dimwitted jock and cheerleader couple to the detached cool of her best friend’s older brother and wide-eyed befuddlement of her father. It’s like the animated answer to My SoCalled Life, but more richly observed and less prone to whiny melodrama. In Stores May 11 MTV/Paramount
Extraordinary Measures
You know your career’s in the shitter when you’re sharing billing with Brendan Fraser, but not the Mummy. Judging by his infamously terse interviews inflating the importance of his recent run of duds, we’re guessing Harrison Ford doesn’t care much one way or the other. Extraordinary Measures is a strange hybrid of melodrama and rippedfrom-the-headlines superscience. Encino Man plays a biotechnology exec whose kids are stricken with a brutal neuromuscular disorder. Ford is the crotchety researcher who specializes in curing rare diseases. As you may recall from the trailer, he ALREADY WORKS AROUND THE CLOCK. So, if you’re a fan of sick urchins, Harrison Ford shouting and Brendan Fraser doing whatever it is he does that somehow continues to inspire casting directors, this is your huckleberry. In Stores May 18 Sony Pictures
The Messenger
Reality television thrives when it introduces us to alien subcultures—mean-spirited rich housewives; roid-raging beach trash. At first glance, The Messenger at first seems like a concept tailor-made for the genre—how compelling would it be to follow the men who have to notify next of kin about military deaths abroad? Except, duh, not even the ghouls who give us exploitative crap like Celebrity Rehab would send cameras along to capture the reactions of those poor families. So, The Messenger works best as fiction after all, and is ably carried by Woody Harrelson in the grizzled veteran role, and Ben Foster as the naïve rookie who falls for a widow. That plot may sound cliché, but in the hands of Best Supporting Actor nominee Harrelson, nuance abounds. In Stores May 18 Oscilloscope Laboratories
Walkabout
If you’ve ever read a Great Directors That Lost It column, Nicolas Roeg is probably in there. Between Walkabout, his 1971 debut, Don’t Look Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth and Bad Timing, the onset of his career stacks up to pretty much anybody’s. But as soon as, say, 1981 rolled around, he simply couldn’t match the daring, often shocking nature of this early work. Hey, nobody can be awesome forever, so let’s just celebrate Walkabout. The title refers to a rite of passage in the Aussie outback, wherein boys wander into the wilderness on their own and emerge as men. In Roeg’s masterpiece, a young brother and sister are left to their own devices and encounter one such Aboriginal. The director and star Jenny Agutter provide insightful audio/visual commentary. In Stores May 18 Criterion
MAY 2010 Cowbell
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M
ichael Haneke is proudly humorless, a guy who wouldn’t know how to
tell a joke if he were force-fed five seasons of The Muppet Show. A tightassed Viennese director-theorist, Haneke came of age at a time when “foreign films” were embraced as an astringent antidote to Hollywood sentimentality. He’s a polemicist who makes art that’s purposefully hard to swallow. So, given his slow-burn plots, glacial camerawork and indigestible politics, why is Haneke’s best work so gut-level gripping? ¶ Haneke claims that his films actually offer a “commentary” on conventional Hollywood genres like horror and suspense, that his violence always has a point beyond sicko entertainment. But for a modern art-film auteur, Haneke’s crafted a body of work designed to keep audiences on the edge of their seats with the ruthlessness of any mainstream thriller. He’s a modern master when it comes to the “I don’t want to watch, but I can’t look away” scene. Press play on a Haneke DVD The chilly pleasures of Michael Haneke’s and find yourself in a world where something avant-horror / by Jess Harvell awful might happen at any moment.
The Unbearable Dread of Being
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photo by Brigitte Lacombe
And Haneke’s earliest films are indeed nearly unbearable. The Seventh Continent (1989) is basically a fake snuff film, and about as cheery as that description implies. Haneke presents the group suicide of a middle-class Austrian family in such a deadpan way that their self-destruction becomes repellant and fascinating. Almost hypnotic. Like a good horror director, he’s daring you to blink, or bury your face in a pillow. “Why are you watching this?” he asks. Shot with an equally unnerving simplicity, Benny’s Video (1992) has all the warmth of a picnic in a morgue’s cold-storage room. Haneke’s tale of a teenage boy who becomes a thrill-killer is actually more about the delusional lengths parents will go to in order to protect even their most damaged offspring. WatchHaneke ing Benny’s mother and father shield on the set him from the police, you want to reach of 2005’s through the screen and shake them back Caché (Hidden) into reality as their lives unravel—while also wondering just how quick you’d be to turn your own child in. But as compelling as they are, Haneke’s ’90s films—climaxing with ’97s Funny Games, his failed ironic critique of the slasher genre—feel like apprentice work leading him to the more nuanced and emotionally raw films he’s unleashed in the 21st century. Haneke’s protagonists now resemble real people, or as close as he’s likely to get, rather than pawns for his sociopolitical shock therapy treatments. It’s the characters’ vulnerability, their humanity, that makes his more recent films all the more horrifying. 2002’s The Piano Teacher is Haneke’s masterpiece-to-date, thanks in large part to Isabelle Huppert’s bravura performance as the title character. Few actresses would have been able to play the self-hating, self-mutilating, sadomasochistic Erika Kohut without succumbing to the temptation of TV movie melodrama. Haneke’s camera never flinches in (very) graphically depicting Erika’s onscreen breakdown as she struggles to feign normalcy, both fearing she’ll be unmasked and longing to expose her true self. Any actress can “play crazy,” but it’s Huppert’s uncanny ability to capture Erika repressing the tsunami-scale rage roiling inside her that makes the character so frightening. Repression and paranoia also drive 2005’s (Hidden), Haneke’s almost mainstream-friendly take on the whodunit. Georges, a complacent middle-class French intellectual, discovers his family is being videotaped by an unknown party—a creepy enough premise, even before Haneke begins to slowly twist the knife into the audience’s expectations. Rather than the innocent victim of a lunatic, Georges is revealed to be equally responsible for his family’s harassment. It’s his guilt—rather than fear of a stalker photo by marion stalens
If you’re looking for the kind of psychological ickiness that seeps into you slowly and hangs around for days, Haneke’s your man. or a slasher—that he’s trying to outrun. And unlike Michael Myers, you can’t shoot guilt in the face when it begins to close in on you. 2003’s Time of the Wolf is arguably Haneke’s most watchable film. Perhaps not coincidentally, it’s also the only Haneke film that seems to offer a tiny bit of hope for humanity. That’s doubly odd when you consider that Time of the Wolf is Haneke’s take on the post-apocalyptic science fiction tale, with mom Isabelle Huppert and her two children walking through the aftermath of some mysterious, societycollapsing calamity. (Considering that Wolf’s postapocalyptic landscape still looks an awful lot like the verdant French countryside, we can probably assume it wasn’t a nuclear war.) Though Haneke plays with many of our favorite end-of-the-world clichés, the typically understated Wolf becomes a series of small vignettes about the value of dignity in a world where people are ready to shoot each other for a Pop-Tart or a pot of clean water. Despite his genre trappings, don’t come to Haneke’s films expecting zombies, mushroom clouds, cannibals or Savini-grade special effects. But if you’re looking for the kind of psychological ickiness that seeps into you slowly and hangs around for days, Haneke’s your man. Shocking twists. Unexpected bursts of traumatizing violence. Characters whose already shaky sanity erodes completely, with horrible consequences. An oppressive atmosphere of pure dread. Sound like fun yet? MAY 2010 Cowbell
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Correctional Facility
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ver since his distressingly simple 1989 debut, The Seventh Continent, Austrian director Michael Haneke has calmly yet thoroughly dissected contemporary society with a provocative rigor. In movies such as The Piano Teacher and Caché, he has focused on otherwise mundane middle-class people who, through a series of at first seemingly banal events, become more and more psychologically beset. The past upsetting the social order of the present is a recurring theme, as is the relationship to witnessing violence and actually committing violence. The intellectual and narrative sophistication of his movies can often make them intentionally unpleasant; Haneke isn’t an entertainer. Haneke crafting a historical drama—2009’s Oscar-nominated The White Ribbon—that directly confronts acts of violence isn’t a surprise. That this 144-minute epic is so visually beautiful and oddly effective is. Shot in a luminous black and white by Haneke’s frequent cinematographer Christian Berger, The White Ribbon takes place in a small, rural German hamlet over the course of about a year between 1913 and 1914. There, the village baron (Ulrich Tukur) owns the land, while the town pastor (Burghart Klaussner), schoolteacher (Christian Friedel), doctor (Rainer Bock) and farmer (Branko Samarovski) perform their assigned roles. And “perform” is the operative word: There’s something amiss with the town, where everybody goes about doing their thing simply because that is what they do. 52
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Michael Haneke crafts an eerie precursor to a century of war in The White Ribbon by Bret McCabe
For the record, Haneke isn’t going to explain what that something is explicitly. The story is told, in fact, as a remembrance by the schoolteacher—everybody is named only by their place in the social order—years later. He’s not even sure what is and isn’t true, but feels this story could explain what happens to Germany in the coming years. Of course, a contemporary audience knows what those coming years bring: World War I, the rise of National Socialism and the Third Reich, World War II—some of the darkest moments of the 20th century. For once, though, the long shadow of Nazism isn’t alluded to for cheap, generalized evilness. Haneke, instead, focuses on small, almost innocuous incidents: the doctor’s horse stumbles over a tripwire one morning. A barn burns. A child is murdered and tied to a tree. Obviously, somebody is committing these acts. The who and why is left totally unanswered. The townsfolk have their own suspicions, but without evidence everything in village life continues apace. The teacher teaches, the doctor doctors. But nothing feels right, and by the movie’s close, nothing feels as if it’s ever going to be the same again. Do note, though, that the title refers to a white ribbon schoolchildren wear as a visible reminder to conduct themselves better after they’ve misbehaved. It’s the tamest of punishments. And it’s those same children—like the offspring of any era—that grow up to correct the social disorders that they perceived their parents couldn’t.
Redemption Song
Director Scott Cooper gets to the Heart of the matter / by Kurt Anthony Krug
F
irst-time director Scott Cooper shot Crazy Heart—which he also produced
and adapted for the screen from Thomas Cobb’s novel—in less than a month for $7 million. Half-The Wrestler/half-Urban Cowboy, Crazy Heart centers on Bad Blake (Jeff Bridges, who won his first Oscar for the role), an aging, alcoholic country star still living on the road and playing dive bars.
How did this movie come about?
I wanted to tell Merle Haggard’s story, but was unable to due to the rights issue. So, I turned to the novel that would allow me to tell Merle Haggard’s story, Kris Kristofferson’s, Waylon Jennings’—fictionalize all of that, take elements of their lives and tell a story about a man taking a personal journey, looking for redemption, suffering all the themes that we go through everyday: hope, regret and loss. We wanted to evoke the movies of the 1970s, where the pace is a little bit more languid, a little bit more poetic and lyrical, and you have to take your time with it—be patient like some of the great country songs. Why was Colin Farrell uncredited?
Colin’s a big star. We didn’t want people to think it’s a Colin Farrell movie. We thought it’d be more of a surprise. We wanted it to be more about a man’s personal journey and not a star vehicle. Talk about working with Jeff Bridges.
Jeff’s the most difficult actor to [secure for] a project; he’s extremely selective. He finds every reason not to go to work, especially for movies he really, really loves, ironically. Once he and I met, he signed on very quickly. You couldn’t write the music until you cast him, right?
There’s no music because you cannot create the music until you know who the performer is. Otherwise, it won’t be soulful or truthful or authentic. I grew up with this type of music, living in the same type of world that Bad Blake lives in. And being an actor, I understood the nature of a performancedriven story.
Can you comment on Bridges winning the Oscar for Best Actor?
It’s surprising. Any time you set out to make a modest film, you don’t expect your name or the film to be attached to Oscar. I wasn’t surprised in the least at Jeff’s and [Maggie Gyllenhaal’s] performances and the music… I was getting as fine a performance as I [had] seen in films in a long time. In your words, why do redemption stories never get old?
Redemption stories never get old because we’re all searching for that in one way or anothe, to varying degrees. The things in this movie I spoke about— hope, loss, regret and redemption—we deal with that on a daily basis. It’s a very humanistic story and it illuminates the human condition. I think it best illuminates what we suffer through on a day-to-day basis; we can all relate to that.
Crazy Heart is in stores now on DVD and Blu-Ray from 20th Century Fox.
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MAY 4
30 Years to Life/Planet Brooklyn/ With or Without You 9 to 5: Days in Porn According to Jim: Season 2 All the Right Moves/Lucas/The Wrestler America’s Test Kitchen: The Complete 7th Season American Dreamz American Experience: Road to Memphis Animal Atlas: Super Hero Animals Anna & The King/Australia/Ever After Annihilator: Live at Masters of Rock Antwone Fisher/Drumline/ Notorious Anything Goes Art & Copy Awkard Comedy Show Bachelor Party 2: The Last Temptation Beach/Cast Away Beautiful Mind Before You Say I Do Best Laid Plans/Deception Bloodmyth Bobby Dogs Bobby Fischer Live Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story Bound by a Secret Boys Don’t Cry/Notes on a Scandal Buffalo Bill Cody Butch Cassidy and the Outlaw Trail California Dreamin’ (Endless) Care Bears: Share-a-Lot in Carea-Lot Cast Away Celle Que J’Aime Chelsea on the Rocks Chickenfoot: Get Your Buzz On – Live Clearing/High Crimes Cold Storage College Boys Live Colorado Cowboys Cowboys and Outlaws Cross Darjeeling Limited/Namesake/ Water Dark Desires in Middle England Darker Than Black: The Complete Series Desires of the Heart Dirt: Season Two Dirty Dancing Do the Right Thing Doctor Who: The Curse of Pedalon Doctor Who: The Masque of Mandragora Doctor Who: The Monster of Peladon Doctor Zhivago: Anniversary Edition Dove Family Double Feature DragonBall Z: Dragon Box Vol. 3 DragonBall: Season Four Dubliners: Live at Vicar Street: The Dublin Experience Dukes Ed Elliot Moose: El Tesco Escaped Evil Toons Exiled/Dynamite Warrior Eye for an Eye Facts of Life: The Complete Fourth Season Fallen
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Fallen: The Beginning Fallen: The Destiny Family Stone/The Secret Life of Bees Fast & The Furious Fast Food Nation/Idiocracy/Young at Heart Field of Dreams Flash Gordon Flawless/Quid Pro Quo/Boarding Gate Foreign Exchange/Freshman Orientation/Who’s Your Daddy Freud Gatekeeper Get Curious, Not Furious! Communicating Your True Colors Get Even Go Diego Go: The Great Panda Adventure God of Vampires Good Year/Walk on the Clouds Greek Pete Growing Op Hamlet (2009) Harlem Hostel Hayate the Combat Butler Part 5 Hellbinders High Country Rails Honeymooners: Valentine Special Honeymooners: The Second Honeymoon Honor Squadrons House of Usher Imagine This Impasse Iron Man: Armored Adventures: The Complete Season 1 Iron Man: The Complete Animated Series Iron Mask Jamie Gillis: Summer of Sleaze Jessica Sinclaire’s Confessions of a Lonely Wife Johnny Test: Game Time Juno/Thank You for Smoking/ Waitress Klaus Schulze/Lisa Gerrard: Dziekuje Bardzo Kurokami: The Animation Part Two Ladies of the House Ladron Thief Leap Year Little Bear and the Master Lost Coast Lost Souls Making of Prima Donna Makoto Aida: Cynic in the Playground Man vs. Wild Season Four Man: Tapes of the Unexpected Marcus Welby M.D.: Season One Mars Rising/Race to Mars Matinee Meadowoods Mine Miss March/Fully Exposed Moment After 2: The Awakening Moments in Budapest Monsters Resurrected Mother’s Day Massacre Murdoch Mysteries Season Two Muse My Chemical Romance: A Road Less Travelled Namesake/Slumdog Millionaire
may 4 Rock ‘n’ Roll High School
Directed by Roger Corman Roger Corman took the punk rock revolution, turned it into drive-in fodder, and the result is still as stupid-fun as it was three decades ago. Rock and Roll High School is really just your average teen comedy—good kids live under the boot heel of boring adults until the Ramones help them go wild in the streets— cranked past the point of any sort of “realism” and straight into the zany realm of an old Warner Brothers cartoon. Plus it’s too short to bother with boring filler like character development or a coherent plot. At 84 minutes it’s almost the cinematic equivalent of a Ramones album, over and done before anyone has a chance to ask if it made any sense. Shout Factory
Nanny Express National Geographic’s Most Incredible Photos Nine Njinga the Queen King: The Return of a Warrior No Time for Sergeants Nova: Extreme Cave Diving Obam Nude On the Road With Charles Kuralt: Set 2 Once/Savage P-Star Rising Paper Covers Rock Penn & Teller: Bullshit: The Complete Seventh Season Perfect Combination Preacher’s Kid Promontory Pulse/Sick Nurses Ranchero Redirecting Eddie Ripple of Hope Rock ‘N’ Roll High School Roger Corman’s Best of the B’s Collection 2: Naughty Nurses &
Tawdry Teachers Rossini’s Ghost Rounder Records 40th Anniversary Concert Rozen Maiden/Rozen Maiden: Traumend Sanctuary Saturday Morning Cartoons: 1980s Vol. 1 Saving Grace: Seasons One and Two Secrets of Jonathan Sperry Sesame Street: The Best of Elmo Vol. 2 Severed/Shallow Ground/Rage Shades of Pale Shaolin Iron Men 4-Film Set Silent Night Slasher Smooth Witness Space Girls in Beverly Hills Strange Case of Delfina Potocka – Mystery of Chopin Strauss: King of the Three Quarter Suburbia Take Us Alive TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection: War TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection: Westerns Tekkaman Blade: Complete Collection Ten9eight: Shoot for the Moon Tetro Texas Rangers Tokyo Sonata Tony Roberts: Wired Tooth Fairy Tracy Ullman’s State of the Union: Season 2 Tribal Beyond the Four: 20 Years of Music, Art and Brotherhood UFC 110: Nogueira vs. Velasquez Ultimate Samurai: Miyamoto Musashi Under Heavy Fire/Straight Into Darkness/Soldiers of Change Unspeakable Valentina Igoshina Plays Chopin Vampegeddon Vandread: Ultimate Collection Velvet Underground: Vanishing Point Virtuality Visions of Nature: Timescapes Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Woman Whitest Kids U Know: The Complete Third Season Wolverine and the X-Men: Revelation World Unseen Wow! Wow! Wubbzy! Escape From Dino Island WWE: Wrestlemania XXI X-Men Vol. 5 You’re Under Arrest: Full Throttle Collection 2 MAY 11
4 and a Half Terrorists 50 Ways of Saying Fabulous Abyss: Special Edition Addiction After Autumn Aids Jaago Amerikana Bandit of Sherwood Forest Better the Devil You Know Big Fish Billy Owens and the Secret of the Runes Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress Boomers: Tom Brokaw Reports Brain Fitness Program Cancer Conquest Carly Simon: Live From Martha’s Vineyard Celine: Through the Eyes of the World Circo
Clutch: Live at the 9:30 Computer Wore Tennis Shoes/The Strongest Man in the World Cooking Italia Vols. 1 & 2 D-Days in the Pacific Daria: The Complete Animated Series Day I Became a Woman Daybreakers Deadliest Warrior: Season One Disposal of a Corpse Divine Souls Diving Adventures Dolphins in the Wild Edge of Darkness Elysium Emma/Shakespeare in Love/Proof Espiral Farzzle’s World: Breakfast at Farzzle’s Father of the Bride/Father of the Bride Part II Fire From Below Fishermans Paradise Fishing & Diving Flesh for the Beast: Media Mix Fray Justica Freedom Road Fresh Prince of Bel-Air: The Complete Fifth Season Frontline: The Suicide Tourist Frontlines: The Men and the Battles – The Rise and Fall of Japan Frontlines: The Men and the Battles – The Rise and Fall of Nazi Germany Frozen Land Gendarme Desconocido George of the Jungle/George of the Jungle 2 Giant Panda Goth Grail Hansel and Gretel Harder They Come Herpers Homeland Hostage How I Got Lost In Passing In the Wild Indian Comedy Tour Initial D: Fourth Stage Part 1 Initial D: Third Stage Jermal Kate & Leopold/Serendipity/ Raising Helen Kid With the Golden Arm Kung Fu Magoo Legend of the Tsunami Warrior Legends of Air Combat: B-29 Superfortress Legion Life in the Graveyards of the Pacific Living Landscapes: Earthscapes – World’s Most Beautiful Waterfalls Los Tres Mosqueteros Mago Mala Malice in Wonderland Maneater Series: Croc/Sea Beast/ Shark Swarm Maui Island of Enchantment Megafault Mini Miyuki Mr. Magoo in Sherwood Forest My Wife & Kids Season 2 National Geographic: Camp Leatherneck Nature’s Splendor Nature’s Tapestry North Face Notes From Underground One Deadly Summer One Night Live One Piece Season Two: Seventh Voyage Pacific Dreams Play the Game
May 11 Legion
Directed by Scott Stewart If only all Biblically-themed epics could be as deranged and blasphemous as Legion. Paul Bettany plays an angel who goes A.W.O.L. when God decides he’s had enough of us pesky humans and sends a plague of monsters straight out of the Old Testament in order to teach us a lesson. Is Legion high art? Hardly. Does it have that unfortunate alien-looking digital gloss so common in 21st-century big-budget action movies? Yes it does. Is it basically 100 minutes of explosions and “shocking twists” delivered with the subtlety of a highspeed nail gun? Of course. Is it so over-the-top that you can’t help but enjoy yourself, despite the fact that the plot can be summarized in one sentence? Damn right. Sony Pictures Prince of Thieves Pulling John Raising the Bar Season 2 Raymundo: A Revolutionary Filmmaker’s Struggle Rogues of Sherwood Forest Rules Ruthless People/Down and Out in Beverly Hills/Outrageous Fortune S.E.R.E. Samurai Harem: Complete Collection SciQ: The Complete Box Set Shinchan: Season One Shinchan: Season Two Shipwrecks of the Pacific and Tasman Sea Shrek Signs/The Village/The Sixth Sense Spy Kids Collection Streets of Laredo Sub Tropic Tour Supermen of Melegaon Sword of Sherwood Forest Swords: Life on the Line – The
Complete First Season Terror Overload Thief Thirtysomething: The Complete Third Season Tidal Wave Tornado Valley Tour De Force Toy Story Toy Story 2 Tree That Remembers Tsunami Beach Club Underworld Underwater Hotel: Life on Artificial Reefs Volar JOven Westbrick Murders Whales, Dolphins and Seals Who Killed Pixote Wild Asia: Monsoon – India God of Life Woodenhead World War II: The War in the Pacific World’s Most Beautiful Beach Xenosaga: The Animation – The Complete Collection Zizek: The Reality of the Virtual MAY 18
2010 NCAA Men’s Final Four Championship 2010 NCAA Women’s Final Four Championship 2012: Doomsday 21 Jump Street: Complete Second Season 30 Days: The Complete Series 30,000 Leagues Under the Sea Air: The Complete Series Allan Quatermain and the Temple of Skulls American Bandits: Frank and Jesse James American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein And Then Came Lola Animal Stories: Complete Series Apocalypse Now Redux Area 51: The Alien Interview Arts Barbara Stanwyck Show Vol. 2 Barney: Let’s Play Outside Bay Gon Crack Being a Friend Bliss Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-Chan Book of Lore/Grave Mistakes Chihuly: Fire & Light Clash of the Olympians Classic Adventures Classic Movie Musicals: Legends of Stage and Screen Clint Eastwood Triple Feature Confessions of a Porn Addict Curious George: Goes to a Birthday Party Day in the Recording Studio Day the Earth Stopped Defamation Defenders of Earth: Complete Series Delirious? Farewell Show: Live in London Dick Tracy: Saga of a Crimefighter Disappeared Disney Parks: Where Dreams Come True DragonBall Z Kai: Season 1 Part 1 Dragons or Dinosaurs? Creation or Evolution? Eden A L’Ouest Enemies Among Us Evening Primrose Everyman’s War Eyeshield 21: Collection 1 Fantasy-Adventure Collector’s Set Vol. 2 Fille Du Rer Film Noir
First Earth Five Frank Sinatra Triple Feature Freakshow Gamera Gangland Ghost Hunters: Military Investigation – Forts, Battleships and Beyond Greatest American Hero: Complete Series Greatest American Hero Season 1 Greatest Tales Ever Told Grindhouse: Sex, Drugs & Rock & Roll Gunfight at La Mesa Gunslingers: Down by Law Colelction Guy Comedies Collection Harold Melvin’s Blue Notes: Live in Concert Haunting of Winchester House Hunter: Complete Second Season I Am Omega In Memory of Michael Jackson 1958-2009 Incredible Stories Invasion of Carol Enders/Come Die With Me Invasion of the Pod People Invictus Iscariot Jack Lemmon Triple Feature Jeff Dunham Show Jermaine Jackson: Dynamite Videos Joe Strummer: Get Up, Stand Up John Jackson Video Collection 1970-99 John Lennon: Rare & Unseen Journey to the Center of the Earth Tech N9ne: Kod Tour: Live in Kansas City L.A. Story Land That Time Forgot Last Madness Law & Order: Criminal Intent – The Fifth Year Legend of Prince Valiant: Complete Series Legendary Performers Liquid Vinyl Long Knives Night/Reporting From a Rabbit Hutch Louis L’Amour Western Collection: The Sacketts/Conagher/Catlow Love, Lies & Betrayal Love, Loss & Affliction Lucky Luke Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus Meredith Monk: Inner Voice Merlin and the War of the Dragons Messenger Michael Jackson History: The King of Pop 1958-2009 Misconceptions Mobile Suit Gundam Trilogy Monster Monster and the Ape Murder in Fashion Mutant Vampire Zombies From the Hood Naruto: Shippuden Vol. 9 National Geographic: Border Wars Season One Navy vs. the Night Monsters Neighbors New Daughter Nicholas Cage Triple Feature Night Dragon Once Upon a Time in the West One Night in Montreal Oscar Herrero in Concert Oshima’s Outlaw Sixties Patrick Swayze Triple Feature Poliwood Race Reese Witherspoon Triple Feature Road Rage Robert Downey Jr. Triple Feature Romantic Comedy Collection Sean Connery Triple Feature Shadow of Fear/Nightmare at 43
may 2010 COWBELL
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Hillcrest Sherlock Holmes: Greatest Mysteries Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas Sirens Sometimes in Life Southern Gothic Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron Spy Next Door Statler Brothers: Gospel Music Vol. 1 Statler Brothers: Gospel Music Vol. 2 Statue Sunrise/Sunset Survival Collection Take Us Alive Temptations Review Featuring Dennis Edwards: Live in Concert This Is the Way I Do It Three Stooges 75th Anniversary Tokyo Gore Police Touch of Spice Transmorphers: Fall of Man Tweeny Witches: Core Collection Valentine’s Day Vamps & The City Veiled Voices Waiting for Armageddon Walkabout War Heroes Collection War of the Worlds 2: The Next Wave Watercolors When You’re Strange: A Film About the Doors Winona Ryder Triple Feature Woman of the Dunes WWE: The Best Pay-Per-View Matches of the Year 2009-2010 You Really Got Me: Story of the Kinks MAY 25
7 Adventures of Sinbad Air Gear: The Complete Collection Aisha and Rahul Alice Goodbody All My Friends Are Funeral Singers Ancients Behaving Badly Babysitter Wanted Because of Winn Dixie/Chomps Being Ian: Hurry for Hollywood Beyond the Barbed Wire: An Artist’s View of the Holocaust Billy Owens & The Secret of the Runes Bing Crosby TV Specials Vol. 1 Bleach Vol. 28 Borrowed Hearts Bottom Land British Cinema Collection: Old Mother Riley Butterfly Dreaming Call Me Madame City of the Living Dead Clint Eastwood Presents Tony Bennett: The Music Never Ends Confessions of an American Bride Contract Costa Rican Summer Creature Feature 4-Pack Crimson Mask Criterion Collection: By Brakhage – An Anthology 2 Dairugger Collection 2 David Lean 3-Pack (The Bridge
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on the River Kwai/Lawrence of Arabia/A Passage to India) Dead Man’s Walk Dear John Digimon Data Squad Collection Two Disco Biscuits Dunston Checks In/Space Chimps Far From Home/Fluke Finale Firehouse Dog/Good Boy Flashbacks of a Fool Flashpoint: The Second Season Fred Meyer: America by Rail/Canada by Rail Fred Meyer: Classic Chrome/Stock Cars of the ‘50s & ‘60s Fred Meyer: North America’s National Parks/America’s Wildlife Fred Meyer: Sharks/Planet Ocean Fred Meyer: Wings of Freedom/ America’s Fighting Jets Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood Part 1 George Gently: Series 2 Godkiller Goodnight Moon… and More Great Bedtime Stories Great Epochs of European Art: The Art of the Renaissance/Baroque Art/Rococo Art Guild: Season 3 Hanged Man Hard Ride to Hell Hell Girl: The Complete First Season Hell Girl: Two Mirrors Collection 1 How I Married My High School Crush I Do But I Don’t I Know What I Saw I Me Wed Ikki Tousen: Premium Box In Desert and Wilderness In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great Inner Circle Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis Kamikaze Hearts Kenichi: Season 1 Kenichi: Season 2 Part 2 Korea: The Forgotten War Landlord Leverage: The Second Season Leza Lido Collection VOl. 1 Love Games Making Mr. Right Manhunt: The Complete Series Marked: The Complete Season 1 Minnesota Clay Moondance Alexander/Virginia’s Run Most Distant Course Mother My Dog: An Unconditional Love Story Mystery Team National Geographic: Wild – American Serengeti New Town Killers No Orchids for Miss Blandish NYC Tornado Terror Obscene: A Portrait of Barney Rosset and Grove Press Owl and the Sparrow Ozzy Osbourne: Blizzard of Ozz – Diary of a Madman Tour 1982
may 18 Apocalypse Now: Redux
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola Did the already quite lengthy Apocalypse Now really need 49 minutes of additional footage? It’s a debate that’s been raging among film geeks since Apocalypse Now Redux first made its debut back in 2001. The answer depends on whether you think Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 masterpiece is a languid exploration of evil and madness, or a war movie that could have used a firmer hand in the editing room. If you’re in the first camp, it’s undeniable that Redux amplifies the original Now’s feeling of slowly mounting dread. What Coppola sacrifices in suspense—in a film that often seemed nearly plotless to begin with—he gains in atmosphere. The claustrophobic conditions and mind-warping humidity of jungle warfare feel more tangible than ever. Lions Gate
Panic Room/Glass House Pep Squad Phyllis and Harold Pocket for Corduroy Race Rain Fall Real End of the Great war Real Housewives of New York Season 1 Real Housewives of New York Season 2 Road Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Live: Start Me Up Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: Legends Rollin’: The Fall of the Auto Industry and the Rise of the Drug Economy
in Detroit Royal Pains; Season One Rurouni Kenshin: The Complete Series Sandokan the Great Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei, Vol. 1 Shadow Within Silver Lode Someone’s Knocking at the Door Stagecoach Stanton Moore: Groove Alchemy Straight Up Illin’ Submission of a Woman Susnets Superpower Supersonic Man/War of the Robots Tale of Robin Hood Talkin’ and Walkin’ New York Tell Tale Testament Tony Stockwell: Live Top Chef: Masters – Season 1 True Blood: The Complete Second Season TV Western Classics UFC 111: St. Pierre vs. Hardy Ultimate Classic/Timeless TV Unidentified Virginian Complete Season 1 Visions and Miracles Visual Acoustics: The Modernisms of Julius Shulman Voyager Waiting for God: Season Five Waiting for God: The Complete Series War to End All Wars What’s Underground About Marshmallows: Ron Vawter Performs Jack Smith White Wall Words of Advice: William S Burroughs on the Road World of Buckminster Fuller WWE: Backlash 2010 WWE: Extreme Rules 2010 Yesterday Girl JUNE 1
20th Century Boys 3 4-Film Family Collection Absolute Power Absolute Zero Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle Always American Pickers: Complete Season 1 American Yakuza/Bangkok Dangerous Any Which Way You Can Band of Brothers Bare Knuckles Baretta: The Best of Baretta Beautiful Creatures BECK: Mongolian Chop Squad: The Complete Series Beguiled Bellydance Superstars: The Art of Bellydance – Live From Shanghai Bird Blood Work Bridges of Madison County Bronco Billy Burn Notice: Season Three Casual Sex? Caveman’s Valentine Change of Habit Charley Varrick City Heat Cleaner: The Complete Series Cleaner: The Final Season Cloak & Dagger Close Encounters of the Third Kind/Starman Cold Equations Colossus: The Forbin Project Commandments Complete Musketeers
Cornered Cure Darkman III: Die Darkman Die Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo/ The Animal Digimon: Journey to Ice Ridge Disaster Zone: Volcano in New York Dragonfly Dream Team Drop Dead Diva: Season 1 Eastwood Factor Elvis: 75th Birthday Collection Emily of New Moon: Collector’s Edition Essential Eastwood: Action Collection Essential Eastwood: Director’s Collection Every Which Way But Loose Fierce Creatures Firefox For Love or Money For My Father Foyle’s War Set 6 Gauntlet Ghost Dad Ghost Hunters International Season 1 Gingerbread Man Glenn Miller Story Gorillas in the Mist Gospel/The Gospel Live Gotcha Grace of My Heart Gran Torino Gray Lady Down Guru Hannah Free Hard Ground Hard to Hold Hard Way Haunting Havana Hawaii: Island Symphony Heartbreak Ridge Henry & June Hilary and Jackie Hindenburg Hitcher II: I’ve Been Waiting Hollow Man/Flatliners Hollywood Homicide/The Devil’s Own Honkytonk Man Hope Springs Horror Collector’s Set V7 How to Give an Angel Card Reading How to Make an American Quilt I Spy/The Medallion Iceman Identity/Secret Window Impossible Elephant Isn’t She Great Jackie Chan Presents Gen-Y Cops Kelly’s Heroes Kissing a Fool Kuffs Kull the Conqueror Letters From Iwo Jima Life Life (Narrated by David Attenborough) Life/Planet Earth Collection Little Miss Marker (1980) Little Sex Live Nude Comedy Lonely Guy Long Time Dead Loni Love: America’s Sister Lorenzo’s Oil Madigan Man From Laramie/The Desperadoes Marsh/Bats Matchmaker Maximum Risk/Double Team Maybe Baby McHale’s Navy Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil Midsomer Murders: Set 15 Million Dollar Baby\
may 25 By Brakhage: An Anthology 2
Directed by Stan Brakhage In a nearly 50 year career, Stan Brakhage defined what it meant to be a truly underground American filmmaker. In an era when “indie movies” can mean romantic comedies with tiny budgets, Brakhage’s intensely personal, often breathtakingly abstract films threw traditional narrative out the window and explored film itself, blurring the line between animation, painting and cinema verite. The guy could make something as simple as light moving across a household object feel like a revelation. The Criterion collection packages another 30 of Brakhage’s films into one of their stunning box sets, and it’s a must-see for anyone interested in outsider art. Criterion
Mister Ed: The Complete Third Season MLB Bloopers: Baseball’s Best Blunders Moribito My Best Friend’s Wedding/Steel Magnolias Mystic River Net/Johnny Mnemonic NFL: New York Jets Best Games of the 2009 Season NFL: Road to Super Bowl XLIV – New Orleans Saints NFL: Run for the Championship – 2009 Season in Review Once Around Opportunity Knocks Outlaw Josey Wales Pale Rider Paleface Paper Soldiers Pavilion of Women Peanuts: 1970s Collection Vol. 2 Perfect World
Pink Cadillac Pistol Planeta Bur Collection Playing for Keeps Quest Raggedy Man Rampage Rat Red Baron Remains of the Day/Sense and Sensibility Rescue Me: The Complete Fifth Seaseon Ring Around the Rosie/Death Tunnel Rio Carnival Vol. 1 River Ron Clark Story Rookie Rudy/Mona Lisa Smile Rudy/Radio Shaun the Sheep: One Giant Leap for Lambkind Shenandoah Silverado/The Quick and the Dead Single White Female/Closer Slap Shot 2: Breaking the Ice Slayers: Evolution-R Season 5 Small Town Saturday Night Snow Falling on Cedars Sonic Underground: Legend Has It Soul Eater Part 3 South Shaolin vs. North Shaolin Space Cowboys Sparkle Splitting Heirs Sting Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot Stranger Sun Sunset Park/Heaven Is a Playground Sweet Liberty Sweetest Thing/Little Black Book Talk Radio Tank Tempo That Old Feeling Thomas & Friends: The Greatest Stories Three Stooges Collection 19551959 Tightrope TImecop 2: The Berlin Decision Tony Manero Trigger Effect Trippin’ Trois/Trois 2: Pandora’s Box True Crime Truth About Charlie Turbo Dogs: Teamwork Two Minute Warning UFO Ultramaiden Valkyrie Seasons 3&4 Unforgiven Unsaid Village of the Damned Waste of Shame Waterworld We’ll Meet Again Whale Rider/Secret of Roan Inish Where Eagles Dare White Chicks/Mo’ Money White Hunter, Black Heart Wild Things: Foursome Winning Wolfman Woods/The Craft Worldwide Vol. 4 Yanks You Got Served/You Got Served: Take It to the Streets Young Hercules Zula Patrol: Animal Adventures in Space Zula Patrol: Moons Mayhem JUNE 8
180 Degrees South 1984 Los Angeles Comedy Comp
A-Team: The Complete Series America the Beautiful American Experience: My Lai Amish at Work And, There You Are Animal Atlas 3-Pack Animation Express Bali: South Pacific Paradise Banana Leaves Behind the Player: Dan Jacobs Behind the Player: Dimmu Borgir Behind the Player: George Lynch Bleach Uncut Box Set: Season 5 – The Assault Bob Hope: Thanks for the Memories Collection Buddha on the Silk Road Caddyshack: Anniversary Edition Call in the Marines Coach Cop Dog Costa Rica: A Tropical Paradise Cross Burning in Willacoochee Cry of the Owl Cryptic Curb Your Enthusiasm: The Complete Seventh Season Cycles Dan Cummins; Crazy With a Capital F Danish Solution Dennis Chambers: Master Drummer Devil Dogs in Nam Die Hard 3: Die Hard With a Vengeance Drifter Drunk in Public El Guapo F15 Eagle Family Matters: The Complete First Season Fine Art of Formal Dining Fly Fishing Adventure: Massachusetts Cape Cod Stripers From Paris With Love Frontline: Behind Taliban Lines Frontlines: The Quake Ghostwriter Girls Next Door: Seasons One & Two Girls Next Door: Seasons Three & Four Goatsucker Goodbye Vietnam Hawaii: Island Paradise Hollywood: It’s a Dog’s Life Holyman Undercover Horses: The Story of Equus Hot Wheels Battle Force 5: Season 1, Vol. 2 Icarly: Isaved Your Life Inventing Cuisine: Le Solfeg Jackie Chan and the Kung Fu Kids: 10 Film Set Jim Henson’s Dog City: The Movie L.A. Proper Lohengrin Long Pigs Masterpiece Theatre: Small Island McDonnell Douglas F/A 18 Mist: Sheepdog Tales – Tale of a Sheepdog MLB: Reds Memories: The Greatest Moments in Cincinnati Reds History Modern Boy Naruto: Shippuden Vol. 10 National Geographic: Is It Real? Vampires Naturally Obsessed: The Making of a Scientist Ninja Nonsense: The Complete Collection Nip/Tuck: The Sixth and Final Season NOVA: The Pluto Files Oceans One Fine Day Patterns Trilogy and Other Short Films Peripheral Vision Reflections of Amish Life
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MAY 4
Mean Days Ten Toes Down Time is the Sulphur in the Veins of the Saint A-Ha The Singles 1984-2004 Air Supply Mumbo Jumbo Air Supply Now and Forever/Air Supply Alcest Ecailes De Lune Andersson/Ulvaeus Kristina Julie Andrews These Precious Things Annihilator Live at Masters of Rock Louis Armstrong 100 Hits Legends Article One The One (I’m Fighting For) EP Ashford & Simpson Come as You Are Ashford & Simpson Gimme Something Real Ashford & Simpson I Wanna Be Selfish Ashford & Simpson Is It Still Good to Ya Ashford & Simpson Musical Affair Ashford & Simpson Performance Ashford & Simpson Send It Ashford & Simpson So So Satisfied Ashford & Simpson Stay Free Asia Omega Rick Astley Free/Body & Soul At the Gates Purgatory Unleashed: Live Atlanta Rhythm Section Underdog/The Boys From Doraville The Austerity Program Backsliders and Apostates Will Burn Avantasia The Wicked Symphony Bad Boy Joe Jersey Shore “Fist Pumpin’ Mix” Pat Benatar True Love/Gravity’s Rainbow Tony Bennett In Person George Benson Good King Bad/Benson & Farrell Chuck Berry Chuck Berry Is on Top Birds & Arrows Starmaker Frances Black Essential Collection Michael Bolton One World One Love Bone Thugs N Harmony Uni5: The World’s Enemy Graham Bonnet No Bad Habits Booka Shade More Toni Braxton Pulse Broken Social Scene Forgiveness Rock Record Zac Brown Band Pass the Jar: Zac Brown Band and Friends Buena Vista Sisters Club Anacaona Juanita Bynum More Passion Calle Real Mo Lo Gane Philip Catherine Concert in Capbreton Cerebral Effusion Impulsive Psychopathic Acts Chalie Boy & Tum Tum Greatest Show on Earth Change Change Yoru Mind Harry Chapin Heads & Tales Harry Chapin Portrait gallery Ray Charles The Genius Anthology Liam Clancy The Essential Collection Stanley Clarke Modern Man/I Wanna Play for You Clarke/Duke Project Vol. 1-3 Clubroot II-MMX Cobra Cobra Is Back Cobra Hello! This Is Cobra Nat King Cole Simply Nat King Cole Sam Cooke Tribute to the Lady Phil Coulter Timeless Tranquility Court Yard Hounds Court Yard Hounds Robert Cray Authorized Bootleg Bing Crosby 100 Hits Legends Justin Currie The Great War Gigi D’Agostino The Essential Gigi D’Agostino Declaime Fonk 8 Inch Betsy 8Ball & MJG Abigor
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Chapters of Repugnance Diamond Eyes Gold Desert Song Elegant Gypsy/Casino Go Bo Diddley Presenting Dion & The Bellmonts Dirty Filthy Mugs All Yobs In DJ T Fabric51: DJ T Doitall American Du Dokken Greatest Hits Dreams Dreams/Imagine My Surprise Jack Earls & The Jimbos The Sun Years, Plus Earth, Wind & Fire Raise/Powerlight Tim Eriksen Soul of the January Hills Extreme Take Us Alive Fabian Fabulous Fabian The Fall Your Future Our Clutter Alan Ferber Music for Nonet and Strings Gracie Fields Best Of The Flaming Lips The Flaming Lips and Stardeath and White Flying Lotus Cosmogramma For the Win For the Win John Foxx Metatronic Free Energy Stuck on Nothing Future Islands In Evening Air Gallhammer Ill Innocence Gallhammer The Dan Of Get Rad I Can Always Live Joe Gibbs 12” Disco Mix Show 4 Joe Gibbs 12” Disco Mix Show 5 Greg Ginn & The Taylor Texas Corrugator Legends of Williamson County Gloominous Doom The Feature Godsmack The Oracle Ben Goldberg Baal: The Book of Angels Vol. 15 Ruben Gonzalez Jr. Mulatas Machicas Davy Graham From Monkhouse to Medway 1963-1973 Rudy Grayzell Let’s Get Wild Paul Greaver Guitar Lullabies Groundhogs Blues Obituary Kip Hanrahan Beautiful Scars Hawkwind Treworgey Tree Festival 1989 Heatwave Too Hot to Handle/Central Heating Heavy Metal Kids Hit the Right Button Hillsong Live Faith + Hope + Love Hillsong United Across the Earth: Tear Down Hillsong United The I Heart Revolution The Hold Steady Heaven Is Whenever Holley 750 Prison Rules Hor Culture Wars Paul Horn Inside Paul Horn Inside II Paul Horn Paul Horn + Nexus Paul Horn Visions Johnny Horton Ballads of Johnny Horton Steve Howe Homebrew Humble Tripe Counting Stars Janis Ian Revenge/Hunger Jackyl When Moonshine and Dynamite Collide Jazz Divas Simply Jazz Divas Jefferson Airplane Thirty Seconds Over Winterland/Early Flight Jews & Catholics Who Are? We Think We Are! Wilko Johnson Best of Vol. 1 Wilko Johnson Best of Vol. 2 Jowell & Randy El Momento Richard Julian Girls Need Attention Kaleidoscope Pulsating Dreams Katastrophe Worst Amazing Snatam Kaur The Essential Snatam Kaur: Sacred Chants Dolores Keane The Essential Collection Kidz Bop Kids Kidz Bop Dance Party Kill the Car Dead Inspection Simon King Unfamous C. King/J. Taylor Live at Troubadour Kings of Modesty Hell or Highwater La Chat Krumbz 2 Brickz Defeated Sanity Deftones Kirkwood Dellinger Desert Song Al Di Meola Bo Diddley Dion & The Belmonts
8Ball & MJG may 4
Ten Toes Down The godfathers of Dirty South hip-hop return with their first album in three years, and while other rappers fill their albums with disco beats and Alphaville samples, you can expect nothing less than 13 slabs of hardcore rhymes about a life of crime from this Tennessee twosome. Producers like Nitti, Drumma Boy and the always underrated David Banner provide stark, synthetic bangers, and with the exception of teenage goofball Soulja Boy, even the guest stars are top-notch. Grand Hustle Labana White Corky Laing & Leslie West Mountain: First Steps Greg Laswell Take a Bow Latent Anxiety Sensation Lazer Crystal MCMLXXX Cate Le Bon Me Oh My Tom Lehrer More of Tom Lehrer Pio Leiva Esta Es Mi rumba Les Discrets Septembre Et Ses Derniers Pensees The Letter Black Hanging on by a Thread Lil Cuete The One and Only George Lynch Orchestral Mayhem Macry Homeland Macry & Orquesta Termidor Rumba Mains De Givre Esther Marie Miriam Makeba South Africa’s Skylark: Mack Maloney Sky Club Mantovani Continental Encores Phil Manzanera Firebird VII Marino The Unexpected Alliance Marshall Law Power Game Dean Martin Simply Dean Martin Mark Masri La Voce Robin McKelle Mess Around John McLaughlin Electric Guitarist/Electric Dreams Amargo Mel Meeco Feat. Ron Carto Menzingers Chamberlain Waits Mercyme The Generous Mr. Lovewell Merqury Feat. Oera Orchestra Leipzig Queen Klassical Minus the Bear Omni Modern English Stop Start Ben Monder & Bill McHenry Bloom Moonbeam Around the World Darryl Moore Where I’m At The Morning Of The Way I Fell In Motech Vol. 2: Broken Research Ms. Lady Pinks Presents The Torpedos My England My England Johnny Nash I Got Rhythm Nekta Storybook Cyril Neville The Essential Cyril Neville 1994-2007 The New Pornographers Together New Young Pony Club The Optimist David Fathead Newman Mr. Fathead
The New Pornographers may 4 Together
It’s not truly summertime until a new album by the New Pornographers drops. (Unfortunately that means summer only really comes around once every few years, but oh well.) Despite hailing from the frost-covered land of Mounties and maple leaves, the New Pornos have been responsible for the sunniest power-pop of the last 10 years. With their jukebox-friendly running times and multi-part bubblegum harmonies, the songs on Together continue the band’s quest to bridge the gap between classic rock and indie rock, while resident genius Dan Bejar is still around to add the avantglam edge. Matador Zalvatore Caine Incorporated Rock Shower Spell of Noise Time to Fight Miracle Blue Call of the Wood Box of Opium An Examination of Being The Entertainer We Will All Evolve Open Up Your Heart Satellite Panzerbastard 2006-2009 Red Trees Letter to Heaven Incisions of Perverse Debauchery Mike Patton Mondo Cane Carl Perkins Dance Album Is on Top Anthony Phillips Pathways and Promenades: Missing Links 4 Poirier Running High Prayer Tree Prayer Tree The Pretty Things SF Sorry: Live at Abbey Road Primitive Graven Image Celebrating Impending Chaos Prince Jammy Strictly Dub Nathaniel Rateliff In Memory of Loss Ashley Ray Ashley Ray Reckless No Frills Paddy Reilly 30 of the Very Best Rey Fresco People Rich Mind Records D-Tour Compilation Cliff Richard Cliff Josh Ritter So Runs the World Away Marty Robbins Gunfighter Ballads & Trail Songs Ruined Soul My Dying Day Rusko O.M.G. Mitch Ryder Detroit Ain’t Dead Yet Rachael Sage Delancey Street Doug Sahm He’s About a Groover: An Essential Collection School Loveless Unbeliever Klaus Schulze & Liza Gerrard Dziekuje Bardzo Peter Sellers Songs For Swingin’ Sellers Nifters
Noisehunter Noisehunter Noisehunter Nonpoint Novembre Opera IX Opium Jukebox Order of Ennead Donny Osmond Our Last Night Buck Owens Panic Room Panzerbastard Lisa Papineau Dolly Parton Pathology
Bobby Sheen Anthology 1958-75 The Shondes My Dear One Frank Sinatra/Antonio Carlos Jobim Reprise Recordings Sinceros Pet Rock/2nd Debut Six O’Clock Saints Exculpation Sixtoo Duration Slapp Happy Ca Va Slapp Happy Live in Japan May 2000 Carl Smith Hey Joe: Gonna Shake This Shake Tonight Mark E. Smith & Ed Blaney The Train Sons of Buena Vista Chicki Chaka Sons of Cuba Musica Cubana Sound Advice Round About Soundtrack Anchors Aweigh Soundtrack Babies Soundtrack On the Town Joe South So the Seeds Are Growing/A Look Inside Harry Spero & His Fabulous Friend Harry Spero & His Fabulous Friend Spirit The Last Euro Tour Bridget St. John BBC Radio 1968-1976 Stereo Total Baby Ouh Laura Stevenson & The Cans Record Stone Roses The Lowdown Syn:drom With Flesh Unbound System F Out of the Blue The Temptations Still Here The Terror Pigeon Dance Revolt I Love You. I Love You and I’m In Love With You Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee I Shall Not Be Moved Alex Theory Full Spectrum Sound Healing Three Degrees Live in London Throdl No Honour in Exile Bill Toms Live at Moondog’s Tonic Tonic Tosca Pony (No Hassle Versions) The Treniers Rock Trina Amazin’ Tubsy Jatt Sheran Varge Bebo Valdes Bebo Rides Again Patato Valdes Masterpiece Townes Van Zandt Texas Troubadour Various Artists Bob Dylan: Theme Time Radiohour Various Artists Boosie’s Way Wally Valley Gardens Watchtower Demonstrations In Chaos Jane Weaver The Fallen By Watch Bird Wendell B Back to Bid’ness Barry White I’ve Got So Much to Give White Lightning As Midnight Approaches The Whitsundays Saul Widow Midnight Strikes Twice Wilmington Chester Mass Choir He’s Been Good Johnny Winter The Progressive Blues Experiment Wishbone Ash 40th Anniversary Concert: Live in London Wolfe Tones The Legendary Set Don Woody You’re Barking Up the Wrong Tree Chely Wright Lifted Off the Ground Yahzarah The Ballad of Purple Saint James Nikki Yanofsky Nikki Zoo Brazil Please Don’t Panic MAY 11
30DB One Man Show 4Troops 4Troops American Idol Season 9 Rene Amesz & Baggi Begovic Nervous Nitelife: New Headliners V.2 As I Lay Dying The Powerless Rise Attila Rage Beneath the Sky In Loving Memory Marco Benevento Between the Needles and Nightfall Harper Blynn Loneliest Generation
7800 Degrees Fahrenheit: Special Edition Bon Jovi Bon Jovi: Special Edition Bon Jovi Bounce: Special Edition Bon Jovi Crush: Special Edition Bon Jovi Have a Nice Day: Special Edition Bon Jovi Keep the Faith: Special Edition Bon Jovi Lost Highway: Special Edition Bon Jovi New Jersey: Special Edition Bon Jovi Slippery When Wet: Special Edition Bon Jovi These Days: Special Edition Boondox South of Hell Brain Drill Quantum Catastrophe Jackson Browne & David Lindley Love Is Strange Jonathan Butler So Strong Carney Mr. Green Vol. 1 Casanova Casanova Charice Charice Class Actress Journal of Ardency Cocorosie Grey Oceans Elizabeth Cook Welder Crash Test Dummies Oooh La La Nohelani Cypriano Pulelehua D.R.I. Crossover The Dead Weather Sea of Cowards Derobert & The Half-Truths Soul in a Digital World Dive Picture Perfect DOA Talk Minus Action Equals Zero Everest On Approach The Expendables Prove It First Class Beach Baby: Best Of Ella Fitzgerald Performance Sage Francis Li(f)e Gayngs Relayted Harvestman Trinity Harvestman/Minsk/U.S. Christmas Hawkwind Triad Haunted George American Crow Hoodoo Gurus Purity of Essence Howl Full of Hell Hunter Valentine Lessons From the Late Night I Am Abomination To Our Forefathers Imagika Portrait of a Hanged Man Indian Jewelry Totaled Jose James, Jeff Neve For All We Know Japandroids No Singles John 5 The Art of Malice Stuart Jones & Margrit Coates Connecting With Animals Judas Priest British Steel: 30th Anniversary Edition Kaospilot Shadows Karma to Burn Appalachian Incantation Kaskade Dynasty Keane Night Train Patrick Kelly Zen Garden Matt Kennon Matt Kennon Jennifer Knapp Letting Go Kris Kristofferson Please Don’t Tell Me How the Story Ends Fela Kuti Alagbon Close/Why Black Me Fela Kuti Excuse-O/Monkey Banana Fela Kuti He Miss Road/Expensive Sh*t Fela Kuti Kalakuta Show Fela Kuti Noise for Vendor Mouth/ Everything Fela Kuti Unnecessary Begging/ Johnny Just Fela Kuti Yellow Fever/Na Poi La Bien Querida Romancero Lacrimas Profundere The Grandiose Nowhere Laethora The Light in Which We All Burn Jim Lauderdale Patchwork River Louisa Gentle Touch Male Bonding Nothing Hurts Margret Com Voce Jana Mashonee New Moon Bron Paul McCartney Good Evening NYC Deluxe Edition Bon Jovi
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Hang Cool Teddy Bear Heirs to Thievery The Way I Fell In Mount Carmel 2009 High Violet Punk’s Not Punk Apocalypse Sun A Bend in the River Pine Unapologetic Art Rap Desolate Kings Here’s to Taking It Easy American Ghetto The Fake That Sunk a Thousand Ships Raw Power Reagan Years River City Extension The Unmistakable Man Vic Ruggiero & Phil Nerges Don’t Feed the Cats in Iraq Kim Salmon & The Surrealists Grand Unifying Theory Arturo Sandoval A Time for Love Kevin Seconds Good Luck Buttons Sing It Loud Everything Collide Skyforger Kurbads Solution .45 For Aeons Past Soundtrack Lost: Season 5 Soundtrack Mother and Child Soundtrack Robin Hood Souvenir’s Young America Name of the Snake Stereophonics Keep Calm and Carry Sweethead Sweethead Taproot Plead the Fifth Otis Taylor Clovis People Vol. 3 Teitanblood Seven Chalices Tenth Avenue North The Light Meets the Dark Thee Oh Sees Warm Slime Twilight Pains of Love Twilight Still Loving You Univox Univox Unkle Where Did the Night Fall Masha Vahdat & Mighty Sam McClain Scent of Reunion Townes Van Zandt Texas Troubadour Wax Fang La La Land We Are the Fallen Tear the World Down Weapon Drakonian Paradigm Wild Set Ourselves Free Wilmington Chester Mass Choir He’s Been Good Woods At Echo Lake Zs New Slaves Rudi Zygadlo Great Western Laymen Meat Loaf Misery Index The Morning Of Mount Carmel Mouth Sewn Shut The National Nerve Scheme Nightbringer Robert Occhipinti Olan Mill Open Mike Eagle Oracle Phosphorescent Portugal the Man Sam Quinn
MAY 18
13th Floor Elevators Headstone: Contact Sessions Mindi Abair In Hi-Fi Stereo Beegie Adair Swingin’ With Sinatra Lynn Anderson Live From the Rose Garden Anew Revolution Imerica Antiseen/Holley 750 Antiseen Holley 750 Armagedda Volkermord (The Appearance) Attrition Keepsakes for Reflections Attrition The Hidden Agenda Audra Mae The Happiest Lamb Elizabeth Ayoub Oceanos Y Lunas Mark Bacino Queen’s English Band of Horses Infinite Arms Blaze Bayley Promise and Terror David Bazan Live at Electrical Audio Bellydance Superstar Art of Bellydance Bo Bice 3 The Black Keys Brothers Graham Bonnet Graham Bonnet Broken Social Scene Broken Social Scene Brutal Truth Extreme Conditions Demand
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Country Tribute: Dolly Parton Rupesh Cartel Anchor Baby Regina Carter Reverse Thread Chalie Boy & Tum Tum Greatest Show on Earth Christawn Life Story The Claudia Quintet With Gary Versace Royal Toast Club 8 The People’s Record Julian Colbeck With Jonathan Cohen Back to Bach College Boyys Spring Break Confide Recover Crooked Still Some Strange Country Curlew A Beautiful Western Saddle/The Hardwood Cynic Re-Traced Fyfe Dangerfield Fly Yellow Moon Danko Jones Below the Belt Delirious? Farewell Show: Live Devo New Traditionalists Disco Discharge Diggin’ Deeper Troy Donockley The Madness of Crowds The Duke Dumont Fabriclive51 Kevin Dunn No Great Lost: Songs 19791985 Duran Duran Duran Duran: Special Edition Duran Duran Seven and the Ragged Tiger: Special Edition Esoteric Epistemological Despondency Esoteric The Pernicious Enigma Exodus Exhibit B: The Human Condition Factor Lawson Graham Fatal Smile World Domination Stephanie Finch Cry Tomorrow Pete Francis The Movie We Are In Future Rock Live From Wicker Park Mary Gauthier The Foundling Glee Cast Glee: The Music Great Lake Swimmers Legion Sessions Green Day American Idiot: Original Cast Recording Grum Heartbeats Guilty Simpson OJ Simpson Buddy Guy DJ Play My Blues Hammock Chasing After Shadows Harper Stand Together Harvey Milk A Small Turn of Human Kindness Hawkwind USA Tour 1989-90 Hells Fire Sinners Confessions of the Damned Daniel Higgs Say God Hood Compilations 1995-2002 Hood Singles Compiled Hoodlum Gang Molotov Muzic Lena Horne MGM Records Collection The Hundred in the Hands This Desert EP Iced Earth Box of the Wicked India.Arie Voyage to India Sarah Jaffe Suburban Nature Rick James Garden of Love Rick James Rire It Up The Jayhawks The Jayhawks Jefferson Starship Jefferson Airplane at Woodstock, CA Jack Jezzro Wine Country Sunset Mick Karn The Concrete Twin Katatonia The Longest Year EP King Rat Everything Burns Lauren Kinhan Avalon LCD Soundsystem This Is Happening Leiana Lucky #3 Cathy Lemons & Johnny Ace Lemonace Jamie Lidell Compass Loaded Nuns Loaded Nuns Madder Mortem Where Dream and Day Collide Magic Slim & The Teardrops Raising the Bar Marching Band Pop Cycle Robin Mark All for Jesus: Songs & Hymns Damian Marley & Nas Distant Relative Mats/Morgan Band The Music or the Money? John Mayall Blues Express Sergio Mendes Bom Tempo Mark Burchfield
Misery Index May 11
Heirs to Thievery This Baltimore-based metal band exists in the always delightful world of slippery sub-genre semantics. Are they death metal? Grindcore? Deathgrind? Can the layperson even tell the difference? Whatever label you want to slap on them, Misery Index have been cranking out willfully ugly extremity for almost a decade now. Heirs to Thievery is the next installment in the band’s ongoing lament for everything rotten about the 21stcentury, set to chest-caving blast beats and phlegm-marinated growls. The kind of band happy to be deep underground, you may not have heard of them until now, but those who enjoy metal at its least housebroken should check them out. Relapse Miggs Wide Awake Moby Wait for Me Remixes Janelle Monae The ArchAndroid Jon Montalban Musica Del Cielo Scott Morgan Scott Morgan Necro Die! Jimmy Needham Nightlights Willie Nelson Rarities Vol. One Willie Nelson The Anthology John Nemeth Name the Day Debi Nova Luna Nueva The O.C. Supertones Reunite October File Our Souls to You Original Cast Recording My Vaudeville Man Peter Ostroushko When the Last Morning Glory Blooms Ozric Tentacles Erpland Peter Parcek 3 The Mathematics of Love Pearly Gate Music Pearly Gate Music Pitch Invasion Live to Regret Poison Control Center Sad Sour Future Pontiak Living Potbelly Sterilize the Stupid Nic Potter The Long Hello Vol. 2 Tobias Preisig Flowing Mood Putumayo Presents South Africa Ral Break’n Stage Lynda Randle Woman After God’s Own Heart Otis Redding Live on Sunset Strip Reflection Eternal: Talib Kweli & Hitek Revolutions Per Minute Rockabye Baby Lullaby Renditions of Kanye West Rolling Stones Exile on Main Street (Deluxe edition) Sabrina Sabrok Jugando Con Sangre The Sadies Darker Circles Silent Civilian Ghost Stories Gene Simmons I Done Told You Sodom Agent Orange Solex vs. Cristina Martinez + Jon Spencer Amsterdam Throwdown, King Street Showdown Soundtrack Friday Night Lights Vol. 2
Path of Fire Straight to DVD Green in Blue: Early Church Revival Requiem Mass & Other Experiments Authority Zero Stories of Survival Raphael Beau & Max Steiner Micmacs Judith Berkson Oylam Black Sunshine Black Sunshine Black Tusk Taste the Sin Blackhawk Greatest Hits Live Apollo Brown The Reset Bobby Caldwell Songs for Lovers Only Vol. 1 Cam’ron Cam’ron & The U.N. Presents Heat in Her Steve Cardenas West of Middle Castevet Mounds of Ash Beth Nielsen Chapman Back to Love Cheap Trick The Music of Cheap Trick Common Go! The Best Of Common Strings Just Dance 3 Chick Corea Solo Piano Improvisa David Cross Bigger and Blackerer Burton Cummings Burton Cummings Dailey & Vincent Singing From the Heart Demonica Demonstrous Rick Derringer The Three Kings of the Blues The Devil’s Blood The Time of No Time Evermore Dew-Scented Invocation Diabulus in Musica Secrets Dimitri From Paris/Joey Negro Get Down With the Philly Sound Dir En Grey Uroboros Embracing Goodbye Rock & Roll Ain’t Dead Enforcer Diamonds Even the Dogs Soul Shaker Far At Night We Live First Aid Kit Big Black & The Blue Flux of Pink Indians Strive to Survive David Ford Let the Hard Times Roll Framing Hanley A Promise to Burn Aretha Franklin The Music of Aretha Franklin Godless Rising Trumpet of Triumph Griftegard Solemn Sacred Severe Grovesnor Soft Return Harret/Haden Jasmine The John Hartford String Band Memories of John John Hicks & Frank Morgan Twogether James Holden DJ Kicks Horde of Hel Blodskam II Integrity The Blackest Curse It’s Alive Human Resources Leela James My Soul Jeremy Jay Splash Joshua’s Troop Troop Nation Judas Priest The Music of Judas Priest Damien Jurdo Saint Bartlett Kansas The Music of Kansas Emilio Kauderer & Federico Jusid The Secret in Their Eyes Keller & The Keels Thief Bill Kirchen Word to the Wise Korkus Hoodoo Smokin’ Joe Kubek & Bnois King Have Blues Will Travel L.A. Guns Shrinking Violet (Deluxe Reissue) Bettye Lavette Interpretations: The British Rock Songbook Legend Valediction Lightning Swords of Death The Extra Dimensional Wound Marina & The Diamonds The Family Jewels Master The Human Machine Masterplan Time to Be King Kit Morgan Gildepath Neverever Angelic Swells Neverland Ophidia Oho Okinawa Aeon All Time Low Arlid Andersen Arc As Hell Retreats Greg Ashley
The Black Keys May 18 Brothers
Blues rock duo the Black Keys have established their sound by now—“blues rock” really says its all—making their name by offering nofrills two-man rock’n’roll that sounds vital again. But the presence of Gnarls Barkley/ Broken Bells member and alt-rock superproducer Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton on Brothers at least promises a few new sonic touches; the guy’s made his name making retro-music feel a little more up-to-date. Plus the album’s got the best deadpan cover art of the year so far. Nonesuch
Macgruber: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack Soundtrack Shrek Forever After The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion Controversial Negro The JonSpencer Blues Explosion Now I Got Worry The Statler Brothers Gospel Music Vol. One The Statler Brothers Gospel Music Vol. Two Styles P The Ghost Dub-Dime Mixtape The Supremes Meet the Supremes Syconaut Burst Into Life Taio Cruz Rokstarr Sofia Talvik Florida Tracey Thorn Love and Its Opposite To Speak of Wolves Myselv<Letting Go Toy Soldiers Whisper Down the Lane Triumph Greatest Hits Remixed Under Byen Alt Er Tabt Underdog Matchless Vain All Those Strangers Various Artists Covers of Darkness Various Artists Gennett Old Time Music Various Artists Sing Me to Sleep: Indie Lullabies Various Artists Swinging on the Golden Gate Various Artists Tru Thoughts Funk Suzanne Vega Close Up Vol. 1, Love Songs John Waite In Real Time Rick Wakeman Past, Present and Future Grover Washington Jr. Grover Live Reggie Watts Why S*** So Crazy? Stan Whitmire Shelter in the Storm Andre Williams That’s All I Need Daphne Willis What to Say Cece Winans Songs of Emotional Healing Winter Hours Remastered Collector’s Edition Malcolm Yelvington Rocking With My Baby Young Jeezy Da Bottom 13 Denny Zeitlin Precipice Z-Ro, Lil C, J Dawg I Ain’t Takin’ No Loss 2 Soundtrack
MAY25
100 Hits 2 Bit Pie
Football Anthems 2 Pie Island
Piebald Volume II Plies Goon Affiliated Gary Plumley & Tony Young Crossing the Water Potluck Greatest Hits John Prine In Person & On Stage Qua Q&A The Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band The Wages Rihanna Rated R: Remixed Rosetta A Determinism of Morality The Ruins of Beverast Foulest Semen of a Sheltered Elite Run DMC The Music of Run DMC Otis Rush & Heroes Stand the Test of Time Salem Playing God and Other Short Stories Savage Grace Master of Disguise/The Dominatress Darrell Scott A Crooked Road Secret Chiefs 3 Satellite Supersonic Vol. 2 Ty Segall Melted Shortee Beat Freak Peg Simone Secrets From the Storm Skerik’s Syncopated Taint Septet Live at the Triple Door Smashing Pumpkins Teargarden by Kaleidyscope vol. 1 Dr. Lonnie Smith The Ghost Who Walks Soft Machine NDR Jazz Workshop Germany, May 17, 1973 Solvent Subject to Shift Soulfly Omen Soundtrack Modern English Soundtrack Prince of Persia Soundtrack True Blood Vol. 2 Special Consensus 35 Starkweather This Sheltering Night Stone Temple Pilots Stone Temple Pilots Tobacco Maniac Meat Tomorrow’s Bad Seeds Sacred for Sale Transmit Now Downtown Merry-GoRound Truth & Salvage Truth & Salvage Tanya Tucker Greatest Hits Twin Sister Color Your Life Various Artists Cedar Chest: The Cedar Walton Songbook
Jamie Lidell May 18 Compass
Jamie Lidell was once the wild man of avant-electronic music, bringing a classic soul singer’s falsetto and some spastically funky dance moves to a world where most artists stand listlessly (and silently) behind their laptops. He’s calmed down a bit in recent years, displaying a traditional songwriter’s chops you’d never have guessed he had in him. On Compass Lidell moves that much closer to the sound of old-school disco and R&B, and while you might miss the weirdness of his old grimy techno days, he’s still got one of the best voices in a scene where instrumental music rules the day. Warp
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SHREK FOREVER AFTER
IN STORES MAY 11
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MAY 18
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MAY 25 AVAILABLE FOR
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Urban Style
IN STORES 5/11
BONE THUGS-NHARMONY UNI5: THE WORLD’S ENEMY
TRINA AMAZIN’
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Courtneyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Back! And her Hole catalog is on saleâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; $9.99 or less!
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Live Through This
may 2010
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/music
How Are We Supposed to Live Without You? Michael Bolton and Lady Gaga are only the latest WTF collaboration in pop history / by Matt Sullivan
T
he mismatched duet isn’t likely to leave pop culture any time soon. The fact that a few are to able
triumph against the odds is enough to keep artists’ people in touch with other artists’ people, while the failures are too epic to ignore. For instance, Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue’s “Where the Wild Roses Grow” skirts any expectations one might have attached to a song pinning those names together, but Paula Abdul’s attraction to polar opposition is so pronounced that only a cartoon cat could play the part. For every Lee Hazlewood with Nancy Sinatra or Dolly Parton with Kenny Rogers, there’s a whole slew of forehead-slappers. ¶ There’s Nelly embarrassing himself on the ballad “Over and Over” with
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COWBELL may 2010
Tim McGraw, or the sheer what-the-fuck-ery of Taylor Swift pairing with T-Pain. Bono and Pavarotti’s voices blend like oil and vinegar in their version of “Ave Maria,” while Eminem convinced Elton John to join him onstage at the 2001 Grammys in a less than subtle ploy to muffle charges of homophobia. The list of unlikely duos expands at a rate similar to the one at which pi gains digits, but when Michael Bolton decides to participate, you pay attention. One World, One Love is Bolton’s latest. Released in the UK last year, it’s only now finding stateside distribution. As the Marley-ish title suggests, there’s a bit of island flavor mixed into a handful of the songs—island-lite, of course. The rest of the set weaves in and out of different styles, proving that there are no boundaries to where power ballads can travel. Considering what little fanfare surrounds this record’s release and its forgettable content, there’s not much reason to pay it any mind. There’s a collaboration with Ne-Yo, which isn’t that strange. He’s basically Usher-lite, while Bolton is everything-lite, so it makes sense. But then Bolton goes out and does a duet with Lady Gaga. Let that sink in. Michael Bolton and Lady Gaga. Together. On the same song. Lady Gaga, who has risen to fame as a hypersexual devotee of risqué dance-pop is paired with a guy who represents all things innocuous and flaccid. Her bizarre wigs, alien make-up and barely-clad tuchus are matched with the man who bore one of history’s bitchin’-est mullets. Surreal doesn’t even come close. Okay, so let’s listen to the song. It’s called, um, “Murder My Heart.” And here we go. Where’s Lady Gaga? Way back there? The backing track even sounds like Lady Gaga-lite. “I can’t breathe with my arms around you.” “Your love is like a weapon.” You’ve got a certified lunatic on your song and you bury her in the mix? This isn’t what I wanted at all. You’ve let me down for the last time, Bolton. Just when it looks like you might do something not lame (or at the very least funnylame), you still manage to disappoint. Do you have any idea how low my expectations already were? You could grow your mullet back out, at the very least. You owe us that. illustration by gluekit
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