Chimpomatic

Torchwood

Season 2 Episode 1

Didn't really get into the first series of Torchwood - have to admit, Doctor Who's passed me by for the most part, so a spin-off didn't really excite that much. And the ones I watched felt like they were relying too much on the ooh! shock! factor with their swearing/snogging and not enough on either the sci-fi or characters to make it work.

Maybe my expectations were lowered, but the first ep of the second series (on BBC2 Jan 16) is a big improvement on what I've seen before. It's snappier, tighter, and feels like they've listened to the critics and tried to fix the problems. You've still got a Cardiff that's pretty much empty, and the odd shot of Cap'n Jack jumping up on a rooftop (a character trait they point out) and some of the trademark polysexual kissing. But on the other hand, they've drafted in James Marsters - Spike from the mighty Buffy.

Now, it may be that it all goes down the pan again further on in the series when he's not around to beat the crap out of Jack, but it's a pretty inspired cameo, even if he is basically playing the very Spike-like "rogue Time Agent Captain John Hart". He's got real presence, and has obviously got used to delivering lines about odd creatures and made-up fantasy blah with real intensity over the years. He also looks a bit like one of Adam's Ants, circa Kings Of The Wild Frontier.

They also cram in some Star Wars references, a nice "where are the blondes on your team?" Buffy gag, and even almost get you to forget all those annoying appearances from Barrowman on Strictly Come Dancing, Jonathan Ross and BBC Breakfast etc.

Am all in favour of the BBC working on new genre pieces like this, and do think the return of the Who enterprise has on the whole been a good thing - even if it's really more of a teatime kids treat than the multi-level fun that US shows like Buffy managed to create. Hope it continues to get better from here - Captain Spike is back for a few more eps, along w Alan "Jim from Neighbours" and Martha from the Tardis later on.

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4th Jan 2008 - 7 comments - Add Comment - Tweet

Best of 2007

chimp71

Top 5 albums
1 Radiohead - In_Rainbows
Just instantly sounded better than everything I'd heard for months - and for once in our instant preview/early release/download era, an album felt like an event.
2 Devandra Banhart - Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon
Love the 70s laid-back vibe here, traversing rock, folk and tropicalia effortlessly.
3 LCD Soundsystem - Sound Of Silver
Beyond the hipster hype, an album with something to say, and a fresh way of saying it.
4 Wilco - Sky Blue Sky
Warm rock, the perfect soundtrack to a snow-bound expedition. Great solos too.
5 Kings Of Leon - Because Of The Times
They disappointed live, but any album that kicks off with a good 7 minutes of slow-burning driving music is a winner round these parts.

Runners Up:
Justice - +
Demented production, great inventive dance/pop that felt like it could only have been released in 2007.
Brazil 70
OK, it's a compilation of post-Tropicalia freak-outs from 70s Brazilian, but most of it was new to me this year.
Burial - Untrue
Intriguing dubstep with soul
Arcade Fire - Neon Bible
Bit like eating a whole chocolate cake after a while, but still great in small chunks.

Top 5 gigs
1 The Rolling Stones - A Bigger Bang - The O2 August 26
They still rule. Billed as the last-ever tour too, glad to have finally caught them.
2 Prince - 3121 - The O2, August 31
Unstoppable showmanship, amazing guitar, huge catalogue of hits to draw on.
3 Wilco - Shepherd's Bush Empire, May 20
Possibly even better live than on record.
4 Beastie Boys - Brixton Academy, September 4
Good to see the BBs again, still got the skills to pay the bills.
5 Black Mountain - Cargo, December 5
Great introduction to a band I'd only heard on one track before - might have been higher in this list if I'd been able to sing along more.

Also: Cornelius/Matmos - Royal Festival Hall
Laptops, psychedelia, rock-outs and pure pop. RFH refurb works too.
The Vitamin Trip reunion, Joyce Is Not Here, September, Hong Kong
Just about pulled it all together again after ten years.

Top 5 films
1 Inland Empire
Unhinged Lynch. Not sure there's anywhere for him to go after this, but it's hard to beat for showing the extremes of cinema possibility; great performance from Laura Dern too.
2 The Lives Of Others
Brutally sharp in its dissection of recent state madness, and the ways people surprise and disappoint.
3 Superbad
McLovin!
4 Knocked Up
Great way to play both sides of the romcom gender split.
5 Disturbia
Enjoyed the tight scale and execution of this MySpace generation Rear Window.

Runners Up:
2 Days In Paris
Night Of The Sunflowers
Zodiac
Smokin' Aces
The Bourne Ultimatum

Most Disappointing threequel - Shrek The Third
Sucked as much as the first two rocked.

Top 5 tracks
1 Seahorse - Devendra Banhart
2 Bodysnatchers - Radiohead
3 Dear Dead Friends - Von Südenfed
4 Keep the Car Running - Arcade Fire
5 505 - Arctic Monkeys

Plus:
Ghost Ship - Menomena
Ponytail - Panda Bear
I Got Lost - Dinosaur Jr
Tenderoni - Chromeo
Love Your Man, Love Your Woman - The Broken Family Band
Veni Vidi Vici (Diplo Mix) - Black Lips
I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance - Black Kids
Is There A Ghost? - Band Of Horses

Top 5 TV shows
1 The Wire - FX/HBO
Just gets better and better. Does it really have to be the last series next time round?
2 Heroes - Sci-Fi/BBC2/NBC
Took a while to put everything in place, but this was one of the most fun shows around this year.
3 Entourage - ITV2/HBO
Vince and the gang are on a roll.
4 Flight Of The Conchords - BBC4/HBO
Jokes? Present. Songs? Present. Something new worth quoting.
5 30 Rock, Five/NBC
Didn't think this would be as funny as it is - Alec Baldwin's timing is great.

Runners Up:
Party Animals - BBC2
Lead Balloon - BBC2
Saxondale - BBC2
Comics Britannia - BBC4
Californication - Five
Five Days - BBC2
The Sopranos - E4/HBO
South Park - Paramount/Comedy Central

#Music
#chimp71

20th Dec 2007 - Add Comment - Tweet

Flight Of The Conchords

Season One

HBO

New Zealand's Brett and Jermaine bring their band, The Flight of The Conchords, to New York City - and with the management help of Murray, a moonlighting member of the New Zealand consulate, they attempt to break out. Band fights, a central park warm up tour and an ill-fated record deal split provide distraction along the way.

- Not even Crowded House gets a 90/10 split!
- Don't they?
- No. 80/20 maybe, but 90/10's unheard of.

Part comedy, part musical, it's easy to pick flaws in Flight of the Conchords. It's simplistic and a bit thin, but with the duo's regular musical interludes there are consistently hilarious moments in nearly every episode - whether that's the New Zealand take on urban hip hop, courtesy of the Rhymenoceros and the Hiphopopotamus, Murray's attempts to woo the leggy blonde or the guidance provided by the ghost(s) of David Bowie through the ages.

We'll have to wait and see how well the concept stretches out to a second series however, with the creator's themselves admitting that they have already tapped their best songs. For now, it's essential viewing - for Brett's sax-fueled angry dance solo in the final episode if nothing else. Flippin' Awesome!

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14th Dec 2007 - 4 comments - Add Comment - Tweet

Jens Lekman

Night Falls Over Kortedala

The master of disguise is back with an even more cloaked album than 2005's fantastic Oh You're So Silent Jens. Night Falls Over Kortedala is 12 songs packed full of bone dry wit, ludicrously surreal observations and expert irony. But as usual they all come heavily masked in cheese and do their best to convince you they're nothing but throwaway tat. His skill is two pronged. He undercuts his grand notions of love by filling them with the common-place, but then he'll sing about the common-place using enormous, sweeping musical arrangements. No one but this guy could construct such wonderfully heartfelt love songs while mentioning avocados and asthma inhalers, or explain the tax repercussions of secretly running a beauty salon from your own apartment by way of the most perfect, floaty pop song.

Kortedala refers to a neighborhood in Jens' hometown of Gothenburg in all its depressing insularity. In his own words Jens explains, "My record basically never leaves the 30 square metres that I live on until the very last song when I take a short bus ride to the countryside in Friday Night At The Drive-in Bingo." The deep irony of these songs lies in Jens' ability to create some of the most uplifting and buoyantly joyful sounds while describing this suburban hell he lives in. He goes on, "Everyone goes to bed at nine, after that you can't see one single window lit up...But it's the atmosphere and the small incidents that scare me. The guys who yell faggot at me when I pass their balcony, the Nazis hanging out in a nearby garage...In Kortedala everyone minds their own business. And I'm slowly turning into one of them so as soon as I've finished this record I will get the hell out of here."

After the opening swell of the string section in And I Remember Every Kiss, Jens' glorious croon caries us through this modern-day kitchen sink drama with unfailing optimism. During tragic anecdotes like The Opposite Of Hallelujah's line "I picked up a seashell to illustrate my loneliness, but a crab crawled out making it useless," Jens maintains this rosy outlook. Tales of love are never cut and dry with Lekman, whether he's fallen in love with his barber in Shirin or pretending to be the boy friend of his lesbian friend during a difficult dinner with her father as in Postcard To Nina. The upshot to this fateful dinner is explained in Lekman's line "Your father's mailing me all the time, says he just wants to say hi, I send back out-of-office auto reply."

Each of these delightfully tragic stories is told in a myriad of high-kicking, tongue-in-cheek musical ways from cheap calypso to full on Strictly Ballroom drama. If you fail to recognise the irony in Lekman's work then it will be lost to you and the one criticism of this record is that this irony is more disguised than ever here. The cheery campness of the music can sometimes be too much to bear. But I guess it all depends on the mood you're in. This album presents Lekman as a truly unique talent. It has all the dry wit of a loved-up Morrissey but dresses it all up in the most hideous sunday best.

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6th Dec 2007 - Add Comment - Tweet

Bobb Trimble

Iron Curtain Innocence / Harvest Of Dreams

Secretly Canadian

Growing up in the Worcester, Massachusetts suburb of Northborough, Bobb Trimble was a teenager listening to the likes of Pink Floyd, Queen, Bowie and The Beatles. Trimble began recording music and became known amongst Worcester's 'Wormtown' scene of the late 70's/Early 80's and went on to self-release these two records in miniscule quantities.

The records quickly became obscure, but an unauthorised re-issue by British label Radioactive kept them alive. With the rise of the internet, Ebay trading was taking the albums up to the $1500 mark and the time appeared right for an official re-release by Secretly Canadian.

Bobb Trimble's songs are deceptively complex - layering stings, multiple guitars, bass and vocals with ahead-of-their time samples and effects. His vocal's are strangely most reminiscent of Naomi Yang and the highlights of the album hit the same tone and atmosphere as some of Damon & Naomi's best work - although Trimble's multi-layered production is a long way from their stripped down sound. Iron Curtain Innocence sees Bobb merely finding his stride. When The Raven Calls is the highlight - a 6 and a half minute song, that cuts in on a guitar solo, giving you an idea of it's scope.

The relative commercial failure of 1980's Iron Curtain Innocence did nothing to stop Bobb Trimble's music and by 1982 he was back with an even more complex and multi-layered album. Harvest Of Dreams finds him with even bigger, more ambitious ideas. Take Me Home Vienna is a haunting, ghostly masterpiece while Another Lonely Angel is like a piece of lost 60's history. Paralyzed is the most memorable track however, cooking up a mesmerising, unforgettable sound that seems near impossible to describe.

That rich, layered sound is let down by the poor treatment of time, which gives away the original release date of these albums - 1981 and 1982 respectively. While they have been remastered as well as can be expected, the fact is that these days anyone with a computer can release a studio quality album, but back in the analog days getting an album out at all was an achievement - and an achievement that Trimble financed on his own. Not so much lo-fi and certainly not low in ambition, just low budget. These arrangements deserved the big screen treatment to fully express how much details there is in these songs - as like an Arthur Lee for the 80's Trimble is a true lost treasures, rightfully resurrected.

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6th Dec 2007 - Add Comment - Tweet

John From Cincinnati (Season One)

(creator. David Milch)

HBO

The arrival of a mysterious, verbally challenged stranger in Southern California's Imperial Beach has a profound effect on a multi-generational surfing family and the residents around a motel where they are based. Mitch Yost is out of the game and his self-indulgent behavior finds himself arguing with his overbearing wife and floating off the ground, while former champion Butchie Yost battles his junkie addictions and tries to prevent prodigy surfer son Shaun Yost signing himself away to the corporate devil of Luke Perry's "Stinkweed" surf brand.

Following David Milch's winding up of Deadwood, expectation was high for this series and it got off to a good start. The production values of the show are fantastic, with the cinematography and setting perfectly capturing the so-cal beach culture in a way that is so easy to get wrong. The acting has also been universally good, with Ed O'Neill, Luiz Guzman, Luke Perry and young surfer Greyson Fletcher putting well cast and Brian Van Holt in particular putting in a great cold-turkey laden performance trough the entire series. Rebecca De Mornay came across as obnoxious and overbearing, which hasn't won me over to her but certainly worked for the troublesome Cissy Yost.

The near Shakespearean delivery made for interesting viewing, but while the show was in some way swell written the basic momentum of the story lets things down in the end. The mood and atmosphere were almost enough to keep things going but the feeling of hoping it would all be leading to some climactic event was never realised and while the finale almost met my hopes of reaching the legendary finale of Big Wednesday, the show was been left with nowhere to go and has not been renewed for a second season.

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3rd Dec 2007 - Add Comment - Tweet

M. Ward

Duet For Guitars No.2

M Ward's debut album gets its second re-release since its initial conception in 1999 and it's a fine time to see this talent at its raw, stripped down beginning. This serves as a kind of sketchbook compared to the masterstrokes that are his recent offerings. The music is underproduced but the result is Wards natural born penchant for melody. His voice is still relatively unpredictable at this point and can be heard wavering a few times but as a whole its a pretty impressive place for a career to start. It shows the distance this song writer has come but it has an amazing maturity for a debut album.

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17th Sep 2007 - Add Comment - Tweet

Disturbia

(dir. DJ Caruso)

iTunes generation remix of Rear Window, w Transformers star Shia Le Beouf here a moody teen who's spending the summer holidays stuck in his bedroom after getting one of those Asbo electronic tags on his leg.

It's a great set-up that lets the surveillance thrills play out when mom Carrie-Anne Moss pulls the plug on his wired-world - no XBox Live!? - what's left, but for him to stare out of the window? At first it's a toss-up between checking out hot new neighbour Sarah Roemer or keeping tabs on creepy David Morse, but once he's convinced her to come up and play w his binoculars, it's all systems go for them to spend the rest of the movie trying to work out if there's a serial killer living next door or not.

Although there's something of a generic big chase finale, for the most part it's a solid mainstream thriller, less indie than the trailer makes out, but v enjoyable nonetheless.

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1st Aug 2007 - Add Comment - Tweet

Night Of The Sunflowers

(dir. Jorge Sanchez-Cabezudo)

Spanish rape and revenge thriller that twists with each of its six chapters to reveal different, subtle shades of a complex, involving story.

A pair of bickering, aging neighbours in a small deserted village, a pot-holing expert and his wife, a married cop who works with his father-in-law, and a disillusioned travelling salesman are among the characters we meet in a dusty backwater where nothing ever seems to happen.

Another grown-up European drama, packed with tiny details that hint at rich back-stories for all the characters, without dwelling on anything for too long. Moves from being a visceral stalker chiller to almost Hitchcock-levels of multiple motivations and human interaction in extreme situations. Highly recommended if you're looking for something that doesn't have the number 3 in the title this summer.

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31st May 2007 - Add Comment - Tweet

Modest Mouse

We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank

Epic

2004's Good News For People Who Love Bad News catapulted this band into the mainstream, earning them two Grammy nominations and selling over 1.6 million copies worldwide. Lead single Float On was given ample airplay and longtime fans held their breath to see if this stardom would be the end of the band. Thankfully We Were dead Before The Ship Even Sank shows them having weathered the storm beautifully. It's as fierce, original and furious as anything that's gone before and then some. Perhaps the addition of Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr to the lineup is what's provided these songs with a fresh sense of melody.

After a somewhat lackluster opener, Dashboard is where this record really introduces itself. It stomps around arrogantly with foot-tapping ease, the beat pounding under swathes of strings and a glorious trumpet fanfare. Fire It Up has all the soaring, skyward swagger of Float On, while Parting Of The Sensory pretty much sums up why this album is so good. It ambles along for the most part with a menacing and brooding shuffling of the feet, but slowly getting faster and more intense until it evolves into a drum pounding, fiddle frenzied tirade of "someday you will die somehow and somethings gonna steal your carbon." This song displays the raw edge of this band and their ability to keep this rawness under wraps but always have it looming. When it's unleashed, singer Isaac Brock's strained and maniacal voice spits a venom so powerful it's hard to imagine it comes from anywhere contrived.

Fly Trapped In A Jar has Marr's expansive and solid guitar sound driving the song to fantastic heights, while Spitting Venom is an eight and a half minute heavy-weight that changes tempo all the time climaxing in enough cymbals and trumpets that it really should close the album. But obviously they didn't mean us to end on this high. Invisible firmly draws a line under this album with it's wake-up call of driving guitars and stabbing vocals. The odd tempo of this closer cleverly explains the choice of opener as one could lead on to the other in a constant loop which is more than possible for an album this packed with ideas.

Modest Mouse have always plotted their own course and this album is evidence of their impressive ability to retain their fiercely original edge throughout 5 albums. In fact it heralds a new and expansive horizon for the band showcasing a depth of sound and breadth of vision that until now has only been hinted at. In a music scene inundated with new bands every day it's a treat to hear the work of a long standing lineup honing its sound.

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4th Apr 2007 - Add Comment - Tweet

300

(dir. Zach Snyder)

Enjoyable macho action that's basically one very long, very crunchy fight scene. Not sure how historically accurate any of this is, but it's the story of 300 buff sixpack Spartans fending off some extras from the dark hordes of Lord Of The Rings (aka Persia).

Based on the Frank Miller graphic novel, it's shot in a similar style to Sin City, and employs the same washed-out digital grainy aesthetic. It's also got the same slim connection to reality - this is heightened everything, everywhere. They shout SPAAAAAAAAAAARTAAAA as often as possible, and make a proto-fascist case for sticking together with your friends and family (as long as they're not born deformed, in which case it's prudent to chuck them out of town asap).

Gerard Butler is the superbuff Spartan leader. He's been the Phantom in The Phantom Of The Opera, Dracula in Dracula 2000 and Attila the Hun in Attila so he's obviously into his historical roles. Lena Headey is the rather unelegantly named Queen Gorgo keeping the Spartan home fires spartan. Weirdest casting for Chimpomatic readers will be The Wire's Dominic West - yes, if you've ever wondered what good po-lice McNulty would look like with long hair and his shirt off, here's your chance.

It's all pretty silly - and vaguely offensive in its depection of the Persians as a horde of unreconstructed "Others" - but carried off with a kind of unpretentious conviction: it sets out to make a crunchy bloodthirsty action blowout, and it succeeds. It's also told from a "here's a story about a legend" perspective, and doesn't really pretend to be anything like a historically accurate account. Apparently they borrowed some swords and stuff from Troy, but it's nowhere near as boring.

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20th Feb 2007 - 1 comments - Add Comment - Tweet

Five Days

(dir. Otto Bathurst, Simon Curtis)

When a young Hertfordshire woman disappears while buying flowers, her two children also go missing - as the police and media machine spring into action.

Superior drama from the BBC and HBO. The series has the high-quality writing and acting that the BBC has recently been more than capable of producing, with the production value of an American show. This however, is a distinctly British story - with none of the (sometimes) psuedo-Americanization seen in State Within, Spooks or Torchwood.

This is a complex and well-thought out script, that unfolds the story over 5 days (one day per episode) - using the interesting device of picking non-consecutive days (1,3,28,33,79) that are pinnacle moments in the case. That allows the writers to fill in the blanks with detail and hindsight, analysing the way that a case like this effects those involved, the community, the media and the general public.

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24th Jan 2007 - Add Comment - Tweet

The Young Knives

Voices Of Animals & Men

This is the debut full length from Leicestershire art/punk-pop trio and it's a mixed bag, which ultimately falls short of the high praise given by many critics. They have been heralded as the new Pulp with their oh-so-English wit but they don't come close to Jarvis Cocker's originality. Their sound is basic and lead singer Henry Dartnall seems far too aware of himself. Current single Weekends & Bleak Days starts off with the classic lyric "Hot summer, what a bummer," and rarely goes much deeper than that. Whatever originality they possess seems to have been manufactured to suit a gap in the market.

But I said it was a mixed bag and with the bad stuff out of the way the second half of the album really picks up. Once they drop the bravado as on Another Hollow Line the quality starts to shine through. The vocals are toned down and sound more real while She's Attracted To tells the story of that situation we can all relate to when you punch out the father of your girlfriend and uses much chunkier instrumentation and almost Parklife spoken vocals that genuinely make you laugh. In Loughborough Suicide, the best and most resolved track on the album, we see exactly what they are capable of. All the English pathetic wit works perfectly here and brings to mind previous masters of this art form such as Morrissey. The line, "I'll never go down fighting" is repeated proudly as the song dips and rises to different tempos, it just makes me wish it wasn't the second to last track.

Although Voices Of Animals & Men is a good listen I can't give it a particularly high rating as it seems like the product of an extensive market research session with NME readers to find out just what kind of sound they want at the moment. This feeling effects every aspect of The Young Knives from their accents to their anti-indie image. Instead of the oh-am-I-having-a-photo-shoot-I-didn't-realise casual bullshit of bands like Razorlight, they adopt the slightly podgy, comfortable-living, conservative party, suit and tie look that's equally affected. But once you get past all of that they show great promise that I hope they can mature into.

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29th Aug 2006 - Add Comment - Tweet

The Science Of Sleep

(dir. Michel Gondry)

Probably the only film where you could say Gael Garcia Bernal sleepwalks through his role without dissing the performance.

Gondry's on similar turf to Eternal Sunshine here, going for an all-out assault on dream logic, framing a romance (of sorts) between arty neighbours Bernal and Charlotte Gainsbourg around Bernal's lifelong inability to distinguish dreams from reality. A subtle playfulness lets the film get away with an elevated level of whimsy here, with stop motion animation used to great effect to play out the REM moments.

A Mexican who's moved to Paris to be with his mother after his father's death, Bernal gets stuck in an office where they make calendars. There the rituals of dealing with boredom soon match the dreams he stages from the cardboard-filled TV studio in his mind. The dialogue skips freely between English, French and a little Spanish to great effect, really giving a sense of lives lived on an international level.

Great music throughout (including a cute rewriting of the Velvets' After Hours), fluid direction and a story that justifies the extended dream logic - this is a confident, charming, modern fromage-free romance that manages to be both cute and occasionally moving. Funny too - Bernal's inventions like the One Second Time Machine or the 3D Glasses For Real Life really come in handy.

#Film
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11th May 2006 - Add Comment - Tweet

The Business

(dir. Nick Love)

If Goodfellas was a painting it would be a Masterpiece. Now, imagine you reduced that painting to a line drawing and invited a load of 6 year old Peckham school kids to colour it in with their crayons. Chances are you’ll end up with The Business. With it’s rise and fall of a gangster story, voiceover and freeze frames, it throws much more than a cheeky wink in the direction of Scorsese’s classic.

Back in the Thatcher years, scoundrel Frankie gets in a bit of trouble with the law and heads to Spain’s Costa del Crime to lay low for a while. On arrival he quickly aquaints himself with the neighbourhood villains and embarks on a sun-filled life of birds, drugs and crime. As he makes his way up the ladder, our man Frankie wears a permanently confused expression; whether taking his 6th line of coke of the morning, having a shotgun pointed at him or being explicitly propositioned by the pretty femme fatale he constantly looks as if he is trying to make sense of Hebrew. It’s somewhat suprising therefore that Frankie eventually becomes Mr. Big, with a direct link to Colombia. The 80’s were indeed ker-ayzee! He’s surrounded by equally wooden pastiches of Sarf Landan gangsters, so much so that I was expecting Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse to turn up and launch into a routine “You Slag!” “You Muppet!” “You Slag!”etc, etc.

The attention to detail with the costumes and music is a nice touch, and to be fair ginger-haired gangster Sammy does come across as properly hard. But this is a bad film. So bad, that it is completely watchable, if you know what I mean. Luvverly!

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26th Apr 2006 - Add Comment - Tweet

Why?

Elephant Eyelash

I wanted to review this album for a few reasons. Firstly because it’s a great album and secondly because I feel the hallowed halls of Chimp Towers needs to reprezent for the underground hip-hop.

Why?, aka Yoni Wolf is one third of the genius that was cLOUDDEAD and has put his skills to many fine releases from the ever-changing and ever-ground breaking Anticon label. Elephant Eyelash seems to have a coherency and focus that has sometimes been missing from a lot of Wolf’s many endeavours. He is a lyricist like no other who delivers playful yet dark sing/speak vocals with an awe inspiring attention to every syllable. It is a strangely uplifting experience which leaves you wondering why you were just joyously singing along to lines like “Unfold an origami death mask/ And cut my DNA with rubber traits/ Pull apart the double helix like a wishbone/ Always be working on a suicide note.”

Anything by this artist is challenging but so worth your time. This album and countless other on this label offers a rare musical experience, a chance to listen and appreciate music that is indefinable and carries with it no genre baggage. My iTunes says ‘Folk’ but I say Why? Stand out tracks include Sanddollars, Rubber Traits, Fall Saddles and Gemini (Birthday Song)

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5th Apr 2006 - Add Comment - Tweet

Dark Days

(dir. Marc Singer)

Thanks in no small part to Michael Moore and his healthy appetite for regime change in North America, feature length documentaries have become something of the new rock and roll lately. Recent heavyweights such as Bowling for Columbine, Touching the Void, Super Size Me. Etc. all left their mark at the box-office and generated their own headlines. One that may have slipped through your radar is Dark Days, released in 2000.

Literally straight from the New York City underground, Dark Days spends time with a group of people who, each for their own reason, call the subway tunnels around Penn station home. And home is exactly what they have, individual shelters with locked doors, some with gas cookers, others shaving with electric razors.

What is remarkable is how the residents of this underworld community adapt to lead such apparently ordinary lives; playing darts with buddies, painting doors, wrestling with pet dogs etc.

But this is no utopia. Cat-sized rodents share the neighbourhood, a crack addict has her shelter burned down over a bad debt and a DJ Shadow score keeps things suitably atmospheric. As one-time resident Greg remarks when trying to figure out how he got so low (no pun intended) as to live in the subway for five years, "Those were dark days man."

Engaging, interesting, funny, sad and deep (intended). Watch it. and you'll get to thinking what's really going on beneath your feet next time you pound the streets.

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31st Oct 2005 - Add Comment - Tweet

Patti Smith's Meltdown: Songs of Experience

Royal Festival Hall, London

From the announcement of Patti Smith’s meltdown line-up this always seemed like one of the clear highlights. Jeff Beck, Flea, Tom Verlaine, John Frusciante and others joining Patti Smith for an evening of music celebrating Jimi Hendrix. John Frusciante does Hendrix? That sounds awesome, dude! Things started to go wrong shortly after that when Frusciante announced that he was not going to be able to make it, due to recording work on the new RHCP album.

The gig kicked off with Patti Smith and her band doing Are You Experienced? A pretty good start, but surely it would get better as more stars came on stage…. but then Patti Smith left the stage and the next act came on. Surely the logical format for an evening like this was Patti Singing with an ever changing line up of superstar backing band?!… but no, each act came on, did one or two songs and then left. There were some collaborations, like Robyn Hitchcock and Johnny Marr doing May This Be Love, but generally it was a stilted, atmosphere-free evening while people trudged on and off stage and roadies wired up new equipment.

No one really came close to hitting the high expectations: Squarepusher started OK, before twiddling and feedbacking his way into his usual freak-out-jazz-solo. Flea was a highpoint, with looping pedals repeating his parts while he built up to a trumpet final, and Jeff Beck was pretty good at matching Hendrix’s skill…. but essentially it was all a bit like watching a busker do a cover of Purple Haze by playing it on a washboard. The closest to getting the freak-out vibe of Hendrix’s playing were Finnish duo Kimmo Pohjonen and drummer Sami Kuoppamaki, who rocked out their accordian/drumkit tracks in true freak out style.

Things did end up in a kind-of jam finale, with Patti Smith back on stage, with Jeff Beck, Flea and Tom Verlaine… but Patti’s emotional recital was undermined by the fact she was reading the lyrics, and guitar-doofus Verlaine was busy tuning up as usual.

#Music
#Gig
#CSF

5th Jul 2005 - Add Comment - Tweet