Pop pick-me-up
Pop songs are more than just background tunes. At their best, they’re a musical metronome, a life-sustaining pulse inside our otherwise wearied hearts and heads. When we can’t seem to make sense of the hustle and bustle of everyday life, we look to record collections and radio dials for direction and answers. The Aislers Set’s…
8 1/2 Women
The instinct, when beginning to watch a Peter Greenaway film, is to brace oneself, past experience having taught the viewer to expect unerotic nudity, beastly behavior and obscure plotting, seemingly overseen by a coldhearted aesthete with advanced degrees in mathematics and art history, and a mandarin-like contempt for his audience. This disregard for our comfort…
Divine Trash
Steve Yeager’s 1998 documentary on perennial provocateur John Waters begins with the future director as a young and already bent puppeteer, and culminates with an extended behind-the-scenes look at the making of his magnum opus, Pink Flamingos (1972). Yeager uses an interesting array of talking heads, with luminaries including Steve Buscemi, Jim Jarmusch and Hal…
My Dog Skip
My Dog Skip is as sprightly and lively as the Jack Russell terrier who enters the life of Willie Morris (Frankie Muniz) on his 9th birthday. It’s 1942 in Yazoo City, Mississippi, and Willie is a desperately shy outcast, a runt and bookworm scorned by his peers, the kind of boys who value the sports…
Visit to strange lands
Emerging from similar avant-garde influences and aesthetics, but shaped by different continents … Stereolab meets Sonic Youth out past the reverbo-sphere.
Oceanic reveries
MOT’s Peter Grimes swells with pure musical drama….
He needs Jesus
Some records are just challenging to review. What to do with an album that is equally disgusting and good? Ill-conceived and well-produced? Gutter-al and intensely creative? What do you do? You inhale and reluctantly give the damn thing what it deserves. So here it goes. Eminem is damned talented. Or is it damned and talented?…
