Styles: drama
Others: How is Your Fish Today?
Grammar usually makes titles seem more grandiose. With its titular antiquated timbre and showy comma, you might expect She, A Chinese to be a sort of sweeping national epic — you know, where sword strokes not only carve up enemies, but also sketch out weighty statements on what it means to be “female” and “Chinese.”
Styles: documentary
Others: Standing in the Shadows of Motown, Michael Jackson: The Interview Collection, Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man
If Phil Spector can be trusted (and that’s neither here nor there), then John Lennon is responsible for saving the film careers of both Martin Scorsese and Robert Deniro. An anecdote about halfway through The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector relates Spector’s reaction to Scorsese’s feature debut, Mean Streets. As anyone familiar with that movie knows, the opening scene, the one where Harvey Keitel wakes up to start his eventually horrible day, unfolds against the sound of “Be My Baby,” an iconic pop jam that Spector produced for the Ronettes in 1963.
Styles: animated family comedy
Others: Ice Age
There is plenty to admire in Despicable Me, the first film from Illumination Entertainment, which serves as NBC Universal’s family-fare subsidiary and was founded by an Ice Age executive producer. All of which is to say that this heavily marketed, computer-animated movie is not a Pixar or a Dreamworks. But after the likes of Coraline, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, the Ice Age films and others, this may be less of an automated presumption.
Styles: pop-post-punk
Others: Mission of Burma, Spacehog
The full-length debut from Cincinnati’s Koala Fires finds the band sharpening the most appealing aspects of 2009’s Sleep Tight, Lucky Grills EP while simultaneously expanding into new territory (full disclosure: I’ve met the Koala Fires’ guitarist, Kendall Bruns, since my original review). The group’s increased confidence is evident from even a passing comparison of “The Friendly Ghost” with its previously released version. By pushing the guitar further down in the mix and emphasizing Dan Johnson’s pulsing bass, they uncover a whole new sense of urgency in the song.
More about: Koala Fires
Links: Koala Fires
Styles: guitar manipulations, futuristic, psychedelic
Others: Emeralds, Earn, Rhys Chatham
The hyperboles about the current crop of effects-heavy music emerging from all corners of the globe are getting increasingly thicker. Compound adjectives and over-hyphenated clauses dot reviews like holes in Swiss cheese. This phenomenon is not a plague, but a gift; much like the vivid pursuits of their subjects, critics chase new methods of translating mutated sounds into language. While this symbiotic relationship finds the adventurous musician winning against the wordsmiths, it’s a battle that the latter should be more willing to lose.
More about: Mark McGuire
Links: Mark McGuire - Weird Forest
Styles: post-rock, instrumental
Others: Brokeback, Directions in Music, Mogwai
Cold Nice Gold is the impressive debut record from Bright Shuttle, an instrumental group that draws from post-rock, folk, ambient, and a smidgen of jazz, at its best moments blurring the lines between those genres. They’ve released a handful of CD-Rs before this full-length, with guitarist Scott Murrin being the only constant member, but they’ve solidified into a tight, intuitive trio who favor clean analogue recording with few overdubs.
More about: Bright Shuttle
Links: Bright Shuttle - Laboratory Standard
Styles: documentary, special interest
Others: 200 Motels, Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man, You’re Gonna Miss Me
For most of his adult life, Frank Zappa spent nearly every day trying to create the most interesting music he could think of. For Zappa, genres were pointless, merely functioning as a way for marketers to bracket and compartmentalize an art form that he considered timeless and indefinable. With this in mind, the creators of Frank Zappa: The Freak-Out List conducted interviews with several academicians, biographers, and musicians to explore the influences that shaped Zappa’s creative output throughout his groundbreaking career.
Styles: Comedy, Existential Mystery
Others: Intimate Strangers, Private Fears in Public Places
Known mostly for his groundbreaking early works, the haunting documentary Night and Fog, and his two features at the outbreak of the French New Wave, Hiroshima, Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad, Alain Resnais has not only worked consistently for the past 55 years, but he’s also never went a particularly long stretch without releasing a solid film.
Styles: flourescent-pink-purple synth-hop, fronted by that robotic vocoder voice from “Kickstart My Heart”
Others: BMSR, Alias, Blueprint, Dof, Visions Of Trees, Pedro/Vowels
There are several notable exceptions, but much of the time, once a solo identity sidles up to a touring, multi-member band, you start to notice changes to the homebase. Tobacco, as the focal point of multi-headed beast Black Moth Super Rainbow, broke out in a big way — indie-wise — with BMSR’s Dandelion Gum in 2007, and since then he’s began to cultivate a parallel solo identity, releasing Fucked Up Friends in 2008 and, now, Maniac Meat in 2010. (I’ll get to 2009’s Eating Us in a moment.)
More about: Tobacco
Styles: comedy
Others: Baghead, The Puffy Chair, The 40-Year Old Virgin
Will mumblecore films ever move into the mainstream? Earlier this year, Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg featured big-name Ben Stiller alongside Greta Gerwig, the indie film trend’s anointed ingénue. And with Jay and Mark Duplass’ Cyrus, mumblecore’s most successful maestros find themselves not only with a mainstream comedy cast, but a plot formula that could have sprung directly from the Judd Apatow camp. Perhaps this a case of the chicken-and-egg in disguise: Apatow’s brand, which currently defines American studio comedy, has always been rooted in veiled autobiography (e.g.
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