I bought some very cool CDs recently. Naturally I had to buy them from Amazon, since I couldn’t get things like that from HMV, Grammaphone, or (heaven help me) one of the stores in Singapore’s pathetic “That CD Shop” chain. Check out the reviews below.
I also found out about a live house here in Singapore that seems to have good live shows from time to time. I mean, I found out about it from my friend Matt, who sent me a youtube video as he was seemingly trolling for Masonna stuff… and found Singapore noise instead. The Gashaus is in Bugis and seems pretty cool. Oddly enough, it was at one time a bank! Have to check that one out…
CD reviews
Sunn 0))) – Flight of the Behemoth: Five songs, including two remixed by Merzbow (who also works with Boris – the connection between the three bands is strong, as the Sunn 0))) guys run a label, Southern Lord, that distributes Boris releases in the U.S.A.). The first song starts off exctingly, with a rising bass sound, but then goes on for over 20 minutes of booming and bass-heavy buzzing. In fact, it sounds like just a single bass groaning away, although I’m sure there’s more happening here than seems at first. Still, it’s very much like Earth for those parts. In fact, it’s practically indistinguisable from Earth on those parts. The Merzbow remixed tracks are a bit different, however, with layers of strange noises going on top of the bass, mesmerizing. The final track is called “F.W.T.B.T.” (the initials stand for “For Whom The Bell Tolls,” the title of both the Ernest Hemingway novel and also the Metallica song”. The full title is actually “F.W.T.B.T (I Dream of Lars Ulrich Being Thrown Through the Bus Window Instead of My Mystikal Master Kliff Burton)”, a bit WEIRD and agenda-laden. The track is more of the usual, but with some cool jazzy snare drums stroked with a brush in an almost Twin Peaks Angelo Badalamenti-sort of way. Very doom-laden and spooky, with some creepy moaning and groaning going on.
Earth – Earth 2: Considered the grand-daddies of drone-core, the three songs on this CD are very long – 15 minutes, 30 minutes, and 27 minutes respectively. Very heavy bass sounds throughout the first two tracks, and the last one is a single mono-drone for 27 minutes. Very much like Aube’s stuff, or maybe like “Pure 2″ from the Godflesh “Pure” release.
Melvins – Bullhead: I might not have bought Bullhead, had it not been out of curiosity over the song “Boris,” which is supposedly how Wata, Atsushi, and Takeshi picked the name for their band. I have about six Boris albums, and now I guess I have about six Melvins albums as well. Bullhead is plenty good music, but in the end really nothing that blew me away like the way Godflesh did when I first heard it, or even some of Aube’s stuff. Final song “Cows” is 8 minutes long, over half of it is a drum solo. So-so.
Melvins – Lysol: I like the Melvins a lot, and many regard this as their best album. Until now, I thought that maybe I liked the Crybaby the best, but then again – what do I know. “Lysol” has a Flipper cover on it, “Sacrifice,” as well as an Alice Cooper song “the Ballad of Dwight Fry.” Strange.
Boris – Absolutego – Please see is generic cialis just as good for a review of this CD.
Boris play a blistering live show – great sound quality:
Boris’ drummer does some stuff with Sunn 0))) – lousy sound, strangely demonic:
More of that Boris strangeness, this time in Switzerlad – sound quality quite poor, editing cuts back and forth (pt. 1)
Boris in Switzerland, part 2: check out Wata’s guitar cord at 1:30, Atsushi’s great Chinese gong,
Boris – Akuma no uta: Please see cialis cost assistance for a review of this CD.
Movie Reviews:
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: Anybody who grew up with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory probably has images of what tht world looked like. For the most part, director Tim Burton sticks to the formula, but I can’t imagine anyone ever thought that Willie Wonka, owner of the factory, ever looked like James Dean, the young Marlon Brando, Steve McQueen, Ryan O’Neal, Michael J. Fox, or… Johnny Depp. So Burton gets Depp to work his usual magic, i.e. model a character after a well-known character from popular culture – it had worked in the Keith Richard-inspired Jack Sparrow character from Pirates of the Carribean, so for Tim Burton why not deconstruct…. Michael Jackson! And so, added into the story are all sorts of clumsy flashbacks to Willie’s childhood, and allow Willie to reconcile with his father (Christopher Lee, harkening back to Burton’s treatment of Edward Scissorhands and another icon from old horror films, Vincent Price – hey, Burton and Depp aren’t creative geniuses, they’re self-plagiarizers!). None of this was in the book as I recall, where Willie Wonka was wacky, self-confident, and a little dangerous. In fact, I seem to remember the mean kids being disposed of permanently, quite sinister. The highlight of the film, besides Charlie himself and his unfortunate family, are the Oompa Loompas, played by a single actor. Nice touch, Tim. But if it had been me, I might have cast Kirk Douglas as Willie Wonka.
This is a bit more of what Willie Wonka should have looked like – Uncle Sam!
So here’s Gene Wilder cast as Willie Wonka, Hollywood was getting it wrong early.
The Man Who Knew Too Little: Saw this movie a few years ago, mainly because I was intrigued by the title and also because it had Bill Murray in a leading role – it if was half as good as “Groundhog Day” it would be all right. I wasn’t too impressed with the Mr. Magoo-like tale of a simple guy who gets immersed in a cloak and dagger world but thinks it’s all an elaborate prank. But a few years went by, somebody gave me a copy, I watched it again, and liked it much more. Besides the fact that the London of the film is quite clearly a Hollywood stage. Lots of very funny scenes, such as when Bill Murray is being chased by the cops. The plot is very well constructed, with lots of clever coincedences preserving the appearance that a guy in this situatoin might actually be fooled into thinking that people weren’t shooting at him for real. Spotted Alfred “Doctor Octopus” Molina playing a Russian butcher.
Music Is The Weapon: documentary of the amazing life of Fela Kuti, which comes as part of a 2-disc set of the man’s work. Showing Fela’s life at one scary interval around the time that thousands of Nigerian soldiers raided his compound and raped his women, threw his mother out a window, and violated every aspect of his life stopping short of actually ending it. An engaging personality with a flamboyand “I don’t give a shit” attitude (and this is a guy who really lived it), there is plenty of righteous rage in his long shows his live harangues, his mesmerizing musical journeys. Top marks for this one.
Wu Bai and China Blue: Xia Ye Wan Feng: Taiwan’s best rock ‘n’ roller and balladeer, a charismatic mix of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards onstage, this is an excellent DVD of a series of concerts where Wu Bai played 30 of his songs that I know best, such as “Last Dance,” “Tong Ku De Ren,” and “Ai Qing De Jing Tou.” Of course, it also has a version of the “Shima Uta” song that The Boom did so well a few years ago, except this time a rather weak version sung with Zhou Hua Jian. Oh well. The stage setting is dark with deep blue lights, sometimes with a live string section playing along, sometimes with a pretty female guitarist, sometimes with companion singers, he’s always mesmerizing. This is a good one to play in the background instead of having the radio on – after all, why not? Zen likes to play guitar and drum when he sees Wu Bai – after all, why not?
Lin Chang – Insects Awaken: The boring CD comes with a DVD containing three boring videos set to Lin Chang’s music. I seem to remember the third one was pretty good. Interactive stuff just recounts text that is already part of the cover art.
Garfield 2: A Tale of Two Kitties: I watched the first film on an airplane out of boredom, with very low expecations. I was pleasantly surprised that it wasn’t a painful Howard The Duck-like experience. In my life – oh, man – I have seen MANY movies that are really the pits, and the first movie hardly came close to any of them. Now, my son wanted to see the new film, and I expected that it would be quite bad – if the first one didn’t suck, surely the sequel would. Well, wrong again – the second movie was pretty all right. Taking the concept of “sequel” for all it’s worth, the second film has two Garfields. Blasphemy? Well, apparently all of this “the Prince and the Pauper” stuff is worth recycling, and Garfield may or may not be related to a royal cat called Prince (if you’re expecting gags riffing on his Purple-ness, there’s only one – when the imposter is revealed, someone says “he’s not even ‘the cat formerly known as prince.’). For sequel, plenty of gags on duality, two, doubles, etc. Even a great copy of the much-imitated Marx Brothers mirror gag from one of their films (A Day At The Races? A Night At The Opera? Duck Soup? Help me out here…). Of course, by the end it’s all very dull, but the film is only 80 minutes long. Zen laughed his head off when Garfield farted. He’ll probably remember that for the rest of his life…
Somehow I just LOVE this cover. ” Torture, thy name is Spider-man.”
Here’s another weird one… Aunt May, packing heat? What was the world coming to?
