Needle Magazine by Gary Hammerschlag

needle

BLACK LABEL SOCIETY THE ORDER OF THE BLACK

Available In Stores August 10th

Also Available SLUM VILLAGE Villa Manifesto

DJ MUGGS VS. ILL BILL Kill Devil Hills

QUEST FOR FIRE

Lights From Paradise

needle

GYPTIAN

THE MAIN STREET GOSPEL Love Will Have Her Revenge

SEU JORGE & ALMAZ

Hold You

S/T

FRED EVERYTHING

Marketed & Distributed in Canada by E1 Music Canada

OM Masters

needle

/music

Maiden Voyage

es we can,” declared Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson from the Molson Amphitheatre stage in Toronto back in July. He copped the 2008 presidential campaign slogan from Barack Obama to rally the troops to buy his new album, The Final Frontier, when it comes out in August, and help make it No. 1. The next day, the 51-year-old singer, whose band has sold 80 million albums in its 30-year career, is sitting in a hotel suite at the Four Seasons, doing a round of interviews for what will be Iron Maiden’s 15th studio release. So does he really care if it hits No. 1? “Yeah, why not? It’s one of the few things that suddenly gets attention for the band,” Dickinson says, snacking on some fresh fruit and drinking a cup of tea, as the English are wont to do. “It’s not so much for the band either; it’s actually for the fans who sit there and wear their Maiden shirts and get roundly ignored in bars because Christina Aguilera and Lady Gaga are all over the radio, and then, all of a sudden, 16,000 people show up to a completely sold out show. ‘What’s happen12

needle

Iron Maiden speak out about the making of The Final Frontier / by Karen Bliss

ing there then? That’s odd.’ But the album goes to No. 1 and people go, ‘How did that happen?’ It’s kind of nice because it’s great for the fans.” On Iron Maiden’s just completed North American Final Frontier tour, the band — Dickinson, drummer Nicko McBrain, bassist Steve Harris, and guitarists Janick Gers, Dave Murray and Adrian Smith — only played one new song from The Final Frontier: “El Dorado,” the album track it gave away as a download through www.ironmaiden.com. “In the 70s and 80s, you could go out and play songs; people didn’t really record them,” said Gers in an interview the previous day at the Four Seasons, alongside McBrain. “I think Pink Floyd got bootlegged, but it’s impossible to play new songs now without them being on the Internet the next night. So ‘El Dorado’ is just a teaser for fans.” Gers, Dickinson and McBrain all say the song fits comfortably with the other Maiden material live and fans are loving it. “I know how they’re responding to it because I can hear them,” laughs Dickinson. “In actual fact, the album is so much bigger than that song, so much more varied, that people will really have no clue from that song.” The Final Frontier is nothing short of epic, a journey of twists and turns, 10 songs that range from the four-and-a-half minute “The Alchemist” to the 11minute closer, “When The Wild Wind Blows,” and another six that are seven, eight, nine minutes long, the music ranging from metal to minstrel, often with dramatic changes within the same song.

Before heading to Nassau, Bahamas to record with producer Kevin Shirley at Compass Point, Iron Maiden sketched out six of the songs during three weeks of preproduction in Paris. On the last day, for a seventh song, “The Man Who Would Be King,” Gers got his finger caught on a broken door handle and couldn’t play guitar at all. “It had a real sharp edge to it and it just ripped his finger,” Nicko recounts. “We had to go to Nassau and, fortunately, he had no major tendon problems.” “It was your left hand, wasn’t it?” he says to Jan, who nods and shows his long-healed finger. “So anyway, we went to the studio and basically we put everything down together, the six of us.” It was a recording method Shirley suggested to the band — live off the floor, all in the same room, with no screens separating them. “Imagine if this was the studio room,” McBrain says, motioning around the hotel suite. “Bruce was in a little box. He has to be because he’s so bloody loud, my drum mics would’ve picked his vocals up. So he’s the one that’s in a box. I wanted to padlock him in there a couple of times, the cheeky little bugger. Jan, Adrian, —Bruce dickinson Dave are right in front of the control room window, but I’m kitty cornered.” Adds Gers: “So on this one [album] what we did — which is really differDoes he ever look up any words from the Maiden ent — is put the actual speakers in another room, about 100 yards away, so all lyrics? “Well, I’m a guitar player,” he says, which obour gear is down the corridor. We had these helicopter headphones [to listen viously means no. on] and I’m thinking, ‘If they don’t work, we’re buggered’ because I can’t hear “I don’t do that,” laughs McBrain. “I don’t have a anything, but they were brilliant. Now, what that meant is we were all in the fuckin’ clue what he sings about most of the time. I same room and feeling everybody. This is something that a lot of other bands just like the melody.” don’t do anymore.” Dickinson — who is also a commercial airline Dickinson says he laid down his vocals “stuck in this bizarre little sort of pilot in the little spare time he has, as well as a pine telephone booth” in the corner of the studio — “a vile little room actually. I screenwriter, author, fencer, radio host, television hated it,” he laughs. His famed vocal approach — all-out metal singing or more presenter — attributes this interest in history and dramatic talk style — is easily determined by “the atmosphere and the words,” mythology to an “overactive education,” but says he says. And those words are little stories that stand alone, epic adventures that he’s not as insatiable a reader as he used to be. focus on historical themes of religion, war, sea and space. “I am, actually, given a chance. This existence — “You’re on pretty good lyrical territory if you’re talking about war and religion hotel room, hotel room, hotel room — is not very and things like that,” says Dickinson. “In terms of the sea, Steve wrote the words conducive to doing something as contemplative to ‘The Talisman’ and that’s a straightforward story in first-person. He has a lot as sitting down and reading books,” Dickinson exof stuff like that and they always come to some horrible stinky end.” plains. “You tend to look at the TV or In “The Talisman,” the lengthy tale includes lines like “We pray to look at things. It’s very fleeting. It’s hard God that we won’t die;” “Four ships are lost in the stormy conditions” to sit down and physically concentrate. I and “Twenty days without a meal…the scurvy rest did slaughter.” At managed it in Saskatoon,” he reveals. “I the end, the song mentions sailing towards the promised land, but he found a tree by a park and sat and read doesn’t reach it. “He dies of some horrible crippling fucking disease my book for a while against a tree.” at the end,” Dickinson laughs loudly. “‘The sickness I am dying from And there sat one of the biggest rock never wanted it to end this way.’” singers in the world, stealing a quiet moSome of the The Final Frontier songs contain references that diement in Canada. Hopefully, he’ll do the hard fans or intellectuals might want to look up, such as Icarus in the same elsewhere when Iron Maiden conlead track and first single, “Satellite 15…The Final Frontier;” Anntinues The Final Frontier World Tour wyn in “Isle of Avalon;” Albion in “Coming Home;” and Damacles in The Final Frontier into 2011 and beyond. (Deluxe Edition) “Starblind.” There’s nothing final about that. stores “Bruce and Steve particularly are very good at hooking into history,” hits August 17 from says Gers. “We’re not a band that’s going to sing love songs. That’s just EMI. not what we do.”

“

You’re on pretty good lyrical territory if you’re talking about war and religion and things like that.”

needle

IRONMAIDEN.COM 14

needle

/music

Film Forum

Looking (and listening) through film history with Dean and Britta. by Michaelangelo Matos

he voicemail arrives about 15 minutes early: “Hey, it’s Dean—

we’re going to be a little late.” The caller’s voice would be familiar to anyone who’s paid attention to alternative rock over the past quarter-century. It’s Dean Wareham, first the singer of Boston’s groundbreaking ’80s dream-pop band Galaxie 500, and then, for most of the ’90s and early ’00s, the guiding force behind Luna. Luna’s original bassist, Justin Harwood, was replaced by Britta Phillips in 2000, and she and Wareham later married, forming a duo after Luna disbanded in 2005. In addition to continuing to make urbane, softfocus rock together, Dean and Britta, as they bill themselves, have also begun to write music for film, scoring Noah Baumbach’s 2005 film The Squid and the Whale. More recently, they scored a handful of Andy Warhol’s series of “Screen Tests,” silent shorts featuring just about everyone who wandered into the Factory, Warhol’s legendary New York art studio, during the mid-’60s. Each participant was more or less watched by the camera for around four minutes at a time. The duo’s score is now being released as the newest Dean and Britta CD, 13 Most Beautiful . . . Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests, on their own Double Feature Records. (An authorized DVD of the shorts, with the duo’s music, is also out.) So it seemed appropriate to meet with the couple at Kim’s Video, Manhattan’s premier DVD shop, to discuss their work for film and television. Kim’s is in their old neighborhood; Dean and Britta lived in the East Village for years before moving to Brooklyn last September, where they’ve found a bigger place they can also use to rehearse and record. Despite Wareham’s worries, they arrive shortly after our scheduled meet-up time. Naturally, they begin by browsing a shelf of imported Warhol titles near the front door. Wareham casts doubt on the DVDs’ legality. “This Italian guy put all these out,” he says. “Chelsea Girls [1966] is complicated because it’s two reels, and every time they showed it, they showed it slightly dif16

needle

ferently. I think it’s hard to say what is the correct alignment of the two. One is silent, and one of them talks. [The Italian] claims that he has the rights, but none of the films that Warhol directed are on DVD [legally].” Dean and Britta became involved with the Screen Tests at the invitation of Ben Harrison, the performance curator of Pittsburgh’s Warhol Museum and a longtime Luna fan. 13 Most Beautiful debuted as part of the 2008 Pittsburgh International Festival of Firsts. “I think that’s one of the few things the Museum actually owns the rights to, his early films, and they’d been wanting to do something to raise awareness of them,” Wareham says. “They wanted songs, and that’s part of why we got hired and not Philip Glass or some composer.” The couple immersed themselves in Warhol research. “Before, I knew all these names,” Wareham says. “I’d heard of [Factory regulars] Paul America and Ingrid Superstar and Billy Name, but I didn’t know anything about them. Now we’ve read everything we could about these people. There’s this new book 13 Most by Tony Scherman and David Dalton Beautiful... Songs for called Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol. Andy Warhol’s That’s great, it really is. It’s only on the Screen Tests hits stores ’60s. There’s another big book called July 27 on Factory Made by Steven Watson. You Double Feature Records. realize these people were often, not al-

“

ways, but some of them were artists in their own right. Like, Billy Name is a bridge between the Beat movement and the experimental dance scene and the ’60s in a way. [Whereas] Paul America’s just a handsome guy.” Writing the music presented unique challenges. “It’s not quite [like] scoring film,” Wareham says. “It’s scoring silent film. A score to a film has about 30 minutes of music in it. With this, the music had to go all the way to the end. It’s kind of like making a music video, but making it backwards.” “Have you seen the Screen Tests?” asks Phillips. “Every facial expression is exaggerated. So when you put music to it, you really use more than you would in a soundtrack, in the way that a music video would. We would play stuff or throw stuff up there and how it reacted with the face, that feeling you got.” We wander over to an aisle devoted to directors, arranged by their nation of origin. Near the Italian Directors section, talk turns to Michelangelo Antonioni, whose 1960 L’Avventura also provided the title for the first Dean and Britta album, from 2003. Wareham pulls out a different Antonioni, 1970’s hippie road saga, Zabriskie Point. “This is one of my favorite movies,” he says. He especially likes the soundtrack— which, like the movie, was heavily marked by the release of Easy Rider the previous year. (Both films were among the earliest to have multiple-artist rock soundtracks.) “That’s a great album,” Wareham says of Zabriskie. “John Fahey, Kaleidoscope, Pink Floyd. Patti Page’s ‘Tennessee Waltz’ is in there. There’s some really nice [stuff ]. [Zabriskie Point] was an enormous flop. Apparently, everyone hated [Antonioni]. The crew hated him.” A few feet away are the US Directors. Naturally, Noah Baumbach comes up. “For The Squid and the Whale, one piece I worked on, Noah was referencing Delacroix and Jean Genet,” Phillips says. “Once we started, the idea was to take classical pieces and play them on synthesizers,” Wareham says. “We were doing that for, like, three months, before it was even shot. Finally we get in there and start looking at it: ‘No, that’s not gonna work.’” The Squid and the Whale wasn’t Wareham’s first collaboration with Baumbach. The pre-Britta Luna wrote music for his 1997 film, Mr. Jealousy. It’s not on Kim’s shelf, but we do find a more popular

A score to a film has about 30 minutes of music in it. With this, the music had to go all the way to the end. It’s kind of like making a music video, but making it backwards.” —dean Wareham

2007 Baumbach film. “We did a score for Margot at the Wedding that’s really good, but he didn’t use it,” Phillips says with a laugh. Dean and Britta did, though, recycling an acoustic guitar piece for the Screen Tests featuring dancer Freddy Herko and adding a drum machine and electric guitar. Then there’s an earlier Baumbach film that Wareham actually appeared in, 1997’s Highball. Both Wareham and Phillips have done a little bit of movie acting, but although they’ve only been in a couple of films each, they have one curious degree of separation that predates their involvement together: Justine Bateman, the teen co-star of the ’80s TV sitcom Family Ties. Bateman was the star of the legendarily disastrous 1988 vehicle Satisfaction, about an allfemale rock band, which also featured Phillips in a small role. Today, it’s known primarily as one of the last times Julia Roberts was ever billed sixth. “It’s a terrible movie,” Phillips says, accurately. She turns to her husband. “But I didn’t make out with her, and you did.” Yep, Wareham locked lips with Bateman in Highball. For a brief moment, two very different ’80s icons—he as progenitor of the indie subgenre slowcore with Galaxie 500, she for six seasons on prime time as Mallory Keaton—collided. Messily, Wareham says. “She was a sloppy kisser. But she said that was the way her character would kiss.” He shrugs. “I’m not a trained actor.” Phillips was also involved with a signature piece of family-friendly ’80s pop culture: For three seasons she was the singing voice of the title character of Jem, the syndicated, animated adventures of an all-female rock band. After that experience, Phillips says, “I didn’t do anything for 20 years,” in the voiceover realm. That changed thanks to a friend. “I know Dino Stamatopoulos, who wrote for Conan [O’Brien] and [David] Letterman,” she says. “I met him 10 years ago, when I lived in L.A. for about six months.” Stamatopoulos created Moral Orel, an often disturbing animated series that aired between 2005 and 2008 on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim and often featured an indie rock soundtrack. “At the last Luna show we did in L.A., he was telling me about the show, and I said, ‘I do voice acting.’” She wound up playing several characters. Still, the most difficult role can sometimes be the most obvious. The one movie Wareham and Phillips appear in together is Tell Me Do You Miss Me, Matthew Buzzell’s 2006 documentary about Luna’s final tour. “I’m glad I’m not in it more,” Phillips says. “But I like watching it.” Wareham respectfully disagrees: “Matthew obviously picked a great moment to make it, since the band was breaking up. He’d wanted to do it for a while, and then when we were breaking up, we said, ‘OK, now’s the time.’” Does Wareham enjoy the movie? “I have to watch that with my eyes covered now.”

/music / the_playlist

►

the_playlist

No Wave

When rock veers closest to chaos you’ll find punk’s most challenging offshoot / by Jess Harvell

n a weird way, the Ramones are to blame. Now it’s almost impossible

punishable by public flogging to hear the band as anything other than a kitschy-but-raw update on on St. Mark’s Place. Sure, no wave was not a rock’n’roll good times. But the Ramones’ chainsaw minimalism liber- “nice” sound. The majority of ated all sorts of New York musicians in the late ’70s: failed jazz cats, punks, who prided themselves art school dropouts, composers-without-concert-halls, teen runaways on their anti-musician credentials, found themselves chased with a short lifetime’s worth of rage. out of no wave gigs. So, why has Many of these outcasts had very little interest in old-school the genre proven to be so influential? (You still can hear no wave’s rockn’roll, and even less of an interest in good times. But they grimy urban alienation reverberating today, say in the clang and wondered if rock’s inherent racket might still be the best way to scrape of beloved indie rockers like Liars.) Because no wave, as express themselves. The Ramones had smashed rock down to close as it edges toward “formless noise,” is still, rock music, disits brightly colored building blocks. Now those blocks couldbe tended though the family resemblance might be. scrambled, or pulped entirely. It’s treble abuse may prod listeners’ pain centers, but no wave’s Existing for only a few short years in the late ’70s and early also an intensely physical music in a way that’s perversely plea‘80s in New York City, this fractious confederation was called no surable. You can almost hear these musicians—some of them unwave. The no wavers unleashed a new guitar vocabulary of acidic schooled and some disavowing their musical training—pulling glissandi and atonal blasts of room-clearing blare. The beats were and squeezing these sounds from their instruments. It affects the ultra-primitive or wildly arrhythmic in the face of the metronomguts and muscles as much as the head. Give yourself over to no ic competency of the era’s corporate rock and disco. And singers wave, stop listening for meaning or melody, and you’ll find rock’s howled, mumbled and bleated, but avoided melody as if it was bodily pleasures in their most concentrated dose. 18

illustration by jim tierney

THE ROOTS

Various Artists, No New York / Antilles (1978) Brian Eno had always searched out musical extremes, and when the first no wave bands began to thrash their way through the city’s clubs and alternative art spaces, he decided to play patron/producer. The Eno-compiled No New York was instantly controversial. Some sniped that Eno had winnowed the tracklist down to his personal favorites, while neglecting the breadth of the scene. Oth-

THE CLASSICS

DNA, DNA on DNA / No More (2004)

The Contortions, Buy / Ze (1979) The two most musically accomplished on No New York are probably the only ones where first-time listeners could survive a full-length album. DNA were lead, if that’s the right word given their autodidact’s brand of improvisation, by Arto Lindsay, who’d later swerve in to aching beautiful pastiches of Brazilian pop. On DNA’s best tune-blurts, bassist Tim Wright provides a not-quiterhythmic anchor to drummer Ikue Mori’s freeform splatter of percus-

ers thought he’d dulled the genre’s serrated edges with a murky production style. But the dark, dank sound of No New York fits the music perfectly, recalling the suffocating subway cars and ghost town streets the bands lived every day. We’ll talk more about DNA and the Contortions below, but Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, fronted by a thenadolescent Lydia Lunch, were a

’60s girl group from hell’s supperclub, slide guitar shrieking in place of notes while Lunch evoked a universal teenage body horror. And despite the bands who’ve imitated them since, Mars, with their frantic/moronic rhythms and jabbering glossolia of alien voices, still sound further out-there than anyone, spacemen from a ‘50s bmovie futilely trying to get their heads around rock’n’roll.

sion and Lindsay’s wild spasms of guitar and vocal gibberish. Like experimental jazz cut down to jukebox-friendly lengths, and with jukebox-unfriendly punk violence subbing for swinging virtuosity, DNA made loose, experimental music that kinda, sorta rocked. Led by infamous jerk James Chance, the Contortions, unlike all of the other no wave bands, actually seemed to have heard a few pop records at some point in their life. Specifically, Chance was enamored

with the tourniquet-tight rhythms, and domineering stage presence, of James Brown. Naturally, this made for an odd combination given no wave’s basic writ of unhingedat-all-costs. But it’s also why the Contortions are the most imitated of the early no wave bands. Though Chance was know for his punchout-the-front-row stage antics, here the violence is controlled, and the band jerks its way through a mutant funk colored by guitars more knife-fight than chicken-scratch.

THE CROSSOVER

Glenn Branca, The Ascension / 99 (1981)

Sonic Youth, Bad Moon Rising / Homestead (1985) Glenn Branca was the no waver who’d later be embraced by the conservatory set, thanks to his “guitar symphony” series. Corralling dozens of guitarists, of varying degrees of technical prowess, Branca has spent three decades reinventing fusty old “classical” music for the era of distortion pedals and overwhelming volume. But Branca’s earliest record as a solo artist is avant-rock at its most listenable, admittedly not a criterion that usually applies to no wave. Taking off from the sprawling classic-rockmeets-punk sound of Television,

THE FUTURE

The Ascension’s rhythms continually crest and crest, as the no waveesque guitars eventually swell to ecstatic, shimmering plateaus. It’s beautiful stuff, in a suitably rawedged way, a wordless place where gutter punk meets the sublime. Branca’s most famous students, Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo, were there at no wave’s ground zero, and you can hear the genre’s guitars all over Sonic Youth’s earliest records. What separated SY was their barely disguised appreciation for classic rock; the tension between cathartic riffs and no wave

texture has defined their music for almost 30 years. Bad Moon Rising isn’t quite among the first rank of SY albums—their rhythm section had yet to tighten up, to say the least—but it’s also the closest no wave can get to rock-qua-rock without ceasing to be no wave. It’s also frequently gorgeous, dark but weirdly pastoral, and of course features SY’s classic collaboration with no wave queen Lydia Lunch, “Death Valley ’69,” which still sounds like the ultimate soundtrack to a ’70s hippie-slasher exploitation flick.

Arab on Radar, Soak the Saddle / Load (1999) No wave survived into the ’90s thanks to small pockets of neversay-die fans-turned-bands. In the Midwest, acts like U.S. Maple— imagine a ’70s bar band shattered and reassembled in no wave’s image—lived at the outmost fringe of indie culture. At the turn of the millennium, though, a host of barely legal musicians began to terror-

ize a new generation of art school kids in loft spaces and D.I.Y. venues, bringing hardcore’s get-in-the-pit intensity to no wave’s repertoire of physical provocation With their squeal-riffs that stretched and tumbled like Slinkys, and their endlessly crashing waves of cymbals, Arab on Radar were exemplars. They deployed surreal moments of

traditional rock—old-school boogie riffs, straight-ahead punk chug— and then imploded them with body-baffling bouts of arrhythmia. Dozens of bands have since formed in the bent image of Arab on Radar and their peers, and for a sound deeply misunderstood at the time, it’s unlikely now that no wave will ever disappear completely. 19

/music

The Paperboy Cometh Eli “Paperboy” Reed is just one of many modern soul fans keeping the genre alive / by Sean L. Maloney

t’s a skin-melting June night in the middle of Tennessee. A night so hot

you could be standing on an air conditioner, double-fisting popsicles with a bag of ice down your pants, and you’d still be sweating like a sinner on Sunday morning. One of those nights where you wish you were Ted Williams or Walt Disney, when it’s tough to fathom leaving your climate-controlled cocoon. ¶ Wearing a suit under the stage lights of a downtown Nashville club, Boston native and soul-revival wunderkind Eli “Paperboy” Reed is seeping energy and sex out of every pore. Perfectly coiffed when his set began, Reed’s pompadour now droops with moisture, and his brow is likewise beaded with persperation. There’s little sign of the low-key dude in glasses and flip flops who’d been milling around backstage a few hours ago. Grown women are screeching like little girls buried under a ton of kittens. Two teenage guys—old enough to vote, but not old enough to drink—stand up front, mouths agape like characters in a low-rent Porky’s knockoff. At the tables around the edge of club, there are boomers and aging hippies and twentysomething hipsters; Reed even manages to get them tapping their feet and nodding approvingly. The crowd is in the palm of Reed’s outstretched hand. It’s just that, well, the crowd isn’t very big. Attendance is in the low double-digits for a room that can hold 500 concertgoers. This isn’t a reflection on the quality of Reed’s performance. It’s just that tonight his major label debut is still two months away from seeing its stateside release. Add in a citywide hangover, musical and otherwise, thanks to Bonnaroo and the Country Music Association Music Festival. And of course the heat isn’t helping. The club’s owner is beaming, though, despite having lost money on Reed’s guarantee. He’s already planning for Reed’s next time through, thinking of the crowds the singer will draw when word gets out. That’s perhaps the best comment of the night on Reed’s wide-ranging appeal. Reed’s Capitol Records debut, Come and Get It, finally released this month, is a juggernaut. From the opening snare-roll-and-horn-stab of lead track “Young Girl” to the closing scream of full-tilt funk rager “Explosion,” Reed barrels through one soul music trope after another, evoking artists like Sam Cooke or Dyke and the Blazers just long enough to acknowledge their influence before moving on to the next reference point. He’s not plagiarizing, but 20

he’s definitely turning in a well-annotated dissertation. Eventually, though, Reed does lock into a sound that is very much his own: A soul music geek turned actual soul star. The Paperboy can flash his library card and still be seen as one of the cool kids. Come and Get It, while definitely indebted to the Motown-Memphis axis of awesome, has a decidedly East Coast flavor—the bounce of Carolina beach music, the swing of Philly’s string arrangements and the all-night-party air of Atlantic Records’ pre-rock heyday. It’s a sound that doesn’t get a lot of props from the “VH1 countdown show” school of music history. And this particular permutation— renewed regionalism—didn’t exist before Paperboy Reed distilled these individual elements into his own particular brew. It’s a kissing cousin to the genre’s classics, but definitely a record that can stand on its own. But Reed’s show-stopper performance style also points to the conundrum at the heart of soul’s most recent revival. Everybody loves vintage soul music. Only a few heartless puppy-kickers would ever deny the genius of Otis Redding or the Temptations. And any halfway decent modern soul band can woo a crowd. But will anybody actively seek the stuff out on CD?

Is there a mass audience out there for music assumed to be a nostalgic pleasure at best? Can contemporary purveyors of the “Sound of Young America”—a sound that’s now more than 40 years old—matter in a world where actual young Americans are more interested in shiny synthetic noises than a killer horn section? Will the generation that made AutoTune the most ubiquitous sound in post-millennial pop even care about an artist that can sing on key without electronic assistance? The answer: Yes, provided they manage to hear it. There’s an undeniable energy to a soul band playing loud instruments in room together. (Always has been, always will be.) Yet the soul revival has been painted as a backwards looking sound, out of step with both the social and musical climate of the 21st century. Critics and collectors are liable to claim that, given the many era-specific socioeconomic tensions (civil rights, Vietnam) that helped create the genre, the energy that defined old-school soul music is a thing of the past. But surely 2010 has its share of turmoil ready to be tackled in song. Between financial chicanery, environmental mismanagement and political shenanigans from all sides, it’s not as if modern soul acts can’t lay claim to a host of “Ball of Confusion”/“Eve of Destruction”-style woes. And musically, modern soul acts can provide a necessary breather from the breakneck pace of pop music’s computerassisted forward momentum over the last decade. Now, it’s been an awesome decade for pop of all kinds, but it’s also easier than ever to burn out on the novelty of the latest digital production techniques thanks to their crossgenre ubiquity. Every so often, you need music that allows you to embrace the sound of the past without sacrificing relevance or excitement. For a moment there, around 2007, it even seemed like the soul revival had a commercial chance. Major labels were salivating at the Grammyconquering trajectory of Amy Winehouse and Back to Black, her heavyweight slab of contemporary soul music. The music press was hot and bothered over 100 Days 100 Nights, the third album from Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings. Cult legends like Bettye LaVette and Charles “Wigg” Walker were plucked from obscurity. And then… nothing. Winehouse descended into a morass of drug abuse, weird behavior and bad breast implants. As her notoriety became more about her inability to act like an even marginally functional adult, as she went from rising pop star to tabloid mainstay. Interest in her music, and the wider soul music revival, took a backseat to tales of crack house antics and wanton self-destruction. Without the (formerly) pretty British lady at the front of the movement, the ADD-addled music press moved on to newer, trends and slightly less damaged pop stars. In the mainstream, the interest in old-school soul quickly dried up. But while many critics were quick to dismiss the wave 21

/music

From Australia to Germany and back again, soul’s 21st century progeny celebrate a living, breathing sound.

of post-Back to Black albums as retreads-of-a-retread, hundreds of acts across the globe continued to revitalize classic R&B tropes, with or without critical approval or popular attention. From Australia to Germany and back again, soul’s 21st century progeny have a broader range than you might think, thanks to our networked world. The Soul Investigators from Helsinki, the Bamboos from Melbourne, the Soulphonics from Atlanta, Baby Charles from Idaho and Eli “Paperboy” Reed from Boston: These musicians now have access to hundreds of obscure soul albums and singles unearthed by record store crate-diggers over the last 30 years, many of which have since been repackaged and reissued. They’ve gained better access to the genre’s global mutations thanks to import CDs and genrefocused online record stores. On top of that, they’ve got the internet’s instant jukeboxes, like YouTube and iLike, allowing them to dial up any song from the genre’s history at any time they wish. This is the first generation of musicians with access to this kind of research, and man do they like to kick their knowledge when it’s time to make an album. Styles previously confined to specific locales—New Orleans funk, Memphis soul, Kingston rocksteady—can now be found on the same album. Sometimes you’ll even hear them in the same song, lending this generation of soul music a unique and worldly timbre. It’s this kind of polyglot party sound you’ll hear on Reed’s Come and Get It. But you’ll also hear it on Shawn Lee’s continent-hopping instrumental albums as Miles of Styles and the Ping Pong Orchestra. (Lee also released the guest-laden Soul in the Hole, one of 2009’s most surprising records given the startling amount of stylistic focus this genre-

mixer brings to the table.) Acts like Brownout and Bronx River Parkway—a Texas-psych-rock-meetsLatin-funk outfit and a straight-up boogaloo revival troupe, respectively—are a friendly reminder of how much influence Latin genres had on American soul before the term “Latin Explosion” was even a twinkle in some marketer’s eye. Meanwhile, several acts have rekindled the genre’s critical fire in the last 18 months. Mayer Hawthorne (a Motown-obsessed multi-instrumentalist from Michigan behind the new Stones Throw Records release Strange Arrangement) and multi-generational Milwaukee band Kings Go Forth (whose The Outsiders Are Back is the harmony-driven party record of the year) have earned kudos in the wake of appearances at the South by Southwest Music Festival. Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings released their fourth album, I Learned the Hard Way, in the spring, reawakening the interest of the NPR set. All in all, it feels like the Winehouse debacle never happened. Soul music is bubbling up again, edging its way back into pop’s consciousness. So how does it go all the way? Maybe through oldfashioned hard work. Back in Nashville, watching him work the crowd, you can see that Eli “Paperboy” Reed understands what’s at stake. There isn’t a soul revivalist clubhouse, a place where everyone gets together to trade records and work on their hand jive, but this disparate, international group of artists is united in one key way. All of them feel the pressure to live up to the almost unreachable heights artists like Sam Cooke and Otis Redding and James Brown achieved decades ago. The discographies of those soul greats have been scrubbed free of filler and repackaged into easy-toswallow doses of concentrated brilliance. The modern audience’s expectations are built more on the genre’s accumulated mythology than any memory of how it sounded at the time, when for every classic single there were a half-dozen records designed to do little but fill up airtime. Reed knows this well; you can tell by the way he performs as if a crowd of 50 was a crowd of 500. Trying to stack up against those hall-of-famers, he and his peers can’t afford to release weak albums or play at any speed less than full-tilt. Even though the commercial math adds up in his favor—tight catchy tunes, killer live show and boyish good looks—Reed knows the fickle finger of fate won’t point in his genre’s diCome and Get rection all that often in the 21st It arrives in stores August century. 10 on Capitol Records.

ON ON THE THE

WARPED TOUR WARPED TOUR

TOUR TOUR DATESDATES

THIS SUMMER THIS SUMMER

EMMURE

A.M. TAXI

FELONY

WE DON'T STAND A CHANCE A.M. TAXI

EMMURE FELONY

WE DON'T STAND A CHANCE

WARPED TOUR 2010

DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN

VARIOUS ARTISTS

OPTION PARALYSIS

DY BA WARPED TOURBOED2010 ITION

VARIOUS ARTISTS

DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN OPTION PARALYSIS

BODY BAG EDITION SUICIDE SILENCE

IWRESTLEDABEARONCE

NO TIME TO BLEED

IT'S ALL HAPPENING

SUICIDE SILENCE

IWRESTLEDABEARONCE

NO TIME TO BLEED

IT'S ALL HAPPENING

6/25 6/26 6/27 6/29 6/30 7/01 7/02 7/03 7/05 7/06 7/07 7/08 7/09 7/10 7/11 7/13 7/14 7/15 7/16 7/17 7/18 7/20 7/21 7/22 7/23 7/24 7/25 7/26 7/28 7/29 7/30 7/31 8/01 8/02 8/05 8/07 8/08 8/10 8/11 8/12 8/13 8/14 8/15

TOUR DATES

CARSON, CA 6/25 - CARSON, CA MOUNTAIN DARIEN VIEW, CA CENTER, 6/26 - MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA VENTURA, P 7/15 - CA SCRANTON, RANTON, PA 6/27 - VENTURA, CA PHOENIX, AZ 7/16 -- PHOENIX, CAMDEN,AZ NJ 6/29 LAS CRUCES, NM 7/17 UNIONDALE, NY SAN ANTONIO, 6/30 - LAS TX CRUCES, NM 7/18 -- SAN OCEANPORT, HOUSTON, TX 7/01 ANTONIO, NJ TX DALLAS, TXCOLUMBIA, MD 7/20 7/02 - HOUSTON, TX ST. LOUIS, MO H, V 7/21 -- DALLAS, VIRGINIATXBEACH, VA 7/03 INDIANAPOLIS, IN 7/22 CHARLOTTE, NC 7/05 - ST. LOUIS, BURGETTSTOWN, PA MO 7/23 -- INDIANAPOLIS, ST.OHPETERSBURG, 7/06 IN FL CLEVELAND, TORONTO, ON 7/24 -- BURGETTSTOWN, WEST PALM BEACH, 7/07 PA FL MONTREAL, QC 7/08 OH 7/25 -- CLEVELAND, ORLANDO, FL HARTFORD, CT 7/09 7/26 -- TORONTO, A LANTA,ON AT GA MANSFIELD, MA 7/10 MONTREAL, QCOH 7/28 CINCINNATI, DARIEN CENTER, NY 7/11 HARTFORD, CT 7/29 - MILWAUKEE, L WI SCRANTON, PALWAUKEE, 7/13 MANSFIELD, CAMDEN, 7/30 -- NJ DETROIT, MIMA UNIONDALE, NY 7/14 CENTER, NY 7/31 -- DARIEN TINSLEY PARK, IL OCEANPORT, NJ 7/15 SCRANTON, PA 8/01 - SHAKOPEE, MN COLUMBIA, MD 7/16 CAMDEN, NJ 8/02 -BEACH, BONNER VIRGINIA VA SPRINGS, KS 7/17 - UNIONDALE, NY CHARLOTTE, NC 8/05 - EDMONTON, AB 7/18 OCEANPORT, NJ ST.8/07 PETERSBURG, FL - SALT LLT LAKE CIT Y, Y UT 7/20PALM - COLUMBIA, WEST BEACH, FL MD 8/08 - DENVER, CO ORLANDO, FL 7/21 - VIRGINIA BEACH, VA 8/10 SAN DIEGO, CA ATLANTA, 7/22 - GA CHARLOTTE, NC CINCINNATI, OH 8/11 -- ST. POMONA, CA 7/23 PETERSBURG, FL MILWAUKEE, WI 8/12 MARYSVILLE, CA FL 7/24 WEST PALM BEACH, DETROIT, MI 8/13 -- ORLANDO, NAMPA, MPA, MP IDFL 7/25 TINSLEY PARK, IL 8/14 GEORGE, WA 7/26 - ATLANTA, GA SHAKOPEE, MN 8/15 --SPRINGS, HILLSBORO, OR BONNER KS OH 7/28 CINCINNATI, EDMONTON, AB 7/29 - MILWAUKEE, WI SALT LAKE CITY, UT 7/30 - DETROIT, MI DENVER, CO 7/31 - TINSLEY PARK, IL SAN DIEGO, CA 8/01 - SHAKOPEE, MN POMONA, CA 8/02 - BONNER SPRINGS, KS MARYSVILLE, CA NAMPA, 8/05 -IDEDMONTON, AB GEORGE, 8/07 -WA SALT LAKE CITY, UT HILLSBORO, OR 8/08 - DENVER, CO

8/10 - SAN DIEGO, CA 8/11 - POMONA, CA 8/12 - MARYSVILLE, CA 8/13 - NAMPA, ID FOURYEARSTRONG 8/14 - GEORGE, WA ENEMY OF THE WORLD 8/15 - HILLSBORO, OR

THESE TITLES ON SALE THIS MONTH AT PARTICIPATING STORES.

/music

Keeping Up With the Pack After a year-long break, Wolf Parade put their side projects on hold to reunite for a short, sharp new album / by Brian Baker

t’s an impossibly early hour—at least for anyone involved with the

days spent writing the album’s music industry—when Wolf Parade vocalist/keyboardist Spencer compositionally tricky tunes, AMZ also ate up an inordinate Krug answers the phone at his Montréal home. He’s barely awake amount of time thanks to a seemand barely audible, his voice rising just above a whisper, like a mob ingly never-ending tour and the informant spilling his secrets in a New Jersey alley. Drinking coffee is construction of the band’s home not likely to help at this juncture; injecting a double espresso straight studio. Once they’d wrapped the extended AMZ tour, Wolf Parade into Krug’s heart sounds like the only way to resuscitate him. took a very necessary year off so Clearly such drastic caffeine-delivery measures weren’t necessary when it that the members could refocus on their various came time to record Wolf Parade’s frenetic Expo 86. The band’s third album side projects, some with their own high profiles in might be less immediate than the lurching new wave of their 2005 debut, Apolothe indie underground, including Krug’s Sunset gies to the Queen Mary, and it also shies away from the prog-like grandeur of Rubdown and Boeckner’s Handsome Furs. 2008’s At Mount Zoomer. But Expo 86 still careens from style to style like a “When a band is working, you can take time off runaway mine car, combining the giddy intellectual pop of Talking Heads and here and there, a few weeks or months, but you’re always thinking about [the band],” Krug says. “There’s Devo and the raw indie rock verve of Modest Mouse. “We all listen to quite different stuff,” the sleepy Krug says when asked about not really enough time to return to the real world the various sonic shifts on the new album. “There’s obviously a lot of stuff [on in a meaningful way. Dan and I were both kind of Expo 86], to me, coming from the early ’80s. But to name some [specific influjuggling these two [side projects], and we were just ences], I’d feel weird speaking for the whole band. Someone we all like is Leongoing crazy. Not in a bad way—we weren’t fighting ard Cohen, and the records don’t sound like Leonard Cohen, but I love him for or anything—but things were getting stale. We knew his lyrics. [Drummer] Arlen [Thompson]’s favorite band is the Rolling Stones, [Wolf Parade] wanted to make another record, but and he’s talked about how the band Can influences his drumming. I like Can, the idea of touring for another six months, and then but I don’t own a single Can record. making a record, gave us the sense that we would “We have different tastes, and we listen to whatever is around us,” Krug conhave made a bad record.” tinues. “But there’s never a discussion in the jam room about [influences]… Thus Wolf Parade’s downtime was more like a Sometimes I make fun of the band when things get a little too bouncy or poppy, working holiday. In addition to Krug and Boeckner’s and I’ll say, ‘Great, we just wrote a Smash Mouth song.’” outside activities, guitarist-and-more DeCaro (forWhatever the band happened to be listening to during the Expo 86 sessions, merly with Hot Hot Heat) fronts the band Johnny Wolf Parade’s current sound was certainly shaped by one significant change and the Moon. Drummer Thompson does session in their basic setup—the defection of synthesist/sound manipulator Hadji Ba- work—he played on the song “Wake Up” for the Arkara, who was accepted into the University of Chicago’s English lit doctorate cade Fire—and occasional production work, includprogram. As Krug talks about Bakara, it’s clear that his departure wasn’t par- ing manning the boards for Boeckner’s Handsome ticularly contentious. Yet it seems equally clear that the band is not looking to Furs albums. Still, while it wasn’t quite a vacation, replace Bakara—with guitarists Dan Boeckner and Dante DeCaro now splitting Wolf Parade’s brief hiatus did offer a much-needed the synth duties—or anticipating his return after he completes his studies. chance to recharge, and you can hear that energy Perhaps it was slimming down to a four-piece that lead to the more stream- coursing through Expo 86’s jittery rhythms and lined Expo 86. Or perhaps the band had slightly burned out on complexity. The riffs. album arrives on the heels of the self-recorded and self-produced At Mount The dark, rollicking carnival atmosphere, and Zoomer, Wolf Parade’s most musically ambitious release to date. Aside from the lyrical pretzel logic, of Expo 86’s opener, “Cloud Shadow on the Mountain,” melds the urgency of Queen Mary with the intricacy of At Mount Zoomer. From the cracked-but-beautiful indie-pop of “In the Direction of the Moon” and “What Did My Lover Say” to the jagged dance-rock of “Ghost Pressure,” the album is one long head rush that occasionally pauses for moments of reflection. It’s a wonderful blend of serious intent and youthful exuberance, suggesting what the New Pornographers might sound like if pop traditionalist A.C. Newman and —Spencer Krug

“

Sometimes I make fun of the band when things get a little too bouncy or poppy, and I’ll say, ‘Great, we just wrote a Smash Mouth song.’” photo by Meqo Sam Cecil

/music

Expo 86 is in stores now from Sub Pop Records.

art-rock wizard Dan Bejar held he also recognizes the qualities You can call equal creative control. that might have detracted from listeners’ enjoyment. The band has a tendency to it charming, let their songs develop in a rela“Wolf Parade has been pretty you can call it tively organic way, as evidenced good at making a mishmash, because we have two different by their occasionally hairy indiewhatever you prog sound, but Krug says that for songwriters, me and Dan,” he says. “We’re always trying a Expo 86 they took a slightly more want. But it’s a proactive approach: “After about bunch of different ideas, espebunch of different cially on the last record. You can four or five songs, we realized the direction that things were going call it charming, you can call it styles, and every in. Other [songs] that I had on the whatever you want. But it’s a bunch of different styles, and backburner, I would take [them] song is quite a home and sit at the piano, or with every song is quite a lot different lot different than the guitar, and sort of make sure than the one before it, whereas I think this record is more cothat those would be something the one before it, hesive. We did know that we that was on the same page [with whereas I think wanted to record mostly live off the rest of the album]. Once we’d [studio] floor, and play and done half the record, we could [Expo 86] is more the write the record as a rock band, steer the rest of the album in a without trying to be anything way that the songs would comcohesive.” plement one another.” more clever” —Spencer Krug During their 2009 hiatus, Krug You only have to listen to Wolf Parade’s three albums back-tosays the band also gained a new perspective on the successes, and possible failures, back to know that their style has been in a state of flux since forming in Montréal seven years ago, as of At Mount Zoomer. While he’s quick to note that Wolf Parade has a great deal of affection for AMZ, much due to creative restlessness as lineup changes, and Bakara’s departure wasn’t the only new variable on Expo 86. “Playing as a four-piece rather than a five-piece, it remained to be seen what we were going to do, and what was going to come out of that,” Krug says. “At the same time, Dante wasn’t really there with us on the first two records. He played on a couple of tracks on [At Mount Zoomer], after we had taken him on the road and he’d worked up his parts live. But this is the first record where he was in [Montréal], in the same room with us, and his influence is in this record a little more.” But still, without Bakara, the band couldn’t go into the studio “saying ‘this is the record we’re going to make,’ because we didn’t even know what we sounded like yet,” Krug says. “Dan and Dante both took on these little synth stations beside their guitars to try to compensate for Hadji’s absence, but I think Dan secretly wanted to play synth for awhile now, and so he was happy to get the opportunity. All we knew [going in] was that we wanted to focus on what we could do live. And we wanted to make a rock record.” So, the taut groove of Expo 86 might mark a permanent change for the band, or it might be a pause before a return to the fanciful sound of At Mount Zoomer. Either way, Krug and Co. got their wish : Expo 86 is one of the year’s tightest indie rock records.

an honor to be These Emmy nominated series on sale now.. SEASON 6 COMING

IN STORES

9/14

9/7

NINETEEN NOMINATIONS

Glee

SEVEN NOMINATIONS

FOUR NOMINATIONS

Breaking Bad

Season 1

Season 2

SEVENTEEN NOMINATIONS

The Office

Mad Men

Season 5

Season 3

IN STORES

8/17

EIGHT NOMINATIONS

Dexter

Season 3

FIFTEEN NOMINATIONS

30 Rock Season 3

EIGHT NOMINATIONS

Nurse Jackie Season 1

FIND OUT WHO WINS ON AUGUST 29! 27

Keep up with NEW MUSIC. FREE SAMPLER and SALE PRICES on these titles ALL MONTH LONG! FREE CD SAMPLER

while supplies last at participating stores

MONITOR THIS AVAILABLE AT THE FINE STORES LISTED HERE

ALSO ON

VINYL!

ALSO ON

VINYL!

Arcade Fire

The Black Crowes

IN STORES AUGUST 3

The Suburbs

Croweology

Crystal Castles Crystal Castles

Dangermouse/ Sparklehorse

Dark Night of the Soul VINYL AND DELUXE VINYL EDITIONS ALSO AVAILABLE!

ALSO ON !

VINYL

ALSO ON

VINYL!

Roscoe Dash Ready Set Go

IN STORES AUGUST 10

Delphic Acolyte

Michael Franti

The Sound of Sunshine IN STORES SEPTEMBER 21

The Gaslight Anthem American Slang

Govt Mule

Gyptian

Mulennium

Hold You

IN STORES AUGUST 3

Kelis

KORN

Flesh Tone

Korn III: Remember Who You Are

Hellyeah

Iron Maiden

Stampede

The Final Frontier

DELUXE CD EDITION ALSO AVAILABLE!

IN STORES AUGUST 17 VINYL AND DELUXE CD EDITIONS ALSO AVAILABLE!

Ed Kowalczyk

Maximum Balloon

Alive

Maximum Balloon

IN STORES AUGUST 10

DELUXE CD EDITION ALSO AVAILABLE!

ALSO ON

VINYL!

John Mellencamp

M.I.A.

IN STORES AUGUST 17

VINYL AND DELUXE CD EDITIONS ALSO AVAILABLE!

No Better Than This

MAYA

Matt Morris

When Everything Breaks Open

Katy Perry

Teenage Dream IN STORES AUGUST 24

ALSO ON

VINYL!

ALSO ON

VINYL!

Eli “Paperboy” Reed Come And Get It

IN STORES AUGUST 10

Steel Train Steel Train

Sun Kil Moon

Admiral Fell Promises

Brian Wilson

Brian Wilson Reimagines Gershwin IN STORES AUGUST 17 29

/music

Darker Than the Rest

The High Confessions release the most subdued “supergroup” album of the year / by Sarah Kitteringham

ame-dropping can have a curious effect on a new band. An unknown

album in the “new release” racks can suddenly become a hot topic just by mentioning the band’s pedigree. When it comes to the High Confessions, with little music from the band’s debut leaking out before its release this month, the hype is based entirely on the lineup: Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley, former Ministry/Revolting Cocks vocalist Chris Connelly, Sanford Parker of Buried at Sea/Minsk and well-known metal producer Jeremy Lemos. It’s difficult to keep the weight of the band’s collective history from overwhelming your first listen. Should we expect the anthemic noise-rock aesthetic of Sonic Youth, the perverse industrial/dance beats of Ministry or the progressive post-metal of Minsk? As it turns out, none of the above. Though the High Confessions’ combined credentials are enough to set fans swooning, anyone interested in the bleaker end of avant-rock will find sinister pleasures on Turning Lead Into Gold With the High Confessions. Even the album’s leadoff single, “Chlorine and Crystal,” is pensive, subdued—little more than a swirl of muted guitar and crisp percussion. “The songs themselves are so drastically different from each other,” Parker says. He lists just a few of the album’s disparate influences—Hawkwind, Swans, the Velvet Underground, Talking Heads. “It’s all over the place… there are definitely —Sanford Parker strong psychedelic elements.” The High Confessions’ sound goes psychedelic whenever Lemos begins to layer on the studio effects. The heavy use of phasers, pedals and other noise-generators may lead listeners to wonder if the band is more interested writing conventional songs or dark ambient soundscapes. Take “Along Came the Dogs,” 17 minutes of overlapping vocal tracks that sounds like a crazed internal dialogue, the voices in your head snapping at each other. Like much of Turning Lead Into Gold, “Along Came the

“

I can’t really think of any other way to describe it than superdark.”

Dogs” is full of machine noises from some factory floor, anchored by the occasional thump of the bass and single-string twangs. Lead is an album that demands repeated listens, and it’s likely some listeners will lack the patience. Like low-register droners from Swans architect Michael Gira to the Velvet Underground’s Lou Reed, Connelly’s voice remains monotone throughout. The playing is deliberately sparse, save for the driving percussion intro on “Mistaken for Cops” and a sparkling cymbal breakdown on “Dead Tenements.” Despite hailing from very different scenes, the band came together through a series of fortuitous connections, and a little old-fashioned fanboy-ism. Parker and Lemos co-own Semaphore Studios in Chicago, where Parker has worked with Pelican, Rwake, Nachtmystium and many other metal bands. Lemos has occasionally worked the boards as Sonic Youth’s live soundman, a connection that helped to bring Shelley into the fold. And as for Connelly, a Scottish vocalist famous for his work with a plethora of classic industrial bands, it turns out one member of the High Confessions was just a longtime fan living out an adolescent fantasy. “Chris has been one of my favorite vocalists since I was in high school,” Parker laughs, adding that the two have also worked together on Connelly’s solo records. “I wouldn’t tell him that—it might make him feel old. Ministry basically changed my life, musically, the first time I heard [1988’s] Land of Rape and Honey. It was the most intense thing I had ever

heard at that time.” Connelly provided fearsome vocals on that crossover industrial classic. On Lead, he lent not only his voice, but also a little piece of his daily commute in service of the cover art. “[Connelly] takes the train to work everyday, so he was telling us about this stain on the side of the subway,” Parker laughs. “We were trying to come up with the art, and he had taken a photo of [the stain], and he sent it to us and we said, ‘Sure, great.’” Combined with the handwritten logo and some finishing touches from Relapse house artist Orion Landau, the result is bleak, as shades of stained gray envelop the scrawled text. Like much of the project, the cover evokes uneasy feelings not easily put into words. “I can’t really think of any other way to describe it than super-dark,” Parker posits. The album’s darker-than-dark vibe was the result of certain shared musical obsessions surfacing in the studio: no wave, Throbbing Gristle, Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream, to name a few. It wasn’t as if they tried to make an album so shadowy and grim. It just sort of happened. “There were no preconceptions about anything,” Parker says of the four-day recording process. “None of us had talked about any sort of direction, or even what instruments we were going to play. We basically went in the studio, set up a drum kit, a synth section, a bass section [and] a piano, and we would just go in there and jam for 30 to 40 minutes at a time.”

When Parker mentions those avant-garde legends, like Throbbing Gristle, he’s alluding to similar recording methods, even if Lead aims to be the hair-raising equal of any Gristle record. “It worked out great, because I would work on some stuff for a while, and when I hit a brick wall, Jeremy would say, ‘I know what to do,’ and jump in the seat and work on it a while,” Parker says. “This is really the first time I’ve worked alongside another engineer like that, and the process was really smooth.” That four-day turnaround resulted in a lengthy record. At over an hour, Lead retains the feel of those long-form studio jams, even edited down, with some tracks meandering perhaps a little lonTurning Lead ger than need be. At its best, however, Into Gold the fidgety, agitated personality of the With the High Confessions music grows more unsettling as the drops July 20 tracks grind on. from Relapse Records For now, Shelley is busy with his Smells Like Records imprint. Parker and Lemos have a studio to run. Connelly averages one new release per year. What should fans expect from a band where all the members have multiple outside obligations? Can they tour? Is Lead a one-off record? “Steve is flying back in town next week to start record number two,” Parker reveals. Evidently, darkness junkies will get another fix.

/music

In the

hen Godflesh’s industrial milestone Streetcleaner came

Flesh

Nearly a decade after burying his highly influential past, Justin Broadrick exhumes UK industrial legends Godflesh / by J. Bennett

out in 1989, it was a slow, punishing repudiation of vocalist/guitarist Justin Broadrick’s highspeed machinations with Birmingham grindcore progenitors Napalm Death. It was also a revelation for many with an ear to the underground who would go on to make music of their own. Godflesh had released a self-titled EP the year before, but it wasn’t until Streetcleaner, their first proper full-length, that the band’s thunderous, mechanized echo of industry-choked Britain’s endemic ruination met with widespread acclaim. Today, the trio that created Streetcleaner—Broadrick, bassist G.C. “Ben” Green and second guitarist Paul Neville (who appears only on side two)—are credited with influencing everyone from Danzig to Isis. Later this month, Earache Records will re-release Streetcleaner in a special double-disc edition remastered by Broadrick himself. Though the label had already pumped out deluxe reissues of Godflesh’s 1992 album Pure and 1996’s Songs of Love and Hate without the band’s involvement, Broadrick wanted to oversee the Streetcleaner reissue personally. 32

“I decided to bury all the trouble between Earache and the band because I was just excited to remaster the record and do something really special,” he says. “I didn’t want anybody else to do it, and I wanted to make sure we got more than our 10 cents. I wanted to make sure we got our dollar, basically. We really wanted to be in control of this one.” Broadrick’s reason for stepping in on Streetcleaner’s redux can be traced to a longstanding quest for musical purity. He’s chased this purity through innumerable projects over the years, from the heavilylayered shoegaze of Jesu and ambient electronica

of Final to his industrialized rap productions with Techno Animal and his recent Greymachine collaboration with Isis’ Aaron Turner and Jesu members Dave Cochrane and Diarmuid Dalton. “For me, it seems almost universal that bands’ first records are the best records they make,” he offers. “Those are usually the records that are made without any outside opinion or influence or any sense of ambition to some extent. There’s no looking at A to B; there’s only looking at A. There are no expectations. That’s how it was with Streetcleaner and the Godflesh self-titled album that preceded it. A lot of the songs were written in the same two-year period prior, and they were written and rehearsed when the band was in the offing, so there was this purity, this very instinctive thing that sometimes gets lost with bands—including our own—over time.” Streetcleaner is a gargantuan, almost suffocating album, as hypnotic as it is bludgeoning. Broadrick, Green and “Machine”—the duo’s matter-offact name for their trusty and relentless drum machine—hammer the listener with merciless precision, invoking the endless soot and working-class monotony of their native Birmingham with every bone-snapping downbeat. On opener “Like Rats,” they announce their arrival via an automatic cannonade of rhythm and churning mechanical riffery, setting a tone of perpetual domination that’s impersonal but never emotionless, programmed but never perfunctory. Between the hiss and moan of Broadrick’s guitar swells on “Head Dirt,” the Machine conjures visions of a broken landscape that can never be repaired, the white noise and cognitive dissonance of unflinching technological progress. “Christbait Rising” is arguably the album’s tour de force—a grim, moaning power-groove with a thudding, face-numbing backbeat. (As one of the few rap fans in the mid ’80s extreme metal scene, Broadrick once said that beat was his attempt to emulate the rhythm on Eric B. and Rakim’s “Microphone Fiend.”) Meanwhile, Broadrick grunts over the proceedings like the fire-belching harbinger of some hyper-urban apocalypse, pointing an accusing, poison-tipped finger at our collective corruption. All told, it’s a deeply powerful document, as resonant today as it was two decades ago. The European re-release of Streetcleaner coincided almost exactly with Godflesh’s reunion performance at Hellfest in Clisson, France, this past June. Before that, Broadrick and Green hadn’t performed together since 2001, the same year Godflesh released their final album, Hymns. By then, they

had abandoned Machine for human drummers, including future Primus member Bryan Mantia (who played on 1996’s Songs of Love and Hate) and former Swans and Prong skinsman Ted Parsons (who played on Hymns itself ). The period was arguably the height of Godflesh’s influence—affirmed GF disciples Isis, a hugely influential band in their own right, formed in 1998—but also their creative nadir. “With Hymns, I felt the well was possibly running dry, like we’d lost our way a bit,” Broadrick concedes. “There are still songs on there I really enjoy, but it seemed to be floating away from the original concept of what Godflesh was.” Green split shortly after Hymns was released, on the eve of a two-month European tour with Fear Factory. “He just called me out of the blue and

“

For me, it seems almost universal that bands’ first records are the best records they make. Those are usually the records that are made without any outside opinion or influence or any sense of ambition to some extent.” —justin broadrick was like, ‘I don’t wanna do these tours anymore.’ I could completely see where he was coming from, but still felt obliged to do the tour.” Broadrick enlisted former (and now deceased) Killing Joke and Prong bassist Paul Raven to fill in for Green, but the chemistry wasn’t the same. “It was quite clear to me during that tour with Fear Factory that it wasn’t Godflesh,” he says. “Without Ben, it just wasn’t the same. It seemed pointless.” Broadrick disbanded Godflesh in early 2002, literally on the day he was supposed to fly overseas for a US tour. “Not the best timing in the world, but I just couldn’t do it anymore,” he says. “Obviously, I could’ve just bit the bullet and done that last tour. I wouldn’t have been in all the personal and financial hell I ended up in as a result of canceling. But I literally couldn’t get out of bed to go to the airport that day. I just completely shut down. My spirit closed down. Physically, it quite clearly could’ve been done. But no matter how pretentious this sounds, my soul wasn’t gonna let me do it. It felt so utterly wrong. It just wasn’t honest anymore.” Godflesh only reunited after being repeatedly asked by the organizers of Hellfest. “They spent three consecutive years absolutely hassling Godflesh to get back together for Hellfest,” Broadrick 33

/music explains with a laugh. “And for three years, we basically said, ‘No chance,’ no matter how tempting the offer was or how exciting it could appear. But they just kept on us for so long, and their passion for the band playing just seemed to increase the more we said no, which was quite funny. To be honest, I never even discussed the first couple of offers with Ben. It was only last year that I decided to ask him. I expected him to be totally against it because he really hasn’t been in the music industry for about 10 years. But as soon as he was like, ‘Yeah, I’d fuckin’ love to,’ we committed to the festival.” Broadrick cites his work on Greymachine’s Disconnected as his personal inspiration for reigniting the Godflesh flame. Released last year on Hydra Head, the album marked his first foray into abrasive music since forming Jesu in 2003. “I was really thrilled by making something brutal again,” he says. “It made me kind of nostalgic for Godflesh and Godflesh performances after immersing myself so heavily in Jesu for a while.” In fact, Broadrick has consistently said that Jesu’s dreamy sonic excursions have more in common with his mellow personality than Godflesh’s relentless angry-young-man onslaught. As such, he was apprehensive about his ability to get back into Godflesh mode after so many years. “With Jesu, I spent a lot of time really trying to self-consciously distance myself from what I was—probably in fairly stringent fashion, really,” he says. “I’m just the type of person who can only feel like I’m going forward if things change. And I think I can only move forward if I quite dramatically negate what I’ve done before. So, I was somewhat fearful that I could potentially feel a little alien in my old skin, so to speak. But once we started actually rehearsing the Godflesh material again, it really felt like second nature.” Unfortunately, Godflesh’s reunion performance at Hellfest did not go particularly well. Broadrick and Green spent the first 20 minutes dealing with a litany of technical difficulties. Once they were finally up and running, they absolutely crushed, airing out Streetcleaner classics alongside other early favorites like “Pure” and “Crush My Soul.” But even then, the specter of calamity hovered when Broadrick’s guitar strap broke mid-song. “Things went pretty shitty,” Broadrick concedes. “We were pumping adrenaline afterwards, but it was a still a little disappointing. Everything that could go wrong pretty much did. You have all this fanfare Broadrick tossed aside technical for your big reunion show, and difficulties to then it turns into that.” crush Hellfest Luckily, Broadrick and 2010 in first Green will have a chance to Godflesh’s live show in redeem themselves at Eng- almost a decade. 34

land’s Supersonic Festival, which is being held in the band’s hometown of Birmingham this October. “We’re really desperate to have Godflesh do the next thing as flawless as possible,” Broadrick says. “And it’ll be nice to go back and play our hometown because Godflesh was such a product of its environment.” For all its difficulties, Broadrick says the Godflesh reunion experience doesn’t even feel real. “I’m still in shock that we played,” he says. “It’s like some surreal dream. It’s really, really strange, but it felt really good. What we both noticed is how ingrained this music is in our very souls. We both feel like, physically and mentally, it’s never left us. And probably never will.”

Streetcleaner Redux Edition arrives August 10 from Earache.

photo by j. bennett

iu t p ON TOUR NOW

The Constellations Southern Gothic

Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes Up From Below

She & Him Volume Two

Spoon Transference

CATCH â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;EM AT LOLLAPALOOZA

Avenged Sevenfold

Nightmare

Marc Cohn Listening Booth: 1970

Foxy Shazam Foxy Shazam

FREE BUTTON PACK WITH PURCHASE, WHILE THEY LAST!

IN STORES 8/17

Toadies Feeler

In This Moment Star-Crossed Wasteland

J Roddy Walston and the Business J Roddy Walston and the Business

Rufio Anybody Out There

Neon Trees Habits

/music

California Dreaming

Best Coast ditch the fuzz and find the heart of West Coast pop by michaelangelo matos

t may be difficult to remember in 2010—now that she’s rapping over In-

dian bhangra beats and rhyming “genius” with “peen-ius”—but Liz Phair was one of the first “lo-fi” musicians with a substantial media profile. Along with fellow lo-fi artists like Guided by Voices, Sebadoh and even Beck, Phair helped bring a sketchbook quality to indie rock in the mid-’90s, a sound that reflected her music’s origins on cheap, portable four-track cassette recorders. Often, these musicians and bands were greeted as a funkier, fuzzier, more human response to the digitalization of pop, whether that meant byte-based studio recording or the compact disc itself. A decade and a half on, questions over “good” or “bad” audio fidelity have long since been set aside for most listeners, thanks to familiarity. Hearing a good pop song deliberately layered in static is now an aesthetic choice more than an economic necessity; it’s a sound that holds as much of a culturalnostalgia buzz as listening to a half-hour of oldies radio. Pop-plus-fuzz is a formula that’s been in place at least since the Jesus and Mary Chain emerged in the mid-’80s. A number of recent bands have revived the approach, but few have done it with the effervescence displayed on Crazy for You, the debut album by Los Angeles indie surf-pop duo Best Coast. Not that Crazy for You is altogether “lo-fi.” Best Coast’s guitarist/songwriter/singer, Bethany Cosentino, made sure of that.

photo by neil visel

“I think if you’re writing good songs, you shouldn’t be hiding it under a bunch of fuzz or distortion,” she says over the phone from Texas, where she and drummer/guitarist Bobb Bruno are playing in advance of the album’s release. Crazy for You is a definite change of tactic from Best Coast’s prior fuzzfriendly approach. The band first attracted attention by releasing a half-dozen 7-inch singles, on as many labels, in 2009 and 2010. All of them featured Cosentino’s big ooh-and-ahh-laden melodies, and her Ramones-simple lyrics, but the songs were often draped in a fog of tape hiss and texture. “When we first started recording, we were recording in Bobb’s bedroom,” Cosentino says. “That was a conscious decision. I wanted the music to sound that way. I wanted it to sound really fuzzy and really hazy.”

/music She got her wish. But unlike many of the bands Best Coast are traditionally mentioned alongside—Brooklyn’s Vivian Girls, or L.A.’s Wavves, led by Cosentino’s boyfriend, Nathan Williams— the feedback racket wasn’t merely a distraction. That’s primarily because Cosentino’s voice is so naturally huge that it cuts through just about any amount of noise. In fact, the hiss of the earlier material actually enhances her voice’s slight nasality, as on the fabulous, bedroom-recorded “Something in the Way,” a 7-inch released on the PPM label in February. On the surface, the song is so simple it’s almost dumb, but its freely arcing melody burrows into your memory for good. And as Best Coast’s singles kept on coming, that sound-fog began to lift. Their releases grew sharper; Cosentino says the change began with the 2009 “When I’m With You”/“This Is Real” 7-inch on Black Iris, which was overseen by producer Lewis Pesacov. “We didn’t have the access to a real big studio [until then],” she says. “We were working with a producer who said, ‘Listen, I have nothing against

your fuzzy, reverb-y sound, but let’s try something different.’” The band took Pesacov up on his challenge. “I listen to the older recordings, and I don’t hate them,” Cosentino says. “I don’t think, God, I wish I’d recorded that with [fewer] vocal effects, or whatever. It’s fine. But [with the album], I wanted to lose that lo-fi tag. I wanted to make a record that has reverb on the vocal, but doesn’t overdo it. Also, if you see us live, it’s not fuzzy or crazy-sounding. It’s really stripped-down. That was another decision: Let’s make [the album] sound more like we do live. I like that better than having [a song] sound like it’s being played through a broken boom box or something.” Just what was playing through Cosentino’s boom box, broken or otherwise, will be immediately obvious to anyone who’s spent some time with oldies radio. Cosentino grew up in a music-saturated environment: Her father is a professional drummer; the radio was always on. “When I was a kid, my parents listened to a lot of really awesome music,” she says, and she’s not kidding.

Between Lo-Fi and a Pop Place Best Coast are hardly the first band to mix pop appeal with indie grit / by Jess Harvell

“Lo-fi” isn’t limited to the world of indie rock. At first, it was merely a way to describe sound quality. If you grew up listening to the high-gloss radio hits of the ’70s and ’80s, you knew lo-fi records when you heard them, and they could be anything from private-press funk singles to local folkies. When punk launched a thousand tiny record labels, though, lo-fi became inextricably linked with underground rock. It was taken for granted that D.I.Y.scale bands couldn’t afford “good” sounding records. Naturally, some of these groups graduated to multi-track studios as soon as possible. But a good number of bands (and their fans) decided they liked the murky/muted/distorted/ buzzing quality of this “badly” recorded pop. This new lo-fi generation decided that, say, the crackle of overdubbed cassette tapes could actually add emotional texture—mournful, wistful, whatever—to their songs. As songwriters, they were in love with the simple and tuneful side of rock history, everything from Brill Building popsmiths to proto-punk ‘60s garage bands to the Banana Splits. The combination of spic-and-span pop tradition and dirtied-up punk production values is bracingly unexpected the first time you hear it. Then it starts to sound like the most natural thing in the world. The recent arrival of blown-out-but-tuneful bands like Best Coast has been a reaffirmation that the lo-fi aesthetic still matters in the slicker-than-ever indie landscape of the 21st century. But even lo-fi acts get restless, as evidenced by Best Coast’s Bethany Cosentino talking about her desire to clean up the band’s act. Sometimes their addiction to fuzz wins out. And sometimes they escape the world of lo-fi entirely, brightening up their sound and never looking back. But the best still seem to straddle the line between fuzz and fun. All of these bands are infamous for their recording techniques, but ultimately it’s the quality of their tunes that matters. Hence why some lo-fi bands enter the canon, and others recede into the grungy background noise of pop history.

The (Not So) Distant Past The Television Personalities, …And Don’t the Kids Just Love It (1981) Like Cosentino, Dan Treacy, a Brit you can’t quite call a punk, was obsessed with the ’60s, but instead of the tranquilizing sound of surf rock, Treacy’s music poked at the darker corners of the psychpop generation. His first album as the Television Personalities, …And Don’t the Kids Just Love It, was one of the first indie albums where the homemade quality of the record felt intentional. Treacy’s little boy bleat fit perfectly with both his sound—the pre-Sgt. Pepper’s era of British rock, played with the sloppy enthusiasm of a tween—and his recording style. The spacey, distant quality of the album sounds less like a psychedelic special effect and more like when you were a kid in your bedroom, huddled under the covers with your tape deck, singing inscrutable little songs about cartoons, pop magazines and first crushes. (Rough Trade)

From an early age, Cosentino, who’s 23, was fascinated with music that predated her by decades. Shortly after the “Something in the Way” single was released, she began embedding YouTube clips of the Everly Brothers on Best Coast’s websites. In preschool, in the early ’90s, she became a Beatles obsessive. One day, when her father picked her up from school, she heard the Beach Boys’ “Don’t Worry, Baby” on the car radio and felt an even stronger attraction. She took ’60s pop and rock seriously enough that her father began to feel some alarm. “My parents were like, ‘Why do you listen to the music that we listen to? You’re a kid.’” Of course, Cosentino couldn’t avoid the pop culture of the era entirely. “I started singing when I was a baby,” she says. “My parents have cassette tape recordings of me singing in the bathtub and video recordings of me dancing around the living room to, like, Paula Abdul.” She began to move toward creating her own music at age 15. “I started writing a bunch of songs that were fueled by a teenage breakup. I played that music until I was 17 or 18, and

then I stopped playing music for a while.” She moved to New York, hoping to become a writer, and spent part of 2008 interning at the hipster fashion magazine and marketing firm The Fader, before heading back to L.A. to form Best Coast. Cosentino began conceptualizing the band during a particularly blustery early 2009. “I basically wanted to make music that was really heavily influenced by girl groups and bands —Bethany Cosentino like the Beach Boys and the Everly Brothers,” she says. “It was definitely a conscious thing. That was the music that I was listening to, living in New York. I was really homesick for California. It was the middle of the winter, and I kind of

“

I wanted it to be music that people in Wisconsin, in the middle of the winter, could play and think, This takes me to a sunny California beach.”

The New Wave The Jesus and Mary Chain, 21 Singles (2002) 1985’s Psychocandy— with its still-influential mix of ’60s girl-group melodies and plugyour-ears feedback—is still the JAMC’s best album. But the bluntly titled 21 Singles, collecting 15 years of the band’s chart attempts, is the best place to hear what happens when a lo-fi band goes pop, with varying degrees of success. The Psychocandy material is still jaw-dropping after all these years: The songs are as catchy as the classic rock staples the band ripped off, while the distortion attempts to rip the flimsy compositions apart. Much of the rest is a pleasant surprise, especially for those who wrote the band off in their post-noise phase. But despite the fact that the JAMC had all but become folkies by the mid-’90s, they made one final, glorious racket with “Cracking Up” and “I Hate Rock and Roll” before imploding. (Rhino)

Times New Viking, Rip It Off {2008} Best Coast may sway to the slow-dance lilt of the Beach Boys and Everly Brothers, but much of the best 21st century lo-fi has been sweaty and frantic, taking its cue more from the post-punk ’90s than the pre-punk ’60s. Times New Viking are a group of twentysomething Rust Belters who first hooked up with one of the ’90s most iconic lo-fi labels, Siltbreeze. In its heyday, Siltbreeze released both singles from bouncy power-poppish (Sebadoh) and murky slabs of free-form noise (the Dead C). TNV fall somewhere in the middle of that spectrum on Rip It Off, their debut for Matador, the quasi-mainstream face of lo-fi in the ’90s. TNV are steeped in the sound, and tongue-incheek teen delinquent shtick, of ’60s garage rock. Their records might sound like a raucous concert recorded via cell phone, but even when they’re incomprehensibly muzzy, the shouted boy-girl harmonies are some of the most infectious in modern indie rock. (Matador)

Wavves, King of the Beach (2010) Wavves should have never even made it to a third album. Their second, and breakthrough, the even-more-dumbly titled Wavvves, was one of 2009’s worst releases, and good evidence of what happens when lo-fi turns from a sound into a shtick. It was all noise—boring noise, at that—with pitiful little excuses for poppunk songs buried somewhere far underneath the din. All of which makes King of the Beach the most surprising comeback of the last few years. Frontman Nathan Williams seems to have taken the scorching backlash to heart, and instead of turning bitter, he stepped his songwriting game up considerably. The noise is now carefully portioned, and while the songs definitely scream “California,” it’s a more rough-and-tumble, punk-leaning L.A. than the dreamy Best Coast vision of the city. (Williams does occasionally slow down a bit; see the geeky don’t-call-it-doo-wop of “Baseball Cards.”) Wavves no longer sound like Williams is thumbing his nose at his audience or hiding a lack of ideas behind a wall of screech. King of the Beach is one of the year’s most inexplicably excellent records. {Fat Possum)

/music

“

A lot of bands I know that are making music that’s a throwback to [the] ’50s or ’60s or ’80s or whatever, everybody’s kind of doing it in their own unique way. I think it’s sort of a cycle.”

—Bethany Cosentino

hated it. I just wanted to be back in California and back in the sun. So, I turned to this kind of music— obviously the Beach Boys were heavily Californian. For whatever reason, it just made me really happy. So, when I started writing [for Best Coast] I thought, OK, I’m going to do my own take on this [sound]… I wanted it to be music that people in Wisconsin, in the middle of the winter, could play and think, This takes me to a sunny California beach. I wanted it to have that sort of vibe.” That taking-it-all-the-way-back quality is part of what gives Crazy for You its freshness. The title obviously recalls Madonna, and Cosentino’s aesthetic has much to do with the mid-’80s British indie scene, another group of bands that fetishized the early ’60s. (Not just the Jesus and Mary Chain, but also the twee-er likes of the Shop Assistants.) But thanks to Cosentino steeping herself in classic rock history as kid, Crazy for You doesn’t feel like just another installment in the long line of ’80s revivals that have stamped pop over the last decade, from electroclash in the early ’00s to the dumbed-down version of synth-pop that dominates the charts now. As with many recent indie rock beach-worshippers, the songs on Crazy for You are deliberately simple—“I wish he was my boyfriend / I wish he was my boyfriend,” goes a typical refrain—but there’s little ironic about them. Cosentino doesn’t seem like she’s winking at her audience. Still, while Best Coast might stand apart from their peers, they’re hardly working in isolation. Crazy for You finds the band moving away from the lo-fi world, but Cosentino still draws inspiration from this recent wave of D.I.Y. throwback acts. She describes hearing a new song by San Francisco indie band Girls, and 40

thinking: That song is so good. That song maybe will inspire me to write a new song. “A lot of bands I know that are making music that’s a throwback to [the] ’50s or ’60s or ’80s or whatever, everybody’s kind of doing it in their own unique way,” she says. “I think it’s sort of a cycle. There’s one thing in music that gets popular around a certain time, and everybody just sort of says, ‘OK, I’m going to draw inspiration from that.’ I don’t really know why it’s this specific genre or this specific sound that everybody’s kind of latching onto right now. But for me it’s music that makes me happy, and has an innocent sound to it. I’m trying to make music that [has that feeling].”

Crazy for You is available now from Mexican Summer.

photo by neil visel

The Overload

Detroit techno king Matthew Dear explores ’80s art-rock, urban dread and endless grooves on Black City / by Jess Harvell

atthew Dear lives an enviable double life. While you’re reading this, Dear-the-DJ might be somewhere in Europe—perhaps at a beachside club— weaving cutting-edge techno records into an all-night mix. Or Dear-the-frontman might be squeezed onto the stage of some beer-sloshed bar, leading his machine-tooled live band through one rippling, melodic new wave jam after another.

Part-time dance producer and part-time rocker, Dear’s found the common ground between these two seemingly disparate scenes: a shared love for the endless beat. Dear has talked openly about his love for Talking Heads, another band led by leftfield singer-songwriter turned funkateer. On his latest album, Black City, you can certainly hear the obsessively intricate rhythms—and brooding atmosphere—of Remain in Light, Talking Heads’ epochal 1980 punk-meets-Afrobeat fusion. Like 41

/music

the Heads in their Brian Eno-assisted heyday, Dear pieces his music together like play in Ibiza, at Amnesia, and then I’m DJing a party a puzzle, snapping itchy rhythmic loops into place until the whole song vibrates in France,” he says. “So, in that sense, I’ve still got with nervous energy. one foot in [dance music] constantly, but I also just That’s also a compositional strategy employed by many techno producers, rehearsed all day with my band today in a sweaty of course. “I’ve always credited house and techno and software for shaping the little practice space with no air conditioner. I just way I like to make music,” Dear says. “Even when I’m using guitars, I really like enjoy the juxtaposition.” to pattern songs out into chunks, like building blocks. That [techno] method of Dear first began to exploit that juxtaposition bemusic production has definitely transferred over to the way I write songs now.” tween two very different personas—singing bandDear’s albums may be more melodically focused, and guitar-heavy, than you’d leader and bedroom techno producer—when he reexpect from a modern techno auteur, but his deep immersion in club culture has leased his first records under his own name, rather also given him a feel for rhythm lacking in 99 percent of “dance-rock.” than a pseudonym. 2003’s Leave Luck to Heaven and That immersion in beats began early. Dear says he “started tinkering with mu2004’s Backstroke, credited to Matthew Dear, still sic around, I think, the age of 14, when I still lived in Texas.” His father was a mu- featured the dizzy clicking drums and polyrhythmic sician with a folk bent who kept the house stocked with instruments and bought computer glitches that characterized German-style Dear a four-track recorder. Dear began to fill up “weird little techno in the early 21st century. cassettes” at home, full of skewed self-penned pop songs. But beneath the shifting percusBut he also found himself “slowly getting drawn into more sive layers of synthetic sound, electronic stuff, the more popular, radio-friendly stuff.” As a you could hear songs, of a sort, teenager, his family left Texas and landed in Detroit—a lifewith Dear’s droning vocals Going to a changing move for any budding techno producer. chopped up and digitally spliced In the mid-’80s, young African-Americans in the city’s Belback together. warehouse in levue neighborhood, smitten with European synth-pop and The real breakthrough came Detroit and homegrown R&B, created Detroit techno. At first, few people with 2008’s Asa Breed, the first paid much attention to these kids and their strange little inof Dear’s albums to sound like a listening to rock band using a techno toolkit strumental singles, which mixed lush sci-fi keyboard melodies a DJ play all rather than a guy with a microand wildly syncopated drum machines. But by the mid-’90s, phone standing behind a laptop. when Dear arrived in the Motor City, Detroit producers and night and The music pulsed with the physiDJs like Carl Craig and Jeff Mills were playing to thousands leaving when cal oomph of a live rhythm secof shirtless, screaming dancers in Berlin and Tokyo. For the young Matt Dear, the extra-musical appeal of techtion driving a band forward, but it the sun comes no was immediately obvious: At Detroit raves, you could paralso offered the delirious, almost up... That plays ty until dawn. “Going to a warehouse in Detroit and listening psychedelic sound-sculpting of to a DJ play all night and leaving when the sun comes up,” he avant-electronic music. The to anyone’s says. “That plays to anyone’s hedonistic, carnal side.” Around hooks were stronger, playfully hedonistic, the turn of the millennium, Dear hooked up with Ghostly Indrawing on synth-pop and new ternational, a Detroit label specializing in both DJ-friendly wave classics without stooping carnal side.” club records and the kind of electronic music that’s a little to outright pastiche, and lyricaltoo rhythmically odd to rock a dancefloor. Dear may have ly, Dear occasionally indulged a —Matthew Dear fancied himself a songwriter, but with a label behind him, New Romantic-esque sentimenand a knack for swiftly knocking out gritty minimal techno tal streak to great effect. tracks, the lure of the nightlife proved too strong to resist. “Asa Breed was wholeheartBeginning in 1999, Dear became an inhuman beatmaking machine, some- edly optimistic, and based in love and the optimism times releasing a half-dozen singles a year, under several monikers, always of relationships,” Dear says. “The songs [on Black ready to fill the record bags of DJs in Germany, France and the US. (See the City] aren’t overtly pessimistic. But there’s defisidebar on page 38 for more on Dear’s very productive decade in dance.) “I’ve nitely something [darker] in there, that I can hear, just grown into doing this every day,” he says of his nonstop output. “I can’t not that wasn’t in there two or three years ago.” The new do it. I’ve got my studio in my apartment, so I’m always working from home. songs are certainly denser, occasionally evoking a I can’t get away from it. I have to wake up, make coffee and start working on very urban sense of claustrophobia. Now a resident music of some sort. Half the stuff I make, it doesn’t even get released. It’s still of Brooklyn, Dear says the tightly-packed vibe of a way to learn, to experiment in the studio, and just try new things. It all just New York living filtered into his songwriting propiles up on hard drives.” cess this time around. You can hear it in Black City’s Dear is still wired into the international techno grid. “I fly out tomorrow to stacked keyboard drones and multi-tracked pitch42

The Shape-Shifter

Matthew Dear is a man of many aliases shifted vocals, which recall the buzzing, vertiginous sonic overload of the video arcades that lined Times Square before the district’s Giuliani-era whitewashing. The beat of “You Put a Smell on Me” crashes like the electro drums favored by old-school NYC breakdancing crews, and Dear’s droning vocal, ominously thickened by distortion, recalls a night gone on the town gone wrong. “I was kind of hesitant [about including] that song,” he says. “I had done a quick demo take, and I remember being on the train. I was on the JMZ, going over the Williamsburg Bridge into [Manhattan]. I had [the demo] in my headphones, looking across Midtown. You could see the Empire State Building and all the skyscrapers, you could see the bridge rails go by, and it was like, Oh, it makes sense now. I have to go back and finish this.” But don’t go looking to find overt traces of his New York experience in Black City’s lyrics. Like Brian Eno’s infamous “songwriting” method on his early ’70s solo records—another good reference point for Dear’s studio-warped rock, actually—Dear says his “favorite lyrics are almost like shorthand, when I can just quickly write weird little things down. It’s very free-flowing, almost free association. It’s about phrases, key phrases, about the way certain words sound more than [their] meaning. And the way the way that a word sounds will…” He trails off, and then sings the first line of Black City’s “I Can’t Feel” to illustrate his point: The days don’t rhyme. “I didn’t know at first what that [line] meant,” he says. “It’s about using that [line] as a rhythmic guide for the rest of the lyrics. So, it becomes, well, what don’t days rhyme with? ‘With all my friends.’ So, now the song is suddenly about social experiences, how I’m growing a little bit further away from my friends as I get older. It’s really quick [as a process], just recording what’s going on in my life at that immediate moment.” What’s going on in Dear’s life at the moment, as previously mentioned, is a string of late-summer international DJ gigs, followed by a full-band tour this fall. “This album’s just a bit slower and darker, so I think it’ll be a bit moodier than our previous tour,” he says. But even with a band behind him, and the chance to stretch out on Black City’s more mid-tempo material, Dear seems to abide by the DJ’s code: If they aren’t dancing, you’re doing something wrong. “There’s still going to be energy. It’s not going to be a wall of amBlack City hits bient noise the whole time. I stores August 17 from Ghostly don’t try to take away from the International party; I don’t try to take away Records. from the crowd.”

Among indie rock fans, Matthew Dear is best known for the downcast (but funky) albums he releases under his birth name. But to club kids around the world, Dear is a pseudonym-hopping producer-hero, one of the few young Americans to be fully embraced by the European electronic underground’s tightknit clique of DJs. Each of Dear’s main aliases—False, Audion and Jabberjaw—offers a distinctive take on techno tradition, sparse and ominous on one release and hyperactively colorful on another. His dance tracks are often stripped-down tools for DJs. But they can also make for excellent headphone music, albeit with a bang-it-out energy that’s in definite contrast to the carefully finessed rhythms of his eponymous records. Audion, Suckfish (2005) In Chicago, the birthplace of house music, they called it “jacking,” an appropriately sleazysounding name for the hormonally charged dancing inspired by clinically mechanical beats. Suckfish is a tribute to the power of “jack tracks,” the brutally funky brand of Chi-town minimalism, an hour of bump-and-grind robo-beats. The early Chicago jack tracks were rough and crude, grimily lo-fi, especially when heard on the cheap crackle-ridden vinyl available to D.I.Y. house labels. Dear’s a 21st century producer, though, working with hi-def digital technology, so his stiffly swinging drums and ragged old-school rave riffs have a computer-assisted voluptuousness that those Windy City jackers might have found truly futuristic. (Spectral Sound)

False, 2007 (2007) Detroit techno is renowned for its lush melodies. As False, Dear takes the exact opposite tack. “Spartan” doesn’t begin to do justice to describing these records; False tracks are all rhythm. Severe and repetitive, often stretching to eight or nine chilly minutes, they will wear the casual listener right out. But minimal techno is a funny thing. On 2007, Dear blends his own tracks—more like an in-studio DJ set than a best-of compilation—and suddenly False makes sense. Multiple rhythm tracks bounce around the mix, with Dear’s snares and cymbals slithering at strange angles around already off-kilter kick drums that dare you to guess when and where they’re going to fall. What was maddeningly simple as a vinyl single becomes thrillingly complex in the hands of the right DJ. (M_nus) Jabberjaw, Girlfriend (2003) There’s not a single second of dead air on Jabberjaw’s four-track Girlfriend EP. It’s the flipside to False’s ruthless, icy minimalism: The drums swing. The bass is warm and enveloping. Dozens of colorful microscopic sounds race past your ears. Hell, Dear even throws in a saxophone— though he does digitally puree it almost beyond recognition—and a ZZ Top reference. So, it’s funny stuff, too, with drums that sound more like slurps or hiccups or other bodily complaints. (Given how much of the record is built out of samples, they might even be slurps and hiccups.) Girlfriend offers Dear’s most bustling, sonically overstuffed dance music. It’s a shame he’s only released one Jabberjaw record since. (Perlon) 43

/movies

Escape From Lo-Def Three ’80s genre classics get the VHSto-Blu-ray makeover by Bret McCabe

he tiny fish are killers. Sea monsters are coming for the women.

Send in the thug to save the president. Joe Dante’s 1978 Piranha, Barbara Peters’ 1980 Humanoids From the Deep and John Carpenter’s 1981 Escape From New York aren’t merely three genre pictures with bulletproof plot synopses. They’re cult movies that occupy a special place in the heart of genre fans of a certain age. And this month they’re all getting released in Blu-ray editions, ensuring that they’ll continue to win over fans among generations to come. ¶ That’s important, because these movies earned their cults through nascent home-video technology. These were the movies that an ’80s teenager might have been too young to see in theaters, but thanks to cable

These were the movies that an ’80s teenager might have been too young to see in theaters, but thanks to cable television and videocassettes, a movie such as Humanoids From the Deep could find the adolescent hormones that would exalt its particular treasures. television and videocassettes, a movie such as Humanoids From the Deep could find the adolescent hormones that would exalt its particular treasures. Those adolescents, of course, would grow up to be movie critics and bloggers who would do the word-ofmouth legwork to help give horror, sci-fi, fantasy and other traditionally overlooked pop genres both serious critical and box-office respect. That clout didn’t exactly exist when these movies were first released. Produced by Roger Corman, directed by Joe Dante (who would earn his mainstream stripes with Gremlins) and written by emerging indie godfather John Sayles, Piranha boasts a better pedigree than some late 1970s genre pictures, but it was still merely one of several films trying to hop aboard Jaws’ blockbuster success. Fortunately, Sayles and Dante weren’t ordinary hacks. The gallows humor coursing throughout the movie makes it feels less like a rip-off and more like a parody of drive-in eco terror, the genre it follows with almost religious devotion. Insurance investigator Maggie (Heather Menzies) accidentally lets loose a school of piranha into the Lost River Lake waterway. They’re fish specially bred for military combat in Vietnam, which she learns about from Dr. Hoak (Kevin McCarthy from the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers). Once unleashed, Maggie and a local man (Bradford Dillman) try to contain the piranha before they kill too many, but kill they do. It’s a hoot start to finish, thanks to its self-awareness. Barbara Steele—the bombshell from many Mario Bava horror outings—shows up as a government scientist, and one of the movie’s many absurd moments features a single piranha leaping out of the water to bite camp counselor Paul Bartel on the face. By the time a local newscaster shows up to offer “terror, horror, death: film at 11,” Piranha’s tongue has been firmly planted in its cheek. Corman also produced Humanoids From the Deep, which, while also post-Jaws eco-horror, is more a throwback to classic ’50s and ‘60s monster movies. In the northern California fish town of Noyo, the salmon cannery—ingeniously named Canco, Inc—has introduced DNA-5 into the water to speed the salmon maturation process to increase production. Trouble is, some other fish must’ve consumed it, because now there are these bipedal things coming out of the water that look like stuntmen wearing kelp suits. It’s all classic creature-feature stuff, but Humanoids adds a heaping dose of post-slasher movies musts: gore and nudity. We’re talking lots of gore and nudity, thanks to the fish-men coming ashore to mate with women. Yes: Humanoids combines the creature flick with sexual anxiety to yield one of the Kurt Russell is forced to take a stand in Escape from New York

more bonkers ’80s genre pictures. In one of its most memorably WTF scenes, a scrawny young man uses ventriloquism (?!) to coax a young woman out of her clothes while they’re camping on the beach. Sadly, a fish-man slashes his back open before he can be rewarded for his efforts, and the woman ends up getting the fishstick. Both Humanoids (in 1981) and Piranha (in 1983) appeared in a Warner Home Video VHS releases, those huge plastic clamshell cases that easily stood out on videostore shelves. And in the ’80s, a young genre film fan could do much worse than choosing movies that only appeared in such big boxes. (See also: The Amityville Horror, The Exorcist, It’s Alive, Murder by Phone, Rabid, Salem’s Lot, The Shining.) John Carpenter’s Escape From New York was originally issued on VHS by Embassy Home Video in a pan and scan version—an ordinary sin in the pre-hi-def home entertainment world, but an especially heinous one considering Carpenter’s CinemaScope work here. And that widescreen look is the first hint that Carpenter is, as his custom, up to something more than a futuristic thriller in Escape. Wherein, by 1997, Manhattan has been turned into a maximum-security prison where a former military Special Forces op and incarcerated criminal, Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell), gets sent to retrieve the president (Donald Pleasance) after anti-American terrorists take out Air Force One. Escape is basically a spaghetti Western—see Sergio Leone regular Lee Van Cleef as the police commissioner—transferred to an environment of urban decay, with Plissken becoming a twist on the existential Man With No Name. Over three pictures in this period, Russell was the Warren Oates to Carpenter’s Sam Peckinpah, a perfect fit for conflicting ideas of masculinity and post-Vietnam political paranoia. Sure, it might play out like a great escape picture, but its visual and thematic details make Escape from New it more than a solid genre outing. York, Humanoids from the Deep, It’s great cinema, period. and Piranha are all available on Blu-ray August 3.

/movies

Family Man

artoonist Robert Crumb is an intensely private

guy. Disconcerted by the initial acclaim (and opprobrium) that greeted his revelatory underground comics in the ’60s and ’70s, when he became an inadvertent youth icon and briefly enjoyed near-rock star levels of popularity, he dropped out of public life more than 25 years ago. Now living in France with his wife (and fellow cartoonist) Aline Kominsky-Crumb, he continues to release work at his own pace, fueled by the same lifelong disregard for audience expectations.

Crumb explores the inextricable link between life and art in the work of a legendary cartoonist by Jess Harvell But Crumb is also one of our most candid artists. For 45 years, his subject, with occasional exceptions, has been himself: The hilariously specific sexual fetishes; the unapologetic rants about his pet hates; the brutally critical personal histories; the depictions of family life so candid they make Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage look like a primetime soap: Interviews with Crumb seem almost superfluous because the details of his life, right down to the nose-picking and onanism, are part of the public record. That tension—between the self-protective need to conceal and the creative urge to reveal—is the unstable engine that drives director Terry Zwigoff ’s still-astounding Crumb. First released in 1994, and now updated by Criterion in a typically lush and erudite double-disc DVD/Blu-ray package, the film was the first time Crumb’s work had reached a mass audience since the early ’70s. Naturally, the “average viewer” wasn’t entirely sympathetic to Crumb, or his work. Nor would you expect them to be. Crumb has depicted graphic incest. He’s drawn ethnic caricatures whose offensiveness sometimes takes them beyond satire. He’s wallowed in stomach-churning misogynistic violence and explored the effects of heavy drug use. In Crumb, he’s vilified by several detractors, feminist and otherwise, and remains fiercely unapologetic about exposing the planet to the contents of his own head. Don’t like it? Don’t look. That inability to self-censor is part of what made him a taboo-busting hero to the counter-culture back in the day, and his gross-out excess remains his legacy in the minds of many. Unfortunately Crumb’s most extreme stuff is often his weakest stuff. If he was just a satirist, he’d still be one of America’s best and most brutal, but satire’s bite dulls quickly as the culture becomes more permissive. If his work hadn’t evolved, Crumb might be remembered today as a comic book adjunct to the black humor movement that swept literature in the early ’60s. Thankfully Crumb’s work deepened as he matured. As a draftsman, he became one of the medium’s true virtuosos. Crumb features Time art

Platonically geeky, alienated from the starchy good-for-you blandness of the era’s pop culture, the three brothers responded to their father’s domineering attention in very different ways. But all of them turned to art. critic Robert Hughes comparing Crumb to Renaissance painters; he’s only exaggerating a little bit for the cameras. By the ’80s, thanks to the freedom provided by his own Weirdo magazine, Crumb was producing the best work of his career, a mix of biography, literary adaptations, slice-of-life vignettes and cultural criticism. Crumb’s experience as a husband and father didn’t purge him of his desire to shock, but family life did erode a bit of the bile, perversion and vicious selfdeprecation, revealing the humanism at the center of Crumb’s work. Family is Crumb’s ultimate subject, and that’s part of why the film found an audience beyond cartooning nerds, art historians and old hippies. It’s the story of the family that formed him—made him not just an artist, but a very specific kind of artist—and the non-standard family he tried to build as he grew older. Crumb’s relationship with both families is the film’s meat. Not that the art content is gristle, per se. It’s unlikely that alternative comics would exist, at least in their present fertile form, without Crumb self-publishing the first issue of Zap in 1967, when no legit comic book publisher would have touched his work. And Crumb’s especially good at skewering the boomer-inflated pomposity of the ’60s myth he helped partially create, much to his chagrin. But it’s the “look behind the curtain” of his life—to use a reality TV phrase completely at odds with the un-sensationalized look and feel of Crumb—which continues to haunt viewers 16 years later. It’s unlikely that Crumb would have let anyone other than Zwigoff, a longtime friend and musical collaborator, into his home. Or his mother’s home: It was these scenes—interviews with Crumb, his mother and his brother Charles—that left the mainstream press depressingly agog. Crumb had an authoritarian ex-military father who, in the hyper-conformist environment of ’50s Pennsylvania, attempted to instill manly values in his three proto-aesthete sons. Platonically geeky, alienated from the starchy good-for-you blandness of the era’s pop culture, the three brothers responded to their father’s domineering attention in very different ways. But all of them turned to art. Robert obviously enjoyed the most success. His

younger brother Max became a legitimate acetic, producing obscure paintings and drawings which mixed broken human bodies with political and religious imagery. And Charles Crumb? Well, Charles never really left his mother’s house. The eldest brother—Robert’s childhood confidant and creative idol, the one who encouraged his younger brothers’ work when almost no one else would— Charles’ story is as much at the heart of Crumb as Robert’s. As a cartoonist, Charles was as preternaturally talented as his younger brother, with an even more idiosyncratic style. He clearly had ambitions at one point; in an alternate universe, it’s easy to see both Crumb brothers as stars in the underground cartooning firmament. Instead, Charles experienced some sort of breakdown. Whether the cause was nature, nurture or some toxic combination, Charles retreated inward even as Robert first escaped to ’60s San Francisco and artistic acclaim. In one scene, Robert tells a story about sending away for the legendary (and much-maligned) “Famous Artists” test, put out by a semi-shady studyfrom-home “art school” in the ’50s. “I did [my test] completely legitimately,” he says. “But Charles couldn’t help himself… He started drawing these weird, psychotic characters in the background.” Robert laughs his way through the tale, marveling at his brother’s invention and oddness even as a young artist. Then, he sighs: “I guess he was already pretty far gone at that point.” Where Robert’s work opened up in the ’70s and beyond, Charles steadily closed himself off from anything happening outside his own skull. In his late teens, Charles gave up on cartooning, and began to fill notebooks with his own writings. The tiny, cramped words look like unreadable glyphs, words that have given up on communication. A short time after being interviewed for Crumb, Charles committed suicide. Even 40 years later, onscreen, the bond between the brothers is palpable. Watching them rifle through childhood detritus together, anyone who’s known a close relationship with a sibling will feel a heart-stab of recognition. They’ll also feel Robert’s sometimes overwhelming empathy for his brother, often expressed with no more than a look or a sigh or half-joking aside. Robert clearly knows that without Charles he might have never been an artist. He also knows that it was art that helped him ride out his alienation from, well, just about everything, and into a life where he’s a father and husband and éminence grise of his chosen profession. Charles never managed. That’s part of what makes Crumb such a harrowing experience. What makes it a redemptive experience is seeing where Crumb, despite those “early years of bitter struggle” (as one volume of The Complete Crumb Comics put it), managed to go. Robert found a way to vent the pressure in his head, with sometimes astounding (and astoundingly graphic) results. Told by everyone, except his brothers, that he was destined for a deadening rat race life, he tapped into his innate refusenik side, pushing against everyone who said “no” and creating one of the late 20th century’s most Crumb will be updated on astounding bodies of work in the process. Often raw and double-disc sometimes barely digestible, much like the artist himself, DVD/Bluray package Crumb is one of those once-in-a-lifetime confluences, the August 10 from right subject at the right moment, that documentary filmthe Criterion Collection. makers (and fans) dream about. 47

/movies

Red Red Crime

The Red Riding Trilogy does for West Yorkshire what The Wire did for Baltimore / by Sean L. Maloney

hat ever Hollywood tells you, don’t believe it: The only movie you abso-

The series initially focuses on cub reporter Edlutely, positively have to see this summer is the brutal, unflinching Red die Dunford, played by Riding, which is finally getting a stateside DVD release. This hard-boiled the fantastic Andrew Garneo-noir trilogy, which uses the historic rampage of the Yorkshire Ripper field, an actor who will be as a backdrop for delving into more disturbing crimes, is one of the most a household name in the uncomfortable and uncompromising films in ages. With a sprawling US once his star turn in cast and a story that unfolds over the course of a decade of violence, corruption and David Fincher’s The Social Network hits screen this degeneracy, Red Riding ups the ante for crime narratives in the modern era. fall. The journalist and King Crimson fan returns to his hometown seeking answers in the case of a missing girl. Instead, he uncovers a ring of corruption that permeates Yorkshire society so deeply and so thoroughly that anyone who’s a fan of The Wire will be thrilled. If you’ve already devoted 60-plus hours to David Simon’s Baltimore, you’re going to fall in love with Red Riding’s Yorkshire. It’s a world where immortality is a given and judgment is reserved only for the most vile, a world where good people do bad things and bad people do the unspeakable. The second film, the Marsh-directed 1980, picks up with Mancunian detective Peter Hunter—Paddy Considine from Hot Fuzz, 24 Hour Party People and The Bourne Ultimatum—brought in to investigate the ongoing Yorkshire Ripper case. He discovers institutional blowback and butts heads with the West Yorkshire Constabulary. Yorkshire cop Bill Molloy becomes the lynchpin in the whole tangled, messy saga and is played by veteran British actor Warren Clarke (whom you might remember as Dim from A Clockwork Orange) with callous vulnerability that belies his own complicity in the ugly, ugly events unfolding around him. Hunter is no angel himself Based on a quartet of novels by David Peace, Red and his own bad behavior is thrown in his face as Riding originally aired as a mini-series on Channel his antagonistic relationship with the WYC comes 4 in the UK in 2009 before making a run through to loggerheads. U.S. arthouses last year. Each feature-length install1984 kicks into high gear with the kind of disoriment is set in a different year (1974, 1980, 1983), and enting flashback that made the last few seasons of each was helmed by a different director (Julian Jar- Lost so annoying. But unlike the work of Leiber and rold, James Marsh and Anand Tucker) using differLindeloff, Red Riding’s audience is eventually going ent media (16mm film, 35mm film and HD video). to have some of their questions answered. They’ll But trust us, the trilogy is far more cohesive than be unpleasant, even downright horrifying answers, Red Riding that description implies. Held together by a taut but answers nonetheless as Det. Maurice Jobson Trilogy is script adapted by Tony Grisoni—who also wrote (David Morrissey) and lawyer Jon Piggot (Mark available stateside the screenplays for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Addy) connect the dots that have been splattered on DVD and and the bizarre conjoined-twin glamsploitation like blood across the course of the previous two Blu-ray on flick Brothers of the Head—and performed by some films. And without getting to close to spoiler-ville, August 17 of Britain’s best character actors, Red Riding is as let’s just say that the film concludes with a reveal impressive as it is ambitious. that’s as obvious as it is unsettling. 48

needle

/movies

Everything New is Old Again essay by

Stan Michna

Ex-soldier Harry Brown (Michael Caine) is a citizen of England’s

Geezer Nation. ¶ He’s a senior citizen who lives alone (his wife dies shortly after the film opens) in his tidy little flat in a vast council housing development resembling the Brutalist architecture of Stalinist Russia. Day and night drug-dealing, pistolpacking, potty-mouthed punks infest the public spaces, most critically a pedestrian tunnel running under a busy expressway. Whether to visit his wife in the hospital or meet his one-and-onlyfriend-in-the-whole-world for a pint and a game of chess at the local pub, Harry always takes the long way round. Vicious beasts rule this urban jungle and Harry, properly, lives in constant fear of them. Even the cops—seen here as little more than feckless social workers—prefer to avoid the area. But it’s when his hot-headed pal decides to confront the punks and is murdered for his trouble (hot-headed friends of the hero always get killed in the movies) that Harry finally takes matters into his own hands—and Harry Brown goes riding madly off in all directions à la Brian DePalma at his worst. There are at least a half-dozen threads of plot in Harry Brown that could have been woven into a half-decent time-waster, every one of which has been done far better elsewhere. A meditation on how it sucks to be old, poor, lonely and fearful? Tokyo Story or Make Way For Tomorrow. Gunning down punks who’ve killed your dearest and nearest? Death Wish. Violent, aimless youth living in soulless projects? Cracker. Convoluted internal politics and obsession with public image in police forces? Prime Suspect. Surreal, blood-splattered gunplay? Taxi Driver. Learning that gangs are led by respected local businessmen? Far too many to mention. (The result might have been far more interesting had director Daniel Barber considered updating 1971’s Get Carter, with Caine reprising his role as vicious gangster Jack Carter, 40 years older and 40 years meaner.) 50

needle

Something else, too: At the beginning of the film, Caine moves about in a peculiar little mincing trot, suggesting fear or a series of mild strokes. At film’s end, after taking a bullet and getting kicked half to death, the oldster recovers not only his health but steam and purpose in his stride. A telltale sign the director’s either lost his sense of direction, or discovered some kind of cockamamie new health-care-forseniors restorative program. Guess which. There’s no guesswork or lack of focus, however, in Richard Linklater’s smart and funny adaptation of Robert Kaplow’s comingof-age novel, Me and Orson Welles. Zac Efron (!) plays a theatre-struck high school student who stumbles into the maelstrom that was Orson Welles’s landmark 1937 Mercury Theatre production of Julius Caesar. Like Harry Brown, Me And Orson Welles also evokes a succession of similarly themed films, including The Cradle Will Rock, Last Stop Greenwich Village, My Favorite Year and Woody Allen’s Radio Days and Purple Rose Of Cairo. The crucial difference is that Me And Orson Welles is both different and better than most of the others. To Linklater’s reputation has been appended (unfairly) the “slacker” label, a result of his first two films, Slacker and Dazed And Confused. But in looking beyond his specific subject matter, it’s clear Linklater’s true talent resides in his ability to capture an era’s Zeitgeist. But to capture both the Zeitgeist and the human whirlwind that was Orson Welles in one huge net is almost miraculous. In Christian McKay’s uncanny performance as Welles, the miracle is consummated. McKay, who starred as Welles in his own one-man play, has the Great One nailed down flat, from the monstrous ego and boundless energy to that odd little lisp his marvellous voice would occasionally betray. And betrayal is a key word here, for as driven, boisterous and monumentally gifted as Welles was, betrayal in the service of his talent emerges as a recurrent theme, particularly if it involved beautiful and available women. All the ambition in the film. however, isn’t sopped up by Welles’s massive sponge of an ego. Everyone here is ambitious, from Claire Danes (who’s wonderful), to Efron, to the kid who designs the sets for the play. It’s as cutthroat backstage as it is onstage. (One of the little pleasures of the film is its insistence on using the real names of the characters, including Joseph Cotten, John Houseman and Norman Lloyd—who is still alive—and the saucy gossip about who’s bedding whom.) Best of all, though, is the film’s exuberance, and sense of life and history on the run. (Why can Hollywood recreate the excitement of live theatre so well, but never the film industry?) And much of the credit goes to Linklater, whose expansive vision in Me And Orson Welles is, at last, his one-way ticket out of Slackerville. Me And Orson Welles, August 17th, Harry Brown, August 31; both on DVD and Blu-ray from E1 Entertainment.

Questions or comments? Email stan@sunriserecords.com

needle

/movies/new_releases

AUGUST 3

300: Collector’s Edition Abby & Friends: P Is for Princess Abraham Lincoln After.Life Allnighter American Graffiti: Collector’s Edition American Legacy American Pie: Collector’s Edtion Bachelor Party/Miss March/ Porky’s Big Lift Big Trouble in Little China/Kung Pow: Enter the Fist Big/The Man With One Red Shoe Billy Elliot Blood Done Sign My Name Blood Night: The Legend of Mary Hatchet Blood Simple Borat/Grandma’s Boy Borat/Me Myself & Irene/Super Troopers Breakfast Club: Special Edition Brown Sugar/I Think I Love My Wife Bubba Ho-Tep Bull Durham Call Me Malcolm Casino: Special Edition Chavo Animado: Season 2 Chilling, True Crime Collector’s Set Classic Albums: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers – Damn the Torpedoes Coal Miner’s Daughter: Anniversary Edition Comebacks/Grandma’s Boy/Stuck on You Coming Alive Cross My Heart Curious George: Back to School Daim Duab Date Movie/Epic Movie/Meet the Spartans Days That Shook the World: The Complete Series Days That Shook the World: The Complete Third Season Dazed and Confused Dead Pit Death Mask of the Ninja Destination X 2006 Diary of a Wimpy Kid Do the Right Thing: Special Edition Dodgeball/The Rocker Dora the Explorer: Dora’s Big Birthday Adventure Dude Where’s My Car/Reno 911: Miami/The Rocker Duel of the Shaolin Fist Dungeon Masters Edgar Broughton Band Elvis; On Tour Elvis 75th Anniversary DVD Collection Escape From New York Fargo Fast Times at Ridgemont High: Special Edition Finding Bliss First Films of Akira Kurosawa Flashdance: Collector’s Edition Forgetting Sarah Marshall Franklin: Back to School With Franklin Friends: The Complete First Season Friends: The Complete Second Season Friends: The Complete Third Season Friends: The Complete Fourth Season Friends: The Complete Fifth Season

needle

Friends: The Complete Sixth Season Friends: The Complete Seventh Season Friends: The Complete Eighth Season Friends: The Complete Ninth Season Friends: The Complete Tenth Season Gentlemen Prefer Blondes Ghost Writer Girl Next Door/Miss March Going Berserk Gone in 60 Seconds Trilogy Gong: At Monserrat 1973 and Other Stories Great Waldo Pepper Greek Tycoon Groupie Handy Manny: La Gran Carrera Hannah Montana Vol. 3 Hannah Montana Vol. 4 Happiness Runs Harbortown Bobber Harp Dreams Hawaii Five-O: Season 9 Henson’s Place: The Man Behind the Muppets Heroes: Season 4 Hidden Gems: Hell on Heels – The Battle of Mary Kay/His and Hers/ Adopt a Sailor Hidden Gems: Lonely Street/ Unbeatable Harold/Route 30 Hitman, Uzi Vol. 3: Sings to Kids Hoboken Hollow Hot Fuzz: Special Edition Hot Shots/Hot Shots Pt. Deux/ Robin Hood: Men in Tights How to Become a Psychic: Everybody Has the Power Hug Moment: Games Babies Play Human Resources Humanoids From the Deep I Am Legend: Collector’s Edition Ikki Tousen: Premium Box In Her Shoes/There’s Something About Mary In Transit Presents: 16MM Into the Void: The International Space Station Japanese Wife Jiri Barta: Labyrinth of Darkness Kalifornia Kick-Ass Kodocha: Season 2 Kodocha: Season 1 La Boheme Lytton’s Diary: Complete Collection Mallrats: Collector’s Edition Matthew Shepard Story Max Headroom: The Complete Series Mercy: The Complete First Season Mission: Impossible II Mist: Sheepdog Tales – Top Dog Mitsein Monarchy: Complete Collection My Name Is Khan Napoleon Dynamite/Revenge of the Nerds Naruto: Shippuden – Box Set 3 National Geographic Dinosaur Collection Never Say Never Again Night Mother Open House Pandora and the Flying Dutchman Patterns Trilogy + Other Short Films Phantom of the Opera Phantom Planet Piranha Pride Fighting Championships: Championship Chaos II/Cold

Tomorrow We Move Towards Zero Unforgettable: The Korean War Visions of the Beast Wallflower: The Complete Collection Weird Science Western Collector’s Set Where’s Poppa? Wiz: Special Edition Wow! Wow! Wubbzy!: Wubbzy Goes to School Xanadu: Special Edition

aug 3 Fargo

Directed by Joel Coen Do we really need to tell you to buy this if you don’t already own a copy? The Coens have proven themselves to be among the most inconsistent filmmakers going, qualitywise, as their filmography grows. But their highs are still some of the key highs in recent cinema. And Fargo is still in the top-tier of their own oeuvre, alongside the one where John Goodman plays a loser criminal and the one where Josh Brolin plays a loser criminal. This is the one, in case you’re unfamiliar, where Steve Buscemi and William H. Macy play loser criminals. A two-fer, then. MGM Fury 3 Princess Bride Princess Resurrection: Complete Collection Prophet Real Ghostbusters Vol. 3 Reno 911: Miami /Super Troopers River’s End Roger Corman’s Cult Classics: Death Sport/Battletruck Sacrifice 2006 Saturday Night Live: The Best of Will Ferrell, Vol. 3 Scotland’s Secret Bunker: Shadows, Raps, Orbs and Strange Paranormal Entities Secrets of the clown Seven Alone Seventeen Years Sex and the City: The Complete Series Shank Sid & Nancy Sixteen Candles: Special Edition Sola: Complete Collection Spaceballs 601 Van Ness Ave. #E3-246 Sundowners Sweetgrass Sweetpea Beauty TCM Spotlight: Errol Flynn Adventures Test of Wills There’s Something About Mary Timothy Goes to School: The Great Race To Save a Life

AUGUST 10

187 Adam-12: Season 5 Alex Reymundo: Red-nexican Alice in Wonderland Amar Gamal: Supreme Shimmies Beautiful Exchange Big Comfy Couch Clown Buddies Bonfire of the Vanities Boy C and I: Careless and Imprudent – Extreme Street Bikes Cash Casper’s Scare School: Season 1 Cheddar: What You Smokin’ On? Children of Invention Chocolate Sundaes Comedy Show: Live on Sunset Strip Christmas Celebration Clone Hunter Coffee Express Coma: Live Crumb: Special Edition D. Gray-Man: Season One Dark Metropolis Date Night Day for Night Death at a Funeral Death in Venice Dick4dick: The Legendary Dick (2004-2009) Diets That Time Forgot Diplomat Do It Yourself Natural Facelift Easy Does It: Getting Started Figure in the Forest Full Dressed Atlantic Salmon Files “In Hand” With Harry Lemire Gangland Ghost Ship Good Heart Graphic Sexual Horror Grease Line Steelhead Flies With Harry Lemire Helen Hell of a Ride Hip-Hop Handbook Vol. 2: Deejaying for Beginners Home for Christmas Home Front House on Haunted Hill Indelible Irawma: 28th Annual International Reggae and World Music Awards Jingles the Clown Joneses Just Say Love Kids in the Hall: Death Comes to Town Killer Weekend Kim Novak Film Collection Kings of the Underground: The Dramatic Journey of UGK Lady Gaga: Just Dance Latest Buzz Led Zeppelin: For Evermore Legends of Air Combat: B-52 Stratofortress Letters to God Little Women Living Warbirds: World War II Fighters Looney Tunes Super Stars: Bugs Bunny – Hare Extraordinaire Looney Tunes Super Stars: Daffy Duck – Frustrated Fowl Louie Bluie

Lucky Days Minder: Season 3 Mission Monster Steam Multiple Sarcasms Naruto Shippuden Vol. 12 Naturally, Sadie Nightmare Alley Numb3rs: The Final Season Office of the Dead One for the Road Paraguay According to Agustin Barrios Penguins of Madagascar: Happy King Julien Day Pink Floyd: Shine On Pink Floyd: Between Syd and the Dark Side Pippi Longstocking: Pippi Goes to School Prince: In the 1980s Private Function Project Blue Earth SOS: Complete Collection Project Solitude: Buried Alive Queen Pin Railfans Chasing Trains Red Hot Chili Peppers: Blast Live Rick Springfield: Live in Rockford Scandalous Sea of Dust Secrets of the Great Barrier Reef Seeing, Searching, Being: Three Films on William Segal by Ken Burns Startupnation: Open for Business With the Sloan Brothers Summer Lover Tales of King Solomon Vol. 1 Tapped Things Thorn in the Heart Three to Tango Titan Maximum: Season 01 Toot and Puddle: I’ll Be Home for Christmas Top Gun Air Power Trauma: Season 1 Triage Twisted Brain UFC 114: Rampage vs. Evans Ultimate Death Match Under the Mountain Verminators: Extreme Extermination Vision of Israel We Have to Stop Now Welcome Wild Asia: A Forest for All Seasons Winston McAnuff: Electric Dread World’s Most Beautiful Places WWE: Best of Raw: Seasons 1 & 2 Zigby Treasure Hunt AUGUST 17

101 Timeless TV Classics Aeon Flux: Collector’s Edition Air Show Extreme: Collector’s Edition Alice Goodbody Ari Eisinger: The Guitar Artistry of Ari Eisinger Assassin Next Door Babel Barnyard Batman: The Brave and the Bold: Season One, Part One Beverly Hills Cop Collection Big Money Rustlas Black Orpheus Black Snake Moan Burning Bright Cemetery Junction Charlotte’s Web Chinatown Jeet Kune Do City of Your Final Destination Classic Family Adventures Clear and Present Danger Clueless Conversation

Aug 3 Kick-Ass

Directed by Matthew Vaughn Forget most critics’ cavils. Here’s the main problem with Kick-Ass: It’s too dumb and timid to be truly offensive. Tainted from the start by creator Mark Millar’s inanely “transgressive” script for the original comic, the movie version of Kick-Ass plays like a sheltered 16-year-old boy’s version of shock-the-squares: Handgun-wielding little girls spouting profanity, and limp displays of ultra-violence. Wheeee. There are a few chuckles, but in a world with Takashi Miike, Kick-Ass is like settling for a wine cooler when you really want a scotch. Lions Gate

Cougar Town: The Complete First Season Creeping Flesh Dark and Stormy Night Days of Thunder Dead Man Running Dexter: The Fourth Season Doc McKenzie & The Hi-Lites: Feel Him Movin’ Dream Machines Dumping Lisa El Premio Extreme Survival Pack Face/Off Fairways to Heaven Fast Lanes Firm Four Seasons Lodge Friday Night Lights: The Fourth Season Furry Vengeance Good, the Bad, the Weird Heart of the Peloton History of Scotland: The Complete Ten-Part Season Horse Crazy Too Ichi-1 Inside Hurricane Katrina Into the Wild Jackass: The Movie: Special Collector’s Edition Jackson Browne: Going Home Keeping Up With the Kardashians: The Complete Third Season L’Enfance Nue Lara Croft: Tomb Raider Last Song

Lights! Camera! Elvis! Collection Steve Kilbey & Martin Kennedy: Live at the Toff in Town Lost Skeleton Returns Again Madeline’s Halloween & Other Spooky Tales Magnificent Italia Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya: Season 2 Mission: Impossible: Special Collector’s Edition My Friends Tigger & Pooh: Bedtime With Pooh New America Next Off and Running One Tree Hill: Complete Seventh Season Origin: Spirits of the Past Orlando Pacific Warriors Patriot Games Payback Prodigy: An Unauthorized Story on Tiger Woods Rainmaker Red Riding Trilogy Robbie Williams: In & Out of Consciousness: Greatest Hits Rocky & Bullwinkle & Friends: Season 4 Rugrats Movie Sabrina (1995) See No Evil Seventh Dat of Blashyrkh Shigofumi: Complete Collection Simon Schama: A History of Britain – The Complete Series Skellig: The Owl Man Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow Slayer: Live Intrusion Sorority Wars Soundtracker Spring Fever Sum of All Fears Super Structures Surprise, Surprise Taking Father Home Temple Grandin Travel the World With Kids U2: Rattle and Hum Ugly Betty: The Complete Fourth Season Wheelmen Wings of Destruction Wolverine and the X-Men: Final Crisis Trilogy Woody Mann: The Guitar Artistry of Woody Mann – Songs From the Blues WWE: Money in the Bank 2010 You Must See It to Believe It! AUGUST 24

$5 a Day 2:22 3 Silent Classics by Josef Von Sternberg 90210: The Second Season Abandoned Age of Stupid Ajami American Journey: In Robert Frank’s Footsteps Assignment Outer Space Aventura: Sold Out at Madison Square Garden – Kings o fBachata Ax Men: The Complete Season Three Back-Up Plan Bad Mother’s Handbook Ben 10: Alien Force Vol. 10 Best of Europe: Beautiful Europe Best of Travel: Pacific Northwest/ Mexico/Hawaii/China/Australia/ New Zealand Big Noise Dispatches 06 Big Windup: The Complete Series Bill Frisell: Solos – The Jazz Sessions

Bizzy Bone: The Celebration Black Love Bleach Vol. 31 Breakfast Special Burt Wolf: Great River Cruises of Europe Burt Wolf: Travels & Traditions – Europe Tour Ca$h Cactus: Live, Loud & Proud Chuck Close Clash of the Dinosaurs Come Hell or High Water Comeback Confidant Crazy Hair Day… And More Back to School Stories Dancing With Dogs Death arc Delerium: Epiphany Der Grossse Verhau Devil’s Diary Diener Digimon Data Squad: The Wrath of SaberLeomon Dinosaurs Under the Sea Discover China Dog Whisperer With Cesar Millan Season 4 Vol. 2 Dorian Gray Dream Boy Earth Science Fundamentals Series Electric Light Orchestra: Live – The Early Years End Time Revelation Fantomas Collection Fear of the Dark/The Big Bad Wolf/ Gangs of the Dead Finding Lenny Flight of the Conchords: The Complete Collection Four Stories of St. Julian Freedom Road Gangland: The Complete Season Five Gangs N Cinema Gathering Ghost Hunters International: Season 1 Part 2 Gossip Girl: The Complete Third Season Gothfather Group Sex Habitats Half-Caste/Demon Within/Hell’s Gate 11:11 Haunting of Sorority Row Heaven’s Neighbors Hemalayaa: Bollywood Boogie Hooked on the Beatles Hooked on Queen House That Jack Built Hunter S. Thompson: Final 24 – His Final Hours Hush Little Baby I Think We’re Alone Now I Wish I Had a House Like This Incredible Human Journey Island Explosion: 6th Anniversary Part 1 Jim Henson’s Dinosaur Train: Dinosaurs Under the Sea Joe Pro: Most Wanted Johnny Winter: Live Through the ‘80s Kavanagh Complete Collection Kick Ass Heroes: Four Film Super Collection King of the Zombies Ladykillers/Nothing to Lose Lang Lang: Live in Vienna Least Among You Letters in the Wind Lost: The Complete Sixth Season Lost: The Complete Series Love Is the Drug Machine Gun McCain Marvin Gaye: Final 24 – His Final Hours Matter

NEEDLE

/movies/new_releases Metamorphosis Michael Jackson: The Story Of (Unauthorized) Midnight Horror Collection: Blood Predators Midnight Horror Collection: Flesh Eating Zombies Midnight Horror Collection: Road Trip to Hell Miss Nelson Has a Field Day… And More School Adventure Stories More Dig Dig Doog Vol. 2 My Fingers and Toes Nature’s Grave/Evil Remains/ Gone Dark NCIS: The Seventh Season Nick Jr. Favorites: Happy Halloween Ninjas vs. Zombies O’Jays: Live in Concert Object One Night Patty Duke Show: The Complete Third Season Paul: Live in New York Pawn Stars: Season Two Practice of Love Pride FC: Grand Prix 2005 Pride Fighting Championships: Pride Fighting Legacy Vol. 7 Private Quest for the Real Jesus Quest for the Real Paul Real Robin Hood Red vs. Blue: The Blood Gulch Chronicles – Recreation Redemption River Phoenix: Final 24 – His Final Hours Rocks & Minerals Runaway Slave: The Return of the Kings Sandbaggers Complete Collection Satan’s Little Helper/Spliced/ Blood Gnome Say Goodnight Seven Days Shattered Angels: The Complete Collection Sherlock Holmes SHirin Showdown: Air Combat Simpsons: The Thirteenth Season Slayer: War at the Warfield Slayer: Still Reigning Square Step Into Darkness Steve Hackett: Spectral Mornings Steven Bernstein: Solos – The Jazz Tales From the Tower Tales of King Solomon Vol. 3 Teacher From the Black Lagoon… And More Slightly Scary Stories Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles Forever Titanic 2 Tobey’s Tricks & Treats Tom and Jerry Meet Sherlock Holmes Truth Tytania: Collection 1 Unraveling Michelle Vampires: Out for Blood/Blood Angels/Succubus Virgin Again Wednesday 13: Weirdo A Go-Go Who Killed Nancy Wordgirl: Tricks & Treats Yoo Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg Youth of Chopin AUGUST 31

9th Company Agatha Christie’s Marple: Series 5 Air Front 2: The Yanks Are Coming

needle

‘42-’45 Alien Time Machine: Encounters From Another Dimension Angelina Ballerina: Love to Dance Animal Atlas: Creepy Creatures Bee Gees: One Night Only Best of Soul Train Black Blood Brothers: The Complete Series Braceface Vol. 2: Getting Real Brainjacked Brothers & Sisters: The Complete Fourth Season Capone Invenstment Car Trouble Cinevardaphoto Dead Eyes Open Desdemona: A Love Story Dick Barton: Special Agent Collection Ex Terminators Expendables 2: Zero Heroes – 4 Film Collection Flash Forward: The Complete Series For My Wife Forbidden Dreams French Film Full Metal Panic! Complete Collection Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood Part 2 Girls on the Road Glimmerberry Ball Go Diego Go! Diego’s Ultimate Rescue League Godkiller Gridiron and Steel Harry Brown Hollywood Rocks! House: Season Six Imogen Heap: Everything InBetween – The Story of Ellipse Iron Bodyguard Jane’s Addiction: Live Voodoo Jeff Koons Show Judy Garland Show Vol. 5 Kanokon: The Girl Who Cried Fox Vol. 2 Kid Racer Legends of the Canyon Lonesome Dove: The Series – The Complete Season One Lorna the Exorcist Made For Each Other Maria Chapdelaine Michel Legrand & Friends: 50 Years of Music and Movies Middle: The Complete First Season National Geographic: Glacier National Park NCIS: Los Angeles – The First Season Occult: The Truth Behind the Word Once an Eagle One Piece: Season Three – Second Voyage Parenthood: Season One Restoration of the British Motorcycle Museum Rio Breaks Sons of Anarchy: Season 2 Soul Train Vol. 1 Thriller: Complete Series TNA Wrestling: Slammiversary 2010 Tormented Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Married Too UFC 115: Liddell vs. Franklin Vampire Diaries: The Complete First Season Vampyres Waiting Room Water Wars William Tell Express Zigby Treasure Hunt

Aug 10 Max Headroom

The Complete Series If you were in grade school in the late ’80s, happening upon this bizarre, Brit-produced sci-fi series, inexplicably aired on prime-time network TV, was probably a formatively weird experiences, like seeing Twin Peaks a few years later. Seriously, who greenlit this thing? “Let’s take ideas found in hardcore cyberpunk and shove them through MTVstyle editing.” Advertising-asmind-control, corporate data hackers, organ transplants and body mods—it’s all there in quick-cutting hyper-colors. It’s aged in some silly ways, as sci-fi always does, but it’s still pretty damned weird. Shout! Factory

september 7

American Chopper Collection Annie Hall Apocalypse Beatles: Ed Sullivan Presents the Beatles: 4 Complete Shows Being Michael Madsen Beneath Clouds Best Little Whorehouse in Texas Big Fat Liar Blood Into Wine Blue Drop: The Complete Collection Blue Green Boy Meets World: The Complete First Season Boy Meets World: The Complete Second Season Boy Meets World: The Complete Third Season Brick Call Girl Camp Rock 2: The Final Jam Caravaggio Chuck: The Complete Third Season Clattorford: Complete Season Three Colony Cosmic Tech: Eye in the Sky Coyote Ragtime Show: Complete Collection Criminal Minds: Season Five Dark Moon Thriller Collection Dave Davies Kronikles: Mystical Diamond Dawgs

Dirty Jobs: Collection 6 Do the Right Thing Doc West Doctor Who: Planet of Fire Doctor Who: Episode 106 – Creature From the Pit Doctor Who: The King’s Demons Electric Horseman Erika Andersen: Being Strategic Evening Exploding Girl Father Figure Fistful of Trinity: Four Film Collection Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi For a Fistful of Diamonds Four Elemental Environments: Earth, Air, Water, Fire Garrow’s law Genshiken: Season 2 Premium Collection George Lopez: Tall, Dark & Chicano/ America’s Mexican Ghosts Don’t Exist Goosebumps: Go Eat Worms Goosebumps: The Blob That Ate Everyone Guardian: The Second Season Hansul and Gretel He’s Your Dog, Charlie Brown Headhunter: Assessment Weekend Jackie Chan: Kung Fu Master Jim Gaffigan: Beyond the Pale John Rabe Journey: The Absolution Jungle Boy Jurassic Park III K-Pax Kevin Pollak: The Littlest Suspect LA Ink: Season 2 Vol. 2 Last of the Summer Wine: Vintage 1985 Laughology Less Than Perfect: Season One List Little People Big World Season 3 V1 Loss of a Teardrop Diamond Love in the Nick of Tyme Meerkat Manor: Family Ties Mickey Mouse Clubhouse: Road Rally Mike Epps: Live From the Club Nokia Mr. Right Now My Bride Is a Mermaid Part 2 Nico the Unicorn Night Before Christmas: A Mouse Tale Norm Show: The Complete Series The Office: Season Six Pie in the Sky: Series 3 & 4 Playing for Time Porky’s Prime Suspect: The Complete Collection Prophet’s Game Question of Trust Road Ends Scoop Shaun the Sheep: Party Animals Simple Wish Sleeping and Waking Snow Blind Solitary Man Sorry, Thanks Sortilegio Sparkle Spicy Mac Project Storm Chasers Season 2 Talk to Me TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection: Gangsters – James Cagney To Live and Die in Amerikkka Troy Alves: Resurrection Urban Terrorist Very Little Time Wonders of the Solar System X’s & O’s You’re So Cupid

Sophisticated Summer Influenced by her Tennessee roots, her latest album '100 MILES FROM MEMPHIS' is a tribute to the soul and RnB classics she grew up with & features some of her most rhythmic and sexy songs yet. Including 'Summer Day'.

STING SYMPHONICITIES Sting’s massively acclaimed new album is released just in time for his world wide tour. Some of Sting’s greatest pop songs and ballads accompanied by the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra. Songs include, “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic,” “Roxanne,” “Englishman in New York” and “She’s Too Good For Me.”

The extraordinary new album from Tom Jones. A captivating collection of songs drawn from the American spiritual, blues and contemporary repertoire. Praise & Blame is a stripped‐down, gritty, soul-baring album from an artist with an incredible career spanning five decades.

needle

/music /new_releases AUGUST 3

Into the Killing Fields The Concert Born on Earth Serious Times The Suburbs Jackson Square Transit Transit International Lullabies Just Jesse Belvin Outside Guilty as Charged Croweology Indoctrine The Collection Happy Daze EP Pianist Reggae sensation All Night Long Trill O.G. Unbeatable Bygraves The Casting Out Freddy Cole Sing Mr B Sings Ballads of the Sad Café Norman Connors You Are My Starship/ Romantic Journey Dash Rip Rock Call of the Wild Miles Davis King of Blue Martin Denny Exotica DJ Hell Body Language Vol. 9 DJ Mustard DJ Mustard David Dondero # Zero With a Bullet Dr. John Tribal Duane Eddy Especially for You El-P We Are All Going to Burn in Hell Megamix Fan Death Womb of Dreams Fax Zig Zag Fleshwrought Dementia/Dyslexia Gaelic Storm Cabbage Freddie Gibbs Str8 Killa EP Paul Gilbert Fuzz Universe Ian Gillan Naked Thunder/Toolbox/ Cherkazoo Roger Glenn Reachin’ Benny Goodman Ultimate Big Band Collection Gov’t Mule Mulennium S Grappelli & D Rein... With the Quintet of the Hot Club of France Hammers/Misfortune Fields/Church of Broken Glass Hammers/Misfortune The August Engine Hammers/Misfortune The Bastard Hammers/Misfortune The Locust Years John Lee Hooker Boom Boom: The Best Of Lena Horne Bewitched Horseback The Invisible Mountain House of Heroes Sburba Jimmy Hughes Something Extra Special In the Midst of Lions The Heart of Man Sandra Ingerman Soul Journeys: Music for Shamanic Practics JJ JJ N?2 JLS JLS George Jones Sacred Songs Randall Jones The World: By Night Jackiem Joyner Jackiem Joyner Juvaliant Inhuman Nature Kingston Trio At Large Lady Gaga The Cherrytree Sessions Lady Gaga The Remix Larkin’s Jazz Larkin’s Jazz Level 42 Living It Up Ferraby Lionheart The Jack of Hearts Little Richard Rip It Up: The Greatest Hits Loden Buggy Los Lobos Tin Can Trust Loss for Words Motown Classics Luciano United States of Africa Vera Lynn Simply Vera Lynn Manose Dhyana Aman Manose Notes From Home Manose Suskera Mantovani Film Encores Dean Martin Sings the Hits All out War Armand Amar Rusty Anderson Horace Andy Arcade Fire Arkells Autolux Babies Presents Jesse Belvin Shelley Berman Bitter End The Black Crowes Blood Revolt Tim Bowman Alex Boye Alex Brown Dennis Brown Buckcherry Bun B Max Bygraves The Casting Out Freddy Cole Chris Connor

needle

Johnny Mathis Heavenly John Mayall’s Blues... So Many Roads Katie Melua The House Glenn Miller Ultimate Big Band Collection L Miller & The Helio... Lloyd Miller & The Heliocentrics Mt. St. Helens Viet... Where the Messengers Meet Neon Bastard Meikhaus Night Horse Perdition Hymns Nottingham Talk to Strangers NTU With Gary Bartz SIngerella: A Ghetto Fairy Tale Orig Broadway Cast The Music Man Poison Arrows Newfound Resolutions Deva Premal Into Light: The Meditation Music of Deva Premal A Previn & David Rose Secret Songs for Young Lovers Purenrg Graduation: The Best Of (CD/DVD) Queens / Stone Age Rated R: Deluxe Edition D Quinn & The 13th... Your Wicked Man Raydio Raydio/Rock On Harold Rayford Live –I Am the Instrument Ola Belle Reed Rising Sun Melodies Jim Reeves Girls I Have Known Debbie Reynolds Love Is a Simple Thing Dax Riggs Say Goodnight to the orld Rocket in My Pocket Rocket in My Pocekt Les Sabler Crescent Shores Gabor Sazbo In Budapest Live Secondhand Seren... Hear Me Now Shapes and Sizes Candle to Your Eyes Side Effect What You Need Joyce Sims Come Into My Life: The Best Of Soundtrack 16 Wishes Soundtrack Middle Men Soundtrack South Pacific Soundtrack Sweetpea’s Songs for Girls Soundtrack The Kids Are All Right Squeeze Spot the Difference Ryan Star 11:59 Bill Summers Feel the Heat Swahili Blonde Man Meat The Tellers Hands Full of Ink Alex Theory Light Alex Theory Water Thieves and Villains South America Tiger’s Jaw Tiger’s Jaw Steve Turre Delicious and Delightful United Audio Singers Happy Toddler Tunes Various Artists Detroit’s Golden Soul Various Artists Horse Meat Disco 2 Various Artists Next Stop Soweto Vol. 3 Various Artists Simply Buddhist Meditation Various Artists Simply Funk Various Artists Simply Relaxation Various Artists Simply Rock ‘N’ Roll Various Artists Simply Spa Chill Various Artists Simply Wellness Various Artists Simply Western Film Themes Various Artists Sweet Slumbers Various Artists Ultimate Big Band Collection Versus On the Ones and Threes Voices of the Valleys Voices of the Valleys Votum Metafiction Doug Walker What Heaven Sees in You Wavves King of the Beach T West / T Cashman Hometown Frolics/Terry Cashman Bobby Womack Check It Out: The Best Of Wretched Beyond the Gate Yardbirds Shape of Things: The Best of the Yardbirds AUGUST 10

(Sic)monic 10 Ft. Ganja Plant 54-40 Jan Akkerman Akurat Alamance Alessi Harold Alexander Bernard Allison

Somnambulist 10 Deadly Shots Vol. 1 54-40 3 Optymistyka In the Moment Long Time Friends Raw Root The Otherside

Queens of the Stone Age aug 3

Rated R Deluxe Edition QOTSA’s first breakthrough gets the double-disc reissue package, complete with demos and live recordings and a lock of Nick Oliveri’s goatee. (At least we think/hope it’s from his goatee.) A decade later, Rated R is both the cleanest-sounding (that silvery guitar tone so unlike earlier and later Josh Homme projects) and most user-friendly QOTSA album (50 percent less screaming and murk, guaranteed). Plus the most tender tune the band ever recorded in form of “In the Fade,” which sounds like it wandered over from a really boss grunge comp, but no complaints. Interscope Forging the Land of Thousand David Amram Latin-Jazz Celebration Amsterdam Amsterdam Analogue Transit ATR Angel Hair Pregnant With the Senior Class Angelfire Angelfire Anvil Past & Presence Live Julian Arguelles Momenta Ark Wild Untamed Imaginings Armagedon Death Then Nothing Artrosi Con Trust Ayatollah Live From the MPC 60 Barnaby Bye Room to Grow Barnaby Bye Touch Beggars & Thieves Beggars & Thieves Beggars & Thieves Look What You Create Beherit Warriors of Black Metal Bennebox 7 Bozes for LB Bethlehem Dictius Te Necare Big Sandy & Fly Rite ... Flly Right With Big Sandy & Fly Rite Boys Bizzy Bone Crossroads 2010 The Black Label Soc Order of the Black Sarah Blasko As Day Follows Night Blasters Blasters Blasters Hard Line Blasters Non Fiction Blind Illusion The Sane Asylum Blood of Kingu Sun in the House of the Scorpion Marc Bolan & T. Rex The Electric Boogie 1971 Bonded by Blood Exiled to Earth Bourbon Crow Highway to Hangovers Brother Clyde Brother Clyde Brown Polswiatlo Buckner & Garcia Pac-Man Fever The Budos Band The Budos Band III Buggirl Dirt in the Skirt Bun B Trill O.G. Swisha Ho Burzum Burzum/Aske Burzum Det Som Engang Var Burzum Filosofem Burzum Hvis Lyset Tar Oss Eric Carmen Eric Carmen/Boats Against the Current Carmero Cat Cats & Clocks Edo Castr Sacred Graffiti Certain General Invisible New York Colossus Drunk on Blood Colour Revolt The Cradle Amorphis

B Guy/J Wells/O Spann Snakebite 5 Viper

Blood of the Earth Honeymoon Suite/Racing After Midnight Honeymoon Suite Singles Hovercraft Pirates When Our Wake Hits Your Shore Hunter Hellwood Hunter Medeis Hunter Requiem Hytest Dishing Out the Good Times Rae Illest The Illness Vol. 1 Iluzjon Silent Andromeda Michael Jackson Do You Remember? Ultimate Steevi Jaimz My Private Hell Jeremiah James Tupel Jay Street Tasty Jelonek Jelonek Jesus on Extasy Beloved Enemy + Bonus Jesus on Extasy Holy Beauty + Bonus Jews & Catholics Inside Norman Johnson If Time Stood Still Jonas Brothers X-posed H Jones/T Flanagan Live in Marciac 1993 Rob Jungklas Mapping the Wreckage Graham Kendrick Very Best of Graham Kendrick Guillermo Klein Domandor De Duellas Alexis Korner Bootleg Him Kottonmouth Jesse Firebocker Kreator Horders of Chaos – Ultra Riot Landing on the Moon We Make History Now Geddy Lee My Favorite Headache Lil Keke Addicted to Fame Remix Lil Tweety Love Poetry Line of Fire Line of Fire Line of Fire Momentum Aynsley Lister Tower Sessions Jeff Lorber Step by Step Lost in the Trees All Alone in an Empty House Loudness Best of Loudness Loudness Masters of Loudness Mademoiselle Karen Attention Magno Greens Point of View Man Ray Summer 88 Melissa Manchester Melissa/Better Days & Happy Endings Dan Mangan Nice, Nice, Very Nice Charles Manson Air Steve Marriott All or Nuffin Mass Angel Power Chris McClarney Defender Megaherz Loblieder: Songs of Praise Memmaker How to Enlist in a Robot Uprising Memphis Slim Legend of the Blues Volumes 1 & 2 Messy Marv Thizz City Metal Music Machine Angels of Destruction Midtown Dickens Oh Yell Dannii Minogue Get Into You Dannii Minogue Love and Kisses Vashawn Mitchell Triumphant Modest Mouse The Moon & Antarctic Mondo Generator Dog Food Mr. Sam Pop Model Negura Bunget Virstele Pamintului Nightlights Long Way Home Liam Noble Brubeck Nobody Lives Forever Cradle Bay None The Rising Daniel O’Donnell Walk Along With Me Roy Orbison The Last Concert David Osmond Road Les Traveled Lee Scratch Perry Revelation John Pinette Show Me the Buffet Pissing Razors Evolution Pissing Razors Live in the Devil’s Triangle Pissing Razors Where We Are From Mike Posner 31 Minutes to Takeoff PVT Church With No Magic Radiosonde Radiosonde Rain Dad Is Dead Raven Soul 100 Bleeding Hearts Lindsey Ray Goodbye From California Rayvon Ryavon Eli “Paperboy” Reed Come and Get It Hawkwind Honeymoon Suite

Squeeze Aug 3

Spot the Difference Re-recording your classic material is a tricky thing. Obsessives will lap up new versions of well-known hits, of course, but the rest of us are usually better off with a band’s bestof collection. Thirty-two years after they first made their mark as new wave’s most classicist duo, Squeeze’s hooks haven’t dulled a bit, which means they survive the transition to 2010 more-or-less intact on Spot the Difference. And if you want to hear what jittery power-pop sounds like smoothed out by a few decades’ worth of maturity, here you go. XOXO

Live Ower, Joy Bourbon River Bank Daddy Lion Land That I Love Live Over Bocholt Paul Davis Planet Botox Harm’s Way Mute Splendido Hotel/Electric Rendezvous Al Di Meola / E Horgas He & Carmen Dick4dick Summer Remains Digit All Love V Dio Evil or Divine Dirt Nasty Nasty as I Want to Be Dive 3D Aura Divinity The Singularity DJ E-Z Rock Spittaz Vol. 1 DJ Screw Forever Kit Downes Golden The Dream Jam Band Leave It in the Soup Dreamend So I Ate Myself George Duke Déjà vu Dusty / Lovenotes What Did You Expect Dwarves Must Die Redux Efy Hymns Efy Hymns Elend The Umbersun Cass Elliot Cass Elliot/Road Is No Place for a Lady Elsinore Yes Yes Yes Enuff Z’Nuff Tonight Sold Out The Faceless Planetary Duality Fingerprints Dream Life Foghat Family Joules Sonny Fortune Infinity Is Sonny Fortune Serengeti Minstrel Sonny Fortune With Sound Reason Connie Francis Sings Jewish Favorites/ Sings Irish Favorites Freebass Two Worlds Collide Frontier(s) There Will Be No Miracles Here Gaither Vocal Band Greatly Blessed Lula Galvao Bossa of My Land Ganxsta N.I.P. Anchor Ganxsta N.I.P. Psych Swag Godflesh Streetcleaner Redux Edition Steve Gulley & Tim Stafford Dogwood Winter Buddy Guy The Blues Biography Coma Complainer / Comp... Corruption Daddy Lion The C Daniels Band Darkness Paul Davis De Van Dead When I Found H Demians Al Di Meola

The Other Woman/Ocean Gypsy Robbie Rivera Juicy Beach Rockabye Baby Lullaby Renditions of Elvis Presley Anni Rossi Heavy Meadow Jeff Rowe Barstool Conversation The Runaways Young and Fast Klaus Schulze La Vie Electronique 3 Klaus Schulze La Vie Electronique 4 Shang-A-Lang Collection Artie Shaw Performance Blake Shelton All About Tonight The Sho Live at the Isle of Wight Julian Siegel Live at the Vortex Gwilym Simcock Blues Vignette Gwilym Simcock Perception Tommy Simms Then e Archers Bowed Matt Skiba Demos Jimmy Smith Respect/Livin’ It Up Snoop Dogg The Lowdown Soundtrack Camp Rock 2: Final Soundtrack Get Carter Soundtrack Scott Pilgrim vs. the World Chris Spedding Just Plu Him In Jon Spencer Blues... Extra Width + Mo’ Width Jon Spencer Blues... Year One Spirit Live From Time Coast Spiritual Beggars Another Way to Shine Spiritual Beggars Mantra III Rick Springfield Wait for Night Starflyer 59 The Changing of the Guard Stornoway Beachcomber’s Windowsill Storys Luck Stray New Dawn/Alive and Giggin’ Street Sweeper Soc... The Ghetto Blaster EP Sundowner We Chase the Waves Swallow Out of the Nest Swallow Swallow T Anti-Matter Poetry Take Only Mountain Tangerine Dream Autumn in Hiroshima Tangerine Dream Springtime in Nagasaki Tangerine Dream Summer in Nagasaki Teasing Lulu Black Summer Templebeat The Grey Space Therapy? High Anxiety Therapy? Never Apologize, Never Explain Billy Thorpe 21st Century Man Thou Summit Thy Disease Anshur-Za Trek Life Everything Changed Nothing Ike & Tina Turner Come Together/Workin’ Together Judie Tzuke Road Noise UFO Beginnings Upon Infliction Inhuman… In Human Various Artists Stereo Hortest Vol. 6 Various Artists Beatlesgrass Various Artists Beginners Guide to Rhythm N Blues Various Artists Deadgrass Various Artists DJ Club Hits Vol. 11 Various Artists Do You Dream? UK Pop & Psychedelia Golden Days of Various Artists Reggae Vol. 1 Various Artists Gospelgrass Various Artists Gotta Have Hits Various Artists Grassroots Various Artists House Anthems 2010 Various Artists Many Hands: Family Music for Haiti Various Artists Miami/Southbeach Tunes Vol. 1 Various Artists New York Blues 1945-1956 Various Artists Next Stop Is Vietnam Various Artists Roots of OK Jazz Various Artists Rough Guide to Desert Blues Various Artists Rough Guide to Paris Café (Second Edition) Various Artists Rough Guide to Salsa Dance (Third Edition) Various Artists Top of House FM Various Artists Top of Tribal House Various Artists Younggrass Vindicator The Antique Witcheri Waking the Cadaver Beyond Cops. Beyond God Renaissance

needle

/music /new_releases Huw Warren Wednesday 13 Ween Stevie Woods Stevie Woods Stevie Woods Neil Young The Young Punx

Hermeto Bloodwork EP Quebec Attitude Take Me to Your Heaven Woman in My Life Neil Young’s Jukebox Mashpop and Punkstep

AUGUST 17

Cowboy’s Back in Town Fight the Frequency World in Decline Who Is This America? Philophobia The Week Never Starts Around Here Bitcrush From Arcs to Embers Bucket & Co. Guitars, Beers & Tears The Burial The Winepress BXI Boris & Ian Astbury Camu Tao King of Hearts Chief Modern Rituals Ciara Basic Instinct Darker My Love Alive as You Are Benjy Davis Project The Angie House/More Than Local Matthew Dear Black City Dollyrots Little Messed Up Downspirit Point of Origin Drivan Disko Filter The Trouble With Angels Joe Firstman Live at the Treehouse M Franti & Spearhead Power to the Peaceful 2005 (CD/DVD) Peter Goloub Countdown to Zero David Gray Foundling Greenskeepers Live Like You Wanna lIve Hambone Conflagrations Hanson & Davis Can’t Stop Hellsent False Profit Heroes & Sweetheart Heroes & Sweethearts Conrad Herwig The Latin Side of Herbie Hancock Hey Monday Beneath It All Hostage Calm Hostage Calm INXS Platinum: Greatest Hits Iron Maiden The Final Frontier Kaskade Kaskade Presents Electric Daisy Carnival Sada Minran Kaur Huna Kem Intimacy King of Asgard Fi’mbulvntr Knights of theabyss The Culling of Wolves Korzus Discipline of Hate Kottonmouth Kings Present D-Loc Made for Kings R Lamontagne/Pariah... God Willin’ & The Creek Don’t Rise Charlie Landsborough Movin’ On & Smile Charlie Landsborough Still Can’t Say Goodbye/ Once in a While The Last Felony Too Many Humans Laya Project A New Day: Laya Project Remixed Lights Out Asia In the Days of Jupiter Lissie Catching a Tiger Ludo Prepare the Preparation The McClymonts Chaos & Bright Lights Megan McCormick Honest Words John Mellencamp No Better Than This Ministry Mixxxes of the Mole Miss May I Monument Morbid Carnage Night Assassins Nazareth Fool Circle Nazareth Malice in Wonderland NOFX The Longest EP Orbs Asleep Next to Science Poem Enough Conflict Retaliation Seven Return to Earth Automata Riotgod Riotgod Duke Robillard Passport to the Blues Salem Playing God and Other Short Stories Peter Salett Addicted to Distraction Trace Adkins American Hi-Fi Antagonist Antibalas Arab Strap Arab Strap

needle

Secret Handshake Night & Day Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin Let It Sway Soundtrack Charlie St. Cloud Soundtrack Dexter Season 4 Soundtrack Dinner for Schmucks Soundtrack Nanny McPhee Returns Soundtrack Piranha 3D Soundtrack The Switch L Stevens & Badgers Roomful of Smoke Superchunk No Pocky for Kitty Superchunk On the Mouth T.I. King Uncaged Taking Back Sunday Live From Orensanz Tallest Trees Ostrich or the Lark Third Day Offerings Box Set Phil Thornton Rhythm of the Rainforest Toadies Feeler TTransit Keep This to Yourself Antonia Trinchera Voce Falena Various Artists Latest & Greatest Women of Song Junior Vasquez Junior’s Nervous Breakdown 2 Kenny Werner No Beginning, No End Shannon Whitworth Water Bound Brian Wilson Reimagines Gershwin AUGUST 24

Strange Weather, Isn’t It? Beechcraft Bonanza/Frutti Di Bosco Apocalyptica 7th Symphony Ashtones Mainline Rocket Chris August No Far Away Bad City Welcome to the Wasteland Bad Days Eat My Luck Bad Machine Surfin’ in the City Barb Barb The Bartley Brothers Hit the Road Blackhawk Greatest Hits Live James Blackshaw All Is Falling Blu Her Favorite Colo(u)r The Boxer Rebellion Exits The Boxer Rebellion Union Building 429 Top 10 Hannibal Buress My Name Is Hannibal Kate Bush Aerial The Capstan Shafts Revelation Skirts J Casin’s Easy Action We’ve Forgotten More Than You’ll Ever Know Chillihounds Welcome to the Show Margaret Cho Cho Dependent Christian Mistress Agony & Opium Chuckies Chuckies Gabriele Coen Awakening Paul Collins King of Power P John Coltrane Definitive Elvis Costello Pomp & Pout Cotton Jones Tall Hours in the Glowstream Cowboy Prostitutes Swingin’ at the Fences Beverly Crawford Live From L.A. Vol. 2 Dead Confederate Suger Devil Wears Prada Zombie EP Deviltones Riding the High Horse Dorrough Get Big Mason Douglas My Wild Heart D Douglas & Keystone Spark of Being: Expand R Earl / Broadcasters Spread the Love Eels Tomorrow Morning M Ehrlich & H Netsky Fables Electric Frankenstein & Bad Dog Boogie Doctor Frankendragster Cesaria Evora The Essential Cesaria Evora Fantasia Back to me Fitz & The Tantrums Pickin’ Up the Pieces Flashfalcon Voracious Appetite Venomous Bite For All Those Sleeping Cross Your Fingers Bill Frisell Beautiful Dreamers S Gainsbourg/J Birkin Jane Birkin/Serge Gainsbourg Gappy Ranks Put the Stereo On Gaza Strippers From the Desk of Dr. Freepill The Golden Dawn Power Plant Goldmund Famous Places Natalie Grant Love Revolution !!! Accidents

Lee “Scratch” Perry aug 10 Revelation

Lee Perry produced some of the most epochal reggae of the late ’60s and ’70s. Collected on compilations like the over-stuffed Arkology and albums like Super Ape, Perry’s dub experiments—where everything, except the bass, is twisted out of shape with echo—are some of the strangest sorta-pop songs ever recorded. Perry’s albums from the ’80s onward have been spotty to say the least, and Revelation is no different. Flashes of his early genius appear, but they’re often lost in a parade of guest stars paying tribute to a one-time game-changer. Megawave Past Time Georgia Warhorse Live From the Heart of Eruope Heads Relaxing With the Heads Highschool Lockers Neverending Party Hi-Power Entertainment Presents Cholos N THugz Billie Holiday The Lady Sings Lena Horne The Essential Lena Horne: The RCA Years Ill Bill & Buggs Kill Devil Hills Intelligence Males Dee Jaywalker 59 O’Clock Al Jolson Performance 1932-49 Kani Rockabeast Tamar Kaprelian Sinner or a Saint Katatonia Night is the New Day (Special Edition) KRS-On & True Master Meta-Historical Rachael Lampa Top 10 Land of Talk Cloak & Cipher Brad Laner Natural Selections J Langford & Skull... Old Devils Dylan Leblanc Paupers Field M.G. Lederman What If’s & Bad Memories Brenda Lee Songs of Inspiration Lime Spiders Live at the Esplanade Limes Rhinestone River Nils Lofgren I Came to Dance Love Injections Trees on a Hill Walter Lure Live in Berlin Lustkillers Black Sugar Session Barbara Lynn It Ain’t No Good to Be Good Henry Mancini The Essential Henry Mancini Magic Kids Memphis Man’s Gin Smiling Dogs Maple Bee Chasing Eva The Marsalis Family Music Redeems Maximum Balloon Maximum Balloon Dannii Minogue The 1995 Sessions Lana Mir Lana Mir Mochines Eagle Has Landed Mogwai Special Moves (CD/DVD) Thelonious Monk Definitive Paula Morelenbaum & SWR Big Band Bossarenova Nicole Mullen Top 1-0 Charlie Musselwhite The Well Nazi Dogs Old Habits Die Hard Grass Widow JJ Grey & Mofro Guido’s Orchestra

Wildbirds/Peacedrums Rivers Willie Will The High Life Hank Williams Hillbilly Hero Wine-O Wine-O Wolfpack Party Pack Brittney Wright The Beginning Y’anna Promise John Zorn Filmworks XXIV The Nobel Prizewinner

My Bloody Valentine aug 24

Isn’t Anything and Loveless These remasters have been promised for-freaking-ever, so don’t be surprised if they don’t hit stores on the 24th of this month. But if they do: Hooray? These two shoegaze masterpieces are so much about sound— the obsessively fiddled-with guitar textures that drove MBV leader Kevin Shields barmy—that a remaster could either massively improve them (they’ve always sounded a bit dim) or massively screw everything up (digital technology has not been kind to nuance). Either way, they’ll at least be worth previewing, and if Shields pulls it off, there’ll no better time to get acquainted (or reacquainted) with MBV. Sony/BMG

Rotten Make Up Supermagique Performance Jesu: Pale Sketches Demixed David Phelps Top 10 Popzillas Tu E L’Estate (Punk Rock Baby) Press Play NY2LA Ra Ra Riot The Orchard Rickolus Youngster Kerrie Roberts Kerrie Roberts Randy Rogers Band Burning the Day Sonny Rollins Definitive Jimmy & David Ruffin I Am My Brother’s Keeper Salvador Top 10 Shontelle No Gravity Buedi Siebert Pyramid Call Sixpence None/Richer Top 10 Ricky Skaggs Mosaic Skinny Bones/Gone... Shot My TV Soap & Skin Lovetune for Vacuum Soundtrack Cats & Dogs: Revenge Soundtrack Lost: Final Season Soundtrack Tudors Season 3 Stargazer Great Work of Aes Stellar Kart Top 10 Sweetbacks Sweetbacks The Sword Warp Riders Terrapin Pond Hello All Stations Things Some Kind of Kick Thorn Starr/Galaxies Anthology Travis Tritt Top 10 Usher Raymond v. Raymond Usher Versus Townes Van Zandt Texas Troubadour Various Artists 10 Top Choirs V4 Various Artists Bloody War: Songs Various Artists Going the Distance Various Artists Moses Tyson Jr. Various Artists R&B Hits in Reg Vol. 4 Various Artists Roots of the Rolling Stones Various Artists Seehorn Soul Farm Various Artists The Engine Room: A History of Jazz Drum Jaci Velasquez Top 10 Venetian Snares My So-Called Life Clay Walker Christmas Clay Walker Top 10 Dale Watson Carryin’ On Nova Aschere Pacifka Patti Page Pale Sketcher

AUGUST 3

Feeding the Wolves Icon Adams Icon Cannonball Adderley Jazz Manifesto Gary Allan Icon Kyle Andrews Kangaroo Atom Smash Love Is in the Missile Patti Austin Every Home Should Have One The Autumn Offering The Autumn Offering Rob Baird Blue Eyed Angels Bobby Bare Jr. A Storm – A Tree – My Mother’s Head Harry Belafonte Best of Harry Belafonte Doug Benson Hypocritical Oaf Big Pokey Warning Shot Acker Bilk Stranger on the Shore Ryan Bingham Junky Star Boss Hogg Outlawz Present J-Dawg Boss Hogg Outlawz Present J-Dawg Brackles Songs for Endless Cities Vol. 1 Carl Broemel All Birds Say James Brown Icon Jonathan Butler Faith, Love & Joy Katie Cadence On the Wings of an Angel Cam’ron & Vado Gunz N’ Butta Johnny Cash Icon Cephalic Carnage Misled by Certainty Chocolate Genius Inc Swansongs Patsy Cline Icon Scott Colley Empire Comeback Kid Symptoms + Cures The Contortionist Explanet The Cranberries Icon Miles Davis Bitches Brew (Legacy Edition) Issac Delgado L-O-V-E Denouncement Pyre World Cremation Detboi Curse of the Voodoo Drums Devil’s Brigade Devil’s Brigade Disturbed Asylum Micky Dolenz King for a Day Dorrough Get Big Dr. Elmo Bluegrass Christmas Drunken Bastards Horns of the Wasted For Today Breaker Marvin Gaye Icon Vince Gill Icon Goo Goo Dolls Something for the Rest of Us Jarrod Gorbel Devil’s Made a New Friend Heart Red Velvet Car Hero Destroyed Throes Hole Icon Hoobastank Icon Israel Houghton Love God Love People Inquisition Into the Infernal Regions of the Ancient Interment Into the Crypts of Blasphemy Jackson 5 Icon Rick James Icon Roy Jay Fairfax Avenue Lyfe Jennings Sooner or Later Jenny and Johnny I’m Having Fun Now Alain Johannes Park The John Henrys White Linen Stuart Jones Touched by Angels Joshua’s Trop Troop Nation Arika Kane Arika Kane Kane & Abel Back on Money Sammy Kershaw Better Than I Used to Be Kimber’s Men Shanties & Songs of the Sea Kingston Trio Best Of Kingston Trio Kiss Icon Gladys Knight Icon 10 Years Abba Bryan

Njod Shakuhachi Water Meditations Gerald Levert The Best of Gerald Levert Lexia Eyes Set to Kill Present Lil C H-Town Chronic 4 Lynyrd Skynyrd Icon Marianas Trench Fix Me Marianas Trench Masterpiece Theatre Rebecca Martin When I Was Long Ago Spoek Mathambo Mshini Wam McGuffey Lane 10 Nils Petter Molvaer Hamada Alan Moore Unearthing Cory Morrow Brand New Me Motorhead Icon Murderdolls Women and Children Last Nighfall Astron Black and the Thirty Tyrants No Doubt Icon Nosound Sol29 Junko Onishi Baroque Orig Cast Recording Good Ol’ Girls The Other New Blood Buck Owens All Time Greatest Hits Papa Roach Time for Annihilation Danilo Perez Providencia Lee Scratch Perry & the Upsetters Sound System Scratch Chico Pinheiro There’s a Storm Inside Ponderosa Moonlight Revival Portico Quartet Isla Profanatica Disgusting Blasphemies Against God Prosanctus Inferi Pandemonic Ululations of Versperic Palpitations Quest for Fire Lights From Paradise Calvin Richardson America’s Most Wanted Smokey Robinson Icon D Ross / Supremes Icon The Royal Arch Blas... The Royal Arch Blaspheme Rush Icon Antonio Sanchez Live in New York Boz Scaggs Moments (Deluxe Edition) BozScaggs Other Roads (Deluxe Ed) J Schwarz-Bart Rise Above Secret Agent 23 Skid... Underground Playground Phii Selway Familial John Serrie Christmas Prayers Shadowarden Ashen Amanda Shaw Good Southern Girl Oli Silk All We Need Brian Simpson South Beach Frank Sinatra September of My Year Sahara Smith Myth of the Heart Sonny & The Sunsets Tomorrow Is Alright Stereoside Stereoside Street Dogs Street Dogs Styx Icon Tarja What Lies Beneath The Temptations Icon Ten Kens For Posterity Richard Thompson Dream Attic Three Dog Night Icon Tiesto Kaleidoscope Remixed Tristania Rubicon Tub Ring Secret Handshakes Turnpike Troubadours Diamonds & Gasoline Chucho Valdes Chucho’s Steps Richie Valens La Bamba Various Artists 100 Beats: African Various Artists Hair Metal Live Various Artists Hollywood Rocks! Audio Companion Various Artists Real Wild Child Various Artists World Travels Abigail Washburn City of Refuge The Weepies Be My Thrll Kirk Whalum Everything Is Everything Barry White Icon Jonalee White Sugar Don Williams Icon Within the Ruins Invade Woe Is Me Number(s) Stevie Wonder Icon The Word Alive Deceiver Trisha Yearwood Icon You, Me and Everyone We Know Some Things Don’t Wash Out Young Jeezy TM 103 Leaves Eyes Riley Lee

needle

the new album

TEENAGE DREAM available August 24 4

needle

features the single