January Needle by Gary Hammerschlag

the highly anticipated and critically acclaimed new album from the most exciting name in electronic music

out now ON TOUR: Kelowna, Dec 29th | Edmonton, Dec 31st

ultrarecords.com deadmau5.com

Grammy award winninG Producer ONE MORE LOVE: his 8 hottest sinGles! featurinG the brand new hit: whoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s that chicK (feat. rihanna) as well as the #1 hits: seXy bitch (feat aKon), when loVe taKes oVer (feat Kelly rowland), memories (feat. Kid cudi), Gettinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; oVer you (feat. chris willis, ferGie, lmfao) and the fmif remiX of i Gotta feelinG by the blacK eyed Peas

aVailable january 25th davidguetta.com

emimusic.ca

$8.99 each CD

Quantities limited. Sale in effect until February 1, 2011.

EMI_DGuetta_HPv_Needle.indd 1

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> music 16 Decemberists Rural simplicity shines on The King is Dead 18 Daft Punk Harder better solar sailers 20 Jimi Hendrix A torrent of new releases 22 Gregg Allman Alive, well and relevant 24 Not Quite Alt-Country Outlaw wailers south of heaven 26 Cee Lo Naughty boys need love, too

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30 Sleigh Bells

The Brooklyn-based duo make noise on our year-end list

> year-end

> green mind

28 Top 15 Albums Where we were while you were getting high

6 Carfree Cities How two heels beat four wheels in York and Venice

40 The Year in Review Michaelangelo Matos power-blurbs the past and future 44 Top DVDs Seven examples of the anti-Avatar

10 The Green Mind Guide A brief look at how you can get started in the world of sustainable living 14 Food Safety FDA reform reaches a critical crossroads 15 Story of Electronics Stuffed with stuffing and other stuff

> movies 47 Restrepo Soldiering on through a dizzying, aimless war 48 Videodrome Long live David Cronenberg’s queasy examination of the new flesh 50 Alan Rudolph Nobody juggles agony and ecstasy like the Trouble in Mind auteur 52 Pretty Great Performances There’s no replicating Rutger Hauer’s iconic Blade Runner turn 54 Red More than just a guilty pleasure

PEARL JAM LIVE ON TEN LEGS

Pearl Jam kickstart their 20th year with a classic-packed new live compilation album. 18 captivating versions of Pearl Jam’s landmark tracks recorded between 2003-2010. DELUXE BOXSET VERSION ALSO AVAILABLE

AVAILABLE 1/18/11

Includes ‘Shake Me Down’

AVAILABLE 1/11/11

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Carfree, Carefree

Advocate Joel Crawford wants us to ditch the autos by Tim McCullough

he city of York, England predates

the car. With its design and architecture well-preserved, many of its narrow streets are touched only by the treads of bike tires and the soles of shoes. It was within the city’s center—where 2,000 years of history mesh with the present—that the ninth annual Towards Carfree Cities Conference took place. Over the course of six days, people shared their ideas for reducing car-dependency, while enjoying biking and walking tours of the city. American-born writer Joel Crawford was one of those people. ¶ “We may see a continuing economic decline, or it could be news about the environment that is going to force some very radical changes,” says Crawford, author of Carfree Cities. “We are going to need to look to the past to see the way to do things in the future.” 6

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Crawford and other advocates see the car and its massive infrastructure as the source of many urban ills. They propose we build cities for people, not cars. To achieve this end, Crawford has authored two books and published 14 years worth of newsletters. “The conviction that urban cars and trucks are wrecking global ecosystems and destroying our communities finally drove me to develop a design for carfree cities,” he explains. From an American point of view, a city not built around cars is a strange thing. Even our urban centers with relatively extensive public transportation systems—like New York or Chicago—are slashed through with major highway systems that stamp out pedestrian street travel and encourage car-depen-

dence for residents. Vast parking lots and towering garages clutter the landscape. Big box stores catering to out-of-town left Traffic on the streets in shoppers (drivers) have replaced locally-owned mom and Barcelona, Spain. pop stores. Crawford argues that cities explicitly designed below A quiet street in carfree for car-dominance (including Los Angeles and Houston) Venice, Italy. are nearly hopeless. “Transportation structure determines and dominates land use,” he says. “As long as cars occupy urban space, you can’t achieve decent urbanism.” Socially speaking, he has a strong argument. A study done by Joshua Hart at the University of West England found “a dramatic decrease in the social life of streets with heavy motor traffic.” The 2008 study conducted in Bristol involved interviews with 60 households. They found that the average person on a street with heavy car traffic claimed to have less than one-quarter the number of local friends and half the number of local acquaintances as their neighbors on streets with light car traffic. The people on streets with light traffic also reported having a sense of personal responsibility for an area much larger than their

counterparts on heavily trafficked streets. The Hart study reaffirmed what a host of American and European studies from the late 1960s and ’70s first indicated about the car’s deleterious effects on society. A nearly identical study was performed in San Francisco in 1972, with strikingly similar results. Research from that era helped form the roots of today’s anti-car movement. In a particularly colorful example from 1975, an Austrian civil engineer, Hermann Knoflacher, donned a set of wooden boards the size of a car, called it the Walkmobile, and took to the streets. The stunt, performed to draw attention to the vast amount of space devoted to cars, was a hit and replicated throughout Europe and parts of Asia. Crawford, who currently resides in Ulster County, New York, is working on a new project. He recently stumbled upon a vacant area of land in Philadelphia. “We were looking at Google maps and said, ‘well, look at that,’” he recalls. He found approximately 220 acres along the Schuylkill that were vacant, formerly part of a municipal gas works. He wants to turn the area into a carfree neighborhood. The space is ideal because of the railroad line running through its center, its proximity to Philadelphia’s downtown and its size, which is big enough to support residents’ daily necessities. Crawford didn’t catch the carfree bug overnight. It was a slow progression, filled with periods of regular car use. His spent some time Carfree Cities is working at the New Jersey available now from International Books. Department of Transportation, a natural fit for his fascination with public transportation. In wasn’t until 1987 that he first asked himself if carfree cities were possible. “Then the final piece of the puzzle was my trip to Venice,” he says. Venice is, indeed, a completely carfree city (though not free of motorized boats). Its streets and buildings are laid out on a small, walkable scale—it is a pedestrian’s paradise. Crawford gets a bit of excitement in his voice when he talks about the Italian metropolis. Venice is comparable to the center of York. Both are old cities that were not rebuilt for the needs of cars. Because of this, they both have thriving street life. In the foreword to Crawford’s Carfree Cities, James Kunstler describes that vibrancy as “the spark of life.” An authentic city, he says, like a body, adds up to more than the sum of its parts. needle

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NINE INCH NAILS PRETTY HATE MACHINE: 2010 Remaster “With this long-awaited remaster, the record never sounded scarier or funkier.” – ROLLING STONE “… it's pretty striking to go back to that seismic first strike and re-feel all the stuff we first felt hearing this thing.” – PITCHFORK needle

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gardening/farming

transportation food

energy

resources

The

Green Mind Guide

A brief guide to sustainable living and how you can get involved

very month we throw you into the world of Green Mind.

For six issues now, we’ve brought you interviews with public transportation advocates, urban gardeners, compositing gurus and more. Our D.I.Y. column has offered specific projects—from fixing a flat bike tire to building an irrigation system—designed to make your life a little more green-friendly. We’ve looked at books and movies and blogs and musicians devoted to environmental issues. Green Mind is designed to expose Needle readers—presumably music fans hoping to read about new records—to stories about the green movement and ideas for sustainable living. ¶ With that in mind, we’ve put together this little Green Mind guide. Broken into four sections— food, gardening, transportation and energy—we’ve included a variety of resources to help readers begin to incorporate sustainable practices into their daily lives. (There’s also a brief look at where you can find more info about green ideas, from books to blogs.) “Sustainable practices” may sound kind of dry, but trust us: When you’re elbow deep in soil, or biting into an organic tomato 24 hours after it came off the vine, you’ll realize how much fun (and pleasure) there is in going green.

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FOOD One of the easiest ways to hook someone on the

value of sustainability is with food. Everyone eats, and everyone presumably wants to eat something fresh and delicious. But sustainable farming is about more than just the quality of the food. (Though, yes, an organic, handmade cheese is going to taste better than the kind where the slices come individually wrapped in plastic.) It’s also about supporting small-scale, local farmers. Industrial farming, which provides us with most of our food, is resource-intensive. It relies on pesticides to boost yields, and those shipping trucks burn a lot of fuel taking tomatoes from one state to another. Not only do local farms produce tastier food, but their products are often safer and their working methods less wasteful.

Small farmers are also deeply tied to the local economy, rather than reporting to corporate shareholders. Feeding their neighbors, they’re community businesses in the best sense. The quickest way to get involved with local farms, and to radically change your grocery-buying habits, is to join a community-sponsored agriculture organization. A CSA provides a direct relationship between a farmer and his or her customers. Consumers pledge a certain level of economic support for an individual farm, and then receive regular shipments (weekly is most common) of what the farm is producing that season. For some CSAs, that means just fruits and veggies, but others also offer meat, dairy, even bread. The CSA setup means that consumers are on the hook as much as farmers if crops fail or yields are low. It also means you won’t be getting cucumbers if they’re out of season or not grown in your area. But it’s the most direct way to support local farmers and make sure you’re getting the freshest food. Local Harvest (localharvest.org/csa), a website devoted to sustainable farming, offers a searchable database of hundreds of CSAs across the country, along with tips on what to look for when choosing a CSA. You can search by city or zip code to find a CSA in your area. If you’re not quite ready to take the CSA plunge, farmers’ markets are the next best thing. Most local farms sell at farmers’ markets, and you’ll be able to buy what you want, when you want. (Again, as long as it’s in season.) Local Harvest also has a searchable database of farmers’ markets (localharvest.org/ farmers-markets/) so you can find the market closest to you.

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GARDENING /FARMING But what if you want to grow your own food?

If you’ve got a backyard, obviously you’re in luck. Planting a garden takes work, but it’s the best kind of work since you get to eat the end results. If you live in a city—or if you live in the suburbs, but don’t have a patch of soil to call your own—you might think you need to put your dreams of overalls and seed packets on hold.

Thankfully, community gardening/farming is enjoying a renaissance, with hundreds of community agriculture projects springing up across the country, from rooftop plots to full-scale farms. For urban dwellers, community gardens and farms offer many opportunities you might have thought were only available to people who live in suburban and rural areas: a chance to grow your own food, work with nature, beautify your community and reduce the impact large-scale farms have on the environment. For people who live in lower-income areas, where fresh produce can be harder to come by, community agriculture can become an important way to ensure health and well-being. Most community gardens and farms are always on the lookout for new volunteers. The American Community Garden Association (communitygarden. org) provides a searchable database that lists community agriculture projects in your area. In addition to growing food for the community, many community gardens and farms also provide work opportunities for the homeless and underprivileged. So, even if you’d prefer to offer financial support, rather than literally get your hands dirty, you’ll still be helping individuals in need. If you’re feeling really industrious, you can even set up your own community garden. There are tips at the ACGA website on how to get started.

TRANSPORTATION Transportation is a huge yearly expense, but switching to mass transit can save you thousands of dollars per year while reducing your carbon footprint in the process. And if you think your daily destination, whether it’s work or school, isn’t accessible by public transportation, you might be surprised. The American Public Transportation Association provides a clickable map on its website (publictransportation.org), which allows you to see what public transportation options are available in your area. Many businesses and schools offer programs that reimburse workers and students who use public transport; there are also tax credits available for those who choose mass transit over driving. Information about these programs can also be found at the APTA’s website. One of the best ways to cut down on your transportation budget and reduce your carbon footprint is to start biking. A bicycle is an inexpensive investment, and the only fuel it requires is the food and water you consume. Bike clubs are a great way to get involved with your local two-wheeled community, from planned rides to bike advocacy to lobbying local and national politicians to improve bike lanes and paths. The League of American Bicyclists (bikeleague.org) has a searchable database that will help you find a bike club, bike shop or advocacy group in your area. 12

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MORE INFO The “environmental” section in most bookstores

ENERGY Want to change a green skeptic’s mind? Just start talking about

the cost of keeping warm in the winter. High utility bills are one issue that unites everybody. There are the simple ways to cut down on your energy use, of course: Unplug appliances when you’re not using them. Turn down the thermostat. Switch to energy-efficient lighting. You can also recycle your older appliances—especially larger and more energy-intensive appliances like air conditioners and dishwashers—and buy newer models that comply with the Department of Energy’s Energy Star guidelines. Energy Star’s website (energystar. gov) has information on properly recycling appliances and electronics, along with tools to help you find a recycling center in your area. One big way to lower your monthly utility bills is to conduct a home energy audit, which is a series of tests, conducted either by yourself or a professional, to determine just how much energy you use every month. But if you have an older home, or exceptionally high bills, you may need a professional’s help. The Energy Star website also allows you to search for a contractor in your area that’s licensed to perform an energy audit. There are also financial benefits beyond your monthly bill when it comes to lowering your energy consumption. Federal, state and local government agencies, along with some utility companies, offer a wide variety of energy-related rebates for conservation-conscious consumers. The Database of State Incentives for Renewables and Efficiency (dsireusa.org/) is an easy way to see what incentives and tax credits are available in your area for making your home more energy-efficient, switching to renewable energy sources like solar or building a new green home from scratch.

is seriously overcrowded at the moment. “Green” is currently hot, and so there’s been a flood of cashin books over the last few years. It’s hard to tell the worthwhile reads from the folks chasing a buck until the next trend shows up. We’ve reviewed several excellent green-themed books in our most recent issues, including a few, like Bill McKibben’s Eaarth and Vandana Shiva’s Soil Not Oil, that belong in any library. McKibben and Shiva provide a broader overview of the current state of the planet and ideas for how to extend sustainability into the future. Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma remains an impassioned, witty and rigorously researched look at how our diets have changed from the days of hunter-gatherers to our current industrialized dinners. And Amanda Little’s The Omnivore’s Power Trip is broad canvas look Dilemma by Michael Pollan at America’s over-reliance on non-renewable energy along with possible prescriptions for weaning ourselves off our dependency on fossil fuels. In Eaarth, McKibben suggests that the internet has been one of the biggest boons to the green movement in the last 15 years. He’s right. There are now hun- Power Trip by dreds of websites—from radical Amanda Little sustainability message boards to green blogs run by mainstream newspapers—that offer environmental news, interviews with activists, how-to tips and more. A good place to start is Grist (grist.org), a longrunning blog that has attracted some of the best environmental writers out there. Grist offers everything from essays by leading scientists to daily news coverage of environmental stories (like this summer’s oil spill off the Gulf Coast) and humor pieces designed to leaven the serious stuff. If you prefer something a little more straight-laced, there’s also the Green Blog at the New York Times (green.blogs. newyorktimes.com), which relies on the in-depth reportorial power of the Paper of Record to cover a wide range of environmental topics.

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There is no single agency in charge of protecting the safety of our food. The USDA handles meat, poultry and egg safety, while the FDA handles pretty much everything else, including milk, cheese, processed food and produce. A product can start under USDA responsibility and move over to FDA’s purview while being processed into its final form. It might help if both agencies involved in protecting our food had the power to keep tainted food off store shelves. Little known fact: the FDA does not have the ability to call for a mandatory recall of tainted or unsafe food. It must rely on the companies selling the stuff to do the right thing. Making matters worse, the agency can and does go years Our nation’s food safety system is broken, between inspections of food makers’ facilities. But but help might be on the way / by Tom Laskawy that’s what happens when you leave a law in place for 72 years; food safety laws in this country haven’t been substantially revised since the ainted peanut butter from a single plant contaminates Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1938. thousands of products and kills over half a dozen people. Right now, Congress is enmeshed in an News of E. coli-tainted spinach, lettuce and even sprouts update to patch some holes in our food safehas become routine. Millions—yes, millions—of pounds ty net. And while many food safety experts of tainted meat have been recalled this year alone. Half maintain that only a single agency can really a billion—yes, billion—salmonella-tainted eggs were do the job, turf battles and political realities suggest that such radical reform isn’t in the sold before federal officials managed to shut down the offending cards. The reform is focused for the most megafarm. ¶ It’s not an exaggeration to report that we have a part on increasing FDA powers over recalls broken food safety system. Nor should it be a surprise to anyone and inspections, as well as increasing rewho reads the news. What may come as a surprise is that we have sponsibilities for producers to track their what is in essence a voluntary, fractured system. If any govern- ingredients and products in case of a problem. For much of the debate, there has been ment policy screams out for reform, it’s this one. broad agreement between retailers, large food companies and consumer groups, and the bill has strong bipartisan support—no one, it turns out, likes unsafe food. But somewhere along the way, a chasm opened up in the debate between large pro-

Healthy Choice

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ducers on one side and small producers and farmers on the other that threatens to overturn this fragile consensus and kill reform. Small producers maintain that simply increasing federal safety protocols and reporting requirements could put them out of business. And never mind that a single recall, even if a false alarm, would instantly obliterate a small farmer. They argued that if you were small enough or sold directly to consumers (at a farmers’ market, for example), you should be exempt from any new federal requirements. At the same time, consumer groups didn’t like the idea that anyone should be exempt from federal food safety laws. And living up to their hard-nosed reputation, industrial food giants saw an opportunity to potentially quash a growing threat (i.e. the rising popularity of small producers and direct-to-consumer sales by farmers) in the guise of protecting consumers. A legislative battle royal has been raging ever since. And how will it all turn out? We don’t yet know. With only weeks left and much work on the bill to be done before Congress adjourns until January— when Republicans will officially take over the House of Representatives—it now seems unlikely that the current food safety bill will become law. If Congress fails to act before then, the entire food safety reform process must start over with a much more conservative Congress. Yet the signs are promising. While the House version of the bill lacks explicit protections for small producers, the Senate has incorporated a proposal by Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) that does. And both consumer groups and small farmer groups support it. If the legislative dance can finish before the music stops at the end of this month, we just might get a system everyone can live with. Given the too-frequent tragedies caused by unsafe food, that’s something that we can all cheer, no matter where we shop.

Stuff It

See that new gadget in a fresh light / by Lee Stabert

tereos, CDs, hard drives, TVs, gaming consoles,

iPods, laptops, cell phones—our lives are full of stuff, yet it’s a rare occasion when we stop to wonder where it all came from, or where it goes when we’re done with it. Enter Annie Leonard. She spent over a decade visiting 40 countries, investigating hundreds of factories and assessing the dumps where all that stuff ends up. The culmination of her efforts was a short animated film called The Story of Stuff that crisply educates and disturbs with its dystopian vision of the materials economy. Since its release in December 2007, the video has been viewed online over 12 million times. Now, with help from Electronics TakeBack Coalition, Leonard has released The Story of Electronics, a film that takes specific aim at the “design for the dump” mentality of gadget producers. They make products that are “hard to upgrade, easy to break and impractical to repair.” Of course, that means dollar signs for corporations reliant on the treadmill of consumer culture. The stick figures are adorable, but the message is a reality check. One of the most illuminating moments comes when Leonard tackles electronics recycling, which often involves shipping e-waste to the Far East, where gadgets are gutted for their precious metals and then dumped or burned. Fortunately, she also offers solutions—most of them involving corporate responsibility and government intervention. That might seem like a long shot, but the situation is so dire that change is not just an option, it’s a necessity. storyofstuff.org

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Barn Raising

The Decemberists embrace rural simplicity in The King is Dead

he Decemberists singer-songwriter Colin Meloy

views Neil Young’s 1972 classic, Harvest, as “the quintessential barn record” and used it as one of the blueprints for his band’s sixth and latest album, The King is Dead. One day, it might have a simple a.k.a. — The Barn Record. That was Meloy’s directive to his bandmates and his singular focus when he wrote the follow-up to the 2009’s complex concept album, Hazards of Love, and recorded it in an actual barn. 16

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by Karen Bliss

Was he trying to make a quintessential barn record too? “That’s a little bit much,” he says, preferring to lop off the lofty qualifier “quintessential.” “Yeah, we were trying to make a barn record. And what was funny to us is that we were talking about making a barn record for many years and how you can just say ‘a barn record’ to somebody and they know what it means,” muses Meloy. “It’s gonna have a country vibe to it, but not a Nashville country. It’s gotta have some kind of scrappiness to it; maybe there’s some bleed in the photo by autumn de wilde

tracks and the performances are a little roughshod. And so I think that was sort of code to us for a while. ‘Next record is gonna be the barn record; don’t you worry, it’s going to be the barn record.’” Don’t worry refers to the sigh of relief a barn record would bring after Meloy and the rest of the Portland’s Decemberists — Meloy (vocals, guitars, harmonica, pump organ, percussion), Chris Funk (guitars, pedal steel guitar, banjo, bouzouki), Jenny Conlee (piano, accordion, organ, Wurlitzer electric piano), Nate Query (bass), and drummer John Moen — toured Hazards of Love, a folk to prog-metal pastiche, playing the entire album in order. The Decemberists new bio ably explains how Meloy felt having to play such a musically ambitious album night after night after night. He doesn’t sound as if he was happy with his decision, and calls that last album, “self-destructive,” saying he longed to play “normal” songs again. “I definitely made my bed and I was prepared to lie in it,” says Meloy when asked about his comments. “It was fun committing to that ethos because when I was writing Hazards of Love and pitching the concept not only to my bandmates but other people that work alongside the band, it was sort of self-destructive. There was almost defiance to it. ‘Yeah , it’s gonna be an hour-long piece of music following this storyline built of archetypes from folk songs and when we play it out, we’re going to play it out from start to finish. And if we only have an hour set at a festival, then that’s what we’re gonna play.’ “I was kind of drawing a line in the sand a little bit and I was happy, and then from the very beginning of the concept from when I first started writing it to our last show playing it was probably a two-year period and certainly things change in that time. My attitude changed and my headspace changed, as I expected it would. So I was ready to do something new at the end.” Unlike Hazards of Love’s complex love story involving a woman, a shape-shifting forest dweller, a jealous fairy queen and villainous rake, Meloy claims The King Is Dead’s lyrics “are simple meditations,” based on his environment and his family. But when asked about a few of the songs, they don’t sound simple at all. “Rox In The Box” was his attempt at writing a musical about the fate of the Butte, Montana miners in 1917, when 168

men lost their lives in an explosion. “One of the mantras of the Butte miners at the time was just accept your fate and get the rocks in the box,” Meloy explains. And the first single, “Down By The Water,” is “a dark, boy-meets-gypsy-girl kind of story,” he says, “which is not uncommon in our oeuvre, but I like the idea of the teenage gang descending on some coastal resort town for a summer, and the kind of mayhem that would ensue and the hearts that would be broken. “ After writing and demoing the songs at home, the Decemberists approached Sherry and Scott Pendarvis, who own the 80-acre Pendarvis Farm, in Happy Valley, Oregon. Meloy got married there, but the site is also used for the annual Pickathon indie roots music festival. “It’s a bit of a

“

ally told REM guitarist Peter Buck that he would be ripping off REM on the next album. “I was upfront,” he laughs. “I told him that I was writing basically REM songs and wanted to know if he’d be interested in playing them. And he was totally game.” Buck understands being in that position. “He says himself that every time he sees Roger McGuinn [of The Byrds] he thanks him and apologizes for ripping off everything that he’s done. But it was funny, bringing him over to my house and sitting him down and teaching him these riffs that I’d imagined he would have written anyway.” Buck then went out to the barn one afternoon and banged out his parts, mandolin on the lead track, “Don’t Carry It All,” and guitars on “Calamity Song” and “Down By The Water.”

It’s gotta have some kind of scrappiness to it; maybe there’s some bleed in the tracks and the performances are a little roughshod.” —Colin meloy

hippie farm,” says Meloy. The couple was happy to have the band record there. “We took over a barn that has not been used for barn-y purposes for quite a while. It’s called The Workshop Barn.” And in it the Decemberists worked. Coproducing again with Tucker Martine, they recorded most of the album there over a five-week period in the summer of 2010. They sometimes even camped out, Moen and Funk in actual tents, and Meloy in his camper van, truly getting into the simple rural spirit. “It was pretty immersive,” Meloy says of the process. “The songs were all ready to go by the time we got out there, but that said, there were definitely some changes made on the spot while we were in the barn. If something didn’t really absolutely need to be there in a song, we just chopped it off. That’s not something that I typically do.” Meloy was so sold on the direction of this album, in fact, that when The Decemberists were on The King is Dead will be available tour behind Hazards January 11 from of Love he had actuCapitol Records.

To help complete Meloy’s vision for this album, he invited Gillian Welch to sing on seven of the songs, including “Down By The Water,” “Dear Avery,” “June Hymn” and “Rox In The Box.” Tucker recorded her in Los Angeles when she had a few days off from cutting her own, long-awaited, new album. “We had a good idea of which [songs] would work best [with her],” says Meloy. “We knew that we wanted a lot of them and to have them really pop in the mix. We were following the blueprint of Comes A Time, the Neil Young record with Nicolette Larson, and the Gram Parsons records with Emmylou [Harris]. Those were our blueprints and those often featured that pairing of those two voices throughout the entire record.” The King Is Dead is one of those albums that should stand the test of time: simple, ragged, mellifluous folk-rock with no date stamp. Like REM and Neil Young, whose albums in that vein are classics, Meloy will never look at this decision as self-destructive. “Normal” turned into a wonderful listen. “It’s a testament to my bandmates that they’ve gone along with every kind of curveball I’ve thrown at them,” says Meloy. needle

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Perpetual Future

Soundtrack composers, dance gods, robots—Daft Punk are the decade’s most unlikely icons / by Michaelangelo Matos

n 2001, when Daft Punk released Discovery, few of us who ence. Basement Jaxx’s putative pop smarts

loved it could have imagined how it would thread its way through pop music and pop culture over the next decade. That doesn’t just mean dance music or dance culture. Obviously, the entire French house renaissance begins with the Parisian duo’s late ’90s work. The Ed Banger label picked up on Daft Punk’s blaring Human After All (2006), and DP’s robotic sheen, as well as the unabashed disco feel of “Music Sounds Better With You”—the all-conquering 1998 single by Stardust, a duo featuring Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter—have proven widely influential with DJs.

But it is on bigger stages that Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo have made their impact. Their impeccable live spectacle—playing inside a glowing pyramid, wearing space suits and headgear and refusing to budge from their robot image, the world’s greatest light show—has made them into festival headliners. By all accounts, Daft Punk’s Coachella concert in May of 2006 was a line-in-the-sand moment for a lot of kids who suddenly realized dance music cool again. Beyond that, the entire android renaissance on pop radio—however dubious much of it ultimately is; sorry, Christina— comes down to two things. One, Daft Punk have proven beyond any doubt (not that there was much) that robots are perennially cool. And two, Kanye West tapped them for “Stronger,” the lead single from 2007’s legend-capping Graduation. What’s key here is that West didn’t have to pump it as a collaboration at all. He could just as easily have just paid for the sample (of “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger,” from Discovery) and left it at that. Instead, he 18

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seemed to give them more legs as a singles act, while the Avalanches’ full-length was a more intricate album experience than Daft Punk’s. But the Jaxx have stayed a cult act while the Avalanches have turned into the ’00s version of My Bloody Valentine, forever promising a follow-up that never comes. All three had identifiable production styles that were as important as the instrumentation or vocals, and in having the biggest sound, Daft Punk ensured their posed with the robots for the press and own longevity in a way similar to how Led promoted them as well. Part of it was Zeppelin’s carefully honed sonics kept their catalog selling for decades. undoubtedly West playing up his hipster I hasten to add that the Zeppelin comcredentials—it proved to be one of his canparison isn’t mine—it’s pop critic Matt niest cultural readings—but he was also clearly in awe of the Frenchmen’s massive, Diehl’s. He interviewed Bangalter and de Homem-Christo for Stop Smiling magabeautiful sound. zine a couple years ago, and pointed out So, it’s fitting, in both corporate-synergy and creative-combustion ways, that Daft the similarities in terms of leaving it to the Punk would get the assignment to create iconography to work on the imagination, new music for Tron: Legacy. Remake a film keeping some mystery in the band’s appeal. But there’s another reason the comthat’s a generational touchstone and you’ll spark off a whole lot of fan griping along parison works: Both groups have an outrageous way with a riff, and in the end, riffs “quit stamping on my childhood” lines, but prevail in pop. From the searing give the movie’s producers credit synth line of 1995’s “Da Funk” to for knowing precisely who to hire the burbling bass line of 1997’s for the soundtrack. Daft Punk are “Around the World” to the juicy already burgeoning pop stars; this guitar that drove 2001’s sublime could take them further. “Digital Love,” Daft Punk want Discovery shared its year with to give you every inch of their the Avalanches’ Since I Left You love. Sometimes with a wink, and Basement Jaxx’s Rooty, and all Legacy sure, though you’ll never see three made it onto many of 2001’s Tron: (Soundtrack) their real faces. Some things are year-end critics’ lists. At the time, will be available better that way. it seemed like any of them could December 7 from Walt have crossed over to a bigger audi- Disney Records.

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Experienced Gentleman A welcome surfeit of new Hendrix material continues / by Gary Graff

anie Hendrix remembers, as a child, hanging out with

big brother Jimi—“just being in his presence and playing in his hair.” Nowadays, she’s digging into a different part of her late sibling’s legacy. ¶ As president and CEO of Experience Hendrix LLC, the family-owned company that oversees all things related to the rock guitar hero, Janie oversees a wealth of material and activity that encompasses album releases, films and even the all-star Experience Hendrix Tour. It’s been an active concern since her father, the late Al Hendrix, won back rights to Jimi’s archives during the early ’90s, after an arduous court battle, and Janie takes the charge seriously. “It’s about Jimi and making sure his music lives tions of Jimi Hendrix Experience: BBC Sessions, Jimi Hendrix: Blues and Live on,” she explains. “It’s about protecting Jimi [and] at Woodstock, and the holiday EP Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. his music, continuing his legacy and bringing his “This year has been a very special year,” Janie acknowledges. And future years music to not only fans that exist but to potential new are looking to be just as interesting. fans... and just making sure his music stays as pure In 2011, Experience Hendrix will release a documentary (and companion alas possible.” bum) about his 1969 concerts at London’s Royal Albert Hall, when four cameras Since it was established in 1995, Experience tracked his movements both on and off stage, and even in the apartment where Hendrix has largely focused on one major project he was staying. “It’s kind of a day in the life of Jimi, how we put it together,” says a year, which led to Jimi Hendrix being ranked No. Janie, who hopes to release it theatrically and possibly as a pay-per-view TV 11 on Forbes magazine’s annual list of dead celebrioffering in addition to DVD. And what would have been Jimi Hendrix’s 70th ties with an income of $6 million. But 2010, which birthday in 2012 will be commemorated by a film of his performance at the marked the 40th anniversary of his death—from a 1968 Miami Pop Festival, culled from recently unearthed “pristine” footage drug overdose in London—inspired something of a from the show. motherlode of material. Experience Hendrix is also working with Stephen Stills on a collection of The company started with the March recordings he made with Hendrix, although Stills will produce and release of the rarities set Valleys of Neprelease the project. tune and continued with West Coast SeExperience Hendrix’s vaults, meanwhile, remain a living entity. attle Boy, housing four discs of unreleased “We discover more music all the time,” says Janie, “and people have material and alternate takes, including a possession of tapes that we’re able to retrieve and recover, so new full disc of pre-Experience tracks recordideas are always around.” The company currently has an eight-year ed with Little Richard, the Isley Brothdeal with Sony Music’s Legacy division to distribute its offerings, and ers, Don Covay and others. The box also Janie is confident she’ll fulfill and probably stretch beyond that. West Coast includes the documentary Jimi Hendrix “Who knows what will happen and what we’ll unearth along the Seattle Boy: The Voodoo Child, narrated by Bootsy Collins way,” she says. “We just want to make sure the audience gets to hear Jimi Hendrix and featuring plenty of commentary from as much of the music that we have, and we’re always open to finding Anthology is available now Hendrix himself. whatever else is out there.” from Sony The box set was joined by deluxe ediLegacy. 20

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No Angel Yet

Gregg Allman is alive, well and relevant as ever on Low Country Blues / by Gary Graff

regg Allman has the blues, and he couldn’t be happier. Coming off liver transplant surgery in June—following a long battle with Hepatitis C—Allman is releasing Low Country Blues, his first solo album in 14 years. A rootsmining set produced by T-Bone Burnett, the record finds him covering songs by Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Otis Rush, Skip James, Junior Wells, Lowell Fulson and others along with one original, “Just Another Rider,” that he co-wrote with Allman Brothers Band guitarist (and Gov’t Mule leader) Warren Haynes. No road goes on forever, but Allman’s long and winding path is taking another rewarding twist with this release. First, how are you feeling? And given what you’ve been through, that’s not a lighthearted question. A llman : I’m doing much better. The

road’s a little rougher, and I’m not totally healed yet. But my color’s real good. My energy comes in spurts, and, boy, they’re big ones. Plus, I dropped a bunch of weight; I’m back to 179, 180, and that’s probably my fighting weight. Before, I was, like, 186 to 196; it would fluctuate back and forth. Now it’s great because all your clothes fit just perfect. Low Country Blues was recorded before the surgery, right?

“

Yeah, it was finished December 4 [2009]. I texted Michael [Lehman, his manager] and said, “Man, wait ’til you hear this,” and he kept it. He showed it to me the other day. It was a good thing to heal up for. Just knowing I had this in the can was a great incentive to get well.

I’ll tell ya, I can’t wait to get back in there and cut another one. It seems like for some reason, every time we do a record, it gets your writing juices flowing.”

—Gregg Allman

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How did you hook up with T-Bone Burnett for this?

Low Country Well, since [producer] Blues will be Tommy Dowd died in available January 18 from 2002, I’ve been hopRounder. ing nobody would say “Let’s go record.” I didn’t know who we could use. Tommy Dowd just spoiled all of us. I met [Burnett] in Memphis on the way home from the Brothers’ [2009] summer tour, and one of the first things out of the guy’s mouth was “Tommy Dowd...” Then I heard why he was in Memphis; he was there with two architect friends of his and they were measuring the Sun Records building board by board, and he was going to replicate it right next to his house. And I was like, “Man, that’s the hippest thing I’ve ever heard!” I think that almost sold me right there.

What does the blues mean to you?

Just a settling of the soul, mostly. I get a lot of great satisfaction out of doing that. It’s a challenge. When the Brothers started, we were digging into the blues when everybody else was playing the Top 40—but the places we played would only let us play a very small smattering of it. They’d have a big floodlight turned right on the band, like 3,000 candlepower or something, and if we got too loud or played the wrong song, they would flash it on us and keep it on us until we played something they wanted us to. [Laughs] So, can you promise we won’t have to wait another 14 years for your next album?

I’ll tell ya, I can’t wait to get back in there and cut another one. It seems like for some reason, every time we do a record, it gets your writing juices flowing. That kind of stuff just starts to come forward, so I’m hoping that maybe [for] the next one I can write a bunch of them. photo by danny clinch

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Not Quite Alt-Country

The two genres have been rubbing up against each other, and occasionally mixing, ever since. In the ’60s, Waylon Jennings A new generation of country bands courts rock audiences played the Fillmore Auditorium, home to psychedelic rock acts while keeping one boot planted in tradition / by Phil Freeman like Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead. The Byrds’ Gram ountry was the dark heart of rock ‘n’ roll when ev- Parsons became a revered country singer/ in the ’70s, at the same time eryone was still figuring out if this new music was songwriter artists like Charlie Daniels scored hits that actually going to amount to anything. Elvis Presley can be heard on classic rock radio to this started out as a country artist—there simply was no day. During the ’80s, traditionalists like such thing as rock ‘n’ roll until he (among others) Dwight Yoakam, who played clubs alongside punk bands like X and the Blasters kick-started the genre—and he returned to country early in his career, blurred the lines again. in his final years on albums like Promised Land. Johnny Cash’s In recent years, all sorts of indie rock acts Sun Records singles “I Walk the Line,” “Guess Things Hap- have flirted with country, including Ryan Adams, Wilco, the Drive-By Truckers and pen That Way” and “Ballad of a Teenage Queen” all topped many others. And recently a number of the country charts, but he was accepted into the rock ‘n’ roll country-to-the-bone acts once again seem fold early on, and his late-career American Recordings discs to be making music with equal appeal to rock audiences—sometimes courting the included covers of acts like Nick Cave, Tom Petty, Nine Inch mainstream, but occasionally working in Nails and Soundgarden. much darker, more underground styles.

Montgomery Gentry Vocal duo Eddie Montgomery and Troy Gentry have pumped out six albums since 1999, bleeding heavy pop-rock into their Nashville-honed sound. Their debut album, Tattoos and Scars, exemplified MG’s hard twanging approach, from its title down to the first single “Hillbilly Shoes,” which featured a couple of searing solos you wouldn’t find on a Willie or Waylon album. And their 2002 album My Town concluded with a cover of the latter-day Allman Brothers song “Good Clean Fun.” Eddie Montgomery’s spoken in interRecommended: views about wanting to see the group’s Tattoos & Scars, Some People material on a jukebox alongside Charlie Change Daniels, Merle Haggard, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Bob Seger, hard rock and honky-tonk sharing equal space. “Hey Country” from 2006’s Some People Change slaps quotes from Skynyrd and Hank Williams Jr. over a funk backbeat and metal guitars, with lyrics that include the defiant line, “He’s a hick / Just like me.”

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The Zac Brown Band This Atlanta-based outfit has been touring hard since 2002, recordeding four studio albums, the first two self-released and the last two (plus a live album) on Atlantic Records. They’ve sent multiple singles up the country charts, won Best New Artist at the Grammys and been nominated for a fistful of country awards. But their tour history, their live repertoire and their collaborators suggest a crew of ’70s rock revivalists. ZBB have played the annual Bonnaroo music festival three times, where their sets Recommended: have included versions of Van Morrison’s Pass the Jar Live, “Into the Mystic,” Ryan Adams’ “Come You Get What You Give Pick Me Up” and Bob Marley’s “One Love.” (Yes, they mix country and reggae. Astonishingly, it doesn’t suck.) While they identify as country, anyone and everyone’s welcome at their party. The band’s original material has a lot of fiddle, but it’s just as often backed by gospel organ, and Brown’s lyrics occasionally cross the line into genuine profundity.

Jamey Johnson Alabama-based singer-songwriter Jamey Johnson is nothing if not dynamic. Lyrically, he ranges from doom-haunted tales of poverty and pain—“High Cost of Living,” on 2008’s That Lonesome Song, tells graphic tales of drug abuse—to idyllic evocations of an idealized heartland existence like “Front Porch Swing Afternoon,” from 2010’s The Guitar Song. His last two albums, recorded with his road band rather than studio pros, have a loose feel that he emphasizes by letting the Recommended: musicians sometimes jam past the sixThat Lonesome or seven-minute mark. Studio chatter Song, The Guitar Song and amplifier hum blend the songs into suites, recalling the album-as-experience vibe established by ’70s rockers like Pink Floyd. The Guitar Song, Johnson’s most recent release, is a two-CD set wrapped in a cover that, with its black-and-white profile shot of Johnson emphasizing his long hair and chest-length beard, looks like it should be adorning a Neurosis album. But while half the songs are driven by acoustic guitar, slow-burners fueled by a seething underclass rage (“Poor Man Blues,” “Can’t Cash My Checks,” “Mental Revenge”), the other half is an upbeat collection of Nashville boilerplate (“Thankful for the Rain,” “Dog in the Yard,” “Macon”). Graphically illustrating this dichotomy, the album is split into “black” and “white” discs, but don’t be fooled by his ominous album art and dour demeanor. Johnson’s hung onto his sense of humor.

Hank Williams III Shelton Hank Williams, the grandson of country pioneer Hank Williams, straddles the rock-country divide like no one else. He’s released five albums on MCA’s country label Curb, culminating in this year’s Rebel Within, but that relationship has always been contentious. Many of his songs lash out at the Nashville establishment in no uncertain terms. He’s also been a friend and collaborator of former Pantera vocalist Phil Anselmo for years, and he’s also the leader of Assjack, a punk-metal band that sounded like a redneck Ministry on their Recommended: self-titled 2009 record (on which Williams Lovesick, Broke played all the instruments). & Driftin’, Rebel Within His first two albums, 1999’s Risin’ Outlaw and 2002’s Lovesick, Broke and Driftin’, were hardcore honky-tonk records, but Williams’ hostility to the mainstream country scene was palpable from day one. (Risin’ Outlaw included the unsubtly titled “Trashville.”) In between, he fought with Curb over their refusal to release This Ain’t Country, a collection of cow-punk/hardcore songs that’s easily downloaded and worth the Google search. A contract dispute kept the more aggressive Straight to Hell on the shelf until 2006, but he’s kept up a frantic pace since. Damn Right, Rebel Proud came out in 2008, mixing extreme metal vocals with the country tunes, and Rebel Within maintains that pattern. On the title track, Williams’ reedy voice is offset by hoarse screams, but the arrangements are dominated by fiddle and steel guitar. Live, he tends to play two or even three sets: one of pure country, one of psychobilly-ish punk and sometimes an ultra-aggressive hardcore set. needle

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The Sacred and the Profane

Cee-Lo’s new album balances humor and heartbreak / by Michaelangelo Matos

homas Callaway—a.k.a. Cee-Lo Green, half of Gnarls Bar-

kley and one-quarter of Goodie Mob—is turning into America’s most reliably excellent hit maker. This is not a small feat. Pop music is intensely competitive at the Billboard level, and while Cee-Lo shares much of his sensibility with the indie audience, he’s become somebody whose success is measurable in numbers as well as pure musical pleasure. For example: Remember that slinky R&B earworm from a few years ago, “Don’t ’Cha”? Cee-Lo worked on that, a big hit in 2004 for the Pussycat Dolls, and before that a tiny one for Tori Alamaze. (Alamaze’s version is much better.) A couple years later, teaming with Danger Mouse under the moniker Gnarls Barkley, Cee-Lo lit the stage on fire with “Crazy,” a record that so thoroughly defined its moment that a lot of people can’t stand to listen to it anymore. But it’s still a great record, and—in a way that defines 2010 as surely as “Crazy” defined 2006—so is “Fuck You.” “Forget You” is the song’s title for radio, which didn’t really know what to do with it, mainly because the profanity is part of the hook—a big part. It’s not the same thing as a novelty hit. Though the song flirts hard 26

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with novelty, part of its triumph is that it doesn’t fall into the trap of wearing itself out quickly, like a joke. It’s all in how exultant that curse word sounds coming out of Cee-Lo’s mouth. It’s both funny and not funny at all. Its combination of showbiz razzmatazz and laugh-to-keep-fromcrying barstool lament hits a chord in the way it mixes those registers so freely. If you don’t know where to begin in dealing with the confused state of the world in 2010, this song is like a great phone call from a friend you didn’t know was coming. My own phone call with Cee-Lo wasn’t quite so revelatory, though it was certainly pleasant. He sounded a little tired; he’d probably been doing interviews for two weeks solid. “Fuck You” blew up online

thanks to a cute animated YouTube video featuring just the song’s lyrics, a placeholder that worked great when it came to virally stamping the song into listener’s heads. As a result, the producer, MC and singer had already been in-demand by the media when the details of The Lady Killer, his newest solo album, were finally announced. He began with a concept, recording close to 70 songs before choosing the 14 on the album. “It’s no different than shooting a year’s worth of footage [for a film] and narrowing it down to an hour and a half,” he says. “Sound-wise, I wanted to do something that Barry White would have done. Even down to the title, Lady Killer, that’s something that implies edge and elegance at the same time. I wanted those undertones to be urban. I wanted a very elegant, orchestral type of thing to give it that surreal and cinematic The Lady Killer is available now approach—like a score from Elektra/ to a movie.” Asylum.

In that way, Lady Killer works as a reaction against the tinny, Auto-Tuned, ringtone-chirpy tracks that often make it onto radio these days. Cee-Lo says that was intentional, “but not initially. It is, ultimately, underneath it all [a reaction], but initially these are my own instincts and my own interests. That’s the initiative that I take, for it to be an honest reflection, an extension of my own partial and particular taste in music. That’s very ambitious in this day and time. I guess I can commend my label for allowing me to do so… It’s gotta be great. If you’re going to go against the grain, it’s gotta be great.” The fact that he claimed to have recorded “70 songs” stuck in my head—a huge number for any artist. Were they all finished recordings? “Some of them were demos,” he says. “Some of them hooks—just kind of scatting around on it. But idealistically, they’re all top-to-bottom. Some of them I’ll go back and finish. You can even include [his 2010] mixtape Stray Bullets—I include that in those songs, too, and you can hear they all fit around the Lady Killer concept.” Had he already picked the songs for the finished album before putting the mixtape together? “Some of those things on the mixtape I did in the course of the three years that I was recording,” he says. “I’ve got to be honest and say that a lot of the things you hear on the mixtape, the label didn’t necessarily get. They saw great music; they just didn’t hear singles.” The label did have a point. The Lady Killer, like the two Gnarls Barkley albums, is a tight package—the songs all come in at single-friendly length, and there’s little fat in its 46 minutes. It extends the

I wanted a very elegant, orchestral type of thing to give it that surreal and cinematic approach—like a score to a movie.” —cee-lo

Gnarls sound more than it does Cee-Lo’s two mid-’00s solo albums. Cee-Lo Green and His Perfect Imperfections (2002) and Cee-Lo Green Is the Soul Machine (2004) were wild and rich, obviously coming out of his genre-defying work over the prior decade with Goodie Mob and the Dungeon Family—the conglomerate of ATL produc-

ers surrounding OutKast. But he’s also a natural pop craftsman—one who can take the public’s temperature. Did he have any inkling how listeners would take to “Fuck You”—or for that matter, “Crazy”—when he made them? There’s a long pause. “Are you asking me do I have a formula?” Not quite, more like: You’re writing songs for yourself, but then the public turns them into something bigger. Can you plan something like that? “Oh! Not so much. I can’t even begin to take all the credit for ‘Fuck You.’ I had been working with Bruno Mars almost two years, a year and a half, prior to, and it’s almost always toward the end that you end up finding that song. So, it took us three years to get it. The last six or so months, we were kind of back and forth about ‘Fuck You.’ These big pop melodies are something that he’s better than me at. But it’s for me. I don’t know if anybody else could have sung the song. I think the chord that strikes people as sincere, as something sacred or something serious, but yet it has a sense of humor… we all can relate to being in that disposition.” The Lady Killer ends with an orchestral cover version of “No One’s Gonna Love You” by Seattle-to-South Carolina roots rockers Band of Horses. Cee-Lo identifies with BoH as a longstanding cult artist—he calls the group “outside heroes”— but isn’t shy about trying a good cross-scene tie-in. “This one song in particular moved me, and was also very relative to the space I was in. Lady Killer has a lot to do with loving someone else better than anyone else could love them.” needle

Needle’s guide to the best music of the last 12 months

hat did music, whether indie or pop, mean in 2010? That’s a hard

question to answer every year, but in 2010, it seemed particularly hard to pin down what bands, moments or movements (if any) truly had an impact on the public’s consciousness. That said, it’s always fun to try. Back in late October, I sent an email to Needle’s regular contributors: “Send me a list of your 10 favorite albums of 2010.” A simple request, really, the kind most music writers expect to start getting as the year draws to a close.

I didn’t think there would be an obvious consensus pick for the best album of the year, and there wasn’t. Instead, the lists reflected a fact that almost everyone now takes for granted: There are so many listening options out there, almost all of them easily (if not instantly) accessible, that people are less willing to argue for any one album as “the best,” than extol private pleasures that move their world and hopefully might move yours as well. Still, there are always standouts. If anything, the sheer amount of music available to listeners in 2010 means any records that achieve some groundswell of support (or appear on numerous writers’ lists) must have something going for them, even if that something might not be your particular thing. Needle’s rundown of the best music of 2010 ranges widely, from politicallyminded pop-punk to roaring stoner metal to R&B that sounds more like ’60s psychedelia. In each of their particular fields, these artists are pushing themselves a little harder than everyone else. Some of these records were made by longtime huge names, others by folks who

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were nobodies working day jobs a year ago. What they all share, though, is personal vision. They may draw from the music of the past, but they’re also hard to mistake for work of anyone else. It may be a perfected version of the kind of records they’ve been making for decades, or it may be something that’s new, not just for them, but for music in general. Take a listen to any or all of them, especially the ones that seem like they might not Top be your thing, and if nothing else you’ll find artists chasing sometop thing unique, something that top was rattling around obsessively in their heads and had to be put to disc. In addition to our Top 15 Albums, we’re offering a series of lists designed to expose music that might have been hidden, whether in plain view on pop radio or deep in the specialty genre racks at your local indie record store. And remember: This is just a small sampling of the good music that came into the world this year. The naysayers might be right about the health of the industry in 2010, but music itself feels richer than ever. —Jess Harvell

15 Albums 10 Lists dvds

Glossary

Feral Fire [Rebel Group]

Mumford and Sons Sigh No More

[Glass Note]

The lineage of British folk is long and illustrious, from itinerant medieval troubadours to their contemporary rock-tinged counterparts. Measured against that long history, the personal three-year timeline of Mumford and Sons barely registers, but even a casual spin through the Mumfords’ impressive collection of EPs and their astonishingly powerful full-length debut, Sigh No More, reveals that the West London quartet is a more than worthy entrant on that genealogical scroll. Mumford and Sons are the band that busks at the intersection of traditional folk and modern rock, acoustic on one corner, electric on the other, flourishing in the tension between hymnal folk whispers and anthemic rock exhortations, equally at ease with a finger-picked banjo, a strummed guitar or howlingly manipulated feedback. With voices raised in ancient harmony to tell epic tales of unfailing courage or intimate remembrances of unbearable heartbreak, Mumford and Sons handle each with a scuffed elegance and a burning intensity. If Dave Matthews, Jim James, James Mercer and the Followill family had been born in Old Blighty, DMB, My Morning Jacket, the Shins and Kings of Leon might well have shared van space with Mumford and Sons as they all roamed the English countryside in search of pubs to entertain and then drink dry. Sigh No More is the dashboard soundtrack to that journey. —Brian Baker

The soundtrack to a backwoods rager, Feral Fire scratches a deep-down itch for musical comfort food. This collection of songs expertly employs both roots rock nostalgia (the honky-tonk shuffle of “No Guarantee”) and jagged moments of immediacy (the snarl of “Trembling Boy”). A five-piece from Murfreesboro, TN, who have quietly released wonderful records for over 10 years, Glossary are finally tickling the bottom rung of mainstream success. They deserve it—the band’s shaggy, underdog honesty is the perfect complement to sly twang (augmented by the excellent pedal steel work of Todd Beene) and frontman Joey Kneiser’s angular, instantly-recognizable guitar work. Feral Fire begins with a bang—the one-two punch of “Lonely Is a Town” and “Save Your Money for the Weekend,” a shimmying number destined for a permanent place on your personal TGIF soundtrack— and eventually winds down, like a booze-addled evening, into torch song territory. (On a related note, Kneiser recently released The All-Night Bedroom Review, a stellar stripped-down solo album that oozes with the afterhours melancholy promised by the title; it’s available for free download at glossary. us.) Those slow-burn numbers are aided greatly by the gentle harmonies of Kneiser’s wife Kelly; she lends the proceedings blink-and-you-miss-it beauty, rounding out the world-weary edges of the band’s more wistful numbers. —Lee Stabert

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Top 15 Albums

Superchunk Majesty Shredding

Drive-By Truckers

The Big To-Do

[ATO Records/Red]

Drive-By Truckers have never been better than on “This Fucking Job”—a tune enlivened by muscular guitars, a propulsive groove, pointed socioeconomic commentary and Patterson Hood’s simmering delivery. It’s a song about barely hanging on, about accepting the soul-crushing disappointment of your circumstances, and it rocks. Swagger, confidence and thoughtfulness are all front and center on The Big To-Do, DBT’s first effort on ATO (their second, recorded during the same sessions, is due in February). The band has been writing about the plight of working-class people since their first full-length (To-Do is album number eight), and this might just be the perfect time for people to start paying attention. As usual, they excel at dark humor—the rock club becomes an Old Navy in “After the Scene Dies,” the clever narrative structure of “The Fourth Night of My Drinking”—as a balance to portraits of people on the verge. And then there’s a song like “Santa Fe,” one of the prettiest (and saddest) ballads the band has ever produced. The tolls of touring are embodied by aching pedal steel, and the quixotic blend of weariness and hope in Hood’s voice is a feat of understated artistry. —LS

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[Merge]

The idea of a new Superchunk record in 2010 is up there with Lazarus walking around and the Rangers in the World Series. The idea of a 2010 Superchunk album standing with such ’90s indie rock high water marks as On the Mouth and Foolish seemed flat-out laughable. Yet here we are. Majesty Shredding doesn’t just return to the band’s high-velocity rock, singer/songwriter Mac McCaughan bleating like the world’s most excited fly—it retains a remarkably savvy sense of adulthood. With the amazing “Digging for Something,” the album kicks off with blatant localism (“I heard there’s a classic mess out on Old 86”) before dissolving into a killer party (“We were dancing on the propane tank / Everybody in the half-light out on the lawn”). But they also know they’re no longer the kids who went on a “Young Rock” tour with Seaweed and Geek back in ’88. “My Gap Feels Weird” (as in generation gap) finds McCaughan trying to avoid becoming the scene’s cranky old man: “Here is a song for the shadows on the curb / Collars up, they’re saying / ‘You don’t even know us and you never will.’” It’s easily the year’s most unexpected rock triumph. —Joe Gross

The Black Keys Brothers [Nonesuch]

Songs for Singles

Torche [Hydra Head]

The only complaint anybody with functional ears/ heart/nether regions could levy at this band is that eight songs in 22 minutes = EP, not LP, brothers. But as Nick Green pointed out in our October feature on the Miami-based “thunder pop” overlords, “The beauty of Torche’s music—especially with the jukebox format the band has adopted on Songs for Singles—is that it encourages you to approach it with open ears and draw your own associations.” Frontman Steve Brooks drew inspiration from sources as disparate as My Bloody Valentine and Van Halen to concoct these eight distinctive Singles, but through the miracles of a) savvy sequencing, and b) an unfuckwithable sense of identity, SFS boils down to one potent, kickass, highly evolved slab of Torche. “U.F.O.” launches their poppiest instincts into orbit, then the ensuing 52 seconds of “Lay Low” machine-guns them into a sludge shake of half-Melvins and halfFloor (Brooks’ influential bottom-heavy predecessor.) The multiple fits and starts are more Universal Studios theme park ride than actual rollercoaster— you thrill to the hairpin turns, but never come close to barfing it all up. And hey, if Mike Huckabee approves (and believe it or not, we’re not being facetious), they have to be doing something… well, not right, but satisfyingly demented. —Andrew Bon-

Considering their personal turmoil and professional overextension, it’s amazing the Black Keys could concentrate on a new album. Before tracking the excellent, diverse Brothers, the Keys embarked on several side excursions: guitarist Dan Auerbach’s production duties (including the new Jessica Lea Mayfield), his wonderfully nuanced solo album, 2009’s Keep It Hid and drummer Patrick Carney’s new outfit, appropriately dubbed Drummer, and their 2009 debut, Feel Good Together. The pair also collaborated with rapper Jim Jones in Blackroc, a project that included, among others, Mos Def, Raekwon and Ludacris. Throw in Carney’s recent divorce and Brooklyn move, and it would seem Brothers was impacted by numerous forces. With the Blackroc sessions—where the duo utilized bass lines and wrote keyboard-based songs beyond their methodology—fresh in the Keys’ minds, their writing sessions were shaped by their recent hip-hop/soul experience, and that spirit inhabits a great deal of Brothers. The Keys injected funky swing and indie-blues-meets-Curtis-Mayfield soul into their psychedelic blues swamp groove, but regardless of their sonic mood, Auerbach and Carney’s lyrical concerns were never more personally illuminating or emotionally naked; even songs that aren’t necessarily autobiographical come from raw and wounded places that translate pain into creative expression. For anyone thinking there’s no evolution for a two-man blues group, Brothers is powerful evidence to the contrary. —BB

azelli

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Top 15 Albums

The National High Violet

[4AD]

After the wrenching emotional impact of Boxer, the National’s 2007 breakthrough, the expectations for its follow-up were more inflated than Tea Party campaign promises. As such, the greatest mistake for diehard fan or casual listener would be to use the suffocatingly desolate Boxer to navigate the decidedly darker, moodier and more complex High Violet. With their latest full-length, the Cincinnati-born/Brooklynbased National beautifully blend their formidable gifts, exemplified by the trembling shiver of “Terrible Love.” Matt Berninger’s almost hymnal delivery of the lyrics in his sonorous baritone mesmerizes as the band quietly stirs up the distilled spirit of, say, the Smiths produced by T-Bone Burnett and Steve Albini. But as the song builds, the shimmer turns to squalling shoegaze chaos, Berninger struggles to maintain sanity in the face of love’s seemingly unwelcome advances, and the band floats sweet Beach Boys vocal harmonies just above the churn. It’s an unsettlingly perfect launch for the National’s epistle of beautiful doom, a comfortable but disturbing triangulation of Leonard Cohen, Magnetic Fields and Radiohead. Moments of gorgeous melodicism are matched by a disquieting undercurrent of discord and dread, and the band shows its amazing facility for sounding epic and intimate simultaneously. With High Violet, the National proved more than their maturity, musicality and stamina—they produced a lasting work showcasing their incredible diversity, immediacy and classicism. —BB

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Frightened Rabbit

The Winter of Mixed Drinks [Fat Cat] This was a bleak year. Sometimes it felt a bit like drowning—fortunately Frightened Rabbit frontman Scott Hutchison was coming down with us. Following the Scottish band’s casually devastating Midnight Organ Fight—a record that occasionally felt downright fun, until you started paying attention—March’s Winter of Mixed Drinks delves deeper into moody atmospherics and welcome distortion. Simultaneously exuberant and heartbreaking, the album’s strongest moments are its strangest: the cacophonous fuzz of “Skip the Youth” dissipating to reveal a man burying himself alive, the soaring refrain of “Not Miserable” (a song that oscillates between earnestness and irony on every listen) or the haunting reprise “Man/Bag of Sand.” Over and over, Hutchison returns to his central motif—rising waters, receding shorelines, “all the pieces lost in the flood”—creating a cohesive vision of a world (or a relationship; this is angsty indie rock after all) slipping away. Thank goodness there’s still a glimmer of hope in the lush beauty of band’s layered sound and their frontman’s exquisite emotionalism. —LS

The national photo by susanna howe

Broken Bells Broken Bells

High on Fire

Snakes for the Divine

[E1 Music]

A dozen years and five albums in, Oakland stonermetal masters High on Fire have already forced the adjective “awesome” to grab its ankles so often that it’s no longer a surprise when they stick it in. Whether this year’s Snakes for the Divine is the band’s best album yet is open to debate (for now), but it’s certainly their biggest, burliest and most devastating. Under the sonic tutelage of Slayer producer Greg Fidelman, guitarist/vocalist Matt Pike’s cyclonic riffs sound leaner and meaner than ever as drummer Des Kensel and bassist Jeff Matz’s rolling-thunder rhythm section booms with newfound clarity and atmospheric nuance— especially on monster cuts like “Bastard Samurai” and the excellently titled “Frost Hammer.” Meanwhile, Pike roars over the blitzkrieg like Lemmy’s younger, angrier, more mystically-minded brother. Listen closely enough and you can almost hear awesome begging for more. —J. Bennett

high on fire photo by travis shinn

[Columbia]

Only the Lindsey Lohan/Herbie the Love Bug mashup seems more unlikely than Broken Bells’ creative pairing; who’s heard Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton and the Shins’ James Mercer and said, “Those guys should totally work together...”? Thankfully, serial collaborator Danger Mouse’s chance meeting with Mercer at Denmark’s 2004 Roskilde festival ultimately led them to blenderize styles. Although Danger Mouse is renowned for his production skills (Beck, Gorillaz), projects like Dark Night of the Soul (with the late Mark Linkous and director David Lynch) and his file-trading partnership with Cee-Lo in Gnarls Barkley, he and Mercer recorded in an essentially two-man band structure. Consequently, Broken Bells’ eponymous debut successfully pairs DM’s compellingly quirky sonic atmospherics and Mercer’s flawless indie pop instincts, neither one overwhelming or acquiescing as they effectively merge their distinctive styles. Mercer, in particular, makes interesting adjustments; a darker, less obtuse lyrical perspective and vocals ranging from soul/ pop falsetto to menacing baritone. Danger Mouse concedes his primary modus operandi, shelving his samplers and relying on live instrumentation, which plays to Mercer’s pop strengths on the Shins-like tracks, but that sound is tweaked and intensified by DM’s psychedelic Abbey Road/spaghetti western/ electronica sensibilities. Nothing can supplant the Shins’ crystalline beauty, but Broken Bells were an evolutionary progression that definitely begs a sophomore reunion of Mercer and Mouse. —BB

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Top 15 Albums

LCD Soundsystem This Is Happening

Ted Leo

The Brutalist Bricks

[Matador]

Ted Leo’s commitment to old-school punk values is easy to admire. He really does believe, passionately, that music can be accessible to a wide audience without the corrupting influence of big business coming anywhere near it. He’s put that ideal into practice over the last 20 years, sticking doggedly to indies despite two of his last three labels being forced out of business due to modern record industry realities. What’s even easier to admire, though, is his strike-rate as a recording artist. After all, plenty of moral bands release unlistenable albums, after all. The Brutalist Bricks, his fifth album with the Pharmacists in the last 10 years, is an infinitely more focused, what-Leo-does-best follow-up to 2007’s Living With the Living, where Leo attempted to display his range with middling results. His command of the language of poppy turn-of-the-’70s punk and new wave remains preternatural. (No one does ultraearnest, anthemic, Strummer/Jones-style choruses better than Leo.) But what really makes The Brutalist Bricks so hot is that reining in the hey-we-can-play-reggae-too excesses lets you once again hear what a super-tight band the Pharmacists are, especially the rhythm section, which moves with a speedy, locked-in fluidity that makes most of your arena-packing pop-punk pretenders sound even more plodding than usual. —jh

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ted leo portrait by shawn brackbill

[DFA /Virgin]

James Murphy’s third album as LCD Soundsystem isn’t quite as revelatory as 2007’s Sound of Silver, but along with Silver it does prove conclusively (and gorgeously) that the man is something more than a hilarious crank and excellent musical mimic. On This Is Happening, Murphy’s even less interested in showing off his eerie knack for noteperfect recreations of old disco and dance-punk classics, or his ability to unveil a new style on each song and then prove he’s mastered it. Instead, he fixes on a kind of motorized-but-lush synth-rock throughout, a sound that’s indebted to Brian Eno without (usually) being too obvious about it. But while the songs may be less formally ostentatious, the production on This Is Happening is richer than ever, each song stuffed with bright little keyboard hooks and catchy percussive accents. Murphy often drapes these new slow-burning songs in a voice-obscuring layer of Bowie-inBerlin keyboard buzz, which is a bit perverse (and probably wholly intentional) considering that the songs on This Is Happening have more to say, about their author and his world, than either of Murphy’s previous albums. Initially cast as the snotty scourge of uptight dance music culture, a rather one-note role he chafed against pretty quickly, Murphy’s moved far beyond the simple sardonic slogans that made up the lyrics to his early singles. Having bravely tried for emotional earnestness on Silver and succeeded, Murphy’s jokes cut even deeper now—sharp standout moments on an otherwise tender, ruminative album. By turns withering and hilarious, gnomic and naked, This Is Happening is the sort of album that requires focused listening and multiple plays to reveal all of its nuances, both sonic and lyrical. It’s the definition of a grower aimed at grownups. Yet it’s still more surface-level thrilling than any album about middle-aged woes has a right to be.. —jH

Grinderman

Grinderman 2

[Anti]

The second album from the side project of Nick Cave—and an assortment of his Bad Seeds—is a bit more polished than the group’s debut. But “more polished” is the equivalent of coarse-grain sandpaper dipped in lye when compared to most other musical offerings in 2010. Lust, paranoia, daddy issues, Disney issues and other deep-seated emotions that might send more religious-minded people straight to the nearest confession booth still rule Cave’s lyrical roost, while even the relatively resplendent “Palaces of Montezuma” sounds whittled down to its absolute sonic minimum. (That song ’s mental image of “The spinal cord of JFK / wrapped in Marilyn Monroe’s negligee” makes the song even more unnerving.) That the harrowing atmosphere presented here is as compulsively listenable—and at times, riotously funny—as it is serves as a testament both to the charms of Cave and to the blinding skill of his bandmates. —MJ

Deerhunter Halcyon Digest

[4AD]

Picking up the torch that made Sonic Youth and shoegaze seem so essential at the tail end of the ’80s, Deerhunter have become modern masters of swirling sometimes ethereal, sometimes grating noise into traditional rock. So, it’s no surprise that they’ve finally landed on 4AD, a label that’s specialized in dreamy, disorienting noise-pop for 30 years now. What’s different about Halcyon Digest—what makes it different from Deerhunter’s earlier albums and perfect for their new home—is that it’s the band’s catchiest, most listenable record yet, without losing the murky sense of mystery that’s made them so interesting. Like a sweet, lilting early ’60s pop (not rock) album draped in Daydream Nation distortion, this is Deerhunter’s most vulnerable, and most melodic, collection of songs. (Few noise-rock jams here, though they still know how to let things sprawl when the mood strikes.) As a group of hummable tunes and a dark atmospheric world to get lost in, Halcyon Digest is the year’s most immersive and compulsively playable slice of avant indie-pop. —JH

Deerhunter portrait by drew vandenberg

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Top 15 Albums

Sleigh Bells Treats

[NEET Recordings]

t’s hard to think of a more “2010” collaboration, a band

for this era of supposedly obliterated genre boundaries: A guy from a second-rate hardcore punk band (Derek Miller) decides to make a noisy dance album and happens on a singing refugee from a TRL-era girl-pop group turned indie ingénue-in-the-making (Alexis Krauss). The results should have been awful. Sleigh Bells should have turned out the kind of tentative, tepid record you usually get when former punks and Brooklyn art kids decide to “go pop.” ¶ Instead, Treats is the most physical, and most mindlessly fun, album released this year. Even the lyrics come out as a rush of glorious gibberish. This is a record full of babbling children, pitch-shifted cartoon voices and Krauss shrieking about… actually, 90 percent of the time I have no idea what she’s shrieking about.

Despite being a contemporary of the Backstreet Boys, Krauss sounds like she grew up secretly listening to old punk albums. The sing-song goofiness of Treats also suggests plenty of time spent watching a Banana Splits box set. Krauss’s “rapping” is sweetly silly, and usually chopped to digital nonsense by Miller, sleepy and sexy and a little robotic all at once. (Kinda like Stacey Q after a heavy ECT session.) Krauss’s alternately laid-back and amped-up playground sass is the perfect complement to the sound of Treats, which is messy in the best sense. Miller’s guitar riffs sound like Scorpions and Accept ringtones played on out-of-date phones. The bass is marrow-wobblingly deep. (Did I mention

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this album was noisy as well as messy? Even when SB slow down to a Funkadelic-sampling lope on “Rill Rill,” shit stays noisy.) But the best thing about the Sleigh Bells sound might be the beats. Even at low volume, the drums on Treats sound huge, the way the drums on early Def Jam releases threatened to stampede right over the rapper. At a time when even hip-hop, once the last bastion of big beats, is plagued by thin and tinny rhythm tracks, Miller’s drums are less blockrocking than neighborhood-obliterating. Sleigh Bells aren’t particularly innovative, despite sounding like very little else around at the

moment. You can pick out some of the scrap parts they used to make Treats easily enough: the volume and swagger of the first few LL Cool J singles; the bratty vocals of riot grrl legends Huggy Bear; the smiley-faced synth riffs of hardcore techno. But Sleigh Bells foreground a need for fun rather than their influences. What smacks you immediately,

and then again and again, is the duo’s enthusiasm, as they smash everything together. It makes Treats so infectious, and hard to ignore, even if it’s blaring from someone else’s car. And in 2010, we needed that kind of enthusiasm. —JH

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Year in Music

Rank & File

ou can’t encapsulate a year with a Top 10 list. But a few of them

together can help bring things into focus—especially if you set your parameters wide. ¶ What follows are a handful of ways to look at the mass of great music 2010 brought us. (And sometimes not-great, but notable: see the Justin Bieber entry.)

With every passing year, there is a greater amount of both past and present to sift through musically. Great music from other nations’ unaccountably rich past fight for shelf space (physical, virtual, mental) with an ever-expanding number of brand new records by homegrown or already-familiar

Forget the Future: 10 reasons 2010 was a great year for looking back

Literally, 2010 saw some amazing reissues and retrospectives; figuratively, we heard great music in classic styles from new talents and veterans alike. Here are a few highlights:

Various Artists Africa: 50 Years of Music [Discograph]

This 18-CD monument is more manageable than you might imagine—it lasts only 16 hours instead of more than 20, and it’s a totally listenable survey of most of the continent’s major pop styles. Good luck getting to the bottom of it—or wanting to. Cee-Lo Green “Fuck You” [Elektra] Fitz and the Tantrums Pickin’ Up the Pieces [Dangerbird] Old soul never dies—it just comes back in unlikely and welcome forms, like a web-conquering hit radio couldn’t touch, or a white L.A. guy with an uncanny vocal resemblance to Daryl Hall.

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One man’s attempt to make sense of the year in music by Michaelangelo Matos

Corinne Bailey-Rae “Paris Nights/ New York Mornings” [EMI] The Foreign Exchange “This City Ain’t the Same Without You” [Foreign Exchange] Neosoul never sounded so perky. Caribou Swim (Domino) It’s never a bad idea to make ’80s NYC downtown icon Arthur Russell into your icon with these results. Deadbeat Radio Rothko (The Agriculture) Matthew Hawtin Once Again, Again (Plus 8) Two techno DJs mix (mostly) ’90s material into sets that feel as right now as they would have then, be they fine-lined minimal techno (Deadbeat) or pillowy ambient (Hawtin).

or buzzing or ripe-for-rediscovery artists. It’s enough to make even the hardiest listeners want to retreat. Not this year, though. Indie rock had a good year, of course. But so did dance music, and there were signs of life in other areas, too. That past-future mesh alluded to above—permaretro, where everything is available at once—has resulted in new areas of sound being explored by everyone from laptop upstarts to veteran songwriters looking to reinvent themselves. And while the business of music still feels uncertain, music itself seemed bullish to a rare degree in 2010. You can slice it 10 ways, and then you can slice that a few others. Here’s our attempt. (All lists are alphabetical by artist or title.) Ramadanman “Don’t Change for Me” (Hessle Audio)

Jungle’s golden period was around 1994’95. That’s what this track sounds like. Superchunk Majesty Shredding (Merge) They made the scrappy punk they’d been doing since they started—and hit new peaks doing it. The Vaselines Sex With an X (Sub Pop) Two decades after splitting, these twee icons sing, “Feels so good, it must be bad for me / Let’s do it, let’s do it again.” Great idea. Wavves King of the Beach (Fat Possum) Former indie stumbler Nathan Williams caught himself, straightened up and flew right into the sun with this halfhour-plus of fuzz-pop gems. Yeasayer “I Remember” (Secretly Canadian) John Hughes, 1950-2009. R.I.P.

Breach “Fatherless” (PTN, U.K.) U.K. bass producer Ben Westbeech makes what may be the year’s dance anthem: deadly percussion and heaving bass on a skipping rhythm and Indian flute. The Bug “Skeng (Autechre Remix)” (Ninja Tune)

Fucked Up “Year of the Ox” (Matador) A 14-minute odyssey from a Toronto hardcore band—a comparative step down from their 2008 opus, which clocked in at 17 minutes, but still, it reminds you you’re living Right Now like little else.

On both the Bug’s Infected EP and the monster compilation Ninja Tune XX, both superb, this cut is the most lethal— a beat so wiry it could slice you open.

Girl Unit His massive singles “Wut” and “I.R.L.,” as well as phenomenal DJ sets for just about every dance blog around, made 2010 this London DJ’s year.

Flying Lotus Cosmogramma (Warp) Like everything you’ve ever heard playing at once, only it makes sense.

Spoek Mathambo Mshini Wam (BBE) South African electro-rap lives and thrives—and no, we’re not talking about Die Antwoord.

Four Tet There Is Love in You (Domino) Digital 3D bubblescapes that help you escape from virtual reality.

The mix-podcast explosion A mushrooming number of DJ sets and radio shows covering all sides of music have become the most convenient way to keep up with the new and rediscover the old, courtesy of sites such as Fact, Resident Advisor and XLR8R. Of Montreal False Priest (Polyvinyl) From Elephant 6 leftovers to the most cunning art-pop troupe around—and with Janelle Monáe and Solange Knowles in tow, no less. Pantha du Prince Black Noise (Rough Trade) Beautiful, laid-back beat music in which tolling bells signal life as well as something darker.

Forget the Past: 10 reasons to bask in 2010’s musical present

Sure, there’s always a revival going on. But 2010 was a year in which all kinds of new stylistic alliances revealed themselves. Here are some of our favorites:

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Year in Music

Forget the Underground: 10 reasons to watch the charts in 2010

Even if you live in a cave, chances are you’ve seen or heard something from one of the big mega-stars that emblazon TV and tabloids. Guess what? Some of them make music, and sometimes it’s good—or at least educational.

Justin Bieber Not because of his music—are you kidding?—but because he’s become mainstream pop’s weirdest and most telling voodoo doll. His hairstyle has been adopted by an alarming number of kids (as well as inspiring the Tumblr, Lesbians Who Look Like Justin Bieber) and one of his songs was slowed down to the length of an album, thereby vastly improving it. His 15 minutes are just about up, but no one provided a richer source of détournement all year. Big Boi Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Return of Chico Dusty (Def Jam) The whole darn thing: every winner a hit, every hit a winner.

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Aloe Blacc “I Need a Dollar” (Stones Throw) Easy-rolling soul and not a chart hit, but the theme song for HBO’s How to Make It in America, so close enough. Mostly, though, a whole lot of people’s 2010 theme song. Cali Swag District “Teach Me How to Dougie” (Capitol) Too charming to say no to. (Don’t bother with the remixes.) Jay-Z ft. Swizz Beatz “On to the Next One” (Roc Nation) When he tries, he can still rap. And when he tries, he can still produce. Lady Gaga “Alejandro” (Interscope) The only song of hers everyone loves instantly.

Rihanna “Rude Boy” (Island Def Jam) Yes, ma’am. Sade “Soldier of Love” (Sony) Who the hell would have figured Sade would come on so Iman-fierce in 2010? What a truly odd year. Rick Ross ft. Ne-Yo “Super High” YG “Toot It and Boot It” (Island Def Jam)

Two Souths: one so clean you can do blow off of its surface, the other vulgar boasting buoyed with the swear-toGod eeriest chorus of the year, evoking chain gangs and slave ghosts as surely as anything in the blues. Kanye West “Power” (Roc-a-Fella) His own power has dimmed, unavoidably—getting as mega as he wants to means softening things. But he really does know what he’s doing.

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Year in Review

the top DVDs of 2010

In our first eight months of existence, Needle has tried to keep you on top of the absolute best DVD releases, both fashionable and obscure. As we settle into Oscar bait season, it’s a good time to sift aside the overrated and/or abysmal and pick out 2010’s shiniest plastic gems. These vids should either be in your TV cabinet already or on your Christmas list.

Moon

Its let’s-bury-this-thing-in-mid-January DVD release was as inauspicious as its truncated indie the-

atrical run. And it’s hard to blame sci-fi fans for steering clear when the preview painted Kevin Spacey’s smiley/frowny robo-assistant GERTY as a blatant HAL rip-off. But the few that did take the plunge with Moon were surely pleased to find director/co-writer Duncan Jones (David Bowie’s kid) using 2010 and Solaris as launching pads, rather than gospel. With an intesely physical performance, Sam Rockwell puts a cherry atop a career of emotional idiosyncrasy, playing a family man about to end an extremely lonely three-year stint at a lunar base. When he encounters what appears to be his clone, unconscious in a rover on the surface, well, no fair revealing the coil of thoughtful twists. We’ll just say that Spacey (who’s rivaled only by Edward Norton in recent freefalls from grace) isn’t... shit, we can’t lie: he’s kind of annoying. But it doesn’t detract from Jones’ fantastic debut effort. S ony Pictures

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Zombieland

“God help you if you use voice-over in your work, my friends,” Brian Cox, as screenwriting guru Rob-

ert McKee boomed in 2002’s Adaptation. “That’s flaccid, sloppy writing. Any idiot can write a voiceover narration to explain the thoughts of a character.” It would seem easy to confuse Zombieland writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick with said flaccid, sloppy idiots (ugh, nasty combo, amirite?), but there’s enough sweet-Christ awesomeness in their Shaun of the Dead-for-Yanks blood feast that we’ll forgive Jesse Eisenberg’s constant exposition. The plot hinges on black humor survival tips, after all, and the use of flashy graphics to convey post-apocalyptic principles like “double tap” (that would be with a firearm), “don’t be a hero” and “check the back seat” is all part of Zombieland’s uniquely selfaware aesthetic. Bonus points for a) Emma Stone’s star-making turn, b) abetting Woody Harrelson’s comeback (still not sure that he ever actually left), and c) the uncredited cameo of the year that, well, you should’ve seen for yourself already. S ony Pictures

Up in the Air

Greenberg

goer a while to acknowledge Up in the Air’s charms. The first 15

king of upper-middle-class-whites-got-it-rough-core. Sounds like a recipe for no-thanks with a side of fuck-that, but only because the preceding sentence is a dickish generalization that doesn’t remotely take into account the subtlety and versatility both actress and writer-director bring to their craft. Ben Stiller is the titular Roger Greenberg, a super pleasant combination of emotional cripple and immature asshole. A fortysomething letter-to-the-editor-writing layabout snob still harboring delusional fondnesses towards old bands/girlfriends, he’s watching his brother’s house/dog in L.A.—Gerwig is the family’s quirky but sweet personal assistant. Baumbach specializes in conversational interplay that peels back layer after layer of stereotype, and we soon learn that Gerwig is far more grounded and stable than the manic pixie dream girl sketch we assume her to be. Her tumultuous, at times crushingly awkward courtship with Roger is representative of Baumbach’s most insightful work. Next time you want to skewer Stiller for cashing in on the latest installment in the Focker series, remember that it probably makes gems like this possible. (Just kidding—he’s still a sellout.)

One imagines that it took even the most open-minded movie-

minutes was quite the smarm-fest, with Juno helmsman Jason Reitman two-shotting reams of interminable blather between George Clooney and Vera Farmiga’s frequent flyers, two human beings seemingly without a single identifiable reason for existence aside from reaping the myriad material benefits of their soulless corporate whoring. But things slowly become less obnoxious (despite the pterodactyllike squeal that passes for Anna Kendrick’s voice), then less predictable (Clooney, who travels across the country to fire people, is in danger of getting downsized himself when Kendrick points out this shit can be done remotely over video), then before you know it, Up in the Air becomes a graceful depiction of two grating careerists learning to stop believing their own bullshit and maybe try an adult relationship for once. Oooh, almost forgot: Danny McBride kind of gets to play a real human being! Paramount

Greta Gerwig is the queen of mumblecore, Noah Baumbach the

Focus Features

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Year in Review

The Thin Red Line

Buyers should know to beware by now: If Terrence Malick is releasing a film—and he’s improbably settled into a once-every-seven-years groove, with The Thin Red Line, The New World and the forthcoming Tree of Life following seminal ’70s triumphs Badlands and Days of Heaven—the studio DVD will be threadbare, eventually followed by a lovingly rendered Criterion edition. Mind you, the man will never submit to a task as pedestrian as a commentary track, but plenty of his closest colleagues helpfully color in the enigma. The most fascinating legend of TRL remains the casting—pretty much every Hollywood actor between 18 and 65 was filmed at some point, although actually appearing onscreen was a much more arduous task. Casting director Dianne Crittenden sheds some light on the protracted process, which is partially captured in archival audition footage. Among the other bonuses are 14 additional minutes of footage—no, not entirely morning dew and katydids—and interviews with actors Kirk Acevedo, Jim Caviezel, Thomas Jane, Elias Koteas, Dash Mihok and Sean Penn. Still not sure if The Passion of the Christ was the best or worst thing to happen to Caviezel’s career, although rest assured that he kills it here. Criterion

Everyone Else Probably too “meditative” and “meandering” to earn any

sort of mass year-end foreign recognition, Maren Ade’s Everyone Else is regardless one of the most revelatory and heartbreaking cinematic journeys of the year. It helps to be indoctrinated into Antonioni’s sometimes sensual, sometimes withdrawn “trilogy” of L’avventura, La Notte and L’Eclisse, but those are only reference points. Ade balances eroticism and palpable unease in this languid decomposition of a relationship. Gitti (Birgit Minichmayr) and Chris (Lars Eidinger) vacation in Sardinia, saying little, taking in the sun-dappled brilliance of their surroundings, intoxicated by each other’s bodies. But as their sabbatical extends, so does their unsaid mutual disdain, and a scarily familiar, slow unraveling begins. Obsession plays a major role in this, albeit not in a trite Fatal Attraction sense—both of Ade’s leads have latent ambitions beyond the countryside villas and beachfronts they infiltrate, and they’re played against each other to chip away at a bond revealed as tenuous at best. Is “anti-romance” the right term? Probably not, but know that Everyone Else is possibly the year’s most underrated drama. Cinema Guild 46

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Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

Short of Irreversible, Antichrist or, I dunno, The Accused, it’s

hard to fathom a film less ripe for a “satirical reimagination” (our words, not Werner Herzog’s) than Abel Ferrara’s 1992 Bad Lieutenant. In both the brutal original and 2010 quasi-sequel, the eponymous lead is a gambling addicted, drug-addled, power-abusing irredeemable shithead. The first time, it’s played for stark, unforgiving did-you-just-seethat/did-he-just-do-that melodrama; this time, Herzog and Nicolas Cage conspired to make Port of Call New Orleans funnier than anything that Apatow Incorporated could muster. And we think at least 75 percent of it was intentional. By now you’ve probably seen the infamous “shoot him again— his soul is still dancing” clip via the preview, and we can only assure you: that’s the tip of a deeply idiotic, infinitely rewatchable iceberg that features Cage’s best, uh, Cage in years. Available for less than the cost of a lucky crack pipe, so there’s that. First Look Pictures

In the Valley of Death

Restrepo goes deep into the lives of soldiers in Afghanistan’s deadliest region / by Bret McCabe

“W

hat are we doing?” That’s the question one

member of Second Platoon, Battle Company, 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Infantry Regiment, remembers asking himself when he first laid eyes on the Korangal Valley in Eastern Afghanistan. In May 2007, he and his unit were deployed to this remote locale, dubbed the “Valley of Death” by American military personnel due to the amount of fighting it has seen.

The Korangal Outpost—the “Kop”—is a small miliar to the genre, with camp located among one of the valley’s rocky crags. soldiers acting like the In every direction lies unforgiving terrain of tribal young men they are villages, scattered brush and dirt—all of it hostile. during downtime back As a different member of Second Platoon says in at the Kop base and Outpost Restrepo, erected a few months into their tour and Restrepo, the documentary about the unit’s deploy- named for a fallen comrade, PFC Juan “Doc” Restrepo. But the movie’s baseline ment here, the Kop is at the end of the road, and experience is completely different. The crackle of gunfire and low-end thud of where the road ends the Taliban begins. artillery begins to feel almost constant during Restrepo, so much so that the American journalist Sebastian Junger and Brit- few moments of near silence feel uncannily tense. ish photojournalist Tim Hetherington spent a year In fact, Restrepo is less narrative documentary than experimental sound embedded with these men, and the riveting footage and visual immersion. It captures the unit’s weekly “shura” meetings with the they brought back and assembled into Restrepo is area’s village elders about trying to help them fight the enemy—the strategic unlike any other document of the ongoing War on value of the Kop is to provide security to a road, keeping goods and services Terror. While Junger and Hetherington do include flowing to the villages so that they don’t turn to Taliban for support—but for a few interviews with the men after they the most part its point of view is that of the grunts doing their job. And leave the valley, and very occasionally add what they do is burn their waste, dig in their positions to provide cover music to accompany their footage, for from the nearly 360 degree field of fire, and try to stay alive. During one most of the movie’s 94 minutes, all that it multiple-day maneuver, Operation Rock Avalanche, this job becomes offers is what the lenses and microphones so intensely anxious that it’s amazing some video artist hasn’t tried captured of the soldier’s experience. It’s requesting the raw footage to be projected in continuous loop on four walls of a square gallery space and titled it “P.T.S.D.” less cinema verite than an ambient recording of surviving hell. What are we doing? Junger and Hetherington never insult their auSince the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, dience’s intelligence by assuming that they can answer that question, this military campaign and occupation but it swirls through the head like the near-constant gunfire in the dishas become the most constantly docu- Restrepo will tance. The filmmakers claim Restrepo is apolitical, as it doesn’t try to be released mented war in history, with a deluge of December 7 politicize the Second Platoon’s presence in Afghanistan. But Restrepo embedded documentaries hitting movie on DVD and also possesses the unnerving power to elicit strong emotions—which Blu-ray, from theaters and home video beginning in in and of itself is a political response to a military operation that is Virgil Films and 2004. Restrepo includes many scenes faseven years old, with no end in sight. Entertainment. needle

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ax Renn, cable television executive and

Video Nasties

and protagonist of David Cronenberg’s David Cronenberg’s conflicted paean 1983 masterpiece Videodrome, has been to shock entertainment still has the warned. Renn (James Woods) is searchpower to provoke / by Sean L. Maloney ing for the source of an underground video program named “Videodrome,” a show of unmitigated brutality, nothing but barren clay walls, mysterious figures and unbridled sadism. Renn wants it for his cable channel, which peddles in sex and violence on the outer reaches of the cable spectrum. Across the table at lunch one day, friend and soft-core pornographer Masha (Lynn Gorman) tries to dissuade him from following the trail any further: “It has something you don’t, Max. It has a philosophy, and that’s what makes it dangerous.” Twenty-seven years later, Cronenberg’s nightmare vision of the analog-media landscape is still dangerous, still philosophically jarring, and still unsettlingly prescient. Our consumption of media may no longer revolve around cassette tapes and rabbit-ears, or even broadcast television in the traditional sense, but the ability of media to corrupt and/or liberate its consumers remains. Even more than lingering, the corruption/liberation of media has become a part of every moment of every day. The cathode ray tube may no longer be a running interest but the blue flicker of its smaller, flatter cousins is omnipresent. You need look no further than your own pocket for a device that can tap into the signal that satisfies the most craven lust for sex and violence. Anyone that’s been forced to watch porn on a drunken friend’s phone can attest to that. Videodrome came out right as home video of the BETA/VHS variety was hitting critical mass and

“

Television is reality, and reality is less than television.”

—Dr. Brian O’blivion, Videodrome 48

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survives as one of the rare riffs on the underground video culture of the day. It’s now almost hard to imagine that people used to have to make actual physical copies of a video and then actually transport it from Point A to Point B. Scoring shock-video took more than typing different combinations of your favorite dirty words into a search engine. It took time, money and a good deal of resources Yes, your local video store probably had a copy of Faces of Death or the version of Driller Killer that runs out of tape before the movie is over, but tracking down the truly extreme, truly deranged edges of the human experience caught on tape took some effort. At one point, Dr. Brian O’blivion (Jack Creley)—a “media prophet”, a literal talking head who only appears on television while on television—tells Renn that “television is reality, and reality is less than television.” And that’s years before The Real World ushered in a an era of unscripted narcissism. Over two and a half decades before Bridalplasty and the end of dignity. Well before competition-reality television became the last sector of the global economy

that was actually hiring. That’s some foresight on Cronenberg’s part. And that’s why Woods’ Renn—a uniquely perverted outlier in his day, a curator of smut in an era when it was first being welcomed into the home via coaxial cable—has become the deeply disturbing everyman for our era. The sadomasochism that underscores Renn’s relationship with media—and his relationship with radio host Nicki Brand, played by Debbie Harry in her first acting role—may have lost

its shock value in a world where even Disney-manufactured pop stars winds up naked on the ’net, but that just cranks the creep-out factor up even higher. Combine that with the unsettling special effects make-up of the legendary Rick Baker (Hellboy, An American Werewolf in London, Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video) and you’ve got a horror film that just may have become more terrifying with age. As with much of Cronenberg’s output—including such classics as the literally mind-blowing Scanners and the way-ahead-of-the-curve and criminally underappreciated eXistenZ—Videodrome is an examination of the horrors inherent in the human body, the weakness of our flesh and the vulnerability of our minds. But unlike Scanners, which concerns itself with terror of intellectual evolution, or Cronenberg’s remake of The Fly, which tackles the horrors of physical evolution, Videodrome is a critique and exploration of our evolution as a society of media consumers, simultaneously the heroes and villains, sadists and masochists, perpetrators and victims. Survival is never assured, but is it really worth it if we’re willing to sacrifice our humanity and our dignity for entertainment? Videodrome is the rare film that pushed the boundaries of its day so far—reveling in the violent sexuality that it simultaneously condemns, celebrating the entrance of grindhouse sensibilities into your house while hoping the neighbors don’t catch you watching—that its moral center (amoral center?) still feels timely. It becomes a tale for this Videodrome will age as well, an analog-era fable made more potent by the be available interceding years of technological development and socio- on Blu-ray 7 logical regression. It has a philosophy and that’s what makes December from Image it dangerous still. Entertainment. needle

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Intimate Relations Director Alan Rudolph brings another kind of adult romance to the screen / by Bret McCabe

y the time Marianne Faithfull’s “El Gavilan” appears at the very end

of writer/director Alan Rudolph’s Trouble in Mind, the movie has more than earned the bittersweet ineffability that the song stirs up. Set in the fictional Rain City at some unspecific time, this 1985 outing recounts the demise of one relationship as another blossoms. Coop (Keith Carradine) and Georgia (Lori Singer) drift into Wanda’s Diner looking for something, anything. There, the titular proprietress (Geneviève Bujold) watches as her old flame Hawk (Kris Kristofferson) starts falling for Georgia. Coop begins dressing like a new wave gangster and hanging around aspiring hoodlum Solo (Joe Morton), and the pair’s antics bring them into the crosshairs of crime boss Hilly Blue (Divine, not in drag). Coop is going one way, Georgia another, and Trouble in Mind follows their forking paths with a whimsical, endearing grace. This month, Shout Factory releases a restored Trouble in Mind on DVD in a special 25th anniversary edition, and the movie still feels hauntingly out of time. Everything about it is a study of contradictions. It takes place in an Alphavillelike future, while everybody looks and acts like they’re living in hardboiled 1940s film noir. The soundtrack doesn’t just add an emotional component as much as it functions like a commentary, and the movie’s color scheme is somewhere between David Lynch baroque and Fassbinder saturated. It’s a movie world that practically couldn’t exist without movies, and it’s the best entryway into the singular cinematic universe of Alan Rudolph. The son of an actor and television director, Rudolph got started working under Robert Altman, serving as the assistant director to The Long Goodbye, California Split and Nashville, and co-writing Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson. Altman has historically cast a long shadow over Rudolph’s work, but the only filmmaking trait the two auteurs really share is their confidence in

It’s a movie world that practically couldn’t exist without movies, and it’s the best entryway into the singular cinematic universe of Alan Rudolph.

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creating their own cinematic space. Rudolph’s movies don’t move or feel like any other director’s, and because of that they can be difficult to engage. To date he’s directed 21 movies, but what he’s best at are meditations on love, be they comedic dramas or dramatic comedies. They’re anything but romantic comedies. Rudolph doesn’t rely on conventional film language or stock characters, and he doesn’t use genre merely as shorthand to express his ideas. Instead, he approaches narrative storytelling as a means to get into his characters’ heads and hearts. In the process, he’s become American cinema’s plainspoken poet of love and its absence, as ebullient as François Truffaut and as savage as Raymond Carver. His 1976 Welcome to L.A. and 1978 Remember My Name showcase a writer/director finding his voice, but his deft touch comes together for the first time in 1984’s Choose Me. It moves through a loosely connected group of Los Angelenos—bar owner Eve (Lesley Ann Warren), her late-night radio advice host roommate (Bujold again), the escaped mental patient who heads to Eve’s bar and meets Pearl (Rae Dawn Chong), whose husband Zack (Patrick Bauchau) is carrying on an affair with Eve—all of whom appear to be able to find sex easily while still looking for something else. It’s a profoundly lonely, yet strangely funny and caring movie, thanks in large parts to its able cast. Given that a “roman-

tic comedy” today typically involves grown men who act like teenage boys failing to communicate with the women they chase, it’s almost alien to see Choose Me’s adults be both vulnerable and human, able to extend their hearts to somebody, if only for the night, without immediately becoming forever scarred when things maybe don’t end up going happily every after. A similar sense of blithe maturity powers Rudolph’s 1988 The Moderns. Set in Paris during the 1920s jazz age, it follow the misadventures of artist/ forger Nick (Keith Carradine), an American expatriate who bumps into the likes of Ernest Hemingway (Kevin J. O’Connor), Gertrude Stein (Elsa Raven), and Alice B. Toklas (Ali Giron) while chasing the wife (Linda Fiorentino) of an industrialist (John Lone). Paris in the ’20s is one of those overly romanticized clichés, where the Lost Generation drank and loved and made madcap fun alongside the surrealists, but Rudolph treats his characters with the same irreverent tenderness as Choose Me and Trouble in Mind’s lovelorn, wayward souls. It’s a decision that makes the era feel lived-in and approachable, not the relic of some imagined past. Bringing the past to devastatingly familiar life is what makes Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle one of Rudolph’s two finest outings to date. Ostensibly a Dorothy Parker biopic, Mrs. Parker takes place primarily in a 1920s Manhattan when the Algonquin

Round Table of critics, actors, editors and the like would gather to eat, drink and drink some more. Rudolph follows this self-absorbed circle through the rollercoaster professional and romantic life of Parker, played with a severe openness by Jennifer Jason Leigh, who was born to play Parker the way Gary Oldman was born to play Sid Vicious. Mrs. Parker is uncomfortably raw at times, so harsh are the turns that Parker’s life takes, but Rudolph affords such faith in Leigh’s performance that watching a woman’s descent into alcoholic depression becomes both comedic and tragic. Love is both, at least when Rudolph is at the top of his game, switching from life’s greatest pleasures to greatest pains at any moment. And he transports that two-sided coin to the present in what remains his finest statement on the fickle ways that love and sex run hot and cold, 1997’s Afterglow. The still luminous Julie Christie and the born-haggard Nick Nolte play an older married couple who live in Montréal. Phyllis is a former B-movie actress, Lucky is a general handyman and inveterate rake who sometimes services more than a housewife’s kitchen sink. It’s a perfectly understandable arrangement between two adults that gets all kinds of fouled up when Lucky starts some work, and maybe a little more, for Marianne (Lara Flynn Boyle), the stay-at-home wife of an uptight yuppie (Jonny Lee Miller), with whom Phyllis begins an affair. This schematic love rectangle would feel more coincidentally preposterous if Rudolph’s sense of romantic foibles weren’t so polished, refined and touching. Afterglow spends a good deal of time with its May-December affairs, but it’s the connection between Lucky and Trouble in Phyllis that anchors the movie—a portrait of two people Mind will be available on who may have endured more valleys than peaks, but who DVD December also put the time into not forgetting what has held them 14 from Shout! together for all those years. Factory. needle

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* Directors often get

all the credit when it comes to great films, and great TV shows are often seen as ensemble pieces. But what about the actors who help elevate a flick to classic status, or the unsung stars who take a show to the next level? Each month, Pretty Great Performances looks at the actors who rescued a project from failure or added that extra layer of awesomeness.

Pretty Great Performances *

et’s start with the moment everyone

Rutger Hauer is much more than a quotable soliloquy as Blade Runner’s Roy Batty / by Joe gross

remembers, the scene most science fiction fans and a fair number of movie buffs can recite from memory. Roy Batty, a Nexus-6 replicant, perhaps the most perfect synthetic human ever produced, sits on a ledge of a building on Earth, a planet that all but the least-favored have long left. He is stripped to the waist, wet from the rain that seems near constant in this city. He has just saved—chosen to save—the life of his hunter, Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), a man who has sworn to kill him. Batty’s friends are dead, killed by Deckard. Batty himself is dying. He looks at Deckard with a mix of incredulity and exhaustion, as if he’s slightly appalled he has to tell this guy, this human, for God’s sake, What It’s All About. ¶ “I’ve… SEEN things you people wouldn’t believe,” Batty says, as if he can’t believe it himself. “Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I’ve watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.”

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Cut to Deckard, who looks like he has no idea what Batty is talking about. (Perhaps it is the expression of an actor who suddenly realizes nobody is going to remember he’s even in this scene, such is his co-star’s atavistic power.) Cut back to Batty, who seems to be looking almost inward. “All those... moments will be lost in time... like… tears... in rain.” He pauses. “Time... to die.” He smiles briefly, almost embarrassed by this display of emotion. But it is also a smile that says, “Now you know as best you can what I know and how I feel. That’s all I can do.” He lowers his head, releases the dove he was holding, and dies. Rutger Hauer didn’t win any awards for this performance, nor was he nominated. Though it grew in status over the decades and is now considered one

of the most important, visionary movies of the 1980s, Blade Runner was met with decidedly mixed notices upon release, and largely tanked at the box office. Indeed, though a star in his native Netherlands, Hauer was barely known in the States. But in Roy Batty, he found his signature role, a mix of actor and part that happens once in a career. Hauer never did anything as interesting since. But he didn’t have to. Science-fiction thrives on suspension of disbelief, and we absolutely believe Hauer as a perfect man. Or, rather, as a child’s idea of a perfect man. Blonde with piercing blue eyes, his looks did have an almost post-human vibe, a sharp contrast to his dank surroundings. He exudes confidence and arrogance mixed with an awe he can never quite suppress. We catch a glimpse of him when Deckard is being briefed on the replicants. In this mugshot, Batty has dead eyes and a stocking on his head, as if he was just released from the vat he was grown in. But when we see him in the world, we see his hand first—he is flexing it, as if arthritic decay has started to set in. In profile, we see him looking at his hand. He turns his head, smiling with the mix of psychopathy and wonder that Hauer manages to embody. He walks over to Leon, the replicant who has just killed another Blade Runner and returned to his home for his “precious photos.” He hasn’t found them; the place was tossed. “Men?” Batty says, his voice full of disdain. Men are the ones who swear they are more human than Batty, but don’t appreciate the amazing gift of life. “Police… men?” Batty says, a little harder. He turns away in disgust—Leon, you’re an idiot. This is the dance Hauer does as Batty. He is violent, profoundly so, but he is pushed to violence. He is a leader who knows his days are (quite literally) numbered. He is packed with human knowledge and loves twisting it to suit his aims.

“

I’ve… SEEN things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I’ve watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those... moments will be lost in time... like…tears... in rain.” —Roy Batty, Blade Runner

“Fiery the angels fell,” Batty says to Chew, the Asian eyemaker. “Deep thunder rolled around their shores, burning with the fires of Orc.” Check out how Hauer rolls the words off his tongue, perhaps knowing the misquote from William Blake is deliberate, well aware he is the fallen angel. He’s least believable when he’s trying to seem human. “Ah, gosh,” Batty says when introduced to J.F. Sebastian, the 25-year-old with “Methuselah’s syndrome” who designed the Nexus-6. “You’ve really got some nice toys here.” J.F., that was your cue to run like hell. But he doesn’t because these replicants seem so perfect. Batty looks like an Aryan Apollo, Pris is a literal sex toy. Batty and Pris are sympathetic to J.F.’s plight, but ultimately, J.F. is merely human, a means to an end. That end is the most violent scene in the film, Batty’s encounter with Tyrell of the Tyrell Corporation. This is also some of Hauer’s most compelling acting, as he vacillates between filial rage and just wanting his dad to make it all better. He tries to debate with Tyrell about the mechanics of modifying his gene sequence to allow for a longer lifespan. Tyrell repeatedly says it can’t be done. Batty makes it plain: “I want more life, fucker.” (Or as some cuts have it, “I want more life, father,” an inspired substitution that doesn’t feel like a less angry alternative.) Notice the almost shamed way Batty says, “I’ve done questionable things…” Tyrell tries to condescend his way out: “Also extraordinary things. Revel in your time,” a comment for which Batty crushes Tyrell’s skull and puts out his eyes. Hauer’s face is pure rage, the slave destroying his master, the son slaying his father, homo superior laying waste to mere humanity. Then, during Batty and Deckard’s final fight, something shifts in Batty. He taunts Deckard throughout their iconic cat-andmouse on rain-slicked buildings, like the Joker mocking a wounded Batman. He breaks Deckard’s fingers, one for each of his fallen replicants. “This is for Zhora… this is for Pris.” It might be the moment of Batty’s clearest morality—he doesn’t feel badly about this at all. Yet, the change still happens. He all but stands there as Deck- Blade Runner ard hits him with a pipe: “Good! is available on DVD and That’s the spirit!!!” Blu-ray, from When he sees Deckard helpless, Warner Brothers. Batty knows that this is the victory, that saving Deckard isn’t a surrender to human mores, but a transcendence of them. “Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it?” Batty says to a struggling Deckard. “That’s what it is to be a slave.” He sits down and talks his way into movie history, the artificial man who embodied the catchphrase “more human than human.” Hauer was never more human, either. needle

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When a Cigar Isn’t A Cigar essay by

Stan Michna

It is a truth rarely acknowledged that a society in

want of illumination need only look at its movies. So when Martin Landau’s Bela Lugosi wises up Johnny Depp’s Ed Wood to the pathetic state of the film industry—too many movies about “giant bugs and grasshoppers” (not to mention wasp women and crab monsters)—he’s collaterally exposing a fearful, wilfully distracted 1950s America slouching toward smug consumerism. Sixty years later, cartoons, wizards, hobbits, and video game and comic book superheroes dominate the film industry landscape. Adolescent fantasy is popular culture’s order of the day: naïve, dreamy, hermetically-sealed oblivion with fake happy endings. It’s like being in a giant opium den, stupefied and disengaged while the hyenas of the real world—bankers and politicians (as if they’re even separate)—move in for the kill. Which brings us to director Robert Schwentke’s RED (an acronym for Retired: Extremely Dangerous), an action thriller about a retired band of crack, CIA Black Operatives targeted by mysterious assassins with High Government Connections. Naturally, the survivors—Bruce Willis, John Malkovich, Morgan Freeman, Helen Mirren (!) and a former KGB rival, Brian Cox—pool their considerable experience in death and mayhem to get to the bottom of the mystery, and all (except one) live happily ever after. On first reading, it sounds suspiciously like another contemporary hybrid insinuating its way into theatres these days: the Geezer Fantasy. You know: where a bunch of superannuated action stars gird their mottled loins, inject their pecs with silicone, grab an arsenal of oversized ordnance, lay a severe ass-kicking on buff punks 30 years their 54

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junior. . . and nail a couple of pneumatically-enhanced babes to boot. (Elves are more real.) True, RED has a cartoonish feel at times, too (for one, very little blood given the ghastly body count), but it’s an element that also works in its favour. Particularly smart is the use of superimposed inter-title cards resembling picturepostcards to give the audience a clear sense of location (the action is scattered all over America), a device dating back to silent-movie days yet as effective and fresh as ever. No wasted establishing shots, no slowing down of its lively pace, controlled masterfully—the movie breezes by—by the great, underrated editor, Thom Noble. The cast of reliable old pros is uniformly excellent (if not exactly taxed dramatically), and clearly seem to be enjoying both themselves and their fellow stars. And even if Malkovich’s hammy-mode button gets jammed occasionally—his character is supposed to have been an unwitting LSD governmentexperiment guinea pig, so what do you expect?—the scenery-chewing is almost non-existent, or at least skilfully disguised. (Especially effective, considering the star wattage, are the two lesser lights who happen to do much of the heavy lifting: Mary-Louise Parker as a civilian swept up in the maelstrom, and Karl Urban as the deadly, conflicted G-man out to erase Willis and his crew.) In short, RED sounds like one of those lively, lightweight, guilty pleasures almost anyone can enjoy. Fast, funny, well-acted and action-packed. No muss, no fuss, and no aspiring to being An Important Film. And yet . . . And yet there’s something crawling under that lovely porcelain skin. And it’s this: the villain here isn’t some fantastical evil wizard, but the inner circle of a corrupt government. Like The Watchmen and V For Vendetta, RED is based on a graphic novel which dares to address (albeit differently) the notion that danger lurks where power coalesces. Where that danger is most pernicious lies in the institutions we as citizens first empower, then blissfully ignore. The monster bent on our destruction is of our own creation. We may not be on the brink of another phase of sweaty, paranoid thrillers like The Parallax View or The Conversation of 35 years ago. But don’t you find it just a little bit creepy that RED—a film about double-dealing, lying governments—should hit the shelves at the same time WikiLeaks smacks the world in the kisser with evidence of lying and double-dealing in the highest echelons of government? RED will be Just asking. released January 25 from Summit Entertainment.

Questions or comments? Email stan@sunriserecords.com

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JANUARY 4

8213: Gacy House Airline Disaster Ancient America: Mound Builders – Edgar Cayce’s Forgotten Legacy Barney: Musical Zoo Behind the Scenes Beware Dogs Beyblade: Metal Fusion Vol. 2 Big Love: The Complete Fourth Season Big Red One Bishop T.D. Jakes: Live From the Potter’s House Bitter Feast Bizarre Foods With Zndrew Zimmern: Collection 4, Part 2 Black Sheep Borderland/Dark Ride/Unearthed/ The Gravedancers Burn: The Evolution of an American City Cabin Fever/Cabin Fever 2/ Descent/Descent 2 Camille Case 39 Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That: Up and Away! Chariots of Fire Cool Dog Demon Resurrection Dinner for Schmucks Dirty Tricks Doctor Zhivago Dracula’s Curse/Bled/Bram Stoker’s Dracula’s Guest/Fangs Edge of Dreaming Enemy at the Door: Series 2 Escape From L.A. Eye/Bug/Ju-On/Alone in the Dark Fright Flick Fubar II Garfield Show: All You Need Is Love and Pasta Glee: Season 1 Godsend/See No evil/Stir of Echoes/Stir of Echoes 2 Gold Rush Good Neighbor Sam Gravitation: The Complete Collection Guilty Gun Haunting in Connecticut/An American Haunting/Soul Survivors/Riding the Bullet Hayate the Combat Butler Part 8 Hope & Redemption: The Lena Baker Story Howl iCarly: Season 2 Vol. 2 Into the Universe With Stephen Hawking Jackal Jamie Kennedy: Uncomfortable JFK K-19: The Widowmaker Lake Dead/Unrest/Crazy Eights/ Wicked Little Things Land Before Time X: The Great Longneck Migration Land Before Time XI: The Invasion of the TInysauruses Last American Cowboy Last Castle Last Exorcism League: The Complete First Season Legend of Bagger Vance

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Leprechaun/Leprechaun 2/ Leprechaun 3/Leprechaun 4 Let me Die Quietly Life Unexpected: The Complete First Season Lost Boys Machete Magi-Nation: Fight the Shadows Make It or Break It: Season 1 Vol. 2 Mama Flora’s Family Man With a Video Camera Manga Yoga: Cherry Blossom Mannix: The Fourth Season Mid-Air Collision Monster Mutt Mummy: The Animated Series Vol. 2 Mummy: The Animated Series Vol. 3 My Best Friend Is a Vampire/ Repossessed/Slaughter High/ Silent Night, Deadly Night 3 Notorious Landlady Nowhere But Texas One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Operation Mad Ball Oregon Trail PHFFFT! Playing From the Heart Portraits of Inspiring Lives: Jack Canfield Pumpkinhead II/Leprechaun/ Wishmaster/Wishmaster 2 Ricky Gervais Show: The Complete First Season Rocky & Bullwinkle & Friends: The Complete Series Rules Sam Steele and the Junior Detective Agency Sarah Jane Adventures: The Complete Third Season Showdown Sid the Science Kid” Sid’s Senseational Adventures Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow Small Time Crooks Sonic Mega Mix Supreme Swordsmen Sword of Swords Teenage Paparazzo Thomas & Friends: Wobbly Wheels & Whistles Ticking Clock Touching Home Traffic UFC 121: Lesnar vs. Velasquez Under the Yum Yum Tree Unexpected Killers Van Helsing: The London Assignment Vanilly Sky Visa Dream Who Loves the Sun Win a Date With Ted Hamilton Wings Over California Wolvesbayne Wow! Wow! Wubbzy!: Wubbzy Be Mine Yellow Handkerchief

JANUARY 11

100 Years of Air Combat: Century of Epic Air Battles Adam-12: Vol. 1 Air Power: Story of the USAF Air Show Extreme Alfred Hitchcock Alien From the Deep All in the Family: The Complete Eighth Season Alpha and Omega America: The War Years 1941-45 American Civil War: 5 Disc Collector’s Edition American Train Journeys Animal Oddities Barbra Streisand Collector’s Box Battleground Vietnam

Jan 11 Hilarious

by Louis C.K. Pro-tip for the latter-day Louis fan: the “C.K.” is simply an easier way to pronounce his actual surname (Szekely). He’s also written a few crummy screenplays with Chris Rock, and some opposite-of-crummy zings for Rock’s Emmy-friendly HBO talk show. If you know all that and also caught Lucky Louie the first time around, your fanship will be further rewarded by this Sundanceapproved stand-up set. (Comedy Central) Ben 10: Ultimate Alien Vol. 2 Beverly Hillbillies Bizarre Animals Black Butler: Season 1 Part 1 Black Metal: The Music of Satan Booky’s Crush Candyman Catfish Century of Flight Chainsaw Sally Show: Season One Cheddar Chinese Kamasutra Chingo Bling and Company: I’m Too Famous for This Chit Civil War Comedy Central Roast of David Hasselhoff Criss Angel: Mindfreak – The Complete Season Six Dances With Wolves Deep Deep Blue Sea Destino Devil’s Hill Divine Miss M: In Performance Doctor Who: Meglos Doctor Who: The Dominators Dragnet Dragnet, Vol. 1 Dream Machines Drive North to the Yalu Duke Ellington… And More Stories to Celebrate Great Figures in African American History Encyclopedia of the 20th Century: Days That Shook the World Endangered Epic Romances Collection: 4 Film Favorites (Dangerous Liasons/ The Painted Veil/Silk/The Affair of the Necklace) Erik Friedlander: Solos – The Jazz Sessions

Explore the World Extreme Comedy Collection Fairways to Heaven Family Fun Collection: 4 Film Favorites Famous Bombers of WWII Famous Fighters of WWII Fighting Forces Vietnam From Normandy to Berlin Frontline: Death by Fire Frontline: The Spill Funny or Die Presents: The Complete First Season Gift Girls Night Collection: 4 Film Favorites (A Cinderella Story/ What a Girl Wants/The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants/Chasing Liberty) Girls Rule Collection (Clueless/ Mean Girls/She’s the Man) Goth Vampire Nation Great American Train Journey Great Battles of WWII Great Generals Great Performances: Macbeth Greek: Chapter Five – The Complete 3rd Season Green Hornet Greg Osby & John Abercrombie: Solos – The Jazz Sessions Halloween Night Hammer and an Anvil Happy Ever Afters Heartbreaker Heroes of WWII Hessen Conspiracy History of American Railroad Hot in Cleveland: Season One How to Get Ahead in Advertising Jackie Robinson Story/The Joe Louis Story Jamie Kennedy: Uncomfortable Kathleen Madigan: Gone Madigan Key-Stonerville Korea: The Forgotten War Land Before Time II: The Great Valley Adventure Land Before Time III: The Time of Great Giving Land Before Time IV: Journey Through the Mists Land Before Time IX; Journey to Big Water Land Before Time V: The Mysterious Island Land Before Time VI: The Secret of Saurus Rock Land Before Time VII: The Stone of Cold Fire Land Before Time VIII: The Big Freeze Land Before Time XII: The Great Day of the Flyers Land Before Time XIII: The Wisdom of Friends Last Brickmaker in America Legion: The Final Exorcism Lincoln and Douglas: An American Friendship… and More Stories to Celebrate U.S. History Louie Giglio: Grace (The One and Only) Louie Giglio: New Year Louie Giglio: Prayer – Remix Louis C.K.: Hilarious Love & Laughs Collection: 4 Film Favorites (Thin Line Between Love and Hate/Love Don’t Cost a Thing/King’s Ransom/Strictly Business) Love Hurts Love Stories Collection: 4 Film Favorites (The Lake House/ Message in a Bottle/Forever Young/Sommersby) Mammals Maos Last Dancer Masterpiece Contemporary: Framed

Jan 11 Once Upon a

Time in America

Directed by Sergio Leone Once Upon a Time in America probably scares off casual GoodFellas/Casino/Godfather fans—hell, it’s an hour longer than even those super-sized mob epics. But Sergio Leone’s sprawling multi-generational pastiche is worth (well, just about) every minute. Robert De Niro and James Woods are the linchpins in the Jewish gangster ghetto saga, with (literally ageless) Elizabeth McGovern as moral compass. {Warner Home Video) Matthew Shipp: Solos – The Jazz Sessions Max & Ruby: Bunny Tales Men of Honor: Story U.S. Army Mi Pecado Michael Douglas Collection: 4 Film Favorites (Falling Down/A Perfect Murder/Disclosure/Coma) Mitsein Moon Race Mountain Wildlife Mr. Belvedere, Vol. 1 Narnia Code Nature: A Murder of Crows NFL: Top 100 – NFL’s Greatest Players Nine Months Once Upon a Time in America PBS Explorer Collection: Health & Fitness Peter & Pompey Picture Me Piranha 3D PKT-Rias Pocoyo: Super Pocoyo Polar & Desert Wildlife Powwow Highway Predators Princess Kate Psychosis Punk: Attitude Red Dirt Rising Rise & Fall of Japan Rise & Fall of Nazi Germany Rules of Engagement: The Complete Fourth Season Seashore Wildlife Secrets of the Dead: Slave Ship Mutiny Secrets of the Dead: The Silver Pharaoh

Semper Fi: Marines in WWII Senor Del Tequila Shake Hands With the Devil Sign of Four Simon Boccanegra Sins of Madame Bovary Skins, Vol. 4 Small Wonder Vol. 1 Social Network Sordid Lives: The Series Soul Kittens Cabaret Space Race Spin City Vol. 1 Stalemate at the 38th Parallel Stonerville Super Size Me Superplanes Switch Temptations There’s Nothing Out There Top Enders Top Secret Rosies: The Female Computers of World War II Vietnam: War in the Jungle Visioneers Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea Season 4 Vol. 2 White Lion Concert Anthology 1987-1991 Wild Kingdom Yo Gabba Gabba!: Let’s Visit the Doctor

JANUARY 18

21 Jump Street: The Complete Fourth Season AKA: Cassius & Rocky Marciano & Diggstown & Dempsey Aliens, Abductions & Extraordinary Sightings All Dogs Go to Heaven 1 & 2 Andrew Dice Clay: One Night With Dice Andy Williams: Moon River and Me Andy Williams: My Favorite Duets Angel Beats Vol. 7 Animal Kingdom Animal Rescue in Taiwan Anthony Bordain: No Reservations Coll. 5 Pt. 2 Army of Crime Assistants Australia Baby Seal Rescue Beached Grey Whale Bears in the Wild Bellydance Superstars: Introduction to Bombay Bellywood Best of Andy Williams Christmas Shows Best of Global Lens: Africa Biology Super Pack Black Klansman Bloodsuckers Boris: Live in Japan Bowfire: Live in Concert Bread Bugs Canada Carrie Triple Feature Cereal Chocolate Clubbed Cold Cold Dog Soup Color WW2 Award Winning Films Corn Creepy Creatures Da Unda Dogg: Unknown Legend Dallas: The Complete Fourteenth Season Danger Mines! Danger Uxo!! Dark Skies: The Declassified Complete Series Death Race 2 Deep Purple Over Zurich Denia Leary & Friends Present: Douchebags and Donuts

Dino World Doc West Dogfather Down Terrace Eichmann Fire on the Amazon Freebie Hannibal Lecter Triple Feature Hello Kitty Triple Pack Hey Vern It’s Ernest!: The Complete Series Hollywood Comedy Legends: 50 Movies Hunters in the Sky: Fighter Aces of World War II 5-Pack Hunting Buddies Igor & Little Monsters Jack Goes Boating James Bond: Connery Vol. 1 Kathleen Madigan: Gone Madigan Ken Hensley: Blood on the Highway King of Paper Chasin’ King Remembered Last of the Summer Wine: Vintage 1987 Lebanon Louie Giglio: Grace (The One and Only) Louie Giglio: New Year Louie Giglio: Prayer Remix Love Kittens: Four Sexy Classics From the ‘60s Man With No Name Triple Feature Married Men and Single Women Mars: The Phoenix Odyssey Marvel Knights: Black Panther Mary Alessi: Pressing On Merlin: The Complete Second Season Mr. Immortality: The Life and Time of Twista Music From Another Room & Autumn in New York Mutants My Two Dads: You Can Count on Me Naked Kiss National Geographic: Inside the State Department Neshoba: The Price of Freedom NFL: Atlanta Falcons Best Games of 2010 Season NFL: Oakland Raiders Best Games of 2010 Season Nite Tales: The Series Oscar Peterson: Live at Ronnie Scott’s 1974 Paper Man Perfect Man Perfect Woman Phantom: Requiem for the Phantom Part 1 Phantom: Requiem for the Phantom Part 2 Pink Panther Double Feature Pink Panther Triple Feature Redneck Comedy Roundup 1 & 2 Return to Me & At First Sight Rocky Double Feature Rocky Four Movies Rocky Triple Feature Roger Corman’s Cult Classics: SciFi Classics Roger Corman’s Cult Classics: Up From the Depths/Demon of Paradise Running Wild Sailor Moon: Sailor Stars Collection Vol. 2 Scoop on Poop Secret of Nimh & Secret of Nimh: Timmy to Rescue Semi-Tough & Johnny Be Good Sheeba Shock Corridor Simon & Simon: Best of Season Two Simon Boccanegra Sins of My Father Stingray: The Complete Series Superstar: The Unlikely Rise of Juan Frances Takers Thirtysomething: Season One Vol. 1

TNA Wrestling: Bound for Glory 2010 UFC 122: Marquardt vs. Okami Untamed Heart & Speechless & True Love Very Best of Price Is Right Victory at Sea Virginity Hit Waking the Dead: The Complete Season Five World of Water: Taking the Plunge World of Water: Vessels World of Water: Watercrafts WWE: TLC – Tables, Ladders and Chairs 2010

JANUARY 25

1st Furry Valentine 48 Hours/Another 48 Hours Aaron Bacon: Troubled Youth Collection AC/DC: The Interview Sessions Adventures of Power Agatha Christie Hour Set 2 Air Front 3: Japan – Triumph & Defeat ‘41-’45 Airplane/Top Secret AKA Tommy Chong American Beauty/The Virgin Suicides American Experience: Robert E. Lee Ancient America: Mound Builders – Edgar Cayce’s Forgotten Legacy Anywhere USA Art of Erotica: The Outsiders At the Edge of the World Back to You and Me Basil Dearden’s London Underground Belcanto Vol. 2 Beowulf Best Supporting Actor Double Feature: City Slickers/A Fish Called Wanda Big Alligator River Bird Can’t Fly Bon Jovi DVD Collector’s Box Bonanza Vol. 1 Bordertown, Vol. 1 Bread Crumbs Broadcast News Brother Yusef: A Chamber Film Bryan Beller: To Nothing the Thanks in Advance California Clay in the Rockies Candyman Captain Johnno Cartune Xprez 2010 Cecil Taylor: All the Notes Celia Cruz: Live in Zaire Charlie Hunter: Solos – The Jazz Sessions Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer Complaints Choir Confessions of an American Bride Crippled Heroes Crossing the American Crises: From Collapse to Action Daniel Barenboim: 50 Years on Stage Dead Space: Aftermath Demon Haunt Derailraded: Inside the Mind of Larry “Wild Man” Fischer Disgaea: The Complete Series Disturbed DOble Feature: Wayne’s World/ Wayne’s World 2 Doctor Atomic Donald Judd’s Marfa Texas Doors Are Open/Rolling Stones in the Park Dope Downtown Abbey Series One Duplicity Dying God East Coast Ryders Vol. 7: Back 2

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/movies/new_releases the Streets Enter the Void Enx: Civ – Resist or Die Everything Strange and New Feed the Fish Fighting Life Fixing the Future: Now on PBS Freakonomics Fresh Prince of Bel-Air: The Complete Seasons 1 & 2 Gantz: Complete Collection Glee Season 2 Vol. 1 God’s Bloody Acre Gold Gotta Sing Greening of Southie Gucci Mane Gone Bonkers Gucci Mane: In Wonderland Halloween Hope and a Little Sugar House of Bones How I Married My High School Crush I Do But I Don’t I Me Wed I Spid on Your Naked Corpse I Told You Not to Call the Police I.R.A.: King of Nothing Inhale Inspector Bellamy Interview With a Serial Killer Iron Maiden: The Interview Sessions Jamaican Railways Jefferson Joe Strummer Tribute Concert: Cast a Long Shadow John Cage: How to Get Started John Cage: One/Seven and Talks About Cows John Kawie: Brain Freeze John Wayne: Bigger Than Life Justified: The Complete First Season King of the Borardwalk Kiss Interviews Kiss: Meet the Press Land of Confusion Last Vampire on Earth Last Winter Lennonyc Let the Balloon Go Like Dandelion Dust Living Legend Lost Cause Love the Beast Lovers & Friends Show; Season Three Making Mr. Right Man in a Suitcase Set 1 Man of Violence Marc Chagall: Profile of the Artist Matlock: The Sixth Season Mi-5 Vol. 8 Mindi Abair: Live in Hi-Fi Stereo Mojo Bones More Winners; Boy Soldiers/His Master’s Ghost Motley Crue: Press Crue Music and Sounds My Last Five Girlfriends Naked Guns Collection Naruto: Shippuden Box Set 5 National Geographic: Inside the Milky Way Nature: Braving Iraq Nature: Revealing the Leopard Nature: Wolverine – Chasing the Phantom Night Court Seasons 1 & 2 No Tomorrow Nowhere Boy Of Boys and Men One Hell of a Guy One Piece: Season 3 – Fourth Voyage

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Only Thrill/Crossed Over Open Season 3 Out of the Blue: The Story of the Santa Cruz Surfing Club Penitent Man Piano Pie in the Sky: Series 4 Pokemon Elements: Collection 2 Primal Primitive London Puppets Who Kill: The Best of Seasons 3 & 4 Red Red Hill Reflections Resistance Road Reps Ronald Reagan Centennial Collection Room to Move/On Loan Sacred Blacksmith: Complete Santa Sangre Savage Holocaust Saw 3D Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated Season One VOl. 1 Scott Cole: Disco Dojo Scout’s Honor: Badge to the Bone Secretariat Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Shadow of the Tower Shaun the Sheep: Spring SheenaA-Anigans She-Ra: The Complete Series Silent Partner Snapper Magee’s Live Vol. 1 Stieg Larsson Trilogy Still Bill Stone Taken by the Romans Tattoo Odyssey Testament of Mother Teresa Tony Cragg: In Celebration of Sculpture Top Kid/The Other Facts of Life Top Shot: The Complete Season 1 Tower of Power: 40th Anniversary Traveler Tupac: The Lost Prison Tapes – Uncensored & Uncut Ultimate Fighting Championships: Ultimate Knockouts Vol. 8 Universe: The Complete Season Five Unmoved Mover Vampire Knight: The Complete Series Vietnam War: A Decade of Dog Tage Violent Blue We Live in Public Webster; Season One West Coast: Beat and Beyond What’s the Matter With Kansas Which Way Home White Wedding Wish Me Luck Series 2 Wonderland: A Traveling Cinema WWE: Raw – The Best of 2010 You Won’t Miss Me Young Jeezy: Biggest Movie Ever – The Visuals to TM:103 Zorro: The Complete Series

FEBRUARY 1

10 11 Harrowhouse Abba: Thank You for the Music Abbott and Costello Show: Who’s on First? Airwolf: Season Four America at War Aviation: National Archives Best of Soul Train Vol. 2 Beverly Hills Chihuahua 2 Big Momma’s House 1 & 2 Blue Murder Complete Collection Bonanza Vol. 1 Bonded by Blood Bordertown Vol. 1

jan 25 Saw 3D

Directed by Kevin Greutert The seventh installment in the Saw series is the last, which means—well, it means that the American public will find something equally shitty to spend their money on around Halloween. (There’s got to be a new Final Destination in the can, right?) At least one of those poor girls from VH1’s Scream Queens got to do her thing for a few minutes, which will surely impress the hell out of the Wayans Brothers. (Lionsgate)

Bulgarian Prophet Bullshot Butch & Sundance: The Early Days/ Death Hunt Chain Letter Checking Out Claire of the Moon Client List Clifford the Big Red Dog: Best Buddies Conviction Death Tube 2 Discovering Hamlet Door County: Traditions of a Rugged Pioneer Past Drug Wars Elena Undone Essence Music Festival Vol. 3 Everyday Black Man Farm Girl in New York First Encampment: First Boy Scout Camp in America Flockton Flyer: Season One Flyabout Forgotten Pills Garrow’s Law Giulia Doesn’t Date at Night Gold Hatchet II Hercule Poirot Coffet 7 Hercule Poirot Coffet 8 Iki Tousen: Premium Box Initial D: Second Stage Leonard Cohen: Early Years Let Me In Linkin Park: Lost in Translation Long Good Friday Love and Honor Lucky Lady Mean Girls 2 Mona Lisa Monsters

Movie Lovers Guide to Film Language: Classic Scenes My One and Only Never Let Me Go NFL Top 10 NFL’s Greatest Players Night Catches Us Nirvana: Teen Spirits Over Washington D.C. Patti Stiger: Married in a Year Pink Floyd: Reflections and Echos Pokemon: Arceus and the Jewel of Life Precode Hollywood Double Feature: Hell Harbor/Jungle Bride Pregnancy Pact Prowler Quantum Apocalypse Red River Rhineland Ronald Reagan: An American Journey Saturday Night Live: Best of John Belushi Saturday Night Live: The Best of Chris Farley Scream Theater: 12 Cheap Chills Sesame Street: Silly Storytime – Rapunzel Shopping Skin Sleepy Eyes of Death: Collector’s Set Vol. 2 Speed of Life Swishbucklers TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection: Lassie TCM Greatest Classic Legends Collection: Errol Flynn TCM Greatest Classic Legends Collection: Jean Harlow TCM Greatest Classic Legends Collection: John Ford Westerns Thoreau’s Walden Tillman Story Time Bandits UFC 123: Rampage vs. Machida Virus X Welcome to the RIleys Withnail and I Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop You’re Under Arrest: Fast & Furious Season 2

FEBRUARY 8

1 a Minute 100 Years That Shook the World 1950s: A Year to Remember Alfred Hitchcock: The Master of the Macabre Alice in Murderland America, America American Civil War American Experience: Dinosaur Wars American Experience: Panama Canal America’s Classic Hero Amira Mor: Behind the Veil Apostles Arctic Mission: The Great Adventure Azorian: The Raising of the K-129 Bamboo Bears: Forest Adventures Barbie Fairytopia Beautiful Flowers & Gardens Beauty & The Briefcase Best of Bonanza Between a Hammer and an Anvil Billy Gardell: Halftime Blood Pledge Bruce Bruce: Losin’ It Live From Boston Bynum Cake Calling Care Bears to the Rescue Movie Caution Show Dogs Celtic Voyage: A Fascinating Journey Through Ireland

Feb 8 I Spit On Your Grave (1978), I Spit On Your Grave (2010)

Directed by Meir Zarchi, Steven R. Monroe The needless remake and abhorrent 1978 original arrive in tandem today. Make a gift of them if you want to assure that no woman ever speaks to you again. Think Last House on the Left without any semblance of intellect, innovation or, frankly, competence. Thumbs up to Roger Ebert for two consecutive no-star reviews. (Anchor Bay Entertainment)

Century of Flight: 100 Years of Aviation Check It Out With Dr. Steve Brule Chrono Crusade: The Complete Series Chuggington: Let’s Ride the Rails Classic Educational Shorts 3: Safe Not Sorry Classic Educational Shorts 4: Celluloid Salesman Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion: The Complete First Season Columbo Mystery Movie Collection 1991-1993 Curious George: A Bike Ride Adventure Deep Blue Sea: The Best of Undersea Explorer Dirty Pair: The Original TV Series Part 2 Doctor Who Doctor Who: The Mutants Double Wedding Down for Life Dragonball: 4 Movie Pack Drive North to the Yalu Drop Dead Gorgeous Drunken Masters Vol. 2 Eyeshield 21: Collection 4 Farewell Five Corners Flickan Four Seasons French Gigolo Frontline: Facing Death Frontline: The Confessions Great Battles of WW2

Great Railways: The Age of Steam Group Marriage Guardian: The Complete Series Guardian: The Final Season Harry Connick Jr. In Concert on Broadway High Lane Hollywood Westerns I Spit on Your Grave (1978) I Spit on Your Grave (2010) It’s Kind of a Funny Story Just Friends/The Journey Just Laugh Kalamity Killers of the Deep Last Play at Shea Last Supper Legends of the Silver Screen: The Biographies Collection Live a Little Steal a Lot Loba Mafia: Coming to America Marines in the Pacific Mickey Mouse Clubhouse: Minnie’s Masquerade Mission Discovery Monte Carlo Rallies 1958-65 More Winners: Second Childhood/ The Big Wish My Soul to Take Nahual Nancy Lamott: The Don’t Tell Mama Shows Nature’s Palette Nick Jr. Favorites: Sisters and Brothers Nora’s Hair Salon 3: Shear Disaster Nuclear Blast Clips Vol. 1 Nudes of the World: Skin Deep Ocean Wonders Ominous Ong Bak 3 Only Love Pacific Battlefront Pacific Battlefront: Marines in the Pacific Pacific Warriors: Hell to Victory Political Promise Private Function Project Runway: The Complete Eighth Season Quest Beyond Time/The Paper Boy Refuge Riot Rock the Paint Role/Play Romantics Running With Wolves Ruta Tj-Ny Samantha Brown’s Asia Secrets of the Dead: Lost Ships of Rome See You in September Shapes & Colors All Around Speed-Dating Stalemate at the 38th Parallel Still Walking Sudden Death Super Hero Squad Show Vol. 3 Tamara Drewe Tarflowers/Mr. Edmund Thesis Tom & Jerry Vol. 1: Fur Flying Adventures Trapped: Haitian Nights Ultimate Jordan Unmade Beds Vietnam: The Battles/The Courage Vietnam: War in the Jungle Walk by Faith 2 When I Rise Women of Brewster Place: Original Uncut Version Wusa WW2: Battlefront WWE: Biggest Knuckleheads Year of the Fish Yojimbo/Sanjuro Zen Garden

FEBRUARY 15

Around the World in 80 Days (1989) Bellydance Superstars: Advance Your Dance With Sabah Best of Soul Train Box Set Bill Moyers’ World of Ideas: Writers Bill Moyers: In Search of the Constitution Biloxi Blues Boxer Brat Pack Movies & Music Collection Brick CB4 Classic Adventures Collection Vol. 4: Jason & The Argonauts/Merlin CSI: Crime Scene Investigation Seasons 1-10 Daylight Robbery Diana Rigg at the BBC Dirty Movie Disconnect Doctor Who: A Christmas Carol Dungeons & Dragons/Dungeons & Dragons Wrath of the Dragon God Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Evan Almighty Felicity: An American Girl Adventure Firesign Theatre: Duke of Madness Motors Fugitive: The Fourth and Final Season Vol. 2 Game of Death Gangland Ghost Whisperer: The Complete Series Glorious 39 Green Paradise Hit Favorites: Jump Into Spring Into the Wild Junior Kansas City Confidential Kiss Before Dying Kiss of Chaos Kiss the Bride Kites Lady Hermit Land Before Time: Chomper Double Feature Last Lovecraft: Relic of Cthulhu Love at First Kill Mercury Rising Middle Men Murphy’s Law: Series 3 Needless: Collection 1 November Son One Night at McCool’s One Piece: Season 3 – Fifth Voyage Oppai Chanbara: Striptease Samurai Squad Paper Paradise Alley Paroled Portrait of St. Petersburg Promised Land Queen’s Blade: Complete Series Real McCoy Respire Rich Little Show Ring Two Rodney Perry: Nothing But the Truth Screwed Sgt. Frog: Season One Shooting April Sinatra Club Skulls Spin City: The Complete Fourth Season Stag Night Storm Warriors Stranger Sudden Death Sugarland Express Summer Wars Time for Drunken Horses TNA Wrestling: Turning Point 2010/ Final Resolution 2010 Top Gear: The Complete Season 14

Top Gear: The Complete Season 15 Traffic: The Miniseries Untold Secrets of the Civil War Virus War Web of Death White Lion Wiggles: Let’s Eat William S. Burroughs: A Man Within Wishbone Women Without Men Working Girls You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger

FEBRUARY 22

300 Killers 4192: The Crowning of the Hit King 7th Hunt After the Wall: A World United Agatha Christie Alien vs. Ninja All-Star Superman American Jazz Life Andrew Previn: Kindness of Strangers – Portrait by Tony Palmer Armless Barbarossa Bat Being/Cop Kilers Birdemic: Shock & Terror Black Rodeo Boudicca British Rail Journeys: North Wales – Chester to Aberystwyth Brutal Beauty: Tales of the Rose City Rollers Call Me Salome Cam Girl Carl Palmer: Drum Solos Carmo, Hit the Road Change of Plans Chautauqua: An American Narrative Climate of Change Clover Clowns Come West Along the Road Vol. 2: Irish Tradition Music Crazy Like a Fox Crying Freeman: The Complete Collection Dennis Miller: Big Speech Depeche Mode: Rewind – 30 Years at the Edge Discreet Douglas Macarthur: Return to Corregidor – One Man Show Dragonball Z: Dragon Box Vol. 5 Eckhart Tolle: Creating a New Earth Edvard Grieg: What Price Immortality Elephant in the Room Eyes of the MOthman Fast & The Furious (1954) Fernando Di Leo Crime Collection FLCL: Complete Fourth World War French Art of Seduction Fresh Fields Set 1 Ga-Rei Zero: The Complete Series Get Low Ghost Month Gintama: Collection 4 Glen the Flying Robot Goatherd Goemon Great White: Live and Raw Guild: Season 4 Guitar Legends: Collection Gungrave: The Complete Series Heaven 17: Live at Scala London Histories of the Holocause: Dachau – State Within a State How to Score With Girls/White Rat Huge: The Complete Series I Am Alive: Surviving the Andes Plane Crash

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JANUARY 4

Gregg Braden Vanessa Carlton Cher Cherrelle Sylvain Chomet Class Actress Jerry Clower Company Sheryl Crow El Debarge Ella Fitzgerald Ella Fitzgerald Ella Fitzgerald M.Gaye & T. Terrell Generationals Billie Holiday I. Heap & Frou Frou Kein Hass Da Louisiana Red Brian McKnight Willie Mitchell Alexander O’Neal Ann Peebles Tyler Ramsey The S.O.S. Band Schiller Soundtrack Rev. John Wilkins The Windupdeads Lee Ann Womack

Gregg Braden’s Music From the Divine Matrix Icon Icon Icon The Illusionist Journey of Ardency Icon Company Icon Icon Icon Love Songs Twelve Nights Vol. 1 & 2 Twelve Nights Vol. 3 & 4 Icon Love Songs Trust Icon Love Songs Icon Hirntrafo: Bad Brains Transformation Sweet Blood Call Icon Love Songs It’s Dance Time Icon Tellin’ It A Long Dream About Swimming Across the Sea Icon Breathless Faster You Can’t Hurry God Army of Invisible Men Icon

JANUARY 11

A Million Thoughts and They’re All About You Alien Vampires Harshlizer Alpha Blondy Masada Alpha Blondy The Prophets Alter Bridge Live From Amsterdam Amgod Dreamcatcher Antimatter Alternative Matter Aura Noir Hades Rise Avantasia Angel of Babylon Gary Barden Rock ‘N’ Roll My Soul Count Basie One O’clock Jump Believe World Is Round Big Country Bluegrass The Boys in Hats & Ties Edie Brickell Edie Brickell British Sea Power Valhalla Dancehall Broken Records Let Me Come Home Bullet The Entrance to Hell Shirley Caesar The Ultimate Collection Cage the Elephant Thank You Happy Birthday Cake Showroom of Compassion Cold Blue Rebels Blood, Guts N’ Rock & Roll Matt Cusson Matt Cusson Darkthrone Darkthrones & Black Flags Doris Day Somebody Loves Me Desmond Dekker The Israelites Dero I Love Juicy DJ Observer & Dan... In Trance We Trust 016 Lee Dorsey Absolutely the Best Duke Ellington Blue Harlem EngelThrenody Fancy That Fancy That Fen The Malediction Fields Final Conflict Stand Up Ella Fitzgerald A Tisket a Tasket T-Model Ford & Grav... Taledragger Hasse Froberg Future Past Erroll Garner The Elf Giant Sand Blurry Blue Mountain Seth Glier The Next Right Thing Godfathers Shot Live at the 100 Club Alice in Videoland

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The Lowdown Trials and Tribulations Syndicate Hi-Power 10 Year Anniversary Hitchers Tees Valley Deadbeats I: Scintilla Dying & Falling Jacka Flight Risk Elmore James Hits & Rarities Jimmy Eat World The Lowdown Kryoburn Three Years Eclipsed Francis Lai Essential Film Music Collection Leaether Strip Dark Passages Peggy Lee Gold Lemuria Pebble John Lewis Improvised Meditations Lifelover Konkurs Lost & Found Down on Sawmill Road Louis C.K. Hilarious Joe Lovano Us Five Bird Songs Lynyrd Skynyrd Skynyrd Nation Magna Carta Midnight Blue Chris Massey Vibranium Monsters Monsters The Morning After... Alone N.E.R.D. The Best of N.E.R.D. Notorious Radio Silence Nova Mob The Last Days of Pompeii Nucleus Torn Andromeda Waiting Nucleus Torn Travellers Matt Panayides Tapestries Oscar Peterson How High the Moon Primal Fear Jaws of Death Primal Fear Nuclear Fire Primal Fear Primal Fear Primal Fire Devil’s Ground Tom Principato A Part of Me Putumayo Presents Bossa Nova Around the World Razorfade This Clear Shining Della Reese It’s Over Now Residents Not Available Marvin Sapp Beginnings Say Hello to the Ang... Mode Shackleton Fabric 55 Karen Clark Sheard The Ultimate Collection Adam Sheridan TImezone the Series Shunka K The Most Wanted Tommy Simms Then the Archer J. Sloane & Coaltown Josh Sloane & Coaltown Rickey Smiley Rickey Smiley Prank Calls Vol. 6 Sodom In War & Pieces Sopor Aeternus Sanatorium Altrosa Sopor Aeternus Where Dead Soundtrack Californication Season 4 Soundtrack Little Fockers Kristian Stanfill Mountains Move Steel Magnolia Steel Magnolia The Stooges A Thousand Lights: Live in 1970 Stork Stork Stranglers In the Night Surf City Kudos T4L Biogenesis Ya Tafari Millennium Tapes ‘N Tapes Outside Theatres Des Vamp... Anima Toasters Dub 56 Trent Burn Bright Triste Loko Presents Death 2 Beef Turf Talk Turf Sinatra Caterina Valente Personalita Various Artists Best of Deep Root Various Artists Blue Moon of Kentucky Various Artists Hand in Glove: The Smiths Tribute Various Artists Mix the Vibe: Mr. V Various Artists Portobello Shuffle: A Testimonial to Boss Various Artists Thirteen Stories Down Various Artists Whom the Moon a Nightsong Sings Abigail Washburn City of Refuge Dinah Washington Low Down Blues Wasp The Last Command Wasp Wasp The Wildhearts Chutzpah! Wire Red Barked Tree Zyklon Storm Manifesto Good Charlotte Halo in Reverse Haushetaere Hi-Power Ent. Pres.

Imbroglio Jan 18

Sleep Deprivation Sleep Deprivation addresses the flaws of predecessor The Oncoming Swarm first and foremost with improved sequencing—the latest album from this crushing Syracuse metal trio flows end-to-end. Not to mention “Cellar Door” is probably the closest any band has come to capturing the sound of Touch & Go-era Jesus Lizard over the last 20 years. This is must-own heaviness in this most dire of seasons. (MRI)

JANUARY 18

10 Years of Anjunabeats Stoned Afrodesia Low Country Blues Hi-Five Soup! Arthur’s Landing Higher Than the Eiffel The Absolute Laru Beya Inferno of Sacred Destruction Blackmore’s Night Autumn Sky James Blunt Some Kind of Trouble The Carrier Blind to What Is Right James Christian House Technique Cobra Skulls Bringing the War Home Leonard Cohen X2: Songs of Love and Hate & Songs of Leonard Cohen Shemekia Copeland Deluxe Edition Corrosion of Confor... X2: Blind & Deliverance Benjy Davis Project Sincerely The Decemberists The King Is Dead Decoder Decoder Dolorean The Unfazed Dragged Into Sunlight Hatred for Mankind Dying Fetus Infatuation With Malevolence Dying Fetus Purification Through Violence Electric Wizard Black Masses J. Elefante & Mast... Revolution of Mind The Fall This Nation’s Saving Grace (Omnibus Edition) Farewell to Freeway Filthy Habits Fergus & Geronimo Unlearn Damon Fowler Devil Got His Way Ghost Opus Eponymous Gifts in Secret Reaching Grave Desecrator Insult Peter Green Splinter Time Traders Joel Harrison String... The Music of Paul Motian Brandon Heath Leaving Eden Imbroglio Sleep Deprivation Imbroglio The Oncoming Swarm Inquisition Ominous Doctrines of the Perpetual Mystical Macrocosm Ion Immaculada The Jayhawks Hollywood Town Hall (Expanded Edition) The Jayhawks Tomorrow the Green Grass (Legacy Edition) Keak da Sneak, PSD... Da Bidness 2 Above & Beyond Acid Witch Afro-Soultet Gregg Allman The Aquabats Arthur’s Landing Audio Bullys Ace Augustine Aurelio Black Witchery

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/music/new_releases

John P. Kee The Legacy Project Kerrigan-Lowdermilk Our First Mistake Kidz Bop Kids Kidz Bop 19 Klaxons Surfing the Void Deluxe Kottonmouth Kings... Shoot to Kill Kristina and the Dolls The Human Condition Fela Kuti Army Arrangement Fela Kuti Beasts of No Nation/ O.D.O.O. Fela Kuti Coffin for Head of State Fela Kuti Live in Amsterdam Fela Kuti Original Suffer Head/I.T.T. Fela Kuti Teacher Don’t Teach Me Nonsense Fela Kuti Underground System Ladytron 604 Ladytron Light & Magic Ladytron Witching Hour Lionheart Built on Struggle Steve Lukather All’s Well That Ends Well Vusi Mahlasela Say Africa Memorials Memorials Daniel Martin Moore In the Cool of the Day Noah Preminger Before the Rain Oh No Oh My People Problems Old Man Markley Guts N’ Teeth Only Son Searchlight Alan Parsons Project X2: I Robot & Eye in the Sky Phish Live Phish: 6/27/10 Merriweather Post Pavilion Phish Live Phish: 7/4/10 Verizon Wireless at Encore Park, Alpharetta, GA Phish Live PhishL7/3/10 Verizon Wireless at Encore Park, Plpharetta, GA Ponderosa Moonlight Revival S. Ray/Happy Hook... Teenage and Torture Reel Big Fish The Best of Us for the Rest of Us Roomful of Blues Hook, Line & Sinker The Script Science & Faith Smith Westerns Dye It Blonde Social Distortion Hard Times and Nursery Rhymes Soundtrack High School Sucks: The Musical Soundtrack The Dilemma Soundtrack The Way Back Steely & Clevie Digital Revolution Stratovarius Elysium Tennis Cape Dory Testament Live at the Fillmore Times of Grace The Hymn of a Broken Man Tokio Hotel Best Of (Deluxe) Ike & Tina Turner Absolutely Best Live Various Artists Sofrito: Tropical Discotheque Voorman & Friends A Sideman’s Journey The Walkmen You & Me Warpaint Exquisite Corpse White Lies Ritual

JANUARY 25

Easter Everywhere Fast Lane Playlist: The Very Best of Ace of Base Beegie Adair I Love Being Here With You Rance Allen Group The Live Experience II The Almost Monster Monster EP Alpha Blondy Revolution Ernestine Anderson Nightlife Pete Anderson Even Things Up (Deluxe Edition)

13th Floor Elevators 3D Ace of Base

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Gang of Four JAN 25 Content

Leeds’ Hall of Fame-caliber minimalist post-punkers reunited a few years ago to take a well-earned victory lap around the international festival circuit. Unlike the Pixies or Pavement, however, they’ve opted to take the biggest risk of all and record new music—this is Gang of Four’s first full-length in 16 years. Early single snippets indicate that it will do their staggering legacy proud. (Yep Roc)

J. Anderson/R. Wake... The Living Tree Apex Manor The Year of Magical Drinking Architects (UK) The Here and Now Andre Afram Asmar Harmonic Emergency Astral Doors Testament of Rock : The Best Of Nicole Atkins Mondo Amore Patti Austin Sound Advice Cyro Baptista & Ban... The Book of Angels Ben + Vesper Honors George Benson White Rabbit The Books Thought for Food Bowling for Soup Playlist: The Very Best of Bowling for Soup Charles Bradley No Time for Dreaming Jim Brickman Yesterday Once More The Bronx Casket Co. Antihero Buckshot The Common Knowledge of the Entertainment Industry T-Bone Burnett Playlist: The Very Best of T-Bone Burnett Bushman Bushman Sings the Bush Doctor Byron Cage Playlist: The Very Best of Byron Cage Carolina Chocolate... Carolina Chocolate Drops/ Luminescent Orchestrii Caroline Verdugo Hills Leroy Carr When the Sun Goes Down 1934-41 Ron Carter All Blues Eva Cassidy Simply Eva Cavus Fester & Putrefy Michael Chapman Trainsong Chapterhouse Whirlpool: The Original Recordings Chikita Violenta Tre3s Cizzle & Bigga Rankin Let’s Trap 2 Dorinda Clark-Cole Playlist: The Very Best of Dorinda Clark Cloud Nothings Cloud Nothings Cold Snap Perfection Cold War Kids Mine Is Yours Jacques Coursil Trails of Tears Darkane Layers of Live C. De Rosa/Cross... Brain Dance Deathspell Omega Paracletus Deerhoof Deerhoof vs. Evil Defiled In Crisis Delicate Steve Wondervisions Demonic Resurrection The Return to Darkness Deodato Prelude Paul Desmond Pure Desmond

Kaputt 3’n the Mornin’ Party All Screwed Up Blood on Snow The Dead of Night Call It My Garden Excerpts Beyond the Pale Mesmerised Phenomena 256 The Koner Experimetn Playlist: The Very Best of Five for Fighting Aretha Franklin The Queen of Soul Bill Frisell & Vinicius... Bill Frisell & Vinicius Cantuaria Fujiya & Miyagi Ventriloquizzing The Gaddabouts The Gaddabouts Gang of Four Content The Get Up Kids There Are Rules Grouplove Grouplove David Guetta One More Love Deitrick Haddon Church of the Moon Jim Hall Concierto Annie Haslam Annie in Wonderland Horned Almighty Necro Spirituals I Am Empire Kings I Was a King Old Friends Lia Ices Grown Unknown Iron & Wine Kiss Each Other Clean Milt Jackson Sunflower Wanda Jackson The Party Ain’t Over K. Wonderboy John... Back 2 Basics: Chapter 2 David Kubinec Return to the World of Oz A.Kuvezin & Yat-Kha Poets and Lighthouses Patti Labelle Playlist: The Very Best of Patti Labelle Lady Gaga X-posed Layzie Bone Thug Luv LCD Soundsystem London Sessions Led Bib Bring Your Own Amos Lee Mission Bell Huw Lloyd-Langton Classical Guitar Tales Luminate Come Home Magnum The Visitation Maniac From the Frontline to the South Phil Manley Life Coach Maranatha ! Music Acoustic Worship Keiko Matsui The Road MC5 Purity Accuracy Donny McCaslin Perpetual Motion Lori McKenna Lorraine Brad Mehldau Live in Marciac Midnite Treasure Lynn Miles Fall for Beauty R. Miret & Disasters Gotta Get Up Now Mother of Mercy IV: Symptoms of Existence Mr. Mister Playlist: The Very Best of Mr. Mister My Disco Little Joy Nadiwrath Nihilistic Stench Napalm Death Inside the…/Words from the… Willie Nelson Playlist: The Very Best Gospel of Willie Nelson Olivia Newton-John A Celebration in Song Joe Nichols Greatest Hits Obsidian Point of Infinity Michael Omartian Movie Moods R. Orbison & F. Young Sing Elvis Presley & Others Order of Appolyon The Flesh The Outfield Playlist: The Very Best of the Outfield Onry Ozzborn Hold On for Dear Life Patti Page The Singles 1946-1952 Jaimee Paul Melancholy Baby Pavlov’s Dog Echo & Boo Jeremy Pelt The Talented Mr. Pelt Pendulum Immersion Petra Back to the Rock The Pineapple Thief Little Man Planeta Imaginario Optical Delusions Popol Vuh The Werner Herzog Soundtracks Praxis Profanation: Preparation for a Coming Darkness Destroyer DJ Screw DJ Screw Eastern Front Ekotren Carrie Elkin Ensemble Exp. Audio Research Exp. Audio Research Exp. Audio Research Exp. Audio Research Five for Fighting

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"NO ACOUSTIC GUITARS WERE HARMED IN THE MAKING OF THIS ALBUM"

JAN 18

HELIX

SMASH HITS… UNPLUGGED A newly recorded acoustic look back from one of the biggest heavy metal bands in Canadian history! Brand new acoustic versions of the band’s biggest anthems including "Gimme Gimme Good Lovin’", "Make Me Do (Anything You Want)" and "Rock You."

N.E.R.D. THE BEST OF

16 of the best tracks from the multi-platinum production team, The Neptunes, musical project N.E.R.D.

JAN 11

Features all the band’s top hits including "She Wants To Move" "Rockstar" "Lapdance" "Run To The Sun" and "Fly Or Die"

IAN HUNTER

You're Never Alone With A Schizophrenic

You’re Never Alone with a Schizophrenic was originally released worldwide in April 1979 on Chrysalis Records and was Ian’s first release with the label.

JAN 25

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This amazing album is now available as a deluxe re-mastered package containing the original LP with bonus tracks plus an extra disc featuring unreleased live performances of the period. THE CELEBRATION IS FULLY JUSTIFIED ON THREE COUNTS 1) because this remains Ian’s biggest selling international solo album, 2) because the live tapes have remained rare treasures in Hunter folklore until now and 3) because the songs are just SO good.

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