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13 articles
David Byrne Brian Eno
1 December 2008 9:06 PM, PST
David Byrne was a young man playing at a mid-life crisis when he first sang "Once In A Lifetime" with Talking Heads, a song from 1980's Remain In Light—the band's third and final collaboration with Brian Eno. Byrne is genuinely middle-aged now, and on Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, his first work with Eno in 27 years, it sounds as if the introspection of "Once In A Lifetime" stopped being an academic exercise a long time ago. "The dimming of the light makes the picture clearer," Byrne sings as the album opens, establishing a sunset glow that shines on much of the album to come. What follows also sounds only a little like what listeners might expect of a renewed Eno/Byrne partnership. Their 1981 album My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts pushed their...
Keith Phipps
Neil Young
1 December 2008 9:05 PM, PST
The biggest problem with Neil Young's recent spate of archival live releases is that he's already put out so many anthologies and concert recordings that the new issues risk redundancy simply by existing. Sure, "It's all one song," as the man himself once put it (on 1997's Year Of The Horse—a live album, of course), but hearing every version is a fanatic's game. Sugar Mountain: Live At Canterbury House 1968 in some ways typifies this. The performances, captured over two November nights at the University Of Michigan, are intimate, clear (the two-track recording is very good), and obviously felt. It's got historical value, too, as Young's first solo performances following his departure from Buffalo Springfield. "I never plan anything ahead, in case anybody hasn't noticed," he says while introducing his early song "Sugar Mountain." For...
Michaelangelo Matos
Megapuss
1 December 2008 9:03 PM, PST
Devendra Banhart has never hurt for an outlet to address his weirdest impulses— after all, this is an artist whose regular albums have no problem absorbing lyrics about psychedelic squids and marriage to little boys—but he goes quite a bit weirder than usual on Megapuss. The name accounts for the collaboration between Banhart and Priestbird's Greg Rogove, both of whom sing and bang out a nimble mix of time-tucked rock on a debut album with lots of strange, surprising rewards. It isn't long before Banhart trills in service of fanciful creatures in "Duck People, Duck Man," a song that could have been sung by those Spongmonkey things in the Quiznos commercials. But just as prominent on Surfing is a sense of musical adventurousness more engrossing than any on Banhart albums in the past. Rock (not...
Andy Battaglia
The Rapture
1 December 2008 9:02 PM, PST
Anyone who first heard The Rapture via its dance-rock crossover singles will be unsurprised that Tapes, the Brooklyn quartet's first officially released mix-cd (bootlegs of DJ sets have floated around for years) is more interesting as a time capsule of what hip urbanites were dancing to in bars during the mid-'00s than as a DJ mix, per se. That isn't a bad thing: These guys have excellent taste, and they construct an entertaining mélange on Tapes, moving from Ghostface Killah's action-fest "Daytona 500" to D.C. go-go giant Junkyard Band without a second thought, while Martin Circus' bubblegum-Kraftwerk "Disco Circus" goes head-to-head with Arcade Lover's "Fantasy Lines" with real grace. The Rapture has a good line on current happenings as well as the classics, throwing in recent club bangers like South African DJ Mujava's "Township Funk" and "Everybody's Got To Make A Living" by house producer Dances With White Girls (who's.
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Michaelangelo Matos
The (International) Noise Conspiracy
1 December 2008 9:01 PM, PST
What could be more shocking from a once-radical group of Marxist punks than an album of bubblegum rock? Under the slick production eye of Rick Rubin, The (International) Noise Conspiracy—a band that once wrote songs with titles like "Capitalism Stole My Virginity" and "Abolish Work"—is now singing of optimism, relationships, and Beverly Hills. The Cross Of My Calling lacks the '60s- and '70s-inspired garage and soul influences—not to mention the Diy feel—that made its early albums engaging, which means that it's best to approach it like a late-'70s Kinks disc: Forget what the band has done in the past, and focus on the product at hand. Sure, "Boredom Of Safety" sounds a bit like an '80s power ballad, but it's also passionate, bittersweet, and catchy. And "Hiroshima Mon Amour" is so laughably, blatantly radio-friendly that it's...
Katherine Silkaitis
"Self Made Man"
1 December 2008 7:52 PM, PST
I always like to watch the "Previously on" montage that opens each new T:scc episode. Not for the plot-refresher, although that can come in handy; it's more that the montage gives you a sense of what to expect from the rest of the ep. If we get a lot of clips of Jesse and Derek, we know they'll be doing some damage in the upcoming forty-three minutes; if we see Sarah freaking, we know there's gonna be some more of that in our future; and if we see John and Riley making googly eyes, we know that this would be a good time to play some FreeCell while the TV runs in the background. "Self-Made Man"'s refresher gave us some quick references to Cameron's chip damage; which is good news, since that means we get another largely Cam-dominated story, with a background assist from John and His Girl Manic.
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"Chuck Vs. The Sensei"
1 December 2008 6:41 PM, PST
After this season's Sarah-centric episode, it was only a matter of time until Josh Schwartz and company set their sights on John Casey, one of my favorite characters on television today. He's just so…mysterious, full of cynicism and humor; plus, as my buddy Margaret Lyons puts it, he gets all the best lines. But I found tonight's episode to be quite a disappointment—it wasn't so much what was said about Casey, but how it was said. First: what we know now. Casey trained with a sensei in 1994, one who saw potential in an unfortunately hair-cutted 23-year-old, though not enough to admit him to the master's program. As it turns out, that's how he turns CIA agents away from the greater good, using them for his own diabolical ends (of which I'm still not quite clear). Casey runs into him in the present day, and fails to...
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Britney Spears Makes The World's Prettiest Infomercial
1 December 2008 10:38 AM, PST
Without Britney Spears, what would MTV have left? A few thousand ex-Real-World contestants, the mummified body of John Norris, and hundreds of girls screaming during the Hills After Show, their cheap jersey Lauren-Conrad-Collection dress/tents billowing in the breeze? She's their go-to product, their guaranteed VMAs hook, because even if all she does is show up, and all Britney ever does these days is show up, she's bound to make news. I pondered all this while watching the last five minutes of the "live" countdown to Britney: For The Record, Britney's documentary/Circus promo/infomercial. The whole thing, as they repeatedly told us before breaking for perfume commercials, was brought to us commercial-free by Britney's two fragrances, Curious and Fantasy. Can a commercial tell you that something is commercial-free without all human logic snapping like a twig? Evidently, yes. I've never sampled Britney's perfumes, but judging by the documentary, they probably.
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Left 4 Dead
1 December 2008 9:05 AM, PST
Left 4 Dead, the new co-operative shooter from the makers of Half-Life and Portal, comes down on the fast side of the zombie speed debate. And it's about time sprinting ghouls had their shot in videogames. George Romero traditionalists may balk, but running ghouls work well in the context of consoles. Shooters depend on forward momentum: Allow players to linger too long, and they obsessively scour every nook for bullets and health boosters. In Left 4 Dead, there's no such thing as a clean room: Hang around, and the game's "director" will throw more zombies at you. And when dozens of undead tweakers come booking at you from the darkness, it's hard not pull a Cosby—first you say the expletive, then you fill your shorts with the stuff. Left 4 Dead recreates the trajectories of four zombie-movie plots, each ending in a dramatic escape. Players make their way through...
Gus Mastrapa
The Last Remnant
1 December 2008 9:03 AM, PST
Nobody will accuse The Last Remnant of being too ambitious. Square Enix's latest RPG mixes a dollop of tactical warfare into a familiar console-epic recipe, tweaking conventions without breaking them. When a game executes the old standards with Remnant's grace, though, a tweak might be enough. Remnant's new ideas play out on the battlefield, where instead of controlling individual fighters, you command "unions" of up to five units each. You issue stirring orders like "Don't be afraid to die!" to your troops, and each character takes action accordingly. At first, this big-picture framework might annoy micromanagers, but there are plenty of details to obsess over, like which mercenaries to recruit and what formation best conceals your scrubs' weaknesses. The main story—a nuclear-proliferation crisis translated into the realm of enchanted talismans—does a workmanlike job of moving the action forward. Remnant's narrative gems are found on a more intimate level,
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John Teti
Tales Of Symphonia: Dawn Of The New World
1 December 2008 8:39 AM, PST
In the opening scene of Tales Of Symphonia: Dawn Of The New World, the hero from the original Tales Of Symphonia goes rogue, torching an innocent village and casting his lot with religious terrorists. This really does seem like a new world, where a Tales game literally burns its bridges to weave a dark, complex epic—on the Wii, no less. After an enticing start, though, New World falls into the old habits of the Japanese RPG genre. The game hints at a serious story, but never sheds its discount-anime hijinks long enough to tell it in compelling fashion. The protagonist, Emil, recounts the harrowing night his parents were murdered before his eyes. Then, a few steps down the trail, his female sidekick maneuvers for a kiss, which is totally ewww! Girls are so weird! And we're jarred back into cutesy-land. The narrative oddities would be more forgivable if...
John Teti
"Mypods And Boomsticks""Straight As An Arrow""Phantom Telethon"
30 November 2008 8:47 PM, PST
This fall's Sunday night schedule has been a bit wonky, with random weeks-off cropping up here-and-there. (There were no episodes last week due to Fox's 24 movie/extended preview for the new season.) And it looks like, after tonight, there's only one more week until our beloved AnDom takes an extended rerun break well into the new year—actually, no one told Family Guy, which is already done for '08—so it's time to make those episodes count. Only that's not what happened tonight, starting with a Simpsons that felt like two overdone, overdue jokes awkwardly cobbled together with some Moe appearances. It's the day after Christmas (hmm…those of you who wonder about the show's questionable timeline, myself included, probably scratched your heads at this one) and the Simpsons are at the mall returning gifts. And what should they find but a shiny, sterile beacon of an impending personal interaction deficit:.
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"Go Your Own Way"
30 November 2008 8:33 PM, PST
Oops. If there's anything as important to the serialized TV show than the penultimate episode, it's the penultimate episode to the penultimate episode, and I'm afraid to say that I and the forces of nature and technology have failed you tonight. I was originally due to arrive back home to Chicago from Thanksgiving on the West Coast in plenty of time to curl up with a bottle of Tru Blood, watch Dexter, and review as I do every week. Then, a series of unfortunate events: A three-hour delay due to inclement weather in Chicago (all three hours spent on the tarmac, with our nine-month-old kid, before the four-hour-plus flight), a failed attempt to tape it via TiVo's online scheduling, and our only other Dexter fan on staff (Amelie Gillette) also out of town and Showtime-less. Long story short: I won't be able to see and review...
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