Video of the Day: The Pretty Black Chains, “Ambulance”
The masterful Oklahoma City-based band with impeccable influences and boundless onstage energy delivers a great new video.
Video of the Day: Girl in a Coma, “El Monte”
This is the latest from the San Antonio band that wears its Mozza adoration on its sleeve and its name. Got turned onto the trio by Kurt Andersen’s “Studio 360″ a couple of weeks ago, and Kurt’s attention was certainly merited. Naturally, the man who values imitation as the sincerest form of flattery invited them to open for him in 2007.
Video of the Day: Dan Deacon, “Paddling Ghost”
Welcome to Literal-Minded Puppet Theatre, starring an actual “Paddling Ghost” and a sock representation of Mr. Deacon. From Bromst.
StaticBlog Passes 50-Grand a Month
Yeesh — Benday dots and bad hair, circa 2004
I don’t do a lot of crowing about StaticBlog, but the last two months have seen this blog’s popularlity roughly double, and as of today, StaticBlog is attracting over 50,000 unique visitors per month. It’s a drop in the bucket compared to larger music and entertainment sites, but we’re growing, and I cannot thank my readership enough for your continued support and regular visitation.
I thank you, I thank you, I thank you,
George Lang
StaticBlog
Movie Review: “Post-Grad”
Rating: 49
“Post Grad” illustrates that reality still bites for those finishing their college education and facing a job market that does not match their career expectations. But while this light, intermittently enjoyable romantic comedy has some solid bullet points on its resume, the experience is insufficient.
Ryden Malby (Alexis Bledel) is a recent college graduate who desperately wants to work in the most prestigious publishing house in Los Angeles. But her short interview with an editor is a disaster, her college rival Jessica (Catherine Reitman) gets the gig, and after four years of diligent study, she cannot find a job that will pay for her dream version of adulthood. Dejected and demoralized, she moves in with her goofball family in suburban Los Angeles.
But Ryden’s problems are not just career-oriented — she cannot see just how smitten her best friend Adam (Zach Gilford) is with her, and she spends a great deal of time spinning her wheel romantically with the Brazilian infomercial producer next door (Rodrigo Santoro). Ryden’s future happiness ultimately hinges on opening her eyes and throwing out her preconceived notions of success.
The home life depicted in “Post Grad” plays like “Little Miss Sunshine” if it were directed by “Savage” Steve Holland, the writer-director of “Better Off Dead” and the man responsible for introducing “I want my two dollars!” into the pop-cultural vernacular. After all, Ryden has a brother (Bobby Coleman) who is uncontrollably compelled to lick people’s heads, Grandma (Carol Burnett) is angrily shopping for her own coffin, and dad Walter (Michael Keaton) is an obsessive-compulsive maker of belt buckles.
They’re all a little too zany for anyone’s good, but at least “Post Grad” can claim some refreshing oddness when that trait is often the first thing redlined from screenplays. Bledel (“Gilmore Girls”) appealingly plays Ryden as exhausted and exasperated by her plight, and director Vicky Jenson (co-director of “Shrek” and “Shark Tale”) and writer Kelly Fremon have genuine affection for Ryden and her odd-duck brood.
But while “Post Grad” is timed well for new graduates competing for jobs in a bad economy, it could have used more genuine bite and character development instead of just quirks. As such, “Post Grad” only squeaks by with a “C” average when, given the assembly of talent on display, it could have finished with honors.
Video of the Day: Florence + The Machine, “Drumming Song”
Florence + The Machine - Drumming Song
Sort of the Goth “Crazy in Love,” and I mean that in a good way. From the superb debut, Lungs.
Video of the Day: The Walkmen, “On the Water”
Creepiest animated story involving rabbits since “Watership Down.”
Music Review: Florence + The Machine, “Lungs”
Rating: 90
Don’t even try to put Florence Welch in a box — Florence + the Machine’s expectation-defiant debut, “Lungs,” is powerful and diverse enough to break the confines of any genre. Welch’s siren songs reverberate with Detroit soul and Renaissance faire Gothic swirl, raw garage rock impulses and Celtic folk, all sounding perfectly radio-ready if only the programming puppet masters at corporate radio magically took leave of their market-driven senses. And all this beautiful bombast exists to serve the range and power of Welch’s arresting, rare bird of a voice — an immodest instrument always at the center of this storm.
Welch’s big-net approach to culture and influence is immediately obvious with “Dog Days Are Over,” in which mandolin and harp wage war with Phil Spector girl-group beats as the singer booms like a supernatural soul diva. On the transcendent “Rabbit Heart (Raise it Up),” Welch comes on like “The Lion and the Cobra”-era Sinead O’Connor with Berry Gordy calling the shots, and “Kiss With a Fist” gets tough and gender-flips Jack White’s garage aesthetic.
This could have just been a genre-jumbling parlor trick, but Welch crafts arresting pop hooks on “Lungs” that justify her ambition — just try to dislodge the descending chords and soaring melody of “Hurricane Drunk” or the polyrhythmic propulsion of “Drumming Song.” As she sings on that epic pop song, Florence + the Machine is “louder than sirens, louder than bells, sweeter than Heaven and hotter than Hell.”
DVD Review: “Adventureland”
Rating: 77
“Adventureland” got cheated by a marketing campaign that presented it as the second coming of “Superbad.” But while Greg Mottola’s follow-up to that ultra-nasty teen party comedy is also concerned with growing up, it is far more weighted with young-adult emotions, the terrible ecstasy of first love and how disappointing parents can be. Mottola has created an absorbing, semi-autobiographical mood piece about a boy becoming a man, spending three frustrating months in Pittsburgh waiting for his life to start.
In 1987, James (Jesse Eisenberg) finishes his bachelor degree hoping to spend the summer hiking through Europe before graduate school. Then his parents’ finances crater, leaving James stuck in Pittsburgh working a summer job at Adventureland, a rundown amusement park with peeling paint, vaguely dangerous rides and rigged games. James is a smart young man whose ideas and emotions spill out of him like a burst water main, and when he meets Em Lewin (Kristen Stewart), a radiant and intelligent beauty working at the park, he falls hard and loses his coordination.
Mottola’s eye and ear for time period are spot-on: “Adventureland” is set after the death of new wave and four years before grunge’s birth, a purgatory of “Rock Me Amadeus” and hair-metal, and Yo La Tengo’s superb score helps capture the scene. While it is hardly the wild ride the trailers promised, great performances by Eisenberg, Stewart and especially Martin Starr as their jaded co-worker all make “Adventureland” more than just an amusement — it is a superbly bittersweet look at the last summer before adulthood. When I first saw this at the theater, I was much less effusive in my praise of “Adventureland,” but it feels more honest and representational of real life with repeated exposure.
Video of the Day: The Antlers, “Two”
Music effervesces around a Williamsburg apartment until escaping through a window and floating like happy bubbles over the New York skyline. From the remastered version of Hospice released yesterday.
