Video of the Day: The Heavy, “How You Like Me Now?”
Quite a bit, actually. The House That Dirt Built hits U.S. stores Oct. 13.
New Flaming Lips Video: “I Can Be A Frog”
The Flaming Lips "I Can Be A Frog"
This beautiful and thoroughly silly track from Embryonic features Karen O from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs making animal noises and a girl with Bettie Page aesthetics acting out the lyrics in the video. There is no better way to spend 2 minutes and 17 seconds of your time today.
Lily Allen and Radiohead Square Off Over File Sharing
While the debate of illegal downloading has gone from boil to simmer lately on our side of the Atlantic, the discussion hit a crescendo in Great Britain in the past week. The government there is currently proposing cutting off Internet connections for persistent illegal downloaders, and the Featured Artists Coalition, a group formed to develop policies and opportunities for musicians in the digital age, has come out against the measure. Ed O’Brien of Radiohead specifically referred to file-sharing as the modern equivalent to creating mixtapes for friends.
In response, Lily Allen started a new blog on Sunday, claiming that the prevalence of file-sharing is killing Britain’s music industry and that while it either has a positive or at very least benign effect on established acts, file-sharing denies emerging artists the opportunity to gain a commercial foothold.
Lobbing the ball back into Allen’s court, the FAC released a statement on file-sharing yesterday, indicating that it does not advocate for the practice, but simply is in opposition to the British government’s proposal to cut people’s Internet access if they’ve been trading far too many Little Boots tracks.
This is probably not over, and Allen’s blog is filling up with posts from Natasha Khan, Mark Ronson and other acts supporting her position, as well as dissenting opinions from such bands as the Futureheads. How this spills over probably depends entirely on whether the government goes forward and starts yanking IP addresses.
Stay tuned for more imported file-sharing madness.
Video of the Day: St. Vincent, “Marrow”
Annie Clark puts the zombie hex on road workers and stranded vacationers — just as she does the rest of us — in this new video from Actor.
DVD Review: “Stella: Live in Boston”
Rating: 63
“Stella: Live in Boston” holds so much promise thanks to the distinctive styles of its constituent parts: Michael Showalter, David Wain and Michael Ian Black. Showalter comes on like a bundle of maladjustment and irritation, Black is a master of snide and snark, and Wain is the anti-comedic center. “Live in Boston” only reaches the heights of the trio’s Comedy Central series when this concert video, shot at Boston’s Wilbur Theatre in 2008, cuts to a gut-busting pre-taped skit about Showalter’s misbegotten birthday party. Other than that, “Live in Boston” is all warm-up, and that might be the point.
Ever since “The State,” the genre-defying MTV sketch comedy series starring Black, Showalter and Wain in the mid-’90s, these comedians have always gone for the slow-burn laughs — the comedy that stems more from behavior than jokes. In “Live in Boston,” much of the routine involves tricking the various members into joining along on road-to-nowhere skits, dance routines and comedic schemes. Every member falls for it, everyone is insulted to within an inch of their egos, and “Live in Boston” feels more like hilarious performance art — it takes a significant understanding of Stella’s rhythms to get the joke.
The DVD extras are actually a good way to start “Live in Boston,” especially Showalter’s “The Michael Showalter Showalter” episodes that first ran on collegehumor.com. These tense anti-interviews capture the players at their most barbed, controversial and comedically astute, but in “Live in Boston,” it seems as if Wain, Showalter and Black, on stage for a mere hour, were not given enough time for their slow-burn to ignite, and probably hit their stride on their way back to the dressing room.
Music Review: Mayer Hawthorne, “A Strange Arrangement”
Rating: 83
Modern explorations of classic soul often fall short because the music obviously references specific songs while having no identity of its own. But there are great exceptions in this field of pastiche: much as Raphael Saadiq did with last year’s “The Way I See It,” Mayer Hawthorne’s “A Strange Arrangement” has its way with ‘60s and ‘70s R&B, but the emphasis is clearly on great songwriting first — these compositions could have easily passed muster with Berry Gordy or Leon Huff in the old days. The fact that Hawthorne takes dead aim with the production and instrumentation makes these 13 tracks of 45 RPM heartbreak a little miraculous.
Hawthorne, a deejay from the Detroit suburbs, seems fully immersed in the architecture of Motown songs and style. The handclaps, bass line and tambourine hits on “Your Easy Lovin’ Ain’t Pleasin’ Nothin’” bear all the marks of a Funk Brothers performance, as do the drum rolls on “Make Her Mine.” And the songs are worthy of such treatment: “One Track Mind,” a sweet love song about a shopping-addicted girlfriend, doesn’t waste a word and the rhymes flow naturally like a great, unearthed Smokey Robinson gem.
“A Strange Arrangement” is not entirely married to Motown, and Hawthorne finds easy inspiration in later vocal groups such as the Chi-Lites and the Stylistics on lush ballads such as “Shiny & New” and the fantastically sad “I Wish It Would Rain.” Nearly every song on “A Strange Arrangement” could be inserted into a classic soul mix and fit nicely with the R&B canon — a feat that few soul revivalists can claim.
Video of the Day: Lusine, “Two Dots”
I hate math, but Lusine somehow makes it relaxing.
The Flaming Lips on “The Colbert Report”
Wayne Coyne interview
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
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“Convinced of the Hex”
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| The Flaming Lips – Convinced of the Hex | ||||
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Video of the Day: Vivian Girls, “When I’m Gone”
The Brooklyn trio offers up more soaring, echo-laden C86 guitar pop from Everything Goes Wrong.
Concert Review: Britney Spears, BOK Center, Sept. 15
Britney Spears performs Tuesday at BOK Center in Tulsa. Photos by Steve Maupin.
Rating: 65 for sheer effort
Not long ago, in those dark days of 2007, it was conventional wisdom that Britney Spears might have problems getting through a Rorschach test, never mind a full-scale, Las Vegas-style concert extravaganza. And yet, there was Spears Tuesday night at Tulsa’s BOK Center, performing as if all that tabloid mess had been scrubbed from the collective memory. No, she had not been magically transformed into a stunning singer, but Spears made her initial reputation as a performer, and at the BOK Center, she was performing.
Following abbreviated sets by Kristinia DeBarge and former “American Idol” champion Jordin Sparks, the Barnum & Britney lights went up, and the Big Apple Circus took to the three rings on the floor of the arena, bouncing on trampolines and spinning chrome-plated giant cubes. After all, this was “The Circus, Starring Britney Spears,” so the
concert began with a surplus of human feats of strength and agility before Spears, 27, descended from the rafters in an egg-shaped cage.
This was a tightly choreographed “Circus,” and not just in terms of dance: the concert moved quickly and with metronomic precision. Spears danced and worked as a magician’s assistant during performances of “Circus” and “Piece of Me,” and acrobats spiraled from the ceiling on long silk scarves as a prelude to “Radar.” Then Spears moved away from the big tent theme and into a martial arts concept piece for “Ooh Ooh Baby” and “Hot As Ice” and an elaborate bicycle routine for “Boys.”
Then, just as she did during a Sept. 5 performance in Greensboro, N.C., Spears temporarily shut down all the flash and spectacle and performed a cover of Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know.” More so than at any other time during the two-hour concert, Spears appeared to be actually singing, and her faithful rendition of “You Oughta Know” provided a refreshing realism to the set.
Having largely surprised the Tulsa crowd with the Morissette song, Spears returned to massive dance sequences with a Bollywood-inspired performance of “Me Against the Music.” And after emphasizing her more sexualized material such as “Freakshow,” “Breathe On Me” and “Get Naked,” she closed out her main set with two of her best-known hits,
“Toxic” and “Baby One More Time.”
There would be no massive encore: Spears performed “Womanizer” before she and her dancers bowed and exited to the strains of “Circus.” Call it an expectations game or grading on a curve, but for a good portion of this decade, Spears did little to inspire confidence that she could put on such a show. At this point, she is far from embarrassing herself or going through the motions as she did during that memorably shambling performance on the MTV Video Music Awards just two years ago. She looked good, was energetic and proved fully capable of being the ringmaster for this “Circus.” And for the approximately 16,000 fans gathered in downtown Tulsa, that was more than enough.
