Video of the Day: Sleigh Bells, “Comeback Kid”
Don’t listen to that Lana Del Rey album that came out today. It will not help you in any way.
But this will.
– Lang
Get More: Sleigh Bells, Comeback Kid, Music, More Music Videos
Video of the Day: Flaming Lips feat. Siri and Erykah Badu, “Now I Understand”
From the sound of things, Wayne Coyne began reciting lyrics from “Instant Karma” into his iPhone 4S, and Siri was forced to ponder the meaning of the moon, the stars and the sun, as was Erykah Badu.
– Lang
84th Annual Academy Awards Nominations Announced, StaticBlog’s Head Is On Fire
With the exception of a lowly Sound Editing nom, Drive got shut out, including the best supporting actor performance in at least a few years by Albert Brooks. Michael Fassbender is shut out. There is at least a chance that Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, a movie with a 48 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, could win Best Picture. All of this and undoubtedly more combine to make the 84th Annual Academy Awards nominations one of the most infuriating Oscar announcements in years.
And I haven’t even started ranting about Albert Nobbs yet.
Best Picture
The Artist
The Descendants
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
The Help
Hugo
Midnight in Paris
Moneyball
The Tree of Life
War Horse
Best Director
Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist
Alexander Payne, The Descendants
Martin Scorsese, Hugo
Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris
Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life
Best Actor
Demián Bichir, A Better Life
George Clooney, The Descendants
Jean Dujardin, The Artist
Gary Oldman, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Brad Pitt, Moneyball
Best Actress
Glenn Close, Albert Nobbs
Viola Davis, The Help
Rooney Mara, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
Meryl Streep, The Iron Lady
Michelle Williams, My Week With Marilyn
Best Supporting Actor
Kenneth Branagh, My Week With Marilyn
Jonah Hill, Moneyball
Nick Nolte, Warrior
Christopher Plummer, Beginners
Max Von Sydow, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
Best Supporting Actress
Bérénice Bejo, The Artist
Jessica Chastain, The Help
Melissa McCarthy, Bridesmaids
Janet McTeer, Albert Nobbs
Octavia Spencer, The Help
Best Original Screenplay
Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist
Annie Mumolo & Kristen Wiig, Bridesmaids
J.C. Chandor, Margin Call
Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris
Asghar Farhadi, A Separation
Best Adapted Screenplay
Alexander Payne, Jim Rash & Nat Faxon, The Descendants
John Logan, Hugo
George Clooney, Grant Heslov & Beau Willimon, The Ides of March
Aaron Sorkin & Steven Zaillian, Moneyball
Peter Straughan & Bridget O’Connor, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Best Animated Film
A Cat in Paris
Chico & Rita
Kung Fu Panda 2
Puss in Boots
Rango
Best Foreign Language Film
Bullhead (Belgium)
Monsieur Lazhar (Canada)
A Separation (Iran)
Footnote (Israel)
In Darkness (Poland)
Art Direction
The Artist
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2
Hugo
War Horse
Costume Design
Anonymous
The Artist
Hugo
Jane Eyre
W.E.
Documentary Feature
Hell and Back Again
If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front
Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory
Pina
Undefeated
Documentary Short
The Barber of Birmingham: Foot Soldier of the Civil Rights Movement
God Is the Bigger Elvis
Incident in New Baghdad
Saving Face
The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom
Film Editing
The Artist, Anne-Sophie Bion and Michel Hazanavicius
The Descendants, Kevin Tent
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall
Hugo, Thelma Schoonmaker
Moneyball, Christopher Tellefsen
Makeup
Albert Nobbs, Martial Corneville, Lynn Johnston and Matthew W. Mungle
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, Edouard F. Henriques, Gregory Funk and Yolanda Toussieng
The Iron Lady, Mark Coulier and J. Roy Helland
Music (Original Score)
The Adventures of Tintin, John Williams
The Artist, Ludovic Bource
Hugo, Howard Shore
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Alberto Iglesias
War Horse, John Williams
Music (Original Song)
“Man or Muppet” from The Muppets, Bret McKenzie
“Real in Rio” from Rio, Sergio Mendes, Carlinhos Brown and Siedah Garrett
Short Film (Animated)
Dimanche/Sunday
The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore
La Luna
A Morning Stroll
Wild Life
Short Film (Live Action)
Pentecost
Raju
The Shore
Time Freak
Tuba Atlantic
Sound Editing
Drive
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
Hugo
Transformers: Dark of the Moon
War Horse
Sound Mixing
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
Hugo
Monyeball
Transformers: Dark of the Moon
War Horse
Visual Effects
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2
Hugo
Real Steel
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
Transformers: Dark of the Moon
St. Vincent To Play Cain’s Ballroom — Finally!
Tulsa-born Annie Clark, a.k.a. St. Vincent, performs at Cain’s Ballroom at 8 p.m. May 15. Tickets go on sale Jan. 27: $19 in advance, $21 day of show. Get your tix here.
We’ve waited patiently, though some less so, and now it’s finally happening.
Carney, they probably have your photo posted near all the entrances, so no funny stuff.
– Lang
Video of the Day 2: St. Vincent Pays Homage to Elvis Costello on “Conan”
Annie pines away for Carney
In his first U.S. television performance on “Saturday Night Live” in 1977, Elvis Costello famously played a few bars of “Less Than Zero” before stopping the Attractions and launching into the far more domestically topical “Radio, Radio.” This time out, Annie Clark begins with “Radio, Radio” before stopping down, mimicking Elvis’ explanation and going forward with “Cheerleader.”
A few people in the audience got the joke, but not really enough: this was a fairly famous incident in which Costello felt that a point needed to be made while the powers that be (yes, they still “be”) thought otherwise.
Elvis Costello - Radio Radio, SNL, 1977 from jmannen77 on Vimeo.
In fact, it is so well known that, on an “SNL” anniversary special, Beastie Boys and a special guest staged their own tribute/allusion to the performance.
Elvis Costello and The Beastie Boys - Radio Radio by
Video of the Day: Arcade Fire on “Austin City Limits”
Arcade Fire’s most most recent performance on “ACL” was shown by OETA this past weekend, and now it is all here. The band is doing a nice job of bookending “The Suburbs,” with the “Sprawl II” video arriving last month and now this performance to cap things off. Here’s to new things on the horizon.
– Lang
Watch Arcade Fire on PBS. See more from Austin City Limits.
Video of the Day: Charli XCX, “Stay Away” (Live from Dalston Heights)
If Florence Welch and Natasha Khan represent the revival of the powerful avant-garde female pop of Kate Bush and “Lion and the Cobra”-era Sinead O’Connoor, then Charli XCX is falling somewhere between Danielle Dax and T’Pau. Not sure if that’s particularly edifying or signifies something good or bad, but it is what it is. The studio version is much more cavernous and with layered background vocals, and is therefore much more enjoyable in its specific mid-1980s-isms.
This is one of those instances where a song is screaming out for an official video, something that reflects the song in its original recorded form, and nothing is arising as of yet. The record company appears to be doing a slow build.
– Lang
Video of the Day: Danger Mouse, Daniele Luppi and Jack White, “Two Against One”
Here’s your headtrip for the morning, essentially the prelude to a feature-length film based on the narrative of Mouse and Luppi’s “Rome” album. Lots of taffy-pull twists in this animated piece directed by Chris Milk.
– Lang
Video of the Day: Van Halen, “Tattoo”
Blame our older brothers for blasting them out of their six-by-nine coaxial speakers every morning, or blame the late-1970s rock radio programmers desperate for an American hard rock band to champion, or just blame us, damn it, because for all the cool we tried to accumulate over the course of three decades we just could not let go of them, but at least two generations of suburban kids got the aesthetics of their genetics altered by Van Halen. Most of us only became aware of Led Zeppelin after they were gone, so what we had left in the early 1980s was the popped-up, sexed-up, goofball-adrenaline Sunset Stripped version, and without exposure to punk, Van Halen became a tool of parental irritation supreme and the insanely loud expression of the teenage id, and in its own way, it rocked hard.
And this is why we cut 75 percent of Van Halen so much slack for so long. After David Lee Roth left/was fired/otherwise went solo, we tried to like the Sammy Hagar version for 10 years until that thing ran into the ditch. Then Roth reunited with the Van Halen brothers and Michael Anthony for about five minutes in 1996, recorded some translucently pale imitations of classic-era VH and split again, which is why the dissolute and disposable 1998 Gary Cherone version made 99.9738 percent of the dwindling fan base want to take Edward’s “Pancake” drill to their eardrums: it wasn’t entirely because the Cherone-led Van Halen sucked like a Dyson, although it did. It was because we were tired of being jerked around by guys who could not understand just how uninteresting they were without one another, and hiring the guy from Extreme just felt like the Van Halen Boys had gotten cocky, believing that they could hire any damn guy (or Sass Jordan, apparently) to front them. They were greeted with a collective “no” and got sent to the wilderness for 10 years.
So after the health scares, questionable cures, the wired-up Roth/Hagar cross-country hatefest and a Hagar/Van Halen reunion tour that seemed to everyone watching like something much smaller than a half measure, Roth reunited with the Van Halens, who brought in Edward’s son Wolfgang after Michael Anthony sided with Sammy. The 2008 tour was big, bountiful and full of reasonably convincing love, and Roth seemed more like himself than he had since about 1986.
And now we have “Tattoo,” the first single from “A Different Kind of Truth,” due out on Interscope on February 7. This midtempo slight return about a housewife getting a tramp stamp and some palaver about the Civil War features the band sounding more like itself than it has in nearly three decades, mainly because Roth is present and accounted for, and it works for the most part because our standards for these guys are down somewhere around “just don’t embarrass yourself.” They do far better than that for three guys pushing 60 and another pushing legal drinking age.
Just in terms of population statistics, Van Halen is still at 75 percent, but in real musical math, the new Van Halen is actually about 10 percentage points higher than that. Still, that 15 percent is missed: in our heads, we can all hear those missing drunken choirboy vocals that should be in the background but are conspicuously absent, and the production on “Tattoo” is way too compressed, lacking the built-for-arenas spaciousness that Ted Templeman brought to VH’s classic period. But it’s better than “Me Wise Magic,” way better than anything on “Van Halen III,” and feels more like the real thing than anything since “5150.”
Yes, this amount of attention is nothing but irrational. I know that. But some of us just cannot repair that adolescent damage.
– Lang
Listen: The Shins, “Simple Song”
The Shins’ “Simple Song” debuted today, featuring James Mercer and a mostly new Shins lineup sounding largely as one might expect five years after “Wincing the Night Away” — the production and arrangements continue the “Wincing” direction toward polish and detail, but it clearly sounds like the Shins rather than an extension of the Broken Bells aesthetic. The new album, “Port of Morrow,” arrives on March 20.
– Lang
