Village Voice | Complete Issue

Edward Burtynsky's 'Oil'; Robert Morris at Hunter College; Justine Cooper's 'Living in Sim'

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

If you're not familiar with the work of Edward Burtynsky in documenting the industrial defacement of the planet, you'd be forgiven for believing that the haunting works in this show about our dependence on oil depict only fictional places. In a diptych of Belridge, California, dozens of identical...

Lore Segal, Rudy Wurlitzer, and Luc Sante (Re)visit Those Dazed '70s

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

"Lucinella is my name. I wear glasses." This is how the eponymous protagonist of Lore Segal's 1976 novella introduces herself, when we meet her upstate at Yaddo. "It's my first visit here and I'm in love with all five poets, four men, one woman, and an obese dog called Winifred." In turn, we are ...

The Strangest Landlord-Tenant Relationship In Town?

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

The smell of piss and fish paste are palpable even outside the locked door of 81 Bowery, a four-story tenement just a few buildings up from Canal Street in Manhattan's Chinatown.

The stairwell inside gives off an air of abandonment. On the second floor, a door opens to reveal a nice enoug...

¡Ask a Mexican! Enough Dobbs!

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

Dear Mexican: Why do beaners or gabachos deliberately try to ignore white people and act like they're not there, or when you're walking by, why do lady beaners laugh so hard with a repulsive fake laugh that makes you want to just punch them? Not only have I noticed this, b...

Free Will Astrology: November 4 Through 10

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

ARIES [March 21–April 19] There was a time when wetlands were considered dismal and unproductive. At best, they were thought to be a waste of space, and at worst, stinky breeding grounds for insect pests. For more than 200 years, many marshes and swamps were filled with dirt and tran...

A Dose of Albany Fraud from Tony Seminerio

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

Anthony Seminerio, former Queens assemblyman, limped through the federal courthouse on Pearl Street last week, a sagging wreck of a man. It was morning, but his collar was already wilted against an extra-wide neck.

Up on the 21st floor, he sat at the defense table, slumped forward and eye...

Kerry Washington: No Slouch in Mamet's Race

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

An accomplished star of multiple media, Bronx-born Kerry Washington is making her Broadway debut as a lawyer in David Mamet's buzzy play Race, about the legal dance that takes place around an effing white man accused of raping an African-American woman.

Hoping it's th...

La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet and The Red Shoes

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

By pure serendipity, two magnificent movies about ballet—one fiction, one fact; one a restored classic, one a brand-new work making its U.S. premiere—open within 48 hours of each other at Film Forum this week. Frederick Wiseman's vérité La Danse: The Paris Opera Balle...

Precious Is the Diary of a Sad Black Woman

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

In her broad outlines, Claireece Precious Jones risks sounding like the epitome of ghetto cliché: an obese, illiterate 16-year-old; mother to a four-year-old Down syndrome daughter and now pregnant again; physically and psychologically abused by her mother; repeatedly raped by her father, ...

Could The Messenger Be a Career High for Harrelson?

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

Who'd have thought Woody Harrelson would be primed to snag an Oscar nomination just one month after mowing down hordes of flesh-munchers in Zombieland? For playing an American hero, no less. The self-proclaimed hippie is getting That Buzz—deserved—for his role in Oren Moverman'...

The Men Who Stare at Goats Too Dippy to Be Serious

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

Historical cataclysm produces conspiratorial thinking: Germany's loss in World War I, the JFK assassination, and 9/11 are all naturally understood as the stuff of unimaginable plots, unspeakable cover-ups, and unseen forces.

The guys who made The Men Who Stare at Goats can't quite ...

First Lady of Film Alice Guy Blaché at the Whitney

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

Largely written out of U.S. film history, cinema's first woman director—as well as producer and studio head—Alice Guy Blaché enters the pantheon, or at least the Whitney Museum of American Art, with a three-month, 80-film retro. A French pioneer, Guy Blaché was, for a de...

Freshmen Director Undercuts Hal Holbrook's Dream Roll in That Evening Sun

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

First-time writer-director Scott Teems has given 84-year-old master actor Hal Holbrook a dream role in Abner Meecham, a Tennessean who walks out of a nursing home and returns to the remote farm where he spent his life. On arrival, Meecham discovers that his son (Walton Goggins) has rented the pla...

Endgame Documents Death of Apartheid

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

Since it already premiered on PBS as part of "Masterpiece Contemporary" on October 25 (and on British TV in May), the theatrical release of Endgame, about the covert negotiations in the '80s that helped bring down apartheid, is puzzling. (Did someone think this would be an instructive prel...

More Fat Guys Screamin' About Pussy in Splinterheads

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

Future students of early-21st-century screen comedy will be mystified by just how much film we devoted to fat guys screaming about gettin' pussy. Jason Rogel barks the best friend part here—his complementary archetype, the awkward nice-guyish leading man, is headlight-eyed Thomas Middleditc...

Collapse a Return to Form for Chris Smith

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

Chris Smith's one-man doc on veteran doomsayer Michael C. Ruppert holds less interest as another sky-is-falling dispatch than as the filmmaker's return to warts-and-all portraiture after 2008's well-received fiction feature The Pool. Ten years ago, Smith's rephouse-circuit hit American ...

Jennifer Baichwal Documents Lightning in Act of God

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

Jennifer Baichwal follows up her superb 2007 documentary Manufactured Landscapes, about the willful harm done to nature by man, with another in which the damage is reversed and random. It's hard to imagine a more biblically cinematic threat—or one more fraught with potential for bana...

On the Heels of Paranormal Activity, The Fourth Kind Comes Off the Weak Imitator

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

Seventy-one years after Orson Welles's War of the Worlds radio broadcast snookered a gullible American public with its real-time alien-invasion scenario, The Fourth Kind writer-director Olatunde Osunsanmi tries a similar gambit, albeit with less showmanship than Welles had in his pi...

Jim Carrey and Robert Zemeckis' Very CGI Christmas Carol

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

It's not hard to see how the director of Forrest Gump would be thought a good fit to adapt the dearly beloved (and much lampooned) Dickens tale that has survived nearly two centuries of retelling if you count the Flintstone, Muppet, and Barbie versions. Stuffed with simple soul...

Richard Kelly's Flick in The Box

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

The secret is out. Warner Bros. waited to unwrap The Box until two days before its opening because, compared to its madcap predecessors—the psychotic Holden Caulfield update Donnie Darko and the delirious welcome-to-the-21st-century extravaganza Southland Tales&#...

SD26: Food in Need of Love

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

The sommelier hunched over the electronic wine list, fingers pecking at the screen. He looked exactly like an airline ticket agent as he pursed his lips, muttered to himself, and sucked air between his teeth. We'd asked him to recommend a bottle at the very bottom of SD26's price range, which sta...

Rum Along to Ambiance

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

The ambiance at Ambiance can be summed up in one word: green. The walls glow lime green, the wainscoting dark marbleized green, while the bulbs that race around the coffered ceiling shine neon green, making the faces of the diners look like scary Halloween masks. The agreeable waitress will seat ...

Halloween With Weezer

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

I now hate Rivers Cuomo, and I've always hated spiders, but I cannot hate Rivers Cuomo dressed as a spider. Nor can anyone else in the sweaty menagerie of Hammerstein Ballroom on Halloween night: The beer-sloshing peacock, violently swaying Teletubby, and mangy werewolf flapping his paws upward i...

The Raw Revelations of Fire in My Bones

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

In the winter 2003 issue of the lamentably defunct magazine Sound Collector Audio Review, writer/critic Mike McGonigal gushes about two recent compilations of "raw gospel"—a strain of church music so fiery, gritty, and raucous it seems to emanate from below. Though enthusiastic throu...

The Secret Life of Girls

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

There are groups that one jokingly refers to as "cults"—White House staff, Park Slope parents, people who wear Snuggies in public—and then there are actual cults. Singer/self-proclaimed fuck-up Christopher Owens, the driving force behind breakout San Francisco downer-rock band Girls, ...

On Michael Jackson's Mercifully Goofy, Cheerful This Is It

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

You go to This Is It—the exploitative but bizarrely heartwarming Michael Jackson documentary, tracking rehearsals for the psychotically exhausting 50-concert London comeback spectacular he didn't live to even start—and you vacillate between a smile and a wince as a clearly driv...

Julian Casablancas Copes

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

"One should always be a little improbable." —Oscar Wilde, Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young

Julian Casablancas is 31 years old. He is completely sober, married, and about to become a father. It's been almost four years since the Strokes released their l...

Finian's Rainbow Retains Much Magic; Love Child Fields Frenzy; Redgrave Cries for Nightingale

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

Mingled with the many raves for the new production of Finian's Rainbow (St. James Theatre) has come a curious counterpoint, on blogs and chat boards, of complaint. Apparently, New York's theater aficionados are split between those simply happy to have a great musical from 1947 back, in wha...

Theatre of the Eighth Day Stages its Noted Wormwood

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

Few theatrical premieres have been as politically charged as Wormwood's 1985 opening in Poland. Staged by a dissident ensemble called Theatre of the Eighth Day, the production dared to openly portray life under Martial Law (declared in 1981) through poetry and gesture.

Now, 20 year...

Halloween Lives on in Americana Kamikaze and The New Electric Ballroom

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

Halloween has passed, but if your appetite for scary stories has not departed with your sugar rush, you might seek out Americana Kamikaze at P.S.122 or The New Electric Ballroom at St. Ann's Warehouse. In the former, Temporary Distortion refracts a Japanese ghost yarn through a New ...

NOT JUST A PICTURE

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600
The six artists taking part in the New Photography 2009 exhibit at the MOMA have nothing in common . . . well, perhaps just one thing: Walead Beshty, Daniel Gordon, Leslie Hewitt, Carter Mull, Sterling Ruby, and Sara VanDerBeek all have different viewpoints, methods, and pictorial modes, but ...

XX FACTOR

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600
This year's CMJ Marathon needed more wind in its sails, given the disappointing absence of marquee headliners and surprising showcase mash-ups. But the lack of boldface names was a boon for the xx, the inexhaustible young shoegaze/new wave band from London, who pounded the pavement with no le...

WHAT A FOX!

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600
Jason Schwartzman and Wes Anderson are already inextricably tied together in our minds because of Rushmore, which still knocks us out. And here comes their latest film together, Fantastic Mr. Fox, a stop-motion animated adaptation of Roald Dahl's beloved children's novel,...

LIT LOCK-UP

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600
Prison isn't all weightlifting and cable TV. The PEN American Center has been mentoring prisoners on the skills of written expression as part of their Prison Writing Program for more than 3 decades, and its annual writing competition gets more than 30 entries per day from prisons around the country....

Steve Tyrell

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600
If you have as much fun watching and listening as he has singing the standards he's come to love, you'll be having a whale of time. He's now the swanky room's holiday-season fixture. It's the late Bobby Short's slot, and he brings the same joy to the world his predecessor always did. Rod Stewart's A...

Bruce Barth

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600
What began as a string of solo ruminations on his Left Coast childhood has turned into a septet-driven song cycle about sundowns and ghost towns entitled The Western Suite. The pianist has a vivid way with melody, so the reeds 'n' brass front line should have plenty of evocative motifs to inv...

'Verboten Presents Ida Engberg'

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600
Sweden's Ida Engberg helps break in North 8th's new sound system with her Get Physical- and John Dahlback-approved techno. Disco Volante makes us picture Nordic robots singing their love across the fjord, but in a muted power-epic video written by Stieg Larsson or Henning Mankell and directed...

Empire Viols

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600
Empire Viols' elegant interpretations of pre-Bach works expose the vivacity of Baroque music, a pious era now often relegated to anthropology. Their namesake instrument, the viola da gamba (a fretted ancestor of the modern bowed string family), requires dexterity and precise temperament, so these...

Eden Espinoza

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600
Espinoza is one of the fiercest voices heard on Broadway in recent years. Think of the volume demanded in Brooklyn and Wicked, and you have the right idea. She can mute that vocal trumpet of hers whenever she wants and undoubtedly will at least part of time she's making her bow in this...

BEEF & BEER

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600
It may be time to embrace the potbelly trend if you're tired of endlessly preening and perpetually staring at yourself in the mirror. Pack on the pounds at Brooklyn Beefsteak, an all-you-can-eat meat-and-beer fest. This bountiful banquet is a throwback to the Tammany Hall glory days when the ...

WHISKY A GO-GO

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600
Apparently, drinking games are no longer just for underage NYU students. This Saturday, Second Chance Saloon will challenge domestic-whisky-experts and beer-can-free-throwers alike to prove their drinking might in its first annual Bar-athlon. Teams of up to four drinkers will compete in 10 di...

JIMMY GROWS UP

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600
Did you give up on Jimmy Fallon's late night show because he seemed a little nervous in those first weeks? If so, you should try it again. Our boy has found his chops, and Late Night With Jimmy Fallon has been funny as hell lately. Jimmy can thank his writers, including head writer A.D. Mi...

SCARRED, BUT NOT DEFEATED

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600
Crazy Itch Radio, the lukewarm 2006 effort from English dance-music duo Basement Jaxx, cost them a good deal of momentum here in the States among all but their most devout fans. But buoyed by killer lead single "Raindrops," their latest full-length, Scars, should please those still ena...

LEBRON BRINGS IT HOME?

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600
With Isiah Thomas finally gone, the Knicks front office is playing up the virtues of stability and rebuilding. Mike D'Antoni has his job cut out for him, and as we go to press, the Knicks were 5-2 in preseason. Fortunately, he can start with building their game around the "Dynamic Duo," Chris...

STRINGING COUTURE

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600
Artist E.V. Day was clueless when it came to her next big commission: the opera. But the higher-ups at the New York City Opera trusted Day's meticulous style of crafting the most fragile of garments in a grand and luminous way. Her installation, elaborately featuring 13 costumes from the Oper...

DIGITAL GET DOWN

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600
The Berlin Wall fell 20 years ago this Monday, and one of the many results of the momentous event was the way two Berlins united into maybe the most awesome city on the planet. Turkish-Muslim-lesbian DJ Ipek Ipekcioglu, a Berliner, brings the capital's electro beats to Brooklyn tonight at Rise&Fa...

BLOODY GOOD SHOW

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600
Fucked Up's second album, The Chemistry of Common Life, landed in 2008 as a scabrous, astounding thing: an elaborate punk credo about the origins of life and humanity that actually did not suck. (It stands in sparse company: see also the Thermals' The Body, the Blood, the Machine

Vijay Iyer Trio

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600
Just because the titillating Historicity is largely a covers disc doesn't mean the pianist has taken his eye off the ball writing-wise. It simply means that he's as strong a programmer as he is a conceptualist—which is way strong. His jittery trio is a working band whose members f...

Gretchen Parlato

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600
Don't fall for her because she won the Monk Vocal Competition—that's just resumè stuff. Swoon because she's turned the promise of such achievements into a few years' worth of dazzling local gigs, becoming a truly inventive working musician. Avoiding overstatement at every turn, Parlato h...

HOT COCO

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600
New York City may be a breeding ground for cross-dressed entertainment, but how many drag queens can actually claim authentic city roots? Miss Coco Peru, a local who has became one of the most recognizable painted faces on cable, hails from the Bronx's City Island. Though she may be a Bravo/Logo reg...

Wolfmother

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600
Wolfmother's rehashed Ozzy-era Sabb jams are packed with some pretty sweet hooks, but the bulk of what they do is sly garage-rock, re-tracing the connections between Jack White and Jimmy Page. The long-awaited and brand-new album, Cosmic Egg, seems to definitely pick at the grimoire of the tw...

'Hum: John Medeski, Marc Ribot, Calvin Weston & Billy Martin'

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600
Who needs a bassist when you've got a quarter-century foundation? Highlighting organist/pianist John Medeski's collab-studded week at the Stone—including a reunion with one-time mentor, drummer Ra-Kalam Bob Moses—is a legit downtown supergroup that could have (and might have) appeared in t...

Carsick Cars

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600
As the Beijing indie label Maybe Mars pulls into town to (perhaps) show us the future of rock music as a "Made in China" brand name this week (with shows at Glasslands and Columbia as well), the band most likely to succeed stateside remains Carsick Cars. Fronted by twentysomething guitarist Zhang Sh...

The Bandit

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600
Dir. Alberto Lattuada (1946). Lattuada's flair for atmosphere stands him in good stead in this melodrama about a disillusioned soldier who returns from World War II, falls in with bad company, and becomes the lover of a flashy woman of the underworld.
Thu., Nov. 5, 2:30 & 6:15 p.m., 20...

Metropolis

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600
Dir. Fritz Lang (1926). One of the most ambitious spectacles in the history of cinema, Lang's monumental vision of the society of the future surmounts the frequent silliness of the script, while 18-year-old Brigitte Helm makes an astonishing screen debut in demanding double roles.
Wed....

The Avenging Conscience

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600
Dir. D.W. Griffith (1914). Griffith's last normally scaled project before he embarked on his epic The Birth of a Nation, this impressive thriller is especially notable for its central portion, a dream sequence extraordinary for the period that makes use of dramatic lighting effects and compos...

The Chandler Travis Philharmonic

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600
Kitschy, excessive, rambunctious, and unfettered, Cape Cod songwriter Chandler Travis's immodestly named nine-piece group is not unlike a classic-pop reflection of the late Sun Ra's Arkestra. That being said, Travis recently released a rare and unexpectedly sincere solo album, After She Left,...

Scream of Fear

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600
Dir. Seth Holt (1960). One of Hammer's most satisfying scary movies, due mainly to the clearly splendid working relationship of able helmer Holt and ace cinematographer Douglas Slocombe. Set on the French Riviera, the fairly unoriginal story is one of those, who is trying to drive the heroine insane...

Shoot the Piano Player

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600
Dir. Francois Truffaut (1960). Although it has been overrated by the director's cultists, Truffaut's second film, which stars sad-eyed Charles Aznavour as a pianist with a past, is a freer work than The 400 Blows. It's an odd pastiche of a gangster movie, lively and entertaining, but also une...

Haxan

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600
Dir. Benjamin Christensen (1922). Also known as Witchcraft Through the Ages, Danish director Benjamin Christensen’s silent is part mockumentary, part docudrama, part shock doc—a lavish personal statement and barely remembered classic that left it...

Cléo From 5 to 7

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600
Dir. Agnès Varda (1962). Agnès Varda’s most overtly nouvelle vague caprice films the uncertain afternoon of a glamorous young Parisienne, waiting for the results of a medical exam, in real time—among other things, it’s a suggestive foremother to Chantal Akerman’s

The Red Shoes

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600
Dir. Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger (1948). Technicolor was made for this luridly-hued backstage melodrama—a madly expressionist spectacle even in the context of the Powell-Pressburger oeuvre. A failure in the U.K. the movie achieved cult status when it opened in New York—the most acc...

Paisan

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600
Dir. Roberto Rossellini (1946). Roberto Rossellini’s second feature (an anthology of stories dealing with post-war Italy) went even further than Open City in creating the neo-realist mode—the use of awkward non-actors in the early scenes, and in late sequences of street fighti...

The Intruder

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600
Dir. Roger Corman (1962). Possibly the most alarming B movie of 1962, Roger Corman’s anti-segregationist screen-scorcher, shot on location in an Ozark town, is both ferociously topical and impressively timeless. William Shatner’s pre Star Trek turn as the ultimate rabble-rousing whi...

Double Dagger

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600
"I'm not sure I know what the point is, and I don't care. That shit gets on my nerves," wrote the Voice's Annie Fischer in a review of Double Dagger's 2007 CMJ showcase. She was reportedly pissed that lead singer Nolen Strals kept forcing his fingers into audience members' mouths, though Doub...

Vivian Girls

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600
For a hyped-up group, you could do a lot worse than Vivian Girls. Though some were disappointed when their second record didn't make sparks fly as much as their debut, they've also been good about bringing the noise for their live shows, and you have to at least give 'em credit for sticking with th...

Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600
In C, the "Louie Louie" of contemporary classical music, turns forty-five this year. There've been birthday performances aplenty, but nothing reveals the potential of the work better than the Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble's In C Remixed, which subjects the group's ow...

Warren G

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600
In September, G-funk OG Warren G released a new album, his first since 2005's In the Mid-Nite Hour. Its title? The G Files, of course. Non-G-funk-affiliated guests include Wu-Tang's Raekwon and Travis Barker of Blink-182, neither of whom sways our man from the laid back sound he's been...

Islands+Jemima Pearl

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600
Montreal indie-poppers Islands cut loose on their third LP, Vapours, using Auto-Tune (on "Heartbeat"), lush percussion, and (gasp!) the occasional major key. While they didn't necessarily make a better record than 2008's moody, occasionally contemplative Arm's Way, they certainly made ...

Thao & the Get Down Stay Down+Portland Cello Project

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600
Indie-rock slow burner Thao Nguyen is slowly breaking via the old word-of-mouth channels thanks to her infectious, cheery sound; think Motown abandon filtered through new-millennial self-awareness. But as ecstatic as Nguyen is, she may seem downright demure next to the antics of the Portland Cello P...

'Osso Quartet:Sufjan Stevens' The BQE'

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600
While we secretly wish Sufjan would get going with an album about Rhode Island, we're happy to note that the musician's latest dalliances in orchestral chamber music (Run Rabbit Run) and experimental filmmaking (The BQE) are almost as good as his songs about Michigan-based serial kille...

Ray Lamontagne

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600
LaMontagne's Gossip in the Grain, from last year, found the bearded Maine-based folkie working with lusher, more expansive arrangements than he'd previously utilized; "You Are the Best Thing," the album's horn-enriched single, sounded like it might've come from an early effort by Blood, Sweat...

'Chuck Chillout Birthday Concert'

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600
Coming full circle, Mr. Chillout is now back on Kiss FM, where he belongs. It was there that he helped to establish the rep of many old-school artists and the field still needs his discerning taste. It's also fitting that his onetime protege Flex, who's made quite a name for himself also, is alongsi...

Say Anything

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600
Given emo-punk group Say Anything's prolific output—their second album was a double-disc set with guest appearances by Pete Yorn, Gerard Way, Chris Carrabba, and a bevy of lesser names—they should maybe have set their sights higher than releasing a mere 13-song self-titled record. A Broadw...