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Saturday, April 04, 2009 ( 4/04/2009 11:26:00 AM ) Bill S.  "WAKEY WAKEY WAKEY, LITTLE SLEEPER!" With Psonic Psunspot, the Dukes of the Stratosphear's full-length follow-up to 25 O'clock, the masquerading members of XTC broadened their swipes. Where the first EP primarily looked to British psychedelic nuggets for its influence, Psunspot crossed the ocean to perform the same affectionate pillaging from American artists, including winking refs to bands like the Byrds, Quicksilver Messenger Service, even the Theremin-drenched Beach Boys. The results, but for a frivolous series of whimsical spoken interludes performed by the studio manager's daughter, proved less broadly spoofish than 25 O'clock.The adjustment in attitude is readily apparent from the first track, Colin Moulding's "Vanishing Girl," which takes from the Hollies circa "Dear Eloise" or "Jennifer Eccles," and holds until the luminous finale, "Pale and Precious," Andy Partridge's tribute to Brian Wilson and the TM Boys. Colin triples his contributions to this set ("Girl," "Shiny Cage" and "The Affiliated"), though his presence is also felt more strongly on the disc's other tracks, too. With 25 O'clock, you get the impression at times that the rest of the band was invited late to Andy's party. Here, listening to Colin's nimble basswork on the "Eight Miles High"-influenced "You're My Drug," for instance, his involvement in the Dukes sounds much more substantial. Moulding's "The Affiliated," his third compositional contribution to the disc, leans toward a world that he'd explore further in XTC's Apple Venus discs ("Frivolous Tonight"). In fact, where all six core cuts of the Dukes' debut rested on the listener's knowledge of sixties studio excess for a full appreciation, many of the follow-up's selections could have easily been put on a straight-faced XTC disc without too much tweaking. Partridge's McCartney-esque "Brainiac's Daughter" could've been a companion piece to Skylarking's "That's Really Super, Supergirl," right down to the lyrics' Silver Age comic book refs, while "Pale and Precious" anticipates Oranges and Lemons' equally SoCal-inflected "Chalkhills and Children." But for its palpable "I'm Only Sleeping" nick, "Shiny Cage" could've easily fit among the songwriter's other observations of working class not-so-quiet desperation. At times, in fact, you can't wishing that the XTCers had held some of these tracks for their next elpee where they might have gotten more serious critical attention. Still, the disc's few acid-y japes remain enjoyable: bad trip reconstruction "Collideascope" (dig that Turtles "Sound Asleep" sawing in the middle) and the gloriously dopey, San Fran-influenced "Little Lighthouse" remain personal faves. To these ears, the only track that works more as a concept than an actual song is the gender bending "Have You Seen, Jackie?" Maybe it's the insertion of that irritating little girl's voice in the middle of the song. Ape House's new reissue of the disc contains six demo versions of songs from the disc (no unfamiliar songs on this 'un). The mnost intriguing demo proves to be Moulding's "No One at Home," an early version of "Vanishing Girl" with less mysterious lyrics in its chorus. I miss Dave Gregory's sparkle-icious guitar work on the finalized "Girl," though. To fans who already own Psunspot from its CD release as a part of the Chips from the Chocolate Fireball set, Ape House's new release may not have the advantage of less familiar extras to pull in the hard-core collectors. But for latecomers just coming into this criminally underappreciated art-pop band, this set might be the one to select. Where the original "Dukes" releases (including the Chocolate Fireball CD) contained no acknowledgment of the group's "true" identity, Ape House's two reissues plaster "XTC as The Dukes of Stratosphear" on both the cover and CD label. Rather like the moment Stephen King had his "Richard Bachman" books reissued with his real name splayed on the cover. Yanking the (red) curtain aside brought an audience to those obscure early works that would otherwise have missed 'em. Perhaps Andy is hoping that something similar will occur for the Dukes' oeuvre. If so, that alone justifies both discs' re-release. Labels: psychedelia # |Friday, April 03, 2009 ( 4/03/2009 03:59:00 PM ) Bill S.  "I'M THE BAD THOUGHTS INSIDE YOUR HEAD." In the history of rock oddities, the spectacle of an established group taking on a pseudonym to record material in tribute to the music that initially inspired 'em has become an established ploy. The Mothers of Invention did it for doo-wop back in 1968 with Cruising with Ruben & the Jets, while in 1984, British art-poppers XTC donned the moniker Dukes of the Stratosphear to do something similar to psychedelia. The results of this masquerade produced two enjoyable pastiches, the EP 25 O'clock and full-length long-player Psonic Psunspot. Together, both discs were originally released together in the U.S. on CD by Geffen as Chips from the Chocolate Fireball (An Anthology), though expanded and remastered versions of both titles are now being reissued separately on XTC mastermind Andy Partridge's Ape House label.Are they worth getting if you already own a copy of Fireball? Depends on how avid a fan you are of this quirky band of studio obsessives. Of the two releases, Dukes debut 25 O'clock is the one with the most extras, which makes sense since the original platter was around the length of the original Magical Mystery Tour EP. Six demos (two of songs not included on the original release) and three additional recordings The six core tracks remain top-notch psychedelic pspoofs: five were penned by Partridge under the pseudonym Sir John John, while the sixth came from the less prolific bassist Colin Moulding (a.k.a. The Red Curtain), playing Harrison to Partridge's Lennon/McCartney with a Zager & Evans-ish prophecy of dire futures entitled "What in the World??…" In the doomy title opener, Partridge melds Electric Prunes' "I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night" to Pink Floyd, while "Bike Ride to the Moon" hints at a greater Britbeat obscurity, Tomorrow's "My White Bicycle." The obligatory hallucinogenic love song, "Your Gold Dress," hints at the Stones' "She's Like A Rainbow" right down to Dave Gregory's Nicky Hopkins-influenced piano fingerings. Final EP track, "Mole," pulls out the woozy stringwork and backwards tape sounds so intrinsic to the original Mystery Tour -- all in service to an obscure psychic pspy (okay, I'll stop) story. As for the less familiar material, the high points are "Can" and "Tin Toy Clockwork Train." The former takes Partridge's trademark skepticism re: humanity (see "Poor Skeleton Steps Out" and "Scarecrow People") and wraps it up with a bracingly moddish Who-styled rave-up. The latter is a Not-So-Big-Express lark with toy train whistles and a lotta laughing embellishing a typically bouncy XTC-styled beat. If some of this gets admittedly cartoonish, the songs still stand strongly by themselves: as demo versions of "25 O'clock," "Bike Ride," "My Love Explodes," and "World?…" all demonstrate. "My Love Explodes" adds to the catalog of great ejaculation songs (neat Easterny guitar riffs on this 'un), though the insertion of a nerdy Woody Allen-y rant about the song's "filthy" subject matter at the end grows old on replays. With their follow-up album, Psunspot, the boys would tamp down the studio goofing, but unfortunately add more spoken interstices. XTC's love for psychedelic nuggetry would ultimately lead to one of their strongest albums, the Todd Rundgren-produced song cycle Skylarking, though few at the time of 25 O'clock's release would have likely predicted the gorgeous village greenery still ahead -- or the evanescent pale and precious sounds that the "Dukes" themselves would create for their Psonic elpee two years later. UPDATE/CORRECTION: Though the two promo discs I received from Ape House promised that the final releases would contain the videos originally shot to promote each release, I've since learned that this is not to be. Labels: psychedelia # |Thursday, April 02, 2009 ( 4/02/2009 07:11:00 AM ) Bill S. "AT THE END OF MY RAINBOW IS A GOLDEN OLDIE." Watching the series finale to the cut-short Life on Mars last night, I found myself thinking during its ham-fistedly literal-minded Major Tom daddy issues sci-fi conclusion, "Good thing this show didn't last for more than one season – 'coz I'd be really pissed if I'd kept following it and it all still led to this!" (A Martian gene hunt? Really?) Still, Michael Imperioli in a spaceman's suit was worth a chuckle, if only for its sheer preposterousness. # | Wednesday, April 01, 2009 ( 4/01/2009 02:51:00 PM ) Bill S. 'THEY'RE THE BEST IN HARMONY." Here's an old film clip of the great Louis Jordan & His Tympany Five, doing one of their biggest hits. Man, I love this stuff. # | Tuesday, March 31, 2009 ( 3/31/2009 06:02:00 AM ) Bill S. FOR LORNE Was saddened to read of the untimely death of Andy Hallett, who played the effervescent demon Lorne on Angel. Hallett was a delight to watch on that show, and that he wasn't able to parlay his performance there into something more was a disappointment to more than one admirer of his work. Here's the demon himself, in a classic musical moment from his one great teevee role: R.I.P. Andy. # | Monday, March 30, 2009 ( 3/30/2009 04:20:00 PM ) Bill S.  "MY EXISTENCE TURNED EVERYTHING AROUND ME INTO DARKNESS." Recently the New York Times, as a part of its "Arts Beat" section, initiated a column of best seller lists for graphic novels and collections. Divided into three sections -- hard and soft cover graphic books, with a third list devoted to manga -- the manga list in particular caught my attention since it was so patently lopsided. In one recent week, all ten of the titles came from the same publisher, Viz Media, who couldn't resist celebrating this moment with a p.r. release trumpeting their chart domination.To be fair, Viz's dominance of the NYTimes Top Ten was skewed by one basic fact: their mega-popular series Naruto is presently in the midst of its second publishing blitz, shoving four volumes a month onto the book racks to get closer to the homeland title's publishing schedule. Seven of the manga titles in the Top Ten list were devoted to the ninja trainee's adventures, the remaining three books being the most recent releases of Black Cat, Bleach and Arina Tanemura's The Gentlemen's Alliance †. Of these, the most intriguing entry is the last, which is released under Viz's Shojo Beat imprint. An "Older Teen" manga aimed at a girl readership, Alliance † is quite different from the boyish fight fantasies of all the other series on the list. To get my own sense of what all the hot fuss was about, I recently read the volume that is currently perched on the NYTimes list. Picking up a manga title in its ninth volume is not the optimal way to introduce oneself to a series, but for a lot of young manga readers, I suspect, it's the way it typically occurs. Where I live, for instance, the number of store-sold manga books is pretty damn spare. One of the other secrets behind Naruto's chart success resides in the fact that it's one of the only titles you can find on the shelves of a rural area Wal-Mart -- and even then the distribution of individual volumes is spotty. During Naruto's current blitz, only two of a given month's four releases have arrived at my local Mart, which definitely wreaks havoc with the books' serialized storyline. I had to wonder: just how easy is it for a newbie to pick up a manga title mid-story? And so it was that I heedlessly plunged into Tanemura's romantic maelstrom. First time through, I read the book rapidly, only occasionally flipping back to the front-of-the-book "character introductions" and story synopsis. Two-thirds into it, I found myself getting decidedly confused as to who was what. Tanemura's tale is packed with characters who have more than one identity: one of the secondary characters is a "very cute boy" who regularly dresses up as a girl; the series' big male love interest is one of two twins who have, apparently, swapped identities in previous volumes; a girl gang member also turns out to be the member of a privileged family. More than once, I had to tell myself, "I'll sort this out on the reread." I was a little more successful getting all the players straight on the rebound, though I'm sure I still missed plenty of character nuances along the way. Alliance † (no, I don't know the significance of the cross in the title) centers on Haine Otomiya, a former "yanki" (term for a juvenile delinquent) who's been passed from her parents to be adopted by a wealthy family in exchange for a 50 million yen business loan. Now living in luxury, she attends the prestigious Imperial Academy where she falls for Shizumasa Togu, a dreamy lad with a mysterious illness. Shizuma's twin brother (the only thing that visually differentiates 'em is their hair color) Takanari is the school's class president. Both he and his brother, we're told, have helped our former punkette heroine grow acclimated to the upper crust school setting. When the book opens, however, Haine is turning her back on the school and the new friends she's made, after learning some surprising facts about her lineage. Turns out she's the offspring of her adoptive father and birth mother; the man she'd thought was her biological father had instead forced her pregnant mother to marry him. When he'd learned that Haine wasn't his, he made the business deal with her real father. This revelation understandably makes our girl more than a little pissed at her step-dad. She rejoins her former yanki gang and recruits them in an ill-defined plan to break into the mansion of her first parents to kidnap her amnesiac mother and take her back to her first love. Haine, we're told, is not the smartest student in the academy -- she's more heart than head -- so it's not surprising that her plan turns into a disaster. A small fire planned as a diversion burns out of control, putting both her mother and stepfather in peril. It's up to our heroine to dash into the burning building to rescue the remarkably young looking grownups. Things happen pretty quickly in the book. In addition to the kidnapping plot, there's a moment where Haine runs into the members of a rival yanki gang -- and dispatches them all in a largely unseen rumble. The focus in Tanemura's series is more on characters' reactions to events, rather than events themselves. Thus, we get multiple pages of the twins processing how Haine is facing up to the news about her parentage plus a suitably adolescently melancholy scene where our heroine stares into the vast universe and tells us all how lonely she feels. "I wonder . . ." she slowly states, "if I died . . . would anybody feel . . . lonely afterward?" You can definitely see the appeal for a young teen girl readership, though older readers might find the adolescent angst just a little too overwrought. But, hey, isn't that what adolescent angst is all about? The manga paperback is formatted in a style that appears to be more common to shojo collections than it does the boys' club books. In addition to the story, the writer/artist regularly divides a page into half art/half text where she chattily talks to the reader about her life and characters. Where a shonen manga creator like Naruto's Kishimoto may occasionally insert little personal text pieces in between chapters, it isn't done as obsessively or intrusively within the story. In Tanemura's manga, the personal is much more intertwined with the storytelling. Appended to the volume is a bonus story, "Strawberry Milk and Chocolate Coffee," centered on one of the teachers in the Imperial Academy, a tall blond named Choko. Because the character doesn't appear at all in the ninth volume's main story, its primary interest comes from what it tells us about the culture of the Academy setting. A no-nonsense teacher, Choko is nonetheless attracted to "girly things." "Everyone sees me as the kind of person who would drink black coffee," she states. "If only someone would tell me, just once, that I look like a strawberry milk drinker." Choko has so internalized what she sees as the world's view of her that she's unwilling to openly appreciate the "frills and lace" she secretly loves. This conflict between public and private personas is, one suspects, common to teens whatever the culture. Tanemura's evocative art suits her emotive material: she's especially good at presenting her characters posed on the verge of action even if she often skimps on the follow-through. There are a lot of headshots in the book, but the artist is able to keep them varied enough through her characters' expressive mouths and super-large eyes. The artist's schoolgirl characters (as well as that "eccentric" boy who dresses as a schoolgirl) can be fairly indistinguishable on some pages, however -- especially during a sequence in the first chapter where Haine's chums argue over whether they're going to help her or not. But since none of these secondaries actually do very much in this volume, I ultimately decided that it didn't mean much to me. Bet it does matter to those devoted Alliance † readers who put this book on the NYTimes Top Ten list, though. Labels: sixty-minute manga # |Sunday, March 29, 2009 ( 3/29/2009 08:40:00 AM ) Bill S.  "FIFTY DOORS IN THE PLACE AND ONLY THIRTEEN KEYS." Fingering through the DVD discount bins, you sometimes can come across some genuine curiosities. Recently, checking out the five buck discs at a local Walgreen's, I happened on the low-budget old dark mansion flick, House of the Damned. Released in 2006 on Fox Home Entertainment Video, the 1963 black-and-white featurette (only runs 63 minutes) comes as a flipper disc in both wide and full screen versions. I recently viewed the wide screen "cinemascope" version and found myself charmed by it, though I suspect that some viewers, bamboozled by the movie's wholly deceptive tagline ("13 Keys to Unleash the Living Dead"), might be pissed off at the picture.The movie concerns a California Spanish-style mansion with dungeon, that is on the verge of being put up for sale since its previous tenant -- a former tent show owner named Captain Arbuckle -- has disappeared mysteriously and ceased paying his lease. Struggling architect Scott Campbell (Ronald Foster) and his wife Nancy (Merry Anders, a regular on sixties TV series who also had a role in Women of the Prehistoric Planet) have come to the house as part of a possible renovation project. (The only thing vaguely architectural that we see him doing is going around the first floor with a measuring tape.) Because the mansion is, of course, out in the middle of nowhere, the two spend the night, expecting to be joined by Scott's lawyer buddy Joe Schiller (Richard Crane) and his shapely foreign wife Loy (Erika Peters). Joe and Loy don't show that first night, leaving our couple to be unnerved by a series of mysterious goings on in the house. While they are sleeping, a legless something makes its way into the room and swipes two of the thirteen keys that they've been given by a real estate. An investigation of the house uncovers only one still-locked door, however, though our spooked couple somehow manages to forget that there's a dungeon in the building until late in the movie. Later, when the lawyer's wife Loy is kidnapped by a hulking giant (Richard Kiel, a year after his appearance in Eegah), they still manage to forget about the basement digs until long after they've gone through the rest of the mansion. Atmospherically filmed by Maury Dexter (The Day Mars Invaded Earth, Maryjane, The Mini-Skirt Mob), House works more on being moody than frightening, though a red herring subplot concerning the mansion's institutionalized former owner contains a decent little jump scare. There's an odd little subtext in the script, pertaining to the two couples' marriages. Scott and Nancy, we're reminded more than once, have just celebrated their anniversary, while the lawyer and his missus are currently experiencing a rough patch thanks to the "excitable" wife's jealousy. Both marriages are meant to be compared and contrasted to the relationships between the house's true denizens, though the script doesn't really do all that much with this theme. Despite the movie's misleading poster blurb, the solution to all the dark night hi-jinx turns out pretty Scooby Doo-ish. (Soon as you learn the missing Captain Arbuckle once ran a traveling circus, you can see where the plot is going: the culprits are all sideshow human oddities!) The flick's troublemakers prove to be benign at heart; even the house's one dire moment -- the sight of a headless Loy reaching out for Nancy -- turns out to be an old-fashioned carnie gaffe. The whole thing wraps on a somewhat melancholy note, as the movie's mislabeled quartet of the "damned" shuffle up the dungeon steps to venture out into the sunlight. When one of them says they fear "the faces" of the outside world, the group's seeming leader (a none-too-imposing circus fat lady played by Ayllene Gibbons) states simply, "We've all been looked at before." An odd capper to this peculiar little low-budgeter. Labels: psychotronic psinema # | |
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