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Saturday, July 31, 2010 ( 7/31/2010 10:42:00 AM ) Bill S. WEEKEND PET PIC: It's house guest Bailey Cat, dangling over the kitchen counter (yes, we do wipe the counter down before we use it):  THE USUAL NOTE: For more cool pics of companion animals, please check out Modulator's "Friday Ark." # | Thursday, July 29, 2010 ( 7/29/2010 07:11:00 AM ) Bill S.  “I JUST CAN’T FIND MY KEYS.” Look at the cover to Aaron Peta’s debut disc, I’m Not A Hipster, with the New York-based singer/songwriter dressed in outsized sunglasses and a gleaming silver jumpsuit, and your first response is “Not a hipster? Truer words were never written.” This guy looks too nerdy to be allowed into Kraftwerk!Look inside the booklet accompanying the CD, and you’ll see our hero striking a variety of pop/rock poses: sensitive singer/songwriter in his bathrobe, country musician, Lou Reed urbanite. It’s a modern take on Nick Lowe’s Pure Pop for Now People cover, and it’s wholly suited to Peta’s eclectic, if occasionally campy, style. Whether he’s indulging in Dylanesque spewing over a martial beat on ironic album opener “Your Songs Have No Form” or coming across like a constipated Stan Ridgeway in the synth-heavy “Super Sexy,” or just doing the sweet guitar-driven pop-rock thing on “Sandy Understand,” the results are endlessly replayable. At times, this disc sounds like a solo outing one of the alumni from a nineties band like Jellyfish or the Grays might’ve concocted (Jason Falkner, say); other times it’ll get you thinking of early Beck (check the title track). If there’s any theme that recurs throughout the disc, it’s captured in the defensive posture of its title: more than one track (“Sexy,” “You You You”) concern the singer’s most likely futile attempts at breaking through a fellow urban dweller’s self-absorption. “Everywhere you go/everything you do/It’s always always always always about you,” he sing/chants in “You.” Yeah, this guy knows his boho music scene alright. P.S. Skip the truly formless bonus instrumental, “Where We Are,” which is as irritating as the final track on the Beck’s Mellow Gold. (First published on Blogcritics.) Labels: art-pop # |Wednesday, July 28, 2010 ( 7/28/2010 06:31:00 AM ) Bill S. MID-WEEK MUSIC VIDEO: Hey, let's watch a young Dave Davies lip synch his follow-up to "Death of A Clown," the equally evocative "Susannah's Still Alive." # | Tuesday, July 27, 2010 ( 7/27/2010 07:10:00 AM ) Bill S.  ”I AM ONE OF THE MANY UNCOUNTED VICTIMS OF THE IMP OF THE PERVERSE.” Recently re-released in a new edition with forty pages of new material, Graphic Classics: Edgar Allan Poe (Eureka Productions) remains one of the top entries in editor Tom Pomplun’s modernized series of Classics Illustrated. Not too surprising since Poe has long been a steady source of inspiration for comic book adaptation over the years -- not to mention a gateway drug for many young readers into the joys of reading classic literature -- and you can imagination a generation of predominately boyish comics artists all chafing at the chance to illustrate their favorite story.All of the expected tales of murder and madness are here, though none of Poe’s Dupin detective tales are featured, a notable omission since the author is largely credited to inventing the modern mystery tale with “ratiocinative” fictions like “Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Still, you can understand the appeal the more gothic entries have for visual artists: it’s much more fun to render the narrator’s guilt-ridden descent into insanity than it is to present the detective’s logical explanation for murderous events. You just know that Rick Geary, responsible for such detail driven graphic novels as his “Treasury of Victorian Murder” series, had a ball depicting the narrator’s outsized PoV in “The Tell-Tale Heart.” In general, the stories that work best are the ones (like Geary’s) that push the edge of storytelling rather than straightforwardly recounting event. Thus, a tale like “William Wilson,” a doppelganger story told from the evil twin’s perspective, comes across a little flat due to Dan Dougherty’s straightforward illustrations, while a piece like Pedro Lopez’s Alex Toth-inspired “Cask of Amontillado” proves more memorable. Other highlights include Milton Knight’s engagingly cartoonish adaptation of “Never Bet the Devil Your Head” (the memorable source for a Fellini movie adaptation, too), Matt Howarth’s ”Fall of the House of Usher” (which uses cross-hatching to suitably oppressive effect); Pomplun and Lance Tooks’ take on the more obscure “Imp of the Perverse” and J.B. Bonivert’s new-to-this-edition stylized adaptations of two death meditation poems, “The Raven” and “Annabel Lee.” The latter especially makes these two much-read pieces fresh and mutes the elements of Victorian sentimentality embedded in each poem. Not sure if Poe, that most modern of early American writers, would approve or not, but they definitely work for this 21st century reader. Labels: art comics # | |
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