For your Sunday dose of Shoegaze, here’s another shot of SPC ECO with “Fallen Stars.”
This is off their new album Sirens and Satellites, which I liked enough to buy. The overall sound features very pretty, very spacey background synthesizer washes with poppy tunes and understated female vocals somewhere between Florence + The Machine, Sarah McLachlan, and Tori Amos, with a dash of Yoko Kanno. The emotional feel of the album is a lot like Malory’s Outerbeats.
OK, this was moderately amusing, especially the chicken…
How long has it been since I featured an obscure Japanese Shoegazer band? Well that’s too long!
Here’s Bertoia‘s “Snow Slide,” which proves once again that low-rent costumes and dreamquest fantasies are a fine hook to hang a music video on…
Stumbled across this cover of Genesis’s “Entangled” off Trick of the Tail by a band called Hydria while looking for something else, and liked it enough to put it up.
It’s a crunchier, almost power ballad version, which actually works quite well for the song.
Here’s “Innocent,” another track of Japanese band Civic‘s debut album Toilet Monster.
Civic gets compared to Supercar, and while I can hear the resemblance, Civic has a rawer sound, like a garage band who just started meshing a few weeks ago. I like that high energy rawness, and some have labeled Civic “Noise Pop,” if that’s a real thing.
I’ve found and ordered Toilet Monster from a domestic source, and I hope to have a more detailed report if/when it comes in.
Via Ace of Spades, comes War is Boring’s primer on how to kill Godzilla.
The basic plan is:
That would probably work in real life (where the square/cube law pretty much precludes 10-story monsters, much less ones breathing atomic fire). But in the world of the just released Godzilla movie (which, alas, I have not seen yet), given that our fire-breathing friend is reported to have survived Castle Bravo, America’s first dry-fuel thermonuclear bomb test on Bikini Atoll, well, color me skeptical that 30,000 pound JDAMs would do the trick…
Honestly, the only thing I know about Jesus on Heroine is that they have a Facebook page. Here’s the slightly differently spelled “Jesus on Heroin.” It’s probably best I didn’t play this on easter Sunday…
Back in the dim mists of time, they used to demonstrate the speed of atomic chain reactions with arrays of mousetraps. Now someone has done the same experiment, with the added benefit of a high speed camera:
Mercury Rev is an American ban that got dubbed Shoegaze early on, then evolved in a more pop direction. “You’re My Queen” is actually one of their more pop numbers, but I think it fits nicely into the shoegaze category somewhere between Black Tambourine and Polyphonic Spree.
In the 1970s, director William Friedkin made three great movies, one after the other. The first, The French Connection won the Academy Award for best picture. The second, The Exorcist, was not only one of the greatest horror films of all time, but one of the highest grossing films ever.
However, his third film, Sorcerer, a remake of the French film The Wages of Fear, sank like a stone at the box office, despite having one of tensest action sequences ever filmed:
It also doesn’t help that the film was later butchered for the international market.
The film has long been champion by many (including Roger Ebert) as a lost classic. But the film was never released on Blu-Ray.
The Blu-Ray version is the full film, restored and remastered with Friedkin’s oversight, and is reportedly “stunning”.
I’ll definitely pick this up, because even on VHS (kids, ask your parents what a VHS was), it was an extremely well-made and gripping film (and one I prefer to the original Wages of Fear).
Warning: Don’t pick up the DVD released the same day as the Blu-Ray, which is reportedly a “botched” full-screen transfer, as the restored version of the DVD isn’t available yet.