I was able to catch most of the M83 show here in Austin. While good, I was equally impressed with Swedish opening act I Break Horses (not to be confused with the Seattle band of the same name, or the Portland band Sparkle Pony), which played a very tight set.
Their online music is good, but they’re much better live, and I’d recommend catching the M83/I Break Horses tour if they come around your neck of the woods.
I know that when I think “punk,” Huey Lewis and Toni Basil are the first names that come to mind:
I can hardly wait for their forthcoming Heavy Metal collection with Simon & Garfunkel and The Bee Gees.
(To be fair, Devo were considered punk very early in their career, and Billy Idol at least dressed the part and came out of the same scene as The Sex Pistols. There’s a very amusing bit in Glen Matlock’s I was a teenage Sex Pistol in which a suddenly chastised Idol grows apprehensive over having wrecked his father’s car…)
(Hat tip: Iowahawk’s Twitter feed. )
We’ve had Shoegazer bands from the UK, the USA, Japan, and France, so why not one from Russia? Named after a Mexican SF movie I really need to track down, here’s Sleep Dealer with “The Tenth Planet”:
Here’s the California Shoegazer band Sway with “Fall” (which is available on iTunes):
Not only are there six bands named Sway, there’s another Shoegazer band named Sway out of New South Wales, Australia!
Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys has died of cancer at the deeply untimely age of 47. Dwight pretty much expressed my thoughts, except I didn’t care for “Rock Hard” either. But I did love “Sabotage,” as well as one other song where the Beasties make a guest appearance:
1990s British duo Curve walk the line (if there is one) between Shoegazer and Dreampop on their song “Frozen”:
This is almost an extended loop rather than a standalone song, but it’s a very pleasant one, that seems to have been composed as a general tribute to shoegaze.
This week’s Shoegazer Sunday offering is a Japanese band called Civic. First up is “Tensai”:
Here’s a live version of “Guitar,” which is a tremendously fun high energy number. Skip the first 1:20 seconds of annoying “walking on stage” intro electronica.
Like many of my Japanese shoegazer discoveries, Civic records for High Fader Records. Guitar seems to have been reborn there as “Tobacco” up on the High Fader Myspace page, and have another song called “Innocent” on their own MySpace page. They have a very coherent, appealing sound, with the male and female vocalists trading off verses. They’re probably closest to SuperCar among their Japanese shoegaze brethren, but they’re also have a bit of U2, The Beatles, The Byrds, and maybe The Ramones in their sound.
Since I don’t read Kanji, I couldn’t tell you what the name of this song is:
I would buy a full length Civic album right now if one were available in the U.S…
More obscure Japanese shoegaze, this time from Speaker Gain Teardrop off their album RENDERING ENCRYPTION (a title that will no doubt bring a smile to Cory Doctrow’s face).
Here’s both the live and studio versions.
Here’s a film I’ve never heard of, that never got a U.S. theatrical release, that cost some €25 million to make, that sounds not just like a train wreck, but like horrifying, misconceived, epic train wreck.
The premise, from IMDB:
Cheyenne, a wealthy former rock star, now bored and jaded in his retirement embarks on a quest to find his father’s persecutor, an ex-Nazi war criminal now hiding out in the U.S.
Well, they doesn’t sound very promising right off the bat. But then you see who’s playing the lead role:
That’s right: Sean Penn, 50-something EMO rocker. That moves it from merely bad to legendarily bad. You look at the IMDB listing and think: “Well, it has David Byrne playing himself. That might be the only thing about this film that doesn’t suck.” And then you watch the trailer:
And think: “Well, it has David Byrne playing himself. That might be the only thing about this film that doesn’t suck.”
This may be the most ill-conceived film involving Auschwitz since Jerry Lewis’ The Day the Clown Cried.
But unlike The Day the Clown Cried, This Must be The Place was actually released. And I’d be willing to watch either of them once.
Once.
Edited to add: Though it’s played in Europe and Sundance, it doesn’t seem to have had a general U.S. release, so it might still pop up at art houses across the country this year.
It does seem to have gotten mostly good reviews from the kind of people who give films like this good reviews…