Category Archives: Music

Music cd and dvd reviews

Low in Europe

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Low in Europe

 

I came late to appre­ci­at­ing Low, but they have since become one of my favorite bands. I was vaguely aware that trainspot­ting music crit­ics had chris­tened a new genre to cat­e­go­rize bands like Low: slow­core, the dis­tin­guish­ing char­ac­ter­is­tics of which being play­ing very qui­etly and slowly (an over­gen­er­al­iza­tion, it turns out, but it never hurts to be famous for some­thing unique). “Venus,” a free pro­mo­tional MP3 from A Life­time of Tem­po­rary Relief given away on Amazon.com, lived in rota­tion on my iPod for some time, and finally con­vinced me to buy the 2005 album The Great Destroyer. I first saw them live in Brooklyn’s McCar­ren Park Pool in 2006, sup­port­ing Iron & Wine (whom I like well enough, but if you ask me it should have been the other way around). Even in direct sun­light, their music is beau­ti­ful and engross­ingly enigmatic.

Low in EuropeThrill to the sounds of slow­core leg­ends tun­ing up

Direc­tor Sebas­t­ian Schrade’s doc­u­men­tary Low in Europe was filmed on their 2002–2003 tour of Europe, before they wrote and recorded my two favorite albums of theirs: The Great Destroyer and Drums and Guns. It’s part con­cert film and part doc­u­men­tary, but not enough of each. There are no com­plete musi­cal per­for­mances included, and although the prin­ci­pals are all intel­li­gent and inter­est­ing, the fact is the inter­views are some­times a lit­tle less than gripping.

The band first expresses their ambiva­lence about oper­at­ing within the com­mer­cial music indus­try. They address their rep­u­ta­tion for slow tem­pos and low vol­ume with good humor; in their early days, they played really slow, in the fuck-you avant-garde spirit but not the loud ‘n’ sloppy let­ter of punk, to antag­o­nize and chal­lenge the audi­ence. Their con­trary nature extends to their per­sonal lives: prin­ci­pal mem­bers Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker, prac­tic­ing Mor­mons and a long­time mar­ried cou­ple, tour with their chil­dren and view it as a sim­pli­fied and focused way of life. This came as some­thing of a sur­prise to this Dork Reporter, whom feels per­haps he had a hereto­fore undis­cov­ered prej­u­dice that Mor­mons couldn’t be rock stars.

Low in EuropeOver to you, Alan

The heavily-documented Low can be fur­ther inves­ti­gated on the three doc­u­men­tary shorts included with the A Life­time of Tem­po­rary Relief boxed set, and on the forth­com­ing You May Need a Mur­derer, a new doc com­ing out June 3.

Offi­cial movie site: www.low-in-europe.com

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

Blue Man Group: The Complex Rock Tour Live

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Blue Man Group - The Complex Rock Tour Live

 

This Dork Reporter may have to burn his Rock Snob card, for I just watched and enjoyed the Blue Man Group con­cert film The Com­plex Rock Tour Live. I’d long assumed that the Blue Man Group’s seem­ingly per­ma­nent res­i­dency on Lafayette Street in down­town Man­hat­tan was some kind of tourist trap like Mars 2112 or Jekyll and Hyde, but now I’m wish­ing I had looked closer.

For any oth­ers that may also have pre­ma­turely dis­missed them, the Blue Man Group is equal parts per­for­mance art col­lec­tive, per­cus­sion ensem­ble, and, well, blue. The Com­plex Rock Tour DVD cap­tures the group live in 2002, with a show that is at once both an actual rock con­cert and an ironic com­men­tary upon one.

I had to fight the sus­pi­cion through­out that a blue-clad trio of cat­bur­glars had slipped into my apart­ment and raided my cd col­lec­tion. As I watched, I started to com­pile in my head a list of artists that must have been influences:

  • Emer­gency Broad­cast Net­work. Now defunct, EBN was a trail­blaz­ing mul­ti­me­dia per­for­mance group that fused McLuhan-esque media the­ory with techno, all in the style of a tele­vi­sion news broad­cast from hell. Their caus­tic and aggres­sive social com­men­tary is a far cry from The Blue Man Group’s squeaky clean naiveté, but it’s hard not to watch footage of their live per­for­mances with­out see­ing an ances­tor of the Com­plex Rock Tour’s ironic infographics.
  • Lau­rie Anderson’s Home of the Brave con­cert film (1986). All the ingre­di­ents are here, albeit in artier form: film, per­for­mance art, mime, masks, dance, etc.
  • Peter Gabriel and Robert LePage’s Secret World Live and Grow­ing Up Live tours were as much the­ater as rock con­certs, uti­liz­ing sim­ple yet hugely sym­bolic shapes and props: a tree, an egg, the moon, etc.
  • Talk­ing Heads’ Stop Mak­ing Sense con­cert film (1983), for all the same rea­sons as Lau­rie Ander­son and Peter Gabriel above.
  • King Crim­son. Some of the Blue Man music bears more than a pass­ing resem­blance to the polyrhyth­mic tuned per­cus­sion King Crim­son employed in the early 1980s with tracks like “Wait­ing Man” and “Neil and Jack and Me.” Not only that, one of the mem­bers of the Blue Man band can be spot­ted played the Chap­man Stick, pop­u­lar­ized by Tony Levin.
  • Rock Snobs might be sur­prised to hear traces of even more mod­ern music in the Blue Man Group reper­toire. I caught snip­pets of the instru­men­tal so-called “post-rock” of UNKLE, Bat­tles, and Explo­sions in the Sky.
  • And finally, the one influ­ence the Blue Men actu­ally namecheck with a (brief) cover ver­sion in their show is Devo, but I don’t own any of their music! Maybe I should take this as a recommendation.

As humor­ous and toe-tapping as the Com­plex Rock show is, the Manhattan-based Blue Man Group end the pro­ceed­ings with “Exhibit 13″, a haunt­ing piece incor­po­rat­ing footage of actual World Trade Cen­ter debris that show­ered over Brook­lyn only a few months prior. The piece is avail­able online at Exhibit13.com

Blue Man Group - The Complex Rock Tour LiveAn excel­lent way to recy­cle your used PVC

Offi­cial site: www.blueman.com

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

U23D

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U23D movie poster

 

U23D is actu­ally a fairly tra­di­tional con­cert movie, a mostly straight-up filmed record of a rep­re­sen­ta­tive show of a sin­gle tour. U2 had already pro­duced one the­atri­cal fea­ture film about them­selves (1988’s Rat­tle and Hum), and released count­less pro­duc­tions on video and DVD before and since. So what could have been just another video of the world’s most over­ex­posed band needed to dif­fer­en­ti­ate itself some­how. Turns out the lat­est 3-D tech­nol­ogy fill­ing a 40-foot screen con­sum­ing your periph­eral vision is more than enough to jus­tify its existence.

3-D tech­nol­ogy has come a long way from what I remem­ber as a kid, watch­ing Crea­ture of the Black Lagoon on TV with red-and-blue card­board glasses. At first, the degree of depth is dis­ori­ent­ing and headache-inducing, but before too long the brain and eyes adjust. Your per­spec­tive is not that of the audi­ence but as if you were stand­ing right on stage with the lads. Some­times I felt as if I should have been hold­ing a tambourine!

U23DIn a state called vertigo

The old songs I’ve mem­o­rized from thou­sands of plays on LP, tape, CD and now iPod are still great. The mar­tial drum­beat to “Sun­day Bloody Sun­day” still sends chills down my spine, and I have to admit I even choked up a lit­tle dur­ing “Pride (In the Name of Love).” I was dis­ap­pointed by the rel­a­tive lack of songs from the band’s 90s “post­mod­ern irony” tril­ogy Achtung Baby / Zooropa / Pop, but I now have a new appre­ci­a­tion for “Love and Peace or Else,” a new song from How to Dis­man­tle an Atomic Bomb that hadn’t quite made an impres­sion on me yet.

Bono in U23DOne blind Bono sez: Coex­ist or else

I’m a long­time fan that has never seen U2 live. There was a frus­tra­tion at every oppor­tu­nity; if they weren’t sold out, I was too broke, sans car, or all of the above. So U23D made a kind of stop­gap pil­grim­age for me. U2 must be one of the only rock bands to ever pre­serve the orig­i­nal per­son­nel for so long; here’s hop­ing they stick together long enough for another tour so I can see them for real.

Offi­cial movie site: www.u23dmovie.com

U2: Zoo TV Live From Syndey

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U2 Zoo TV Live From Sydney

 

If I could build a time machine to take me to see any band in any con­cert in his­tory, it would be a trip to the early 90s to see U2 any­where on their leg­endary Zoo TV tour. New to DVD, U2 — Zoo TV, Live From Syd­ney catches the lads in Syd­ney dur­ing the Zoomerang leg. Rewatch­ing the film in the 21st cen­tury is inter­est­ing: on one hand, it’s almost shock­ing how post-modern and “meta” U2’s whole ironic kill-your-television the­sis was. But on the other, true cul­tural desen­si­tiviza­tion & alien­ation via media sat­u­ra­tion came, in the end, more from the inter­net and less from cable and satel­lite TV (“every­thing you know is wrong”, indeed).

U2 - Zoo TV Live From SyndeyI’d hate to see the band’s util­ity bill at the end of this tour…

Zoo TV was less a rock con­cert than a thought­fully directed the­atri­cal event. Bono donned mul­ti­ple cos­tumes and per­sonas through­out each show: a drunken rock star clad in leather and flay shades, a para­mil­i­tary in fatigues, a gold lamé cow­boy hat-wearing megachurch tel­e­van­ge­list blast­ing mil­lions of U2 bucks into the audi­ence, finally emerg­ing as MacPhisto, a kind of washed-up wasted devil tired of life but still up for a good time.

Bono as MacPhisto in U2 - Zoo TV Live From SydneyBono’s dev­il­ish alter-ego MacPhisto

Regard­less, what’s amaz­ing is that despite all the high-mindedness and avante-garde video art con­tributed by Brian Eno and Emer­gency Broad­cast Net­work, U2 still man­aged to put on a truly ass-kicking rock con­cert and get mil­lions of peo­ple around the globe to come and love every sec­ond of it. And for me to buy the DVD.

Coachella

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Coachella

 

I don’t nor­mally review music dvds in this blog, but since Coachella received a the­atri­cal release in Europe, I thought it deserved a men­tion. It’s a rare con­cert film that is as inter­ested in the con­cert­go­ers and the char­ac­ter of the event itself as in sim­ply cap­tur­ing the performances.

Favorite moments: Thom Yorke actu­ally smil­ing before Radio­head rips into Planet Telex, the unex­pected sight of a crowd groov­ing to Square­pusher’s dif­fi­cult arrhyth­mic beats, The Flam­ing Lips’ furry freak­out, and The Poly­phonic Spree joy­ously herald­ing the sun Sun­day morn­ing. Scari­est moments: Iggy Pop’s return of the liv­ing dead, and Fis­ch­er­spooner dress­ing up in fright wigs and fish­net speedos.

A Brief Word on R.E.M.

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R.E.M. by Anton Corbijn

Being an unapolo­getic iPod/iTunes addict, I’m not too ashamed to announce I just fin­ished rip­ping all of my R.E.M. cds. So this is blog­wor­thy exactly how, you ask? Well, I was moved to post here because, all told, it amounts to over 28 hours of music. 28 HOURS! Isn’t that amaz­ing? On sec­ond thought, I sup­pose one could say that a day’s worth of songs isn’t that much con­sid­er­ing the band’s record­ing career is at least 20 years and run­ning. But I’m sure there’s a com­pletist out there with every sound­track, b-side, and boot­leg whose pile o’ R.E.M. MP3s reaches into not days but weeks.

Part of my iTunes obses­sion involves rat­ing every track (see­ing as how I’m con­stantly rip­ping more cds, it’s also a sisy­phusean Big-Dig-type job). So a quick glance at my track-by-track rat­ings betrays my favorite albums, in rough order: Doc­u­ment, Life’s Rich Pageant, Up, Mon­ster. Least favorites? The two most recent: Reveal and Around the Sun. What hap­pened after Up? I know that album isn’t well-regarded, but per­son­ally I love it for its flaws and hon­estly, its weird­ness. It’s their first album after drum­mer Bill Berry left the band, and it shows them reach­ing for a new sound. Per­haps the touches of elec­tron­ica are a bit dated (Bowie and U2 have also left much of that behind by now), but I like it. Unfor­tu­nately, the iden­tity they chose is to fol­low up on the tone set by the most bland song on Up, Daysleeper. It’s the sort of jan­gly bal­lad R.E.M. can dash off in their sleep. It lets the album down, and it’s a real bum­mer for the next two whole albums to share that feel. Oh well, I’m sure I’ll buy the next one to see if they jump off the cliff again.