Giant Robot Store and GR2 News
Rad new music keeps coming in… I interviewed Ian Svenonious for Robot Power issue back when he was in The Make-Up and The Dirtbombs for GR62. Beaches will be touring with Dum Dum Girls, who I featured in GR68. Frodus? Gotta mix in something new now and then, even if the 7″ is a comeback of sorts… Enjoy! (Above pic: Ian S. at The Smell, May 2009.) Chain & The Gang – Music's Not For Everyone Crossing the line from singing totally naturally to sounding absolutely fabulous, Ian Svenonious's latest band has gone from primal, campfire funk to what can only be described as deconstructed musical theatre. And it provides the makings for a really interesting show. “Can't Get Away” would be a great opener, showing our hero's mental duress. “It's a Hard, Hard Job (Keeping Everybody High)” would reveal the larger problem. “Not Good Enough” would show his heroic defeat/resolution. Wouldn't the ex-leader of Nation of Ulysses, The Make-Up, Scene Creamers, and Weird War look great on a big stage in his white suit? And isn't the celebratory “Detroit Music” a perfect closing number? Yet the songs' storytelling aspects would mean crap if they didn't resonate as perfectly true–which they do. [K Records]
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Just plowed through two obsessively, almost freakishly thorough nonfiction publications about punk rock. The first is Marcus Gray's Route 19 Revisited: The Clash and London Calling, a 2009 import which has been released for U.S. distribution by Soft Skull Press. The six lengthy chapters can be broken down into four categories: (1) the band's formation, (2) the recording of the double album, (3) song-by-song breakdowns, and (4) packaging, reception, and aftermath. The entirety adds up to more than two inches of text-filled pages…
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Giant Robot 68 not only came out ages ago, but it has fewer music reviews then ever. Yet review CDs keep coming in, and here are a few you should know about… This time I'm concentrating on some of the more interesting releases which just happen to feature friends and familiar faces to GR readers. KIT – Invocation. This was released last year and got lot in the shuffle on my desk, but you might recall guitarist George Chen showing up with his sister Yvonne in GR67. I wrote about their Zum project, which started out 12 years ago as indie and pop punk zine and grew into George's more experimental music label. KIT
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Two especially memorable shows that I attended in the very early '90s happened to feature Samiam (with Snuff at UCLA's Coop and then at Gilman Street with MTX and Fifteen), so it was super rad to see the post-hardcore, pre-pop punk band play Alex's Bar in Long Beach last week. Twenty years later, I suppose it made sense to finally see them at a venue that was not all-ages. Opening the show was Southern California's own Tiltwheel. Although the band from San Diego humbly bills itself as “Pleatherface” after a certain UK punk group named after a slasher movie hero, they were dropped onto the stage by helicopters with a blast of pyrotechnics and smoke machines. A joke. I just happened to capture a “real” photographer's flash in the first image. I love it when that happens. I try to shoot with natural light, so it's always a funky surprise. But back to the show, Tiltwheel was a band that I knew about and was interested in via RazorCake but never got around to seeing live. They lived up to the punk zine's gushing, with ultra melodic hooks and deceptively sharp chops taking the edge off bitter lyrics and drunken rambling.
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TV Party is movie review section I put together for each issue of Giant Robot magazine. To compile this list, I simply went through the year's columns and wrote something quickly about what stuck with me. By no means is it The Best of 2010, since I don't get to attend many film festivals or stay up all night watching movies online. In fact, I actually paid for most of them on imported DVDs! Perhaps this isn't as much of a guide to what happened in Asian or Asian-American (no way) cinema as it is what I've been digging. Maybe you'll like some of it, too. The movie titles are linked to the trailers for your convenience. As for full-on reviews, you'll have to track down the magazines. Assault Girls (Japan, 2009) – Mamoru Oshii's live-action depiction of three flawless women in battle armor fighting mutant sand creatures is as simple or complex as you want it to be. But whether you see it as a glorified video game scenario or seamless study and critique on society, it is perfectly executed with amazing production value. Each frame is a visual masterpiece. (Image above.) Barking Dogs Never Bite (Korea, 2000) – Bong Joon-ho's darkly comic debut has (and needs) no budget but carries out his heady concepts with ease. As usual, actress Bae Doona is impossible not to watch, playing the wage slave who is obsessed with tracking down missing dogs killed by a protagonist driven to madness by the system. Finally released in the U.S. by Magnolia. The Darjeeling Limited (USA, 2007) – Yes, Wes Anderson's latest sausage party (but another witty, stylish, and sharp one) was released by Fox on the heels of its theatrical release, but true fans will settle for nothing less than a Criterion DVD for any of his works. One of the main extras is a cool conversation between Anderson and James Ivory about their respective, overlapping Indian soundtracks. Dream Home (Hong Kong, 2010) – Producers Conroy Chan and Josie Ho (who also stars) hired Wong Kar-Wai's production team and charged it with making a slasher film. Over-the-top violence, mangled bodies, and mass quantities of blood have never looked so artistic. There's also a message about real estate and materialism mixed into the plot. Fish Story (Japan, 2009) – Like Miracle Mile or Wall.E, this is an end-of-the-world movie that tightens its focus onto a smaller story rather than create a sprawling epic. What makes Yoshihiro Nakamura's film especially cool is that it revolves around geeks at a record store discussing a pre-Sex Pistols punk song from Japan as a meteor plummets toward earth–and the tune actually happens to be pretty good. House (Japan, 1977) – Although I never found the the brand-new, official DVD that Criterion sent later on, even the hand-burned screener I received is light years better than the VHS copies or YouTube clips of the schoolgirl-eating piano that film nerds worshipped beforehand. Nobu Obayashi's experimental horror movie continues to shock, delight,...
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