Assemblog: May 17, 2013

James Spader, from NBC’s The Blacklist

New this week on Popshifter: Chelsea thinks Xenia Rubinos’s Magic Trix is a “thrilling listen”; Metal Mayhem continues with Jeff’s take on Dangerous Toys and Judas Priest; Jeff also says that Big Country’s The Journey is the best new album he’s heard this year; Melissa B. parties traditional style with the new album from Kermit Ruffins and gets transported to the past with the reissue of Marty Robbins’s El Paso City and Adios Amigo; I recommend both the glam psychedelia of Burnt Ones’ You’ll Never Walk Alone and the party music of Dead Ghosts’ Can’t Get No, and revisit 2002′s excellent, unsettling One Hour Photo, recently released on Blu-Ray.

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Music Review: Dead Ghosts, Can’t Get No

By Less Lee Moore

If you think Dead Ghosts sounds like a Goth band name, you’d be right, but you’d be dead wrong about their sound. This is old school, straight-up party music. The only thing better than listening to this album at a party (nighttime, outside, backyard, torches to ward off mosquitoes) would be having the band actually play live at your party.

In other words, you have to dance to this music. There is no other way.

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Music Review: Burnt Ones, You’ll Never Walk Alone

By Less Lee Moore

You’ll Never Walk Alone opens with the wonderfully titled, warped shimmy of “Glitter Death” and the clever lyric: tell all of your friends that this is the end/of all these stupid trends.

The first six tracks on the album weave in and out of each other so slyly they all seem like one glorious, extended song. A song that’s a three-dimensional rainbow tapestry of sonic bliss.

Burnt Ones recalls the psychedelia of both early Pink Floyd and T. Rex with more than a dusting of the latter’s primo glam rawk stomp, and lyrics to match (sample: Just like a sweater how you’re so together). At first those lyrics won’t make a whole lot of sense, but once you get into their groove, the crazy visuals they describe—”hypnotized and fried, licking glass perfumes”–will nag at you until you start to feel like you understand on some subterranean, emotional level.

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Blu-Ray Review: One Hour Photo

By Less Lee Moore

I saw One Hour Photo when it was released in theaters in 2002. I’ve never forgotten it.

It was the first film I saw with Robin Williams playing against type as a truly disturbed character. Even 1991′s The Fisher King was Disney compared to One Hour Photo.

Writer and director Mark Romanek cut his filmmaking teeth on music videos for Nine Inch Nails, Madonna, Michael and Janet Jackson, and Fiona Apple. With the success of filmmakers like David Fincher, the stigma of transitioning from music videos into feature films has thankfully diminished. For a first feature, One Hour Photo is astonishing, but it would still be were Romanek a veteran.

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Music Review: Marty Robbins, El Paso City/Adios Amigo

By Melissa B.

I’m a nostalgist. What I love about reissues is hearing a song I’ve forgotten entirely about. In a beat, I’m transported to the back-backseat of my parents’ station wagon, listening to KTTS on the radio. The reissue of Marty Robbins’s El Paso City/Adios Amigo took me right back to that station wagon.

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Waxing Nostalgic: METAL MAYHEM! with Judas Priest, “Hell Bent For Leather”

By Jeffery X Martin

Except for Kelso in that one episode of That ’70s Show, there is no one whose looks cannot be greatly improved by the addition of a leather jacket. Now, I’m not trying to piss off any animal rights groups by saying that. I know there are leather alternatives. I don’t know what animal pleather comes from, though, and vinyl is horrible to have wrapped around your package on a hot Tennessee afternoon. Therefore, it is with leather we remain.

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Music Review: Big Country, The Journey

By Jeffery X Martin

It’s difficult to talk about what the new Big Country album is without talking about what it isn’t. The Journey is the first album from the band in 14 years. It’s also the first studio album since original lead singer/songwriter Stuart Adamson took his own life in a hotel room in Hawaii in December of 2001. Bouncing back from a blow like that is difficult for any band. Look at the shambles INXS became after Michael Hutchence passed out and away.

Fronting Big Country now is Mike Peters, singer/songwriter for The Alarm, well-remembered for Eighties hits like “Sixty-Eight Guns” and “The Stand.” There are similarities between Peters and Adamson as songwriters. Adamson and Peters both created songs of epic scope, real sweepers. Listen to the guitars masquerading as bagpipes on “In a Big Country” and feel the cold grass of Scotland under your feet. Listen to the sweet high guitar trills of “Rain in the Summertime” and you really can almost feel the rain on your face.

Replacing Adamson’s vision with Peters’s panoramic view seems like the perfect match.

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Music Review: Kermit Ruffins, We Partyin’ Traditional Style

By Melissa B.

Kermit Ruffins co-founded The Rebirth Brass Band in high school. The Rebirth Brass Band revitalized the brass band community in New Orleans, and their success rejuvenated New Orleans’s Second Line culture. Kermit Ruffins is a great ambassador for that aspect of New Orleans. His extraordinarily distinctive, raspy voice paired with his virtuoso trumpet playing gives the casual listener a glimpse into the broad spectrum of New Orleans music.

His newest record We Partyin’ Traditional Style is like a time capsule, taking 20th-century classics and skewing them his own personal way and in the process, making an incredibly fun record. Partyin’ in the title? Not a coincidence.

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Music Review: Xenia Rubinos, Magic Trix

By Chelsea Spear

On Magic Trix, Xenia Rubinos sounds like a radio caught between two frequencies. The first station carries brassy 1930s show tunes, a capella field recordings of folk songs, multi-tracked choruses, and lushly melodic whispered confessions. On the other, psychedelic keyboard freakouts, skittering drums, thumping hardcore declarations, and a cacophony of characters rule the day. Binding the disparate styles together is a soupçon of feedback from an analog keyboard and Rubinos’s force of nature vocals.

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Waxing Nostalgic: METAL MAYHEM! with Dangerous Toys, “Sport’n a Woody”

By Jeffery X Martin

Eighties metal was nothing if not hyper-sexualized, as men who looked like women objectified females as simply holes to be filled. Were they glorifying bisexuality or simply echoing the glam rock stylings of Bryan Ferry and David Bowie? Were any of them smart enough to make that kind of conscious decision? It’s hard to say.

The sight of longhaired bottle-blonde men wearing mascara and codpieces was strange enough. Hearing them spout metaphorical lyrics about their sexual conquests was difficult to take seriously. Who can forget Warrant’s immortal paean to sensual cooking, “Cherry Pie?” Def Leppard wanted ladies to pour some sugar on them, which I never found to be attractive at all. That just sounds messy.

Leave it to a band from Texas to be straightforward about the whole business. There was no make-up to be found on these guys and certainly no beating around the bush (snicker). Dangerous Toys, in the span of one song, both undermined and cemented the comically retarded machismo of the hair metal era.

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