// Category Archive for: Current Faves

Music Review: Temples, Sun Structures

By Less Lee Moore

When the time comes move with the feeling,
Lend your young ears to the sound of day.
—Temples, “Move With The Season”

Upon a first listen to Sun Structures, the debut album from Temples, it’s tempting to wonder if they’re time travelers. Sun Structures is drenched in late ’60s and early ’70s psychedelia, full of fuzzy, chiming guitars, phase shifters, mellotrons, faux sitars, and harps. Certainly there are curmudgeons out there who would roll their eyes at “England’s premier retro-futurists,” sputtering the names of a long list of bands from whom these four young men are blatantly stealing. Yet Temples cheerfully admits to their influences, with dozens of YouTube clips posted on their Facebook page indicating who has provided inspiration.

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Music Review: Clan Of Xymox, Matters Of Mind, Body And Soul

By Hanna

Matters Of Mind, Body And Soul is the first Clan of Xymox studio album in several years, since 2012’s cover album Kindred Spirits. Because of this, and their sudden and short recent return to L.A., there has been some tradgoth excitement about this release. The result is safe but not boring: on the one hand, this album sounds like their music has always sounded; on the other, it’s new and varied.

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DVD Review: Birth Of The Living Dead

By Brad Henderson

When I was little, one of the first films that I can remember seeing and buying on VHS was Night Of The Living Dead on the Blockbuster Exclusive label. You know the one; the one with the big red label on the side. . . Night Of The Living Dead is one of the most important and influential films that exists. It has impacted not only the film industry but also the world, inspiring many people along the way. First Run Features recently released a documentary based on the events leading up to the making of this important film. Birth Of The Living Dead sheds a lot of light on the making of Night Of The Living Dead including stories of its successes and mishaps.

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DVD Review: Concussion

By Less Lee Moore

The tagline on the DVD for Concussion is the kind of lurid text that implies we’re going to watch a Lifetime movie from the 1990s: Wife. Mother. Escort. When you examine the plot—middle-aged wife and mother gets hit on the head and then creates a secret life as a prostitute—it doesn’t do much to dissuade that notion. Yet Concussion isn’t a cautionary tale and the head injury doesn’t produce dissociative fugues; no one gets blackmailed, kidnapped, or murdered. It’s a frank examination of dissatisfaction and desire that could easily be transposed onto a heterosexual relationship, but in Concussion the married couple are lesbians with two kids.

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DVD Review: Violet & Daisy

By Less Lee Moore

With more than 300 films screening in a ten-day time period, the Toronto International Film Festival makes time management a challenge. Rumor has it that some film critics will leave a screening after ten minutes if they’re not fully engaged. I’m going to bet that there were quite a few who walked out on Violet & Daisy at TIFF 2011. That would have been a big mistake.

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Music Review: I Break Horses, Chiaroscuro

By Less Lee Moore

Chiaroscuro is defined as “the technique of using light and shade in pictorial representation.” It’s a ideal name for the second album from I Break Horses, the musical project from Swedish singer/songwriter Maria Lindén. Rather than a contrast between light and shade, however, the songs on Chiaroscuro are a study in the interplay between the retro synths of ’80s shoegaze and the more contemporary flavors of techno and EDM. In a way, Chiaroscuro reminds me a lot of School of Seven Bells’ Ghostory, but while that album was crystalline ice, these songs are like smoldering embers.

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DVD Review: The Invoking

By Brad Henderson

Making a film is hard no matter what subject matter or genre you tackle, but some genres are harder than others. When it comes down to it, I believe most people would rather watch a bad horror film rather than a bad drama or comedy because watching a bad horror film is just easier on certain levels.

Indie horror is something hard to pull off for many reasons. The story and acting have to be solid or you will just bore your audience. If you have special effects in the film—either CGI or practical—they also have to look solid or you have a problem. I’m pleased to say that The Invoking is an indie horror film that gets things right.

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Music Review: Shelly Bhushan, Something Out Of Nothing

By Melissa Bratcher

With a voice as soulful as Shelly Bhushan’s, Something Out Of Nothing could have taken a straight R&B route, and she could have thrown in boatloads of melisma to impress. Instead, she’s turned in an album full of interesting, unexpected arrangements and thoughtful lyrics, and presented them with her gorgeous, versatile voice. Something Out Of Nothing is a stealth charmer.

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DVD Review: Wakefield Poole’s Bible!

By Brad Henderson

When we see the rating X or XXX, what is the first thing that comes to mind? Hardcore porn? Or a film that has so much sexual content that it isn’t fit for an R rating? Sometimes neither of these things can be the case. Back in the 1960s and ’70s films that had sexual content were rated X because in that day and age it was considered too much. Those films are nothing compared to what we have today between porn and R-rated films that are deemed “extreme.”

Vinegar Syndrome is probably a name that you aren’t familiar with yet, but take note because these guys are true fans of vintage/art cinema. I was fortunate enough to watch one of their reissues, an X-rated film from 1974 called Bible! directed by Wakefield Poole. Just looking at the synopsis or reading about it you might think it’s a hardcore porno or maybe a sexplotation film. I’m here to tell you that it’s neither.

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DVD Review: Blue Caprice

By Less Lee Moore

Reviewing a narrative film based so closely on real-life tragedy is a challenge. If it were a documentary, it might be easier to analyze how the filmmaker’s possible agenda influences the way the events were presented and if the recounting of history was done responsibly.

Blue Caprice opens with what seems like a documentary cliché: a montage of news footage covering the Beltway Sniper attacks from 2002. Immediately, we feel a distance from the subject being addressed. Then, the film cuts to a series of scenes of a teenage boy in Antigua, trying to cope with his mother’s departure to find work in the United States. The visual dichotomy between grainy newsreels and the lushness of the Caribbean is as profound as the tonal one. There is no reporter documenting what we’re seeing so we’re forced to make sense of what’s going on.

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