// Category Archive for: Feminism

New Vinyl: Concrete Blonde, “Rosalie” b/w “I Know The Ghost”

By Cait Brennan

From their circa-1980 Dream 6 post-punk bona fides to their genre defining alternative rock gems like “God Is A Bullet,” “Joey,” “Ghost of a Texas Ladies Man,” and “Everybody Knows,” Concrete Blonde has made an enduring career of mixing the sacred and the profane, the earthy and the unearthly, a mosaic assembled in light and blood. Now 30 years into a truly iconoclastic career, singer/songwriter/bassist/artist Johnette Napolitano makes her home deep in the Mojave desert, and the ghosts of Joshua Tree haunt all seven inches of the group’s eminently cool new white vinyl spinner “Rosalie” b/w “I Know The Ghost.”

The limited edition 45 was originally pressed for the band’s 2011 Texas Halloween tour, and now a handful of the records are available at the band’s Official Website.

“She wraps herself in firelight, and dances in the sand like a ghost,” Napolitano sings on “Rosalie,” all low and mournful like a lost coyote. It’s a great country-infused old west tune, the kind you’d spin at midnight on Dia De Los Muertos. The flip side, “I Know The Ghost,” is a rave-up that hearkens to the band’s punk roots, buzzing with the kind of Madame Wong’s energy that only authentic survivors of the era could conjure.

Both tunes feature founding Concrete Blonde guitarist Jim Mankey (ex-Sparks, and himself a Joshua Tree resident) and drummer Gabriel Ramirez-Quezada, one of the brothers in LA rock en español standouts Maria Fatal and a ten year veteran of Concrete Blonde. The disc was recorded at Stagg Street Studios in Van Nuys with the band’s rock-steady engineer Anne Catalino. Videos for each of the songs are in the works.

The band is about to launch an East Coast tour, kicking off at Boston’s Sinclair Music Hall on Dec. 12 and heading to NYC’s Irving Plaza (12/13), Asbury Park’s Stone Pony (12/14), Washington DC’s 9:30 Club (12/17), Carrboro, NC’s Cat’s Cradle (12/18), Atlanta’s Variety Playhouse (12/19), Chicago’s Park West (12/21) and Minneapolis’ Variety Theatre (12/22). The band will also perform on WXPN Philadelphia’s “World Café Live” radio show on December 15.

One of the most unique and enduring bands of the alternative rock era, Concrete Blonde is still getting it done with passion and fire. These “songs of the spirits of the desert” are a welcome reminder of the band’s strength and Napolitano’s singular voice.

DVD Review: Take This Waltz

By Less Lee Moore

Take This Waltz, writer/director Sarah Polley’s latest feature, is lovely to look at, with bright, stimulating visuals and convincing dialogue performed beautifully by the cast. It is also terrifically exasperating. Much of this is due to the central character, Margot, portrayed by Michelle Williams.

Granted, I haven’t seen Michelle Williams in anything but Brokeback Mountain, so it’s difficult for me to tell if she’s incredibly gifted at playing an extremely annoying person or if that’s her acting style, but I will give her the benefit of the doubt. However, it also makes it difficult to decide whether to root for her.

28-year-old Margot meets single Daniel (Luke Kirby) on a business trip and there is instant chemistry, or at least we can understand why she’s attracted to him. He’s handsome, sharp, and witty. Then we discover that not only is Margot married, but also that Daniel lives across the street. As she astutely observes right after than discovery: “Oh shit.” Things get more complicated from there, with Margot and Daniel dancing around each other but never consummating anything physically, on ongoing situation skillfully rendered in the pool scene where the two swim around each other like fighting fish.

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Assemblog: November 23, 2012

Broken, image from The CillianSite

New this week on Popshifter: I take a look at the excellent Jay Reatard documentary Better Than Something and the upcoming What The Brothers Sang album by Dawn McCarthy and Bonnie “Prince” Billy; Cait provides a beautiful review of Bert Jansch’s recently reissued Heartbreak and encourages music lovers to check out the latest single from the Explorers Club, “No Good To Cry.”

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Assemblog: November 16, 2012

Skyfall

New this week on Popshifter: Cait has the scoop on the newest Marshall Crenshaw single and subscription service, reviews the reissue of 1985’s Romance from David Cassidy, and is delighted by The Edie Adams Christmas Album; I have good things to say about School of Seven Bells’s new EP Put Your Sad Down as well as The Barrens on Blu-Ray; and Elizabeth outlines your options if you’re thinking of ditching your cable TV subscription.

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Music Review: The Edie Adams Christmas Album

By Cait Brennan

Ernie Kovacs is rightly regarded as television’s first genius. Dynamic, irreverent and uncompromising, Kovacs pushed TV technology to its limits in the service of his anarchic comic brilliance. More than that, Kovacs was larger than life. His personal motto was “Nothing In Moderation,” and he lived up to that billing until the day he died.

Few mere mortals could hope to keep up with his madness. But he met his match the day he met Edie Adams. Smart, sexy, sultry and with a voice like butter, Adams was everything Ernie needed: merry co-conspirator, brilliant comic foil, and a tremendously versatile actress and vocalist that brought elegance and heart to the proceedings. Kovacs’s life, and for that matter his untimely death, cast a big shadow, and Edie’s talents have often been unfairly overlooked.

Thankfully, the lady’s finally getting her due. From the formidable Kovacs/Adams archive and the good folks at Omnivore Recordings comes The Edie Adams Christmas Album, featuring Ernie Kovacs, a warm, charming, and nostalgic record featuring 15 never-before-heard holiday classics. It’s the perfect antidote to contemporary holiday angst and a testament to Adams’s vocal gifts.

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Music Review: Sophie Auster, Red Weather EP

By Chelsea Spear

From the first notes of her debut EP Red Weather, Sophie Auster creates a compelling mise e scene. The angular piano riff and cacophonous arrangement that propel the first song, “Run Run Run,” invest the song with a palpable sense of urgency. Auster sketches out a minimal narrative that deepens this mood, and you feel her voice in the pit of your stomach as surely as you hear it.

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Toronto After Dark 2012: American Mary Review

By Less Lee Moore

If you remember Jen and Sylvia Soska from their feature debut, Dead Hooker In A Trunk, their new film American Mary will provide plenty of pleasant surprises. It’s a remarkably solid effort for this pair of up and coming young horror filmmakers and one that bodes well for their future.

Mary Mason is a cash-strapped medical student who gets sucked into the world of strip clubs and underground body modification surgeries after a traumatic experience. Katherine Isabelle (Ginger Snaps) portrays Mary with an immense amount of subtlety and charm. She’s studying to be a surgeon and right away, her deadpan voice, sarcastic sense of humor, and fashion sense (including interior decorating skills) prove that she is serious and mature. Wisely, the Soska sisters (who also penned the script) have chosen to make Mary a convincing character, not a bimbo with a tacked-on med school plot device.

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Toronto After Dark 2012: Top Five Picks – American Mary

By Less Lee Moore

What:

American Mary: A disillusioned medical student decides to ply her trade in the shady underworld of unregulated surgeries and body modification with horrifying consequences. (Synopsis from the Toronto After Dark Film Fest website)

Who:

Written and directed by The Twisted Twins, a.k.a. Jen and Sylvia Soska.

Why:

At the risk of restating the oh-so-obvious, women do not frequently get taken seriously in the film industry, especially in genre films. Although there are many strong female characters throughout the history of horror, there are more Final Girls and Scream Queens than horror heroines, much less writers and directors. The film also boasts women behind the camera including casting, production, art and set decoration, production and costume design, and effects makeup. American Mary should ace the Bechdel Test.

Twins Jen and Sylvia Soska were born in Vancouver, where they filmed 2011’s exploitation smash, the ultra-violent (and controversial) Dead Hooker In A Trunk. The appeal of a female Canadian horror director—much less two—cannot be overstated. American Mary received a lot of positive attention at this year’s Fantastic Fest, including the performance of lead actress Katherine Isabelle (from horror cult classic Ginger Snaps).

When:

American Mary‘s Canadian premiere takes place on Thursday, October 18 at 9:45PM.

Where:

Bloor Cinema, 506 Bloor Street West.

Music Review: Holly Golightly & The Brokeoffs, Sunday Run Me Over

By Danny R. Phillips

Country music—as a genre—has been a crapshoot for the last decade or so. For every Wayne Hancock or Justin Townes Earle that wade into the deep end of true country song craft, there’s a Kenny Chesney, Carrie Underwood, or Sugarland that claim the country mantle but are merely pop acts with lap steel.

That’s why I find a group like Holly Golightly & The Brokeoffs to be such a kick in the pants; they embrace instrumentation as if they were recording with the Carter Family, and give bear hugs to tradition. Holly, an Englishwoman by birth, delivers more twang than Loretta Lynn. Two songs in, you’d swear she just walked down from The Blue Ridge Mountains with her flour sack dress on, well-worn Bible tightly in her hand. It is a respite from the everyday, manufactured “country” backwash.

Sunday Run Me Over is the perfect companion to last year’s fantastic (and my #2 album of the year behind Foo Fighters’ Wasting Light) No Help Coming (reviewed here).

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Music Review: Dark Dark Dark, Who Needs Who

By Chelsea Spear

If Who Needs Who dropped in the early 1990s, Dark Dark Dark would have appeared in Sassy magazine’s “One to Watch” column. This band is the real deal. Frontwoman Nona Marie Imrie has a striking voice, their songs are catchy and insightful, and their arrangements and the spare production cast a spell over the listener. This Minneapolis-based quintet has a great album in them. The band’s third long-player isn’t quite that album.

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