// Category Archive for: Music

FanExpo Canada 2013: 100,000 Fans Can’t Be Wrong

By Less Lee Moore

Another year of FanExpo Canada has come and gone. As usual, the four-day event was jam-packed with people and panels, photo ops and paraphernalia. With so many things happening and so many attendees, there are bound to be a multiplicity of experiences. Here are mine.

Day One: Thursday, August 22

The doors opened at 2:00 p.m. and as usual, there was already a line-up. I don’t like to brag, but I enjoy being able to go through the Media entrance and not wait in the lines outside. Although, never fear, non-media folks: I still have to wait in a line to get onto the exhibition floor like the rest of you. (I do think it would be nice if media got to go in about an hour before the show opens, just to prepare for photos and video shoots.)

This year, due to the addition of the Sports segment and the expected increase in attendance, FanExpo took up multiple floors in both the South and North buildings. This meant a bit more walking across the bridge between buildings, but it also made for less cramped conditions (at least on Thursday, Friday, and Sunday; I didn’t attend Saturday).

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Waxing Nostalgic Connecting the Dots: An Introduction

By Jeffery X Martin

I was born in 1969. When we imagine 1969 now, through the shattered lens of revisionist history, we think of hippies and acid and the overuse of the word “quagmire” when describing the Vietnam War. I look at things through a pop culture filter, always, so it isn’t really a surprise that I would, one drunken night, check the charts to see what the number one song was the week I was born. It had to be something cool, with lots of flanging and sitar and lyrics about flowers.

The number one song the week I was born was “Love Theme from Romeo and Juliet” by Henry Mancini.

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It Came From Ohio! Pere Ubu

By Tim Murr

My friend Jase told me and he heard it from Black Francis via Twitter who retweeted from @Ubuprojex: “I quit music. Goodbye.”—David Thomas

“There goes another one,” I thought. Another favorite band gone. We’re also talking about a trailblazing band that has been around almost 40 years and have recorded two of their finest albums in the last couple of years. To have them just break up now, so unceremoniously, would be quite a loss for rock and roll.

Well, false alarm apparently. Thomas had a “fit of frustration,” but no, Ubu was still going.

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Music Review: The Copper Gamins, Los Niños de Cobre

By Chelsea Spear

Critics sometimes use the phrase “more fun to talk about than to listen to” when describing an album that plays with new ideas and approaches to music. The inverse—that an album is more fun to listen to than to review or discuss—doesn’t come up as frequently. Los Niños de Cobre is an album that would live up to the inverse of that phrase. The qualities that make it compulsively listenable—its straightforward simplicity and the band members’ passion and skill—also make it an elusive subject for review. The Copper Gamins have created an album that makes an ideal soundtrack to long walks in the early-morning magic hour and humid, sleepless nights. When I listen to it, I feel as though I’m under a spell, but finding words to match the shimmering music on this disc is like chasing balls of mercury with my bare hands.

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Music Review: Various Artists, Loose Lips Might Sink Ships—Greasy Instrumental Magic From The Vault Of Lux And Ivy

By Melissa Bratcher

If you were to give Quentin Tarantino a copy of Loose Lips Might Sink Ships—Greasy Instrumental Magic From The Vault Of Lux And Ivy, he could probably pull a movie out of it, or the soundtrack to one at the very least. It’s a tidy, brief collection of pockets of unheralded instrumental awesome, and it may as well have been subtitled “All your guitar vs. sax needs are covered here.” Like it says on the tin, these are tracks culled from Lux Interior’s Purple Knife Show and they cover the gamut of early rock with twangy guitars, dirty sax, and surfy beats.

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FanExpo Canada 2013: Top Ten Picks

By Less Lee Moore

The Cybertronic Spree
Photo © Paul Hillier Photography

FanExpo Canada 2013 runs from Thursday, August 22 through Sunday, August 25 this year. The annual four-day event is crammed with stuff to do and see across multiple fandoms, like anime, comics, gaming, horror, science fiction, and now, sports. It can be a little overwhelming to plan out your days.

My favorite part of FanExpo is always Rue Morgue’s Festival of Fear, but with so much to choose from, there’s always a bit of crossover. I’ve come up with my Top Ten Picks of this year’s FanExpo, which I think will satisfy all of your fandom-related urges.

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Music Review: White Lies, Big TV

By Less Lee Moore

The critical and commercial success of White Lies over the last few years should come as no surprise to those who’ve followed the band’s career closely. For their newest album, Big TV, White Lies are once again working with Ed Buller, who produced their debut To Lose My Life . . . The production on Big TV is more restrained than it was on Ritual, but that only allows the songs to shine more brilliantly. It feels like both a blending of the band’s first two albums and a further development of the band’s signature sound.

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Why “Morphine” Is Michael Jackson’s Most Personal Song

By Paul Casey

Blood on the Dance Floor was released in 1997, two years after HIStory. It was marketed, in part, as a remix album, with the subtitle being HIStory in the Mix. It contained five new songs, and would result in videos and the full-on Michael Jackson short film treatment. This seemed slightly confusing at the time. Such a lavish production for something that seemed like a beefed up B-sides collection was odd to younger Paul, especially seeing as nothing quite as involved had been done for the songs on HIStory.

It took a long time to appreciate that the songs on Blood on the Dance Floor were not just a ploy to make the remixes seem like better value, but a unified collection of songs as important as any Michael Jackson would release in the 1990s. Paranoia became a major theme in MJ’s music from Thriller on, and while his fear of the media was well founded, the songs which expressed his fear of the world outside rarely felt connected with the singer’s reality. You would have tracks that would act as a musical retort, full of confidence and bravado that would show Michael at his very best.

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New Video: Big Black Delta, “Money Rain Down”

By Less Lee Moore

The self-titled debut album from Big Black Delta, a.k.a. Jonathan Bates, is one of my favorites of 2013 thus far (review). The first single, “Side of the Road” had a cool video which I blogged about in February.

Now there’s another video from the band, this time for “Money Rain Down.” It’s one of the less bombastic tunes on the album, and that makes it even more interesting, as it shows just how much musical range Bates possesses. It’s incredibly danceable and wisely, the video includes lots of dancing. It’s whimsical and clever but not in a cutesy way. Check it out below.

Tour Dates:
August
15th The Fonda, Los Angeles, CA
17th Echo Park Rising, Los Angeles CA

September
7th Hopscotch Festival, Raleigh, NC
8th Boston Calling – City Hall Plaza, Boston MA
13th Lobster Fest at Port of LA, Los Angeles, CA
14th Summersalt Block Party, San Francisco, CA
21st The Courtyard @ The Getty, Los Angeles, CA
25th Bunk Bar, Portland, OR
26th Decibel Festival, Seattle WA
28th Festival Of Hope, Tulare CA
29th Adams Street Fair, San Diego, CA

Movie Review: A Band Called Death

By Less Lee Moore

In an article on Film School Rejects, Scott Beggs points out the similarities between A Band Called Death and other recent music documentaries.

He notes that the trajectory of this film is similar to that of Searching For Sugar Man and Anvil! The Story of Anvil. Watching A Band Called Death, I was reminded of both Bad Brains: A Band In DC and also Nothing Can Hurt Me, the film about Big Star. The trajectory—unknown band, their individual and collective obstacles to fame, and their posthumous rediscovery and appreciation—is one that’s repeated in all of these films.

This is not to say that any of these films are formulaic or that music documentaries are repetitive. As Beggs argues, it just means that our preconceived notions of music history might be skewed.

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