DVD Review: Manborg

By Less Lee Moore

There are two groups of people in the world: those who love Manborg and those who just haven’t seen it yet. (Too pompous?)

Let’s try this: anyone with only a cursory knowledge of Mystery Science Theater 3000 knows that there is an audience for bad movies. Although some of the most famously bad bad movies have escaped the comic commentary of MST3K (Troll 2, The Room), it doesn’t make them any less beloved in their awfulness. Yes, screenings are organized for fans to openly mock these movies, but if it brings people so much joy and it isn’t really harming anyone, is that necessarily a bad thing? Especially when it comes from the heart.

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Music Review: Big Black Delta, Big Black Delta

By Less Lee Moore

The claim that music with keyboards and synthesizers isn’t “real music” or is just crap has gone on long past its sell-by date. It was tired in the ’80s; now it’s just embarrassing. If music makes you feel something on a gut level—or hell, if it just makes you want to hit the dance floor—then who cares if it’s got synths, keyboards, or a didgeridoo?

The anti-keyboard bridge would probably break out the torches and pitchforks for Big Black Delta. Jonathan Bates has taken Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound to its most synthesized, processed extreme. It’s not just that Big Black Delta’s music features a preponderance of electronic sounds, it’s that the sounds include mountains, oceans, and skies.

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Music Review: Meat Puppets, Rat Farm

By Danny R. Phillips

The Meat Puppets are not only icons of the alternative/punk/underground music scenes; they are like fine wines: The band and their music just keep getting better with age. The latest from the Kirkwood Brothers, Rat Farm, is perhaps their finest, the band’s most playful and diverse offering since releasing Up On The Sun in 1985.

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Music Review: The Armoury Show, Waiting For The Floods (Reissue)

By Jeffery X Martin

In 1985, The Armoury Show took Britain by storm, billed as the first punk supergroup. By 1987, they had fallen off the radar completely, leaving only one album behind. Cherry Red’s reissue of that album, Waiting For The Floods, is a beautiful shiny thing, a welcome rediscovery of a band that faded out far too quickly.

Consisting of former members of Magazine, The Skids, and Siouxsie & the Banshees (John McGeoch!), The Armoury Show served up gorgeously slick cathedral Goth with strangely danceable grooves. Theirs was not music for the stand and shuffle crowd. You could dress up in your funereal best and still sway your anthemic hips, maybe even crack a smile.

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Assemblog: April 26, 2013

Logan, we miss you.

New this week on Popshifter: Melissa calls Luke-Winslow King “one to watch” in her review of his “excellent” The Coming Tide; Jeff wonders how the labouring man can find time for self-culture in a new installment of “Waxing Nostalgic”; I discuss the new Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead short film Wrecked, praise the “spirited” Chapin Sisters album A Date With The Everly Brothers, and call Life of Pi a “certified cinematic breakthrough.”

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Waxing Nostalgic: Martini Ranch, “How Can the Labouring Man Find Time for Self-Culture?”

By Jeffery X Martin

The Eighties were self-referential as soon as they began, simultaneously creating and copying themselves, everything instantly ironic and dependent on everything else. The determinedly plastic and disposable nature of most American New Wave music showed this better than most things; helium songs, with the fluffy substance of a dandelion spore, floating through the earholes of bright girls with side pony-tails and chunky necklaces.

Cleverly, the band Martini Ranch took this aspect of the genre to task in their 1986 single, “How Can the Labouring Man Find Time for Self-Culture?” The lyrics take a firmly humanistic, proletariat stance. I am a human, I am not a number, yet the demands of the modern work-a-day world keep me from ascending Olympus and becoming the god I am destined to be.

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Blu-Ray Review: Life Of Pi

By Less Lee Moore

TM and © 2011 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved. Not for sale or duplication.

Those who read Yann Martel’s Life of Pi towards the beginning of the last decade probably wondered how such a fantastic tale could ever be filmed. There were also those who, upon hearing that Ang Lee was tackling a film version of Life of Pi, felt elated and relieved that someone with such talent and commitment to a story was the one chosen.

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Music Review: The Chapin Sisters, A Date With The Everly Brothers

By Less Lee Moore

Like The Everly Brothers, The Chapin Sisters come from a musical family. Their father is Grammy-award-winning musician Tom Chapin; their uncle was folk singer and humanitarian Harry Chapin. This pedigree shows in their most recent release, A Date With The Everly Brothers, an album of 14 cover songs by the beloved duo.

A Date With The Everly Brothers focuses on the songs released by the siblings between 1957 and 1961, the most commercially successful period in their career. About half of the songs are Everly originals; most of the rest are Felice and Boudleaux Bryant compositions from the brothers’ tenure on Cadence Records in the late ’50s.

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Music Review: Luke Winslow-King, The Coming Tide

By Melissa Bratcher

I once saw Luke Winslow-King perform a miracle. He was opening for Jack White, which is, of course, miraculous in and of itself, and Jack White’s audience was less than receptive to this man in a seersucker suit with a guitar, a woman playing a washboard, and a fellow with a standup bass. The most amazing thing was watching the audience’s attitude change. By the third song in his set, Luke Winslow-King had made fans. His performance was engaging, wickedly tuneful, and pretty much brilliant. The interplay between him and washboard player/backup singer Esther Rose was charming. By the time his set was over, the merch table was flooded with people buying his CD.

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New Short Film: Wrecked by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead

By Less Lee Moore

Image courtesy of Twitchfilm

If you recall my raves about Resolution from Toronto After Dark Film Festival last year, then you’re already familiar with Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead. And if you’ve seen Resolution, you know that theire defining style is “expect the unexpected.”

But first, let’s provide some context. Tribeca Enterprises has announced a collaboration with Maker Studios, a media company formed in 2009 to “to provide the best environment for artists to create, distribute, and monetize their original content on YouTube.” The two groups have recently launched Picture Show, a YouTube channel which will host short films for “comedy nerds and movie lovers.”

Benson and Moorhead’s Wrecked is the first film from Picture Show and you can watch it online. Like Resolution, the less said about the plot or genre of the film, the better. Just enjoy the ride.

For more on Picture Show, check out the YouTube channel.