Music Review: Todd Rundgren, State

By Jeffery X Martin

Todd Rundgren has been making music since before most of us were born. His first solo album came out in 1969. He was huge during the early Seventies, riding the wave of his radio hit “Hello, It’s Me.” He resurged during the early Eighties as not only a musician, but as a video software pioneer. The video for “Time Heals” was everywhere back then. He resurged again in the Nineties, re-inventing himself as the first interactive musician, inviting folks to remix his tracks and play his music with him in his interactive music pod at PepsiStock ’94.

Then he started recording Samba versions of his old songs. This seemed to be a lateral move.

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Assemblog: April 5, 2013

The Assemblog is on a three-week hiatus. It will be back on April 19.

New this week on Popshifter: Paul thinks Bioshock Infinite “has a good shot at defining an entire generation”; LabSplice is disappointed in the “utterly forgettable” G.I. Joe: Retaliation; Cait feels that Johnny Marr’s The Messenger will “add to his considerable legend” and that we’re “very blessed” to have Here Tonight: The White Light Demos from Gene Clark; Lisa has ten ideas on how NBC’s Grimm could improve; Maureen visits the Game of Thrones exhibit in New York; and Jeffery ponders Alice Cooper’s take on New Wave in a new installment of “Waxing Nostalgic.”

Waxing Nostalgic: Alice Cooper, “Clones (We’re All)”

By Jeffery X Martin

Oh, my gods, you guys, it’s 1980! There’s robots and test tube babies and shit! The New Wave is here, and guitar strings are quickly being replaced by wires. Dynamic stage shows are becoming starkly lit installations of performance art. Humanoid beings stand behind keyboards bathed in shadow, soundtracking Dystopia before your bionically enhanced eyes. Science fiction is now science fact and music has embraced it, just like they did the Crybaby pedal and the phrase, “Hey now, mama.”

It was a scary time for traditional rock and roll. Normal rock fans were scorned and mocked, gathering in the alleys at night like Morlocks, forced to live on the streets in makeshift shelters composed entirely of Rumours and Frampton Comes Alive! gatefold album covers. If rock and roll wasn’t dead, it was in a coma and we knew, we knew it was serious. We also knew if anyone could save us, it was the Son of Satan himself, Alice Cooper.

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Westeros in West Midtown: Game Of Thrones: The Exhibition

By Maureen

I knew that I would have to wait in line for Game Of Thrones: The Exhibition. It came to New York City for only five days amidst a five-city world tour to promote the show before season three’s premiere. I knew it would be crowded, and I knew it would probably end up taking a whole day to look at half an hour’s worth of an exhibit. I was right about all of these things.

What I didn’t anticipate, however, was how worth it that would all be. I got there about 1:45 p.m. on Friday, and was let into the exhibit at about 4:45 p.m. During the wait, staff members of the exhibit walked up and down the line shouting out trivia questions, and my boyfriend won a pen light by answering “what song is used to convey the message ‘don’t mess with the Lannisters’?” Mostly, though, we were just reading/playing games on various devices.

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Ten Ways To Make Grimm Better

By Lisa Anderson

Few shows on TV are frustratingly uneven as NBC’s Grimm. The fairytale-inspired adventures of homicide detective Nick Burkhardt got off to a shaky start early last year, but dramatically improved over the first season. The show got off to a strong start at the beginning of the second season, only to resume wobbling after a long hiatus.

Fans of Grimm acknowledge its flaws, even as they celebrate its strengths. Its ensemble cast and story arcs are strong, and for the most part, the weakness lies in the one-off, week-by-week plots. Here are the suggestions for improvement that I came up with.

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Music Review: Johnny Marr, The Messenger

By Cait Brennan

“Hear me, the wonder of it,” Johnny Marr sings on “The Right Thing Right,” the opening track of his new solo album The Messenger. Marr essentially invented ’80s Britpop with The Smiths, a band whose hallmarks featured Marr’s blazing melodic runs and (oh god let’s just get it over with) jangling guitars, serving as the perfect counterpoint to those literate, mannered, melancholic lyrics from an obscure vocalist whose name time has sadly forgotten.

In the intervening years, as The Smiths’ influence has grown to legend, countless guitarists have reproduced that iconic sound with near-religious devotion. Everybody, it seems, but Marr himself, who often seemingly took pains to play like somebody, anybody other than that guy on The Smiths records. While Morrissey rose to new heights as a writ-large, Nicholas Ray CinemaScope version of himself, Marr left it all behind, blazing an exhaustive, exhausting trail through new sounds and new identities that would wear out Richard Kimble.

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Music Review: Gene Clark, Here Tonight: The White Light Demos

By Cait Brennan

The experience of being alive is joyous and unbearable. This crude matter we’re made of fights us every step of the way, but something deeper, something more, some beauty and energy blasting through from a source we can’t know animates us, fills us, drives us onward, and the friction, the vibration of energy that moves us, is what we call music. Where does it go, do you suppose, when we’re gone? Nobody knows, but you’ve gotta hope that when the radio breaks, still the signal shines on.

If rock and roll means anything worth caring about, it’s the need to express something real and beautiful and transcendent from the human soul. But that need can lead to soul-destroying results. There’s a fake thing called fame today, but it’s nothing like the sun that blistered down on the rock and roll bands of the 1960s. Know-nothing hambones like Mike Love get out in front and let their egos feast on the callow roar and toxic adulation of the crowd while sucking the lifeblood out of the delicate creative genius that brought them to the party, like a fat tick on a sick dog. The songwriter gets in the way? Kick ’em out of the band and keep the carnival on the road. Don’t mess with the formula, right?

Which brings us to the Byrds’ creative genius, Gene Clark. A down-to-earth, folk-influenced kid from the Midwest, he co-founded the band, and (excepting a few covers written by some stray named Robert Zimmerman) was the songwriting powerhouse behind the Byrds’ golden age. Just a few of the highlights he wrote or co-wrote: “I’ll Feel A Whole Lot Better,” “She Don’t Care About Time,” “I’m Feelin’ Higher,” “If You’re Gone,” “Here Without You,” “The World Turns All Around Her,” “Set You Free This Time,” oh, and a little number called “Eight Miles High.”

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Movie Review: G.I. Joe: Retaliation

By LabSplice

In G.I. Joe: Retaliation, the Joes are no more. The entire squad and their leader were wiped out in a double-cross by Zartan, the Cobra lieutenant who has impersonated the president of the United States and is working from within the government to free Cobra Commander. The remaining Joes, led by Roadblock (Dwayne Johnson), are forced to take on a government that no longer trusts them and rescue the entire world from the brink of nuclear war.

You almost have to feel sorry for way the cards were stacked against G.I. Joe: Retaliation. The first film in the series, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, limped out of theaters as a critical failure, and many fans would have preferred to see the franchise die an ignominious death without any additional entries. Furthermore, Retaliation suffered from several delays in its production schedule, delays that allegedly arose regarding complications in the use of Channing Tatum’s character, Duke. This meant that the only actors who would reprise their roles in the second film would be Jonathan Pryce as the president of the United States, Byung-hun Lee as Storm Shadow, and the silent and faceless presence of Ray Park as Snake Eyes. Throw in a few quick scenes with Arnold Vosloo as Zartan and you had perhaps the most underwhelming core of franchise talent in summer blockbuster history.

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Game Review: Bioshock Infinite

By Paul Casey

When Science Fiction reaches a large, mainstream audience it frequently stumbles. There are those out there, we are reminded until we expel body liquid, who are not particularly enamored with the idea of bizarre imaginings or Dystopian re-purposing of real events. These unreal things must be shrouded or hidden or compromised to meet the exacting standards of a public that drives Michael Bay pictures to earn hundreds of millions of dollars. They simply will not accept things that cannot happen, unless they get something tangible in return. “Gimme that walking arse shot or allusions to ear-fucking Megan Fox, whatever; just make sure that those grinning mugs don’t get their sense of reality altered! We’re running a business here. Don’t go abstract. Don’t make bold statements.”

When Irrational Games did Bioshock, it seemed to me, and some other folks, that here was a legitimate, big-budget step towards a new philosophy in video games. One that did not insist that the bare mechanics were the only thing worth evaluating. It made a powerful argument for world building, art direction, and quality writing and acting being able to do more than give finely tuned aiming and shooting a pretty wrapping. In Bioshock these things impacted the player’s experience to such a degree that evaluating one without the other seems foolish. That game had its issues, but its issues were a result of its ambition.

Bioshock Infinite is what happens when that ambition finds larger public, creative, and financial support. There is a storytelling depth here that very few games have approached. More importantly, it is a braver and more challenging piece of work than any of the other narrative successes in recent years. Its politics are not easily identifiable—though I am sure there are some lining up to suggest it fails because it contradicts some ideology or other—and its examination of human flaws leads the player to bad, honest places. If there is any clear message to be taken, it is probably that people who seek power are invariably the people who should not possess it, regardless of how righteous they appear.

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Assemblog: March 29, 2013

The Assemblog is on a three-week hiatus. It will be back on April 19.

New this week on Popshifter: My final Canadian Music Week Film Fest 13 reviews for Bad Brains: A Band in DC and Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me; LabSplice explains The Only Hope We’ve Got movies in his Olympus Has Fallen review; Paul praises the underrated poppy funk of Wendy and Lisa‘s reissued, self-titled debut album; Jeffery brings the “Waxing Nostalgic” column back from the cut-out bins with “Escalator of Life”; and J Howell calls the new Atoms For Peace album Amok, “brilliant.”