Toronto After Dark 2012: Full Schedule

By Less Lee Moore

Only one day left until the 2012 Toronto After Dark Film Fest!

This year’s nine-day event includes twenty feature films, many of which are premiering in Canada for the first time.

All the films will be screening at the glorious, newly remodeled Bloor Cinema in Toronto, at 506 Bloor Street West. Here’s the schedule:

Thursday October 18

Grabbers, 6:45PM
American Mary, 9:45PM

Friday October 19

Crave, 6:45PM
Inbred, 9:45PM

Saturday October 20

Shorts After Dark, 3:45PM
[REC] 3: Genesis, 6:45PM
Cockneys vs. Zombies, 9:45PM

Sunday October 21

Doomsday Book, 1:00PM
Lloyd The Conqueror, 3:44PM
Universal Soldier: Day Of Reckoning, 6:45PM
After, 9:45PM

Monday October 22

Grave Encounters 2, 6:45PM
Citadel, 9:45PM

Tuesday October 23

My Amityville Horror, 6:45PM
Resolution, 9:45PM

Wednesday October 24

Sushi Girl, 6:45PM
Dead Sushi, 9:45PM

Thursday October 25

In Their Skin, 6:45PM
Wrong, 9:45PM

Friday October 26

A Fantastic Fear of Everything, 6:45PM
Game of Werewolves, 9:45PM

For more info on the films, trailers, and tickets, please check the Toronto After Dark Film Festival website.

I’ll be profiling my Top Five Picks of the festival over the next few days, so stay tuned!

Assemblog: October 12, 2012

This week’s Assemblog (and probably next week’s) will be bare bones; I’m working on lots of good stuff for the next few weeks.

Still, you can enjoy all the new articles on Popshifter this week if you haven’t read them already:

I think Ty Segall’s Twins is “deliriously enjoyable,” call Merchandise’s Children of Desire “unique and bracing,” am overwhelmed by Beyond The Black Rainbow, but disappointed in Wrath; Danny says Holly Golightly & The Brokeoffs’ Sunday Run Me Over is the “prime example of what country music should sound like;” J declares Peggy Sue Play The Songs Of Scorpio Rising is “flat-out brilliant;” and Cait adds another chapter to the “Book of Long Lost Albums” in her review of the recently issued Elton Duck.

—Less Lee Moore, Managing Editor

Music Review: Elton Duck

By Cait Brennan

In the modern history of popular music, the “great lost album” is a mythology that looms large. Whether it was the brilliant lost fourth Verve/MGM Velvet Underground record (pieces of which surfaced in the mid ’80s on VU and Another VU), the Beach Boys’ Smile, Prince’s Black Album, Eno’s My Squelchy Life, or even Danger Mouse’s Grey Album, pop music is littered with tantalizing projects that were abandoned, lost, or suppressed by hostile label execs.

But all those artists, at least, got to release something, sometime. Sadly, one of the finest “lost” albums came from a band whose promising career, like their self-titled debut, got stopped in its tracks. Now, an extremely limited pressing of Elton Duck‘s long-thought-lost debut album has finally made its way through the wilderness, and it more than lives up to the legend. If you like power pop you need to own this record, period.

Continue reading ‘Music Review: Elton Duck‘

Movie Review: Wrath

By Less Lee Moore

Wrath is a film with much potential. Shot in New South Wales, Australia, it takes full advantage of the area’s beautiful open spaces. The cinematography is lush and the special effects are well done and believable in a grisly way. All the actors are more than capable in their roles, conveying fear, frustration, duplicity, rage, and suffering. The score, alternating between low, sinister synths and haunting harmonica, conveys the struggle between the rural residents and the outsiders. Unfortunately, what Wrath lacks is the narrative cohesion to make these elements affecting.

There’s a story in Wrath, for sure, but we never find out exactly what it is. There are many movies which suffer from too much expository dialogue and leave no questions unanswered, but Wrath‘s dialogue, while enticingly ambiguous, is too much of a good (or bad) thing. Characters often speak in evocative prose that conveys their emotions without conveying much sense. There is a voice over in the beginning that is heavy on repetitive symbolism and tries unsuccessfully to set the tone.

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DVD Review: Beyond The Black Rainbow

By Less Lee Moore

How do you describe a movie like Beyond The Black Rainbow, much less review it with a critical eye? It’s bizarre, hypnotic, compelling, disturbing, and stunning. My only complaint is that I was unable to witness the spectacle on the big screen, but even on DVD the movie is powerful and incredible.

Beyond The Black Rainbow presents a basic story, one we’ve heard before: a controlling doctor, a mysterious clinic, a tormented patient. There are other, less clear-cut or easily understood elements that contribute to the unsettling, overwhelming experience of watching Beyond The Black Rainbow. To attempt an explanation would be to rob the viewer of witnessing and interpreting these things for him or herself.

There are influences, to be sure—Altered States, The Grudge, Suspiria, The Brood—but nothing feels stolen. Beyond The Black Rainbow is a universe unto itself. It’s beautiful and horrible at the same time.

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Music Review: Peggy Sue Play The Songs Of Scorpio Rising

By J Howell

Following Peggy Sue‘s brilliant first two records, listeners may be a bit surprised by the band’s choice to (mostly) recreate the soundtrack from Kenneth Anger’s 1963 film Scorpio Rising as a next move. Somewhat predictably, though, the record is flat-out brilliant.

Modern music fans with a Phil Spector bent should take especial heed: Peggy Sue recreates, perhaps most importantly, the spirit of the original tracks while finding a sonic space for them to exist in that feels a bit more like alternate-universe versions of familiar songs than slavish imitation or heavy-handed “updating”. The band deftly walks the fine line between reproducing the original songs and making them their own, somehow managing to treat the “teenage drama” factor of many of the tracks with a respectful empathy that feels less melodramatic than urgent. Elsewhere, Scorpio Rising is just plain fun.

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Music Review: Merchandise, Children Of Desire

By Less Lee Moore

As much as I loathe music reviews featuring lazy equations like, “take one part [name of band] plus one part [name of other band] . . . ” in the case of Merchandise‘s Children of Desire, it does make for a good jumping off point. What separates Children of Desire from bands that are just a formulaic rehashing of previous, and far superior bands, is how they merge these styles and sounds to create something unique and bracing that doesn’t actually sound like anything else.

The album opens with “Thin Air,” a short, yet yearning piece that feels like an introduction for what’s to come. “Time” is longer, but still somewhat freeform in that it doesn’t rely on shopworn riffs or rhyming couplets. Singer Carson Cox has a rather idiosyncratic voice and delivery, ranging from falsetto to a deeper baritone; no matter how he’s singing, what registers is a sincerity and frankness that is offset by a combination of feedback, synths, processed drums, and subtle basslines that give these songs an oddly retro yet completely modern feeling.

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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: Ty Segall, Twins

By Less Lee Moore

Despite being astonishingly prolific, I’ve only gotten wise to Ty Segall‘s musical output recently; my album intro was June’s Slaughterhouse, performed with Segall’s touring band (reviewed here). Hearing Twins, recorded almost entirely by Segall himself, has proved he’s not a one trick pony. Twins hits the sweet spot between heavy guitar fuzz and pretty melodies and is immediately, deliriously enjoyable.

That’s not to say Twins is full of disposable pop songs. In these post-post-ironic times, it’s not uncommon for music fans to feel distrustful of something they like immediately, concerned about being manipulated by both our nostalgia and the desire for something that’s not a rip-off.

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Assemblog: October 5, 2012

Xtro, 1982

New this week on Popshifter: I assemble my favorite reviews from Fantastic Fest 2012, reveal the full lineup for Toronto After Dark Film Festival 2012, and review two new worthwhile Blu-Ray releases: The Tall Man and Chained; Emily calls John Cale’s oddly-titled Shifty Adventures In Nookie Wood “recommended listening;” Chelsea says the songs on Dark Dark Dark’s Who Needs Who are “catchy and insightful;” Michelle has conflicted thoughts on The Minus Times Collected; Ricky Lima poses questions to Artistic Director David Dacks about the upcoming X Avant New Music Festival; and Elizabeth brings us her latest installment on Linear TV.

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