Kinks Kommentary: CD, DVD, And Live Reviews

By Ann Clarke

My fandom with the Kinks goes back as far as pre-school age. They are the reason I love and obsess over music as much as I do, and they raised the bar of excellence for my tastes to follow throughout my life.

They are not a recent fad with me. I didn’t decide they were great once I heard The Village Green Preservation Society, like bullshitting journalists out there claim to give themselves street-cred. I even obsessed over them during the ’80s when it wasn’t cool to like them! So, my reviews come from a lifetime commitment of love and knowledge. . . which are going to be exceedingly honest. The following reviews are listed in chronological order based upon when I first observed them.
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Arcadia, So Red The Rose Special Edition

By Less Lee Moore

One would think that with so many Duran Duran CDs, at least six Duran Duran DVDs, and a box of VHS tapes, I’d have enough to satisfy me. But as Hamlet used to say, it’s “As if increase of appetite had grown/By what it fed on.” And if you think that sounds pretentious, you should listen to Arcadia’s So Red The Rose.

Now now, calm down. I kid. I kid because I love. For those who haven’t been Duranies since the dawn of the ’80s, I’ll fill you in: Arcadia was a side project of Duran Duran members Nick Rhodes, Simon LeBon, and Roger Taylor. The band came to fruition in 1985, after the release of Duran Duran’s Seven and the Ragged Tiger album.
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Top Gear: It’s Biblically Good

By Melissa Bratcher

With the American version of Top Gear on the horizon, there is no better time to discuss what makes the British version such a brilliant show. The American version is destined to be dreadful—partially because America makes crap cars. European cars are just better.

Top Gear is a car show for people who don’t particularly care about cars (though after watching for a while, one begins to notice cars in ways not noticed before). The cinematography on Top Gear is as gorgeous as anything one would see in a nature documentary. The people on the show drive supercars and do ridiculous challenges and feats of derring-do, but that’s not the best part. The best part is the strange alchemy of the hosts.

Top Gear in Botswana

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Ben Folds Five, Whatever And Ever Amen

By Jesse Roth

The end of every school year is always filled with a mix of emotions. There’s the excitement of finally being done with another grueling, possibly boring 180 days of state-sanctioned education. There’s a tinge of sadness that you may not see your friends for a whole three months, or possibly forever. And for some of us, there’s that mix of bitterness and angst that you feel in regards to your not-so-beloved alma mater and its denizens, briefly interrupted by daydreams of busting out and becoming someone other than some unknown dork hanging out in the hallways.

How does a person properly sum up these various feelings regarding the newly completed school year, other than trite yearbook quotes or lame pranks? For this awkward teen, it involved the passenger seat of mom’s car, my middle finger, and Ben Folds Five.
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HTRK, Marry Me Tonight: In Memory Of Sean Stewart

By Julie Finley

At the end of 2009, I stumbled upon an Australian band known as HTRK (pronounced “Hate Rock”). Their name was linked to the late great Rowland S. Howard, and I had to figure out what the connection was (this was before Rowland had passed. . . R.I.P. RSH!)

HTRK were linked to a few musical icons other than Rowland, all part of a corps of musicians hailing from Melbourne, Australia. The most direct link is to The Devastations. HTRK Singer Jonnine Standish is married to The Devastations’ Conrad Standish, and the matrimony doesn’t end there; the other members of HTRK (Nigel Yang and Sean Stewart) were involved with the Devastations musically as well.
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Stereolab, Mars Audiac Quintet

By Jemiah Jefferson

“Listen to this,” my friend Ben said to me on a happily semi-spontaneous trip to my fortress of solitude in San Francisco. “This is the most static music I’ve ever heard.”

Ben had spent the entire evening turning me onto bands that I would go on to love—Soul Coughing among them, but that’s another story—and I was starved for new sounds to get into, having listened to a steady diet of Brian Eno for some years.

It was a dark and grim time in my life, when I found the city of my hopes and aspirations to be merely a vast wasteland of things I couldn’t afford and people I couldn’t be. There was a lot of banked, formless anger I couldn’t voice, and a lot of beauty all around me that I observed which nobody else seemed to notice.
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Suburbia Collector’s Edition

By Less Lee Moore

One weekend in 1986, a friend of mine invited me and a bunch of other freak friends over to watch Suburbia, Penelope Spheeris’ quasi-documentary look at the early ’80s punk scene. My memory is fuzzy on the details of the plot; I mostly remember being disturbed by the other movie we watched, Faces of Death. I do remember that everyone else in the group, some of whom looked somewhat similar to the punk teens examined in Suburbia, were merciless in mocking it; to this day, I still recall the particular scorn they heaped upon the T.R. “gang” depicted in the film, T.R. standing, of course, for “The Rejected.”

I had not seen Suburbia again until this latest Collector’s Edition DVD, so like with Rock ‘n’ Roll High School‘s reissue, I was curious to see if the movie was actually good (or what actually took place in the movie). I think it’s actually worse than I remembered.
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I Need That Record! The Death (Or Possible Survival) Of The Independent Record Store

By Less Lee Moore

I Need That Record! purports to be a “documentary feature examining why over 3,000 independent record stores have closed across the US in the past decade.” But it’s much more than that. In truth, the film does a splendid job of not only showing the causal links that led to this somewhat alarming situation, but also asking, answering, and ultimately, allowing its viewers to weigh in on what this really means.
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Images Of Peter: Finding Peter Godwin, Part Two

Interview by Emily Carney

In this continuation of Popshifter’s interview with singer/musician Peter Godwin from our January/February 2010 issue, Peter discusses his memorable music videos, musical production, his new album with his project Nuevo, and plans for future projects.
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Rock ‘n’ Roll High School 30th Anniversary Special Edition

By Less Lee Moore

Although for many, The Ramones represent the birth of the US punk scene in the ’70s, I was only about three years old when the band first formed in 1974. For me, The Ramones were the four weird-looking, tall dudes who kept popping up in promos for MTV in 1981. Most of the videos in the early days of MTV were fairly bizarre; at that point the channel would show any videos they could and the shift to glamorous, new wave pretty boys had not yet occurred. However, even amongst Loverboy, Meatloaf, Split Enz, and The Tubes, The Ramones looked pretty damn strange.

I didn’t see Rock ‘n’ Roll High School until a few years later, when I’d officially hit my own teenage years. I remember feeling confused and vaguely uncomfortable, not totally grasping why it was supposed to be so great. The news of the upcoming release of a 30th Anniversary Special Edition made me curious to see how the film as aged. Would it be funny? Would it be relevant?

Thankfully, the answer to both questions is, “YES.”
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