Music Review: Various Artists, C86: The Deluxe Edition

By Less Lee Moore

“C86 was introduced to the world on 3 May 1986 when the NME revealed that the next tape to be released in its highly-popular and long-running cassette series would be a compilation of indie bands.” So begins Neil Taylor’s extensive, exhaustive liner notes for the deluxe edition of C86, now expanded from its original 22 songs into three discs’ worth of music. If you weren’t around for the original version, The Deluxe Edition should give you hours of listening enjoyment as well as the excuse to delve into the discographies of dozens of bands.

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Movie Review: The Sacrament

By Less Lee Moore

Suspense is vital to the horror genre. Blood and guts can be effective, true, but without suspense, they’re just gore. Filmmaker Ti West has proven that he can build tension in a film until we’re begging for release. The House of the Devil was a master class in how to freak the hell out of audiences starved for actual scares. Plus, it’s just a great movie. The Innkeepers was less terrifying, but still worthwhile, and West’s contribution to the first V/H/S found footage anthology, “Second Honeymoon” is one of the few films in the last five years to make me sleep with the lights on. What’s most impressive about that is the way absolutely nothing happens in the film for the longest time, so the payoff is inexplicably frightening.

All of this made me extremely excited for The Sacrament, especially since West was once again tackling found footage (a style which I quite like), but this time using the real-life events at Jonestown as the basis for his film. It makes me sad to report that The Sacrament did not live up to my expectations.

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Blu-Ray Review: Countess Dracula

By Less Lee Moore

The term “Hammer Horror” evokes a certain feeling. For more than two decades, Hammer Film Productions produced some of the most iconic horror films of all time, movies which implied a distinctive cachet: lush, artful, Gothic. There were also buxom beauties and a lot of vivid red blood.

Countess Dracula was released in 1971 when the studio was starting to lose its grasp on the market and trying different approaches to the Dracula/Frankenstein/Mummy trilogy of terrors. Ingrid Pitt, fresh from Hammer’s The Vampire Lovers (loosely based on J. Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla), stars as the Hungarian countess Elisabeth Nádasdy, herself loosely based on the infamous Countess Elisabeth Bathory, who allegedly bathed in the blood of virgins to maintain a hold on her youth.

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Canadian Music Week Film Fest Review: Jimi: All Is By My Side

By Less Lee Moore

When Jimi Hendrix’s estate refused permission for writer/director John Ridley to use any of Hendrix’s songs in his movie, it seemed like the film was doomed. Yet, while watching Jimi: All Is By My Side, the lack of original Hendrix music seems nearly irrelevant. Like Todd Haynes did with Velvet Goldmine, his loosely-based-on-David Bowie love letter to glam rock, Ridley manages to make it work. Without the specter of “the hits” looming over the film, All Is By My Side plays like a stadium-filling band performing deep cuts in a tiny club. It’s more snapshots and impressions than a by-the-numbers biography.

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Music Review: Various Artists, South Side Story Vol. 23

By Less Lee Moore

It’s always a challenge to step out of your comfort zone.

Although I certainly enjoy my share of R&B and Soul music, I would never claim to be an expert. This made Numero Group’s soul compilation South Side Story Vol. 23 all the more interesting, especially with the release’s lack of liner notes. A PR rep referred to it as a “cool mix tape,” and that’s an apt description. Mix tapes were always a labor of love, with homemade artwork and only the band names and song titles included. South Side Story is definitely a labor of love for the Chicago-based label who included relative unknowns in the soul genre, at least unknown to those outside of the Chicago area. This required a lot of digging on the Internet, and unsurprisingly, there was not a wealth of information found, although thanks to soul fanatics and collectors, I managed to find some information on each performer included.

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DVD Review: Wrong Cops

By Less Lee Moore

There are people who will love Wrong Cops. Others will probably cringe with embarrassment and/or confusion. Some might even run from the room screaming. These are all normal reactions to a Quentin Dupieux movie. His absurdist humor is certainly not for everyone.

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Music Review: Odonis Odonis, Hard Boiled Soft Boiled

By Less Lee Moore

“Keep your halo tight until you choke us/But I would like to carry on”
—”Alexa Wait”

If you’ve been following the career of Toronto’s Odonis Odonis, Hard Boiled Soft Boiled will be a mild revelation. It’s way heavier and louder than the band’s previous releases. The Surf Goth tones of Hollandaze and the Better EP are almost completely gone, or perhaps just sublimated within all those layers of noise. Yet, under the distortion and grime, there are brutally gripping melodies. Relying more on guitars and bass than synths, Hard Boiled Soft Boiled is a nightmarish vision of jangly, reverbed dream pop.

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Music Review: De Lux, Voyage

By Less Lee Moore

“I wanna say we’re doing great/but there’s something wrong, something wrong”
—”Better At Making Time”

De Lux’s self-titled, four-song 2013 EP was fantastic. I think I listened to its first track, “Better At Making Time,” three times a day for a straight week. Now they’ve got a full-length album, with a few of the songs from that EP and the added bonus of more great songs. Don’t let the deceptively simple cover art fool you. Voyage is 55 minutes of extravagance in musical form. (more…)

Music Review: The Mary Onettes, Portico:

By Less Lee Moore

The Mary Onettes’ new release, Portico: is dense with almost claustrophobic layers of synths and jangling guitars. But singer Philip Ekström’s voice has a lighter touch and floats above the music, which gives depth to these songs. Portico: reminds me a lot of The Cure’s Disintegration at times, but far more restrained and condensed. Ekström has an emotive warble like Robert Smith even while sounding almost nothing like him. He talks about death and ghosts and dreaming, all of which fit the music like a hand in a glove. There are choruses and bridges everywhere, both instrumental and vocal, which propel the songs forward, and out of the heaviness that might otherwise weigh them down.
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The Rainbow Kid Needs Your Help: Must Reach Crowdfunding Goal By April 14

By Less Lee Moore

Photo © Biserka Livaja

Whenever a movie is announced with an actor or actress playing the role of a special needs person, what is your first reaction? If you’ve seen movies like Radio or Riding The Bus With My Sister, it’s probably a groan and an eye roll (or worse).

But what about the very real scenario of an actor who also happens to be a special needs person? Dylan Harman is a 23-year-old actor with Down syndrome who starred in the award-winning 2012 short film Rainbow Connection from writer/director Kire Paputts (The Last Pogo Jumps Again).

Harman is also starring in the follow-up, a feature length expansion of the short called The Rainbow Kid. As Paputts notes, this is “not an episode of Life Goes On.” Here’s the synopsis: (more…)