Legion

By Lisa Anderson

If you’ve gone to the movies in the past few months, you’re probably at least peripherally aware of Legion. It’s the movie advertised by the cardboard cutout of the winged, shirtless man with weapons in both hands. If you’ve seen the trailer, you know that its premise is that God gets fed up with humanity and sends angels to exterminate us, but that there’s a baby who can turn everything around if only it survives, and one lone angel who wants to help. Even with all of that, though, I went in not really knowing what to expect.
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Jay Reatard, Watch Me Fall

By Less Lee Moore

Maybe he’s grown up a bit since the days when the Memphis music scene dubbed him “Little Lord Punkleroy,” but thankfully, Jay Reatard hasn’t become boring.

In a recent article on the Matador Records blog, he noted:

“A lot of bands these days, they approach the making of an album like it’s collecting songs, they don’t think about how all of the songs are going to work together. They sequence their albums on iTunes, wondering what songs sound best next to each other rather than putting them together as they were written. That’s not an album.”

If these songs were written in the order they appear on the album, then Watch Me Fall is a great achievement for Jay Reatard. If you listen closely enough, you can actually hear the sound of an artist evolving.
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Bat For Lashes, Two Suns

By Julie Finley

I’d heard of Bat For Lashes last year, and the name didn’t grab me, so I ignored it. I had inadvertently absorbed the info that the act was critically acclaimed. Big Deal, right? So when I was on vacation earlier this year in Dublin, I saw promo posters in almost all of the record stores I went into. . . still ignored it!

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Electric Six, KILL

By Christian Lipski

“You can’t run away from your legs, because that’s what you’re trying to run away from them with!”
—unknown SubGenius

In “Waste Of Time And Money,” the second track on the new Electric Six album KILL, Dick Valentine sings: Take this back to where we started. It’s not possible to avoid your origins forever; eventually you’re going to have to accept that your beginnings are part of what makes you unique, and embrace them. Or in Electric Six’s case, you just plug them in and dance along with them.
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Don’t Fall Into The Pit: Parks And Recreation

By Lisa Anderson

A network TV season has ended, and as usual, the battlefield is littered. Some shows have been renewed, some have been axed, and some have found homes on other networks. One survivor among new shows was Parks and Recreation, a sitcom co-produced by and starring Saturday Night Live alum Amy Poehler.
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Cheap Trick, The Latest

By Less Lee Moore

I haven’t bought a new Cheap Trick album since their 1997 self-titled release on the then soon-to-be-defunct Red Ant label. Now that I’ve copped to this embarrassing admission, the next one should be easier. I hate writing record reviews. That old chestnut comparing the ridiculousness of music writing to “dancing about architecture” worms its way into my brain and I start to panic. Panic turns to dread as deadlines quickly approach.

Look, it’s not that I don’t love the latest release from Cheap Trick (cleverly titled The Latest), it’s that I don’t know if I can properly convey how much I love it, or perhaps more succinctly, I don’t know if I can convince you to love it as much as I do.
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Sports: The Band, S/T EP

By Megashaun

In recent years, we’ve seen an increase in quality regarding the debut releases of bands. Now, there are many bands with such strong debuts that listeners can’t imagine how they can possibly get better. Toronto, Ontario’s Sports: The Band is certainly guilty of this. Their debut album, technically only an EP, sounds so mature you’d imagine the band has been together for ages instead of the few short years they actually have been around.
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Adanowsky, El Idolo

By Julie Finley

There is a recurring phenomenon when the offspring of a talented parent tries to come out with something creative and it just sucks. For example . . . anything that Sean Lennon has ever done, and that sums it up! So I never have high hopes from anyone that comes from a top notch pedigree, and the fact they were born into “connections,” is really irritating!
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Black Moth Super Rainbow, Eating Us

By Noreen Sobczyk

When you visit the Black Moth Super Rainbow website, you’ll find that their new album Eating Us is available in a limited “hairy summer jacket” version. Well if that doesn’t say it all, what does? Hopefully this review will help elaborate on this, at least a bit, because a lot of the beauty of Black Moth Super Rainbow is that the music must be experienced and can’t be fully explained in text. Does that sound pretentious? It’s not, I promise. Take a tab of BMSR and you’re guaranteed not to have a bad trip.
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I Heard Your Voice In Cambridge: Elvis Perkins In Dearland

By Chelsea Spear

Brattle Theatre, Cambridge, MA
April 22, 2009

The music of Elvis Perkins has a cathartic quality that borders on the spiritual. His vivid, fever-dream lyrics draw on Biblical themes and imagery (note the title of his first album, Ash Wednesday, and its closing song “Good Friday”), his melodies share the memorable simplicity of hymns, and he and his band perform them with great fervor and no small emotion. Thus, it seemed appropriate that they would grace the stage of the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Mass.
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