The X List: Found Footage Films

By Jeffery X Martin

The Bay, 2012

On the evening of May 20, 2014, Jeffery X Martin was asked to write an article on the best ten found footage films ever made. He told his wife he was about to start work on it. After a few hours of furious typing, and a couple of stiff drinks, he went to bed to dream his little dreamy-dreams. The next morning, this list you are about to read was found on Martin’s desktop. After a furious search, Martin was discovered in his living room, eating soft-boiled eggs and watching professional wrestling matches from 1987. He sent the article in to his editor, who presents it to you now, as she received it.

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Waxing Nostalgic: Joy Division, “She’s Lost Control”

By Jeffery X Martin

Joy Division was the ultimate Manchester band, encapsulating that town’s darkness, smoke, and despair in their music as surely as if they had encased it in Lucite. It’s a paperweight. It’s a time capsule. It’s like eavesdropping on someone’s lowest thoughts, hearing the sounds their brains make, the constant loop that brings about madness.

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Music Review: Swans, To Be Kind

By Jeffery X Martin

I have an irrational fear of Swans leader Michael Gira. I imagine him striding through the desert at sunset, taking impossibly long steps, heat shimmering from him in mirage waves, impossible to look at directly. He holds out his arms and silently begins to absorb the encroaching darkness, holding it somewhere deep within himself, perhaps in the fetid abyss he calls a “heart.” He moves through the world like the Walking Man and, in my mind, he sounds like Werner Herzog when he speaks.

To Be Kind, the third album from Swans since their reformation in 2010, does nothing to alter that vision.

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DVD Review: Suzanne Vega Live: Solitude Standing

By Jeffery X Martin

The problem with being a hardcore fan of any artist is the constant desire for more. We want new songs. We want new versions of new songs. We want a tour. We want new videos. We want it all, and we want it now, sooner if possible.

The new Suzanne Vega concert DVD, a show from Rome filmed in 2003, is great for those who haven’t had the chance to see her live. It’s a stripped-down affair, with Vega on acoustic guitar and vocals, Mike Visceglia on bass, and a translator, Valerio Piccolo. It has the earmarks of a small, intimate show. We would have a better sense of that, if we were ever shown the audience outside of some silhouette shots.

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Waxing Nostalgic: Freedy Johnston, This Perfect World

By Jeffery X Martin

Maybe it’s the phrase “singer/songwriter” that makes my asshole clench up. I think of the douchebag in Animal House singing “I Gave My Love a Cherry,” until John Belushi, in his infinite wisdom, comes along and smashes the schmuck’s thrift-store guitar against the wall, shattering the vehicle of his lousy poetry into millions of pieces.

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Waxing Nostalgic: The Final Dot – Duran Duran

By Jeffery X Martin

Hello. My name is X, and I’m a Duran Duran fan. I was one in the Eighties. I am still one today. There is nothing hipsterish about this claim. I am not misappropriating anything. It is not ironic or tongue in cheek. I have danced on the valentine. I have lit my torch and waved it for the New Moon on Monday. I have reached up for the sunrise, met El Presidenté and had my last chance on the stairway.

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Waxing Nostalgic: Golden Palominos, “Buenos Aires”

By Jeffery X Martin

It’s not fair to call the Golden Palominos a supergroup. They were one, but they were beyond that. The Golden Palominos were a collaboration of musicians, heroes of the deep underground, with a lineup that rotated from album to album, changing styles and moods, sometimes drastically, with every release.

Accessibility was not their strong suit.

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Music Review: Blancmange, Happy Families too…

By Jeffery X Martin

Remember back in 1998 when Gus Van Sant remade Psycho? That wasn’t necessarily a bad idea. Lots of things get the remake treatment. Van Sant’s version only raised a fuss because it was practically a shot-for-shot remake of the original, with very little changed. It was perceived as a sweet—although odd—gesture, more homage than remake. Ultimately, though, people asked the question, “What was wrong with the original?” Hitchcock’s thriller remains a classic. Van Sant’s changeling has been relegated to being nothing more than a curiosity.

There is a grave similarity between that project and Blancmange’s Happy Families too… which is original band member Neil Arthur’s complete re-recording of their breakthrough album, Happy Families. Originally recorded in 1982, that album included the band’s first big hit, “Living on the Ceiling.” It may not be a classic album, but it is a solid effort with very little filler.

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DVD Review: Don’t Ask Me Questions: The Unsung Life of Graham Parker and The Rumour

By Jeffery X Martin

Read Cait Brennan’s interview with Graham Parker.

At the end of the Seventies, a British gas station attendant, who was also a musician, got his record played on the radio. The next day, he had a contract offer from a major record label. Overnight success? A Cinderella story? Not quite.

The Kickstarter-backed documentary Don’t Ask Me Questions chronicles the rise, fall, and rise of Graham Parker and the Rumour, a band whose contemporaries included Elvis Costello and Squeeze. Their big US hit was “Local Girls,” one of the earliest videos to be played on MTV.

When their first album, Howling Wind, came out in 1976, the critical acclaim was instant and practically universal. They were widely regarded as the best live act in Britain. That doesn’t necessarily lead to stellar album sales, though, and as Parker says, “Everything was just a bit off.”

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Music Review: From Hell, Ascent from Hell

By Jeffery X Martin

There was a time, not too long ago, when rock and roll was the Devil’s music. Heavy metal was Lucifer’s tool of destruction and damnation, and if you even touched a Hamer Scarab electric guitar, that was enough to send your soul screaming out of your body into the abyss, where demons would torture your eternal soul with free-form jazz and Zydeco gospel music.

Those were the halcyon days. Black magic and pentacles, hailing Satan on a regular basis (not just on holidays, like we do now), and rock loud enough to cause internal bleeding were normal things. Good times, man, good times.

Thank god for From Hell, a metal supergroup, bound and determined to bring horror-metal back to the forefront. Name-checking the immortal King Diamond, From Hell’s debut album, Ascent From Hell, is part metal album, part radio play. It’s a concept album about . . . well, here. Let me just quote the press release. (more…)