May 24, 2011

Tom Vek – Leisure Seizure (2011)


TOM VEK’S LEISURE SEIZURE TO BE RELEASED SEPTEMBER 13TH OUT DIGITALLY JUNE 7, 2011/ PHYSICALLY SEPTEMBER 13, 2011 VIA ISLAND RECORDS UK/ COOPERATIVE MUSIC/ DOWNTOWN
Following much speculation, Tom Vek’s brand new single “A Chore” was premiered on April 18th by famed Radio 1 DJ Zane Lowe and is available to buy immediately as a digital download. Recorded in his own PALLET studios, “A Chore” is a prime example of Vek’s self-coined beat focused rock – a more controlled, consistent and elaborated version of the unique, raw sound of his debut album, We Have Sound. The single also comes with some stellar remixes by up Primary 1 under his new alias Amateur Best, as well as Breton who will be supporting the upcoming UK shows, and even a remix from Mr. Vek himself.

May 23, 2011

The Raveonettes-Apparations

Ravenna Woods – Valley of the Headless Men (2011)


In essence, the idea of Ravenna Woods can be traced back to a small coral atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. With just an acoustic guitar and 4-track, songwriter Chris Cunningham traveled to the outer island community of Jabor, Jaluit to teach at a boarding school in 2007-2008. Immersed in the simplistic elements of acoustic guitar, ukulele and choral music, Cunningham drew inspiration from the extreme isolation of the location as well as the country’s unfortunate history as a nuclear testing ground for the US military.
Upon returning to Seattle, Cunningham quickly teamed up with like-minded musicians Brantley Duke and Matt Badger. Combining stripped down instrumentation with a penchant for hardcore/punk music, Demons and Lakes was dreamed up and executed in the form of a 14 song album in early 2010.

Woods – Sun and Shade (2011)


On June 14th, WOODS will release their 6th full-length album, Sun & Shade, on their own Woodsist record label. Recorded Winter to Winter, 2010-2011, it features a helping hand from west coast brother, Glenn Donaldson (Skygreen Leopards, Art Museums) and is the first full album recorded at the new Woodsist Headquarters in the small upstate town of Warwick, NY.


“These guys veer into West Coast & Kraut explorations when they get bored of structure, but you won’t mind indulging them. Woods is back porch with a psychedelic sting in the guitars, a wild percussive clatter & somewhat unhinged desperation in the earworm vocal melodies of Jeremy Earl. Woods & Woodsist try to come-on all laid back with the hippie references, but you know they are not (who is really?). It’s the subtle tension, SUN & SHADE, that makes the music worth jamming…”- Glenn Donaldson

May 21, 2011

Mesrine: Public Enemy #1(Jean-François Richet, 2008)


The story of Jacques Mesrine, France's public enemy No. 1 during the 1970s. After nearly two decades of legendary criminal feats -- from multiple bank robberies and to prison breaks -- Mesrine was gunned down by the French police in Paris.

Mesrine: Killer Instinct (Jean-François Richet, 2008)


Mesrine: Killer Instinct -- the first of two parts -- charts the outlaw odyssey of Jacques Mesrine (Vincent Cassel), the legendary French gangster of the 1960s and 1970s who came to be known as French Public Enemy No. 1 and The Man of a Thousand Faces.

Okkervil River - Rider

May 20, 2011

Iron & Wine "Tree By The River"

Night and the City (Jules Dassin, 1950)


Harry Fabian is a London hustler with ambitious plans that never work out. One day, when he encounters the most famous Greco-Roman wrestler in the world, Gregorius, at a London wrestling arena run by his son Kristo, he dreams up a scheme that he thinks will finally be his ticket to financial independence.

La piscine(Jacques Deray, 1969)

Lovers Marianne and Jean-Paul spend their vacation in a villa near St.-Tropez. The main feature of the villa is a swimming pool, stage for most of the action. After a visit Marianne invites former lover Harry and his teenage daughter Penelope to stay. Tension between the grown-ups rises especially when Jean-Paul seduces Penelope. The consequences are deadly.

May 19, 2011

Country Mice – Twister (2011)



The Antlers - Burst Apart [2011]



Weyes Blood and The Dark Juices

Weyes Blood and The Dark Juices
The Outside Room (2011, Not Not Fun)


















Natalie Mering (Weyes Bluhd/Jackie-O Motherf*cker) presents a compelling debut solo LP of forlorn “narcotic drifter ballads” for NNF. ‘The Outside Room’ is like a haunting acid flashback to late ’60s Nico, only distorted by time and a drug-degraded memory. Undeniably her vocals bear a genuinely uncanny resemblance to the folk-pop heroine, a fact doubtless enforced by her musical morphosis from murky FX riddled experiments as Weyes Bluhd towards death-folk guitars, doom-laced drums and stark ambience.

May 18, 2011

Seapony – Go With Me (2011)


Last year, a Seattle three-piece known as Seapony entered the blogosphere at the pinnacle of a now cherished medium known as Bandcamp, with only a handful of singles (which they offered for free). These four songs provided attention for the band’s music – simplistic, slightly distorted surf pop – and would go on to be the foundation for the band’s full length debut, Go With Me, via Sub Pop subsidiary Hardly Art. The breezy, jangling rock tunes located here could easily garner comparisons to Best Coast due to their corresponding guitar pop mannerisms, uncomplicated drum patterns, and summer night arousal. It’s in the lyrics, however, sung by vocalist Jen Weidl and contributed by songwriter Danny Rowlands, where Seapony branches away, as they are certainly less redundant and don’t even begin to address the marijuana happiness, or relationship-abandoned woes of Bethany Cosentino.

The Muppets: Bohemian Rhapsody

Dark Horse, Dagur Kári (2005)

With the bleak comedic drama Dark Horse, Icelandic director Dagur Kári reworks several thematic and topical elements from his prior film, Nói Albinói. He also crafts a feature which brings together two trends of Scandinavian cinema in the early 2000s: matter-of- fact examinations of ordinary, working class Scandinavian folks, with intersecting lives and stories, shot in stark black-and-white (typified by films such as Ragnar Bragasson's Born), and the low-key, whimsical, offbeat humor of northern European directors such as Aki Kaurismaki.Dark Horse opens in Copenhagen, where Daniel, a twentysomething young man, makes a paltry living as a graffiti painter, accepting money from Danish residents to create personalized valentines on the sides of buildings. Unable to collect enough from this trade to pay his rent, he is evicted and must approach his father for lodging, but the father refuses, forcing Daniel to sleep in his car. Daniel's friend Roger (nicknamed "Grandpa") works at a local medical clinic that is conducting sleep experiments on volunteers, including a judge; in Roger's off time, he trains as a football referee. Roger confides in Daniel about his discovery of a former model Franc, who works at a local bakery; Daniel and Franc inevitably then become involved, to Roger's consternation, and Roger plots to intervene by attempting to win Franc for himself. Meanwhile, the judge, suffering from pronounced sleep deprivation, has a complete emotional and mental breakdown and flies off the handle, engaging in increasingly bizarre and dysfunctional behavior.

Too Beautiful for You, Bertrand Blier (1990)

Originally titled TROP BELLE POUR TOI, French filmmaker Bertrand Blier's Too Beautiful for You takes several unexpected side trips while exploring its basic romantic-triangle plotline. Successful business executive and family man Gerard Depardieu falls hopelessly in love with his secretary Josiane Balasko. Flying in the face of motion picture convention, Depardieu's wife Carole Bouquet is drop-dead gorgeous, while Balasko is chubby and long in tooth! Further confounding the audience (in a most entertaining fashion) is the presence of Bouquet in a secondary role, as Balasko's woebegone neighbor. We don't know how he does it, but director Blier invests his funniest scenes in Too Beautiful for You with profound melancholy, while stirring up gales of laughter in the serious portions.

Reprise

Reprise
Joachim Trier (2006)


















Reprise is a film about friendship, madness and creativity, love and sorrow, great ambitions, and the unpleasant discrepancy between hope and reality. It has a distinct narrative structure, in which recordings are done in black and white using hand-held cameras, and playful montages and voiceovers are put to use. The film was partly inspired by François Truffaut and the French Nouvelle Vague.

May 17, 2011

What's In My Bag? -Dan Auerbach (The Black Keys)



Friday Night, Claire Denis (2002)

Paris resident Laure (Valerie Lemercier) has just finished packing her belongings in preparation for moving in with her lover, though she is oblivious to her apparent jitters at doing so. As she leaves her apartment for the night to join a pair of friends for dinner, Laure gets held up in traffic, due to a crippling public transportation strike. As she waits in her car, she finds a sense of serenity in the midst of all the chaos and begins to watch a number of people as they work their way through the congestion. One man in particular attracts her attention, as he also seems to be calmly regarding the traffic jam and its participants. The man, Jean (Vincent Lindon), gets into Laure's car and transports her down a number of side streets and away from all the confusion -- as both the strangers begin to feel an attraction toward one another

May 15, 2011

Nedelja Vece...



Nedelja popodne...

Ben Harper – Give Till It’s Gone (2011)


On May 17th, Virgin Records will release Give Till It’s Gone , Ben Harper’s 10th studio album.
With “Rock N’ Roll Is Free,” the album’s first single, Harper pays tribute to an audacious art form that continually challenges the status quo, demanding that we look at the world in “a brand new way.” The song was inspired by rock legend Neil Young, whom Harper opened for in London last summer. Young’s mesmerizing performance of “Rockin’ in the Free World” planted the seeds of a new song in Harper’s mind, compelling him to go straight back to his room after the show and write “Rock N’ Roll Is Free.” The incident is emblematic of the kind of urgency with which the new album was forged.

May 14, 2011

Lia Ices- Grown Unknown(2011)




Blank Dogs / Collected By Itself: 2006-2009 [2011]


Mike Sniper, aka Blank Dogs, cleaned up his sound and embraced hi-fidelity last October with the release of Land And Fixed. Before then, the Brooklyn native was one of the more "mysterious" artists around, though he admittedly never wanted that to be the case.

La Collectionneuse (Eric Rohmer, 1967)


A bombastic, womanizing art dealer and his painter friend go to a seventeenth-century villa on the Riviera for a relaxing summer getaway. But their idyll is disturbed by the presence of the bohemian Haydée, accused of being a “collector” of men.

Birdy (Alan Parker, 1984)


Two friends arrive back from Vietnam, scarred in different ways. One has physical injuries, the other has mental problems that make him yearn to be a bird, a subject he has always been fascinated with.

May 13, 2011

Planningtorock - W

Planningtorock
W (DFA,2011)

when you play 'w' and let its melodrama and uncommon beauty grip you, suddenly all those cliches make sense: this album stops you in your tracks, blows your mind and makes you feel alive.
while she is a new name to many, those who know planningtorock tend to form a strong emotional connection with her work. no doubt about it, janine is totally out there on her own, and with 'w', she's raised the bar several notches, producing a powerful soul odyssey that ravishes the listener and comfortably ranks as one of the dfa label's finest releases. so how does it sound? well, it's melancholy and euphoric, epic in scale yet deeply personal, strikingly alien but weirdly familiar, and always daring and original.

May 10, 2011

Pat Jordache - Future Songs

Pat Jordache
"Future Songs"
(Constellation, 2011)


















Somehow ‘Future Songs’ is the perfect title for this blown-out set from Canadian noisenik Pat Gregoire. Shrouded in the kind of roomy, wrong-but-right recording you’d expect to hear on a punk tape in 1978 there is absolutely nothing even remotely connected to the future over forty minutes, but at the same time it makes perfect sense. Gregoire is obsessed with jangly guitar pop of all kinds, and this obsession manifests itself in the genre bending jumps from track to track that seem to span pop music from the 1950s to the mid 1980s. It’s almost like a more lucid Daniel Johnson playing Joy Division covers in an empty warehouse, and as I’m sure you’ll realize there’s no way that can be anything else than gripping. Through the grit, shaky vocals and drowned percussion these are small and perfectly formed songs with verses, choruses and real tangible hooks. You’ll be humming them for weeks to come – and that’s where the ‘future’ comes into it. Future Songs is the bracing result of Pat’s isolation; an album of brilliant off-kilter pop.

The Felice Brothers – Celebration, Florida (2011)


Felice Brother Bob+Felice Brother Dylan-HURRICANE!!!


99.9 , Agustí Villaronga(1997)


Lara, the host of a radio call-in show dealing in psychic phenomena, discovers that her estranged lover has been found dead in a small Spanish village.

Everybody Loves Alice (Alla älskar Alice)Richard Hobert, 2002


Johan, a newspaper correspondent, his wife Lotta and their two children, 12-year-old, tomboyish Alice and her little brother Pontus, live a comfortable middle-class life. That life, however, gets shattered when Johan has an affair with a neighbour, single mother Anna.

May 9, 2011

Jezebel, William Wyler (1938)

In 1938, Jezebel was widely regarded as Warner Bros.' "compensation" to Bette Davis for her losing the opportunity to play Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind. Resemblances between the two properties are inescapable: Jezebel heroine Julie Marsden (Davis) is a headstrong Southern belle not unlike Scarlett (Julie lives in New Orleans rather than Georgia); she loves fiancé Preston Dillard (played by Henry Fonda) but loses him when she makes a public spectacle of herself (to provoke envy in him) by wearing an inappropriate red dress at a ball, just as Scarlett O'Hara brazenly danced with Rhett Butler while still garbed in widow's weeds.

Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi – Rome (2011)

It seems like anything Danger Mouse touches, he turns to gold.The new “Rome” project is slated for release on May 17th and last night, Zane Lowe from Radio 1 played two tracks from the forthcoming album. For those that aren’t aware, the album is Danger Mouse’s interpretation of what it would have been like to score an old western flick with the likes of Clint Eastwood , John Wayne or Charles Bronson. The album was composed by Italian Daniele Luppi and Danger Mouse in Ennio Moriccone’s Forum Studios in Rome. After all, Ennio is responsible for the most synonymous tune scored for a movie, ever. The “Rome” album has vocals contributed by Jack White and Norah Jones amongst others in which I’m sure will lead to many new collaborations for all involved.

May 6, 2011

The Fresh & Onlys -Secret Walls (EP)

Toliko iskren i dobar ep, steta sto ne traje ko Use Your Illusion...
If you're going to San Francisco put a flower into your hear!!!


Jeremy Jay – Dream Diary (2011)


Dzeremaja back to the best, najbolji rad jos od cuvenog ep-a!


Adrift (À Deriva), Heitor Dhalia, 2009


It is the 80's, and fourteen year-old Filipa is spending her vacation at Búzios with her father, Mathias, her alcoholic mother, Clarice, and her two younger siblings in their beach house. When Filipa feels that the relationship of her parents is deteriorating, she snoops in her father's office.

May 4, 2011

The Cave Singers



Cemetery Man, Michele Soavi (1994)

Achingly romantic and creepy-funny, this funereal fantasy from the director of La Chiesa (1989) is unlike any Italian film in memory. Rupert Everett plays Francesco Dellamorte, a lonely cemetery caretaker who just wants to get out of his small town of Buffalora. His assistant and sole companion, Gnaghi (played by famed French musician Francois Hadji-Lazaro) is an overweight cretin who speaks only in grunts, and the dead people outside are rising from their graves as zombies and trying to have him for breakfast. This situation, coupled with all his other problems, gives Francesco a real complex. His troubles are compounded when he meets a series of mysterious women (all played by the beautiful Anna Falchi) whom he loves before they die tragically. Soavi's film is based on a graphic-novel, Dylan Dog by Tiziano Sclavi, but Soavi's more obvious influences range from Jean Rollin's La Rose de Fer (1973) to Tim Burton's Edward Scissorhands (1990). Barbara Cupisti (of Soavi's Deliria) has a small role, and the film also benefits from Manuel de Sica's memorable score and excellent pacing by editor Franco Fraticelli. This is a film to savor and it will go down as one of the most striking Italian genre efforts of the decade, despite some weak effects work by the normally reliable Sergio Stivaletti.

Gummo, Harmony Korine (1997)

In this elliptical ensemble piece, which marks the directorial debut of indie bad boy Harmony Korine, the teens of tornado-scarred Xenia, OH, kill cats, tape their boobies, arm-wrestle, bathe, cross-dress, huff glue, avoid perverts, pay to have sex with retarded girls, lift makeshift dumbbells to the strains of Madonna's "Like a Prayer," fight, cuss, shave their eyebrows, undergo cancer treatment, euthanize senior citizens, and pee on passing cars. A hallucinatory barrage of images and scenarios with little in the way of traditional plot, Gummo has been variously described as a surrealist joke, a visual poem, and a worm's-eye view of white-trash suffering.

May 3, 2011

Pearl and the Beard – Killing the Darlings (2011)

Pearl and the Beard – Brooklyn trio Jocelyn Mackenzie, Emily Hope Price, and Jeremy Styles return with their second full length of folked up smart/pop, following up their 2009 debut — one we called “jawdroppingly exquisite” — and last year’s Black Vessel EP // Release: Killing the Darlings (May 10, Family) // Sounds like: sophisticated, syncopated indie pop is heavy on twisting, catch-your-breath melodies and intricate jazz-styled vocal harmonies… // What we like: the shimmering, tumbling vocals of “40k”…the dramatic gospel-tent-meets-campfire-sing-a-long fervor of “Reverend”… beautifully melodic, glockenspieled nu-folk charm of “Prodigal Daughter”… http://pearlandthebeard.com/

Wild Beasts - Smother (Domino,May 3, 2011)

Starting with Limbo, Panto's “She Purred, While I Grrred,” Wild Beasts have never shied away from singing about sex, but they master it on Smother. While Two Dancers refined their palate and palette, offering a deceptively gentle sound that masked some of their most hedonistic lyrics, Smother goes even further, pairing quiet, achingly lovely music with words that convey all the beauty and pain that come with desire. The lead single, “Albatross,” which drifts along a rippling, gamelan-tinged melody, gave a taste of the album’s subtlety, but not of its full power: Smother's title is perfectly chosen, evoking stifled cries and what it’s like to be so suffocated with want that only whispers come out.

May 2, 2011

Shearwater – The Island Arc (2011)


On January 15th, 2011, Shearwater will present The Island Arc, the trilogy of albums that includes 2006’s Palo Santo, 2008’s Rook, and 2010’s The Golden Archipelago, in a single, complete performance at the beautiful Central Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas. This will be a one-time-only event – they’ve never performed these thematically-linked albums in order, and probably never will again.
Here are more details directly from the band:

The Age of Ignorance (L'âge des ténèbres) Denys Arcand, 2007


Jean-Marc is a man without qualities living in times that are out of joint. His wife and children ignore him; he's a mid-level government functionary in Montreal doing his job without care.

Baghead, Jay Duplass, Mark Duplass (2008)

The Puffy Chair filmmaking duo Jay and Mark Duplass return to the realm of cinema with this tale of a man, a bag, and the strangeness that occurs when the two independently inconsequential factors come together.