Results tagged “review”

Rather appropriately, Prince's "Party Like It's 1999" served as ring entrance music to the the main event at The Get Up Kids TLA show. The newly reunited band is currently touring to support their Something To Write Home About 10th Anniversary CD + DVD. After the new year they're off to see our friends in Australia and Japan, but it sure was nice to have them visit us in Philly for two dates.

The members of Band of Skulls are interesting above and beyond their music. Bassist/Vocalist Emma Richardson competed on the English swimming team and won a few medals for her country. Drummer Matt Hayward played tennis with John McEnroe. Guitarist/Vocalist (and Kurt Cobain look alike) Russell Marsden cheated accidental death twice. But more interesting than that, there haven't been many times I've seen members of a headlining band hanging out in the crowd to watch their openers. And yet at the Band of Skulls show at the North Star I saw just that. Richardson lounged directly in front of me with a bottle of water and her tour manager on his laptap sitting by her side. Hayward and Marsden bounced around the sparsely populated room. Fans journeyed over for autographs that were graciously signed. If my car hadn't been so far away I would have gone to grab my copy of Baby Darling Doll Face Honey for a quick signature, too. I was almost worried the venue wouldn't fill up for the talented Brits, but of course by the time they took the stage went on there were plenty of people both upstairs and down.

        

Here at Phillyist, we've been to our fair share of punk shows. We're well aware that there are certain rules that go along with attending said shows. Even though we know better, we broke almost all the rules at Rise Against/Rancid/Billy Talent. Inappropriate footwear? Check. Expensive sunglasses and camera that might get crushed in a mosh pit? Check. Thank god we brought along our ability to fling guys twice our size into the pit for our own protection.

So, other than the whole aging backward thing, David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button has very little in common with F. Scott Fitzgerald's original story of the same name. That usually bothers me a lot in adaptations, because as a writer, I wouldn't want somebody to do that to my words. But Fitzgerald is dead and his story is a bit dated, so what we're left with is a film very true to the spirit of the original tale, if not to many of the details.

Once upon a time, Oliver Stone enjoyed a reputation as the most paranoid man in Hollywood, seeing conspiracy theories under every rock and questioning the official explanations. So when Stone decided, earlier this year, to tackle the subject of our current president, who is responsible for any number of actual conspiracies to take away civil liberties and then cover up his own responsibility for same, I got a little giddy. This is, after all, the president that’s held people for years without any sort of review, with secret evidence and occasionally secret legal arguments, on a prison that the American government runs but claimed not to control. I didn’t want to hear my opinions parroted back to me, but I figured that the dramatic expansion of torture and electronic surveillance might have sparked his interest.

           

We've always liked Weezer (MySpace) a lot, but never considered them one of our absolute favorite bands. This is largely because, with the exception of the Blue Album, there's quite a bit of inconsistency in their releases. The albums tend to have three or four killer tracks, two or three pretty good songs, and three or four complete throwaways. But we were cautiously optimistic about Saturday's Weezer show at the Susquehanna Bank Center, because we figured there was a possibility that the setlist would include most of the band's standout songs and keep the throwaways to a minimum.

A couple of pretty cool psych rock bands are going to be playing Johnny Brenda's tomorrow night. We're talking about Thrill Jockey label mates Arbouretum and Pontiak. Pontiak is made up of three brothers from the Blue Ridge farm country of Virginia. Pontiak's latest and second full length release, Sun on Sun, was literally recorded in a log cabin, and alternates between eerie, groovy, guitar-driven rock and atmospheric instrumentals. Also, there's an organ! Arbouretum is headed up by songwriter, guitarist, and singer Dave Heumann, who lives and works in Baltimore. According to Thrill Jockey, "Heumann’s idea for the band was one whose songs would evoke natural forms and movements as opposed to architectural constructions with rigid forms and linear progressions." Pontiak and Arbouretum worked together on a split LP called Kale, featuring many John Cale covers. It's a collection of slower, but still guitar-driven, tracks, that have a sad, thoughtful, Warren Zevon-type feel to them.

Just in case there was any doubt left, yes, Robert Downey is in blackface for almost the entirety of Tropic Thunder. And no, I didn't feel guilty about laughing at him. That's because Downey, who plays the Russel Crowe-like Kirk Lazarus, is laughing at himself. It's a ridiculous premise: a multi-time Oscar winner, Lazarus undergoes controversial (you don't say!) skin pigmentation-altering surgery to play the African-American sergeant of the American platoon featured in the Vietnam War-era film-within-a-film, also dubbed Tropic Thunder, that he is filming alongside action star Tugg Speedman (Ben Stiller), comedian Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black), hip-hop artist Alpa Chino (Brandon T. Jackson), and up-and-comer Kevin Sandusky (Jay Baruchel). So "Method" is his acting that Lazarus refuses to drop character, vacillating between truly stubborn and genuinely confused, often putting him at odds with the African-American Chino, who is upset that "they had one good part in there for a black man, and they gave it to "Crocodile Dundee!" (Lazarus's rebuttal is one of the best lines in the movie, thanks in no small part to Downey's delivery.)

When I entered the TLA on Wednesday night, I experienced a slight feeling of déjà vu. And it wasn’t even just that I had been there the night before to see Bloc Party. No, it was because I was there to see British retro-soul singer Duffy, whose sound harkens back to Dionne Warwick during the Burt Bacharach years, or Dusty Springfield, if you need me to compare her to a white person to restore the cosmic balance. The singer, who is part of the cavalcade of voices who entered the door opened by Amy Winehouse before she became a babbling crack whore, released a stellar debut album named Rockferry this year, and though she is not known for her showmanship, she is certainly known for having a voice that can make grown men spill beer all over themselves in admiration…or maybe that was just me.

At the TLA on Tuesday night, the assembled crowd witnessed a band at the peak of their powers. Bloc Party, the British foursome with two solid albums to their credit (2005’s superior Silent Alarm and 2007’s solid A Weekend in the City) gave a transcendent, 16-song performance that earned the crowd’s raucous reaction and made their two encores totally acceptable (a bit ostentatious for a mid-weekend if you ask me, but what the heck?). They also gave their fans an extra added bonus by choosing as their openers their fellow UK natives, Does It Offend You, Yeah?, four up-and-coming lads who offered a set that was never less than interesting, and often threatened to be revelatory.

We've been contemplating a jaunt to the old NYC all summer (mainly to see this geekalicious exhibit and have some chocolate), and back before the humidity fried all neural pathways we looked into how, exactly, we would get there. We're not fried too much to remember we’re on a tighter than usual budget, and when did a train ticket get that exorbitant? We resigned ourselves to bussing it, and were delighted, if a bit hesitant, to check out the challengers to the standard Chinatown Bus, which promised (reliable) A/C and Wi-Fi among other amenities, including hard-to-believe $1 fares. Luckily Sulina Gabale over at City Paper took the plunge for us, subjecting herself to four roundtrips to see if the newcomers lived up to her usual chariot, the 2000 New Century Travel Chinatown Bus. The take-away: the newbies deliver, and strange food odors are absent to boot. Excuse us, we're grabbing the laptop so's we can blog our way to the Met.

...because seriously, whatever brand they're using in their microphones right now sucks. But we'll get to that eventually, because we weren't at the TLA last Tuesday night just to see Alkaline Trio (MySpace). We were also there to see the opening act, The Fashion (MySpace). We were more or less completely psyched for this show, because we've become pretty big Alkaline Trio fans over the course of the last year, and we were pleasantly surprised by the quality of The Fashion's recent album. But our evening got off to a pretty inauspicious start, and we couldn't help but walk away from the show disappointed.

, but we still weren't expecting much. Not that we thought Locksley would be bad. We just kinda figured that they wouldn't give us much reason to endorse their live performance versus just saying, "Locksley's CD is worth picking up." Fortunately, Locksley proved us wrong.

I have to be honest here for a minute: I was pretty pessimistic about The Walnut's production of Les Miserables, more or less from the second it was announced as the season closer. It wasn't lack of faith in The Walnut that led to my lack of optimism. Rather, it was a familiarity: nothing about Les Mis—not the music, not the costumes, not the set*—is easy, and bad productions are far too common. Not only that, the better known a musical is, the greater the chance that the audience, used to hearing the original Broadway soundtrack, or having seen the production in London or New York, will be tough to please. Perhaps I should re-phrase my initial statement. It's not that I was pessimistic about The Walnut's production—it's just that I entered the theatre with a healthy sense of reality.

As the credits rolled on Get Smart, I thought to myself: "Ah. Well that makes sense." The missing piece to the puzzle? Mel Brooks and Buck Henry, the creators of the original series, served as consultants on the film. My guess is that they're the reason things in the film, although silly, never got too over-the-top, and that as things began to near the top, there was just a little bit of restraint used.

We had forgotten not all Death Cab for Cutie songs are thisclose to being emo. Our association of the band's music with melancholy proved to be a misnomer. Kicking off the show with an upbeat choice from their new album, Narrow Stairs, Ben Gibbard and the band seemed hell bent on reminding concert-goers that sensitive lyrics do not necessarily lead to a lack of energy. By the second song—the epic "New Year" from Transatlanticism—the entire crowd was on its feet, singing along and punching the air with each blast of the bass drum. The unfurling of the Pollack-esque (we know that's a stretch) album cover whipped everyone into a frenzy.

Heading into the Eric Hutchinson (MySpace) show at World Cafe Live, we pretty much knew what to expect from Eric: good banter, strong performance, and a bit of cheekiness that makes you wonder how much of it is shtick and how much is actual ego. It's all part of Eric Hutchinson's charm. We were expecting him to put a smile on our faces. What we didn't expect was how badly we'd need that smile because of the inauspicious start our evening at WCL had gotten off to.

Walking into the Philadelphia Museum of Art's gallery where Frida Kahlo's iconic Las Dos Fridas (The Two Fridas) hangs as part of the PMA's massive Frida Kahlo exhibition brought forth memories of first seeing that memorable painting in Mexico City over 30 years ago.

So many singers are known by their voice—Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Carly Simon. Although not as widely known, Mike Doughty is no different. His droning, monotone voice is what characterized every song he played last Friday night at the TLA. Haunting, melodic, and just gosh darn beautiful.

I used to be a dancer. I even used to choreograph a little. And oh! how I loved to create pieces to confound the audience: straightforward stories told so abstractly that it would take an advanced degree in philosophy to understand what the dancers were doing on the stage. The audience could like it fine, love it even—they just wouldn't really know what was going on.

"Hmmm..." you may be saying to yourself. "A one-act musical centered around a group therapy session? How good could that possibly be?"

Entering the empty stage, David Ford began to shake his maracas into the microphone. He stepped away and lowered the maracas, but, as if it was somehow coming from behind the scenes, the sound continued to echo. He then briefly vocalized into the mic and -- same as the maracas -- after the vocalization was over, it eerily continued. At this point, hushed murmurs throughout the crowd could be heard: "What is he doing?" "How is that happening?" What it took the audience a few minutes to understand was that he was looping each sound individually to create a rich texture of music to fill out the entire room with his first song of the night, "Go To Hell." It was truly a mark of high showmanship, but David Ford did it with such grace and understatedness that not only was it entertaining, it was also endearing. Throughout his entire performance, he commanded the stage while also performing with an air of self-consciousness and an honest-to-goodness "Gee shucks I'm so glad to be here" attitude. With his album already having been released in the UK to great success and recently having been released for digital download here in the States (available physically in April), this is a man who is headed swiftly up that daunting hill to stardom. His enthusiasm for performing shined through as he told the crowd that he was glad to be in Philadelphia: "the birthplace of the Constitution and Will Smith."

Did you ever imagine yourself getting paid to be a food critic? Most of us have at one point. (We bet that food critic is on your dream job wish list right below travel writer.) Surely most of us will never reach Craig LaBan status, but here's a way that we can all rate our favorite restaurants and receive something in return. Zagat's is calling for reviews of Philadelphia area restaurants in their online survey. They are offering a free copy of the resulting Philadelphia Restaurants guide book to all participants in the survey. The only catch is that you have to create a login for their site, and will most certainly be bombarded with emails in the future, but that's nothing unusual. Once you sign into the Philadelphia Restaurants survey, you will be asked to rate the restaurants, which are listed by neighborhood. Or you can just dive right into the full list comprised of restaurants in the city and also many suburban spots. Warning: if you dine out as often as Phillyist, this survey might be a little bit of a time suck. But instead of mindlessly searching the internet for celebrity gossip during your next lunch break, devote twenty minutes or so to this task. We think that the payoff of a free guide is worth it. Even if you don't have time to complete the whole survey in one sitting, you have until March 23, 2008 to submit your votes. So get voting and get your free book!

Here's hoping that on the next album and tour, she takes the Middle Way.

I checked out Toronto's own The Midway State on Thursday, Jan. 31 when they opened the kickoff of MIKA's American tour.

I am thoroughly convinced that for his solo shows, when there's no percussion onstage, Rhett Miller uses his hair to help him keep time. It seems to have a mind of its own, swirling around his head and over his eyes as he energetically plays the songs that his fans know every word to. His isn't '80s headbanger hair: it starts out perfectly feathered and carefully blown-dry, but as Miller performs, it becomes drenched in sweat, spraying the members of the audience who dare to stand in the front row. Miller may be playing a solo show, but there are two very visible personalities on that stage. (At one point halfway through his set, he mentioned that his hair was getting in his eyes and he needed to get it cut. Not too short, I hope – what would he use as a metronome then?)

A steaming hot pile of our favorite things from around the internets.

You know those songs that take over your headphones for weeks at a time? Well, the youngest alternative-rocker on the Phillyist staff decided to put all those infectious tunes into a list of 10 - and then 10 more, just because. And for your listening pleasure, yours truly linked to the album versions of those songs (thanks YouTube, for your comprehensiveness) - just click on the song names! I think you'll enjoy this medley of happy, somber, honest, and beautiful songs. And if you don't find three songs that you like, well, you can tell me that I don't know anything about music.

The holidays kind of snuck up on us this year. Perhaps because Thanksgiving was so early. After Turkey Day was over, it was still too early to get into the Christmannakkanzaa spirit. (This Phillyist adheres to a strict "No Christmas music before December 1" rule.) And then we got caught up with other things, and we didn't really notice that, yep, we're in holiday season. It took Thursday night's WXPN Musicians On Call benefit concert...

Fun around town, for $10 or less: FRIDAY Polish Those Ivories: Steve Odabashian’s Happy Hour Piano Show, every Friday at the Cascamorto Piano Bar (1939 Arch), 5-8:30PM. Free Veloz Attack: Veloz Attack, Rellik, Mortal Decay, and Divination at Millcreek Tavern (4200 Chester Ave), 9:30PM. Free (21+) SATURDAY Don’t Be a Scrooge: Readings from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol at the Ebeneezer Maxwell Mansion (200 West Tulpehocken St), 2:30PM. $10 ($5 for kids under 12) Fall...