Let’s dig in like an Alabama tick.
BRANDED TO KILL (CRITERION)
TOKYO DRIFTER (CRITERION)
Seijun Sezuki’s weirdo Japanese gangland pictures get the Blu treatment from Voyager. Drifter’s probably going to look amazing, since it’s always been a gleefully gaudy four-color assault.
THE HANGOVER PART II
Chaos abounds in this reboot of an unsuccessful property from a couple years back. Apparently, Warner Brothers liked the cast and the script, but decided that the location was why the first film didn’t click with audiences, so they rehired everyone to shoot the same screenplay – this time in exotic Bangkok Dangerous. The results of this experiment are yours to own.
Having said all that, Hangover star Bradley Cooper recently stated that the next film in the franchise is gearing up, and CHUD.com has an EXCLUSIVE FIRST LOOK at the screenplay for The Hangover III:
THE HELP
Another charming addition to the “Only White People Can Save You” genre, this one at least has some truly delicious ingredients – I’m speaking of Emma Stone and Bryce Dallas Howard.
Man…the producers of this flick were NOT fucking around. Those are two of the palest white girls on the planet. If anyone can usher in a new era of civil rights, it’s the two of them. I think the best way they can protest is by making out with me until social justice is finally attained. Still not gonna’ bother with the movie, though.
IT MEANS EVERYTHING: THE BLU RAY OF THE WEEK!
THE LADY VANISHES (CRITERION)
Sinister smart-assery from Alfred Hitchcock centers on a beautiful young woman travelling by train who winds up on the case of an elderly missing passenger – who everyone on board claims never really existed. So did she? Let’s find out. There’s hardly any Hitch on Blu, so Criterion’s offering – one of the director’s last Brit-born flicks – is very welcome.
ALL IN – THIS WEEK’S BLU:
2011 World Series
Arabia (IMAX)
Branded to Kill (Criterion)
The Caine Mutiny
Colin Quinn: Long Story Short
Cowboys & Aliens
The Debt
Design for Living (Criterion) – The smarmy pre-Hays Lubitsch love triangle comedy resurfaces on Blu Ray.
Devil May Cry Complete Collection
Ford Robert: Paris Concert Revisited by the Coward Robert, Ford
The Hangover Part II
The Help
The Lady Vanishes (Criterion)
Life, Above All
Medea – I’m really tired of these Tyler Perry flicks. It’s like he churns them out every five min…oh.
Michael Feinstein: The Sinatra Legacy
Mission: Impossible Trilogy – Guess who repackaged the same discs over again? It’s PARAMOUNT!
Mr. Popper’s Penguins
Paul McCartney: The Love We Make
Peter Cetera with Special Guest Amy Grant: Live in Concert – Share it with someone you hate.
Point Blank
Portlandia: Season One
The Scarlet Worm
Shakira: En Vivo Desde Paris
The Simpsons: The Complete Fourteenth Season
The St. Louis Cardinals: 2011 World Series Champions
Stieg Larsson’s Dragon Tattoo Trilogy: Extended Edition – More damaged-goods skinny-goth mystery creeper for your entertainment dollar!
Tokyo Drifter (Criterion)
Tora! Tora! Tora! – The definitive filmic chronicle of the invasion of Pearl Harbor. Tora! is often smacked around for its “dry” depiction of events – but I wonder if those critics think that something like a love triangle might zazz it up?
Triple Tap
NOW THAT’S WHAT CHUD CALLS MUSIC – WITH JEB DELIA!
THE ROOTS – UNDUN
If, so to speak, the concept of a “concept album” tends to send you running from the room… well, as a rule, I wouldn’t blame you. But in this case, the nearly ubiquitous Roots have come up with a musical narrative that is so well- constructed, unblinking, bleak, and funk-slathered that it’ll grab you by the collar before you’re halfway to the door.
If last year’s How I Got Over nodded to the slim hope of redemption for its inner-city cast, Undun seems to dump ice-cold water all over that notion. Its protagonist, Redford Stephens, is a street hustler, living fast (and, as needs must, dying young) against a musical cityscape that rivals The Wire for its observational specificity and emotional gutpunch (and it’s no surprise that The Wire seems to be everyone’s touchpoint for reflections on this album: both, in their way, stand out uniquely from their genre brethren).
Opening the album with the sound of a flatlining heart monitor, the band (with collaborators including Black Thought, Dice Raw, and Phonte) digs into what ?uestlove has described as “an imagined internal dialogue that could take place as a deceased black youth looks forward into our post-modern void.” Though the rhymes occasionally bristle with the bravado of Raw’s “I live life trying to tip the scales my way,” more typical is “There I go / From a man to a memory / I wonder if / My fam will remember me,” rapped by Black Thought as Redford pictures his own funeral: the defiance we associate with the urban street outlaw gives way to a bleak self-awareness. That Redford is an idealized version of the street kid (your typical urban male of 2011 doesn’t name-check Hammurabi and Walter Cronkite) lends a doubly tragic perspective, as Redford stands in not simply for America’s racial problems, but for their intractability.
It’s the music, though, that puts this one over: not simply its expected high technical quality, but its firm thematic throughline: it begins with the Roots’ familiar deep-soul hip-hop, with ferocious kick-drum and tinkling synths, but moves through darker jazz territory, and then into its surprisingly quiet climax as Sufjan Stevens helps the Roots shape his song, “Redford,” into the album’s signature piece, followed by the ?uestlove/D.D. Jackson drum/piano free-jazz frenzy of “Will To Power.” The last track, “Finality,” for strings and piano, is maybe the only place where the album gets a bit too on-the-nose, but you’ll forgive the slight misstep of some easily-tugged heartstrings: by this time, the album has earned it and more.
BETTY WRIGHT AND THE ROOTS – BETTY WRIGHT: THE MOVIE
I’m actually just catching up on this November release and it seemed a propos to cover it as the sort of flip side of the Roots’ own new album: if Undun is reportage from the front lines, Betty Wright: The Movie is a fair and funky examination of the place that traditional soul music can still occupy in today’s R & B scene: “neo-soul” versus “retro.” And while Undun can be considered the more “important,” more intellectually provocative album, Betty Wright: The Movie is a rich, musically and emotionally satisfying experience.
Considering that Wright has sustained her career more as a vocal coach (for Janet Jackson and Joss Stone, among others) than as a performer, the opener, “Old Songs,” could feel like out-of-touch resentment at the success of those young whippersnappers with all their new-fangled “samples.” But her collaborators ain’t exactly spring chickens, either, and the Roots’ support is completely sympathetic without ever feeling musty or secondhand. Wright’s easy interplay with Snoop Dogg on “Real Woman” bridges the decades: its litany of advice to young men to find a woman with the right qualities is right out of “Take Time To Know Her” or “Only The Strong Survive.” But the 70’s get their due, too, with tracks like “Hollywould,” and the Roots pull off a smooth, uncannily exact Chic move on “In the Middle of the Game (Don’t Change the Play). ” Stone pays back her debt to her mentor with rugged harmony vocals on “Whisper in the Wind.” And how can you not fall in love with “Tonight Again,” Wright’s followup to 1975’s “Tonight is the Night”: “OK, grown folks’ music being’ played right now,” she tells us. “Put children to bed. This song goes out to all of you that blame every child you ever had on me! I know, because I meet all these little kids named Betty Wright after ‘Tonight is the Night.‘”
In contrast to the Roots’ quick-hitting 2008 collaboration with Al Green, though, Betty Wright: The Movie is a little long, and maybe a bit too much of a good thing; music this nostalgically evocative works better in smaller doses. On the other hand, if you asked me which track or tracks to live without to tighten things up, I’d be pushed for an answer.
AMY WINEHOUSE – LIONESS: HIDDEN TREASURES
It’s tempting to write off this set of mostly cover songs and alternate versions as low-hanging fruit that would be easy to market in the wake of the artist’s early, sensationalized passing. It was her scabrous personal honesty that set Winehouse apart from her neo-soul sisters, and while her idiosyncratic vocal style left its imprint on pretty much anything she attempted, if not for the searing frankness of songs like “You Know I’m No Good” and “Wake Up Alone” (not to mention “Rehab”), she’d have been Diana Krall with a substance abuse problem, and little more than a footnote in pop music. And there is supposedly some rougher, darker material from her last days that may yet see the light of day. But give your typical radio program director the Winehouse name attached to a familiar song without the word “fuck” in it, and it’s an instant-add.
Still, this isn’t one of those posthumous collections assembled by the marketing department. Producer Mark Ronson was as much responsible for the sound, if not the sense, of Back to Black, as Winehouse herself, along with co-producer Salaam Remi. With the added contributions of folks like Nas and ?uestlove (the man is everywhere this week), the album, though too often over-produced, works as a farewell to Winehouse as well as one from her.
Some of it’s kind of by-the-numbers stuff that I suspect would probably have wound up as bonus tracks for a future release (a peppy “Our Day Will Come,” a wrongheaded race through “The Girl From Ipanema,” alternate takes of “Tears Dry” and “Wake Up Alone”). And while the two previously-unreleased songs (“Between the Cheats” and “Like Smoke,” with a newly-added rap from Nas) are decent, it’s three of the covers that seal the deal. “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” and “Body and Soul” might have been written for (or, rather, by) Winehouse herself, and she certainly finds the core of desperate longing in each (even with Tony Bennett’s glib contribution to the latter). Not everything here is really Ronson’s meat, and his over-fussy arrangements are often just busy enough to distract from the vocals. Which, to be fair, might be the point: for the most part, these were originally not polished, commercial recordings, and Ronson’s trying to cover imperfections that would likely have disappeared in subsequent takes; I should also mention that those moments are among my favorites on the album. And if you’d tried to script a final message from this troubled woman, you’d have looked long and hard to find anything more a propos than Leon Russell’s “A Song For You”: “And when my life is over / Remember when we were together / We were alone / And I was singing this song for you.” Again, though, a pity that Ronson and Salmi had to lay on so much after-the-fact schmaltz (and the slurred studio chatter they left on at the end does Amy no favors either). The Amy Winehouse catalog is such a small one, though, that it has a place for this one, warts and all.
THE BLACK KEYS – EL CAMINO
The issue with “white-boy” blues has never really been its appropriation of black vocal or instrumental styles; rather, it’s the fact that the patriarchal litany of cheatin’ women wronging their hapless men plays more sympathetically coming out of the culture of America’s underclass than from that of the middle-class suburban white music geek. In other words, if Jimmy Reed is always looking for someone to blame, he may have a point; for guys like Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney, it can sound petty and self-satisfied. Typically, the white bluesman gets by, then, on musical virtuosity, where someone like Eric Clapton understands that a “Key to the Highway” is musical structure for him to build on, rather than first-hand experience, and why something like “Layla” works as a testament because it channels the bluesman’s emotions through pop synthesis, not some pale version of the supposedly “authentic” blues.
With the Black Keys, though, the point isn’t virtuosity: Auerbach revs up a helluva noise, but he’s closer in spirit to junk geniuses like Johnny Thunders or Billy Zoom than Clapton, and Carney’s pitiless drumming eschews the subtlety of a Bernard Purdie or Steve Jordan for the four-on-the-floor energy of Bonham. The strength of the Keys’ earliest music was the way it seemed to trick the ear into hearing a full-on show revue band in the spaces between the two musicians. Since moving over to Nonesuch, the attempt to actually build a band resulted in some fairly lifeless stuff (I couldn’t hum a song from Attack and Release if you paid me), and indeed when I saw them live a month or so ago, the portions of the show that featured just Dan and Patrick sounded every bit as full as (and far less compromised than) the numbers with added bass and keyboards. But Brothers showed them finally getting a handle on the concept, and for this album, producer Danger Mouse seems to have spent a bit of time re-listening to Thickfreakness and Chulahoma, because, sonically, El Camino is almost the reverse of Attack and Release: now, even the full band numbers sound stripped-down and to-the-point.
Opener “Lonely Boy” is as strong a follow-up to Brothers‘ unlikely breakthrough as you could have asked: a low hum of feedback gives way to a stomping piece of rock and roll anchored by what sounds like Auerbach de-tuning in mid-riff (imagine Richard Thompson playing Junior Kimbrough). When Mouse brings in the keyboards and backing vocals, they’re appropriately thin and a bit dirty: the whole album sounds as though it was produced to be heard on old AM car radios, or tinny close-n-play record players. “Dead and Gone” adds more production tricks, but it’s the insistent soul rhythm that drives it. The hookiness that makes these guys the favorites of TV advertisers continues on catchy gems like “Money Maker” and “Gold On the Ceiling,” but there are also hints of a worldview outside of Memphis and Chicago: “Sister” is a bit reminiscent of Television, while “Nova Baby” might be the result of a collision between the tour buses of Roxy Music and Oasis. And I leave it to the lawyers to explain how they got away with the blatant “Stairway to Heaven” rip “Little Black Submarines;” I just think it’s hilarious.
OTHER NOTABLE 12/6 RELEASES:
Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings – Soul Time! While Wright and the Roots may be making the case for neo-soul versus retro, this odds ‘n’ sods collection reminds us that Jones is fronting a formidable band with some of the finest horn charts and chicken-scratch guitar since JB’s glory days. And 2002’s “What If We All Stopped Paying Taxes” is of interest less for its continued timeliness than for Binky Griptite’s insane guitar breaks.
Fred Wesley & The J.B.’s – The Lost Album. In what is already a great week for soul, both retro and modern, the real find might actually be this one: the never-released full LP from James Brown’s legendary sideman, with a band consisting of Randy and Michael Brecker, Joe Farrell, Eddie Daniels, Steve Gadd, and Ron Carter, among others. You may know the one released single, “Watermelon Man” (with JB himself on drums), but six of the eight other cuts were never released in any format. In addition to some funky originals, the selections include JB’s “Get On The Good Foot”, Bill Withers’ “Use Me,” and the classic “Secret Love” (a recent hit for Billy Stewart at the time). A must for fans of 70’s jazz-funk.
Chevelle – Hats Off To The Bull. Nothing wrong with being on the Warped Tour: if it’s good enough for Reverend Peyton, it’s good enough for these Illini jamokes. Now if there was only a “Clap Yo’ Hands” or “Your Cousin’s on Cops” here. Maybe the Rev can spare a song or two for his buds.
Korn – The Path of Totality. The vocal harmonies remain teeth-grinding clichés, but these guys knew who Skrillex was before the Grammy voters did, so there’s that. And, as you’d expect, it doesn’t lack for power. Not exactly revolutionary, but a step or two away from the norm, so good for them. Doesn’t mean I’d listen to it twice, but at least I made it all the way through once.
The Maine – Pioneer. Teenage confusion carries you only so far, and gets a little awkward (not to say creepy) as you get older; the fact that these guys hail from the same place as the Gin Blossoms might be a cautionary factoid for them in future. But if “Time” or “Don’t Give Up On ‘Us'” came on the radio, you’d crank it up. Unfortunately, most of the rest of the album is bogged down in self-awareness with such on-the-nosers as “Like We Did (Windows Down)” and “While Listening To Rock & Roll”: if you have to TELL me to roll down the windows and rock out, it takes all the fun out of it.
Gary Numan – Dead Son Rising. Haven’t heard it yet, but the prospect of new Numan (so to speak) intrigues me.
Brad Mehldau – The Art of the Trio: Recordings 1996-2001. 7 CD’s tracing the evolution of Mehldau’s group, including bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jorge Rossy, that is setting the standard for modern jazz piano trio, with one CD of previously unreleased material.
A passel of NEW LIVE ALBUMS:
Elvis Costello – The Return of the Spectacular Spinning Songbook Super Deluxe Edition. The best part of this $260 set isn’t that Costello’s recent tour was one of his best, or that this limited 1500-copy edition comes with a souvenir book, bonus vinyl EP, poster, etc. No, the best part is that Costello went to the label’s website under an assumed online moniker and suggested that fans wait for the lower-price 2 CD version coming next year.
The Allman Brothers Band – S.U.N.Y. at Stonybrook 9/19/71. First general commercial CD release of one of the most revered live recordings among the Allman faithful, recorded just six weeks’ before Duane’s death. Also reissued on CD this week, One Way Out, a 2-disk live set from 2003.
The Cure – Bestival Live 2011. Impressive turnaround time for this show from last September, with proceeds going to the Isle Of Wight Youth Trust.
Emerson Lake & Palmer – Live at the Mar Y Sol Festival ’72. Honestly, are there any more ELP shows left to release on CD? No, wait– that was a rhetorical question!
Phish – Hampton/Winston-Salem ’97. Three shows, 45 songs, seven disks, eight hours.
Fleetwood Mac – Preaching the Blues. Live album from the post-Peter Green, pre-Bob Welch Mac with John McVie, Mick Fleetwood, Christine McVie, Jeremy Spencer and Danny Kirwan.
Just as I was finishing this column, I learned of the death, at age 80, of longtime Howlin’ Wolf guitarist Hubert Sumlin, who ranks with John Lee Hooker among the most influential guitarists to electrify the country style of blues guitar. Though the Howlin’ Wolf box set that I covered recently would certainly stand as the ideal tribute, Sumlin also released a fine 2005 solo album, About Them Shoes, with contributions from Keith Richards and Levon Helm, among others.
TONY’S PLAYIN’ GAMES – WITH TONY RYAN (obviously)!
MARIO KART 7 (3DS)
If I can’t punch the person that just shrunk me, I’m not interested in Mario Kart. Hand held Mario Kart just doesn’t have that thrill. Playing against a group of faceless strangers online just isn’t the same as playing with friends. Mostly because you can’t throw shit at faceless strangers. And Nintendo goes out of their way to make it hard for me to insult some stranger’s mom. If only Nintendo would catch up with the times and implement some sort of system that gave me the home address of everyone who hit me with a blue shell.
THE OREGON TRAIL (Wii, 3DS)
Now the whole family can die of Malaria in 3D. Fuck you, Malaria.
THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN: THE GAME (PS3, 360, Wii, DS)
Of course this exists and is coming out on everything. Also – don’t be surprised when it’s terrible.
OTHER GAMES:
Final Fantasy VI. Well, a crappy version on PSN. But really, if you don’t own a copy of Final Fantasy VI, go grab one. It could be the crappy PSN one or the really, really solid GBA port. It doesn’t matter. You can now pretty much play it on anything and it’s Final Fantasy VI. Still the best game in the series, and almost infinity repayable. We’re the middle of a two-month span with almost no games coming up, save for some low-key Star Wars game.
FIN.