“Fembots are human too,” according to a retro-cyber standout track on Robyn’s new Body Talk Pt. 1, but you wouldn’t know it from the electropop bobblehead’s impeccably-paced show, which made Kelis’s look like a half-hearted promotional appearance.
The last time I saw Of Montreal was over a decade ago, at a modest festival in St. Louis, Missouri. The music hasn’t stuck with me, beyond a general impression of a ‘90s version of the ‘60s version of the ’20s, but I recall that the show’s “theatrical” element was…
Rioting grrrlishly on singles like “Oh Bondage! Up Yours!” and “Identity” (“When you see yourself/Does it make you scream?”) a generation before Kathleen Hanna uncapped her first Sharpie, were one of a handful of bands to turn English punk’s scouring negativity to feminist ends.
During a recent reading from The World As Phone Bill, his first collection of essays after several books of poetry, Stan Apps interrupted himself to explain something about the title piece: “This started with some good ideas and sophisticated language, but I kept dumbing it down and dumbing it down….So now it’s incomprehensible, but at least it’s really accessible.”
Last May, NBC’s Parks and Recreation ended its second season with a cliffhanger: Would the Parks Department of Pawnee, Indiana fall victim to draconian budget cuts administered by state auditors Adam Scott (Party Down’s Ben Wyatt) and Chris Trager (Rob Lowe, in the sharpest ‘80s-icon stunt casting this side of Wynona Ryder’s turn in The Black Swan)?
Even though the presence of outside lyricists pulls against the most obvious autobiographical readings, Dark Night of the Soul sometimes treats these concerns with a self-awareness and gallows humor it’s difficult not to trace back to Linkous himself, as when Iggy Pop himself, rock’s paradoxically indestructible cartoon hero of self-destructiveness, is employed to intone “pain, pain, pain, I’ll always be in pain.”
In the park, dead ends and doublings-back amplify the aimlessness of the dialogue, which ranges over immediate phenomena (“Do you like how backs of benches catch a glow from streetlamps?”), roommate stories, and wooly summaries of Aristotle’s and Wittgenstein’s views of language.
Ida Lupino’s on-screen career stretched from early’-30s ingénue roles in her native England to a 1977 Charlie’s Angels guest shot, so it’s inevitable that MOMA’s retrospective of her films (which begins today) is selective, even leaving out some defining performances (High Sierra, Out of the Fog) from her noir-centric 1940s peak at Warner Bros.
It isn’t a secret: Gene McDaniels, an unthreatening song stylist who scored several hits just before Beatlemania struck, and Eugene McDaniels, a Black Power militant who released two radicalized funk-soul albums in the early ‘70s, are one and the same.
To call Wavves’ King of the Beach (Fat Possum) a cleaner, more considered affair than the band’s first two albums is to say very little. 2008’s self-titled cassette-turned-CD and 2009’s Wavvves were the kinds of records it’s good to know that near-teenagers still make, whether one actually cares to listen to them or not…