What do arrows sound like? They sound like awesome.
Welcome to a new, and possibly recurring feature on Spinning Platters, Not Necessarily New Release Tuesday. In this, I’ll recommend some new music to listen to. Some of these will be actual new releases, but not necessarily. I’ll also be including recently discovered imports, leaked albums, and rediscovered music as well. Sometimes I’ll just try to get you to listen to a forgotten record that I love. Since this is a new feature, I’ll be making it up as I go along so I absolutely want your feedback; therefore, please comment below and together we can make this the best Spinning Platters recurring feature ever. (Take that, Weekly Guide to Bay Area Concerts!) Continue reading “Not Necessarily New Release Tuesday, 11/8/2011”
The longevity of Weird Al Yankovic’s career will always boggle my mind. He’s been recording for over 30 years, and has consistently remained one of the most easily recognizable faces in America for most of that time. He is currently touring to support his 13th studio album, Alpocalypse, and its companion DVD, The Alpocalypse Tour, and this tour included a very, very rare Bay Area tour stop. (This is only his second time playing here since 1997!)
If there is one subject that art constantly draws its attention to, it is love. It is a beautiful and terrible thing, utterly perplexing and impossible to define or simplify, and poets, painters, writers and musicians the world over have attempted its expression for a long as human history can recall. It is a funny concept, because it often takes the joyful, numbing jitters one feels in moments of tender intimacy, and pairs them up with the glorious, whooping sensation of a fiery passion to run to rooftops and scream your newfound devotion to the world below. Artists who know and have felt these moments of indescribable sense have done their best to bring forth their craft and communicate both sides of that spectrum, and everything in between, in their chosen mediums. It stands to reason, therefore, that two artists, both experts at their craft and both devotedly, passionately in love with another, will craft some of the most fantastic, loud and rambunctious work, while also taking moments of elegant poise, and charmingly stumbling between the two along the way. Such a scene was set and displayed with jubilant wonder by the couple that graced San Francisco with their presence for two separate nights: literary and screen writer Neil Gaiman, author of American Gods, Stardust and Coraline; and his wife, mindbending songmistress Amanda Palmer, the frontwoman of The Dresden Dolls.
Just about two weeks shy of one year ago today, a hotly rumored about Wild Flag embarked on their first tour. Nobody new what to expect. Yes, we knew what the pieces were, and most of the people in this band have played together before. As we know from history, without even a single note on a myspace page, they managed to sell out every venue they played along the west coast, melting faces off in each town. This time the band has done some of the more traditional things, like put out a record. (Mind you, one of the best reviewed records of 2011, the self titled Wild Flag) On this chilly November night, the good people of San Francisco were treated to their second ever dosing of Wild Flag. If you weren’t in attendance, which was a rather silly decision to make, after the jump, I will tell you what you missed.
With a musical movement like metal, being significant, staying relevant, and still having room to experiment while perfecting your craft is always a difficult combination of skills to possess. The genre calls for solid commitment to unyielding volume, viciously downtuned notes and hellish distortion, with vocals that span from the powerful to the deranged, and lyrics that cross a general spectrum of darkness, mayhem, and more-than-mild discontent. To introduce any additional elements into this equation makes a solution extremely difficult to arrive at, but for the Atlanta metal masterminds of Mastodon, experimentation is simply the bolt of lightning that breathes life into their compositions, which have not at all dwindled in their ferocity from album to album.
Few films have nailed the invincible excitement of young love with the giddy, wrenching precision of Like Crazy. The third feature film in as many years from director Drake Doremus, the film stars Anton Yelchin (The Beaver) and Felicity Jones (The Tempest) as Jacob and Anna, a young couple that meet while attending college together in southern California. When they discover their mutual attraction, they immediately understand the obstacle in their path – Anna is British and only in the U.S. on a student visa – but as they fall deeper and deeper into the first throes of romance, Anna decides to throw caution to the wind and stay with Jacob a few months past the expiration of her visa. Despite the instant gratification this choice provides, it will lead to lasting, disastrous consequences. The film works as a romantic drama as well as a terrifying cautionary tale about the dangers of abusing a student visa.
John Cho and Kal Penn in A VERY HAROLD & KUMAR 3D CHRISTMAS
John Cho recently had a fairly perfect San Francisco day. The Berkeley graduate, 39, was in town with his family during fleet week, observing its many air shows. “It was very loud,” he says. “If I lived here, I would have been really annoyed. But I was visiting, so it was fun.” And if Cho lived here, there’s at least one place you’d have a good chance of finding him: “That Embarcadero thing – you guys don’t know how good you have it. The eating there is ridiculous. I found a three-hour parking spot, then we went to Yank Sing, had dim sum, walked to the Embarcadero, got more yummies, watched the planes, then came back. It was kinda perfect.”
Tonight is an experiment. A record by the odd pairing of Velvet Underground leader Lou Reed and bay area metal titans Metallica. I’ve tried hard to avoid any press or tracks from this record, so this will be as fresh as possible. I am not a fan of either act. I do consider the Velvet Underground to be one of the most important bands ever, and much of Reed’s solo work is fine. I even enjoyed some elements of elements of 2003’s The Raven. As for Metallica, I think that Master Of Puppets and Ride The Lightning are great records, but I haven’t liked much after that. I will admit that I don’t consider St Anger to be absolute garbage. I love the drum sounds on that album, but the songwriting could use some editing.
Anyways, keep refreshing, because I will be updating this throughout my entire listening experience. I don’t know what to expect from this, but I hope you enjoy it:
One night a year, the darkest of spirits and the most mysterious of characters are summoned into the world at large to frighten, to amaze, to baffle, to worry, but definitely to excite the forces of peace that remain calm for the other 364 days. Rarely is there a better occasion for the spooky and the sibilant to make themselves known than on Halloween Night. In accordance with the popular holiday adage, however, it is always best to have some treats to go along with your tricks, and for the haunting act known as The Soft Moon, there was no better occasion to host their showcase of apocalyptic rhythms, droning dance pulses, and howling shrieks, all while bathed in a hellish display of strobing lights and unearthly projections. If ever there was a band better suited to usher in a new movement of smartly dark and morbidly interesting music, it would definitely be this San Francisco trio.
