Category: Music
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26 Albums I’m Told I Should Remove From My Collection
Chalkills, the XTC fansite, wants to help you sift through the detritus of your music collection, pronto: One Hundred Albums You Should Remove from Your Collection Immediately (spotted on DGMLive). I own (or once owned) a whopping 26% of these overrated (so they say) canonical classics! Hey, Chalkhills, what did I ever do to you? […]
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Sebastian Schrade’s tour documentary Low in Europe
I came late to appreciating Low, but they have since become one of my favorite bands. I was vaguely aware that trainspotting music critics had christened a genre to categorize bands like Low: slowcore, the distinguishing characteristics of which being playing very quietly and slowly. An overgeneralization, it turns out, but it never hurts to […]
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The Musical Box recreates Genesis’ Black Show at Highline Ballroom, New York
The Musical Box is a Canadian group that stages elaborate recreations of entire concerts given by the English progressive rock band Genesis in the early 1970s. They perform closely-observed note-for-note cover versions of the original songs, in the original set list order, with full recreations of the set design, props, costumes, vintage instruments, and even […]
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Blue Man Group: The Complex Rock Tour Live
This blogger may have to burn his Rock Snob card, for I just watched and enjoyed the Blue Man Group concert film The Complex Rock Tour Live. I’d long assumed that the Blue Man Group’s seemingly permanent residency on Lafayette Street in downtown Manhattan was some kind of tourist trap like Mars 2112 or Jekyll […]
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U2 in a state called vertigo: U23D
U23D is actually a fairly traditional concert movie, a mostly straight-up filmed record of a representative show of a single tour. U2 had already produced one theatrical feature film about themselves (1988’s Rattle and Hum), and released numerous productions on video and DVD before and since. So what could have been just another video of […]
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Everything You Know is Wrong: U2: Zoo TV Live From Syndey
If I could build a time machine to take me to see any band in history, it would be a trip to the early 90s to catch U2 at any point along their legendary Zoo TV tour. New to DVD, director David Mallet’s Zoo TV: Live From Sydney documents the lads’ performance in Sydney during […]
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Joseph Arthur with special guest Michael Stipe, live at Bowery Ballroom, New York, 2006
I hope to post my reactions soon, but the five stars should give a hint as to my general feelings. In the meantime, here’s some coverage of the show on the web: The Tripwire’s review features excellent photographs by Erin Chandler. Billboard also reviews the show and posts a video of Joseph’s duet with Michael […]
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Yo La Tengo perform live to Jean Painlevé’s Science is Fiction in Prospect Park, 2006
Hoboken institution Yo La Tengo performs a live score to several of French filmmaker Jean Painlevé’s underwater documentaries. Interestingly, English subtitles indicate the films were apparently not silent in their original form, with narration and perhaps scores of their own. So not only is the audience’s experience of the films filtered through a spoken-French-to-written-English translation, […]
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Drew Thomas’ 2006 documentary Coachella
I don’t normally review music DVDs on this blog, but since Drew Thomas’ 2006 documentary Coachella received a theatrical release in Europe, I thought it deserved a mention. It’s a rare concert film that is as interested in the concertgoers and the character of the event itself as in simply capturing the performances. Favorite moments: […]
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A Brief Word on R.E.M.
Being an unapologetic iPod/iTunes addict, I’m not too ashamed to announce I just finished ripping all of my R.E.M. cds. So this is blogworthy exactly how, you ask? Well, I was moved to post here because, all told, it amounts to over 28 hours of music. 28 HOURS! Isn’t that amazing? On second thought, I […]