Music Review: Devo, SOMETHING FOR EVERYBODY

Question: Are we not an '80s novelty act performing "Whip It" to die-hard fans on an endless reunion tour through Europe, Japan and Australia?

Answer: We are middle-aged Devo!

SOMETHING FOR EVERYBODY, Devo's first studio album in twenty years is sure to darken the pupils of seriously affected de-evolution believers. Although every song seems a commercially infused variation on their big 1980 hit, "Whip It" the album offers enough sonic retardation - wobbling sheets of aluminum, computer sound glitches, spud boy yelping - to satisfy even the casual devotee. A strict adherence to '80s new wave - lots of synth keyboard and mechanic-like percussion - gives the album an impossibly organic sound like we never left the decade.



"Later Is Now" borrows the opening bars of The Who's "Baba O'Reilly" and gently steers into a Talk Talk melody that recalls the best of '80s radio. "Siren Ready" offers an adrenalin charged vocal track that sounds like a competitive driver weaving through traffic in downtown Afghanistan. "What We Do" has a guitar grind over a dopey, middle-aged view on mortality, ("eenie, meenie, minee, mo"), and "Sumthin'" is an addictive foot-to-the-pedal rocker with shaking wobbling aluminum presenting the state of democracy as a gilded jewel offering "something for everybody".


Often these songs are quickly digested and short on mental afterglow although the catchy rhythms of "Later Is Now" and "Sumthin'" have found a permanent home in my melody maker mind. You won't be chanting the moronic and militant "Jocko Homo" from their first album anytime soon again or pondering the state of de-evolution as a feasible scientific philosophy as these songs serve mostly as short punchy radio anthems.

Blame the commercial art of it on the tracks being voted for inclusion to the album by fans at the Club Devo internet site where a more radical song like "Signal Ready" didn't make the final cut. Devo remedied the situation by releasing three versions of the album - Standard Version, Song Study Version, and Deluxe Version - with different sequencing and exclusive tracks on each. A vinyl edition is due in July.

Devo have always been best considered an intellectual joke not to be taken too seriously and never to be dismissed as a passing novelty despite the anti-contaminant body suits, energy dome caps and a week's duty as co-hosts of "The Mike Douglas Show" in the early '80s, (John Lennon they are not). Their debut album from 1978, the Brian Eno produced Q: ARE WE NOT MEN? A: WE ARE DEVO! is a slaughterhouse pop masterpiece and remains one of new wave's finest moments. Since then their albums have been hit or miss and SOMETHING FOR EVERYBODY mostly hits like a tireless energy bunny.

Theatre Review: I AM HAMLET, at the Subversive Theatre Collective

I AM HAMLET is part rock opera, part puppet theatre, and part cinema, yet it's still a staged working of Shakespeare's "Hamlet", as told by a jester. In this production, the Danish prince, suspecting his mother and stepfather of murder, struts to a nearby standing microphone and belts out a rock music song just about the time he'd be delivering an anguished soliloquy in a more traditional production.

His unfortunate fiance, Ophelia, clutches flowers and skips merrily across the stage, (picture Porky Pig's girlfriend Petunia at her most coy), and belts out her own righteous babe song as if in answer to Meatloaf's "Paradise By The Dashboard Lights", while gleefully shaking her tush in the direction of her forlorn lover.

Meanwhile, Hamlet's father's ghost appears, cued by spooky sound effects, dressed as if he assaulted the wardrobe rack at a Japanese Noh theatre production, and lip-speaks to a heavily produced taped recording. This bit goes on for some time. Derroch and Dan Death, the gravediggers, are tacky Halloween hand puppets animated by the only actor on stage. This is "Hamlet" performed by a single actor.

It may be true that the word, "ham", an actor who steals the spotlight, is derived from the play's title. In I AM HAMLET we watch an actor's subconscious anxiety while playing the role manipulate every aspect of the play, reducing all around him to insignificance.

Ophelia's father, Polonius, wearing a rubbery grotesque mask, has never before seemed such a genuinely funny character. The once martyred and righteous player is now a buffoon, and his death scene is a hilarious comedy only altered from the traditional play by a funny face.

Ophelia is no longer the delicate flower overpowered with depression, but a dumb blond who jumps into the river to allow Hamlet more freedom on the stage. The ghost, maybe Shakespeare's most towering character, looks as though he could be hosting a third rate children's television show on local TV. Only the Ham himself manages to gnaw the woodwork of earnest and limited acting. He's succeeded in eliminating everyone else from the stage.

The production is not simply played for laughs, although it certainly isn't serious Shakespeare either. Actor/performer Brian Morey and director Joe Siracusa have given us "Hamlet" splattered with a vaudevillian pop art. It may touch upon the profound but cerebral merit is soon swept away by the fine but sparse Broadway-like original music, (picture a small scale Shakespearean "Rent"), sung most exceptionally by Morey, and the sheer audacity of this foolish man delivering "Hamlet" as though his life depended on it.

If it does have meaning it may lie in the dead skull of the jester Yorick, ("Alas, poor Yorick"), who in this production should be grinning like a crazed jack-o-lantern. Morey glides through each scene with a magician's sleight of hand, creating a natural rhythm that eludes the absence of actors on the stage.

His King Claudius is a little heavy on the Peter O'Toole, and the production's "play within a play" jarringly projected on a movie screen and a bit long in the tooth, is such an abrupt change of circus rings you half expect a hot dog vendor to come hawking through the aisle. Still, this first-rate joke is a whole lot better than second rate Shakespeare.

I AM HAMLET plays at the Subversive Theatre Collective at The Manny Fried Playhouse, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays through June 5 in Buffalo, New York.

Music Review: Peter Frampton, THANK YOU MR. CHURCHILL

You want to party like it's 1976? Peter Frampton's new album, THANK YOU MR. CHURCHILL, has enough guitar riffs and musical hooks to rival the pleasures of his celebrated FRAMPTON COMES ALIVE album, still the fourth biggest selling live album in America. While CHURCHILL offers a more rocking COMES ALIVE vibe, it doesn't sound like yesterday's clunky 8-track and there's not a talking box to be heard. It's a breezy bit of serious rock and roll in the classic rock vein that fits nicely among the sons of grunge and teeny-bopper kiddie cocktail music that fills today's radio.

Not that you can expect to hear any of it on the radio even as "Invisible Man" from the album is currently the number six single on the classic rock best sellers list, (it takes a satellite radio connection to realize such a list even exists). It's a catchy Motown inspired rocker, think The Four Tops not so much The Temptations, that may lay evidence to what I've always suspected: Frampton is an unaccredited session player on scores of hit records - "I'm pulling the strings in the shadows behind the scenes. I'm keeping the beat, before you know it you'll be on your feet dancing in the street.", he sings invoking the pleasant beat of Smoky Robinson's "Tears Of A Clown".

It's a tight rocker but not as efficient a hit single as the cutesy titled "I'm Due A You", with a 'do-what-you-do-wah-do' lyrical atmosphere underscored by a foreboding darkness with happily infectious guitar riffs. Steely Dan at their most paranoid contemplative moments come to mind - "emotionally overdrawn, the check's in the mail, something is creeping across the lawn, my stalker's out of jail.".

While the title track seems an impersonal and clumsy sentiment, (Frampton claims he is thanking Churchill for ending WWII so his father can return and impregnate his mother, so he may be born, he may as well be thanking the milk man), "Vaudeville Nanna and The Banjole" is a soft spoken reminiscence of his first affair with a crude stringed instrument, a memory that serves as a nuclei to his life, longing for "guitars behind glass that I wanted to play". The seven minutes plus instrumental, "Suite Liberte" combines surf rock lullaby with blues guitar licks in a simple elegant invitation to every fledgling guitarist to pick up your guitar and play along.

Elsewhere the album rides a wave of competent rockers featuring Frampton's fiery and jagged playing, ("Road To The Sun" especially rocks), and testimonial ballads that find him an ever maturing lyricist forever embedded in rock culture.

Peter Frampton, legendary 16 year old guitar player of beloved British blues rock band Humble Pie, proven songwriter and hit maker, seasoned musician and sudden overnight sensation, time weary traveler of the humble concert trail, Grammy award winning composer of the 2007 rock instrumental, FINGERPRINTS, is still punching the clock of the music we love that is rock and roll. So who do you got to blow away on guitar to be inducted into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?

in reference to: Music Review: Peter Frampton - Thank You Mr. Churchill - Page 2 - Blogcritics Music (view on Google Sidewiki)

RECORD STORE DAY

April 17 was Record Store Day. It's celebrated the third Saturday every April. This year marked its third anniversary. It was conceived by a record store employee to celebrate the unique culture of the nearly abolished and newly resurgent independently owned record store. It has grown into a minor cultural phenomena with several recording labels releasing major records in minimum quantity on Record Store Day. It was parodied on this past weekend's "Saturday Night Live". This year's crop is the biggest and best yet with unique one of a kind and reissued records from Leonard Cohen, Depeche Mode, Bob Dylan, The Flaming Lips, Green Day, Modest Mouse, New Order, Pavement, Radiohead, Sonic Youth, Bruce Springsteen, John Lennon, Talking Heads, Tom Waits, Wilco, Neil Young, and nearly countless others.So I ventured out early driving to Jamestown, NY to hit my first record store, Townhouse Records on East 4th Street downtown. I've never been. It's small. So small that I kept tripping on crates of records that were scewed about and bumping my head into things that were hanging. It's a more records through the hippie bead archway sort of place. The three or four young men who worked there, (or maybe they were living there), didn't so much as greet me when I walked in to what looked like a private bedroom under construction with records, records, records! After a deadly silence I summoned a "Hello!", to which they responded. Mind you, it felt like I walked into somebody's home.So I got my bearings and navigated through the store and it's a pretty cool store, with record player collectibles in eye-catching spots, and when I say record player collectibles, I mean crafted replicas of record players, like Hummel, or bigger, or those spooky snow babies. And much cooler, unknown, nearly antique loving replicas of the phonograph. Still I couldn't grasp this store. Not understanding in a few moments the layout, and trying to land in a comfort zone, and truly stepping over mounds of stuff with every step in every direction I anchored on the punk section which was woefully small given this castle of records. My mission was to find the Record Store Day records under a code of silence. All the workers, so close to me I could have reached out and slapped them, were indulged in a constant superficial conversation. I would say personal conversation but it was too dull to be personal. They were annoying. They kept buzzing by me with stacks of records, yacking, yacking, yacking. Mind you, we are all in the same small room. And I left my glasses in the car and I can't read the fine print without them. So I have to leave this intimate situation and then return. Mind you, this is a second story 'townhouse' through a door at the end of a dilapidating hallway like you're gonna meet a guy named 'Mike'. And I think I'm the only customer but I'm not sure. There were four of them, walking in and out the door yacking, yacking, yacking, and after awhile I couldn't tell if they worked there or not. At least one of them seemed versatile enough to be record store worker, owner, customer, and friend from the neighborhood rolled into one. But I felt funny about leaving and coming back, like they'll think, he leaves he comes back he's gonna kill us all with a gun, so I announce, "I am leaving but I will be right back". They took no notice like one of them could have said, "is there someone in the room with us?".I found the Record Store section, and it was a humble and proud little group. I suppose it costs these small independent record stores to supply the new releases on Record Store Day and while a lot is offered in limited quantities from the record labels, each store has only a share dependent on the size and success of the store. Perfectly understandable, and the kid's face lit up when he told me I was looking at a Record Store Day exclusive. It was a reissue of TV ON THE RADIO's 2008 release on vinyl. I have it on CD. I really wanted to buy a Record Store exclusive off these guys, the most humble store I visited but I was anxious to leave. They kept standing around blocking the records while browsing them, yacking, yacking, yacking. And they kept greeting each other with an absolutely serious, "Happy Record Store Day", sounding like an exchange between committed Communists. I did buy some old records - The Alarm, "Electric Folklore Live", ( I played it and it is in pristine condition with poster, even as I am the last Alarm fan), Sly and The Family Stone, "Back on The Right Track", (it skipped), and David Bowie, "Tonight", often cited as his worst album ever. Great price and they gave me three protective record sleeves. But no cookie. There was a plate of them freshly baked at the register, certainly in honor of Record Store Day, and I was sort of munchie, and they looked good, but I was not going to reach over and just take a cookie from what may have been some-one's lunch. My eyes on the cookies must have expressed fascination, hunger, delight. Yes, I would like a cookie, thank you very much. Dude, your arm goes flinging uncontrollably at your side, you pick up the plate of cookies, you smile, and you say, would you like a cookie? To your only customer.

















Several hours later I drove into Buffalo to visit Spiral Scratch Records on Delaware Avenue, another record store I've never been. Here is a familiar record store - small and dark, with characters out of a Crumb comic book hunched over prized gold. Like the hushed word is we're about to be raided but everything's cool. The RSD (Record Store Day) selections were greater than in Townhouse. But not quite what I wanted. The guy browsing next to me said it, - "this is so not a day to be spending 30 bucks on a record. " Yes, be selective. I still had a third store to visit. I bought a Canadian punk compilation, Canadian Relics, a seven inch vinyl record that I now love, for pittance. I was determined to buy at least one RSD album at my next stop.




But more trouble. I parked on the road right in front of the store and some jerk parked his car illegally just an inch in front of me, and I was wedged in. Oh, I know this. Somebody likes me and they made it so I couldn't leave my parking space, and I'd be forced to talk with them. This trouble follows me everywhere. God knows what trouble I've caused myself this time. Surely my sarcasm is evident.


So I go back into the record store and I yell, "Who's the asshole that blocked me in?". Well, only in my brutish fantasy. Actually I worked those wheels and tires like a surgeon removing a sliver. I went sideways out of my parking space. It took me several minutes what with traffic bombarding me every inch. The nerve of some people.


Record Theatre was like the plaza suite of RSD stores. Both locations had a live band playing every hour, and the place was mobbed. Pennsylvania & Gold, an alt-Americana outfit were playing when I was there. A nice version of Dylan's "One More Cup of Coffee". I've been going to Record Theatre since I was a teenager. At the University Plaza location they had a slew of RSD merchandise. Still I somehow left Record Store Day 2010 without any designated merchandise. Now I'll probably do what I do every year after RSD - buy the records on ebay for much more than they cost on RSD. I had a list of all the offerings this year and my favorites just weren't in stock at these locations.



Pennyslvania & Gold at Record Theatre, Record Store Day 2010

I really ragged on the guys from Townhouse Records. I love the store and I will be back to buy more records as soon as my horse comes in. It was an amusing surreal experience and I enjoyed joking about it, and I relish my time there. After all, I can be an intimidating presence and it was the first hour of Record Store Day, nerves were frayed...

"You got to be young and never grow old, it's the golden age of rock 'n roll"
Mott the Hoople

MATT POND PA, The Dark Leaves

Matt Pond PA, may have stayed too long in the woods. Their earthy landscape of harvest moons and shadowy creeks harboring folk-goth songs of sorrow and lust has sustained them through nine albums. Their newest, THE DARK LEAVES doesn't depart from the cello driven forested parlor music they are identified with or singer, lyricist, and only constant band member Matt Pond's woeful meanderings in which his sad and weary view often struck a gentle nerve of alienation and heartache, ("The Hollows" from the MEASURE album is exciting and mournful). In THE DARK LEAVES the cloying lyrics, ("how it kills me, oh love kills me") and same old sound, like chamber music led by a pop star, finally sounds only dreary.

Given the band's narrow scope the songs here are quite diverse. "Remains" features a mesmerizing electric keyboard against a marching gospel-like ballad, "Winter Fawn" sounds like Roger Waters' "Grandchester Meadows" as a wind-up squeaky toy, and "Specks" has a go-tell-it-on-the-mountain fiddle with a echoed Springsteen yelp. But the stuff is getting maddeningly tiresome due to Pond's increasingly metaphoric lyrics set mostly against a moonlit country creek in which we waded, we swam, we frolicked, and now we want to get the hell out of these woods. New ground needed to be unearthed and we don't even go deeper into the hollow as the album flickers with interest via warm musical passages but extinguishes itself in a monotonous vibe.

The album may pass the mental hum test as parts of it gently breeze through my mind hours after hearing it, but still it's got no bite, no stinging refrain, too much salt in the wound and not enough tongue. It's lovely, just not lovely enough. Even the title of the album, The Dark Leaves, the dark departs, like there's got to be a morning after, leaves the most unimaginative of thoughts. I liked Matt Pond PA so much more when I thought they were a place, and not a person in Pennsylvania.

MOVIE: The Ghost Writer

Kim Cattrall and Ewan McGregor in Polanski's THE GHOST WRITER

Roman Polanski's new film, THE GHOST WRITER is a suspeseful if conventional espionage thriller along the paranoid lines of such 1970s cinema as ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN and THE PARALLAX VIEW in which American institutions like the CIA and the Secret Service are seen as nothing short of the scariest movie monster since Godzilla.

Written by Polanski and Robert Harris from his novel, the film tells the intriguing story of a Tony Blair-inspired retired British Prime Minister, Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan), who hires a ghost writer, (Ewan McGregor) to finish rewriting his memoirs after the previous ghost writer he hired dies unexpectedly and maybe mysteriously before the manuscript is completed. As the nameless ghost writer moves into the Martha's Island winter retreat where the former Prime Minister is holed up while finishing his book, there is a public outcry and accusation that the former British politician is responsible for the kidnapping of terror suspects and their subsequent torture by the CIA.

As in his previous works like ROSEMARY'S BABY, THE TENANT, and BITTER MOON, Polanski is a craftsman at building suspense based not on cinematography but on a screenplay. This taut topical thriller is standard storytelling yet the audience finds itself ingrained in the plot and anxious for the next development which offers profound conviction and subtle, ever growing suspense as thrilling as a protagonist dangling from the precipice of a cliff. While it doesn't empower the viewer as those 1970s films that proved engrossing enough to contribute to the removal of a U.S. President, it does leave us asking, just short of hopelessly, if we are indeed enslaved to the global powers that be.

The casting of several unlikely actors in key roles gives the film an eerie recognition as if Polanski is familiarizing us with headlines from our own times. Kim Cattrall, Samantha on TV's SEX AND THE CITY, is smashing and indeed an actress as Lang's right hand woman. Jim Belushi - yes, the sitcom star - is momentarily unrecognizable as a completely bald publishing boss, and the eternally young Timothy Hutton is a mild-mannered, possibly sinister lawyer. Aged character actor Eli Wallach is gritty and colorful, but seen too briefly as a local oddball possessing a link to the mystery.

THE GHOST WRITER is not the grand motion picture Polanski's THE PIANIST was, but it is entertaining and thoughtful and drawn from the hand of a director who at 76 years old can still spellbind his audience.

in reference to: Movie Review: The Ghost Writer (2010) - Blogcritics Video (view on Google Sidewiki)

THEATRE REVIEW, Macbeth, The New Phoenix

One of the three withches in New Phoenix Theatre on the Park's production of MACBETH forcefully and accidentally rammed into my leg as she squirmed and gesticulated at the feet of the audience while prophesying the splendor and doom of the would-be-king Macbeth. The witch, played by a male actor hunching like a manic cat, clucking like a bewitched hen, crouching so close to me I could have used her as a footstool, looked up at me and hissed after clobbering my shin with her full body weight. I managed a polite smile. Later when a sword was slammed to the ground after a valiant bit of swashbuckling, it did a sort of bounce on its handle and landed with a crash just inches from another audience member. Thse poor players were eager to convey the murderous rage of power-hungry Macbeth and I suppose we were fortunate enough to leave the theatre fairly uninjured.

The production's minimalist set design - a chair here, a lantern there - the spare costumes in goth black with red drape signifying royalty, and the intimate but small stage space demanded a strong verbal resonance from the actors which they delivered like the hushed secrecy of a candlelight storytelling. The stage was set, indeed emptied for something wicked coming as the players routinely and creatively performed this darkest drama with as much enthusiastic spirit as children playing from a costume trunk in a spooky attic.

The pervertedly devoted Macbeth and Lady Macbeth (Brian Riggs and Kate LoConti), plotting to inherit the royal crown of Scotland through murderous deeds, played off one another brilliantly displaying a hateful dance of rage and lust, confronting and comforting each other like caged injured animals while violently kissing and coiling thier clamped embraced bodies together in what seemed less a display of heated emotion than of erotic asphyxiation. The acrobatic tumbling witches (watch out for that body slam) looked at times to be playing a wildly complex game of Twister and successfully created a goofy sort of mysticism meets yoga. The swordplay was exceptional and offered relief in the form of exciting choreographed movement when interrupting the increasingly intense tragedy.

Occasionally the players lost themselves in the deep anguish of their speeches, and words became whimpers, shrieks and squeals. Macbeth particularly, with his back turned and far into the depths of his tormented psyche, was often indiscernible. Yet his broken physical stance spoke measures.

Seating on all four sides of the stage left a glaring red light directly in my sight path forcing me to cup my hand over my eyes to see the action on stage before it landed in my lap. A lighting design error maybe, but the suspense of the story heightened with the emergence of a player silhouetted against a blazing sunset. Hence, horrible shadow! The nine-member cast accomodated the 30-plus characters in the play with efficient and casual costume alteration: acquiring a limp, throwing on a hat, affixing a pair of glasses, sometimes in mid-scene, creating a bit of a Mad Hatter identity crisis. This too only added to the charm of this hands-on, grassroots, and devoted production.

Directed by Kelli Bocock-Natale, this fine dose of Shakespeare plays at the New Phoenix on the Park in Buffalo, New York on Thursday, Fridays and Saturdays at 8PM through April 10. Thursday night performances are pay-what-you-can.

in reference to: http://blogcritics.org/culture/article/theater-review-buffalo-ny-macbeth-at/page-2/ (view on Google Sidewiki)