CDs:
U2 “No Line on the Horizon”
Bruce Springsteen “Working on a Dream”
Depeche Mode “Sounds of the Universe”
Adele “19”
Afghan Whigs “Congregation”
Magnetic Fields “Distortion”
Cave In “Perfect Pitch Black”

DVDs:
Slumdog Millionaire
Milk
Get Smart
Good Night and Good Luck

new + upcoming releases

6/2

311-Uplifter
Elvis Costello – Secret, Profane and Sugar cane
Dave Matthews Band – Whiskey and the Groogrux King
Iggy Pop – Preliminaries
Drop Dead Gorgeous – The Hot N’ Heavy
Eels – Hombre Lobo: 12 Songs of Desire
Rancid – Dominoes Fall
Taking Back Sunday – New Again
Revolutionary Road - DVD
Defiance - DVD
He’s Just Not That Into You - DVD


6/9

Sonic Youth – The Eternal
Anti-Flag – People Or The Gun
Black Eyed Peas – The E.N.D.
The Dead Weather – Horehound
Iron Maiden – Flight 666 (Live)
Lil Wayne – Rebirth
Placebo – Battle For The Sun
Gran Torino - DVD
The International - DVD

6/16

Incubus – Monuments and Melodies (Greatest Hits)
Spinal Tap – Back From The Dead


6/23
The Mars Volta – Octahedron
Alexisonfire – Old Crows / Young Cardinals
Dinosaur Jr. – Farm
He Is Legend – It Hates You
Regina Spektor – Far
Third Eye Blind – Ursa Major


6/30

Wilco – Wilco (The Album)
Killswitch Engage – Killswitch Engage

[CD] Secret, Profane and Sugar Cane - Elvis Costello
Reviewed by Stephen Thomas Erlewine for allmusic.com

Elvis Costello has spent the back half of his career flitting from style to style, recording everything from opera to R&B, but he avoided the country-folk of 1986's King of America until 2009, when he teamed up with America producer (and fellow Coward Brother) T Bone Burnett for Secret, Profane & Sugarcane. By its very definition, country-folk seems straightforward, but the only thing simple about Secret is the speed of its recording. Costello and Burnett assembled an all-star acoustic string band — featuring Jerry Douglas on Dobro, Dennis Crouch on bass, Stuart Duncan on fiddle and banjo, and Jim Lauderdale on vocal harmonies — and cut the album in just three days, its swiftness similar to its knocked-out predecessor Momofuku. Secret, Profane & Sugarcane often bears its quick conception fetchingly, feeling loose-limbed and intimate, a record made simply because it's fun to play, a sentiment that can't quite be said of its songs. Surely, there are times where the humor is as riotous as those old Coward Brothers singles — Costello and Burnett have a ball on the bawdy travelogue "Sulphur to Sugarcane" and sweetly harmonize with Emmylou Harris on "The Crooked Line" — but Secret is frequently fussy, particularly on the songs Costello has carried over from his unfinished Hans Christian Andersen opera. The very presence of these songs ("How Deep Is the Red?," "She Was No Good," "She Handed Me a Mirror," "Red Cotton") suggests just how muddled Secret, Profane & Sugarcane is conceptually: it bounces all over the place, threading these stagebound tunes between a collaboration with Loretta Lynn and his take on "Down Among the Wine and Spirits," which he originally wrote for Ms. Loretta, a rollicking leftover from The Delivery Man ("Hidden Shame"), a cover of Bing Crosby's "Changing Partners," the Burnett co-writes, a few new songs, and a reworking of Elvis' old "Complicated Shadows." Despite the occasional stuffiness, there's a lot of good material here and it's all executed well, but it's hard not to shake the feeling that this is a collection of leftovers masquerading as a main course.





[CD] Preliminaries - Iggy Pop
Reviewed by Mark Deming for allmusic.com

The timing of Iggy Pop's album Preliminaires is probably a product of coincidence and fate rather than careful planning, but it's hard to ignore the fact that just a few months after the unexpected death of Ron Asheton put the Stooges into limbo (at least for a while), Iggy has released an album that almost entirely avoids the issue of rock & roll. In a publicity piece for Preliminaires, Iggy wrote "I just got sick of listening to idiot thugs with guitars," and the man whose music helped inspire so many of those thugs keeps a wary distance from electric guitars on most on this album. Advance reports suggested that Preliminaires would be a jazz album, but that's not accurate, even though one of the best songs on the set, "King of the Dogs," features Iggy borrowing a melody from Louis Armstrong while backed by a traditional New Orleans jazz band. Instead, most of the music on Preliminaires recalls European pop — music influenced by music influenced by jazz — and the lion's share of the arrangements resemble some fusion of Serge Gainsbourg and late-period Leonard Cohen, fitted with a distinctly American accent on songs like "Spanish Coast," "I Want to Go to the Beach," and a cover of "How Insensitive." For those put off by such things, "Nice to Be Dead" is dominated by distorted electric guitars and "She's a Business" (like the nearly identical "Je Sais Que Tu Sais") booms with martial drumming, (both recall Iggy's moody solo debut The Idiot), while "He's Dead/ She's Alive" is backed by Pop's powerful acoustic blues guitar. Like 1999's Avenue B, Preliminaires is an introspective set, with Iggy crooning in a low murmur as he contemplates the failings of the world around him; he cites Michel Houellebecq's novel The Possibility of an Island as an influence (Houellebecq's words provided the lyrics for one stand-out track, "A Machine for Loving"), and the album is bookended by tunes which Iggy sings in French. Where Avenue B was a pretentious mess, Preliminaires is flawed but significantly more successful; though "Party Time" is mildly embarrassing in its depiction of decadence among the idle rich, the other songs are intelligent and often compelling meditations on a world where love and compassion are in short supply, and if "King of the Dogs" isn't exactly a new sentiment coming from Iggy, it's cock-of-the-walk air fits him like a glove (as does the trad jazz arrangement). Iggy's a better shouter than a crooner, but time has burnished his instrument with the character to fit these lyrics, and the best moments on this disc are truly inspired. Iggy Pop would be ill advised to give up on rock & roll, but Preliminaires shows he can do other things and do them well, and it speaks of a welcome maturity missing from many of his efforts outside the realm of fast and loud.




[DVD] Gran Torino
Reviewed by Josh Taylor for cinemablend.com

Everyone has at least one friend with a racist grandparent. They’ll scream and shout about how the Mexicans are moving into the neighborhood or bitch about the white devils down the street. They’re not out there actively wearing clan hoods or marching in hate demonstrations, but they’re not above dropping the occasional racial slur. Many people tend to excuse racism among the elderly as a product of the way they were raised. “My granny’s from a different time,” your friend will tell you after spending twenty minutes trapped in her kitchen while she blames the Jews for 9/11. “She’s not a hate-monger, she just doesn’t know any better,” your friend will say. Until now, that’s an excuse I’ve never really bought into. But Eastwood makes a rather compelling case for it in his new grandpa gets revenge flick Gran Torino.

Korean war vet Walt Kowalski (Clint Eastwood) is everybody’s angry, racist grandpa crossed-bred with gun-toting Mr. Strickland from Back to the Future. His wife has recently died and he’s the last white person left in an old neighborhood which has long since been repopulated with immigrants. We never see Walt’s life with his wife, but he speaks of her with reverence. Presumably she was a stabilizing influence. Without her he’s anger, bitterness and loneliness personified; a sour-faced ogre who seems to hate everyone and everything around him. He sits day after day on his porch guzzling beer, scowling at his neighbors and calling them the most vicious ethnic slurs imaginable. His relationship with his greedy, selfish family is little better. After a long life Walt has no tolerance left for laziness or fools. “Pussy!” he snarls whenever someone fails to live up to his expectations. He wouldn’t be out of place running into the street, firing off a shotgun and screaming “slackers!” at passing children, and at first it seems that a bitter, fed-up, racist husk is all that’s left of craggy-faced old Walt.

Walt may have a low opinion of the world, but he’s a man of principal and character. When gangbangers rough up the quiet Hmong (people from Southeast Asia) family next door, he drives them off with a rifle in a classic, Eastwood, badass standoff. His grateful neighbors don’t buy it when he growls that he simply didn’t want them on his lawn, and Walt wakes up the next morning to discover his porch littered with gifts. Walt isn’t interested in their friendship at first, but eventually he starts to see some value in Thao and Sue, the Lor family’s well-behaved kids, a marked contrast to his own self-absorbed grandchildren. Soon even he gets sick of all the constant loneliness and Walt accepts an invite to dinner where he develops an affinity for Hmong food.

In another film, this is the spot where hard-bitten racist Walt would be magically transformed into old softie. The movie would end with him weeping and perhaps reconnecting with his son. Well forget it. That never happens in Gran Torino and maybe that’s why it’s so damn good. There’s obvious affection between Walt and his neighbors but he stays the same unforgiving, bitter, aged badass he is at the beginning of the film. Rather than them changing him, he sets out to change them by taking Thao under his wing and working with him to build character, to turn him into a proper man. Soon it’s clear that Walt loves Thao and his family, his loneliness is satiated, but he goes right on calling them “chinks” and “spoonheads”. It’s not out of malice, for Walt that’s just the way it’s always been. Thao and Sue look past it, recognizing they’re only words. They’ve seen the good in him and it outweighs whatever it is that makes him such a curmudgeon.

If there’s any change in Walt it’s that his tolerance for the thugs and gangbangers who accost his friends has become even lower. He sets out to protect Thao and Sue. His way of protecting them is by packing a pistol and refusing to put up with crap. Imagine every butt-kicking, unflinching character Clint Eastwood has ever played. Now imagine seeing them in their twilight years, wrinkled, haggard, on death’s door, and spitting in the face of death one last time to help a friend. As Walt lets Thao and Sue in, he starts to care. The more he starts to care the less he can stand to let the scum continue to rule his neighborhood. He loads his weapon and stands up.

Clint Eastwood’s performance as Walt is his best work as an actor in years, a return to all of the things that made him great as a younger man. He’s brilliant and imposing, shocking and so over the top he’s often funny. Unfortunately the rest of the movie’s cast isn’t quite up to the task of going toe to toe with them. They range in acting ability from bearable to plumb awful. Christopher Carley is the film’s worst offender as a concerned neighborhood priest and the gangbangers Walt takes on never manage anything better than thug stereotypes. Bee Vang and Ahney Her fair better as Thao and Sue, but it’s Eastwood that makes Gran Torino so compelling.

Gran Torino is a movie you must see. The PC police will almost certainly lambaste it, attempt to dismiss it as clumsy and cry out in shock at Eastwood’s willingness to portray a man so filled with hate and intolerance. Spike Lee, after publicly calling out Clint for leaving black men out of Flags of our Fathers, may have an actual coronary. Hey Spike, this time he’s surrounded himself with brown people and decided to scream ethnic slurs. Ignore the naysayers, they won’t be able to see past their own prejudices to what lies beneath. Gran Torino is smarter than it seems and it’s broader, funnier, and more straightforward than you’d expect. This is the Clint Eastwood we all remember in a perfect final performance. He’s riding off into the sunset scowling, snarling, and spitting blood.






[DVD] Revoltionary Road
Reviewed by Katey Rich for cinemablend.com

We tend to forget this about them, given the stellar careers they've built for themselves as adults, but most of us first met Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio aboard the most popular doomed ship of all time, Titanic. This is not an irrelevant bit of trivia in the background of their new movie, Revolutionary Road. Even if you've wiped away all memories of Titanic, sworn it off as trash, you and the rest of the world have seen this couple's courtship. And as Frank and April Wheeler, a couple as realistic and miserable as Jack and Rose were carefree fantasies, Winslet and DiCaprio, bearing crow's feet and fuller faces, have twice the capacity of any to break your heart.

It helps a lot that the movie, directed by American Beauty phenom Sam Mendes, is very, very good in its own right. But it was special casting brilliance to make Winslet and DiCaprio the Wheelers, the "golden couple" of their specific universe, whose dissolution is just that much harder to accept for themselves. The pair gives commanding, emotionally raw performances that make up the heart of a film that, not nearly as cynically as the novel it is based on, sears to the heart of where the American Dream probably ended.

With master cinematographer Roger Deakins, Mendes has recreated 1950s suburban Connecticut as still and verdant, a forbiddingly placid pond. Frank and April aren't the only unhappy ones, as we learn through quiet moments with supporting characters, but their disappointment is so immense they've no choice but to turn on each other. Seven years into their marriage they've memorized each others weaknesses, opening the film with a roadside argument that's unbearably vicious. Each of them once fancied themselves citified intellectuals, and treated their move to the suburbs-- seen in a single flashback-- as a kind of grand ironic adventure. But seven years later they've settled into lives neither of them wanted, but neither knows how to escape-- Frank in a low-level position at the same machine tooling company that rendered his father an anonymous gray flannel suit, and April a lonely and despairing housewife.

On his 30th birthday Frank impulsively starts an affair with office secretary Maureen (Zoe Kazan), a naive girl who falls for his false masculine bravado. He arrives home and is moved to tears by the birthday greeting from his wife and children, then blindsided by April's big idea to escape. They'll move to Paris, she'll get a job, and he'll finally figure out what he really wants to do with his life-- something we know, even at this early stage, he will probably never find. Their plans to move away disappoint their earnest friends Millie (Kathryn Hahn) and Shep (David Harbour), as well as neighborhood gossip Mrs. Givings (Kathy Bates), but the Paris dream gives them a summer of marital bliss they haven't known in years. But the dream, of course, is just that, and as the moving date moves closer both Frank and April confront their own terrors both of changing, and the knowledge that nothing really ever changes after all.

Blazing through all this like an aggressive Cassandra is John Givings (Michael Shannon), Mrs. Givings' mental patient son whom she hopes will benefit from Frank and April's genteel presence. He derides them and their classy lifestyle from the beginning, and when Frank jokes that Paris will help them escape the "hopelessness and emptiness" of the suburbs, John points out that it's not joke. His ability to see through Frank and April's bullshit further divides them, April recognizing John's brashness as truth, and Frank further retreating to the safe comfort of the life he thought he wanted to escape.
Adapted as it is from a novel that spends huge sections inside its characters' heads, it's remarkable how well Revolutionary Road is able to capture the same truths about its characters. Small gestures take on huge significance, entire series of emotions wash across a face within seconds-- all of the actors, from Winslet and DiCaprio down to Kazan, work together beautifully to externalize a story that's all about what's never said. Frank and April lay it all out in their screaming matches, but the real story is in the moment Frank's face breaks during their fight, or the suspiciously even tone in April's voice when she prepares him breakfast the night after a blowout. Hahn and Harbour are especially great at this, given their limited scenes, and perhaps it's because Shannon's performance is the most external that I was less impressed than others have been, though duly overwhelmed by his mesmerizing character.

While not quite reaching the masterpiece level of Yates' novel-- was that even possible?--Revolutionary Road is the rare classy literary adaptation with a beating heart, a cry of sorrow for Frank and April's despair as much as it is a sly deconstruction of all they hold dear. Vital and brilliant, without American Beauty's occasional pretension, it's a shot in the arm for the dull holiday season, a shattering experience well worth having.

6/5 - The Doves @ The Trocadero
6/6 - The Decemberists @ Tower Theater
6/6 - The Roots Picnic (w/ The Roots, TV On The Radio, Public Enemy) @ Penn's
6/6 - Landing Festival Pier
6/11 - Eddie Vedder @ Tower Theater
6/12 - Drop Dead, Gorgeous @ The TLA
6/12 - Eddie Vedder @ Tower Theater
6/12 - The Psychedelic Furs @ House Of Blues (Atlantic City)
6/14 - Plain White T's @ The TLA
6/18 - The New York Dolls @ The Trocadero
6/19 - Metric @ The Trocadero
6/20 - Taking Back Sunday @ The Electric Factory
6/21 - Old 97's @ The TLA
6/22 - Camera Obscura @ The TLA
6/27 - Legends Of Hip-Hop (w/ Doug E. Fresh, Biz Markie, Schooly D., Slick Rick). House Of Blues (Atlantic City)
6/30 - 311 @ Penn's Landing Festival Pier