Soft Metals - The Cold World Melts EP (2010) [Captured Tracks] // Grade: B+

Soft Metals have garnered quite a bit of hype and love from the internet recently, even here, on this very blog. Now with their first official release, the debut EP The Cold War Melts sees the duo try to live up to that blog pressure with five tracks that run through a dark club land of Italo disco and cold wave to brooding late night dance floors and housey synth fueled nostalgia for a night out at club that never really existed.

The Cold War Melts starts with the brilliant “Love or Music”, a track full of grooving drum machine claps and slow achingly retro synths stances, when the vocal hits it’s drenched in all that echo and reverb you’d expect from an Italo disco track from ’83 but it’s got a surprising dynamism that stops it from being too spacey and brings the pop element in with a vengeance, properly nice. To go from there would take something impressive and track two manages it with the EPs title track which bursts into life with dark and throbbing synths that beat out a rhythm that the Predator would stalk you to, it’s a great dance floor tune all acid squelches, posing in the dark, lasers painting lines though smoke and after work execs chatting on phones the size of bricks.

By the third track the late night, trip out on the dance floor vibe is firmly established and you can settle into the pop hooks and epic female vocals drifting serenely over everything. Then we hit up what I find most annoying on albums (and especially EPs), the instrumental track. And sure it’s nice enough and would maybe be fine on a release with more songs but I just can’t help feel instrumentals are included as filler, especially when the rest of the songs have such a pop sensibility about them. The final track “Another Goodbye” brings things back with a glacial New Order via Patrick Cowley feel, slow and seductive with vocals like a valium dosed 1983 Madonna.

This is the sort of release that can be enjoyed via headphones on a rain soaked day as much as on the dance floor of a smoke filled club. The EP’s heavy Italo sound will I’m sure draw obvious comparisons to Johnny Jewel’s recent work. But what sets this apart from Glass Candy, Chromatics and Desire is that Jewel has never worked with a vocalist as confidant as Patricia Furpurse nor released 5 tracks quite as dancefloor ready as these.

Fans familiar with Soft Metals will have no doubt heard these five tracks via their soundcloud and Myspace page for quite some time now but they’re a band that’s very much deserving a wider audience and an official vinyl release. So while I enjoyed this EP quite a bit, I’m at the point where I’m dying to hear newer material my ears haven’t yet fully devoured. But for the rest of you who will undoubtedly first be introduced to Soft Metals via this EP you’ll find a dark, imposing and even epic release that once over will have you where I’m already at… eagerly awaiting what’s next.

Metallica – The Black Album (1991)

Vs.

Queens of the Stone Age – Songs For the Deaf (2002)

The Game is simple… if only one could exist which would it be? What’s more important… personal relevance, cultural significance, or simply being the better album all other things aside? Choice is yours…

Oofa! So let me preface this by saying that I’m a pretty big Eli Roth fan. I think he’s one of the sharpest minds making Horror today. And while he hasn’t really directed anything since the  merely “OK” Hostel 2, the man knows what it takes to make not only great but campy horror… so I went into The Last Exorcism, which he produced (his first as a producer), hoping it would be an extension of the witty, blood-soaked and tongue-in-cheek style he not only helped resurrect, but take to the next level.

Roth has been tweeting endlessly about the film and crowd reactions to its numerous festival screenings, reputed gorehound sites were singing its praises, and it had a clever viral campaign a week or so prior to its national debut. So you know, I had a pretty good feeling that this film would deliver a few solid thrills, some chuckles, and gore, gore and more gore. Oofa! Was I ever wrong.

I’ll give the film its due in how it cleverly revamped the tired exorcism model into something that could have been a great premise. Cotton Marcus has been groomed to be a reverend since he was a child, eventually taking over for his father preaching sermons and performing exorcisms. Problem is that Cotton is a great showman, and all of this is just a fun little act. For him, being a reverend is not about faith, but simply telling people what they want to hear to get past their problems. When Cotton reads about an autistic child who dies at the hands of another reverend during an exorcism, he has a crisis of conscious and decides that it’s time to expose exorcisms for the ruse that they really are. He teams up with a film crew who sets out to document every aspect of the preparation and staging of what will hopefully be the last exorcism ever.

Cotton and the crew head down to Louisiana to the Sweetzer farm after receiving a letter from Louis Sweetzer to come help his daughter, Nell, who is supposedly possessed and slaughtering livestock in her sleep. Cotton obviously doesn’t believe in demons and for him, the whole production of an “exorcism” is a sort of shock therapy for people move past some psychological baggage that they’re carrying. So Cotton does his whole exorcism shtick and proclaims young Nell cured. But funny thing is that later that night, Nell shows up in Cotton’s hotel room acting creepy as all fuck. From then on, the film shifts to Cotton trying to figure out what the underlying cause of her “demonic” behavior is, as the audience is left guessing if Nell is actually crazy or possessed all the way until the end.

Before I tear into the film, I would like to single out both Patrick Fabian (Cotton) and Ashley Bell (Nell) for their acting… actually the acting in The Last Exorcism is, overall, pretty damn good. It’s the directing and the plot that leave a lot to be desired. The whole film is shot from the perspective of the film crew’s cameraman, except none of it whatsoever looks like it was shot from one camera by a guy documenting something. It’s over-directed and so strategically shot and paced that you can’t help but wonder why the film couldn’t just have been about a film crew documenting the exorcism  rather than the supposed “real” film. This fault is very hard to get past, like speaking with someone with a bad toupee. Try as you might to get past it, you just keep wondering “how do they not know how bad this looks?” instead of actually concentrating on the conversation… or movie in this case.

The guessing game of what’s at the root of Nell’s “possession” is also pretty tedious and predictable — a melodramatic see-saw back and forth centered around family trauma that just makes you want to scream, “Ok, we get it! Show us more blood and creepy contortion shit!”, most of which had already been used for the trailers. After dragging on and on, at the very end you’re gifted with a bungled yet clever twist (right before sputtering into either a poor homage or comically bad rip of The Blair Witch Project) that just leaves you contemplating “why couldn’t this more just have been more of this?”. Those 5 minutes at the end are some of the films most interesting and it’s only suspenseful moment. It’s a shame they weren’t fleshed out more.

Maybe I expected too much from something Eli Roth would put his name and money behind, and that’s probably my fault because horror is horror and even the greats produce their fair share of crap. The Last Exorcism is about on par with the Horror movies that get dumped at 1am on Showtime 2, and that’s probably when and where you should catch it… preferably from the middlepoint on, after stumbling home half-soused.

RxRy - VAEIOUWLS (2010) [Self-Released] // Grade: B+

These 12 songs, all named as vowel variations (“AIUIA” or “EUIEE”), mark the bedroom arranger RxRy’s most focused and inclusive effort yet. Whereas the curative eight-song debut took just six days from start to finish, the 40-minute VAEIOUWLS took closer to two months to complete and upon first listen, you’re given a layered invitation into lurking the space just below the water’s surface and only faintly hearing the noises above you.

It was originally thought that the player behind the RxRy tag was Panda Bear’s Noah Lennox and that the debut, self-titled batch of 8 songs were “unreleased joints” from the Animal Collective member’s Tomboy sessions. Fending off the case of mistaken identity, rumors were discredited after RxRy posted an image on their MySpace page, saying simply that he/she/it was “not Noah.” The sonic similarities are largely a stretch as the music on both VAEIOUWLS and RxRy remain planted in the realm of murmuring electronic ambience and many steps away from the Wilson-soaked, hazy harmonic luminosity of Lennox.

VAEIOUWLS is a pervasively discrete collection of digitized pulsations swabbed over barely-there washes, buzzing ambiance and soothing landscape (and genre) nods. It’s easy to tick off immediate similarities to the likes of Aphex Twin, Eluvium, Loscil or Nathan Fake while placing the songs under the overused mark of IDM alongside lesser parts of Dub, Dark Ambient and House flourishes.

RxRy’s debut was made while its creator was ill. Starting in December of last year, the  sonic space spawned as an in-the-moment restorative measure— “Rx” is the prescription and “Ry” represents rays extending outward— and soon became a cure for routine. The musician describes daily life: “Wake up, drive to school, float aimlessly, drive home, get lost in sounds, repeat” like a perfect subtitle for the creation. Getting lost in VAEIOUWLS’ runtime is of effortless appeal.

What you’ll notice is just how much RxRy’s sophomore release skims the fat from other contemporary background maestros; this is a record that’s deep, though concise, and glowingly ear-to-ear agile. Starting with waving synths and building percussive clunks, VAEIOUWLS’ opener, “AIUIA” is over before you have a real chance to fall anywhere near it’s bottom. “UUAII” is spiced with orchestral weight and a low-toned bass hum, though it plays more like a refrain of sorts, checking to see if it’s listener is still there.

Starting to pick up pace, VAEIOUWLS’ legs are well and stretched by the time “EIIOA” hits and we move through jumping bass prods that bolster an almost electro lead before the album’s opus “AAIEI” blows in with multi-layered sophistication.

The person behind RxRy represents a growing number of boutique artists that exist solely on bandwidth buzz and viral value. RxRy says on their blog, “I want people to have free music, unrestrained and broadly available to every person who can download it,” They support the ubiquitous goal by continuing to offer music like VEAIOUWLS, at no cost. Though they “would love” to release physical formats, all RxRy releases— 2 LPs and EPs as well as a few singles— have all been free, direct Mediafire links. VEAIOUWLS is well worth a listen- so snag a copy down below.

Download RxRy’s VAEIOUWLS for FREE! (Click Here)

No, I’m not talking about The Social Network, I said the “other” Facebook movie. This past Friday before enduring through The Last Exorcism (more on that tomorrow) I was treated to the trailer for Catfish, who prior to this I hadn’t heard, read or seen  jack shit about.

For the first minute and a half of this trailer my girlfriend, Yüng Chow and myself sat giggling over what we thought was some sappy mockumentary  style, feel-good, romantic comedy about finding love via Facebook until out of nowhere SHIT GETS REAL FUCKIN’ CREEPY! Watch it! It’s a really good trailer and has me amped on seeing this. I really hope this delivers because I can haz one good internetz horror movie?

Hipster Youth - Teenage Elders (2010) [Self-Released] // Grade: B-

Love or loathe Crystal Castles, their use of chiptune samples sort of repositioned the genre, illustrating how 8-bit beats could sound as one element of a larger, hi-fidelity composition. But as good as those samples sound within their work, severing them from the context in which they’re generally created loses much of the specialness of the sound. 19-year-old Aidan Wall (who also releases music as Porn on Vinyl) produces gritty, off-kilter 8-bit bedroom dance under the name Hipster Youth on album Teenage Elders.

With track titles bearing names like “Pop Song For Those With Short Attention Spans”, “I Lost My Corpse Paint” and “Super Fun Hipster Suicide Party”, Wall  brings a observational humor to his tracks. They feel lighthearted, approachable but also carry with them a measure of loner self-doubt. Aidan Wall is that kid with the messy hair in the back of class inking out a graphic novel when he should be taking notes. Teenage Elders embodies that notion of creative escape from the mundaneness of reality, and for anyone who’s ever built a world within their own head and decided to live there awhile, Wall is easily identifiable as a kindred spirit.

As a whole, the album possesses little continuity. Some tracks are barely over a minute (“Interlude [Yes, I did drink too much. I must get out of here]“, “Things I Should Say”) while “I Lost My Corpse Paint” clocks in at nearly nine. Stylistically, Wall leaps between sounds which does nothing to help the album’s flow, but establishes an environment of wild unpredictability that is energizing. “Pop Song For Those With Short Attention Spans” pairs far-off, light typewriter-sounding beats with woozy vocals then jars you out of dreaming and into “Little Lost Bear” which sounds like an synth organ-led final boss showdown. “Myself Or Something” emulates gritty reverb with digital static while both “Super Fun Hipster Suicide Party” and “Things I Should Say” kick up the pace offering speaker-blown 8-bit dance parties to the mix.

The sound quality overall is amateur at best. The collection of tracks don’t transition well, with volume level discrepancies that are often jarring jumps. But neither polish nor high production values are the point. Teenage Elders is exciting. You are never sure what will fly into your ears next, but you can count on it being highly creative, and, fun.

You can download Teenage Elders for FREE at Hipster Youth’s Bandcamp or by using the player below.

Dear Eric Northman, if you die, I will be inconsolable. Somehow, I haven’t tired of your brooding nature, or your staccato bursts of malaise. Nor your continuous pining for Sookie Stackhouse, despite the fact that you’re far too good for her hillbilly ass. No seriously, if you are reduced to cinders and eulogies next episode, I am going to be one seriously sad dudebro.

And so the writers of True Blood have me hooked like it’s the good ole days. Yeah, you know, back in 2008. When I loved True Blood. I know I do a lot of hatin’ about True Blood, but it’s based out of pure emotional response and not some sort of agenda. So I can say I was pretty stoked with last night’s episode.

For the first time since the middle of season two, I was totally aggravated that the show was over. I have to wait two goddamn weeks to find out what happens to my beloved Eric? Fucking Labor Day! Do you know what I’ll be doing next Sunday? Probably sitting on my fat ass! Why can’t I do that while watchin’ the season finale? Son of a bitch.

But it’s a good aggravation, the sort of interest that stems from wanting to know what happens next. This is in contrast to almost this entire season, where my mind was a river of profanity and hate following an episode. I was a river of confusion, wondering what the fuck I loved about the show so much in the first place, and how it had run so far off course.

Last night reminded me.

Bill and Sookie In: Of Mice And Men
A good portion of the episode was dedicated to Bill and Sookie cruisin’ the swamp-ass roads of Louisiana, dreaming of what their life would be like if they could start over. Just to prove that I’m not just fickle, but also an overly emotional dude, I actually dug on those scenes. It was all Of Mice & Men & Vampires & Fairies, as they detailed the impossibilities they’d love to indulge in.

Plus, with those gap-teeth and that tendency to embark on the hopelessly stupid, Sookie can totally be the Bon Temps’ version of Lennie.

It was enjoyable though, to see the couple actually interacting for almost like three minutes without someone’s life at stake. Sure it goes to shit pretty quickly, but before Russell totally upends their dumb car, they actually come off like the rest of us couples; fucked up, trying to make it work, and hopelessly in love with the idea of their relationship.

Jason In: No Country For Old Stackhouse
Leave it to True Blood to drag in some commentary on the state of modern sports. Poor Jason Stackhouse strives to legitimize his career in the face of his spiritual successor as the High School Jock Top Shit. Motherfuckers.

Jason’s always been one of my favorite characters, because of his hopelessly retarded antics. But underneath all that bullshit, I’ve enjoyed the times when they’ve attempted to humanize him. Give him a few flourishes to go alone with his boneheaded statements and his nintety-three pack abs.

I feel for the dude. Stuck in a back road town, one of his only claims to fame seemingly about to be obliterated by a cheater, it’s got to be depressing as fuck for the guy. Even more so since I think Jason feels that there’s a good chance this kid will make it.

There’s probably some ethical dilemma here for more people, but I hope Jason blasts that kid’s stupid arm off with a shotgun and then dances in his blood.

Jason actually comes off like the rest of us humans; fearful of being outmoded in the face of newer, superior versions of ourselves. Quicker, faster, their potential not yet wasted, or withered, or perhaps worst of all, close to being actually actualized.

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So think of this as a “release party” of sorts for the Fall 2010, Actual Pain collection called Mystery Faith. Tees, Tanks, Crews, Hats… all that Satanic goodness you’ve come to expect and love from Actual Pain is alive and well in the newest collection. As with all Actual Pain collection, we have a limited stock and the brand has a pretty die-hard fan base. This shit will not stick around for too long in-store. You can expect an online drop sometime later this week.

And while the graphics are amazing and evil as always you should really take a look through the Mystery Faith lookbook which is pretty awesome in it’s own right! Keep scrolling to the right to see the entire thing.

And the icing on the cake is that King Dude, AKA T.J. Cowgill who is “Actual Pain” will be doing a very special in-store performance later this evening at our shop. T.J. strips down to his voice and acoustic guitar and channels some dark and haunting neo-folk with a heavy focus on knowledge and faith. Luciferian light and spirituality beyond the confines of a strict monotheistic reasoning are just some of the heady topics.

The show will run from 7-8pm and we ask that you arrive on time as space is limited. If you’d like to attend, please RSVP to rsvp@mishkanyc.com. Please note that entry will work on a first come first served basis via the RSVP list. We also welcome you to take pictures, shoot video and/or record the show for your blogs/sites. We simply ask that you inform one of our employees that you will be doing such before hand.

Head here for more details. We look forward to seeing you and hail the black triangle!

Monday August 30th, 7pm-8pm
Мишка
350 Broadway
Brooklyn, NY
718-388-1725

J/M/Z to Marcy Ave
G to Broadway
L to Lorimer

Piranha 3D is a throwback flick, not just because it’s a remake of a movie that came out in 1978. It’s a throwback piece because its the kind of tit centric B-movie that the internet killed off. Back in the day a million movies like this were cranked out to hit video and shows like USA’s Up All Night with Rhonda Shear. Movies that allowed you to see half naked chicks skinny dip and then get chased/killed by some kinda monster. The type of movie that has giant plot holes, bad acting and questionable writing… but, lots of tits. Unfortunately, now that tits of all sorts are available anytime via the internet there’s no longer a reason to make these movie. And, that’s kinda fucked up because sometimes the world needs ridiculous and base flicks like Piranha 3D. Sometimes you need a shoestring of a plot with your titties to put everything in perspective.

I could describe the plot of this movie, but that misses the point of the movie. You don’t go to a strip club and talk about the quality of the buffet. You don’t want to know about the character development, how the story arc is resolved or the cinematography. So, let me tell you what you do want to know. This movie runs on over the top from the get go. When most other movies do 3D they say “we’re not going to be throwing stuff at the screen”, to let you know it’ll be a classy 3D experience. Piranha 3D has 3D vomit. That’s what you need to know about the kind of experience your in line for.

Ya boy Jerry O’Connell is also in this movie as what I’d imagine is a pretty on point version of the dude who owns Girls Gone Wild. He plays him as coked up and tit obsessed to the end. I’m pretty sure this is his best performance since Sliders Season 2. This movie also has Adam Scott (from the recently canceled Party Down) on a jet ski with a shotgun, shooting into crowded water. At fish. Dude is shooting fish in a lake with a motherfucking shotgun from a jet ski. Oh and Christopher Lloyd as your resident Piranha expert.

There’s a ton of half naked and fully naked girls, occasionally in three dimensions. I’ve not been a fan of the 3D movement at all so far and surprisingly adding breast to the mix has not changed my opinion. Maybe because in order for breast to really be 3D they’d have to be really far away from the body, and for that to happen you’d have to have some incredible monster titties jammed in a weird corset to get the proper distance. Physics of 3D breasts aside, if it’s slight titillation of the Maxim variety you’re looking for you’ll be covered. Elisabeth Shue though will not be the source of your titillation, she’s looking kind of old in the face. Fear not though, careful observers will be able to pick out porn star Gianna Michaels making a cameo as a chick para-sailing. If, you’re that dude who has always watched her “work” and thought “hey, you know what’d make this hotter? Her being dismembered by shiftily CGI’d fish” then this will be you movie.

About two thirds of the way through the movie is when all hell breaks lose and everyone turns into piranha bait, but what’s kinda interesting is how gory the whole thing gets. There’s about 15 minutes of pure blood and severed limbs that reminds you that Piranha 3D is an actual horror movie.  In this barrage of mangled bodies, the influence of Eli Roth (who makes a cameo as a wet T-shirt contest host) really shows on director Alexandre Aja (High Tension and the excellent The Hills Have Eyes remake). The scenes of swimmers trying to escape from the killer fish, looked a lot like some kind of zombie apocalypse. But, an apocalypse that’s immediately preceded by lots and lots of nakedness. If the apocalypse has to come, that’s how I want it.*

*The reason I want it that way is because I know I’m going to be safe. See,my blackness will not allow me to be frolicking in the water when killer fish bring about the rapture. I can’t swim, so I’ll be chilling on the beach while everyone else is getting nibbled to death, rocking ever so gently to a slowed down version of “Margaritaville.”

Fairly rarely do I put guitar-rock-pop type acts in a mix, but I managed to slip a couple mickies onto Ballet, which is fully ’80s and a fairly urban, summer’s-end affair for subway surfers and taxi-takers.

That said, there are some world music moments to meet eclectic standards. Ballet fun fact – three tunes on here feature Phil Collins as a liner-note contributor. Know which ones? It’s not Kajagoogoo… Tracklist after the jump.

Ballet by A Silent Flute

Download A Silent Flute’s Ballet from Sound Cloud

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