Reviews by JxSxPx

Hot Hot Heat’s five song EP Knock Knock Knock is as quirky and jittery a neo-New Wave alternative dance party as Make Up the Breakdown. In fact, these songs wouldn’t sound out of place wedged onto the end of Breakdown. Bays’ nasal brat-punk voice is tailor made for music like this. “Have a Good Sleep” owes an obvious debt to Gang of Four (guitars), Elvis Costello (lyrics) and the Police (the almost ragga-like keyboards). “5 Times Out of 100” jerks back and forth between energetic party song and a dark, chaotic mid-tempo breather. And the metallic boot stomp intro to “Touch You Touch You” sounds like pure Devo-esque nerdy art-punk New Wave. While Hot Hot Heat never sound like they’re biting the style and posing as these bands, they do sound like they’re merging their references with their own point-of-view to make something new and fresh. DOWNLOAD: “Have a Good Sleep”

Garbage’s greatest hits plays like the assembly line of sounds and textures of the 80s and 90s alternative rock scenes. Shirley Manson is the perfect voice and image for this kind of music: all brass attitude, smoking-in-the-girls-room sass, yet there’s a thinly veiled romanticism and vulnerability. She’s essentially the updated form of Debbie Harry, Chrissie Hynde, Siouxsie Sioux or Patti Smith depending on her mood, or the song. I’ve always found it absolutely thrilling.

Garbage and Version 2.0 provide the vast majority of the sixteen singles present on the album, which is both expected and slightly frustrating. Beautifulgarbage and Bleed Like Me weren’t slouches for great singles and album tracks, but they didn’t quite capture the ears of the public like the first two albums. Which is also a shame. But what is here is a flat out great assortment of songs.

Early singles like “Vow” and “Queer” represent the mild flirtation with fetishistic and kinky sex that Garbage would bring to bigger and badder life on later releases. “Special” and “When I Grow Up” show that Garbage was, above all things, a neo New Wave act with a fondness for electronic bleeps and burps. While “Cherry Lips (Go Baby Go!)” showcased Manson’s impressive range and the band’s willingness to experiment with different pop and alternative rock textures. “Cherry Lips” is also the best Debbie Harry impression I’ve heard from anyone. But it’s ballads like “Bleed Like Me,” “You Look So Fine” and the mid-tempo swinging 60s British pop of the newly recorded “Tell Me Where It Hurts” that prove Garbage have always been the Pretenders 2.0, that’s not a dig against them since I love them more than the Pretenders. The other new track, a remixed version of the Bleed Like Me album track “It’s All Over But the Crying,” actually improves upon the original.

Absolute Garbage, despite being the cleverest named Garbage album ever, is far from the essential Garbage recording though. Well, if you’re a fan like I am, then it’s not. Although the previous unreleased and soundtrack only songs, like “No. 1 Crush” and “The World Is Not Enough,” make it a damn fine purchase. If you’re looking for the band’s best moments and don’t feel like getting an actual album then this will work like gangbusters. DOWNLOAD: “Tell Me Where It Hurts,” “No. 1 Crush,” “The World Is Not Enough”

Deborah Harry is my absolute favorite icon ever. Regardless of gender, for me, she’s the coolest, hippest and greatest person to ever step up to a microphone and make music. I’ve always been intrigued by her combination of supermodel pretty looks and patent refusal to be anything close to safe or innocent. With Blondie, she’s always been an avant-garde ironist making perfect hybrid pop singles. Her solo career is an entirely different matter. While she’s always been experimental, without the reign of Chris Stein, Clem Burke and Jimmy Destri behind her she’s too wild and weird. While I’m normally down with it, there’s a limit. Necessary Evil is no different.

“Two Times Blue,” the first single and album opener, is a gorgeous little dance-pop song, “School for Scandal” is a fun punk-dance song and “If I Had You” is a pretty little ballad. These are the first three songs on the album, so everything seems to be going fine until you hit “Live With Vengeance” a song that sounds ultimately like a rejected James Bond theme and a generically produced hip-hop inspired dance-pop song. It’s awful. This song is just a symptom of the overriding issue with the entire album: it’s too generically produced, too insistent on hip-hop lite beats and posturing, too long and indulgent. If more songs had been like the trashy Strokes-ish “You’re Too Hot” and “Two Times Blue” this would have been a much better release. As it stands it’s not awful, but it’s nothing spectacular either. So, while she’s made solid, and numerous classic, albums with Blondie, Harry has yet to make a consistent solo album. DOWNLOAD: “Two Times Blue,” “White Out,” “You’re Too Hot”

Chrissie Hynde is a great frontwoman. There’s no need in arguing with that, and while the Pretenders have become nothing more than a vehicle for her artistic explorations, they were once a fantastic band. While Pretenders II is not as groundbreaking, rollicking or hard-edged are their debut album, it is a great album from front to back.

She still jerks back and forth from tough girl (“Bad Boys Get Spanked”) to achingly tender (“I Go to Sleep”), but that’s always been part of her charm. And this first incarnation of the band remains the same. Their first two albums play like a two-disc greatest hits collection (and I would make the argument that Learning to Crawl acts as a third disc). From the tough girl with a soft heart sass of “Message of Love” onwards, Chrissie has got you hooked with her steely but melodic voice. She even makes like a spiritual daughter of Patti Smith on “Pack It Up,” which is a good thing. But my favorite moment is the sweet, but never saccharine, British Invasion-era pop of “Talk of the Town.” From the poetic lyrics to the way that Hynde sings “You’ve changed…your place in this world,” this is truly one of their greatest moments. DOWNLOAD: “Talk of the Town”

Patti Smith is an incredibly original, fiery and passionate artist with her own material, she gives this collection of cover songs the same treatment. Ever the consummate artist, these songs barely resemble their original forms. Since Gone Again, Smith’s albums have experimented with alternative-folk, or punk-folk, and these covers are no different. “Are You Experienced?” sounds like the Earth mother is beaming down from the heavens to give us all her personal motto. While “Within You Without You” gets a stripped down arrangement, and Smith’s own personal convicts and feelings give the cover more depth and feeling than it should have had. The Beatles are an easy group to cover, but a difficult group to get right. Smith gets it right. But the best song has to be “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” which bares no resemblance to the seminal grunge sound it invented. “Teen Spirit” is now an Americana classic, sounding like it was already written long before Nirvana came into the pop culture lexicon. I don’t know how ‘essential’ this release is to Patti Smith’s artistic legacy, but it’s a solid collection and she delivers the goods. Hardcore fans will love it, and the casual fan should give it a try. She has said that covers are an essential part of her musical identity and she always wanted to record one. And here’s a great one. DOWNLOAD: “Smells Like Teen Spirit”

Gung Ho has Patti Smith imaging herself into several different political situations: in Vietnam, speaking for the stolen Africans in the Middle Passage, as Salome ordering the head of John the Baptist. What she manages to do with these situations is really something special, and a great testament to her talents as a poet and artist. She hasn’t been this full of piss-and-vinegar since Radio Ethiopia, but she’s still managing to sound like the goddess of alternative rock that she is. While this isn’t as crazy as the folk-punk hybrid Gone Again, this is more like Easter – full of big and scary ideas for a mainstream album, but given enough of a polish to give the illusion of being easily accessible. The lone single, “Glitter in Their Eyes,” is an anti-materialism rant, and possibly about blood diamonds, if I’m understanding the imagery correctly. But I can’t imagine too many people being riveted and thrilled by “Libbie’s Song,” but I was. Patti Smith is someone who’s never had to worry about chart performance, working with flash-in-the-pan producers or compromising her artistic integrity, so she’s allowed to follow her muse wherever it takes her. And in this instance it took her to a song which sounds like the world’s oldest country song – her voice sounds warm and great in the genre, maybe that’s where she’s heading towards next? I’d be on board for it. I’ve already loved her early punk days, her glossier rock middle period, latter day alternative folkie rebirth and this just melds and merges the different versions of Smith into one rollicking new one. Or perhaps she was just summarizing her years at Arista for her final studio release. Either way, I believe that Gung Ho is one of her best efforts. DOWNLOAD: “Glitter in Their Eyes”

Time Out of Mind is a fantastic latter day Dylan album proving that not all great artists use up all of their creativity, imagination and power in their youth. Sonically murky, densely written and wearily sung, Time Out of Mind sounds like Dylan went on a three-day drinking spree and then decided to record an album of immense isolation and darkness.

The album is filled with an early rockabilly sound, but slowed down to a bluesy crawl, that would mature and go on to make Love and Theft so essential. This is a great album to listen to late at night, around two in the morning to be more specific, while you’re in a melancholy or frustrated mood. “Dirt Road Blues” sounds like it could have been plucked from the obscurities pill in the Sun Records vault, not an insult. While “Love Sick” and “Cold Iron Bounds” have an almost reggae swagger to their guitar lines, but they’re played too folksy to really be a reggae song. And “Highlands” is another great epic closing sonic landscape to get lost in. At a young age Dylan tried to sound world weary, wise, bitter and forceful, and now he has become the artist he’s always envisioned himself as. Luckily for us, that hasn’t changed his near God-like abilities to write a beautiful song. DOWNLOAD: “Love Sick”

Guillermo del Toro is a great talent. He writes, produces, directs and designs many of his films. I believe that twenty years from now he will be looked upon with the same revance, love and respect that directors like Coppola, Spielberg and Scorese have currently. His attention to detail and loving care put into every fabric of his films makes them works of great art. Yes, these are quite often horror, fantasy or supernatural films, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t have to be artistic. The Devil’s Backbone is a spiritual cousin to Pan’s Labyrinth, and while it doesn’t quite reach the emotional heights and artistic greatness that Labyrinth did without even trying, Backbone is a great film from beginning to end and comes within inches of reaching those same plateaus.

The ominous, and golden hued, opening follows a dead boy’s sinking to the bottom of a body of water and a fetus in a jar. These images are interspersed and woven together so seamlessly that it’s hard to tell which is which. They act as foils to each other, and establish the tone for the rest of the film. Del Toro has professed that once a Catholic you’re always a Catholic, and there is a strong element of Catholicism permeating throughout the film. The artifacts, symbols, color palette – everything feels as if it was culled from the church. I am in awe of how he can make the image of a dead boy’s ghost both frightening, beautiful and vaguely religious. That floating blood from his wound and bubbles, or are those small bugs?, hovering around him add to the mystique.

But what is there to say of the story? I don’t want to reveal too much, but it involves a groundskeeper and his hatred for those around him. It is told from the point-of-view of a child left behind at the orphanage/school during the final stages of the Spanish Civil War. It wouldn’t be impossible to think that somewhere in the distantly viewed woods that Ofelia was finding her own supernatural/mystical adventures.

This film even shares some of the same cast. But I make it sound like Pan’s Labyrinth came first, it didn’t. The Devil’s Backbone and Cronos are horror films which pointed the way and illustrated the beautiful depths to which del Toro was willing to crave down into in order to churn out his art. Notice how he’s only made about seven or eight films since 1993 while numerous other directors that appeared around that time have gone on to make twice or three times that? Del Toro is about the art, and The Devil’s Backbone is his first great work of art, but not his last.

The Cure’s The Head on the Door album picks right up where Japanese Whispers– an assortment of non-album singles and b-sides – left off. Which is to say that the Cure were experimenting with dance music and shiny pop hooks, but never losing their identity as gloomy existentialist New Wavers. On this they added a hint of Latin rhythm (“The Blood”), invented shoegazing (“Push”), and got in touch with the gloriously beautiful Gothic pop sonic landscapes they would develop even further on Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me and Disintegration (“Six Different Ways”), The Head on the Door shouldn’t work, at all really, but it’s a beautiful slice of British New Wave. There’s even a quick exploration of a semi-hard rock sound (“Push”).

“The Baby Screams” marries their alternative rock roots with their off-kilter pop song craft. And that bubbling musical note throughout probably kept most up-and-comers awake trying to figure out just what made that noise. Robert Smith also sounds like he’s whispering his vocals in a very large hallway and he’s on the other side of it. While “Close to Me” is a mope-rock classic. His demented cat-in-heat wail is restrained enough to be slightly unnerving, but sad enough to be inviting. I also prefer the album version not ending with the horn section. Instead, it ends abruptly and moves right on to “A Night Like This.” The experimentalism only adds more depth and texture to their great songs. Check the flamenco guitar on “The Blood” – a song about the blood of Christ paralyzing you. Obviously someone has a complicated relationship with their Catholic upbringing, or he’s really good at faking it. This is but one of the many reasons why I love the Cure – they could make you dance around, but they’re smart enough to give you a lyric or an image to stop and make you think.

The Head On the Door is just a literate, existentialist and flat out strange as any of the best Cure albums, in fact, this is one of the best Cure albums. Every single on here ranks among their best work, and the album tracks aren’t anything to scoff at. This definitely ranks with Disintegration, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Pornography and Boys Don’t Cry as one of their standout discs. DOWNLOAD: “The Blood”

Guillermo del Toro’s first film is less a vampire story, of which it is, and more of a love story between a grandfather and his granddaughter. It is filled with del Toro’s wildly inventive imagination – you’ve got to see the inside of the golden egg/mechanical spider to believe it – and love for humanity amongst all of the gore, it is a great debut film. It should come as no shock that he’s only made a handful of films and I have either loved or respected them all.

Cronos is half in Spanish and half in English, but it’s merged together in a realistic and believable way. There’s no tourists played for laughs or awkward moments with border patrol here. These groups of people occupy the same part of town and interact routinely. Well, mostly Frederico Luppi as the grandfather and Ron Perlman as the anatagonist’s nose job obsessed nephew interact. Our main villain and heroine are confined to one room or mute throughout much of the film.

And while later films like Mimic or Pan’s Labyrinth would be brutal and vivid in their violence and gore, but never without a certain amount of taste and always necessary to the story, the gore and brutality is relatively limited in this film. But our main character still removes his blue skin to reveal a shiny white new layer, and gets his mouth shown shut while being embalmed. Del Toro understands that unnecessary gore and bloodshed actually distract from and takeaway from a good film. And this is a very good one. Mimic and Blade II would be creative dips, but not without a certain amount of charm and respectability, he would go on to great things with The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth. Here’s the beginnings of one of our greatest young directors currently working.