Tag: Review

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Film Features Film/TV

An effective biopic of alt-rock icon Ian Curtis

When the Replacements were drunkenly stumbling toward indie-rock immortality in the mid-1980s, lead singer Paul Westerberg was still living and writing songs for his band’s major-label debut in his parents’ basement. Why aren’t these revealing economic realities ever shown in movies about artists? Maybe most moviegoers can’t stomach the sight of poverty; maybe they like their cult heroes to emerge from the head of Zeus fully formed, rich and famous. Director Anton Corbijn’s new film Control, about the life of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis, is a bracing success in part because it stares long and hard into what writer Michael Azerrad called “the yawning gap between critical acclaim and financial reward.”

Like I’m Not There, Todd Haynes’ graduate thesis in Bob Dylan semiotics, Control rejects many biopic conventions, although some of these, like the grinding psychic toil of life on tour and the emotional fallout from the hero’s on-the-road philandering, now seem like an inevitable part of every rocker’s life story. I’m Not There is about the theory of cultural stardom; Control is about the everyday reality of a cultural star, especially before the royalties start rolling in.

Sam Riley plays Curtis as an intelligent, working-class Bowie-phile whose drive to create art co-existed uneasily with his decision to marry young, settle down, and have kids with his wife Deborah (a fierce and vulnerable Samantha Morton, whose gigantic, expressive eyes burn through a paper-thin role). One early sequence succinctly captures Curtis’ discrepant desires. The camera tracks Curtis’ morning walk to a government office, where he works as an employment counselor for people with mental and physical disabilities. Halfway through his walk, the camera glides behind him to show the word “HATE” scrawled in white on the back of his black jacket.

Unlike many rock-star pictures, Control is not interested in showing the fun of emerging stardom. Although they worked hard, the members of Joy Division don’t seem to share many moments of unambiguous creative joy. Their songs were notoriously “assembled,” sometimes instrument by instrument, in the recording studio. And the music they made could hardly be called cheerful. Still, the band’s following steadily increases, as Curtis’ desultory affair with a Belgian woman (Alexandra Maria Lara) and his increasing bouts of adult-onset epilepsy further unmoor him. Riley bravely underplays Curtis’ final days, suggesting that his suicide was somewhat motivated by the way the massive daily doses of prescription medication limited his ability to think clearly about the world around him.

Like many rock stars, Curtis was more in charge of his life when he was onstage, where he could simultaneously act out and escape his troubles. The recreations of Joy Division’s live performances are tense, strange, riveting; like Curtis, Riley dances in a weird march that makes him seem part sleep-deprived jungle trooper and part music-activated android, as if he were endlessly fighting a battle between self-expression and rigid, assembly-line conformity.

Control’s final shot of smoke blowing into the sky (while Joy Division’s “Atmosphere” plays in the background) offers a hint of resolution to Curtis’ struggles. It strikes notes of regret, melancholy, and hope that are as inexplicably affecting as the band’s best music.

Control

Opens Friday, December 21st

Ridgeway

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Film Features Film/TV

Not for the Faint of Heart

Margot at the Wedding is Noah Baumbach’s darkest film yet, a group atrocity wherein smug, aloof Margot (Nicole Kidman), her sharp-tongued hippie sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh), her sister’s brooding fiancé Malcolm (Jack Black), and a trio of confused and awkward teenagers from numerous failed marriages and couplings gather for an ostensibly festive occasion, only to spit deadly venom for as long as they can stand to be around each other. The film is so unrelenting in its emphasis on the worst human characteristics that it achieves a kind of diseased purity, like a perfectly round open sore.

Speaking of unpleasant images, Margot at the Wedding is maybe the ugliest movie I’ve seen all year. It’s frequently shot with handheld cameras in natural light, which would have been fine if anyone bothered to check the weather outside or the light levels in any of the rooms inside. As a result, the interior scenes are so dark that everyone seems to read their lines while scuttling around the crawlspace under the house, where most of the film takes place. The actors contribute to this deliberately ugly mise-en-scène, too; it looks like everyone was allowed to work in whatever clothes they slept in the night before.

So Margot at the Wedding is not much to look at. But it’s a defiantly written, defiantly literary film. The characters snap off their barbs like chorus gals snapping off line kicks, and everyone is constantly jostling for the emotional upper hand. Kidman and Leigh’s moments together play like scenes from an endless horror show they’ve been restaging since they were kids. Both sisters use the past to wound each other, dredging up unpleasant memories and revising their own futures by standing atop their sibling’s shamed carcass.

Everyone in the movie carves out personal space through hostile insults, and no one does it better than Pauline’s groom-to-be, a sloppy, half-assed provocateur who is eventually revealed as the most craven one in the bunch. They all feint and dodge in a world where a line like “No one fills the ice-cube trays” is tossed out as a deadly gambit. We’ve been here before, just not in many movies. Think of playwright Edward Albee’s bitter, frustrated marrieds or John Cheever stories gone bananas or furtive John Updike scribblings even he couldn’t publish.

I can’t say that I would want see such an ugly, mean-spirited movie again. But I also can’t say I’ve seen a recent film so single-minded in its unpleasantness; there isn’t a hint of compromise in it. I’m always shocked at people who can laugh at such desperate, pathetic verbal sparring, but I’m told this film accurately depicts a kind of communicatory rawness common among East Coast residents at a certain level of intellectual force and emotional weakness. Fair enough. Best to wave goodbye to this film, admire it from a safe distance, and let it saunter along and frighten people in one art house after another, rid of my provincial squeamishness forever.

Margot at the Wedding

Opens Friday, December 21st

Studio on the Square

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Film Features Film/TV

I Am Legend: Not Worth the Wait

Attention all fans of 28 Days Later, Children of Men, Twelve Monkeys, The Descent, Signs, The Road Warrior, Night of the Comet, and/or Richard Matheson fiction: Do I have a film for you to avoid: I Am Legend. (Independence Day devotees, your movie is waiting.)

I Am Legend is the long-gestating adaptation of the 1954 Matheson sci-fi/horror novel of the same name. Previously brought to film as Vincent Price’s The Last Man on Earth and Charlton Heston’s The Omega Man, I Am Legend has been linked for years to moviemakers such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Ridley Scott, and Michael Bay. Finally, the movie’s out, in the combination of star Will Smith and director Francis Lawrence. It was not worth the wait.

The film opens three years after a genetically engineered measles virus escapes labs and gets into the general population. Everybody on earth is either killed by the virus or by those whom the virus has turned into monsters. The last man on earth: Colonel Robert Neville, a virologist who conveniently is an expert on the sickness. Plus, he’s immune, so that helps. Neville is stranded on Manhattan Island with his dog — last man on earth’s best friend. He spends his days working on a cure to the virus, eating canned goods, and palling around with his pup. He also has to be mindful of New York’s other remaining citizens: the vampire-like, virus-ravaged fiends.

Can just screenwriter Akiva Goldsman go on strike? Goldsman has made a career of making bad movies based on books I’m fond of. Going chronologically backward: I Am Legend, The Da Vinci Code, I, Robot, the two horrible Batman movies, and A Time to Kill. (To be fair, he shares I Am Legend screenwriting co-blame with Mark Protosevich.) Good thing I never read A Beautiful Mind or Practical Magic. Up next for Goldsman: Da Vinci follow-up Angels & Demons. It’ll suck, too.

I Am Legend doesn’t get everything wrong. It opens with a fast and furious deer hunt safari through New York City’s savannah. And Smith isn’t a bad choice for this role. He can act, for one, and he’s a convincing action star.

But Smith can’t escape the film’s shallowness. It’s not a cautionary tale. It has no politics. Its spirituality is as shoddy as its science. It fails its own internal logic. Worst, I Am Legend has no meaningful human element.

Instead, the film is commercialism run roughshod. (But not in a knowing, Dawn of the Dead way.) To maintain his connection with his own humanity, Neville goes shopping. For leisure, Neville hits golf balls off the tail of an SR-71 Blackbird atop an aircraft carrier in New York harbor. It’s a pretty, sweeping, expensive-looking shot. I’d trade it for a quiet scene with Neville making art, playing music, or writing in Washington Square. In a key scene, Neville bonds with someone over a shared love for Shrek — and not a shared sense of tragedy or even hope. Tis the season.

I Am Legend

Opening Friday, December 14th

Multiple Locations

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Book Features Books

Grievous Angel

“He was a good Southern boy,” Chris Ethridge said of his onetime bandmate Gram Parsons. “Loved to rock and roll, sad all the time.”

“With certain people,” Chris Hillman said of his onetime bandmate Gram Parsons, “you figure there is nothing you can do.”

Ethridge and Hillman were right. Gram Parsons had the wealthy makings of a good Southern boy, and he loved to rock when he wasn’t crooning according to the sounds laid down in Nashville and Bakersfield. At heart, he was a sad guy too, and what could anyone do? Nothing, apparently, but watch as drug usage and drinking landed Parsons — former member of the International Submarine Band, the Byrds, and the Flying Burrito Brothers and later solo artist or in partnership with Emmylou Harris — in an early grave.

Parsons died in 1973 at 26. But before he could reach that grave, there was one thing ex-con artist Philip Kaufman could do: honor Parsons’ wish to be cremated and scatter his ashes at a site where Parsons, in life, found peace: Joshua Tree, California.

So, following Parsons’ death, Kaufman and Parsons’ friend Michael Martin stole the coffin containing Parsons’ body in Los Angeles, drove it to Joshua Tree (where Parsons had died of an overdose), poured gasoline on the body, and set fire to it. Then Kaufman and Martin drunkenly hit the road back to L.A. But Parsons’ remains didn’t stay in Joshua Tree for long. Parsons’ stepfather had them flown to New Orleans and buried.

And yet, today, when it comes to Gram Parsons, things still don’t go right. As David N. Meyer reports in the 500-plus pages of Twenty Thousand Roads: The Ballad of Gram Parsons and His Cosmic American Music (Villard), the singer-songwriter’s date of birth on his grave is off by two days. But that figures, given the facts of Parsons’ emotionally charged household chronicled in the opening chapters of Meyer’s thoroughly researched and highly readable biography:

Those facts include (but are hardly limited to) the suicidal gunshot death of Parsons’ biological father, Ingram Cecil “Coon Dog” Connor, when Parsons was 12 years old and the alcoholically fueled death of Parsons’ mother, “Big” Avis, after she entered into a tumultuous marriage to Robert Parsons, himself a towering alcoholic. And what of “Little” Avis, the sister Parsons adored. In 1991, she and her daughter were drowned in a freak boating accident. And what of Polly, Parsons’ daughter? She’s seeing to her father’s musical legacy in the form of tribute albums, which comes as a surprise, since Parsons hardly saw to Polly’s welfare growing up.

More on his mind was music in all its popular forms, be it rock, country, pop, gospel, folk, R&B, or rockabilly — the more “authentic” and unpolished the better. It was that way when Parsons was a teenager attending prep school in Florida and already playing in bands. And it was that way when Parsons entered Harvard. (“Attended” isn’t the right word; he split after one semester.)

But if Parsons’ sights were on making music, recording that music was another matter. So too, rehearsing. So too, performing, all of which Meyer covers in often depressing detail. Only his late work with a team of seasoned musicians (including members of Elvis Presley’s Las Vegas band) and his duet work with Emmylou Harris gave Parsons the discipline and professionalism he needed — and then only when he put his mind to it. Parsons’ fabled friendship with Keith Richards, no stranger to excess? As Meyer explains, even the Rolling Stones knew when to get down to business and nail the details.

“Gram fled those details, refusing to confront them, thus avoiding the rigor of making good work great and great work immortal,” Meyer writes.

And that’s not all. Meyer condemns the romanticized circumstances behind Parsons’ death and calls the man himself, by turns, “a pathological liar, an unreliable friend, a narcissistic husband and careless father.” Parsons’ sizable talent? “He threw it all away.” In the same breath, though, Meyer will add that Parsons’ “songwriting showcases the bravery with which he described the self he could not bear.”

That’s beautifully put by David Meyer. And though Gram Parsons didn’t write it, that’s just what you hear from Parsons on a song called “Sleepless Nights.”

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Music Record Reviews

The Knee Plays

The mid-’80s was the pinnacle of David Byrne’s weirdness. Recording an album based on the indigenous music of a made-up tribe (In the Bush of Ghosts) was weird. Breaking up a successful group like the Talking Heads wasn’t normal. And The Knee Plays, his 1985 collaboration with playwright Robert Wilson, was an exercise in sustained weirdness. Reissued now on a 1 CD/2 DVD set with eight bonus tracks, The Knee Plays features compositions for reeds and horns, primarily holding and shaping chords to form a backdrop for Byrne’s meditations on working and traveling. “I thought that if I ate the food of the area I was visiting,” Byrne explains on “Social Studies,” “that I might assimilate the point of view of the people of that region.” He’s neither ironic nor satirical but simply fascinated by human behavior. (“Tree [Today Is an Important Occasion],” “In the Future”) — SD

Grade: B+

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Music Record Reviews

Let’s Stay Friends

Les Savy Fav have allayed fan fears of a break-up with Let’s Stay Friends, their first album of original material in six years. “Let’s tear this whole place down and build it up again,” Tim Harrington sings on opener “Pats & Pans.” “This band’s a beating heart and nowhere near its end.” Following that, the songs hide adult sentiments about disappointment and frustration within the band’s signature pop melodies, shout-along choruses, and indie-punk guitar noise. As the album proceeds, the band makes its ambitions clearer with guest vocalists, varied song structures, a larger sound, and self-aware lyrics that recall Propeller-era Guided by Voices. In so eloquently examining the trials of playing in a cult band, Let’s Stay Friends suggests that Les Savy Fav should have long ago transcended cult status. (“Patty Lee,” “What Would Wolves Do?”) — SD

Grade: A-

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Music Record Reviews

Levon Helm mines his Arkansas roots for a great comeback album.

The story leading up to the making of Levon Helm’s first album in 25 years is filled with so much triumph over adversity that you might think it’s made up. In the late ’90s, Helm, who played drums and sang for the Band, was diagnosed with throat cancer, and the radiation treatment robbed him of his voice. Pretty soon he was forced to declare bankruptcy. His home studio in Woodstock, New York, burned, and his friend and Bandmate Rick Danko died in his sleep.

Yet Helm worked to recover his voice. He rebuilt his studio and gradually began playing and singing again, launching a popular concert series called the Midnight Rambles. And, with friends and daughter Amy Helm of Ollabelle, he recorded Dirt Farmer, a stirring collection of old family songs and covers of new songs.

Helm, who grew on the family farm near Marvell, Arkansas, dedicates the album to his parents, who taught him songs like “Little Birds” and “The Girl I Left Behind.” He turns these traditional ditties into lively acoustic numbers whose mix of folk, country, Cajun, bluegrass, and even jazz echoes Helm’s work with the Band. “Poor Old Dirt Farmer” leavens its dire story about a failing farm with potent shots of grim humor: “Well, the poor old dirt farmer, how bad he must feel/He fell off his tractor up under the wheel,” Helm sings. “And now his head is shaped like a tread/But he ain’t quite dead.”

Helm sounds strong and confident on Dirt Farmer. His voice is weathered but not weak, and his drums still pop agilely around the beat. On Paul Kennerley’s “A Train Robbery,” with its period details and dramatic chorus, he sounds sinister, the choir of voices behind him like a gang of thieves. The Carter Family’s “Single Girl, Married Girl” and the Stanley Brothers’ “False Hearted Lover Blues” get dramatically new arrangements that bolster Helm’s alternately soulful and playful performance.

His best moment, however, is his cover of Steve Earle’s “The Mountain,” which loses the bluegrass lilt of the original for Appalachian gravity. Helm sounds defiant and convincingly outraged as he laments the mining industry’s toll on his home, and his delivery of the verse melody is one of many moments that prove Dirt Farmer doesn’t need its back story to be powerful and moving. — Stephen Deusner

Grade: A-

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Music Music Features

Holsapple at Otherlands

Great news for audiophiles and fans of classic guitar pop: Peter Holsapple is on his way to Memphis to play an intimate show at Otherlands Coffee Bar on Friday, December 14th.

Holsapple’s name may not be a household word, but it should be. In the 1980s, as the bed-headed and bespectacled singer/songwriter for North Carolina’s The dBs, Holsapple bridged the gap between Big Star’s lush power pop and the Replacements’ thoughtfully ragged barroom rock. Cliché terms like “jangle pop” and “jangly guitars” were practically invented to describe Holsapple’s sound, as well as the sound of his kindred spirits in R.E.M.

The dBs’ commercial success never matched the band’s influence, and when the group broke up in 1988, Holsapple hooked up with R.E.M., whose career was just beginning to take off. In addition to playing guitar and keyboards, he helped to write several songs on the band’s major commercial breakthrough, Out of Time.

After parting ways with R.E.M., Holsapple worked as a sideman for Hootie & the Blowfish and played with The Continental Drifters, an underappreciated superband featuring Vicki Peterson of the Bangles, as well as Robert Mache and Mark Walton of the Dream Syndicate.

Holsapple returned to North Carolina after Hurricane Katrina, and in recent years he’s regrouped the dBs for a handful of shows. Hopefully, his Otherlands set will include some vintage material as well as a sneak preview of what the dBs will be doing next. Locals Van Duren and Dan Montgomery open the show, which starts at 8 p.m., with Holsapple scheduled to perform at 10 p.m. Admission is $5.

— Chris Davis

The most underrated local album of the year? Probably World Wide Open, the second album from hip-hop trio Tunnel Clones — DJ Redeye Jedi and MCs Bosco and Rachi. Rather than just a nice change of pace from the standard-issue style of most Memphis rap, World Wide Open (like the band’s debut, Concrete Jungle, only more so) is a strong, confident record — densely musical (opening with Steely Dan, closing in Africa, supplying considerable funk in between) with smart, grounded flows and terrific backing vocals. Tunnel Clones play a Christmas show at the Hi-Tone Café Friday, December 14th. Doors open at 9 p.m.; admission is $10.

The party spills over the next night at the Hi-Tone, when Shangri-La Records will throw its annual Christmas party. Garage-rock heroes Jack Oblivian & the Tennessee Tearjerkers will headline the show, which will also feature a performance from Those Darlin’s, a female bluegrass trio from Murfreesboro. Resident Shangri-La DJs Buck Wilders & The Hook-Up will keep things moving between sets. Admission is $5 with a nonperishable food donation to the Memphis Food Bank. The Shangri-La Christmas party is at the Hi-Tone Saturday, December 15th. Showtime is 9 p.m.

— Chris Herrington

Riffs: On December 10th, the Stax Museum of American Soul Music opened a new exhibit, Otis Redding: From Macon to Memphis, in commemoration of the 40th anniversary of Redding’s death. Culled from the personal collection of Redding’s widow, Zelma, the exhibit will run through April 30th. … Congratulations to Kirk Whalum and Three 6 Mafia, who were among the Memphis-connected artists to receive Grammy nominations last week. Saxophonist Whalum, currently artist in residence at the Stax Music Academy, was nominated for Best Pop Instrumental Album for Roundtrip. Three 6 Mafia was involved in the writing and producing of UGK’s “Int’l Players Anthem (I Choose You),” which was nominated for Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group. … The dates have been announced for the seventh annual Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival, which will take place June 12th-15th in Manchester, Tennessee. … Congratulations to frequent Flyer contributor Andrew Earles, whose prank-call comedy discs Just Farr a Laugh Vol. 1 and 2, which he produced with New Yorker Jeffrey Jensen, will be re-released by venerable New York indie label Matador Records on February 19th. It’s been awhile since I’ve listened to any of this stuff, but I still recall with great glee such sublime moments as the attempt to book a Jermaine Stewart tribute band (“Bedroom ETA”) on Beale Street and a post-Bonnaroo call to a Birkenstock vendor of some sort (“You’re Harshing My Trip”). More on this in February. — CH

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Film Features Film/TV

Failed Fantasy

I’ve read all seven Harry Potter books. I’ve been up one side of Mount Doom and down the other with Tolkien. I’ve chased (and finally caught) Stephen King’s Dark Tower since prepubescence. And I’m here to tell you that love them all though I do, none of them can hold a candle to Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy.

Composed of The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass, Pullman’s books are teenage-appropriate fantasy with an adults-only allegorical kicker. It’s a coming-of-age story about coming-of-age. Wondrous, ambitious, original, black, profound — the series exists, as far as I’m concerned, in a hyperbole-free zone.

Which does not mean that the new film adaptation of The Golden Compass is anywhere near as good. Directed and adapted by Chris Weitz (About a Boy, Down to Earth), the film is clunky in exposition — a forgivable sin, except it’s all exposition.

The missteps begin immediately, with a narrated prologue that spills the beans on some primary mysteries that the book withheld to build tension. It’s sickening. Imagine if the opening crawl in Star Wars bluntly stated what the Force was, that it was indisputably real, and that, oh yeah, Darth Vader is Luke’s dad: Obi-Wan would come off like a preening know-it-all, Luke like an imbecile, and Han Solo like a recalcitrant asshole. If The Golden Compass doesn’t guard its secrets jealously, why should anybody else be invested in it?

Skipping past some of the more frustrating revelations, Pullman’s world opens up: Jordan College, Oxford, England, something like the 1800s. Except there are fundamental differences from our own world: Primarily, each person has an animal-like creature companion, called a daemon, that is much more than just a friend — that is analogous, in a way, to the human soul.

At Jordan College lives Lyra Belacqua (the very convincing Dakota Blue Richards), the 11-year-old clever, wild child who is the protagonist of the story. The orphan Lyra rules the roost at Jordan, palling around with Gyptian children (an ethnic group similar to the Roma) and getting into trouble with her daemon, Pantalaimon (voiced by Freddie Highmore). She encounters her uncle, Lord Asriel (Daniel Craig), a kind of English Richard Halliburton who has made a scientific discovery about the mysterious particle “Dust” in the Arctic and wants funding from Jordan College for an expedition.

After Asriel heads north, Lyra meets Mrs. Coulter (the perfectly rotten Nicole Kidman), another dignitary visiting Jordan. Attracted by her ethereal beauty and confidence, Lyra accepts Coulter’s invitation to go home with her to London. Before leaving, the college master gives Lyra an alethiometer to safeguard, a small, extremely rare device that is said to be able to tell the truth, but it doesn’t come with an instruction booklet. (This is the titular golden compass.)

In London, Lyra learns that Coulter may not be everything she seems, and, soon enough, she escapes to head north on a journey with the Gyptians. Oh, and lurking in the wings is the Magisterium, the ruling authority in this world, who have set themselves in opposition to Lord Asriel, the existence of Dust, the use of the alethiometer, and a laundry list of other things. But Dust, we learn from the prologue, is real. Therefore, the Magisterium, believing otherwise, is set up as the bad guys right away, and not very intelligent ones at that. Does it matter that the Magisterium will turn out to actually be the bad guys much later in the series? Only if you haven’t read the books.

Dakota Blue Richards in The Golden Compass

And then there are the witches, and the armored bears, and the prophecy, and … well, I could go on, but it’s just too much information — especially when the film tries to cram it all in about 20 minutes of screen time. The Golden Compass doesn’t take enough time to establish the ground rules for this familiar but fundamentally alien world. It acts as though it needs to do no work to gain the trust of the audience or to establish any credibility, or, for that matter, that there’s any doubt that the audience is going to buy any of this.

The film has garnered a lot of pre-release bother from some religious groups, who accuse it of having an atheist message. Inevitable questions about whether many of these protesters have even seen the film aside, the argument gains no traction. There’s no doubt that the Magisterium resembles the Catholic Church, just as there’s no doubt that in the books, especially The Amber Spyglass, certain key religious elements come under fire. As a fantasy, it’s the anti-Narnia.

But Pullman’s books — it remains to be seen how true it is of the films — don’t decry religious experience so much as the organization that traps it. If it’s atheistic, then I hate college football just because I detest the Bowl Championship Series.

The Golden Compass also struggles almost every minute with editing. This is a three-hour fatty crammed in a two-hour corset. The story is globetrotting in breadth, and there’s a lot of plot to put in play, especially since it’s based on a book that is all set up for the breathtaking last two installments.

Unfortunately, the big payoff in the book is remaindered by the movie for its presumed sequel. The Golden Compass ends exactly one sequence too soon and loses out on what could have been a saving grace. Herein is yet another basic flaw in the film: trusting that by playing off the audiences’ built-in fantasy-film expectations and desire for a happy ending, it will be enough to lure them back for a sequel. Instead, the movie is all empty calories. If my interest in the series weren’t rooted in the books, there’s no way this film would have me asking for more.

I can’t stand the idea that films have to be faithful to their source material, and I won’t respect myself in the morning for saying this (but I’ll respect Chris Weitz even less): would that The Golden Compass treated the book it’s based on like it was the gospel truth.

The Golden Compass

Opening Friday, December 7th

Multiple locations

Categories
Music Music Features

Reigning Sound Returns

Reigning Sound ringleader Greg Cartwright played an impromptu acoustic set at Goner Records Friday, November 30th, in part to celebrate the completion of the band’s most recent album. The former Memphian, now comfortably ensconced in Asheville, North Carolina (asked before his set if he were tempted to move back, he charitably responded that he loves visiting Memphis), played with his band at the Gibson Beale Street Showcase over Thanksgiving weekend, then spent the following week holed up at Ardent‘s Studio C, with Doug Easley engineering.

The newly bearded Cartwright said during his Goner set that the new album would be released via the In the Red label in late spring. After spending time in the past year backing up (and, in Cartwright’s case, producing and writing for) former Shangri-Las singer Mary Weiss and keeping the Reigning Sound section of record-store racks stocked with outtakes (Home for Orphans) and live (Live at Goner, Live at Maxwell’s) discs, this will be the band’s first album of new material since 2004’s Too Much Guitar.

The Reigning Sound isn’t the only high-profile Memphis-connected band that’s been in the studio working on an early-2008 release. The North Mississippi Allstars have announced that their next album, titled Hernando, will be released on January 22nd. The band’s first studio album since 2005’s Electric Blue Watermelon, Hernando will also be the first released on the band’s own label, Sounds of the South. The album was produced by Jim Dickinson in September at his Zebra Ranch studio.

If you missed ambitious local rock band The Third Man‘s record-release party for its new album Among the Wolves at the Hi-Tone Café, you can make up for it this week, when the band plays an early-evening set at Shangri-La Records. The Third Man is set to play at 6 p.m. Friday, December 7th, and it’ll be interesting to see how the band’s epic, guitar-heavy sound translates to a more intimate setting.

The Memphis Roller Derby will take over the Hi-Tone Café Saturday, December 8th, for their second annual “Memphis Roller Derby Ho Ho Ho Burlesque Show.” In addition to skits featuring the Derby gals, there will be plenty of musical entertainment as well. Longtime local-scene drummer/commentator Ross Johnson, fresh off the release of his “career”-spanning Goner compilation Make It Stop: The Most of Ross Johnson, will be backed by an “all-star” band he’s dubbed the Play Pretteez. Johnson also will retreat back behind the drum kit alongside Jeff Golightly, Lamar Sorrento, and Jeremy Scott in a British-invasion style band called Jeffrey & the Pacemakers. Rounding out the music will be electronic dance act Shortwave Dahlia and DJ Steve Anne. Doors open at 9 p.m. Admission is $10.

Australian Idol winner and MemphisFlyer.com celebrity Guy Sebastian has released his Ardent Studios-recorded debut The Memphis Album, crafted with MGs Steve Cropper and Donald “Duck” Dunn headlining a terrific Memphis studio band. Sebastian clearly loves Memphis soul, but his take on the genre is too respectful and too unadventurous for his own good. He sings only the most identifiable hits (“Soul Man,” “In the Midnight Hour,” “Let’s Stay Together,” etc.) and mimics the original recordings too closely. Still, it’s a better Memphis tribute than actor Peter Gallagher’s. Sebastian will be taking the core of his Memphis band — Cropper and Dunn along with drummer Steve Potts and keyboardist Lester Snell — on an Australian tour starting in February.

The Stax Music Academy‘s SNAP! After School Winter Concert will take place at 7 p.m. Saturday, December 8th, at the Michael D. Rose Theatre at the University of Memphis. Stax Music Academy artist-in-residence Kirk Whalum will be performing alongside the kids, as will soul singer Glenn Jones. Tickets to the SNAP! concert are $5 and are available through the Soulsville Foundation development office. Call 946-2535 for details.

Finally, congratulations to the New Daisy Theatre‘s Mike Glenn, who is the only Memphian receiving a Keeping the Blues Alive award from the International Blues Foundation this year. The awards will be presented February 2nd during International Blues Challenge weekend.