They were absolutely brilliant live last night. Here is their myspace and here is their profile page on Raw Rip and if you sign up for Raw Rip you get 10 free downloads so you can download all five songs they have posted there.
Lovely british boys. Lovely!
Pick yourself up a copy of Shwayze because this is summer lovin’ music of the best kind.* Windows rolled down, sand between your toes, cruisin’, stereo cranked. Totally ridiculous rhymin’ lyrics (“Light ‘er up, light light light ‘er up, like it’s 1985 and we’re high as fuck”), bouncy bouncy beats. This would also be perfect rollerskating music.
Just so you know.
Reminds me of what is probably my all-time favorite summer* song “More Bounce in California” by Soul Kid #1.
It’s true what they say: sometimes a girl just wants to have fun.
*Or it is TO ME which is all I am concerned with isn’t it.
I know, I know, I’m getting so old and cranky, I seem to mostly regret festivals afterward….but I just couldn’t resist the lineup for this one PLUS the bonus of visiting Colorado friends, staying for free, drinking beer, playing with puppies… Yeah yeah yeah.
Anyway, one of the BIG reasons to buy a Monolith ticket is to see The Avett Brothers, who technically I SHOULD have already seen since I had tickets to their House of Blues show in Chicago (least favorite Chicago venue) but I blew it off during a horrific w-0-r-k week.
Check out the video Alicia posted and the live performance Heather posted and I mean… OK so maybe they’re a little more country than what you usually listen to? But they are also maybe a little more awesome than what you usually listen to. Yay yay yay! Can’t wait!
Another – typically as you might expect from who the author is – completely entertaining, engrossing fantasy novel.
Dear Ms. Briggs,
Every book of yours I read just breaks my heart a little bit more than the last one. The characters are so enticing; smart and funny and strong and so many other things that you wish people were in your real life. I just want their stories to go on and on and on…
Seriously,
I want to marry Kith, do you know a real him for me?,
Duff.
Oh yeah, baby, this was a GREAT show. [Minus the opener. I’ve decided not to say much about openers unless they were really good. My advice in this case: Don’t get there early if you’re going to see these guys.]
Zoey Deschanel has *such* a lovely voice and she can really open it up much more than you’d guess from the album. It’s also got a very distinctive edge to it which really lends itself to this country/folky type of tune. The full band sets often felt like a throwback to June Carter or Patsy Cline. But when she and M.Ward did some one-on-one stuff, it had a more modern feel. Equally entertaining either way, I really liked when they did some harmonizing/trading vocals back and forth. I haven’t been able to get into his solo stuff, but I though his voice worked well in counterpoint to hers.
The kind of show you just come out of HAPPY. So happy that you wind up drinking and talking and drinking and laughing and drinking [and eating mini corn dogs and doing karaoke] and getting home with only a few hours to go before the alarm goes off? Perhaps.
If they are coming to your town, they come very highly recommended.
Oh! and they played two new songs that were both really great! Yay!
Wow. Soooooo good.
A follow-up of sorts to her debut “In the Woods”, taking the #2 character from that book and putting the focus on them (and I hear an auxiliary character in this book will be the focus of her third).
Really intriguing mystery, characters that become sooooo real… The descriptions are rich and thick, and the emotions are layered and tangled.
French has just written two of the most interesting, and unusual, mysteries out there.
Wow, this album is just great. I wasn’t going to buy it, given my lukewarm (or less than) feelings for “Z”, but Mariko sent it to me anyway and dang, girl, if this isn’t the ONLY thing I want to listen to right now.
Some of it is crazy funkalicious and totally Prince-worthy (or perhaps Michael Jackson when he was good). Other bits are more sexy soul Marvin Gaye jumping in. And there’s even some Southern Rock influence (“I’m Amazed”). It’s jazzy and funky and I’d have to say downright spirited. Love it. LOVE IT.
And if you haven’t bought yourself a copy of Jim James covering “Goin’ to Acapulco” off the I’m Not There soundtrack, I’d highly recommend that as well. Him crooning that onstage at the bizarro funeral; his voice just blew me away.
It’s almost dangerous seeing a band you like this much at a tiny place like the Hideout.
Dangerous like you might accidentally touch them or start raving about how awesome they are and do they need groupies because you could quit your d-a-y-j-o-b at ANY TIME. (No, I didn’t. Ask or quit.)
Mentor Tormentor kept me under its dreamy seduction for many, many months. The new release Hymn & Her is a bit subtler. Sparser in arrangement, tauter.
Comfortable stage banter, lovely harmonies, introspective lyrics. What a wonderful evening.
Note: Opener billed as “Peter & the Rabbits” was actually “The Office” a much buzzed-about Chi-town band. And they were good!
I liked it a lot, it definitely lived up to the hype for me, which these days is almost harder to do than to just make a decent movie.
But I thought the last half hour dragged, too much time setting up the Two Face character. If he lived to be the villain of the next movie then it would make sense to me. But since he didn’t, it made it feel long. I thought they could have edited some of that down. Yes, I understand that bringing him down was certainly one of the Joker’s goals, but I thought the whole bit with the bombs on the ships just lagged. Didn’t need it, we already KNOW the things that pointed out to us (or we should) and it just seemed like wasted time. While neither Iron Man nor Wanted made me get shifty in my seat, the last half hour of this had me really feeling the time. There was stuff they could’ve cut (and I think should’ve). Coulda been a little tighter.
That said, still tremendous. Super dark and delightfully so. Really a tour de force in the sequels department; takes the first movie and ratchets up quite a few notches. The additions of Ledger and Gyllenhaal really sent it over the top. Kudos. I’ve seen it twice already, I wouldn’t be reluctant to see it again. But then that’s nothing new for me and good movies; I am a repeat big-screen viewer and proud of it.
Mindblowingly fucking hilarous. Truly comedic. Completely non-PC, an equal opportunity satirist taking on everyone/thing. Smart and sarcastic, yet willing to show a softer side on occasion. Brilliant.
In the tradition of “Confederacy of Dunces”, but I enjoyed this more. Takes it a few steps further, less bitter, more fun. And in addition to the narrator and (anti-)hero Misha Vainberg, the author himself plays a bit part in this book (from afar), the emigre writer “Jerry Shteynfarb” author of “Russian Arriviste’s Hand Job” [Shteyngart wrote “The Russian Debutante’s Handbook”]. Poking fun at yourself equally as to others = always fertile ground for hilarity.
This is in no way one of the funniest quotes in the book, but it’s emblematic of the general tone: “We give these American schmendricks a map of the world and say, ‘Point to the general area where you think Congo is located.’ Nineteen percent point to the continent of Africa. Another twenty-three percent point to either India or South America. We count those as correct answers, because Africa, India and South America all start out wide and then taper off at the bottom. So, for our purposes, forty-two percent of respondents sort of know where Congo is.”
So the book. Yeah. It’s really crude, and often gross, and TOTALLY AWESOME.