One for Friday: Figurine, “Let’s Make Our Love Song”

One thing I learned fairly early on in my college radio career is that there’s ultimately too much new music coming out to keep up with it all on your own. That was the case in the late eighties and early nineties, before the grunge-led boom in “alternative music” occurred in rough symmetry with greater affordability for more DIY-inclined bands to produce and distribute their own material. When I later started my second, slightly different life on the left end of the dial, the number of new CDs that flooded into the station each and every week, often from largely … Continue reading One for Friday: Figurine, “Let’s Make Our Love Song”

Kosinski, McQueen, Melville, Reichardt, Young

Tron: Legacy (Joseph Kosinski, 2010). “You’re messing with my Zen thing, man!” Is there another actor working today besides Jeff Bridges who could deliver a line like that and make it sound plausible? In the never-ending quest to mine every cinematic artifact from the past three to four decades and turn it into a sparkling new franchise, Disney delivers the sequel, almost three decades in the making, that almost no one waited anxiously to see. What’s more, someone apparently decided that the best way to honor the zippy innocence of the original digital groundbreaker was to heap a whole bunch … Continue reading Kosinski, McQueen, Melville, Reichardt, Young

Spectrum Check

While I’m falling a little behind in my music reviews, I still had two new film pieces go up at Spectrum Culture this past week. First there was a review of a new documentary that uses one man’s personal experience, documented with a series of video cameras, to illuminate the ongoing challenges of the conflict between Israel and Palestine. While its homemade origins instill some humility into the film, it was also fairly complex and required a certain amount of deftness to detail its strengths and weaknesses. It was a nice challenge to write the review. I also wrote on … Continue reading Spectrum Check

One for Friday: Mental As Anything, “If You Leave Me, Can I Come Too?”

I wish I were better at coming up with titles. There’s few things more satisfying than a great title for an album, a movie or a book, something that immediately grabs attention and is smart and memorable enough that it engenders goodwill right off the bat. There’s some added pressure with a song, of course, because the hope and expectation is that the cleverness of the title will fully and cleanly carry over to the track, especially if the title is actually used in the song. It’s easy enough to pile up an assemblage of clever words if they don’t … Continue reading One for Friday: Mental As Anything, “If You Leave Me, Can I Come Too?”

Top 40 Smash Taps: “Crazy Eyes for You”

These posts are about the songs that can accurately claim to crossed the key line of chart success, becoming Top 40 hits on Billboard, but just barely. Every song featured in this series peaked at number 40. Apt Records was started in the late nineteen-fifties as a subsidiary of ABC-Paramount, which itself is widely considered to be the first major label to be formed after the rock ‘n’ roll era truly got underway. Whether by design of happenstance, Apt Records stuck solely with singles, apparently releasing not one one full-length album during its eight years of existence. In that span, … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “Crazy Eyes for You”