Pages tagged “issue 48”

Nashville singer/songwriter pens her own hymns

Three years ago, Sandra McCracken released The Builder And the Architect, a collection of reworked traditional hymns that remains one of the strongest albums in her near-decade-long career. Her latest, Red Balloon, only sounds like a collection of hymns. These McCracken originals move gracefully and dramatically, exploring spiritual matters with wide-eyed inquisitiveness. At times, her lyrics veer toward the saccharine, but her soft-as-down voice—equal parts Emmylou Harris, Dusty Springfield and Eva Cassidy—makes “Guardian” and “Lock And Key” feel like comfort food rather than Hallmark sap. Red Balloon sounds best when McCracken and collaborator/husband Derek Webb are most adventurous: Standout “Saturn’s Fields” marries cosmic imagery to fluttery backing vocals and cascading keyboards that sound more shoegazer than stargazer. Superfluous programmed beats rumble through most of these songs, threatening to carbon-date Red Balloon circa 1994, but eventually these tacked-on rhythms become part of the album’s larger tapestry, complementing rather than overpowering McCracken’s elegant vocals.

Listen to tracks from Red Balloon on Sandra McCracken's MySpace page.

When Scott Urban damaged his glasses during an ill-fated break-dancing 
attempt, he had a choice: purchase a new pair, or craft his own. “I thought I’d make a pair of wooden frames,” he says, “because I hate shopping.”

In addition to their long chats at Jittery Joe's in Athens, Ga., while preparing for Paste's November cover story Associate Editor Steve LaBate and Of Montreal's Kevin Barnes engaged in a lightning-round of free-association with the band's discography. Read the uncut interview here, and peruse the workings of Barnes' subconscious below.

Paste's Associate Editor, Steve LaBate, sat down with Of Montreal frontman (and our November cover subject) Kevin Barnes for two hour-long interviews outside Jittery Joe’s Coffee in the artist's hometown of Athens, Ga. Here, uncut and in its entirety, is their two-part conversation.

Publisher: LucasArts
Platforms: Xbox 360, Ps3, Ps2, Wii, DS, PSP, iPhone

Embracing your Dork Side can be loads of fun

Hardcore Star Wars fans are well aware of what happened during The Clone Wars and after the Emperor died. But in casting you as Darth Vader’s Secret Apprentice, who’s tasked with hunting missing Jedi, this third-person action-packed game is one of the few adventures set between the fall of the Republic and the rise of the Rebellion.

Publisher: EA Games
Platforms: Xbox 360, PS3, PC

Averting disaster, once again, requires plenty of gore

Zombie-like aliens overtake an abandoned ship floating through space, and it’s your job—as the none-too-subtly-named Isaac Clarke—to traverse the corpse of the ship while running a series of mostly forgettable errands. That’s right: It’s Shinji Mikami’s Resident Evil 4 meets Ridley Scott’s Alien. Even the over-the-right-shoulder viewpoint is lifted straight from RE 4. And like Alien, the game’s most unnerving moments are found between encounters. Listening to the sound of something scuttling in the overhead ducts is far more goosebump-inducing than finally seeing whatever horror emerges.

Hometown: Winton-Salem, N.C.
Film: A Walk to Beautiful
For Fans Of: Born into Brothels, The Business of Being Born

A severe condition in which a hole develops between a woman’s rectum or bladder and her vagina, obstetric fistula results from obstructed labor and leads to chronic incontinence and sometimes nerve damage and infertility. This occurs predominantly in developing countries, due to insufficient obstetric care, and it affects at least two million women worldwide. Sufferers are often ostracized by their villages and even their own families. Mary Olive Smith’s first feature-length documentary, A Walk to Beautiful, chronicles five young African women as they travel to Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital, seeking free treatment for their debilitating condition.

Publisher: Codemasters
Platforms: PS3, Xbox 360

Tracking the Golden Fleece is (mostly) a pleasure cruise

The cultural obsession with superheroes is not a contemporary phenomenon. Thousands of years before Batman and Spider-Man saved Gotham and New York—and a few decades later, Hollywood—human beings were fascinated with superhuman do-gooders. Don’t forget: The Christian faith begins with an ordinary-seeming guy who reluctantly unveils miraculous powers in his crusade against injustice and an unfathomably sinister arch-nemesis. (Sounds like a Stan Lee creation, no?) The ancient Greeks had their own superheroes—some divine, some mortal. In a world filled with such wearying complexity, we yearn for tales in which good triumphs over a wholly unambiguous evil.

DVD Release Date: Nov. 11
Director: Benson Lee
Studio/Run Time: Elephant Eye Films, 98 mins.

Inspiring breakdance doc waves hip-hop flag

For the average person, breakdancing is merely a jocular piece of ’80s nostalgia. It calls to mind that sauced attention whore at every wedding reception who inevitably flops to the ground in the middle of a dance circle during “Billie Jean” and tries to spin on his back. But even though the b-boy phenomenon exhausted its 15 minutes in the pop-culture spotlight nearly two decades ago, it has thrived ever since in madly devoted pockets all over the globe. Benson Lee’s riveting, adrenaline-fueled documentary, Planet B-Boy, shows the unifying power of hip-hop culture by focusing on b-boy crews around the world who’ve qualified to compete in the esteemed 2005 Battle of the Year in Hanover, Germany. While it’s impossible to stress enough just how electrifying the dancing in the film is (you’ll be jumping off the couch and shouting “WHAAAT?!” every few minutes), the emotional impact of the dancers’ stories gives the film its real heft. Regardless of the language barriers between these crews, hip-hop provides a common flag to rally beneath and a place to seek a mutual (and thoroughly sweat-soaked) understanding. 

Watch the trailer for Planet B-Boy:

Will Wright makes God games—simulations that give players the power to create the world in their own image. SimCity cast us as urban planners, providing the tools to build, manage and gleefully raze sprawling metropolises. The Sims let us pull the strings in a virtual dollhouse, acting out the complexities of human interactions from a comfortable distance. Now Wright has his eyes on the whole enchilada. “The point of Spore,” he says, is “to step back five steps from life and the universe and the world and get a very vast perspective on the complete history and possible future of life.” From the primordial ooze to the vast reaches of space, Spore lets players micromanage a species for eons. And, in doing so, it flirts with divisive questions about the origins of life.

Julia left last week—got in her little Honda, backed out and drove away. West to California. With her long brown hair streaming and her boyfriend riding shotgun. My oldest daughter, gone.

The unbearable lightness of being

Eight albums in, Denison Witmer’s best record is 2003’s Recovered. It featured reverent covers of acknowledged classics from Jackson Browne, Leonard Cohen and Alex Chilton: tough competition, to be sure. But Carry the Weight, the latest installment in his ongoing mopefest, too often accentuates the differences between those morose masters and this young man. Witmer sings about “the weight,” but most of his songs seem feather light.

Hometown: Leksand, Sweden
Album: Shallow Grave
Band Member: Kristian Matsson
For Fans Of: Neutral Milk Hotel, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, early Dylan

Toward the end of “Talkin’ New York,” the second track from Bob Dylan’s eponymous debut, the 20-year-old folksinger probed into American lives with precocious insight: “A lot of people don’t have much food on their table,” he drawled, “but they got a lot of forks 'n knives, and they gotta cut somethin'.” Dylan was wrought by his world. And his hunt for the right words, stories and sounds to comprehend its changes led him into all corners of creation—whimsical poetry, matter-of-fact protest tales, acoustic twang and electric echoes.

Hometown: Kendal, a town in England’s Lake District
Album: Limbo, Panto
Band Members [l-r]: Tom Fleming (bass, vocals) Benny Little (lead guitar), Hayden Thorpe (lead vocals), Chris Talbot (drums, vocals)
For Fans Of: Antony and the Johnsons, falsetto

British band Wild Beasts was originally called Fauve, a reference to a group of early-20th-century French painters (les Fauves) whose outrageous use of bold colors marked them as true avant-gardists. The band eventually translated its name to Wild Beasts “because it sounds so much more crude in English,” says singer Hayden Thorpe. Still, the avant-garde parallels remain: Wild Beasts’ debut Limbo, Panto is a soaring, singular combination of emotional abandon, frank laddishness, shimmering guitars and cabaret theatricality.

Hometown: Tokyo

Game: Song Summoner
For Fans Of: Final Fantasy Tactics, Steve Jobs

If you need advice on how to get paid for obsessing over the things you love most in the world, you might start by consulting with Japanese video-game designer Takehiro Ando.

Release Date: Oct. 28
Creator: Paul Feig
Starring: Linda Cardellini, John Francis Daley, James Franco, Seth Rogen, Samm Levine
Studio: Shout! Factory

Painfully, awkwardly, wonderfully real

With all the critical praise it’s received in the near decade since its cancellation, it’s easy to forget that Freaks And Geeks was, at its heart, just another high-school show. It featured the same jocks and pimples and every other cliché the genre can offer, not only because its audience expected it, but also because that’s what high school is all about. By embracing these tropes (rather than pretending they’re mere clichés), Freaks managed to transcend the genre while similar shows with greater ambition, such as My So-Called Life, and even Undeclared, seem dated or trite by comparison. Instead of trying for clever twists on the concept, Freaks focused on human interaction and, above all, character. Ultimately, it’s this focus on character that turned another typical high-school sitcom into an incredibly funny and moving show. The Yearbook Collection features everything from Shout!’s earlier package, plus 2 discs of table readings, auditions, other behind the scenes bric-a-brac and an 80 page yearbook full of essays and photos. It’s absurdly priced but worthwhile.

Watch a scene from "Smooching and Mooching" from Freaks and Geeks Yearbook Edition:

Hometown: Roberta, Ga.
Album: Meiko
For Fans Of: Brandi Carlile, Shawn Colvin, Dido

When Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter Meiko landed two songs on Grey’s Anatomy last year, her hometown of Roberta, Ga., responded with a congratulatory billboard in the middle of town. She had left years earlier, following her older sister to L.A. without knowing exactly what she’d do once she got there. Growing up, Meiko wrote songs and played guitar in her room after school, but stage fright kept her from sharing her music.

Play It Louder
By Shane Harrison

Play is a big gamble—a largely instrumental album from one of country’s most reliable hit makers. You can just hear the Nashville suits gnashing their teeth, asking, “Where are the hits?” They might be here, but only among the four vocal tracks. Play is at its best, though, when Telecaster master Paisley is tearing it up on his twangy six-string. On album opener “Huckleberry Jam,” Paisley’s guitar rolls and tumbles like an Olympic gymnast, trading licks with the pedal steel and banjo. Play is pretty (“Kim”), finger-popping (the cocktail jazzy “Les Is More”) and goofy fun. “Turf’s Up” sends country to the beach, as Paisley channels both the living (surf-guitar god Dick Dale) and the dead (country-guitar titan Chet Atkins). When guest six-string slingers James Burton, Vince Gill, John Jorgensen, Albert Lee, Redd Volkaert and Steve Wariner join Paisley for a romp through “Cluster Pluck”—silly title notwithstanding—it’s a Telecaster lover’s fever dream.

If video-game franchise Guitar Hero has shown us anything, it’s that anyone can play guitar, provided the guitar has five colored buttons instead of actual strings. So maybe it’s just shown us that anyone can play Simon. In any case, playing guitar is the easy part of being in a band.

Release Date: Oct. 31
Director: Clint Eastwood
Writer: J. Michael Straczynski

Cinematographer: Tom Stern

Starring: Angelina Jolie, John Malkovich, Jeffrey Donovan, Amy Ryan
Studio/Run Time: Universal Pictures, 140 mins.

In Eastwood’s latest, a woman’s struggle against the system spirals into chaos

It shouldn’t be a spoiler, but it is: Changeling is based on a true story. This detail went largely unannounced before the movie’s world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival this past May. When the credits rolled at film’s end, it was as if director Clint Eastwood whispered in everyone’s ears, “That was for real."

Fifteen years before the birth of gangsta rap, A Clockwork Orange bore witness to the strength of street knowledge

A Cliffs Notes summary of N.W.A.’s 1988 breakthrough Straight Outta Compton might look something like this: Senseless beatdowns. Misogyny-by-numbers. Gangland murder masquerading as casual, cruel bloodsport. A new slang understood only by the perpetrators themselves. All carried out with gusto by loquacious street-toughs whose easy familiarity with the thug life would go on to influence the generation that followed, desensitizing these latecomers to behavioral and societal extremes while encouraging ever-greater feats of outrageously violent indifference.

Release Date: Oct. 31
Director/Writer: Guy Ritchie
Cinematographer: David Higgs
Starring: Gerard Butler, Tom Wilkinson, Mark Strong
Studio/Run Time: 
Warner Bros., 117 mins.

British gangsters deliver popcorn violence in quirky heist film

A decade ago, Guy Ritchie became the new British icon of pop violence with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch. His visual assault of gunfire camera cuts and cockney one-liners made him the international competition to Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avery’s exploitation renaissance. After the combined disappointment of Swept Away and Revolver, Ritchie returns to form with RocknRolla, a hyper-stylized crime ensemble with just enough bombast for a modest career resurrection. The film stars Tom Wilkinson as Lenny Cole, a traditional gangster whose real-estate monopoly is pursued by an Eastern Bloc crime lord (Karel Roden) and a troupe of modern opportunists led by One Two (Gerard Butler). A boring exposition and clichéd archetypes trail into colorful bits of hilarity, including a homoerotic subplot among two criminals and an exaggerated chase sequence that finds Butler squaring off against two Russian war criminals. Ritchie continues to riff on the plot he wrote years ago, but has finally learned how to improvise in new and refreshing directions.

Watch the trailer for RockNRolla:

In Lou Reed’s New York, the people worth knowing—the ones with nobility—are jazz arrangers, maverick saxophonists, conceptual artists. Characters. These days, that’s pretty much who to mention if you don’t want the 66-year-old 
songwriter to hang up. Topics politely suggested as verboten by his publicist: his personal life, the ’60s, bisexuality.

Note: Also serves as review for Deerhunter's Microcastle. Go to rate that album by clicking here.

As global warming threatens the chilly habitats of the family Cervidae, we can thank Deerhunter and Deerhoof for calling attention to the noble antlered animal. Last year, the bands’ Cryptograms and Friend Opportunity offered equal parts ambition and experimentation. This year both follow-up their breakthroughs, so deer around the world can sleep a little easier, knowing their namesakes are keeping the kingdom in the spotlight.

Note: Also serves as review for Deerhoof's Offend Maggie. Go to rate that album by clicking here.

As global warming threatens the chilly habitats of the family Cervidae, we can thank Deerhunter and Deerhoof for calling attention to the noble antlered animal. Last year, the bands’ Cryptograms and Friend Opportunity offered equal parts ambition and experimentation. This year both follow-up their breakthroughs, so deer around the world can sleep a little easier, knowing their namesakes are keeping the kingdom in the spotlight.

Hometown: Brooklyn, N.Y.
Album Title: High Places
Band Members: Robert Barber (multi-instrumentalist) and Mary Pearson (vocals, bassoon)
For Fans Of: Cocteau Twins, Thrill Jockey Records, etchings.

Seventy years ago, a rakish gentleman’s come-on would’ve been to invite a lady up to ‘see his etchings.’ Today, fine-art major Robert Barber isn’t getting fresh when he utters the same phrase—he really has them. And he’s become so familiar with the bygone acid-engraving art that he wound up teaching a college course on it. “Etching, in the ’30s, was one of the main ways people met and produced art,” he explains. “And a lot of etchings from back then were pretty dramatic—like Otto Dix’s, whose stuff was all war imagery with people in gas masks crawling through trenches. And me being a weird punk-rock/art-school kid, I was always focusing on the dark stuff.”

Release Date: Sept. 2
Director: Bill Melendez
Writer: Charles M. Schulz
Starring: Peter Robbins, Christopher Shea, Sally Dryer

Studio/Run Time: Warner Home Video, 25 mins.

It’s the best Halloween cartoon ever, Charlie Brown!

CBS demanded another blockbuster Peanuts cartoon following the success of A Charlie Brown Christmas in 1965, so Charles M. Schulz, director Bill Melendez and executive producer Lee Mendelson came up with It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, in which Linus and Sally spend Halloween waiting for the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown gets nothing but rocks while trick-or-treating, and Snoopy’s WWI flying ace is shot down behind enemy lines. Even four decades after its original airing, Great Pumpkin feels as ageless as the Peanuts kids, thanks to Melendez’s inventive art work, Vince Guaraldi’s evocative score, the use of child actors to voice the characters, and some surprisingly sophisticated punchlines: When Linus defends the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown replies, “We’re obviously separated by denominational differences.” This remastered set—which includes a short making-of doc as well as the forgettable It’s Magic, Charlie Brown—presents Great Pumpkin as a quiet, ruminative alternative to today’s shrill animation.

Watch the first three chapters of It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown:

Review Haiku

Abstract rock, spiked with
melody. So percussive!
Download “Biko,” “Signs.”
—Nick Marino

On track one did they
Chant “I declare a thumb war”?
Whoa adrenaline
—Jason Killingsworth

Intimacy means
everyone’s invited to
The pity party
—Josh Jackson

Listen to Bloc Party's "Signs" from Intimacy:

Fifteen years ago, Lee Ann Womack was handing out demos door-to-door in Nashville, baby daughter in tow. “My husband at the time was on the road. I couldn’t afford a babysitter and thought, ‘I’ll probably never have a career now because I have to take care of this baby,” she says, perched on a barstool in her kitchen. “Then I finally decided, ‘I’ll stop bitching about it and take the kid with me.’"

Release Date: Oct. 24
Director/Writer: Philippe Claudel
Cinematographer: Jérôme Alméras
Starring: Kristin Scott Thomas, Elsa Zylberstein
Studio/Run Time: 
Sony Pictures Classics, 
117 mins.

Novelist’s film debut allusive, ambitious

After a successful literary career in his native France and a stint as a professor of literature, Philippe Claudel has ventured into film with his first directorial effort. I’ve Loved You So Long—the story of two sisters who hazard a reconnection after the older sibling has been incarcerated for 15 years—is rife with allusions to literature and overloaded with water motifs and the notion of family. Kristin Scott Thomas’ haunted, Oscar-worthy turn (as the convict struggling to assimilate back into the world) conveys unspeakable pain and guilt through her gaunt visage and thousand-yard stare. Relying on Alméras’ static camera, Claudel sometimes shoehorns in too much peripheral suffering. Ultimately, he defuses the horror of the unspeakable crime, the sisterly tension unclenching without much in the way of true catharsis.

Watch the trailer for I've Loved You So Long: