WARNING: Some profanity, adult themes and references to human sexuality BY TONY CARO It was good, but it just wasn’t doing it for me. I grabbed some tissues and wiped the lotion off my hand. None of these thumbnails looked interesting: a chick with busty tits getting banged from behind. No. Two chicks making out with a random guy standing beside them. Nope. A guy and a girl getting frisky by a pool…interesting. I clicked on the link, and, after wading through many unavoidable ads, I started lotioning back up. It was hot as they bathed in the sun by […]
Win Tix To See David Byrne @ The Mann Tomorrow
David Byrne — post-New Wave elder statesman of all things arch, artsy, affected and oblique — is the Marcel Duchamp of 20th Century rock n’ roll, transmuting the artifacts of the mundane and the quotidian into magical charms to ward off the confusion, dread and ennui of modern life. That was/is his great trick: embracing weirdness as the baseline of the new normal, and in the process making the avant-garde danceable while convincing us all to stop trying to make sense of the senselessness swirling all around us. Message: The WTF-ness of The Now? Same as it ever was. […]
BEING THERE: Car Seat Headrest @ UT
Photo by MATT SHAVER I first heard Car Seat Headrest last spring, driving through Southwestern Pennsylvania mountain roads with my mom, on Jenny Eliscu’s satellite radio show. As Will Toledo [pictured, above] alternately screamed and spoke the lyrics of “Bodys” in a matter-of-fact tone, my mom laughed out loud, saying “What is this depressing shit you listen to?” Typical baby boomer parent, unable to understand my millennial malaise. Six months later, I look up at Toledo on the stage of Union Transfer as he sings that same song off of the 2018 re-release of his 2011 DIY triumph, Twin Fantasy, […]
GEEK SQUAD: What’s Not To Love About The Captain Marvel Trailer That Just Dropped?
So, the Captain Marvel trailer finally dropped. First of all, seeing Brie Larson crash land on Earth and Samuel L Jackson narrate the first half of the trailer completely sells the film — it’s set-in-the-’90s trailer and jammed pack with action scenes. Captain Marvel is such a complicated character that giving a detailed history will be exhausting and pointless given that the film is invariably going to streamline her sprawling back story to avoid forcing audiences to juggle alien sleeper agents, cosmic spaceship accidents that merged an alien DNA with a human, children that were genetically aged, X-Men member Rogue […]
REVIEW: Joe Ely Full Circle: The Lubbock Tapes
BY JON HOULON Any archival release from Mr. Joe Ely — one-man Texas music institution, former Ringling Bros. wrangler and founding member of the Flatlanders – is cause for celebration around these parts. This one is called Full Circle: The Lubbock Tapes and it’s brought to us on Ely’s own Rack ‘Em Records. Full Circle. Let me come. This may take a minute if you’ll indulge me. There are holy grails and there are HOLY GRAILS. The grails that mark us. The Flatlander’s More A Legend Than a Band, recorded in 1972 but not released in the United States […]
HILLARY CLINTON: Tryanny Is On Our Doorstep
Artwork by SARAH SOLE HILLARY CLINTON: It’s been nearly two years since Donald Trump won enough Electoral College votes to become president of the United States. On the day after, in my concession speech, I said, “We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead.” I hoped that my fears for our future were overblown. They were not. In the roughly 21 months since he took the oath of office, Trump has sunk far below the already-low bar he set for himself in his ugly campaign. Exhibit A is the unspeakable cruelty that his administration has inflicted on […]
BEING THERE: Jay Laughlin @ Johnny Brenda’s
Photo by MARK LIKOSKY Opening with “Before the Dawn” perfectly set the mood for Saturday night’s intimate, unplugged celebration of the 30 year anniversary of the day guitarist Jay Laughlin and his friend Frank “Skip” Candelori started playing music together in a band called Turning Point. Although Skip tragically passed away in 2002, Saturday night, Jay sat with his old acoustic guitar upstairs at Johnny Brendas to walk us through his memories making the audience fell like they were right there in the practice space writing some of early 90’s hardcore’s most seminal material. Some diehard fans from back in […]
TESTIMONIAL: Q&A W/ The MC5’s Wayne Kramer
BY JONATHAN VALANIA Borne of riots and ruin, under a bad moon rising in the end times of the Age of Aquarius, Detroit’s MC5 were an unholy marriage of jacked-up vintage rawk n’ roll boogaloo, bloozy black snake moaning, free jazz interstellar overdrive, stick-it-to-the-man radical chic and lysergic emanations. Doing their level best to unleash anarchy in the USA, their rallying cry was “Dope, rock n’ roll and fucking in the streets” and their guru/manager was John Sinclair, self-appointed leader of the White Panther Party, a caucasoid analog to the Black Panthers. The original line-up was as follows: haystack-haired blooze […]
CINEMA: Let Us Prey
THE PREDATOR (Directed by Shane Black, 107 minutes, USA, 2018) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC It’s been eight years since the Predator last stalked our multiplexes and he’s back thanks to director Shane Black (who played Hawkins in the original), who reunites the franchise with its 80’s action roots. To fully realize this vision Shane has also enlisted co-writer Fred Dekker the man who gave us such ‘80s monster classics as The Monster Squad, Night of the Creeps and House. Given those two pedigrees, you know what to expect here, the film is as heavy on the laughs as […]
BEING THERE: Sir Elton John @ Wells Fargo Center
Photo courtesy of Getty Images And, in the end, the chap born Reginald Kenneth Dwight 71 years ago – long known better as Elton Hercules John – rose from the piano stool on the Wells Fargo Center stage after closing his hits-heavy 24-song show and soaked up the vociferous Philadelphia crowd’s love one last time. It was only the third of his 300+-date “Farewell Yellow Brick Road” tour – which opened in glamorous Allentown, PA, over the weekend and is expected to circle the globe thru 2021 – but it was the finale of his sold-out two-night stand in Philly. […]
TED TALK: Q&A With Ted F*cking Leo
BY SOPHIE BURKHOLDER Ted Leo is a born and bred punk. He grew up in Bloomfield, New Jersey, coming of age at the peak of the 1980’s hardcore punk scene, playing in bands like Citizens Arrest, Puzzlehead, and, later, noted DC neo-mods Chisel. In 1999, having mothballed Chisel, he stepped into the spotlight with Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, cranking out seven well-received albums of high-octane, punk-edged power-pop over the course of the next decade and built a large and loyal following in the process. But somewhere around 2010 he ran smack into a brick wall of bad karma, […]
BEACH HOUSE: Drunk In LA
Directed by Sonic Boom. PREVIOUSLY: In the beginning, before there was Spiritualized or Spectrum, there was Spacemen 3. If you came of age in 80s, in the dreary grey flannel age of Reagan/Thatcher, when drug war hysteria was reaching a feverish pitch, Spacemen 3 was hands down the most persuasive and rewarding argument for the ingestion of mind-expanding substances since Pink met Floyd. In August of 1984, Jason Pierce (a.k.a. Jason Spaceman) received a government grant to attend Rugby Art College — which he promptly misused to purchase an electric guitar and amplifier. It was at Rugby Art College that […]
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When U Can’t
FRESH AIR: Veteran journalist Bob Woodward has written about every U.S. president since Richard Nixon — nine in total. But in all his years covering politics, he has never encountered a president like President Trump. Woodward’s latest work, Fear: Trump In The White House, paints a portrait of Trump as uninformed and mercurial. The book describes moments when staff members joined together to purposefully block what they believe are the president’s most dangerous impulses — sometimes by surreptitiously removing papers from the president’s desk. “There were drafts of a proposal to get out of the Paris climate accord that […]