Concert review: The New Pornographers

Posted on by Eric

TNP 2014

also appearing: Iron & Wine                                                                                                         Lifestyle Communities Pavilion, Columbus, Ohio – September 20, 2014

Despite five solid years now of reinforcement from the music journalism establishment, I can never quite bring myself to consider Vancouver, BC’s The New Pornographers a “supergroup”. Having read with zeal approximately every article published about them in that period, all of which invoke the label “supergroup”, I can say mine is at least a considered opinion. While technically true, the moniker still strikes me as a lazy sort of shorthand. My relationship with the band stretches from just after the release of the textured, understated (but commanding) Together in 2010 to just after the release of this summer’s celebratory Brill Bruisers, and in that time they went from complete unknowns (mine are the only eyes that matter) to one of my very favorites regardless of genre, a meteoric rise in my estimation that, while not without precedent, still has vanishingly few peers. Continue reading “Concert review: The New Pornographers” →

Lobbying hard for “Big Dictionary”…

Posted on by Eric

dictionary

Even when I’m listening to sports talk radio, I’m still only paying real attention to it a fraction of the time. I’m much more reliably aware of the news programs on local NPR, or piqued by a specific song dug out of the vaults by Columbus, OH’s local indie/alternative station for “No Repeat Thursday”. Sports talk to me is largely background noise, for three main reasons: 1) none of the teams I follow – the Steelers, the Mets, the Blue Jackets, Ohio State, UNC, the entire sport of boxing – are a consistent part of the national sports conversation, and if they are, it’s generally for all the wrong reasons Continue reading “Lobbying hard for “Big Dictionary”…” →

Steelers Thoughts #4 (9/29/14): Duck! Rabbit! Duck!

Posted on by Eric

I have a few points to make about yesterday’s last minute Steelers loss to the Buccaneers, and no wish to belabor any of them. Sixteen hours later, the sting is still fresh and the taste still bitter. It was one of the most frustrating losses in my recent memory, or, at any rate, has temporarily crowded out all other contenders from my personal shortlist. I certainly have no desire to detract from the performance of Tampa Bay, who were game, opportunistic, resilient, and tenacious in victory. Though Tampa played well enough to win, I also don’t think it’s homerism to suggest that, by most objective measures, the Steelers on the whole outplayed them. They moved the ball, often with ease, and for much of the game held close to a threefold advantage on Tampa in terms of yards gained. The Bucs parlayed a crippling turnover into an early lead but then seemed to succumb to our offensive pressure and relative defensive competence, before the Steelers, who have a well-established recent history of playing down to lesser competition, shot themselves in the foot late, taking it off the gas in the process. Continue reading “Steelers Thoughts #4 (9/29/14): Duck! Rabbit! Duck!” →

Movie review: “Not Another Teen Movie” (2001)

Posted on by Eric

not another teen movie

“And I’ll bet that you lose that bet…but that in doing so, you’ll learn an even more valuable lesson, and win. (pause) In life, I mean.”

The late Roger Ebert lamented, early and often, the inadequacies of grading movies on any sort of scale. Essentially, art is so subjective that it has a built-in natural resistance to easy criticism, and the labels we use to compensate can be obscure, imprecise or reductive, even with the best of intentions behind them. Ebert’s print reviews, which are absolutely required reading for anyone seeking more than a cursory knowledge of 20th Century film, followed a “star” model, with four being the highest possible awarded rating and zero the lowest. On television, of course, Ebert was never granted the ideal space or agency to regard a movie as much more than a simple up/down vote (cue his famous thumb), but in print his muse and talent ranged far and wide, requiring a more nuanced scale to render the final verdict. Ebert found the star format frustrating and limiting, a necessary evil of sorts, and since adopting it as the basis for my own grades on this blog, I’ve come to understand a bit from whence he came. Continue reading “Movie review: “Not Another Teen Movie” (2001)” →

Concert review: Overkill

Posted on by Eric

The Orpheum, Tampa, FL – September 13, 2014

Overkill is among the great craft breweries, so to speak, in the entire heavy metal genre. Think about it. Its music is singular, memorable, and tasty, and fills a niche no one else is quite able to. Its fans are brand loyal and highly devoted. The band does lack mainstream press and wide acclaim, but is able to compete in the marketplace, more or less under its own rules. Overkill has been making its peculiar brand of sardonic, high energy thrash metal for over thirty years now. In that time, it has muscled into the overall conversation on its own merits – equal parts quality and tenacity, with a healthy chaser of Jersey attitude – yet, compared to thrash’s long-established “Big Four” – Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth, and Anthrax – the band is still relatively unsung. Through all those years, however – as Metallica famously sold out, cut its collective hair and eventually morphed into the metal version of the Walt Disney Co., as Slayer replaced its early peaks with foothills and mid-period plateaus with valleys, as Megadeth turned into some weird sideshow for which sustained musical excellence was the exception rather than the norm, and as Anthrax struggled variously to find its footing and reclaim its identity, or build any sort of new millennium momentum – Overkill has been constant, a steady, dependable, often outstanding force for metal good and an enduring DIY success story. Continue reading “Concert review: Overkill” →

Post No. 50: Iron Maiden saved my life.

Posted on by Eric

iron-maiden-announce-live-album-book-of-souls

AUTHOR’S NOTE – Tradition for this blog, informal until now, has been for every 25th post to eschew the usual route of reviews and features and speak to something personal. What follows does all that and much more. In rereading and editing it, I realized immediately that its protagonist doesn’t come off particularly well. I hope much of that can be chalked up to these being remembrances (fairly accurate, I’m forced to concede) of how I felt, and what I was, at the ages of 11-13, a shy, lonely kid trying and failing to navigate the choppy social waters of junior high/middle school. What I was and how I felt were pretty much one thing and the same: lost. I try to always write from a passionate point of view, in part because it’s comfortable and inspiring, but also because I worry I’m not particularly interesting and hope that subject matter for which I feel a particular affinity will help make up the difference. When I’m the subject matter I’m writing about, well, the intensity is necessarily compounded.

What you’re about to read is a long and winding journey, cathartic (I found) in addition to being self-indulgent, meticulous in detail and overreaching in scope. Some of the details were particularly uncomfortable for me to excavate and inhabit, and I apologize if they’re upsetting, or if the journey becomes wearying. I thought it proper and necessary to describe both the heights and depths in full. This was a very hard piece for me to write, or at least half of it was. When things later shifted abruptly to far happier subject matter, I predictably found it difficult to stop writing. Continue reading “Post No. 50: Iron Maiden saved my life.” →

Movie review: “Lucy” (2014)

Posted on by Eric

lucy

“One neuron, you’re alive. Two neurons, you’re moving. And with movement, interesting things begin to happen…”

Lucy is Scarlett Johansson’s show from start to finish, but director Luc Besson was still wise to secure the services of Hollywood’s go-to provider of gravitas, Morgan Freeman, to function as what may be the first fully expository main character in action film history. Expository characters in action films are, of course, a dime a dozen. Every other James Bond movie, for example, produces, upon the superspy’s arrival in an exotic, forbidding new locale, some goofy local agent whose entire purpose is to appear from out of a nearby bush just long enough to bring Bond up to speed on the villain’s progress before getting himself killed. Freeman’s second-billed scientist sets the new standard, spending the first third of Lucy lecturing a hall of attentive European extras on the untapped but tantalizing potential of the human mind, the second third bewildered after he is contacted by a young woman whose misadventures with a Taiwanese designer drug (intended to – stay with me – synthesize and concentrate the miraculous natural agent that kick starts fetuses in utero) have unlocked her mind in unheard of and highly dangerous ways, Continue reading “Movie review: “Lucy” (2014)” →

Steelers Thoughts #3 (7/30/14): Are we there yet?

Posted on by Eric

shazier

Steelers Training Camp is officially underway in beautiful Latrobe, PA, though today is an off day for the team. Yesterday, the boys practiced in pads for the first time this year, and, though Mike Tomlin has in his press briefings kept things in strict perspective and been typically (and, I might add, properly) circumspect about praising anybody, there is nevertheless lots to talk about, both on and off the field. The air is thick with possibility, which, of course, is so much fuel to the fires of speculation. Soon enough, they’ll be raging, but I’ll do my best to keep this piece comparatively breezy in feel. There is, of course, absolutely no news to be found here, but this is just too fun a time of year for fans for it to go wholly unremarked upon. So, without further ado, my quick takes on some recent Steeler headlines, plus other tidbits. Mmmm…training camp! Continue reading “Steelers Thoughts #3 (7/30/14): Are we there yet?” →

Concert review: Clutch

Posted on by Eric

Clutch-live-review

also appearing: All That Remains                                                                                                Lifestyle Communities Pavilion, Columbus, Ohio – July 26, 2014

Clutch gets it. Clutch knows what rock & roll is, what it has been, what it’s supposed to be. They are a breath of pure, bracing oxygen in a smoggy, dire musical landscape. Whenever I hear internet denizens grumbling about the latest rap, folk or foundational country act elected to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, part of me is very sympathetic, no matter how much my musical palette might have expanded in the years since it was first forged. The music I love most dearly has always been Rock & Roll (capital R, capital R, for emphasis), which is to say the distorted, amplified blues of The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin and Cream, the tasty licks and unshakeable groove of AC/DC and ZZ Top, the crowd-pleasing bombast of Queen and Kiss and Van Halen, the intensity of Hendrix and The Who, or the blue collar impact of Springsteen and Bob Seger and The Ramones. Continue reading “Concert review: Clutch” →

Concert/Movie review: “Monty Python Live (Mostly)” (2014)

Posted on by Eric

python live mostly

O2 Arena, London, England – July 20, 2014

The pioneering British comedy troupe Monty Python effectively ceased operations as a creative entity in 1983 with the release of their provocative and underappreciated cinematic swan song, Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. Through the years of radio silence that followed, fans clamored for any sort of reconstitution they could get, and the lack of a grand retirement announcement, plus the fact that members kept popping up in one another’s projects*, continued to stoke faint hope that the Pythons might reunite. Graham Chapman’s death in 1989 should have closed that book definitively, but the thirty+ years since 1983 have been thick with retrospectives and articles, documentaries and oral histories, all of which painted the original partnership as rewarding but fraught, occasionally extremely difficult, and their salad days as something certainly worth remembering but not really worth revisiting.** Continue reading “Concert/Movie review: “Monty Python Live (Mostly)” (2014)” →