Still Thinking

After success with The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973), William Friedkin coolly requested $15 million (over the $2.5 million offered) to film two trucks hauling dynamite across a South American jungle. Friedkin’s problem was that this pitch -- truck, dynamite, jungle -- provided his entire plot. Whereas The French Connection offered a gritty crime-thriller with epic car chases, and The Exorcist argued for Christian faith over scientific reasoning (with pea-soup projectiles to spare), Friedkin’s poorly titled Sorcerer (1977) explored little more than classic man-in-conflict scenarios. He eventually won (and exceeded) his budget for a project that failed to earn $6 million in box offices and panned in the press. Friedkin contends that Star Wars’ premiere a month prior overshadowed Sorcerer, making it the flop that nearly ended his career. However, Sorcerer recently garnered praise as an overlooked masterpiece. Surely, Friedkin captured viscerally intense naturalis...

  " Sometimes I am two people. Johnny is the nice one. Cash causes all the trouble. They fight." -- Johnny Cash Happy birthday today to the Man In Black -- Mr. Johnny Cash (1932). Admittedly, my all-time favorite Cash record is  Unchained , his second installment of the Rick Rubin helmed American Recordings. I love this record because Cash sounds strong and happy and mean on these tracks. Also, you've got Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers as the backing band, which brings a tinge of sweaty swaggered rock-n-raw to Cash's gruff vocal performance.  Unchained  feels like the apex of America's musical evolution -- a signal of what's still possible when experience and expertise and patience collide sonically. It's encouraging to consider that the best music these men made -- arguably -- was in their latter years. While the industry exalts youth and the next flash-pan fad of aural anesthesia, on  Unchained  the old guard redefined greatness through the simplicity o...

The following was written as a dual review with my friend Kelly Minnis, who merely liked the new Bully record. **************** I heard Bully for the first time while playing YouTube jukebox with Kelly Minnis in my living room. We were swapping the TV remote, slamming beers because I still did, and he says, “Ah, yes. You like female vocals.” Then he played the video for “Running” from Bully’s sophomore album Losing . The recommendation took. I owned Losing less than a week later. The thing I instantly liked about Losing was the nostalgia it contained. The album felt a time-capsule of 90s sensibilities. The production. The muted, twisted guitars and trigger-thumpy bass lines. Bognanno’s riot grrrl vocals. Even the video for “Running” (minus the cell-phones) looks like something that would make a young Noah Baumbach lose sleep. Losing feels like a love-letter to a bygone, younger era. It’s a solid record, one I turn to when it’s too hot for a flannel AND a cardigan but I still don’t w...

  Those who love metal music, especially extreme metal, understand something that those who do not simply never will, and that is how a music so immediately dark often reveals a light, even while explicitly challenging it. The idea is similar to horror cinema and literature: that which deals in mayhem often points most vividly to virtue. It’s the law of opposing forces. The dance of irony. The reward of the initiated. If the Devil can appear as an angel of light, perhaps the flip begs possibility for his adversary, as well. Crazier things have happened and will again. Ask the plagued Pharoah. Konvent is a four-piece hailing from Denmark. After a ridiculously successful demo released in 2017, which shot the band into immediate prominence on the festival circuit, Konvent released their first full-length album, Puritan Masochism, on January 24 via Napalm Records. An initial listen offers one blazingly solid assurance about these ladies: they’re not messing around. Puritan Masochism ...

The fact that Amalie Bruun released her new album Folkesange under her Myrkur moniker is significant. In a career spanning a mere fourteen years, Bruun has recorded under three names, each projecting a different timbre of her musical voice. As a debut self-titled solo act, Bruun recorded a handful of schizophrenic singer-songwriter “pop” albums that paid homage to an array of artists spanning ABBA, Kate Bush, Bjork, The Beatles, and maybe early career Beyonce(?). These songs were musically quaint and lyrically juvenile, but not necessarily in a good way. In 2013 and 2014, Bruun formed Ex Cops with a forgettable and chisel-chinned male hipster. The duo released two either pop-rock or rock-pop (actually, there is a difference) LPs -- albums as sugary and delightfully easy to sip as chilled Capri-Suns by a mid-summer swimming hole.  However, in 2014 Bruun also unleashed her greatest claim to clickbait fame when she was ousted as the one-woman black metal artist known only as Myrkur. ...

Although The Ex-Optimists have a distinct sound and stage presence, I never know what to expect from their new music. And I love this about The Ex-Optimists. For instance, 2012's  Bee Corpse Collector,  nearly a decade old and half a different band ago, pays homage to swimmy-guitar college-rock radio, while 2015's  Phantom Freight  opens with a 15 minute chime-infested soundscape of "True Evil" only to be followed by 2018's angry AF full-fist, shoe-gaze rocker  Drowned In Moonlight.  Various splits and 7" releases along the way feature Ex-Ops playing post-punk thumpers ( Bee Corpse Thousand ), sweaty-stadium stompers ( Save Your Love ), and summer-love crooners ( Reruns from the '60s ). Listening through their catalogue is like reading a musical memoir of the band's influences and ideas. Life reveals itself in the progression of their recordings (2012 - poppy; 2015 - experimental; 2018 - pissed off), often telling their collective stories more throug...