I’ve always been far more interested in music criticism (obviously), but of late I find myself more and more drawn to movie criticism. Blissfully unaware of many of the major ideas and concerns that critics were hashing out in the 1960s and 70s, I’m very excited to read American Movie Critics: An Anthology From the Silents Until Now, which was fairly favorably reviewed by Atlantic editor Benjamin Schwarz this past month.

On a similar tip, I’ve been going through some of the primers located over at GreenCine and catching up on some of the genres that I barely knew had enough directors to constitute one.

They point towards two interesting links today concerning movie criticism: first, at Tom Stupen and Stephen Cooke’s blog, there is a clip of Pauline Kael delivering a talk at San Fernando Valley State College during 1963 that hews closely to essay Circles and Squares.

Second, Village Voice contributor Anthony Kaufman senses that despite all of New Times Media’s assurances that the Voice has already gotten a nice taste of what might be to come in the form of this guy and others reviewing movies.

Here’s the official press release on the dissolution of the Test Icicles:

OFFICIAL STATEMENT FROM TEST ICICLES MANAGEMENT:

“As of Tuesday, February 21 Test Icicles have split. The band have just come off a European tour and are exhausted from the constant pressures of touring, subsequently they have cancelled their show at the NME Awards show this Friday and US tour. The band will play their final dates on their UK tour in April.’

OFFICIAL STATEMENT FROM TEST ICICLES MEMBER RORY ATWELL:

Hmm, well, I not really sure how to explain this, but I gather from the comments that have been left on our myspace page over the last twenty-four hours that you all know that our ‘group’, band’, ‘project’ or whateveryawannacallit is going to split up.
I’ve just spent the last hour writing a dissertation about what our band is/was/intended-to-be and have twisted my brain inside out trying to explain the chaos, dilemmas and confusion that has engulfed this band in the past 18 months, I’m not even sure I understand what has happened to us let alone trying to explain it to someone else.
We started this band in August 2004, our only intention was to have bit of fun, to play a few shows, cause some trouble and to split up shortly afterwards, the fact of the matter is that we played our 5millionth gig the other day after a year of multiple tours and we’re sick, tired and miserable, and to put it simply, it just isn’t fun anymore and hasn’t been for a very long time, so we’ve decided it’s time to find something that does make us happy because unfortunately this isn’t it.

The original plan was to play a UK tour, European Tour and American Tour all in succession, finishing up with our final 5 shows around the UK in April.
I think we always suspected that at some point during this three month period of constant touring that something would go wrong and unfortunately that time came after the final show of our European tour in St. Malo last week, I’m not say who it was who snapped or in what circumstance but it had been a long time coming and I was almost relieved when it actually happened.

I’m really sorry to anyone who was looking forward to seeing us playing at that NME show or catching us on tour in the US, I hope that anyone who bought a ticket manages to get their money back without too much hassle. I would’ve loved to have toured the US, but in our current state of disrepair it was never going to happen and if we did try and make it happen it probably would have led to something much worse happening and the three of us disappearing somewhere near Utah never to be seen again, or something like that, so unfortunately the US tour wasn’t to be. We will however play our final shows in April, that’ll give us some time to sort our heads out and hopefully we can all have a week long ‘fuck the Test Icicles’ party together ? should be a good way to kill us off I think, bring your shovels and we’ll bury Test Icicles once and for all.

Ok, well, I don’t really know what else to say other than thanks to anyone who invested their time, money and effort into this band, i.e. the people who bought our records and came to see us play, I know it probably doesn’t always seem like it, but we do appreciate it.
With a bit of luck the next projects that we undertake, whether they be comic books, Nobel prize winning scientific discoveries or, who knows, maybe just maybe another band, will be better than Test Icicles and you’ll look back and be glad we split up ?

For the time being I’m going to grow a beard, move to the forest and work on my hillbilly-psych-out-jams and we’ll see you in April, clean shaven and ready to fuck some shit up for the last time as Test Icicles!!!!

Take care of your badass-mudda-fuggin-selves, Luurve,

Raaaaaary Decihells/Aggwelt/Atwell

Massive Attack released “Live With Me” on Tuesday, their first new single since 2003’s 100th Window. it’s a stunning difference from the frigid, nefarious design of their last studio album, perhaps because they actually employ the vocals of Terry Callier as opposed to (and he’s still great) Horace Andy. and this is just an unsubstantiated suspicion, but it sounds as though Daddy G may have finally (and officially) returned after taking time off for family. Del Naja was all too present on their last effort, and it was primarily under his helm that the gloriously vespertine Mezzanine came about and Adrian Vowles left.

it’s a pity that the new single will be appended to Collected, a retrospective that includes singles and a bonus DVD of videos, since they released a singles box set in 1998 of originals, edits, that was 63 tracks long and a video collection a few years ago of everything before 100th Window. sure, there’s a second cd of rarities and unreleased tracks, but it’s still sandwiched between a repeat buy. whatever. i’m a sucker and will probably get it anyway. damn my sycophancy!

With the Test Icicles out of the way, we can go back and remember one of the most hyped bands of 2004. The Futureheads have completed work on their second album, News and Tributes and will tour to promote its May release. Here’s hoping that, in order to represent the success of their first album, the lads stand on stage, holding signs pointing to a stereo playing Kate Bush records.

Brooklyn Vegan collates a number of news stories involving Jim O’Rourke and Loose Fur…First, the band has a new record coming out on March 21st via Drag City entitled Born Again in the U.S.A.. The label has posted a video for the song “Hey Chicken” on their website.O’Rourke will also be participating in some fashion in the Whitney Biennial. Although the museum’s website helpfully doesn’t specify in what way.

cmj.com reports that everyone’s favorite ex-Black Flag singer was reported as a possible threat on a recent flight from New Zealand to Australia during the Big Day Out Tour. Rollins’ blog states that he was given a letter addressed from a member of the Aussie government letting him know that the person next to him had reported him to a Hotline based on the fact that he was reading a book entitled Jihad: The Rise Of Militant Islam In Central Asia.His letter in response reads as follows:

�I was reading a book called Jihad by Ahmed Rashid which is a history of Central Asia. I didn’t speak to the man next to me past how do you do. I think Ahmed Rashid is published by Yale University Press. Bush’s alma mater. Please tell your government and everyone in your office to go fuck themselves. Tell them twice. If your boss is looking for something to do, you can tell him I suggest he go fuck himself. Baghdad’s safer than my hometown and your PM is a sissy. You have a nice night.�

SOUND

THE RALFE BAND

The Ralfe Band need your ears. Mine are reeling in uncomplicated joy. They are an incredible, vital band. Crazy folk-polka whirls. Check them out here.

SIGHT

HIDDEN

Awesome, the one true masterpiece of my lifetime. There’s something absorbingly degenerate and purely terrifying about this film. If you haven’t caught it yet, make sure you do. Watch out for Majid - he hates chickens.

TOUCH

Have you seen the new sugababe? What the hell are hands for, anyway?

SMELL

The BAFTA winners were stinkers. Terrence Malik will be rolling in Rousseau’s grave.

TASTE

Check out Tony Richardson’s A Taste of Honey [1961]. An amazing, dizzying film with one of the oddest, most effective soundtracks you’ll ever hear.

FLIGHT

Listening to The Soft Parade by The Doors, I noticed my feet were off the ground. The monk bought lunch, yes he did. Give this album the life it deserves, people.

In the most shocking news of the week since discovering that the “Pete Doherty is a hoax” story was, in fact a hoax, the Test Icicles have broken up. Tens of bloggers were upset by this news, as the band they had spent a handful of months hyping has gone the way of the Candlebox. If the Internet fans have their way, we can expect a Test Icicles tribute album (featuring The Editors, Arctic Monkeys, Art Brut, etc.) in late October on Kill Rock Stars. In “bands with staying power” news, the Goo Goo Dolls will be releasing a new album in April.

According to our good friends at Nature Sounds, the long-whispered rumors are true. This mighty collab is set to see the light of day on Nature Sounds not too long from now. The details are still sketchy, but the very acknowledgment of its existence is enough to get me jumping, right on over to this board in fact. . .

Roger Ebert thinks so.� The snark writes itself here, but the fact remains: if Crash is the Best Picture of 2005, then the members of the Academy have lost their collective mind.

Easily one of the most underrated rappers of recent vintage, Scarface has a new record out now, entitled One Hunid. He’s credited along with fresh-faces Willie Hen and Young Malice as The Product.

And while people like David Drake will laugh at me for this, one of the major reasons that I like this record is that there are few guests. Besides making this record more of an album, it also gives us ample time to get to know Scarface and his crew time to lay things out in a relatively old-school gangsta style, going back and forth easily from Hen’s West Coast-isms to Malice’s Mississippi twang with Scarface as the lynchpin for the whole thing.

Perhaps the most important part of release for Scarface is the fact that it’s on an independent tip. He had this to say in a recent interview with allhiphop.com:

20 years down the line, if somebody wants to use one of my songs, and the person who owns the publishing and masters of it is getting paid, that ain�t right. I did all the work. I think every artist in the music industry should boycott that s**t, and demand some of the ownership back. We�re in a position to start owning our music.

I know you’ve all been on the edge of your seat about this one, but following up on yesterday’s post about The Fallen Idol, the star of the film Robert Henrey, appeared live and in person at Film Forum last night.

From the theater’s newsletter:

The son of French refugees then living in England, Robert Henrey was discovered by producer Alexander Korda, who spotted his photograph on a book cover. Though completely inexperienced, Henrey, with Reed’s expert direction, delivered one of the archetypal portrayals of chatty childhood. Mr. Henrey, who appeared in only one other movie, lives today in Connecticut and, 57 years later, still has vivid memories of filming The Fallen Idol.

Stylus ran a very favorable review of this one a few weeks ago, but I couldn’t find it at the time. Since then, they seem to have exploded on chatboards; their files are everywhere. Cheeky, swirling sexy with plenty of pop-punk guitars, more glam-gleam than post-noire, and junky drum-machine beats mark this fantastic record; it goes from contorting the B-52’s into electro-pop to thawing Kelly Clarkson’s sugarsicles out in the course of a single track. Somebody let me in on the secret; who are these gals? I’m about to get all feverish. Get on this one now.

Those of you suffering from DFA withdrawal, can see both the Tim Goldsworthy and James Murphy withdrawal-photo and get your fill of news about Stylus’ favorite / not-favorite DFA act on his blog.

As rumblings of a new album have been emerging from the TV on the Radio camp for quite some time, a casting call confirms that they’re ready to shoot a new video this week. Featuring a call for “St Marks street crowd” (speaking different languages, of course) and “Williamsburg Passers-By” (”good at subtle, realistic comedy”, of course) one can only assume this will be a New York scene music video, whose likes we haven’t seen since…The Strokes’ “Juicebox” video. Best of all, the video will feature the precious/precocious poop-obsessed Brandon Ratcliff from Miranda July’s twee-stravaganza Me and You And Everyone We Know. There is no word on whether the video shoot will feature a hand being set on fire, a discussion of walking down a city block as metaphor for a relationship, or a hope chest full of appliances, but it should be video art that Ms. July herself would be proud of.

[Casting information courtesy of Brooklyn Vegan]

Stylus movie editor, Josh Timmermann, is participating in an Oscar Symposium over at Nathaniel Roger’s The Film Experience this week. Read his and other’s thoughts on the Awards, the nominees, and the possible winners…

Trapped at the local Starbucks (because real O.G.�s wait until February to step up their Christmas thank-you�s game) earlier this week and the male baristas are on some Ken Burns Jazz shit. I�m droning it out with Califone�s debut full-length Roomsound, but mainman Tim Rutili leaves so much space between the strums that I�m getting my fill of smoove regardless. Of course, given that jazz is basically the only nook of American music that Califone hasn�t fucked with, the ambience doesn�t sound totally out of place amidst Rutili�s fevers.

Califone has been running their skewed-Americana game out of Chicago ever since Rutili�s Red Red Meat sat things down in the late 90�s. In fact, if Rutili was a 24 year-old Brooklynite with an eerie alto and Califone probably would�ve been the subject of four Vice features and the apple of Elijah Woods� New Pantheon eye.

But Rutili is actually a clumpy, shy Midwesterner, and his band has been stuck in indie limbo since Roomsound inexplicably shot to the top of Amazon�s best-seller list in 2001, back when Beanie Babies were still poppin� on eBay. No alto, Rutili hums his free associations in a gutty baritone that keeps the white-soul tip locked down. Tracks like �Bottles and Bones� sound like Buffalo Springfield Screwed + Chopped, complete with �ooh ooh oohs� sinking in the folk quicksand.

Originally released on the band�s own Perishable Records, Roomsound was unearthed this week by Thrill Jockey, and is once again available at finer record stores everywhere. Though the reissue forfeits the original�s gorgeous die-cut packaging, it�s still a must-hear for anyone interested in contemporary American music. Since this record was released, Califone spawned the Fruit Bats, and engineer Brian Deck has established himself as one of the underground�s most creative producers. Rutili himself is one of Chi-town�s indie granpappies, ripe for a reappraisal. Amber, impressionistic, strangely affecting, Roomsound is the perfect place to start.

Rolling Stone reports that Billy Bragg has released (yesterday) a nine(!)-disc box set entitled Volume I, which collects early releases (Life’s a Riot With Spy vs. Spy, Brewing Up With Billy Bragg, Talking With Taxman About Poetry, and EPs Live and Dubious and The Internationale), outtakes, and two live DVDs. In addition to this mammoth set, Bragg is preparing more material for a second volume and is working on a book entitled England Made Me, Too.

Stylus contributor Anthony Miccio asks on his blog, In Billboard Top 200 history, has there ever been a weirder batch of #1s than in February 2006?

If you can think of one, he’s kindly offering up The Golden Pen Of R. Kelly, a 6 CD-R retrospective including cameos, songs written for other artists, album tracks, and assorted ephemera.

Sometimes you just don�t the know the world is missing something, until you’re told it exists.

Shocker Toys announces they have acquired the rights to produce GWAR action figures in Shockini form and 6-8 inch fully sculpted figures. GWAR has been the most horrifying band since it’s inception in the 80’s, the present and ongoing. Oderus Urungus, Flattus Maximus, Beefcake the Mighty, Jizmak Da Gusha and Balsac the Jaws of Death will be featured in the set based off of their GWAR characters.

Under a license from GWAR, the GWAR action figures will retail for around $15 and will be available at specialty stores and mass retailers in Summer of 2006. Each figure will come with plenty of murderous accessories and a GWAR comic book for a little reading after dark! Also to be produced will be Shockini versions of GWAR shrunk down into 3 inch block figures they will kick the block figure world square in the blocks!

I *hope* these are the Shockini figures.

Anyone have any favorite rock-stars-made-into-toys stories?

Music bloggers are a-flutter (I like to picture music bloggers sitting in front of their computers “Squee”-ing intermittently) about the announced line-up for the Sasquatch! Festival in Washington state over Memorial Day weekend. Bands scheduled to play include the usual suspects Sufjan Stevens, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Decemberists, and The Shins, along with Tragically Hip, whom we are featuring quite prominently on our site this week.

[Festival information available here.]

Though it is nice to see that the American outdoor festival circuit, taking cues from the European scene, has settled down to a few mainstays per year, I miss the days of the traveling festival. Yours truly, as an awkward extra-large t-shirt wearing adolescent in a Midwestern city known for its chili best served with spaghetti, was once dragged to the HORDE festival, the Blues Traveler-curated show, featuring Barenaked Ladies, Ben Harper, Smashing Pumpkins, Alana Davis, and Marcy Playground. Though that is hardly music I’d even acknowledge listening to even back then, it was nice that in the 90s one could not have to travel see a full line-up of bands that would rarely get together and tour smaller cities. In favor of the return to the travelling tour, I say that more people need to be exposed to sun poisoning.

Vikram Dodd reports for The Guardian: Actors from the Silver Bear Award-winning movie The Road to Guantanamo were �questioned under anti-terror laws, alongside two of the former terrorism suspects they play on screen� when they returned to Britain from the Berlinale.

In a statement, Rizwan Ahmed said police swore at him and asked if he had become an actor to further the Islamic cause. He said he was at first denied access to a lawyer and was questioned about his views on the Iraq war by a policewoman. “She asked me whether I intended to do more documentary films, specifically more political ones like The Road to Guant�namo. She asked ‘Did you become an actor mainly to do films like this, to publicise the struggles of Muslims?’”

I’ve recently begun immersing myself in the music of The Go-Betweens. Except for one track someone had included on a mixtape a while ago, I had never listened to them until Oceans Apart came out last year, which I quickly fell in love with.

One of the things so striking about the group is their fine execution of setting. Too few songwriters manage to pin down a place just so; whether it’s a known area like Brisbane, or somewhere like a train or a field, the Go-Bes depict that location precisely in the lyrics and evocatively in the music. When you listen to one of their songs, you end up in an exact spot. For three minutes.

That’s only one of the things the group does so well, but it’s the trait that seems most especially theirs, and I’m looking forward to exploring this element of their songwriting further, and I’m interested in any other groups that people find this to be true of.

Leave it to the British to do this “magazine/newspaper/mainstream media outlet” Podcasting thing right. The Times Online has been doing podcasts for a while now with the likes of Ryan Adams and Editors. The difference between this and other publications Podcasts is that there are no ads, explicit (Slate) or implicit (Spin). Sure, the interviews aren’t all that damning, but they never kow-tow to the band/artist either. Anyway, they have a nice interview with Sparks about their Stylus recommended album Hello Young Lovers, which you can listen to directly if you scroll down past the subscribe info.

I was lucky enough to see The Fallen Idol last evening at Film Forum, which Stylus writer Alfred Soto tells me is sadly very much out-of-print. I keep wavering between �great� and �very good,� in the final analysis, but it hardly matters: either way, the film was a strong prelude/counter-point to the indisputable greatness of The Third Man, with a much stronger dose of comedy thrown in along the way.

What particularly interested me was the child actor in the film: Bobby Henrey, who apparently featured in only one other film, 1951�s The Wonder Kid. I imagine that coming off the *cough* massive success of The Fallen Idol that perhaps little Bobby became a child-star of some repute and started making ridiculous script demands and eventually got run out of film�s forever for his Bad Boy behavior. Either that, or someone finally pushed him down those stairs that feature heavily in The Fallen Idol (a wish that several fellow film-goers and I seemed to be hoping for from nearly the first frame on.)

After a decade of widespread cultural emofication and progressively weaker albums, Rivers Cuomo, lead singer of Weezer, will finally be graduating from Harvard this Spring. While some of us managed to complete high school, college, and graduate school in the same time he was shelling out the Ivy League dollars, I’d like to congratulate him on his efforts. That BA in English will serve him well in the real world, allowing him access to a variety of desk jobs. Or he could just make the follow-up to the Blue Album we’ve been waiting for.

Now the real question, which song should be included on his graduation mixtape: Baz Luhrmann’s “Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)” or Vitamin C’s “Graduation (Friends Forever)”????

With Metallica now utilizing Rick Rubin’s magical touch in the studio, one can only hope that the “basics” that the group was getting back to with St. Anger were the ego-driven kind and that this newest album will signal a new stripped-down version of the band that both purists and fair-weather fans can love.� Something tell us, though, that it’s going to be a “return-to-form” more along the lines of AC/DC’s Ballbreaker, though…

According to NME, Radiohead is completing a song from its OK Computer heyday, to be included on the band’s forthcoming album. The song could first be heard on the OK Computer tour, and on your cool high school friend’s video of the documentary Meeting People Is Easy. Old Radiohead fans would be very excited by this news, had the band’s output quality not declined after Thom Yorke had his wonky eye fixed during the Amnesiac era. More surprising to NME readers was not necessarily the content of this news piece, but the fact that its inclusion meant one less Arctic Monkeys write up.

One of the most talked about tours (not so much around these parts) of 2006 has got to be the upcoming Franz Ferdinand/Death Cab For Cutie “check out our cred” co-headlining tour. The former indie darlings have joined forces to see if two alternative acts with decent sales can equal the selling power of a smaller-scale major label pop act. The large auditorium/small arena tour serves to remind me of one of the best ill-fated tours of my lifetime: the late 90s Hole and Marilyn Manson double bill.

As the fate of rock became questionable in the boy band-heavy late 90s, promoters thought it best to present a united front for rock fans in the highly publicized 1999 tour. Courtney Love and Marilyn Manson hit the press to remind America that rock was still vital, but instead crashed and burned after a few West Coast date, only to serve the purpose of proving that rock was dying. I’m not saying that the FranzCab (if celebrity couples can have cute abbreviations, why not rock bands?) will crash-and-burn in a storm of egos, but I’d like to imagine that these bands are as dysfunctional as those alternative bands who paved the way for the current wave of indie crossover.

But picture this scene outside the venue: much like the stand-offs between the red-Manic-Panic-and-babydoll-dress-a-few-years-too-late Hole fans and the black-Manic-Panic-just-discovered-at-Hot-Topic Marilyn Manson fans that characterized their tour, one could only hope for some sort of out-cred fest waiting on line for entry at the Death Cab/Franz Ferdinand show. This time it’ll be a faceoff of buttoned-down cardigans and faux-distressed cowboy boots against V-neck sweaters and faux-distressed Chuck Taylors. Lots of posturing around Josef K and Guided By Voices will ensue. On stage, there won’t be the severity of Love and Manson trash talking one another, but this time around lots of passive-aggressive banter will be expected in order to maintain some indie cred.

On that note, I wish the boys of both bands luck on their upcoming tour. But please, for the sake of our interest, I’d like to encourage Ben Gibbard to throw makeup compacts at Kurt Loder while he’s interviewing Madonna, because pretend outrageousness is so much more exciting than pretend preciousness.

[Franz Ferdinand/Death Cab For Cutie tour dates courtesy of Brooklyn Vegan]