]> http://www.artistdirect.com/nad/editorial/albumreviews/0,,,00.html Most Recent Album Reviews on ARTISTdirect 86400 Fri, 18 Jul 2008 11:17:22 PST en-us http://www.artistdirect.com/nad/store/movies/title/0,,3688965,00.html#review Meet Bill is eerily reminiscent of American Beauty, albeit with a goofy indie slant. Aaron Eckhart, whose chiseled good looks make it a wee bit tough to accept him as a chocolate snorting, cuckolded loser, plays Bill, a bored man on the verge of a mid-life crisis. He hates his life, his WASP-y wife Jess ( Elizabeth Banks, sporting perfectly coiffed soccer mom hair), and his shitty bank job. Who doesn't, right? What separates bored and brash Bill from the boys is his biting wit, which is his sharpest—pun intended—asset. When he's not shoveling Snickers bars and donuts into his mouth to satisfy his sugar fix, he's spewing vinegary barbs at his cheating spouse and reluctantly mentoring boys from the local high school. The impressionable young'uns regard him as a renegade hero after he attacks his wife's smarmy anchorman lover Chip ( Timothy Olyphant, who's also impeccably coiffed). Their fight is broadcast on local news media, garnering celeb status for our man Bill, who is Fri, 18 Jul 2008 11:17:22 PST 4708528 Album Review http://www.artistdirect.com/nad/store/artist/album/0,,4693136,00.html#review High Places' compilation of digital singles, 03/07-09/07, should be required listening for anyone who equates minimalism with simplicity. The release finds the Brooklyn duo mixing rhythmic webs of shakers, drums and electronic glitches with infectiously lighthearted vocal melodies. Mary Pearson's lilting lends the latter. Her sugary voice dances around pop hooks with a free-spirited imprecision that ensures her performance never turns saccharine. To back her, Rob Barber tears a page from Steve Reich's book and boils music down to layers of polyrhythmic loops, but then mixes in echo and reverb until the minimalist beat borders on tacit. The result is not a defined pulse, but a spacious ebb and flow for Pearson's carefree musings to swim through. This recipe produces a batch of succinct indie-pop songs with a coquettish aesthetic sugarcoating their surprisingly complex sea of sounds. On "Universe," Pearson's phrases speed by like a teen chattering with a melody caught in her Fri, 18 Jul 2008 00:20:38 PST 4708502 Album Review http://www.artistdirect.com/nad/store/artist/album/0,,4708479,00.html#review Vancouver's Jet Black Stare exhibit a supercharged, rock n' roll gusto that's bound to rattle at least a few stripper poles. The band have found the perfect balance between Motley Crue's gritty, gutter riffs and Nickelback's pop sensibility. More importantly, they manage to sound fresh in the process. Their debut album, In This Life, often revs like a fine-tuned engine. "Ready to Roll" fires off a huge hook over a power rock melody. Singer Rod Black's voice carries the chorus with a cock rock bravado that's bound to get some asses shaking. However, he can also play the sensitive guy. "I'm Breathin'" is a somber and melodic rumination on blacking out, and it's vibrant and pained enough to wake Layne Staley. That's where Jet Black Stare excels. Rather than simply fall into the Nickelback formula that's marred numerous Canadian rock exports, the band expounds on it. Certainly, "Every Moment" and "Fly" are straight-up radio anthems, but Black manages to channel the grunge gods quite Fri, 18 Jul 2008 00:18:24 PST 4708500 Album Review http://www.artistdirect.com/nad/store/artist/album/0,,4708498,00.html#review For someone who has had the most seemingly perfect trajectory toward musical stardom—from slicing and dicing his way to every turntablist championship imaginable, to touring as Kanye West's deck jockey—A-Trak goes inexplicably off track with Running Man: Nike + Original Run, derailing himself with his own production, of all things. At the end of the day, bad electro is just that, no matter how well it's mixed or no matter who slaved away in the studio for hours perfecting every last, grimy, woefully monotonous bar. In fact, DJ's like Diplo, Erol Alkan, and A-Trak (circa last year's Dirty South Dance mixtape) have been successful with it because they use the sound sparingly -- and when they do, it’s a filthy enough track to make you feel like a George Costanza skidmark on a hot day. And then think of the acts that craft and perform this style of music well. Daft Punk. Justice. Short list, eh? If you were at Coachella on Saturday this past year, you understand why Boys Noize Fri, 18 Jul 2008 00:16:25 PST 4708499 Album Review http://www.artistdirect.com/nad/store/movies/title/0,,3741988,00.html#review In the opening sequence of The Dark Knight, Heath Ledger's Joker wickedly comments, "I believe what doesn't kill you simply makes you stranger." Ledger half-stutters with an eerie wheeze, and the succinct remark's implications are far-reaching. The Dark Knight explores that which drives individuals to disturbing ends, whether good or evil in intent. There's no doubt that this role was one of the most taxing of Ledger's unfortunately truncated career. With his passing, any comments about his death as an extension of this, his final performance, are bound to hang heavily. Nevertheless, no matter how The Joker's psychoses permeated Ledger in real life, his portrayal of the classic comic book villain is simultaneously unsettling and undeniably powerful. The Dark Knight is a modern superhero classic, not just because of Ledger's brilliant performance, but because Christian Bale remains the best actor to ever don the black cape and bat ears. The cat-and-mouse game that ensues between Bale Thu, 17 Jul 2008 11:50:43 PST 4708419 Album Review http://www.artistdirect.com/nad/store/movies/title/0,,4002543,00.html#review Heist movies are a static, and even stale, genre. The best plots have already been written (with members of the French New Wave movement achieving the task best) or remade, and the style has decreased in popularity and volume over the past decade. Antithetically, The Bank Job employs a swift pace and a web of twists to remain interesting from stem to stern. It's essentially a political thriller masked as a bank robbery flick, and it’s based on a true story. The crime caper is set in ‘70s London, featuring a team of professional criminals who are more good than bad, lead by Jason Statham's Terry, a family man and chop shop operator who accepts his final mission in order to better the economic circumstances of his family. Giving Terry a wife and kids and portraying him as generally affable aligns viewers with him, even though he's a white-collar crook. Terry's morals are obviously not stellar—he is robbing banks and kisses a woman who is not his wife—but Statham's rugged good looks Thu, 17 Jul 2008 10:55:48 PST 4708410 Album Review http://www.artistdirect.com/nad/store/artist/album/0,,4474017,00.html#review New York City rapper Nas had a snappier, more in-your-face title in mind for his latest effort. He wanted to call it N*****, obviously an inflammatory, cultural lightning rod statement, which emulates how the rapper has positioned himself throughout most of his prolific career. But by defiantly giving his best album in years such a non-descript title, he incites just as much interest in what he is doing and why. Nas has endured on-record battles with Jay-Z and political pundit Bill O'Reilly, but through all the drama, he continues to deliver his rhymes with uncompromising swagger and a surprisingly endearing bravado, despite seeing a decline in album sales and his general popularity. And while Nas changed the album title, reportedly due to label and management pressure, he sure didn't edit the album's content for anyone else but himself. Untitled is a tense thumper of a record, driven by the rapper's fiercely thought-provoking lyrical science. He's doing what he wants, saying Thu, 17 Jul 2008 04:41:54 PST 4708391 Album Review http://www.artistdirect.com/nad/store/movies/title/0,,4086589,00.html#review Though Quentin Tarantino did not birth non-linear editing, his early successes (namely, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction) are often credited with resurrecting this alternative, novelic method of storytelling. Since then, some films have employed the approach and strengthened their narrative trajectories (e.g., Memento, and, in a different way, Irreversible) while others, like Take, utilize it with haphazard success. Take begins where it ends, so to speak, with Ana (Minnie Driver) arriving at a maximum security prison to witness the death of inmate Saul (Jeremy Renner). She has lost someone, he is responsible for her loss, and details of their fateful intersection emerge as the film progresses. Take’s setting is wholly bleak, from the asylum-like walls in which Saul broods prior to his execution (shot in familiar Hitchcock-ian fashion, with Renner framed like Anthony Perkins at the coda of Psycho) to the dusty desert roads that Ana traverses, this is a world where melancholy has found a Wed, 16 Jul 2008 15:20:58 PST 4708300 Album Review http://www.artistdirect.com/nad/store/movies/title/0,,3349692,00.html#review The last time an actress donned an unattractive prosthetic nose, it won her an Academy Award. We're referring to Nicole Kidman, who portrayed noted authoress Virginia Woolf in The Hours. In the delightful modern day fairy tale Penelope, Christina Ricci is outfitted with a pig nose that’s essentially a pair of overly large nostrils which are not as hideous as expected. While the role won’t garner the young actress any statues, the film still bites, thanks to its satirical look at the age-old lesson of not judging a book by its cover, no matter how swine-like. It also explores the soul's innate quest for love. Ricci's Penelope Wilhern is a wily, self-aware young girl with a wicked sense of humor who accepts her deformity. Her pig nose has rendered her "unkissable," inherited from a longstanding curse that befell one of her blue-blooded ancestors. The film's semi-serious theme is whipped into a light, frothy, all-ages picture that cross pollinates classic fairy tale Wed, 16 Jul 2008 10:22:07 PST 4708267 Album Review http://www.artistdirect.com/nad/store/artist/album/0,,4669005,00.html#review Digi Snacks' first single, "You Can't Stop Me Now," sums up the whole record. On the third installment of his "Bobby Digital" trilogy, RZA proves that he's unstoppable. Like his dark, superhero alter ego, Bobby, RZA's still a force to be reckoned with. He led the Wu-Tang Clan to the top, and as a composer, he's lent his strangely, orchestral aesthetic to films ranging from Kill Bill to Blade Trinity. However, Mr. Robert Diggs still shines behind the mic, and he's gotten even better with his latest offering. Digi Snacks is the most cohesive Bobby Digital record, yet. This romp in Bobby D's dojo serves up enough philosophy, kung fu and space-funk beats to go around. The first single sees RZA trading off with Wu-Tang cohort Inspectah Deck over a smooth, smoky guitar lead. RZA's snaky rhymes fuse to even catchier beats on "Money Don't Own Me." "Drama" and "Creep" both take us back to the mean streets via those funk-infused rhythms and infectious hooks. The album's standout track, "Up Wed, 16 Jul 2008 09:01:56 PST 4708259 Album Review