After a year or so of sporadic posting, I feel that this version of my blog has ran it’s course…
Here is the link to the new one, for the zero people who read it!
www.dovteta.wordpress.com
OrRevor!! 
Dead Man’s Bones
An Oscar-nominated Hollywood heartthrob and his best friend round up a bunch of instruments– some of which they don’t know how to play– and a massive children’s choir and make a concept album about the supernatural. Seems like a recipe for disaster, right? Guess again.
Meet Dead Man’s Bones, a collaboration between actors Ryan Gosling (Half Nelson, The Believer, The Notebook) and Zach Shields. The duo plan to release their debut album, Never Let a Lack of Talent Get You Down, on their own label, Werewolf Heart, this summer. You might have seen their MySpace page, or a video for their song “In the Room Where You Sleep” floating around the web recently. In the clip, Gosling and Shields lead a bunch of kids, all dressed in Halloween costumes, through a spare acoustic lament. It’s creepy and catchy. It sounds like a middle school assembly gone goth. And it’s pretty damn good.
As far as celebrity music projects go, the quality level on this one is a lot closer to She & Him than, say, Joaquin Phoenix’s rap career. While listening to tracks from the Dead Man’s Bones album at the office, I’ve been asked by co-workers if I’m listening to Bryan Ferry or something by the Arcade Fire. No lie.
Earlier this week, Gosling and Shields gave Pitchfork their first-ever interview about Dead Man’s Bones. The pair were nervous and excited to talk about the band, and they seem genuinely committed to the project, which is a labor-intensive D.I.Y. undertaking. As Gosling put it, “We’ve worked on it solid for two years. I made a couple movies because I had to, but this is all we do.”
The pair bonded over a shared obsession with scary stuff like ghosts, monsters, and zombies, and set out to create a spooky musical theater production, “a Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire kind of show,” as Gosling described it. Somewhere along the way, the “theater production” aspect of it fell to the wayside, but the songs remained.
Inspired by musical classroom experiments the Langley Schools Music Project and Nancy Dupree’s Ghetto Reality, the two decided to involve children in Dead Man’s Bones from the very beginning. “We’d rather see a high school play as opposed to a Broadway show any day,” Gosling explained. “Not that Broadway shows aren’t great, but there’s just something about a high school play…you’re not distracted by the achievements, you get to watch the process, the will to make something.”
To help Dead Man’s Bones acheive that pre-fridge feeling, the pair recruited a choir from the Silverlake Conservatory of Music, the Los Angeles music education facility co-founded by Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The choir members’ ages ranged from five to 17. Every Sunday afternoon for several months, Gosling and Shields would rehearse and record with the kids. The “In the Room Where You Sleep” video was filmed on their final day together, during a wrap party that also included a bouncy castle, a taco truck, and a piñata.
Integral to the creation of Dead Man’s Bones was the pair’s motivation to keep things as raw and real as possible, stripped down to reveal even the limitations of their musicianship. When it came time to record the album, Gosling and Shields created a set of White Stripes-esque rules to follow so as to not taint the purity of the process. Rules like no click tracks or electric guitars, no more than three takes, and playing all of the instruments themselves (along with producer Tim Anderson of Ima Robot). Gosling played cello and piano for the first time, while Shields took up the drums. Their desire to work under these conditions stemmed from bad music industry experiences in the past.
Gosling’s singing also suffered under the weight of conventional studio expectations. On the Dead Man’s Bones album, Shields’ indie-everyman voice complements Gosling’s more mannered tone, which exhibits a bit of Roy Orbison (or, some might say, Bryan Ferry) tremolo. However, encouraging Gosling to display his natural talent wasn’t all that easy. Shields explained, “I’d hear him do karaoke, or when he thinks nobody’s listening, like he’s in the other room singing, with his natural voice, when he’s singing and nobody’s listening, it has this old quality, like this 50s kind of croonery feel. Every time I would hear him singing, without trying to sound like anything, that’s how he sings. So we were trying to record one session, and they were trying to make us both sound so modern, which he doesn’t. I was like, ‘You know, you should just sing in your natural voice,’ and they kind of made fun of us. They were like, ‘Oh that’s goofy, that’s silly.’”
The album is currently in the final mixing stage, and the pair is currently discussing distribution options to have it come out in June. Gosling and Shields are in the process of making videos for all of the songs, working with the likes of sculptor Arthur Ganson and the creators of the Adult Swim show “Robot Chicken”.
The next step for the band is taking the show on the road. Dead Man’s Bones’ first gig is slated to be at a showcase for their label, Werewolf Heart, on March 21 at SXSW. The plan is to work with a different local children’s choir in each city they visit– a labor-intensive, but ultimately rewarding, idea. “I think it’ll keep it interesting for us, because every time we’ll get to work with new kids and get new ideas and hopefully tailor each performance to that experience,” Gosling said. “And, you know, we can’t play bars with kids, so we’ll have to put together a night-time version of our act, which we’re working on. I think we’re excited about that, we’re excited about how many different ways we can dress it up, with different kinds of choirs and artists, and it should be interesting.”
Top 25 of 2008
The first 10 are in order; the rest, not so much….
1. Spiritualized || Songs in A & E
“…newly focused energy, willfully restrained arrangements, and taut compositions give the set a sheer emotional power that no Spiritualized recording has ever displayed before, making it, quite possibly, their finest outing yet.”
2. U.S. Christmas || Eat The Low Dogs
“…U.S. Christmas has steadily evolved into a full-blown psychedelic assault. The music cannot be ignored. It hurts people, physically and mentally. It stirs intense feelings of pain, frustration, loss, fear, and, occasionally, euphoria.”
3. Local H || 12 Angry Months
“Written after the bitter end of a long-term relationship, Local H’s new album, 12 Angry Months, chronicles a full year of post-breakup experiences. Each track corresponds to a month and deals with the range of emotions one encounters after love turns sour.”
4. Sebastien Grainger || Sebastien Grainger & The Mountains
“Following his short run with Death from Above 1979, Sebastien Grainger opted to take the solo route, nixing his former band’s hip-hop and punk influences for a combination of swaggering dance rock and singer/songwriter material.”
5. Nine Inch Nails || The Slip
“…retains the sense of urgency that flowed through Year Zero, but as it’s a lean album, it’s easier to appreciate his mastery of darkness and light or his ability to construct throbbing melodic hooks out of noise.”
6. Snowman || The Horse, The Rat & The Swan
“…a ferocious urgency, a mysteriously dark and intriguing energy at play… A flow, a long hidden path to be uncovered, running through the album’s dense instrumentation.”
7. Greg Dulli || Live At The Triple Door
“Performing a stripped down and subdued set, Dulli leads his band through a selection of Twilight Singers songs such as “King Only” and “Candy Cane Crawl,” a brand new Gutter Twins song “Front Street” along with a mix of covers, including his first live version of Jose Gonzalez’s “Down The Line”. For a man that’s been known for his live performances, this release is shockingly the first ever full live album of Greg Dulli’s illustrious career.”
8. The Gutter Twins || Saturnalia
“Saturnalia is the anticipated first album from The Gutter Twins, the collaboration forged in late 2003 by Mark Lanegan and fellow maverick singer-songwriter Greg Dulli. Saturnalia finds the axis Dulli nicknamed “the Satanic Everly Brothers” going even deeper into the shadows than ever before. Mystical, unpredictable, ultimately masterful, the album both embodies and defies any expectations suggested by the principals’ individual notoriety. Pointedly not resting on the sonic laurels of their previous successes, Saturnalia instead proves rootsy but Baroque, handmade yet modernist, teeming with siren melodies that don’t resolve.”
9. The Helio Sequence || Keep Your Eyes Ahead
“Not that they’ve forgotten how to bring the shoegaze; “Hallelujah,” for one, flies off into space on a wave of epic, bliss-fuzz guitar. Still, the record is short and cries out for one last big scream. Instead, they end with the whisper of “Broken Afternoon” and the folksy, Dylan-esque “No Regrets.” Their increasing subtlety has cost them some grandeur, but their melodious gifts are more seductive than ever.”
10. Guns n Roses || Chinese Democracy
(Piss off haters….Get over the 17 year wait and Axl’s douchery. It’s a real good record and far better than anything Velvet Revolver has put out.)
THE REST:
Warbringer || War Without End
Torche || Meanderthal
Cockpunch || Cockpunch
Opeth || Watershed
Those Poor Bastrards || The Plaque
Capricorns || River, Bear Your Bones
Flobots || Fight With Tools
Metallica || Death Magnetic
The Kills || Midnight Boom
Earth || The Bee Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull
The Black Keys || Attack & Release
Jucifer || L’Autrichienne
Black Mountain || In the Future
Sigur Ros || With a Buzz In Our Ears….
Let the Right One In
A fragile, anxious boy, 12-year-old Oskar is regularly bullied by his stronger classmates but never strikes back. The lonely boy’s wish for a friend seems to come true when he meets Eli, also 12, who moves in next door to him with her father. A pale, serious young girl, she only comes out at night and doesn’t seem affected by the freezing temperatures. Coinciding with Eli’s arrival is a series of inexplicable disappearances and murders. One man is found tied to a tree, another frozen in the lake, a woman bitten in the neck. Blood seems to be the common denominator – and for an introverted boy like Oskar, who is fascinated by gruesome stories, it doesn’t take long before he figures out that Eli is a vampire. But by now a subtle romance has blossomed between Oskar and Eli, and she gives him the strength to fight back against his aggressors. Oskar becomes increasingly aware of the tragic, inhuman dimension of Eli’s plight, but cannot bring himself to forsake her. Frozen forever in a twelve-year-old’s body, with all the burgeoning feelings and confused emotions of a young adolescent, Eli knows that she can only continue to live if she keeps on moving. But when Oskar faces his darkest hour, Eli returns to defend him the only way she can… Swedish filmmaker Tomas Alfredson weaves friendship, rejection and loyalty into a disturbing and darkly atmospheric, yet poetic and unexpectedly tender tableau of adolescence. LET THE RIGHT ONE IN is based on the best-selling novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist.
The Midnight Meat Train
A photographer propelled to explore his dark side begins tracking a subway serial killer whose brutal butchery makes for the most nightmarish images ever captured on camera in director Ryuhei Kitamura‘s adaptation of a short story by horror heavyweight Clive Barker. Leon Kaufman (Bradley Cooper) is just another struggling photographer in search of the perfect subject. Encouraged to explore the sinister side of humanity by a prominent art gallery proprietor (Brooke Shields) who is set to display his upcoming debut, Leon goes against the wishes of his girlfriend, Maya (Leslie Bibb), and begins stalking notorious serial killer Mahogany (Vinnie Jones) — whose sadistic murder spree has been making headlines all across the country. As Leon’s fascination with Mahogany gradually grows into obsession, his descent into the killer’s putrid world of murder begins to corrupt his soul while simultaneously dragging his concerned girlfriend down a perverse path of darkness from which there is no return.
The Midnight Meat Train Official Website
Showing now on FearNET – In Demand
U.S. Christmas
In the running for my favorite CD of the year…..
God and devils, piss and venom.
The band US Christmas has never strayed far from its roots. Its members were born and raised in or near the mountains of rural North Carolina, a place that will always be their home. Its culture, geography, history, and spiritual presence have a great influence on the band’s sound.
Originally formed in the summer of 2002, USC has steadily evolved into a full-blown psychedelic assault. The music cannot be ignored. It hurts people – physically and mentally. It stirs intense feelings of pain, frustration, loss, fear, and occasionally – euphoria.
The band always plays at deafening volumes, and Hall often uses multiple amp setups for a layered, thick sound. Tim and John hit the low-end, and Matt often mans guitar and theremin simultaneously. Chad is able to handle any musical duties at any time. Shows are always chaotic and unpredictable, riddled with sythesizer and theremin spasms. Images are projected onto the stage, the ceiling, or performers themselves. Many a drunken bystander has been drawn to the theremin’s magic antennae. US Christmas has shared bills with some of the world’s best heavy bands, including High on Fire, Weedeater, DOVE, Place of Skulls, Orange Goblin, ATP, Graves at Sea, Scissorfight, Red Sparowes, Atomic Bitchwax, and Kylesa.
