Arts & Culture
Robbie Fulks
By Allison Berndt The best way to describe Robbie Fulks’ new album Revenge! is to call it an eclectic hillbilly mix produced live on the road for an audience that’s looking for some good ol’ country music alongside a good laugh. Well, it’s true. Fulks, known for his catchy country songs and humorous lyrics, has put together an impressive collection of his very best. Hints of jazz, bluegrass and even a little ‘50s rock are evident in this generally hillbilly-esque compilation. Revenge! is a two-CD set of live recordings, half of which are brand-new songs. “I Like Being Left Alone” is a perfect example of a song that makes you laugh while engaging you musically with a charming melody. The best tracks on the album include previous hits “I Want to Be Mama’d” and “Cigarette State,” as well as a cover of Cher’s “Believe.” Fulks goes off on a guitar tangent that’ll take the listener through some masterful riffs in “Mama’d,” and “Cigarette State” is bound to be a crowd pleaser no matter where or when you hear it – it’s a staple in his repertoire. To hear a western cover of “Believe” is laughable in general, but even more so with the adaptation Fulks provides. Slower and more serious, “The Buck Starts Here” is a great theme that showcases a classic twangy country sound. Revenge! has a smattering of everything on it: old songs and new, covers and originals and any tempo for which you could be in the mood. It’s a solid collection with one constant element: hillbilly. VS
May 1st, 2007 by Vital Archives
Tartuffe
The con is on once more. Moliere’s classic tale of deception through feigned piety climbs the stage again in a glossy, big-budget Milwaukee Rep production. Just months after the Skylight Opera closed its production of the musical adaptation of Moliere’s comedy, The Rep opens a more traditional interpretation of the story. Director Joseph Hanreddy has opted for a highly kinetic slapstick approach that engages the audience without any real attempt to find any deeper insight into Moliere’s masterpiece. Longtime Rep Resident Acting Company member Lee Ernst plays the title role of a religious hypocrite who schemes his way into the household of a wealthy man in the interest of taking him for as much as he can get. Ernst is explosively over the top. He’s taken the role to the edge of physical comedy and beyond. Rarely has he been so animate on stage. It’s the type of performance that bigger audiences adore, but it leaves something to be desired from jaded theatre critics. Moliere’s script leaves an impressive amount of room for plumbing the subtle depths of human manipulation with the title character. Ernst’s performance here possesses a manic disregard for subtlety. It may be fun to watch, but it’s a guilty pleasure. The decision to do Tartuffe as somewhat highbrow slapstick doesn’t drown ALL the subtleties of the play. Marianne, daughter of Tartuffe’s victim, is played here with an insightful flourish by Emily Trask. When Orgon (played here by Peter Silbert) offers Tartufe her hand in marriage, it complicates things considerably for Marianne, whose heart belongs to another man. In so many productions this role gets played simply as the comedy of over-emotional youth being hopelessly dramatic about young love. Trask’s performance goes way beyond this. Her rendering of the character has a playful kind of sympathy for it. Trask seems to have brilliant instincts for subtle physical comedy. At one point, she’s face down on the floor center stage in emotional grief. All is silent. She raises her head ever so slightly and lets it fall. The audience laughs. The production lingers on this moment for just a bit longer. Dorine (a sharp Elizabeth Ledo) cautiously says a few more things to her. Marianne ever-so-delicately pounds her head into the floor a couple more times. It’s never overdone. Trask’s timing is perfect. We feel just a bit more for Marianne than less accomplished productions have managed in the past. Most of the rest of the people in the cast follow their usual strengths in roles that they fall into quite nicely. Rose Pickering carries her considerable stage presence to this production in the role of Orgon’s respected mother who has nothing but respect for Tartuffe. Deborah Staples is charming as Orgon’s wife Elmire, who is forced into the unenviable position of having to attempt to snare Tartuffe to reveal his hypocrisy. Jonathan Gillard Daly is shrewd as the honest, respectable Cleante. This is a thoroughly professional cast putting in a thoroughly professional production, but it’s moments like […]
May 1st, 2007 by Russ Bickerstaff
The Nerd
An unwanted houseguest can make for good comedy so long as it isn’t your house. Put such a houseguest onstage and, ideally, no one has to suffer. It’s comedy for everybody because no one actually has to live with the person. Such is the case with the late Larry Shue’s smash hit The Nerd. The Milwaukee Rep returns once more to the play it debuted over two decades ago in a production directed by original Nerd star James Pickering. Looking into Geoffrey M. Curley’s set, one sees the ‘70s slowly bleeding out into the ‘80s – a distinctly awkward time for popular aesthetics. It’s the house of Willum Cubbert, a successful architect who is nevertheless living in Terre Haute, Indiana. Cibbuert is a single guy with friends who include Tansy McGinnis, a soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend leaving for the east coast, played by Melinda Pfundstein and a theatre critic named Axel Hammond played by Torrey Hanson. (The Hammond thing throws me a little. Precisely how big is the theatre scene in Terra Haute, Indiana in 1979? Do they really need a full-time professional theatre critic?) Shue’s dialogue, always predictably witty, gradually sketches out the casual conflicts of the play until the subject of the title character finally surfaces. As it turns out, the man who saved Cubbert’s life in Viet Nam is in town and just might be stopping by for a visit. He’s a guy from Wisconsin who works in quality control at a chalk factory. Hs name is Rick Steadman and he’s played here by accomplished local comic actor Gerard Neugent. Rick is abrasively difficult to be around, which makes things difficult for Cubbert as he is in negotiations with a client named Warnock Waldgrove (Chris Tarjan). Waldgrove and his wife Clelia (Laura Gordon) are visiting Cubbert to discuss the hotel he is designing for them. As a whole, the production is solid. Pacing and delivery are every bit as impeccable as one would expect from the Rep. The script my be a classic, but it’s not particularly provocative comedy. The play’s comedy relies pretty heavily on the weird. At one particular high point, Steadman leads the cast in a nearly indecipherable game of “Shoes and Socks.” Nugent is great in the role, carrying it off with a nasally whine that is both annoying and endearing. Shue hands some of the best lines in the play to the critic Axel Hammond. If you’re going to be handing most of the best comic lines in a play to a single actor at The Rep, you’d better be handing them to Torrey Hanson. Hanson is brilliant here, throwing wry lines out from the corners of the script. This is a comedy that doesn’t take itself seriously and Hammond is the vice it uses to mock itself. Laura Gordon also puts in a notable performance here as Waldgrove’s librarian wife. A meek woman with some strange habits, Clelia would be all too easy to play as a comic prop. Gordon’s performance feels natural enough […]
May 1st, 2007 by Russ Bickerstaff
Who I Was Yesterday
Moct Bar sits in an area just south of downtown that is rapidly being carved into an upscale, trendy haunt for the young, wealthy and reasonably hip. Amidst shiny new condos and expensive restaurants, nestled in a space that apparently is a converted machine shop, Kurt Hartwig’s theatre outfit Bad Soviet Habits is staging a trippy little show involving stilts, puppets, the number 93 and quite a few other things. Who I Was Yesterday is a dreamlike neo-mythic fairy tale that touches on quite a few things without much regard for depth or coherence. To be fair to Writer/Director Kurt Hartwig, Who I Was Yesterday is a very ambitious project. The story goes a little something like this – twin humanoid sons of a Manticore (face of a woman, body of a lion, tail of a scorpion) are being raised by their towering humanoid grandparents. Their fate as offspring of an evil monster is to be hunted by it until they reach the age of 18. Apparently Manticores are quite insistent about eating their children. It’s a mythic coming of age story fitting somewhere between the age of fairy tales and the contemporary world. A story such as this could be produced for the stage in a variety of different ways. Hartwig’s vision as realized here is incredibly complex. The twins are whimsically presented as Andy North wearing one mask and holding another, occasionally switching them for effect, which is simple enough but there’s a lot more going on here. The twins’ grandparents are played by Amie Segal and Kurt Hartwig himself. On stilts. In makeup. Susan Currie plays Mother Manticore by wearing a huge, bulky metal mask complete with glowing eyes. While this probably takes a great deal of focus and concentration, it may be the single greatest waste of acting talent to make it to the local stage this season. Currie is a remarkable actress; she can do a lot more than serve as support for a metal mask onstage. Aside from the main characters, there are a lot of puppets. Some of them are effective. Some of them aren’t. And some of them meet with mixed results. The bedbugs that haunt the twins, for instance, make a clever rattling, scratching sound as their thin metal bodies scrape across the bar’s stage, but they don’t offer much of a visual impact. For the most part, all we’re seeing of them is the puppeteer pushing them across the floor. It looks a bit silly unless you make a conscious effort to focus on the puppets. One of the more effective puppets in the show is The Marionette, a character which acts as sort of a narrator who sometimes interacts with the twins. A puppet sits high above a curtain that covers the puppeteer. The apparatus holding the curtain and the puppet are harnessed to the puppeteer (Tom Thoreson) who is free to walk around the stage. It’s a lot more effective than it sounds, even if the puppet itself […]
May 1st, 2007 by Russ Bickerstaff
Patti Smith
The word “mulatto” jumps from Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” the National Anthem for the blanker than blank generation. And until all the kids memorized the lyrics and drove Kurt Cobain over the edge it was that one word that hung like cool, moist ground fog on a hot summer night. But before Nirvana there was Big Joe Turner. In fact before just about everything there was Big Joe Turner. One might even argue plausibly that Big Joe was the real nirvana when it came to rock & roll. In his book Where Dead Voices Gather Nick Tosches writes: But enough of color. I tire of every race. I shall, however, here glance for a moment in this context of color and auditory evidence and speculation, to the bellowed words of Big Joe Turner’s “Tell Me, Pretty Baby” of 1948: They say brown-skinned women are evil. And yellow girls are worse. I got myself a mulatta, boy; I’m playin’ it safety first. Or is there no comma intended between the penultimate and ultimate words of the third line of this quatrain? – I got myself a mulatta boy Has the question of a solitary punctuation mark…, ever before or since presented an ambiguity of momentousness such as this? Get thee, then, a mulatto, regardless of gender, punctuation or pronunciation; and proceed, then, behind me, together as one. While the Cobain saga proves once again, sadly, that rock & roll eats its young, what is more vexing is just how many generations it took for mulatto to resurface in a lyric. Twelve, then, is Patti Smith’s twelfth album. (Longtime collaborators Lenny Kaye and Jay Dee Daugherty are still riding shotgun.) It is an album of cover tunes. She has earned the right to coast, pay tribute, have fun – whatever the explanation of this album may be. She is the ultimate case of the fan who made the leap of faith to the stage. (She behaved admirably when she was recently inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame because her late husband Fred Sonic requested she do so.) Twelve gives us an even dozen snapshots paying tribute to The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, the folky Neil Young, Jefferson Airplane and The Doors. Paul Simon and Stevie Wonder, too. The most interesting tune is an odd old- timey take on “Smells Like Teen Spirit” itself, with playwright Sam Shepherd on banjo. We may never know Smith’s reason for covering Gregg Allman’s “Midnight Rider,” but Tears For Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” always sounded to me like it was writ for Muzak from the gitgo. Friends, we are currently living in modern times. Some Old Testament types may even vehemently suggest the end is near. So what better time to sidestep the laws of The Man and track down bootleg recordings of Patti Smith’s real covers. Her first single was turning “Hey Joe” into a heavy liquid ballad, and along the way she’s covered The Velvet […]
May 1st, 2007 by Blaine Schultz
1 Henry IV
Sometimes theatre hurts. Milwaukee Shakespeare’s production of 1 Henry IV can attest to this, having suffered a few minor injuries early in its run. When Jeffrey Withers sustained a show-stopping injury to his lower back, it was only a short while until someone else had suffered a minor broadsword wound to the hand. After a few days, however, the show was back on its feet to start the second weekend with a flourish. Milwaukee Shakespeare continues its multi-season staging of The Henriad, closing its 2006-2007 season with 1 Henry IV. Jeff Allin stars as King Henry IV, the consummate politician who has taken over a tumultuous empire. Allin’s performance echoes that of any contemporary politician in poise and presence. As the play opens, the audience is made aware of an uprising against him in the south lead by Welshman Owen Glendower (an intense Lawrnce O’Dwyer). Meanwhile, supposed Henry loyalist Henry Percy (a charismatic Brian J. Gill) is refusing to send reinforcements from the north that Henry had requested. As the play opens, the King is summoning Percy back to the court to explain his actions. The play’s center rests with Henry’s son, Prince Hal (Jeffrey Withers), who has taken in with bandits and highwaymen. Some of the production’s most intense moments happen at a tavern between Hal and the thieves. Hal is caught somewhere between royalty and thievery as he associates himself with the likes of the rotund rogue Sir John Falstaff (Richard Ziman). Hal and Falstaff play an intricate game of subtle wits at the tavern that plays out particularly well in the intimate space of the studio theatre. Shakespearian subtleties that don’t normally get rendered in all that much detail burst with texture here. Milwaukee Shakespeare further ratchets up the intensity by having the audience flank the stage. Actors play between halves of the audience in a captivating 3-dimensional space that lends the play a very accessible earthiness. Action is particularly intense in the tiny space. The fight scenes are meticulously choreographed with painstaking attention to detail. Careful thought was put into the psychology and motivations behind aggression and it all comes through with a remarkable degree of clarity. Fights are played out in epic slow motion, which runs the risk of seeming silly in such close quarters were it not all so well executed. The interaction between Withers and Ziman is particularly captivating. Both perform with a style and poise that serve as a memorable high point of the production. The production leads directly into part two without much of a feeling of finality. Local theater audiences will have to wait until next season to see Henry IV wrap up at the Broadway Theatre center. It’s a bit of a strange experience sitting through something like three hours of Shakespeare and not having it reach a final conclusion, but there’s more than enough that reaches some form of resolution to satiate audiences until next season. VS Milwaukee Shakespeare’s production of 1 Henry IV runs through May 20th […]
May 1st, 2007 by Russ Bickerstaff
Feist
Leslie Feist has all the makings of a classic indie girl – completely indecipherable, yet at the same time completely able to be pigeonholed. For one not familiar with Feist, the Canadian has some pretty ridiculous credits racked up: from the electro-shock value of Peaches to the pretty indie-pop of the Broken Social Scene (not to mention stints with By Divine Right and Kings of Convenience). She seems comfortable with and suited to each place she ventures. Her newest album, The Reminder, sees her travel right from writing in the tour bus and creating in the studio to finishing up a tour stint in Berlin and capping it off with a recording session with pals Mocky, [Chilly] Gonzales and Jaime Lidell in la Frette Studios outside of Paris. Feist’s previous releases, Let it Die and Open Season, made Canada and Europe take notice of her youthful but classic jazz vocals and guitar playing that lent a punchy yet wispy quality to her pop, half penned by her, half lent by others. This time around, Feist is writing more, collaborating with her recording pals Mocky and Gonzales as well as Ron Sexsmith. If Feist was arresting before doing other people’s songs, she is even more so singing her own. The lone cover song, “Sea Lion Woman,” was originally written by George Bass and made famous by Nina Simone. Feist revamps it by pairing light-stepping vocals with energetic and full handclaps. Feist also tries her hand at gospel, country-twinged pop in “Past in Present,” brooding piano dynamics in “My Moon My Man,” haunting ethereality in the chilling “The Water” and upbeat with “I Feel it All.” Versatility is the mark of a great songwriter, and Feist is writing with such fluidity on The Reminder that it will be interesting to see which direction Feist will travel next. VS
May 1st, 2007 by Erin Wolf
Lady Day
By Jill Gilmer It’s hard not to have a great evening at the Stackner Cabaret. The nightclub-style setting creates a relaxed and festive atmosphere and the well-heeled crowd doesn’t seem to mind sharing tables with strangers and chit-chatting over cocktails or coffee and dessert. Add to this backdrop the wonderful music of Billie Holiday performed by Grammy award-winning singer Regina Marie Williams and you have the recipe for a string of sell-out performances, which Lady Day has enjoyed since it opened on March 16. But theatre-goers hoping to learn more about the life and legacy of this jazz icon may leave the Cabaret disappointed. Like many theatrical productions that examine a celebrity figure, Lady Day focuses less on Ms. Holiday’s life and career and more on her personality. While this in itself is a worthy endeavor, director David Hunter Koch’s obsession with her surprising dark side nearly overshadows both her story and her talent. The story takes place at the Emerson Bar & Grill, a hole-in-the-wall jazz club in Philadelphia and the actual site of one of Holiday’s last performances before her death in 1959, at age 44. Emerson was, apparently, one of the few clubs in the U.S. where she was still welcomed. A series of temperamental incidents – most likely exacerbated by alcohol and heroin abuse – had tarnished her reputation and limited her performance venues. Regina Marie Williams delivers a riveting enactment of Ms. Holiday’s descent into a drunken trance over the course of her 1-hour and 15 minute performance. At least, we can only hope it was alcohol that fueled the seemingly-endless string of expletives that dotted her performance and the insults she hurled at her unsuspecting audience. This drunken rant was a stark contrast from the image of graciousness suggested by her strapless white satin gown, elbow-length gloves and trademark gardenia in her hair. Leaving the show, audience members who are unfamiliar with her contributions to jazz might even question whether the accolades history has bestowed on her are justified. These thoughts were sufficiently disturbing to send this writer surfing the in search of “the real Billie Holiday.” The artist I read about online seemed to bear little resemblance to the obnoxious faded starlet portrayed in Lady Day. The lack of balance in this portrayal of Ms. Holiday leaves an unwarranted black eye on this great artist. Despite her unbalanced portrait of Ms. Holiday, Regina Marie Williams does a superb job capturing the emotional intensity and famed uniqueness of Ms. Holiday’s voice, if not its exact tone quality. A highlight is a soul-stirring rendition of “Strange Fruit,” her classic song about Jim Crow-era lynchings. The song is a fitting conclusion to Ms. Holiday’s account of a racist incident she experienced while touring with Artie Shaw. That story reminds us of the difficult era (the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s) during which she succeeded in establishing herself as an African-American singer with a ground-breaking sound. The enormous obstacles she had to overcome are proof that this lady […]
May 1st, 2007 by Vital Archives
Andrew Bird/Apostle of Hustle @ Alverno’s Pitman Theatre, April 21
Announcing that the audience at Alverno’s Pitman Theatre was about to experience the venue’s only ‘rock’ show of the season, opening act Apostle of Hustle began their set. It was filled with punchy banter from front man Andrew Whiteman, flippant statements on politics, co-eds and drug culture and lots of new material from their latest release National Anthem of Nowhere. The set swapped southwestern indie rock sounds with indie pop rock, pleasing fans, intriguing first-time listeners and warming the crowd well for the headliner. Chicagoan Andrew Bird (whose music is based on the excellent combination of big sounds and big words) returned to Milwaukee for his first ‘big-venue’ appearance at the Pitman Theatre (his previous Milwaukee shows have been at the former Gil’s Café and the Miramar Theatre). And while Whiteman may have dubbed the evening a “rock show,” true-blue Bird fans knew they were in for much more than that. Armed with his latest collection of songs from Armchair Apocrypha, his two touring pals Martin Dosh (drums, keys) and Jeremy Ylvisaker (guitar, bass) from Minneapolis and two of the coolest amps ever created by Chicago luthier Ian Schneller – a single horn shaped like a gramophone and a double-spinning-horn amp called a “Janus Horn”– Bird and company created a stunning mini-orchestra. Bird hushed the audience with his whimsical croon, sparkling, world-famous whistle and glockenspiel combination, and his amazing ability to layer guitar and violin via a sampler. Bird even shook off his shoes, giving himself easier toe-push access to the buttons on his sampler, arranging a base of guitar, then plucked up his violin, setting his Janus amp a-spinning to bow his way through renditions of “Fiery Crash” and “Imitosis.” He later took it solo with “Masterfade” (the audience helping him along with his brain-farted lyrics) and “Dr. Stringz,” dedicated to his nieces and from his television appearance on kids TV network Noggin. Bird pulled the show together by weaving in stories about his travels in France and how they were the partial inspiration for his new material. “Plasticities,” he said, is a song born from a breakfast of oatmeal and accompanied by four looped songs in a topsy-turvy French hotel, while an attempted car-parking in Bordeaux before a show gave us “Heretics.” Storytime ended and Bird finished up the set with material from The Mysterious Production of Eggs (“Skin Is, My” and “Tables and Chairs” ) and “Scythian Empires” from Armchair. The audience, picture-perfect up until now, politely hushed during songs and wildly cheering in-between, couldn’t resist any longer as a few made their way down the aisle, dancing and twirling to Bird’s literary indie symphony. VS To view more images from the show, click HERE.
Apr 24th, 2007 by Erin Wolf
A Walk In The Woods
A park bench seems innocent enough until you get it on stage. What might casually be seen as an unsuspecting piece of furniture in its aural habitat takes on a whole new personality when it is placed in front of an audience. In Edward Albee’s Zoo Story, a bench is a silent witness to murder; it may as well be an accomplice. In Mark St. Germain’s Ears On A Beatle a park bench bears witness to meetings between FBI agents whose values slowly shift. And in Lee Blessing’s Walk In The Woods, a park bench takes center stage in the impressive space of the Broadway Theatre Center’s Cabot Theatre. The bench in question is Swiss. It sits on the outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland in the mid-1980s. Scenic Designer R.H.Graham sculpts the ample space of the Cabot’s stage into a grand sylvan setting. The ground is very earthy and organic. The trees are stark vertical lines far in the background and there is a winding path leading off the stage on the left. It is here that two men meet, away from the conference, to hammer out a few agreements involving weapons that could wipe out most of the life on the face of the planet. Peter Reeves plays John Honeyman, an American. Robert Spencer plays the Soviet Andrey Botvinnik. Relying entirely on two actors playing two characters for an entire story can strain any feature-length play. Thankfully, Reeves and Spencer develop a rapport within Graham’s script that is interesting enough to swiftly carry four scenes with relatively few tiresome stretches. At the beginning of the first scene, we are seeing two people who have just met and begun working with each other. They’ve been hired by opposing employers and both want to work out an agreement. Honeyman is a young, lean and bureaucratic man who seems to want to meet success in negotiations for the sake of his own achievement as a professional negotiator. Botvinnik is an older gentleman who has been working away at brokering an arms agreement between the U.S. and the USSR for a number of years. He wants to get to know Honeyman as a human being. Much of the appeal of the play unfolds in the first scene as Botvinnik tries desperately to reach Henyman’s human side so that they can talk like normal human beings. Any appeal that the rest of the play holds resonates from that first scene. Spencer’s charisma here is much the same as it was in the Milwaukee Rep’s production of Tuesdays With Morrie some time ago. Spencer has a gift for portraying wise older man with diligent ethics and complex personalities. Reeves plays the straight man with such ferocity here that his suspicion of Botvinnik is palpable. With Spencer’s precise execution of Honeyman’s smart professionalism, it’s easy to side with his suspicions. Maybe Botvinnik’s efforts to reach a more friendly level of rapport with him are actually an attempt to control him. As the conversations play out, it is […]
Apr 23rd, 2007 by Russ Bickerstaff
Ears on a Beatle
John Lennon mastered the deceptively simple genius of finding his own voice and speaking with it. He spoke it deftly and frequently enough to have made quite a few people uncomfortable over the years and some of these people were in rather prominent positions in the U.S. government. As a result, Lennon was trailed by the FBI for a number of years. Agents were assigned. Reports were written. A stage comedy about this could be done a lot of different ways. With Ears On A Beatle, playwright Mark St. Germain delivers a competent script that mixes some clever bits of comedy with an overall natural sense of drama about two FBI agents assigned to trail John Lennon. Under the direction of frequent Rep actor Jonathan Smoots, Next Act Theater closes its season with an enjoyable production of the hit comedy. St. Germain chose for the play to follow the two FBI agents over an extended period of years. Next Act Producing Artistic Director David Cescarini plays Howard Ballentine, the older, more cynical agent who’s been on the job for a very long time. Ryan Schaubach plays younger, more idealistic FBI agent Daniel McClure, who goes undercover as a young hippie. This sets up a youth/experience theme that sees cynicism slowly change hands between generations as the ‘70s slowly fade-out into the ‘80s with the death of Lennon. The story is painted in fairly broad strokes, but that doesn’t make it any less compelling than a more intricate plot might have been. For the most part, we focus on the two agents and their lives and their interactions with each other. Other characters appear in the production as rendered in dialogue. J. Edgar Hoover is a silent character in the play, making his presence known subtly throughout the story. It was Hoover’s FBI that opened the file on Lennon in the first place. Dialogue ranges from very obvious jokes about the nature of work at the FBI to very, very subtle moments passing between two agents in idle conversation. Lennon himself is evident in so much of the dialogue, but nowhere is he more present than St. Germain’s depiction of the era of which he was a part. Cescarini brings his usual charisma to the role of Agent Ballentine. It’s a sympathetic portrayal of a public servant who just happens to be following around one of the most popular musicians of the 20th century. Cescarini has an impressive presence in any role and his performance here is no exception. His sympathetic portrayal of a practical conservative who comes to an understanding about the man he’s being paid to follow has a great deal of depth to it. Schaubach plays McClure as the nice guy who comes from a proud military family but gets shifted off to the FBI instead. He seems to believe in the idealism of his country, but understands that there’s a moral code that it doesn’t always live up to. His idealism outweighs his patriotism, leaving his personality […]
Apr 2nd, 2007 by Russ Bickerstaff
Low
Two years ago, The Great Destroyer marked a period of incredible transition for Low. Not only did the album itself bristle with challenges to the band’s established method of slow and steady and hauntingly beautiful, but the period shortly after its release also saw bassist Zak Sally leave the band and founding member Alan Sparhawk check into the hospital for mental health treatment. Clearly, there were shakeups, and Drums and Guns refracts the altered configuration of thoughts and people. Producer Dave Fridmann returns to work the subtle transformations that informed his efforts on The Great Destroyer (and with bands like The Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev) ; new bassist and vocalist Matt Livingston fills no one’s shoes but his own and the album feels constantly unsettled. Even now, with listeners braced for new directions, Low’s music surprises. The opening track, “Pretty People,” crackles in with static and feedback as it raises a golem of Eastern-flavored psychedelic meditation. “Always Fade” sets an electronic whirl in the background of a jazz-funk bass line and a thunderous cardboard-like snare snap. And “Take Your Time” drops chiming bells over a deliberately skipping loop of church-like vocal cadences and a tinny drum-machine rhythm. Even in relatively familiar territory – the vocal harmonizing between Sparhawk and wife/drummer Mimi Parker is as tenderly hushed as ever on “Belarus” – Low orient themselves to see and hear things differently. Drums and Guns mesmerizes listeners to do the same. VS
Apr 1st, 2007 by Jon Gilbertson
