by Dean Blunt
feat. Joanne Robertson
from BLACK METAL 2
on Rough Trade
New From the Mods: “Force 10 From Navarone”
Sleaford Mods
feat. Florence Shaw (of Dry Cleaning)
from UK Grim
Fontaines D.C. Dance the Feet with this Fleet Ditty
“Boys in The Better Land”
from Dogrel
on Partisan Records
Water From Your Eyes and Still Counting
Biig Piig Strikes an Inviting Match to “Kerosene”
from Bubblegum
“Kerosene”
newly released on RCA Records
.
Brijean’s “Ooo La La” is so ooh la la!
(The Bad Tuner Remix)
“Ooo La La”
on Ghostly International
.
M(h)aol’s “Asking For It” Picks Up the Retributive Hammer
Into the Triangular Warp
Jeff Parker Hits an Ace at LA’s Enfield Tennis Academy
“2021-04-08”
from Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy
Read Riot Material’s review of Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy [Read more…]
Love Borne of a Good Groove, and a Trio
“Show Me Some Love”
Honey Dijon & Channel Tres
Feat. Sadie Walkier
out now on Black Girl Magic
on Classic Music
.
For Its Sweetness, We Turn The Ear
“Help”
new from Rozi Plain
video directed by Noriko Okaku
Ingesting Liberation Through Song
New work from Special Interest
“Midnight Legend”
ft. Mykki Blanco
Please Baby Please
Reviewed by Manuel Betancourt
The opening moments of Amanda Kramer’s Please Baby Please (2022) play like an archly stylized West Side Story by way of Kenneth Anger. Only, instead of the Jets, we have the “Young Gents,” a group of leather-clad rascals who dance their way through the streets of a neon-tinged, foggy 1950s Manhattan before descending on an unsuspecting couple and, well, beating them to death. Looking like Marlon Brando circa The Wild One cosplayers, this ragtag group is interrupted by two stunned bystanders, Arthur and Suze (Harry Melling and Andrea Riseborough). The moment will change the bohemian couple forever. The lustful gazes exchanged between Arthur and Teddy (the always delectable Karl Glusman, here in full leather boy cruising mode), as well as the electrifying fear-turned-titillation Suze experiences (Arthur may want, but Suze wants to be Teddy), set them both on a conquest to undo the relationship they thought they wanted. In the process, Kramer sketches out a feverish queer manifesto on gender that feels both novel and familiar. [Read more…]
New Work From Irish Noise Rockers Gilla Band: “Post Ryan”
from Most Normal
(out today)
on Rough Trade
Pearl
Reviewed by William Bibbiani
Ti West’s Pearl (2022) is an oddity amongst horror sequels and prequels. The fact of its existence is not the remarkable part. What’s actually extraordinary is that Pearl is more than just a fantastic prequel: it successfully illuminates and recontextualizes its predecessor, dramatically improving a film that was already acclaimed to begin with. Pearl is a prequel to West’s retro slasher X, which takes place in the 1970s and follows a group of independent filmmakers who rent a cabin on a farm from an elderly couple. Their mission is clandestine, to secretly film a pornographic movie starring Maxine Minx (Mia Goth, Emma) under the farmers’ noses. But when they’re not having spirited debates about sex-positivity, they’re getting murdered one-by-one by Pearl (also played by Goth), an old woman who longs for her sexual prime. [Read more…]
Nothing Groundbreaking, But For Some Cheeky Fun…
New from Hudson Mohawke:
“Bicstan”
From the Cry Sugar release
out now on Warp Records
A Spat at the Wind, A Touch to the Moon
Brilliant new work from Yeah Yeah Yeahs
“Spitting Off the Edge of the World”
w/ Perfume Genius
from the forthcoming Cool It Down
out 30 September
on Secretly Canadian
Crimes of the Future
Reviewed by Anna Shechtman and D.A. Miller
A line from Crimes of the Future (2022), David Cronenberg’s latest film, has been trailing it around with the campy insistence of an old-fashioned ad campaign: “Surgery is the new sex.” On receiving this information, a skeptical Saul Tenser, played by Viggo Mortensen, asks, “Does there have to be a new sex?” “Yes,” he is told by Kristen Stewart’s Timlin, with the assurance of a fashion influencer, “It’s time.”
It’s time for a new sex? For Timlin, infatuated with Saul, this might mean, “It’s time for a new sex act—sex between us.” For devotees of Cronenberg’s cinema, the phrase more pertinently means, “It’s time for a new Cronenberg film.” The director has been spawning new versions of sex since the start of his career. Murder is the new sex (Videodrome, 1983), car accidents are the new sex (Crash, 1996), commodity fetishism is the new sex (Cosmopolis, 2012), and so on. To get in the mood for new sex, you might resort to the rave drug that Cosmopolis calls “novo,” and afterward, you may need to be cured of bugs at the “Institute of Neo-venereal Disease” (the first Crimes of the Future, 1970). At all events, the precondition for making it with anyone in Cronenberg is making it new. [Read more…]
Mad God
Reviewed by Nicholas Goldwin
Technically astonishing and immersive to a fault, director Phil Tippett successfully demonstrates that thirty years of relentless dedication to your craft can lead to cinematic innovations even his old stomping grounds – the sets of Star Wars and Jurassic Park – have yet to catch up. Not to disparage either of those staples of cinema, but neither Tyrannosaurs nor Tatooine have anything on Tippett.
The aptly titled Mad God (2021) can only be pointing to such a mind as endlessly imaginative as Tippett’s, whose film can only be described as a playground of the damned and demented, where imagery of war, nuclear fallout, slave labour, torture, espionage, Orwellian dystopia and Cronenberg-esque body horror seemingly compete and collaborate with one another to find out what exactly will wind up pushing the world into the inevitable oblivion it seems to be hurtling towards. [Read more…]