The News Review:
- MOVIE REVIEW | ‘CONTROL’
- The Who: The Who By Numbers : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone
- The ‘Grass Grows Greener on the LES
MOVIE REVIEW | ‘CONTROL’
New York Times – Oct 10, 2007
Curtis the lead singer in Joy Division the great post-punk Manchester quartet committed suicide in 1980 just before the band was to embark on its first American tour. He was 23 and in the years since his death he has become a canonical figure in his own right. Even as Joy Division’s austere brooding songs… Instead their film shows plainly and sufficiently how those songs were made. They were written down in a notebook practiced with the rest of the band and then performed in front of ever larger and more ecstatic audiences. But the group’s progress it wins the favor of the Manchester music guru Tony Wilson (Craig Parkinson) and acquires an aggressive manager in the person of Rob Gretton (Toby Kebbell) is accompanied by increasing complication and strain in Mr. Curtis’s personal life. While still a teenager he marries Deborah and becomes a father just as Joy Division is recording its first album. He begins to suffer from epileptic seizures and to worry that the medicine he takes to treat the condition will affect his moods and his mind. He also falls for a Belgian journalist named Annik Honor?Alexandra Maria Lara) and love tears him apart again.
The Who: The Who By Numbers : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone – Oct 10, 2007
But Tommy is as much star as prophet—and he fails at both—while Quadrophenia’s Jimmy was clearly shooting for center stage when he wound up on that rock. Even Who’s Next which seems so anticonceptual is obsessed with these things fore and aft; it begins with “Baba O’Riley” ‘s “teenage wasteland” ends with “Won’t Get Fooled Again” ‘s half threat half promise to do something about it. “The real truth as I see it is that rock music as it was is not really contemporary to these times” Townshend recently told an interviewer. “It’s really the music of yesteryear. The only things that continue to keep abreast of the times are those songs that stand out due to their simplicity. ” There is no better summary of what The Who by Numbers is about: Townshend has always been his own best critic. As angry as it is desperate the album moves from song to song on pure bitterness disillusionment and hopelessness… ” Always before the Who have been able to ride out of these situations on power and bravado—now they wonder if they still have enough of either. As ex-Beatles solo albums rush forward in feeble proliferation as the Rolling Stones stagger into their second decade with songs drawn almost exclusively from their first as the Who stumble onward another of Townshend’s thoughts in that interview quoted above sounds truer than ever: “It’s like that line in ‘The Punk Meets the Godfather’. ‘you paid me to do the dancing. ‘ The kids pay us for a good time yet nowadays people don’t really want to get involved.
The ‘Grass Grows Greener on the LES
Village Voice – Oct 10, 2007
It was a hootenanny done right and bluegrass that does New York City proud. Unlike the slick country-pop style found in Nashville or the hippie-inspired jam-band scene out west a growing cadre of New York musicians is taking bluegrass back to its iconoclastic roots with a traditional sound that’s raw gritty and a lot more rock ‘n’ roll. Bluegrass “is a roots music and it should reflect where it is” says Karen Waltermire owner of the Parkside Lounge which holds concerts and monthly jams on the Lower East Side. “Delta blues sounds like the Delta. New York bluegrass sounds like New York. ” “Bluegrass has become cool” adds Michael Daves who hosts the Parkside’s jam the first Monday of the month. “Rock venues a few years ago wouldn’t have offered it but now bluegrass has been able to straddle this line between the baby boomers and the hipster generation… Jen Larson a 38-year-old singer and guitaristwho can be found at many of the jams and will soon guest on A Prairie Home Companion fell into traditional bluegrass after falling out of punk. “My generation is informed by rock ‘n’ roll and punk” she says. “For a while I was listening to punk and I got really bored. I recognized something similar in traditional bluegrass— it was raw and had similar momentum. Emotionally it is very direct. Furthermore with no industry pressures— for most there’s not much money in bluegrass at the moment—these musicians can explore the more ribald less living-room-friendly aspects of bluegrass made popular by Alison Krauss and the like. “This is not our full-time job” says Jacob Tilove an architectural writer who moonlights in the band All Night Cookin’.