The folks at A&E have this tremendous knack of taking the truly odd and seemingly mundane tasks and turning them into DVR-worthy TV. Storage Wars is the latest and quite possible best example as it is now the networks most popular show. The first season focuses on four individuals who make their living by bidding on storage units that have gone up to auction after the owners fell behind on…
Like a cross between an 80’s American sex romp comedy and Waking Ned Devine, Zonad sounds dreadful on paper. An alcoholic runaway from a rehab hospital, clad in a red leather jumpsuit with a goofy helmet on his head is found in the home of a simpleton family in a small Irish town and the stranger manages to convince everyone that he’s an alien. Oh, and the family has a…
There’s something about the state of Louisiana the draws reality shows like… well like New Jersey draws reality shows. While the Garden State has Jersey Shore, Cake Boss, Real Housewives of New Jersey and Jersilicious, Louisiana has Swamp People, Bad Girls Club, Steven Seagal Lawman, Trashmen, Real World New Orleans (yup, that one counts) and now Billy the Exterminator. Billy the Exterminator (the third season just out on DVD) profiles…
Megadeth founder, and former Metallica guitarist Dave Mustaine is full of contradictions and many of them come out in his memoir. His band Megadeth, along with other thrash metal founders like Anthrax and Slayer were seen as the antidote to the preening, style-over-substance genre of hair metal that hijacked the 80’s music scene, yet throughout his book, Mustaine talks about band member who did not have the “right look” –…
When Athens’ favorite sons R.E.M. released Life’s Rich Pageants in 1986, the rest of the world finally got a peek at what the college rock crowd had been raving about for years. Four albums into it, R.E.M. had their strongest commercial success with Lifes Rich Pageant, a foreshadowing of what was to come with the impressive succession of follow ups (Document, Green, Out of Time and Automatic for the People).…
SPOILER ALERT! To get the big unanswered question out of the way up front, don’t count on a Husker Du reunion any time soon. “Beyond my personal reasons for not looking back, a Husker Du reunion would surely tarnish the history of the band,” front man/guitarist Bob Mould writes in See a Little Light. In his exhaustive new bio, Mould – co-founder of the highly influential Minneapolis indie punk group…
Washington state’s The Riffbrokers have managed to find a way to sound completely timeless. They play “rock” without any unnecessary prefix needed to describe their sound and as a result they could have recorded their latest (Every Pilot’s Blinded By the Sun) in the studio right next to Tom Petty when he was working on Damn the Torpedoes in ’79 or they could have just as easily been playing with…
Not since The Big Chill has a drama so deftly relied on music to serve as its own character in a movie. The emotional indie, The Music Never Stopped, is based on a true story by neurologist/researcher Oliver Sacks (the doctor who also inspired the book and eventual movie “Awakenings”) about a father (played flawlessly by J.K. Simmons) who uses music to connect with his son (Lou Taylor Pucci), hospitalized…
After a bumpy couple of seasons, the long-running HBO series finally gets back into its groove with the seventh and second to last season. This season finds actor Vincent Chase (Adrian Grenier) between movies, hooking up with porn star Sasha Grey (essentially playing herself) and getting addicted to booze and Cocaine. His hangers on have each found their own lives, Eric (Kevin Connolly) managing other actors; Turtle (Jerry Ferrara) pitching…
Matthew McConaughey may have just found his ticket out of the romantic comedy ghetto. Lincoln Lawyer, based on the wildly popular Michael Connelly novels, centers around the somewhat sleazy defense attorney Mickey Haller who works out of his Lincoln Continental (get it?). Don’t worry, Haller (played deftly by McConaughey) is a loving dad, gets along great with his ex-wife and has just the right amount of charm to make you…
American TV audiences have a problem saying goodbye… well, let me clarify, American TV show producers have a problem saying goodbye as evidenced by how often they keep the shows on life support long after all of the story lines have been exhausted and the audience has moved on. Though NBC’s ER happens to be a big exception to that rule. By centering the show around a revolving cast of…
Nick Cave is right up there with Leonard Cohen and the late Jeff Buckley as being one of those musicians everyone claims to love but if you look purely at record sales all three still hover closer to cult status rather than international superstars…which is far from being a bad thing (unless you have to pay a mortgage). If you’ve been resolving to actually listen to Cave versus just nodding…
A hybrid of fact and fiction, Bob Pfeifer’s latest is an impressively original look at secret societies and International corruption in the courtroom, all tied into the real life trial of Amanda Knox. The story is cleverly told through journal entries, interviews and news reports and centers around a hush-hush society of international celebrities called The Strangers (everyone from Dave Grohl and Woodie Allen to Sean Penn and the fictional…
Along with having quite possibly the best named backup band in the recent history of rock, Glenn Tilbrook, the former front man of the influential UK pop rock band Squeeze, is also a fantastic pop music song writer. Live in New York showcases this better than just about any of his albums. Coming across relaxed and humble in a small New York club, Tilbrook and his band run through nine…
Squidbillies is by far the best cartoon depiction of redneck, inbred squids living in the Georgia’s Appalachian Mountains since… well ever. The Adult Swim show packaged in tidy 10 minute episodes was conceived by the same brains behind Adult Swim staple Aqua Team Hunger Force, so if that show has you scratching your head, it’s probably best to skip Squidbillies. Your loss though, unless you can find another adult-targeted cartoon…
Given the paint-by-numbers memoirs that are being churned out at an alarming rate lately by rock stars that reveal just about nothing, it’s refreshing to read a collection of essays by a little known indie folk singer who reveals more about herself via humor than the recent works of Belinda Carlisle, Vince Neil and Scott Wieland combined. In You Must Go and Win, Alina Simone opens up about her childhood…
Chicago’s Material Issue is one of the best power pop bands to come out of the 90’s and there were a slew of decent bands from that genre in the 90s. International Pop Overthrow, the band’s first major label (and finest )release is finally getting the anniversary treatment, complete with a slew (eight to be exact) of bonus tracks including a live version of Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Boxer” and…
The most surprising revelation about the History Channel realty show Swamp People is how the network manages to portray the families in the series in an honest, non exploitive manner. The show focuses on a number of Louisiana families who make their living in the swamps catching alligators and snakes. Yes the Cajun accents are thick enough to require subtitles, but there are no ridiculous scenarios constructed simply to make…
If Queen were to make their debut now, instead of 1973 when they released their eponymous debut, it’s very likely they’d be considered a novelty band, and I’m not even talking about Freddy Mercury’s skin tight cat suits or Brian May’s getting closer to God afro as reasons why. The songs alone, which have proven not only to be fantastic examples of what can be accomplished with hard driving drums…
You’d be excused for thinking Shot in the Dark, the new HBO doc from Entourage’s Adrian Grenier, was little more than a predictably sappy tear jerker aimed at the Lifetime crowd. That’s certainly what I was expecting, so I was pleasantly surprised when the film turned out to be a sincere look at Grenier simply searching for answers about the estranged father he grew up without. Out on DVD just…