This Week

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Josef Krebs  |  May 21, 2013  | 
When her husband, Martin (Channing Tatum) gets out of stint in prison for insider trading, Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara) falls into a deep depression and attempts suicide leading to her being put on an experimental new medication that has complicated side effects - such as stabbing your husband while you're sleep walking.
Ken Richardson  |  May 20, 2013  | 

Daft Punk: Random Access Memories

New release (Daft Life/Columbia)
Photo by David Black

In this era of electronic dance music, you might think the pioneering French duo Daft Punk would be eager to trump the upstarts. But you’d be thinking wrong.

As Thomas Bangalter told Rolling Stone, “We wanted to do what we used to do with machines and samplers but with people.” And as Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo said, “It’s not that we can’t make crazy, futuristic-sounding stuff, but we wanted to play with the past.”

Josef Krebs  |  May 14, 2013  | 

Cloud Atlas

Written and directed by Andy and Lana (formerly Larry) Wachowski (The Matrix trilogy) and Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run), Cloud Atlas takes you on a mind-boggling odyssey through many ages and places that come together to make up the six-story tapestry of lives and previous lives, allowing many of the best actors in Hollywood and England to play multipl

Ken Richardson  |  May 14, 2013  | 

Vampire Weekend: Modern Vampires of the City

New release (XL; tour dates)
Photo by Alex John Beck

“Much of the overall sound and approach to the album was [the outcome of] being able to record the drums to tape on an old Ampex machine at Vox Recording Studios. That put us in a different world. There’s a quality that happens with tape; it lets you really crunch and compress the drums, and they don’t get harsh or painful. It has to do with the transients hitting the tape; something changes. Once the drums have been passed through tape to Pro Tools, you can really mangle them and go crazy with them.”

Ken Richardson  |  May 07, 2013  | 

Natalie Maines: Mother

New release (Columbia; tour dates with Dixie Chicks)
Photo by Danny Clinch  © Columbia

“Lots of albums by lead singers might just as well have been made by the band, but I think this is very different from anything the Dixie Chicks could make.” So says Natalie Maines about her debut solo album. It’s “a new direction,” her press release underscores. Most common translation I’ve seen to date: It’s “a rock album.”

Ken Richardson  |  May 07, 2013  | 

Natalie Maines: Mother

New release (Columbia; tour dates with Dixie Chicks)
Photo by Danny Clinch  © Columbia

"Lots of albums by lead singers might just as well have been made by the band, but I think this is very different from anything the Dixie Chicks could make." So says Natalie Maines about her debut solo album. It's "a new direction," her press release underscores. Most common translation I've seen to date: It's "a rock album."

Josef Krebs  |  May 07, 2013  | 

Jack Reacher

Reacher (Tom Cruise) is an ex-lifer military police officer living off the grid. He agrees to become lead investigator for attorney Helen Rodin (Rosamund Pike) who’s trying to keep a veteran sniper off death row since all evidence points to him having randomly shot five people.

Ken Richardson  |  Apr 30, 2013  | 

Iggy and the Stooges: Ready to Die

New release (Fat Possum; tour dates)
Photo by David Raccuglia

Ready to Die is billed as the 40th-anniversary follow-up to 1973’s Raw Power because it’s the first album since then to be credited specifically to Iggy and the Stooges, with James Williamson returning on guitar.

Josef Krebs  |  Apr 30, 2013  | 

Silver Linings Playbook

In Silver Linings Playbook by director David O. Russell (Three Kings, The Fighter, I Heart Huckabees), former high school history teacher Pat Solatano (Bradley Cooper) gets out of a state institution after spending eight months incarcerated there.

Josef Krebs  |  Apr 23, 2013  | 

Gangster Squad

By 1949, Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn), a New York Jew, has gone West to follow his manifest destiny to take over Los Angeles and then the whole of the Western United States through buying politicians, judges, and cops with profits from his vice, gambling, and drug rackets.

Ken Richardson  |  Apr 23, 2013  | 

will.i.am: #willpower

New release (Interscope)

Has a hip-hop-related record ever opened as optimistically as this?

Good morning, welcome to the thing called life
Good morning, don’t you let it pass you by
We laugh, we cry, and then we dry our eyes
We fall, we rise, ready for another try
When life gets tough, remember, we were never born to die
When times get rough, remember, we were born to be alive

Ken Richardson  |  Apr 19, 2013  | 

Years ago, someone told me that 1,200 high school kids were given a survey. A question was posed to them: Have you ever been to a stand-alone record shop? The number of kids that answered “yes” was . . . zero.

Josef Krebs  |  Apr 17, 2013  | 

Django Unchained

Set in the South in 1858, two years before the Civil War, writer-director Quentin Tarantino's Spaghetti-sauced Western (or more accurately Southern) Django Unchained tells of Django (Jamie Foxx), a slave bought and freed by a German-born bounty hunter, Dr.

Ken Richardson  |  Apr 16, 2013  | 

The Flaming Lips: The Terror

New release (Warner Bros.; tour dates)
Photo by George Salisbury

Telepathic surgery. Ego tripping at the gates of hell. I’ve allowed the Flaming Lips to take me deep inside myself and pull me far afield. But I can’t submit entirely to The Terror.

Josef Krebs  |  Apr 09, 2013  | 

Richard III

I'm no bard or balladeer, but I'd like to sing the praises of this Blu-ray (not to bury it).

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