Photo: Clark Deal Oklahoma City’s Kill the Reflection has come a long way. What began as a trip-hop group in 1999 has morphed into a post-punk band that does moody with the best of them. Heavily indebted to Joy Division and Interpol — yet inspired by acts as varied as Deftones, Iggy Pop and Sade […]
buy
Posted inArts & Culture
The Man Who Created Halloween — Irwin Yablans
This self-published paperback is his story — emphasis on The Man, not Halloween. The making of that 1978 now-classic movie is only a small part of the autobiography, which covers his entire life. Luckily, Yablans is an engaging storyteller who’s full of amusing anecdotes — some of which are intentional (John Wayne declaring his wish […]
Posted inArts & Culture
It’s a TV-on-DVD fall frenzy!
The Walking Dead: The Complete Second Season Now that the third season has started, I guess we’ll know soon enough, but The Walking Dead must figure out a way to deliver a consistent season. It delivers awesome season openers and closers, but the ones in between can be maddening; they can take several episodes to […]
Posted inMusic
Kendrick Lamar — good kid, m.A.A.d City
The album, which Lamar labeled as a “short film,” tells the story of his life as a good kid in the mad city of Compton, Calif. He raps about trying to avoid temptations, including women, drugs, alcohol, violence and revenge. However, even the good kids succumb to temptation from time to time. The disc twists […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Maximum Conviction
The two Steves — one formerly stone cold, the other once hard to kill — star as tough-talkin’ former black-ops partners at a “high-risk extraction” prison that’s so “dark military,” the local police don’t even know the place exists. Therefore, the fuzz won’t be any help when rogue military man Michael Paré (The Lincoln Lawyer) […]
Posted inMusic
Freaky Friday
Maybe it’s too early, but what are you doing New Year’s Eve? Unless you’re Down Under, you’re not going to see The Flaming Lips’ annual New Year’s Eve Freakout. It’s true: Music’s favorite weirdoes will ring in 2013 in Australia, but in exchange, they’ve conjured up a holiday gift more appropriate than their usual end-of-year […]
Posted inMusic
Reid all about it
Lots of guys get in trouble with their girlfriends for eating in bed. Norman singer-songwriter Kyle Reid was in the doghouse for building cigar-box guitars there. “Sawdust would get everywhere, including in my bed,” he said. “It didn’t bother me very much, because the sawdust reminded me of the work I had done that day, […]
Posted inMusic
Cheap shoots
The notion of genre has become increasingly muddled with each passing decade. As technology progresses, so, too, do the means by which that music is produced. New sounds are born from new methods and ideas, and the traditional framework of a once-pure building block evolves into something completely its own. This is especially true of […]
Posted inMusic
Whitey power
Photo: Clay Abbott While many critics are quick to label Whitey Morgan as part of the new breed of “outlaw country,” a movement begun in the 1970s by the likes of Merle Haggard and Waylon Jennings, he is just as quick to put that dog down. “I don’t think there’s really any outlaw country these […]
Posted inMusic
Lost Empires — Death and Evil Beasts
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto; line-height:normal;mso-outline-level:1″> <p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto; line-height:normal”> From the title alone of its new EP, Death and Evil Beasts, you get a feeling of where this six-song affair is going: This ain’t no Taylor Swift. Clocking in at around 20 minutes, the disc covers a lot of ground, musically. The old-school punk noise of […]