Photo: Jason Tanaka Blaney When Ohio rock act Red Wanting Blue got booked to play Norman Music Festival this past spring, the band members worried about whether they’d be able to impress the crowd. “These people have seen everything,” lead singer Scott Terry said. “I’ve never been close to a tornado, but most of these […]
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Animal Collective — Centipede HZ
In direct contrast to, say, Grizzly Bear, Animal Collective thrives on being inexact, and to come so close to re-creating the formula nonetheless is impressive. Centipede Hz is not half as catchy; nothing resembles “Summertime Clothes” or “My Girls,” save for “Applesauce.” What you’ve got instead are nearly a dozen jarring pop songs that split […]
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Mad Monster Party?
Filmed in “Animagic” and with characters designed and a script by two Mad magazine giants — Jack Davis and Harvey Kurtzman, respectively — the movie got beloved horror icon Boris Karloff to voice mad scientist Dr. Frankenstein, who looks just like the actor. The doc has invited all of moviedom’s monsters — y’know, Dracula, the […]
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Killer Joe
The second collaboration between director William Friedkin (The Exorcist, The French Connection) and Tulsa-born playwright Tracy Letts — their first being 2006’s Bug — this work serves up trailer-trash noir as savage as it is savagely funny. Not that all audiences will get the joke. Letts’ first play rolls around in the muck, and Friedkin […]
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Oh, yeah
This fall’s co-headlining tour between Ty Segall and Thee Oh Sees finds both acts in new territory. Longtime favorites of the underground garage-rock scene, the groups are far more used to playing in venues that double as closet-sized dive bars or warehouse backrooms, but as they begin to command more sizable crowds, they find themselves […]
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We’ve been had
Coming up in the New York garage-rock revival of the early 2000s with bands like The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Interpol, The Walkmen have stepped out of the past decade looking no worse for the wear. Unlike most of their peers, the group has put out one critically acclaimed album after another, emerging as […]
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Depth test
Photo: Laura Raczkowski Owning a recording studio and heading a small, Oklahoma record label gives Chris Harris, front man of local shoegaze three-piece Depth & Current, a certain perspective on what it takes to survive in the world of independent music: Namely, adapt or die. To that end, the Norman-based “nightmare-pop” band decided to include […]
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Naked Angels
The 1969 picture arrived at the crest of the biker-film craze, yet is so dull, it could’ve killed the genre. The plot concerns gang leader Mother (Michael Greene, The Harrad Experiment) being freshly discharged from the hospital, but in danger of going right back in as he seeks revenge on his rivals who put him […]
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Karate-Robo Zaborgar
As silly as it is satisfying, the Sushi Typhoon serving is both an update and a spoof of a live-action kiddie series from the 1970s, à la Ultraman, so the approach is both reverent and respectfully raunchy (think The Brady Bunch Movie). It’s about the love story between a man named Daimon (Yasuhisa Furuhara) and […]
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Vile
So, yeah: It’s aptly titled. When two camping couples agree to give a ride to a stranded cougar (soap actress McKenzie Westmore) they meet at a gas station, they are gassed and awaken trapped in a house with five others. As explained by a helpful video, “Pain will be your only way out of this […]