As is always the way, I suppose, I finish one compilation of newish psych acts, then a load more records start turning up. For a good 30 minutes now, my new favourite band has been some shady punks from Long Beach who allegedly travel in “a vegetable oil-powered school bus”, and have a percussionist called, well, Sexual Chocolate.
Over the weekend, I watched one of the best music documentaries I’ve seen in an age. “Wild Combination” is subtitled “A Portrait Of Arthur Russell”, and I can only defer to The New Yorker for a start, who noted about the film, “This story begins, as many good ones do, with a gay man from Oskaloosa, Iowa, playing cello in a closet in a Buddhist seminary.”
Coming to work this morning past the giant Budweiser posters of William Tyler, it occurred to me it was really high time I wrote about “OH (Ohio)”. I guess there may have been some reluctance on my part to commit to this one, possibly because I’ve found the last couple – maybe more – Lambchop albums so disappointing, and also because, clearly, none of their slowly insinuating records merit rushed judgments.
A bit of a sketchy bunch this week, as you’ll see. But the TV On The Radio album is getting played daily at least once, and there’s an auspicious new Mystery Record for me to be all cagey about.
Much as I like a fair bit of hardcore, there’s a slightly dim earnestness surrounding some contemporary bands on the scene (like the musically quite interesting Gallows, I suppose) that can sometimes be irritating. Obviously I can sympathise with the ideology, but I guess I’ve reached a point in life where I don’t need to be lectured on the multifarious iniquities of the music business - or the iniquities of life, come to that - in such artless terms.
Don LaFontaine
1940 - 2008
It’s a fair bet that you don’t recognise the name. But the voice, surely, is as iconic to moviegoers as Harry Lime’s final act appearance in The Third Man, Omar Sharif’s entrance in Lawrence Of Arabia or the great white’s tail fin in Jaws.
Don LaFontaine was the unseen star of Hollywood; he was the guy who provided over 5,000 gravely voiceovers for movie trailers.
Judging by the activity on the blog about “Golden Age”, there’s a fair amount of excitement about TV On The Radio’s “Dear Science”. And, now that I’ve heard the album properly a few times, I reckon it’s pretty justified: this is the best record the band have made by a mile.
The movie career of Steve Coogan has so far proved to be a fascinatingly erratic subject. Sure, it’s not unusual to find a successful British TV comedian struggle to establish himself in movies, particularly in Hollywood. For every Dudley Moore, who became a huge movie star in the States with Arthur and 10, you only have to look at Peter Cook - the true genius in that partnership - whose transatlantic film career barely made it beyond Supergirl.
