Black Moth Super Rainbow - Eating Us (Graveface)

After three full-length albums and a handful of EPs, it’s only natural that Pennsylvania psychedelic outfit Black Moth Super Rainbow would feel the need to expand on its sound. Not that Eating Us, the band’s fourth release and second for Graveface Records, marks a significant stylistic shift. The band still deals in hazy keyboards, shimmering guitars and front man Tobacco’s sickly sweet vocodored vocals and they still anchor it all with deep, head-bobbing beats.

Rather, the big difference is in the texture. Where the band previously embraced the warbly imperfection of its lo-fi recording process, Eating Us is all about crisp production. Credit for the newfound polish (or blame, for the purists) goes to Flaming Lips producer Dave Fridmann — the first professional producer the band has recruited. The drums in particular bear Fridmann’s fingerprints, compressed to perfection for maximum impact on album opener “Born on a Day the Sun Didn’t Rise,” but the entire album is noticeably crisper than the band’s previous output, even as it maintains the laid-back psych vibe.

While Black Moth has never been shy about the influence of electronic music on its sound — the band has even been derided in some corners as just an analogue take on Boards of Canada — the production on Eating Us brings that influence to the forefront. “Gold Splatter” particularly sounds like an outtake from Air’s Moon Safari, albeit one that’s as good as anything that actually made it onto that album. It also makes the album an easy entry point for a band that’s always hidden its pop instincts beneath occasionally off-putting production. In fact, with its hazy atmosphere and casual hookiness, Eating Us comes very close to being perfect blissed-out summer listening. It’s only when you really start to pay attention, and hear lines like “Neon lemonade, eat my face away” (from “Iron Lemonade”) that you realize the band’s trademark weirdness is still present. There are some things that production can’t change.

Drag Me to Hell review

It’s not necessarily true that all horror movies these days are sequels, remakes, torture porn or some combination of the three, but it certainly feels that way. This year alone has seen a 3-D remake of My Bloody Valentine, a reboot of Friday the 13th and The Last House on the Left. In a few months, there’ll be new sequels to Cabin Fever, Saw, Wrong Turn and The Descent (one of the more original horror flicks of 2005), and fresh stabs at The Wolfman and Night of the Demons, not to mention a sequel to Rob Zombie’s remake of Halloween. Almost universally, the remakes in particular are darker, nastier and a whole lot less fun than the originals.

Granted, this is nothing new to the genre. Anyone raised on the slasher flicks of the ’80s and early ’90s should be well accustomed to series that carry on well past the point of ridiculousness. Still, it’s always nice to see someone buck the trend.

That someone is Sam Raimi, the man behind Evil Dead, Army of Darkness and, most recently, the decidedly non-frightening Spider-Man series. His return to horror, Drag Me to Hell, is exactly the kind of movie that got folks like me into the genre in the first place.

From the ’80s-style Universal logo that opens the picture to the reliance on practical effects and sound design over CGI effects (for the most part), Raimi’s latest makes it clear that it’s part of a grand tradition of horror movies. Unlike the recent spate of remakes that take those classics and give them a soulless sheen, though, Drag Me to Hell remembers that the horror flicks of decades past were still fun. Yes, people die grizzly deaths and jump-scares and sinister music get your heart racing, but it’s done without the weird prurience that can leave crowds feeling dirty when the picture ends.

Darkness has its place, especially in horror, and sequelitis isn’t likely to stop any time soon, but it’s nice to have a reminder of what made the genre so appealing in the first place. Now if only that other goofy-horror-fan-turned-credible-director would come back to the genre. The world doesn’t need The Hobbit half as much as we need another Dead Alive.

Up - review

Between Finding Nemo, The Incredibles and the back-to-back critical success of Ratatouille and Wall-E, Pixar has built up a vast store of goodwill. The consistently groundbreaking visuals are a big part of the studio’s success, but even more so, their attention to character, their flair for visual storytelling and their willingness to ignore marketability in favour of quality have endeared them to critics and audiences alike. Last year’s Wall-E pushed the limits of that philosophy through both the film’s structure —it eschewed dialogue for nearly half of its run time — and in its critique of lazy consumerism. It was also one of the year’s best movies.

On its surface, Up isn’t quite as unorthodox, but it’s still not exactly conventional for a kids’ movie. Two of its three main characters are senior citizens. The other, a portly Boy Scout, isn’t the typical precocious tyke that dominates children’s fare, either. Carl Fredricksen (Ed Asner), the boxy curmudgeon at the film’s centre, isn’t the kind of character that kids will clamour to have on their underoos.

Put your faith in Pixar once again, though, and you’ll witness a marvel. Any notion that Up could be a misstep is dispelled in its opening sequence, a deft and delicate summary of Carl’s life that both humanizes him and explains his motivation for hooking thousands of balloons to his house and leaving civilization behind. With that sequence, the one-dimensional (albeit lovingly 3-D rendered) coot from Up’s trailers becomes as fully realized a character as any that Pixar has brought forward.

That grounding is needed, too, because Up goes to some pretty ridiculous places. An army of talking dogs, an explorer gone mad from isolation and an exotic bird that resembles a cross between the roadrunner and dodo from Looney Tunes all figure heavily in the plot, which seems cut more from old adventure serials than from the standard pun-filled sass-fests that dominate modern 3-D animation. Every development, though, no matter how ludicrous, is brimming with so much imagination and charm that it’s impossible not to be taken in.

Exactly what those charms are, I’m not going to say — half the fun of a film like Up is being taken along for the ride, and too much detail would only spoil the experience. Suffice to say, the usual Pixar quality is present in spades. The voice work is stellar, especially Asner, as well as screenwriter and co-director Bob Peterson as the simple-minded dog, Dug. The visuals are almost absurdly rich, the humour is genuine and the sentimentality is more heartwarming than cloying. It’s nothing short of a triumph.