[ with plenty of techno-flash ] culturecypher
[ disc-o-scope ]
³ singer-songwriter
³ pop
Devon Sproule and Mike O’Neill met singing Beach Boys
That a song as political as “Royals” penetrated the charts in the Katy Perry Age counts as a minor revolution. That it comes from Lorde, a 16-year-old New Zealander with a hint of smoke in her voice and a kill-your-idols attitude about the current pop landscape, is a major aberration. Her minimalist synth music comes with lyrics you should pay attention to: “Don’t you think it’s boring how people talk?” But not too much attention: “It drives you crazy getting old.” Pure Heroine (Motown/ —Dotun Akintoye Universal) may be pure pop.
³ electronic/art-pop Cameron Mesirow’s gonna have a tough time shaking those Björk comparisons with her second LP as Glasser, and not just because of certain heavily reminiscent contours in the otherworldly acrobatics of her voice. While Interiors (True Panther) remains undeniably Mesirovian, its architecturally inspired yet organically fluid technopop shapes evoke the hypercolor digitalia of Homogenic more than anything Björk has touched in years. —K. Ross Hoffman
flickpick
John Morrison on hip-hop
duets on YouTube and crafted Colours (Tin Angel) long-distance, between Austin and Halifax. But there’s nothing newfangled or logistically strained about the topics traversed here — family, ceiling fans, a minor boating accident, love — nor the album’s unhurried folk-pop. His voice is high and pure like hers, and the results, colored by Sandro Perri’s sympathetic, synth- and horn-flecked production, are rarely dazzling but consistently comforting. The Wilsons should be proud. —K. Ross Hoffman
³ live/rock/pop On Feb. 13, 1997, following a power outage, Alex Chilton played an impromptu acoustic set at the Knitting Factory and now the oft traded audience recording sees official release as Electricity by Candlelight (Bar/None). It’s both atypical and typical of the late, great Chilton: an idiosyncratic collection of country, pop, folk and jazz covers. He plays great guitar, gamely banters with the crowd and leads a few sing-alongs. Most impressive are the three Beach Boys songs. —Michael Pelusi
[ movie review ]
THE FIFTH ESTATE [ B- ] IT’S OFTEN SAID that journalism is the first draft of history. The Fifth Estate,
released three years after the disclosure of classified U.S. government documents that brought Julian Assange’s muckraking website WikiLeaks to the world’s attention, is at best the second draft. Working from a script by West Wing alum Josh Singer, itself an adaptation of a book by former Assange associate Daniel Domscheit-Berg, director Bill Condon’s film is something of an info-dump itself, a collection of incidents without an animating point of view. As Assange, Benedict Cumberbatch is only slightly more human than his Star Trek villain, a cunning megalomaniac bent on shining sunlight into the darkest of government hidey-holes. In one self-mythologizing speech, he declaims that the beginning of conspiracy is “two men and a secret,” whereas “one moral man ... can topple the most repressive of regimes.” And so the information-wants-to-be-free credo finds itself welded to the Hollywood myth of individualism, in which institutions are reduced to representative figures who can thus be toppled as easily as any flesh-and-blood human. The Fifth Estate has plenty of techno-flash, with a gleaming sense of international intrigue on loan from the Bourne series, but nothing like the intelligence that could untangle a thorny, even defining, debate. Newspapers are stodgy and slow, government is secretive, information activists begin with noble intentions and are corrupted by a sense of their own power — and so on. It’s not wrong, exactly; just old hat, a conventional and contained recitation of a story that is neither. On WikiLeaks itself, Assange posted a version of the movie’s script with extensive annotations purporting to clear up its misrepresentations, but there’s little danger of anyone taking The Fifth Estate as fact. —Sam Adams
A gleaming sense of international intrigue.
THEY GOT THE HAIR RIGHT: In the WikiLeaks thriller-drama, Benedict Cumberbatch (L) stars as Julian Assange alongside Daniel Brühl, who plays a former colleague of the activist.
WALKING CRED
³STEPPING INTO theCRED Philly OnSitespace at 325 South St., I am immediately struck by the busy, colorful and slightly scattershot look of the place, a mix of eclectic art, funky furniture and random paint splatter. All over the room, small circles of twentysomethings hammer away at laptops, field calls and discuss the projects they’re working on. In the middle of it all, CRED intern and event coordinator Paul “S.Frosty” Jackson is prepping — hanging paintings, arranging display cases and helping artists set up drum machines, samplers and sound equipment — for the evening’s event, The Co-Production,a round-robin live showcase of the city’s dopest up-and-coming hip-hop and electronic beat producers. CRED OnSite aspires to be a lot of things to a lot of people; Frosty sums it up as a “visual-art gallery, a storefront, a workspace and an events venue focused on a 25-and-under demographic.” The space was conceived as a physical externalization of CRED Magazine,the slick and eclectic print mag written and edited by 25-and-unders under the stewardship of North Philly nonprofit the Village Arts & Humanities.The magazine aims to help the city’s creative youth develop skills and a unique progressive aesthetic while building portfolios in journalism, photography, music and graphic design. The idea was to turn all that into something immersive and multidimensional, a place for creative explorations into everything from live DJs to body painting, visual arts to music performance. Throughout the month of October, CRED OnSite will be hosting events for young artists and professionals, a series that promises to be part live social networking/part urban art happening. (editorial@citypaper.net) ✚ More info on CRED OnSite at credphilly.com.
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