Author: J T. Ramsay

  • I couldn’t invoke Ian McCulloch without elaborating further.

    Lis­ten: Arcade Fire — “Black Mirror” With­out bela­bor­ing the point, the new Arcade Fire record came as a com­plete sur­prise. There’s nary a trace of the Bright Eyes des­per­a­tion to be found, which to me was the ruin of Funer­al. Neon Bible is dark­er and mood­i­er with­out as much effort. Some­times it’s Ocean Rain, oth­ers…

  • The army, remember?

    Play­time is to film what Exer­cis­es in Style is to lit­er­a­ture. Tati’s hero­ic buf­foon Hulot returns as Every­man, some­times quite lit­er­al­ly, in this Chap­linesque ballet.

  • It’s like early morning darkness.

    I think it’s because they’re not try­ing so hard to be Spring­steen that Neon Bible real­ly works for me. They just hap­pened to arrive there and then real­ized it was­n’t so bad. And since they sound like Echo & the Bun­ny­men some­times, just as acci­den­tal­ly, it’s a nice change of pace. Twen­ty years from now, I…

  • Now for an exercise in high seriousness.

    In the big pic­ture, this stereo­type was brief, last­ing just over two and a half years. Turns out though that for about an hour a day, Com­e­dy Cen­tral is pret­ty sophis­ti­cat­ed…and lit­er­ate too! Imme­di­ate­ly after­ward the Naked Truck­er, Car­los Men­cia and the Blue Col­lar Com­e­dy guys appear to explain the shad­ows at the back of…

  • You can’t tell me this is not a suave thing to do.

    Iggy Pop and the Stooges sit down to talk with the New York Times.