Soundtrack to my Halloween: "Dig Up Her Bones" by The Misfits

From their American Psycho album. Always thought this song was oddly... melodic?

Soundtrack to my Halloween: "Burn the Flames" by Roky Erickson

From the most-excellent, and out-of-print/hard-to-find Return of the Living Dead (1985) soundtrack.

Music I Can't Live Without: Squarepusher's Hard Normal Daddy (1997)

A little personal history here: Hard Normal Daddy (1997) is the second album I bought by the multi-talented Tom Jenkinson a.k.a. Squarepusher, after being introduced to/hooked by his work via Ken Ishii's X-mix: Fast Forward and Rewind (1998). In particular, it was "Squarepusher's Theme" (which is actually on the Feed Me Weird Things album.*

Anyway, I was actually a little put out when I bought this disc way back when--there was a gulf between the high energy jazz acrobatics of "Squarepusher's Theme" and the more laid-back vibe on display here. But laid-back isn't code for lazy: the album is incredibly sophisticated, with Jenkinson employing a variety of instrumental arrangements to realize his eclectic, acid-jazz-meets-drum-and-bass vision.

The album didn't have me truly in its grasp until the second track, "Beep Street," an arrangement of digital and analog arrangements that feels like Jenkinson's output in miniature: lively instrumental arrangements based on heavily-layered compositions, relying on a variety of instrumentation (and not just a drum track and a sick sample).



If you're familiar with their output it should come as no surprise that I got into Squarepusher around the same time as I started digging into Aphex Twin (Richard D. James). I always imagined that the latter was something of a lunatic prankster, laying down sick soundscapes and occasionally wicked moods with the occasional concession to typical forms of coherence.* Squarepusher, meanwhile, always felt like a genius in his lab, trying to rebuild beats using superscience. He might have a playful streak, but he's dead serious about it.

Hard Normal Daddy is one of those albums one can revisit every couple of years just to hear how the music changes the more sophisticated one becomes as a music listener. I envy a person who discovers it for the first time with an open mind.  



*The hell? This album is out of print? I still have the original CD at home. The lack of a digital release is troubling as well. 

**His most accessible works, "Come to Daddy" and "Windowlicker" are off-putting in their own ways, subverting and twisting industrial and hip hop sounds respectively.

Ugly Blu Mess

No, not the films--some are actually quite brilliant. I'm talking about the hideous covers chosen for the Blu Ray releases.

I'm often curious about the instinct or inclination that goes into making these choices. Is it as simple as the original art being unavailable for some reason? Are they hoping to differentiate it from the packaging from older formats? Maybe they're trying to capitalize on some trend or other (Twilight-fever seems to have inspired the Near Dark cover).

Besides being ugly, many of these covers often offer something the movie frankly isn't selling. They promise something either cheap, silly, or compromised. They say, "hey, this movie's not so great but it's cheap--give it a try!" 

Compare it to the original art used for either the DVD release or the theatrical posters and you'll find some prime art going unused.

Look at that Return of the Living Dead (1985) poster - say what you will but it's a distinctive image. Not like the slime green mess used for the Blu Ray (which is actually a pretty stacked, excellent disc, by the way). Looking at my copy of the disc I wish Fox had shipped the movie with a reversible cover.

Ditto, the Night of the Creeps poster, which I think was the art used for the video advertisements for the movie back in the day. 

Finally, I find the Near Dark image to be the worst offender, pandering as it does to the Twilight audience. Not necessarily because I have anything against the franchise, but because it's pushing a soft, feminine vibe that's really only a small part of the movie. It's actually a pretty gory outlaw vampire movie. I'd have to imagine the audience that picks it up based on the art would feel like a bait and switch had been pulled on them.

"Resident Evil: Afterlife"

Catch it before it wanders off the front page, my review of Resident Evil: Afterlife is live over at Twitch. It's about what you would expect given the limited narrative aspirations of the series, as Glenn Kenny so astutely observes, they're "the most subtext-free of any zombie movies."

It's perhaps this that keeps me coming back to the first and third movies: they're uniquely a collection of moments, sometimes interlinked, other times not, that feel like a free-flow blast of whiz-pow scenes that verge of being describes as non sequiturs. More than anything else I feel attracted to the empty calories the one might be into Mallomars or White Castle burgers. In moderation, it's not too bad for you and for a moment they provide a respite from complexity. Resident Evil as a film franchise isn't over-burdened by any particularly weighty thoughts, save to maintain fidelity to the long-running game series and present a few over-the-top action set pieces that, for my tastes, peaked at the laser grid in the first entry.  





The third film in the series, Extinction admirably recreates this sequence as one of a series of traps for one of the infinite Alices revealed at during the opening of that film. It's a shame Afterlife does away with this plot point early on in its running time (the Resident Evil films: where the important plot bits bookend the actual meat and potatoes of the movie).  

I just made the connection that this being the 4th movie in the franchise it's directly cribbing from the 4th movie in the game series (at least 4th chronologically with regards to the canon), which also took a wild left turn away from the conventions of the previous entries in the franchise. The games scaled back their reliance on the Umbrella Corporation as the prime villains, changed the setting, the flow of the action, and even did away with zombies as the primary enemies (the Ganados of 4 and 5 are mind-controlled humans).