Holy Crap! I knew
Sopranos was a popular show but I didn't realize just how much so until
I noticed the series finale being discussed on ESPN (WTF?) yesterday
morning. Personally, I never watched it since I'm too cheap to pay for
HBO and the DVDs tend to be rather expensive, but this burst of impassioned
chatter has me interested. Maybe one day I'll see what the excitement
was all about, but for now I want to share the punkish post-rock goodness of
Arks. The band hails from the greatest city I've never been to,
Chicago, and will be unveiling a new LP titled The International on
August 14. The Highwheel Records release comes on the heels of 2005's
Or Else It's Not There EP and will probably be the most raw
collection of songs you hear all year. Enjoy.
:Arks
- Stator Asymptote:
The press release for the quartet notes that they don't have any formal
music training, but you can't really tell here. The arrangement is
heavy and brooding with a thick baseline that pounds at you as it glides
along to various moments of relentless guitars and raw drumming. In
other words, it's well thought out and placed together in a way that
effortlessly gets the head moving and then, before you know it, the body.
This deserves to be played loudly.
:Arks - The International:
At only 1:37 this song doesn't give you much time to do anything more then
wish that At The Drive-In was still together, but it does at least manage to
give you one, albeit quick, rollercoaster ride of joy. Everything is
relentless this time around, especially Paul Hornschemeier's vocals.
He has a magnificent vintage punk howl that sticks in your head and leaves
you with no choice but to poorly simulate it in the shower. Say hello
to your new summer anthem.
On a grindhouse related side
note, I had myself a little double feature last night.
The first film that I watched was a boring little war number called Attack
Force Z. You would think that with a title like that and a couple of
young actors in it named Sam Neill and Mel Gibson that it would of at least
been entertaining, but it wasn't. The second was probably the most
bizarre kung fu flick that I will ever have the experience of seeing with my
own eyes. It was called Hanzo The Razor: Sword Of Justice and it
involved a guy who, I shit you not, would capture suspicious women and then
proceed to torture them with his penis into a submissive world of pleasure
where they would divulge loads of information that pertained to certain
cases. I say, skip Mel's uninspired war mongering and spend an
afternoon watching a guy beat his penis with a stick in order to build his
torture endurance.
-
John Laird -
Unless
otherwise expressly stated, all text in this blog and any
related pages, including the blog's archives, is licensed by
John Laird under a
Creative Commons License.
