1) The Fever – Pawn Shoppe Heart – The Von Bondies

2) Darts of Pleasure – Franz Ferdinand – Franz Ferdinand

3) C30, C60, C90, Go! – All Medicated Geniuses [EP] – Pretty Girls Make Graves

4) Get By – Quality – Talib Kweli

5) Freestyle – Chappelle Show – Mos Def

6) Lady Don’t Tek No – Lady Don’t Tek No – Latyrx

7) Human Behaviour – Read: Interpreting Bjork – The Decemberists

8) The Scarlet Tide – Cold Mountain – Alison Krauss

9) Alison – Costello & Nieve (NY) – Costello & Nieve

10) Watch This House – Beat Beat Heartbeat – The Natural History

11) Dirty Old Town – Tell Balgeary, Balgury Is Dead [EP] – Ted Leo / Pharmacists

12) Glitterball – Lay of the Land – Seachange

13) Muzzle of Bees – A Ghost is Born – Wilco

14) What I Say and What I Mean – Like It Or Not – The Like

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I’m not a huge fan of Zombie Action, except for my beloved Dead-Alive (BrainDead), but Dawn of the Dead turned out to be a lot of b-movie fun. People start getting eaten within minutes of the start and it never really stops, and that’s the kind of cannibal pacing I can really get behind.

In general, I just dug that there weren’t lots of startling cuts and shocking out of the corner of the frame zombie attacks. The movie is really more about building this impending sense of dread and hopelessness and that worked. Fighting zombies is a war of attrition more than anything, and the film got that.

There are some pretty bad horror movie tropes, but that’s part of the fun. You’ve got to be able to yell at dumb people, because really, isn’t the real horror of life dealing with INCREDIBLY DUMB PEOPLE? Is that just me?

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Haven’t heard of Franz Ferdinand? You will. Franz Ferdinand is one of the most hyped bands to hit these shores in years, already labeled as “The British Strokes” or “The Scottish Interpol.” Those are a little off the mark, as Franz Ferdinand’s stock and trade isn’t that kind of detached cool, but the raw danceability of the other New New Wave bands like Hot Hot Heat and the Rapture. Of course, they’re not that similar to those bands either, as their vocals have an inviting smoothness that those bands don’t have. If you start to mix up all those It Bands in your head a little, you’ll start to get a sense of what’s going on. While they may not initiate another World War like their namesake, Franz Ferdinand is almost certain to start something, the least of which are their own personal fame and fortunes. Before they even finished the east coast leg of their tour, they’d signed a deal with Epic Records that was just short of $3 million.

I’m not sure how this happened, but the Campus Events group at UCLA managed to book one of the hottest groups in the world to play in the Cooperage at Ackerman Student Union. If any of you have been to the Coop, it’s a campus eatery with a tiny stage in the corner with a pizza place and Krispy Kreme on the other side. I can only guessimate the capacity, but I can’t imagine it being much over 200 people. It is almost certainly the smallest venue Ferdinand was booked at on this American tour, and given the size of their deal with Epic, probably the smallest place they’ll ever play from here on out.

The band itself did not disappoint. Despite writing most of the material, guitarists Nick McCarthy and Alex Kapranos don’t dominate the songs. Instead, the songs are driven by the melodic upfront bass work of Bob Hardy and the deliberate, insistent pounding of Paul Thomson. The music is absurdly catchy, and when McCarthy plays keyboards on material like “Auf Achse” and “Come On Home,” Ferdinand is practically disco. Kapranos handles all the singing and has a sly sexiness to his delivery, particularly on the flirtations of “Dark of the Matinee” and “Michael.”

There’s not an abundance of histrionics, mostly a little dancing in place and a litte bit of coordinated marching. Kapranos has a neat trick to get the audience clapping, where he just raises his arm and taps to the beat on some of the longer extended breaks. The audience catches the hint soon enough, and the band never looks like it’s so desperate for attention that it starts cheerleading. Kapranos also had a bit of stage banter, but his Glaswegian accent is pretty well nigh impenetrable.

The show reached capacity very early, and for the first time that I know of, people were made to wait outside the Cooperage for a show. It was a bizarre scene, but the intimacy of it all set the stage for an absolute barn-burner. I’d like to report that everyone went crazy and there was this outrageous amount of energy in a compressed space, but that didn’t really happen. There’s only the bare minimum of floor space in the joint and most of the crowd was standing on tops of tables and booths to get a look. Instead, it was mostly modest bouncing and head bobbing with pockets of all out dancing here and there. There were two or three people that were just about to vibrate themselves right out of their skin though, and as a whole I think the entire audience was very into it, despite not being overly familiar with the band.

Is Franz Ferdinand the next big thing? It’s horrible to try and predict these things, but they are a very marketable band, and there’s a little bit of everything for everyone. The music is ass shaking and fun but the lyrics are witty enough to let you know that it’s just not Dumb Dance Music. The girls seem to be taking a liking to these boys and their ultrafashionable forward swept hair, and the boys will almost certainly follow. Final verdict? SUPERFANTASTISCH!

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A little bit after the Wrens show, I was able to catch Pretty Girls Make Graves once again. A lot’s changed for PGMG since I last saw them. Their album was actually released and they’ve had enough push from Matador to land a video on MTV, they had all their equipment stolen and most recently, Nathan Thelen, one of their guitarists, left the band in order to spend time with his family.

This show was at the El Rey, which is just about twice as big as the Echo where I saw them last, and it just happened to be on the same night as a sold out Yeah Yeah Yeahs show at the even bigger Henry Fonda Theater. I expected it to be a pretty light crowd, but apparently there are more than enough hipsters in LA to go around, as the place was packed and probably just short of being sold out.

I covered PGMG in pretty decent detail last time, so I’m going to avoid repeating myself. PGMG is probably one of the very best bands I’ve seen live, but they were just a step short of mind-blowing this night. The big reason was the departure of Nathan Thelen. Losing a member will always hurt, but it’s even more apparent on a band that relies so much on chemistry. Replacement guitarist Seth Jabour of Les Savy Fav put up a valiant effort but there were a few times where it felt like he wasn’t on the same page, and overall there just wasn’t the same kind of electricity. On a sartorial sidenote, Jabour was wearing a tight, checkered sleeveless shirt that made him seem like the lost member of Loverboy.

As for improvements, I’d say that Andrea Zollo’s a stronger singer now than she was even six months ago, commanding the crowd and the band with more confidence and coming over the top of the band on the choruses with a lot more power. Sometimes, her vocal can get a bit lost in the chaos, and that’s happening less and less now. Also, now that the album’s been out for a few months and a bit more lived in with the fanbase, the crowd reactions are much stronger and organic. People know when the clapping bits are, when the music’s going to burst and when Zollo’s going to fire it up and they responded accordingly.

Even without Thelen, Pretty Girls Make Graves are still a must-see act, and I’d expect them to be back up to speed in a month or so. Hopefully everything will settle down for them soon and they’ll be able to blast past this transitional phase pretty quickly.

IGeneration has a full show from XFM available for download, so you may want to check it out for a little PGMG flavor.

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I’m going to play a little catchup for the month of March right now, before the onslaught of upcoming shows absolutely buries me permanently.

A couple of weeks ago, I managed to catch the Wrens play an outdoor show at Westwood Plaza on the UCLA campus. Performing during lunch, it was the equivalent of an in-store, with people casually milling around and mostly minding their own business with the music going on in the background. It’s not really the best time to evaluate a band, but the Wrens are a band that I’m not into enough to actively seek a concert. Meadowlands is a strong record, but not one that blew me away.
The show started off a bit roughly, as the Wrens tried to blast into their more rockin’ material right away but the audience wasn’t biting. The band had a little more success with their soft/loud material, easing the audience into their sound before breaking through with the fast and easy melodies of “Faster Gun” and “Nervous and Not Me.” Once they got their mojo working, they were able to muscle their way through the very Jimmy Eat World “Everyone Chooses Sides” and keep the kids’ attention to more subtle material like “Happy.”

It was a fun time, and I was able to absorb the songs a lot better live than on record. Everything’s just a little more immediate and tightly focused, and the sonic noodling was kept to a minimum. That said, there still wasn’t anything that ran me over and screamed “I’m BRILLIANT” and there were times the the plainspoken angst of the lyrics seemed dated and past-due.

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of the best/worst band shirt around :

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I bought these Sandbaggers DVDs on Fraction‘s recommendation about a few months ago but I’m only now getting around to watching them. He told me they were all about this crazy spy shit and it was British so you know it had to be good. After I mentioned to him that I bought the set, he was like “Yeah, it’s about as good as TV gets when it only involves a dude sitting at a desk for 60 minutes.” Um. Shouldn’t spy shit have a little running around or something?

Anyway, he was right and Sandbaggers is pretty rad, desktalking or no. It’s a really old series, so the production values are absolute ass on plastic for the DVD but it just kinda adds to the old skool PBS flavor. The Sandbaggers are the tiny, tiny Special Intelligence Section of MI-6 (I think I have that right) and the political side of espionage. No James Bond, no guns… one guy has a rocket launcher but never gets to shoot it. It’s really about dealing with different countries and their intelligence departments during the Cold War, about the phone calls and the budgets and the paperwork. There’s really nothing on modern TV to compare it to, except maybe those Taiwan/China or India/Pakistan episodes of West Wing. I know it sounds kind of boring, but how can you not be fascinated by Burnside, the director of operations of SIS? In one episode, a Sandbagger wants to quit to be with his family. What does Burnside do? He puts a tail on his fiancee and sweats her like she stole his bike.

It’s British. It must be good!

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I polished off Positively Fifth Street this weekend. It was fair, but not really great. Covering the World Series of Poker for Harper’s, James McManus originally planned on weaving a tale about the rise of women in the World Series at Binion’s Horsehoe with the seedy murder case of Ted Binion that was going down at about the same time. Something funny happened on the way to the story though, and McManus finds himself playing further and longer in the World Series than the people he planned on covering, all the way until the final table and placing him in the top six poker players in the whole world.

It’s a great story, and when McManus is focused on his incredible run, the book is terrific. He breaks down hands card by card and readily admits to his numerous mistakes on his miraculous trip. In certain ways, it does take a bit of mystique from the game, as McManus’ self-effacing narration makes it seem like he lucked into almost all of his winning hands. Even still, the longshot, underdog storyline writes itself and it’s by far the best part of the book.

The problems I had with the book were with all the surrounding stuff. All the bits about the other players are solid, but it all suffers a bit since the author is too busy playing poker for himself. He covers a lot of back story, but there’s not a whole lotta info about Annie Duke powering through to 10th place … while EIGHT MONTHS PREGNANT. While that’s a little problematic, the bits about the Ted Binion murder are almost completely superfluous. I felt like they were supposed to add color, but there’s not much interplay between this thread and the other. Instead it’s just kind of tacked on.

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