Oh Internet

It’s been a pretty good month for music, and an almost completely unremarkable one for films:

The Dresden Dolls: We went to see them play live a little while back, and they were just stunning. One of the best gigs I’ve been to in ages, despite taking place in a damp, leaky cellar. Anyone going to the Nine Inch Nails gigs in London at the end of the month will see them as a support band, and they’re coming back to the UK later in the summer. (On a related note, I tried to get NIN tickets for the Glasgow gig, and the TicketMaster website all but laughed in my face…)

They’re a voice/piano + drums duo, and their 2 albums, ‘Dresden Dolls‘ and ‘A is for Accident‘, are both wonderfully dramatic punk-goth-cabaret things, with lots of precise stop-start playing. I didn’t know how well it would work live, but I needn’t have worried, since it turns out that all any gig really needs is a female vocalist with 2 voice boxes and an atomic mutant drummer. Their cover of ‘War Pigs’ has to be heard to be believed.

Special note goes to the 2 girls standing off to the sound of the crowd, E’d off their faces and lava-lamp dancing throughout the whole set. I think they could have been at a Slayer concert and not noticed anything particularly different about it. The guy dressed like Voldo and being pushed through the crowd in a wheelchair was also more than a little irritating.

On a final, geeky, note, during the show I was sure I’d seen Charlie Stross and it turns out, I had. I would have gone and said hello, but I’m sure he can do without a weird Internet stalker.

The Kills new album, ‘No Wow‘, came out recently. It’s growing on me now, but, with the exception of ‘Rodeo Town’, it hasn’t really grabbed me the way that ‘Keep on Your Mean Side‘ did. They’re playing in the Liquid Rooms in March, so I’ll get to see whether they look as ill in real life as they do on the DVD packed with the album.

Sigur Ros: I’ve just got a copy of their first album, ‘Von‘, after ignoring it for a while. It hasn’t had the same kind of attention as their other albums, so I was assuming that it was nothing special. It’s actually really good. It’s a lot more dark and sinister than their newer stuff, and I’d say I like it a bit more than ‘()‘, but not as much as ‘Agaetis Byrjun‘.

The news on recent films isn’t so good. The only really memorable thing I’ve seen in the last few weeks has been “Robots” by Blue Sky Studios, the makers of Ice Age. After the first 10 minutes you know the rest of the story, but it turns out that that’s ok, since it leaves you plenty of time to gawp at the pretty pictures and laugh at the fart jokes.

The reason I was interested in seeing the film in the first place was that I’d seen a bunch of talks by people from the studio at Siggraph 2002 about the making of Ice Age. Since they don’t have the staff numbers or budget to compete with the likes of Pixar and Dreamworks, they had to come up with a whole load of really neat hacks to get some of their trickier effects done with minimal processing time. As a result, a lot of their techniques were more suitable for potentially adapting for a real-time game than is generally the case with CG movies.

That being said, if you’re only going to watch one animated movie this month, I would point out that The Incredibles comes out on DVD tomorrow, and is the best thing that Pixar have ever done.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 17th, 2005 at 10:28 pm and is filed under Media Consumption. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.