REASONS TO LIVE
By the time you read this, I will have survived another Justin Bieber show. Or not. Perhaps I’ve already perished from too much excitement.
Pinback, Information Retrieved. Pinback just kinda ticks away in the background, doing what it does, flying under the radar of all but the members of its cult following. If you’re fortunate enough to be part of that cult, then, Information Retrieved — the San Diego duo’s fifth album — is more of exactly what you’ve been going to Pinback for since the 1990s: crisply latticed guitar and bass lines, locked-on rhythms and hirsute guitarist Rob Crow’s sumptuous high-register vocal melodies.
He’s a terrific singer whose almostangelic pipes tend to mask the clenched-teeth bile that often lurks in the lyric sheet in a manner that recalls the late, great Elliott Smith (to whom Crow is frequently compared). He’s got the perfect sparring partner in bassist Zach Smith; the pair’s voices entwine and enchant in much the same way their instruments do. No surprises, but “Glide” is perfect Pinback and the sawing strings on “True North” push it to a frisson-inducing level of urgency.
S---t From Hell, Why Do You Hate Me?. One could easily write S--t From Hell off as a joke band because it’s a punk combo fronted by noted Liberal strategist Warren Kinsella and, frankly, also because its lyrics are damn funny.
The band’s latest, Why Do You Hate Me?, is an enjoyably prickly and authentic throwback to London circa 1977, not to mention occasionally the Hamilton that gave us Teenage Head. Kinsella’s sneer could belong to a chap half his age, and his gleefully puerile handling of tunes like “Horny Single Mom,” “Jesus Got Wood” and “The Modern Age” (“F--- you and your Facebook page”) exudes a contagious joy.
“Even I think we’ve come a long way and we’re better than just a bunch of middle-age f---sticks with guitars,” guitarist Derek Raymaker quipped to me weeks ago. And they are.
Bedevilled. This 2010 Korean picture is a bit of an ordeal for a lighthearted evening at home, but if you’re in a dark place and want to watch someone waaaaay worse off than you for a couple of hours, here’s your movie.
It’s sorta billed as a horror movie, but its first couple of acts dwell on the atrocious life of a young woman on a windswept island with scumbag men and hateful old women who work her to the bone and then beat, rape and demean her for her troubles. You want to them all to die in the most horrible fashions and, sure enough, they do.
It kinda spins out of control at that point, but protagonist Yeong-hie Seo is tremendous and impossible not to root for even as she staggers further into psychosis. On Netflix if you’re curious.