REASONS TO LIVE
This week: Beliefs! Rituals! Evil Dead! Which could be construed as a loose attempt at a “Halloween in April”-ish theme, yes.
Beliefs, Beliefs (Hand Drawn Dracula). One tries very hard not to trot out My Bloody Valentine references willynilly because, frankly, everyone does it all the time and quite often they’re lazy and inaccurate. Overdriven guitars don’t automatically necessitate the invocation of Kevin Shields’s name.
It does seem fair to invoke it in comparison to noise-lovin’ Toronto duo Beliefs, however, since Jesse Crow and Josh Korody are game to pile on the androgynously blended boy/girl sighs and wavy tremolo guitars so influentially pioneered by MBV during the late ’80s and early ’90s with a fond, albeit not fawning eye on the past for much of their debut album. Still, there’s a rough-hewn quality to the material here that makes it all sound a touch earthier and more rock ‘n’ roll and Neil Young than the work of many “nugazing” peers with their heads similarly in the stars, and when Beliefs spread out a bit and tilt in the direction of stoned-and-dethroned, slightly hippiefied psychedelia reminiscent of the Dandy Warhols (“Waiting for the World to End”), Beach House (“Dead Water”) or Mazzy Star (“Carousel”) you definitely get the impression that spectacular things are to come when the pair finishes sorting through its influences and decides exactly what it wants to be.
Rituals, Mesmerized (One Big Silence). Halifax-raised, Toronto-based Adam Christopher Seward’s New Wave-y one-man-band-turned- actualband Rituals is another act doomed to some obvious references — particularly a couple of gloomy, Goth-y Reasons to Live favourites who rhyme with . . . er . . . “provision” and “demure.” Mesmerized, Rituals’ second EP after a fab four-song debut for Unfamiliar Records in late 2011, nevertheless once again exhumes something fresh from familiar turf. “July” has an appealingly muddleheaded bop to it that keeps getting further submerged in layers of blissful noise, “Our Blood” manages to be rackingly aggro and aqueous at the same time, and “Young and Bored” swoons like Ride might have had it gotten deep into Faith and Pornography. Murky stuff, but the more you listen to these songs, the more they haunt you.
Evil Dead. Not a patch on Sam Raimi’s unhinged 1981 original (or either of its sequels, for that matter) and a tad too serious with the ludicrous for its own good, but first-time feature director Fede Alvarez’s remake of the gonzo classic about demons unleashed upon a remote cabin in the woods is still a rousingly grand guignol night out at the cinema if you go in with the right atti- tude. If nothing else, it’s notable for being perhaps the bloodiest mainstream horror picture ever to hit the screens in North America, which is saying something, since Raimi’s Evil Deads didn’t exactly skimp on the splatter. You’ve seen people saw their limbs off onscreen before, sure, but when was the last time you saw someone pull her own hand off in stomachchurning, stretch-until-it-snaps detail? So that’s something.