8 - The Michigan Daily - Wednesday, March 31, 2004 ARTS -1" Deerhoof cast their spell with Milk Man 2004 is the new 1980. Couresy or Atlantic DARKNESS IS SPREADING U.S. TOUR GIVES BRITS PERMISSION TO LAND By Alexandra Jones Daily Arts Writer Music REVIEW Imagine that you and five friends are standing in a brightly lit kitchen. Strawberries and bananas are piled in the sinks and in pots on the stove; more fruit squelches under foot. You and each of your compatriots hold a kitchen utensil - ladle, whisk, wood- en spoon, can opener, salad fork. Even though you can't figure out why you're there, you know you're sup- posed to make noises with your "instrument," and each of you only gets one beat to work with until it's someone else's turn. In the middle of this fantastic kitchen, there's a devil- ishly cute girl who sings along with this homemade percussion with a voice like a Sanrio character. And inexplicably, The Who's "Pinball Wiz- ard" is blasting in the background. Deerhoof That's what it's like to hear noise- Milk Man rock band Deer- Kill Rock Stars hoof's latest offering, Milk Man. After the sweet, crisp sounds of Apple 0', the band focused its ideas into a concept album. Inspired by Ken Kagami's cute yet creepy art - which graces the album's cover and liner notes - Deerhoof tells the story of the Milk Man, a masked Pied Piper-like char- acter who lures children to his dream- land home. Opener "Milk Man" kicks off with the title character's siren song. Raw, vibrant guitar riffs contrast perfectly with bassist/vocalist Satomi Matsuza- ki's dreamy, childlike delivery. "Boys and girls, be mine / I'll take you to my dreamland," sings Satomi - as the Milk Man - against sunny, infectious rock instrumentals. Doubled vocals counter the Milk Man's call: "Boo, boo, the Milk Man / Hide, hide, he's masked man." But it's no use: The children have fallen under the Milk Man's spell. The. crashing, diabolical keyboard/guitar hook on "Gija Dance" heralds par- G By Todd Weiser Daily Arts Writer MILK M DRIRHO o . Faced with a rapidly increasing fanbase and a sold-out crowd, The Darkness were forced to move their Sunday night show.from Detroit's intimate St. Andrew's Hall to Pontiac's Clutch Cargos to accommodate the demand. It being The Darkness's first-ever show in Detroit, little did organizers The know that the English old- school rockers could not be Darkness contained by any venue. Sunday, March 28 With music made for arena At Clutch Cargo's rock, The Darkness's falsetto frontman and guitarist Justin Hawkins was intro- duced to the crowd as a giant silhouette behind a sheet stretching across the stage. Larger than life they seemed, and the high-energy, high-pitched show that followed proved it. With Justin's little brother Dan, wearing his trademark Thin Lizzy T-shirt, on guitar, Ed Gra- ham providing the clap-along backbeat and Fu Manchu-wearing, Zoolander look-alike Frankie Poullain pounding the bass, The Darkness immediately strutted their chops on an instru- mental guitar romp. The waifish Justin then threw off his shirt, leaving on only his leather pants and silver sneakers, leading into "Black Shuck," the lead track from the gold-album sell- ing debut, Permission to Land. Echoing their major influence, Queen, and a few 1980s hair-rock bands to boot, The Dark- ness have endured a difficult road in the United States on their way to being taken seriously. With three retro-costume changes throughout the night, including a silver jumpsuit with feath- ers, Justin surely mimicked a kind of rock long forgotten and unloved. Still, they are no joke, and because they take their having rock'n'roll fun seriously, it makes for serious enjoyment. Before launching the band's new single, "Love Is Only a Feeling," Justin put up a lighter and asked the crowd, "You know why we do this? Because it's power-ballad time." Not everyone in the audience responded with a Zippo, but practically all sang along, proving The Darkness has a loyal following not present solely for the MTV single. Still, "I Believe in a Thing Called Love" had to be played, started off by a crowd-led chorus before Justin prologued the track with one of many awe-inspiring blues riffs on his sparkling pink guitar. A widespread handclap session fol- lowed along to the music, to a song that will soon be the ultimate karaoke hit. Combining Freddie Mercury vocals and Brian May guitar chops, Justin was in the spotlight all night, and encore-closer "Love on the Rocks With No Ice" sealed the deal. The word "love" being spelled out behind him one letter at a time, Justin first kicked out a two-minute guitar solo on the back of a fan while being carried around the venue floor and then retreated to the stage for back-and-forth falsetto vocal exercises with the crowd. Justin was practically a one- man show, and the crowd was fortunate to be so intimate with him, because next time The Dark- ness just might find themselves contained by Ford Field. ents' panic as they discover that their children have been lured away to a castle in the clouds. The spell is soon broken, however, and Satomi calls through the dense chorus singing as one of the enchanted children: "Home is better than it seems." On tracks like "C" and "Milking," the band explores the sonic capabili- ties of their mostly conventional for- mula (guitars, bass, drums, synths), wringing even the most improbable sounds out of their instruments. But Milk Man's textures are intricate, never too heavily layered. Deerhoof always leaves room for ornamentation by a well-placed burst of static or tickled synthesizer. Milk Man sounds more accessible and more conventional than Apple O'; listeners can accept and digest the album's unconventional combinations of sounds and ideas easily. Why shouldn't a band that communicates moods of hypnosis, joy, loss and para- noia take its listeners on a little Pied Piper journey of their own? Such contrasting elements can't be paired together well without care and consideration, and that's where Milk Man's seductive power lies. Deerhoof enchants without pretension, never letting us hear the calculations behind their craft. They've synthesized a kind of harmony out of sonic scrap paper, fairy-tale books and motor-scooter engines. Succumb to Deerhoof's seductive songs: Let Milk Man lead you through the clouds to a land of strawberry fields and banana trees. Newest Worms' introduces 3-D By Jason Roberts Daily Arts Editor VIDEOGAME R VIEW Worm-aholics, fear not! The nearly decade-old, side-scroll- ing strategy game "Worms" is given a breath of fresh air in its latest update and moves into the three-dimensional world. "Worms 3D" manages to maintain the sophisticated strategy elements of the prior installments while adding even more features to the constantly evolving "Worms" world. The jump to the third dimension could have been disas- Senior dance theses brought to stage By Dawn L. Low Daily Arts Writer FINE AS PREVIEW When most people hear the words "senior thesis," they conjure images of gargantuan stacks of analytical writing and research interesting only to a select group of academics. Say uorzsyo Hci The early bird will catch me ... zings trous for the franchise if it wasn't well executed. For the most part, Acclaim and Team 17 were able to maintain the same tongue-in-cheek premise and explosive gameplay that made the turn-based strat- egy game a hit so many years ago. Players take turns commanding a team of up to six worms across a vast - and often randomly generated - land- conceived and well Worms 3D GameCube, PS2, XBox and PC Acclaim trating. Camera angles jump suddenly as worms move over bridges or around buildings, forcing gainers to adjust their patterns on the fly and making getting from one place to another a bigger hassle than it should be. Making up for this glaring weakness, however, is the sheer amount of fun the game supplies. Boasting a stellar single- player campaign that features specific challenges to unlock new and more powerful weapons - as well as scenarios with goal-based objectives - Acclaim provides a much richer sin- gle-player experience than prior installments. In addition, the single-player, last-worm-standing style of play returns unchanged, as does the dynamic multiplayer modes. Classic attacks such as the air strike and the homing missile have each been given a fresh new look, adding to and dramatizing the comedic action. Though "Worms 3D" is certainly not as intuitive and user- friendly as its predecessors, the switch to three dimensions has made it a much richer endeavor while still providing the addictive turn-based style of gameplay worm-aholics have come to recognize and love. those same words to one of this year's graduating dance majors and you'll find an entirely different mental image. This weekend, five dancers will showcase nine works of original Clear Box Left Thursday - Saturday at 8 p.m. Tickets $5 At the Betty Pease Studio Theater in the Dance Building choreography - Myers also explores the themes of "independence versus dependence and the essential need of human beings to have intimate relation- ships" in her group work, "Crashing Life." She began choreography for the piece last semester, finding inspiration for the movement in her dancers' response to questions on the nature of human interaction. Through a process of working in smaller groups and building the project from spontaneous ideas in the studio, she ended up with a series of episodes in solos, duets, trios and quintets linked by improvi- sational transitions. Myers also made her own costumes and mixed the percussive music from sound effects and songs by Kodo and the Master Drummers of Ghana. Jen Koski will present "Curves," a piece for which she, like Myers, mixed music and created costumes, this time by sewing newspaper onto shirts and jeans. Her creative process was highly involved, bor- rowing elements from two inventive dances at a summer festival and relating her dancers' movements to photos from her personal collection. The end result takes a cue from "Alice in Wonderland." "It's a surre- alist look at the curves in life, things that don't make sense," Koski said. "It became this messed-up world that someone's passing through, but there's beauty there." Her solo, "Falling Demeanor," was choreographed by University alum Ricky Mason, who now lives in Seattle. The two worked primari- ly from long distance on the work, which Koski said addressed "the parallels between the performance space and the pedestrian life." The recital also includes Justin House's thesis based on Dante's "Divine Comedy," centering on a small girl who encounters demons and angels. It's choreographed by alum Anna Beard. In addition, Natalie Lacuesta presents "Manipu- lated " about the individual facing societal pressure to conform and the solo "Neo Punk Junkie," choreographed by Jon Fredricks to music by The White Stripes. Finally, Nikki Stasunas showcases "Cover Me," which uses music from Bjork and dancers from the studio where she teaches in Brighton. The performance offers an oppor- tunity to sample an abundance of innovative work and gain insight into what inspires five artists. These talented dance students are showing what they are capable of and should be able to contribute to the field for years to come. 4 scape in an attempt to be the last team remaining. Standing in the way is up to three other teams armed to the tooth with bazookas, flying sheep, banana bombs and various other fan- tastical weapons. While the original "Worms" featured a control scheme that could easily be picked up by anyone, the scheme in "Worms 3D" is one of the game's weakest points. Simply overlaying the two-dimensional controls on a three-dimensional environ- ment provides problems, as they are often not as intuitive as they should be. Newcomers may find them downright frus- their final theses - in "Clear Box Left" at the Dance Building's Betty Pease Studio Theater. Ryan Myers will present her solo "To When She Returns," featuring the song "Nobody But You" by the legendary gospel vocalist Shirley Caesar. In the piece, her character approaches God from a posture of humility, a companion who is a per- sonal rather than a distant deity. "It's about spiritual reconciliation, returning to my cultural roots," Myers explained. a