ARTS
The Michigan Daily - Wednesday, October 20, 2004 -11A
Brothers bring hardcore rock to Detroit
By Chris Gaerig
Daily Arts Writer
The underground music scene is a dangerous place
to be: relentless critics, unforgiving fans and a seri-
ous lack of cash and promiscuous sex. When most
indie bands break through onto a major label, their
sound drastically changes and their fans desert them;
but not the Seattle quintet The
Blood Brothers. The band is cur-
rently tearing across America The Blood
to promote its fourth full-length Brothers
album, Crimes, bringing the tour Tonight at 7 p.m.
to Detroit's Magic Stick tonight. The Magic Stick
Since signing to V2, The Blood
Brothers have slightly changed
their sound, but continued their aural onslaught and
brutal demeanor. Crimes, though released on a major
label, is by no means directed or suitable for the
mainstream.
In 2000, The Blood Brothers exploded onto the
underground scene with their debut album The Adul-
tery is Ripe. Influenced by groups such as Refused,
The Adultery is Ripe presented a wholly new per-
spective on the hardcore genre. With their piercing
vocals and spastic music, The Blood Brothers were
single-handedly changing the once monotonous
hardcore genre. Their second full-length, March On
Electric Children, was much of the same punish-
ing music and sounded cleaner and better produced
than their debut. However, lead singer Johnny Whit-
ney says, "With March On Electric Children, we
were basically just trying to put a record together."
It wasn't until their third album, Burn Piano Island,
Burn, that The Blood Brothers began to draw seri-
ous attention from those outside of the hardcore
genre.
On The Blood Brothers third full-length, they
once again reinvented not only themselves but also
the hardcore genre. The inclusion of keyboards
and sound manipulation in addition to continuing
their glaring vocals all added to this new vision
of hardcore. On their latest album, they continue
IL URIOIE,
IIVET
THE HOTTEST PICKS IN ENTERTAINMENT
FROM A DAILY ARTS WRITER
S
"Alexander" - Did Aristotle kill Alexander the Great on the grassy
knoll? While most scholars believe that either the West Nile Virus or a
form of typhoid did in the Macedonian warrior, you never know who
the conspiratorial Oliver Stone will pin the blame on in his next film.
Courtesy of V2
Yeah, we are all related.
the tradition of reinventing themselves. Crimes
takes a more subdued approach but continues their
aggressive attitude. "It's a bit of a departure from
the completely spastic, all the time on our previous
records," Whitney says. "I enjoy playing our slower
songs almost more than playing our faster songs. It
gives me a chance to relax and sing, and not just
scream all the time."
Crimes is not only less aggressive than earlier
albums, but also deals with different emotions and
feelings. While Whitney says that the album does
not necessarily deal with one certain topic or per-
sonal tribulation, it does reflect his life and the vari-
ous experiences the band has encountered. "With
this record I wanted to have songs with different
feelings: different tones, different moods. Have
some songs that are really fast and really short but
also have songs that are more minimal."
Even through the hype and anticipation that Crimes
received, The Blood Brothers stay level-headed and
truly appreciate what they have. Even the artwork on
Crimes, mindless doodles juxtaposed against color
prints, shows this maturity. "We wanted to have a
record cover that incorporated images of us in a way
that isn't super glorifying," Whitney says. "I feel very
fortunate getting to see the country. I don't know any
other situation where you would be in a different city
every night." The Blood Brothers will bring their
excitement and energy with them, tonight delivering
another spastic performance in support of Crimes.
Wilco's A Ghost is Born - Yes, it's four months old, but the lugubri-
ous melodies and dyspeptic lyrics of Jeff Tweedy have an autumnal
flavor to them that doesn't quite mesh with playing volleyball at the
beach. Listen to it while orange and yellow leaves fall around you.
"Freakonomics: Cheating School-
teachers, Crooked Realtors and $
Crack-Selling Mama's Boys" - A
University of Chicago economist and
a journalist team up for this layman's
guide - slated for release next year -
to Steven Levitt's innovative and con-
troversial scholarship on crack dealing,
white-collar crime and other forms of
miscreant behavior. Levitt and Ste-
phen Dubner have already won the
prize for the best titled economics
book of all time, narrowly surpass-
ing Milton Friedman's "A Theory of
the Consumption Function."
The New Yorker College Tour «
- David Denby, Seymour Hersh,
David Remnick and other luminaries
from the world's most perfect magazine
will be visiting Ann Arbor from Oct. 26
to 30. Stand-up comedy, film, fiction read-
ings and political cartoons will descend on
campus in the tour's first stop before head-
ing off to the University of Texas-Austin and
Georgetown University.
"
'She Hate Me' plagued by inconsistent plot
By Amanda Andrade
For the Daily
Hot lesbians, corporate greed, mafia
bosses and lots and lots of sex abound
in the absurdly
titled "She Hate
Me." The Spike She Hate Me
Lee-directed film At the
has at least two Mi, hida, Thpat*n
inconsistent, so meandering and so
mind-numbingly boring that it fails as
a film on every level.
The movie follows the exploits of
Jack Armstrong (Anthony Mackie,
"The Manchurian Candidate") who is
fired from his high paying job after he
turns corporate whistle-blower. Jack
resorts to the only reasonable fallback
occupation for a man in his position -
impregnating lesbians. The film thus
proceeds to jump from a legitimate
condemnation of self-serving corpo-
rate America to some kind of weird and
unfunny sitcom. There is absolutely
nothing to connect the two storylines
apart from the actor, and the change in
tone is so abrupt that whatever inter-
est either story may have generated is
quickly severed by the jarring shift.
Lee wanders between these two
disparate threads with no indication
of what he's working toward. Just to
make sure the film is as wildly uneven
as possible, he throws in a mafia prin-
cess played by Monica Bellucci ("The
Passion of the Christ"), a few knocks
at President Bush that even party-line
Democrats will roll their eyes at, an
extraneous family subplot, a Water-
gate throwback, a "Mr. Smith goes to
Washington" riff and a series of laugh-
inspiringly earnest endings.
This is a shame since the finale in
which Jack comes to terms with himself
was the only part of the movie that gar-
nered any laughs.
For a picture that bills itself as a com-
edy, the film is shockingly unfunny.
Worse yet, for a Spike Lee movie, which
relies on controversy to sell itself, this
project leaves the audience incredibly
indifferent. Lee attempts to play on ste-
reotypes ranging from the absent black
father to the black sex superman to gor-
geous sexually open lesbians. The point,
presumably, is to shock and annoy his
audience into paying attention with his
avant-garde lack of structure and obtru-
sive, heavy-handed camerawork. What
happens, however, is that sometime in
the first two hours of the film, the audi-
ence stops being offended and starts
heading for the exits.
"I Am Charlotte Simmons" by Tom Wolfe
- The incomparable Tom Wolfe's first full-
fledged novel since 1998's "A Man in Full"
hits bookstores on Nov. 9. The greatest jour-
nalist of the 20th century went undercover
at fraternity parties for this ethnography of
American college life in the new millennia.
Courtesy of Farrar,
Straus and Giroux
and conceivably
five almost unre-
lated storylines
ocgan cu eaer
Sony Pictures Classics
DAILY ARTS.
WE'RE NO DAVID SCHWIMMER AND
YOU'RE NO JENNIFER ANIsTON.
packed into an epic two-plus-hour run-
ning time. This is ok for "Lord of the
Rings," but this movie is so tonally
m