a 2B - Thursday, January 3, 2008 The Michigan Daily - michigandailycom REDUCTIVE REASONING Picking one and one apart. ADENR'BILL AND TED EXCELLENT ADVENTURE' 09$9) 4 Today 1.03.08 Bill Hildebrandt Comedy 8 p.m. Ann Arbor Comedy Showcase $5 in Advance/ $7 at the Door Deastro, Javelins!, Childbite and Friendly Foes 9:30 p.m. At the Blind Pig $5/Under 21, $8/18+ Tomorrow 1.04.08 Yellow Room Gang 8 p.m. At The Ark $15 Faculty Recital: Adam Unsworth, Horn 8 P.m. E.V. Moore Building Britton Recital Hall Free Ann Arbor Soul Club 9:30 p.m. At the Blind Pig $5/Under 21, $8/18+ Saturday 1.05.08 Third Dissertation Recital: Stephen Lancaster, Baritone 2 p.m. E.V. Moore Building Britton Recital Hall Free RFD Boys At The Ark $11 Sunday 1.06.08 Charles E. Owen Memorial Percussion Masterclass: Chris Deviney 6 p.m. E.V. Moore Building McIntosh Theatre Free Melvin Taylor 7:30 p.m. At The Ark $15 Please send all press releases and event information to artspage@michigandaily.com. AGREE WITH OUR TOP ALBUMS? DISAGREE? WRITE US. OR WRITE FOR US. Apply for Daily Arts staff. 4 4 HOLIDAY ROUND-UP Bill and Ted,' the timeless classic 4 Who partied with whom to welcome in the New Year? Lucky you if you were in LA and able to get into the HARD New Year's Eve party. Justice manned the decks and Peaches worked the stage. Good times, we hear. Too bad we fell asleep watching Dick Clark's Rockin' Eve, empty bottle of Andre clutched in our hot little hands. But in another part of town, Kevin Federline was seen "chat- ting intimately" with Paris Hil- ton at a Mensa meeting over the weekend - just kidding, at LA club Lax. Ex-wife Britney - divorce 4 newly finalized - spent New Year's day with paparazzo boytoy Adnan Ghalib, kids and court-appointed moni- tor in tow. Her new photog pal is reportedly married, according to OK! Magazine, and the tabloid must be reliable - it broke the news about kid sister Jamie Lynn's pregnancy after all. Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban are still denying that they're in the family way, though rumors said they told their families over Christmas that they were expecting. ButTyraBanksannounced that she's planning to adopt a child. Orphanages around the world, ready yourselves. And Leonardo DiCaprio is reportedly back with Israeli model Bar Rafaeli. Sigh. The cou- ple was spotted holding hands all over Hollywood before Christmas. By PAUL TASSI Daily Film Editor Time travel movies never make sense. Now hear me, I'm not saying that time travel movies suck. I love "Back to the Future" as much as the next guy, but in terms of the con- cept of going back in time, chang- ing something, and coming back to a different (or not different) future has never clicked with me. Take the "Terminator" series for example. Three times Arnold came back to change the future, and three times nothing ended up happening - the robots still blew everything up. Don't pretend to know what happened in "Donnie Darko," either. You're lying. And don't even get me started on "The Lake House." The point to be made is that it's nearly impossible to craft a cohe- sive storyline involving time travel. Thank God the geniuses behind "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adven- ture" realized this. Armed with an unknown cast, a preposterous sto- ryline and special effects that look suspiciously like Microsoft screen- savers, they managed to turn it all into something classic. The plot is simple enough. Two slackers have to write a history paper, a guy from the future shows up in a time-traveling phone booth, they go back in time to kidnap his- torical figures to give their reports for them. And then Bill and Ted play these really weird guitars at Pills" and "Bros" layer sampleupon sample, and then just seem to grow organically in different directions. It's pop with patience. Rarely does an album sound so studied in its creation, yet immediate in its lis- tening. This was the best album in the spring - and now, as bitter winds keep us sheltered indoors, it fits even better. GABRIEL BAKER 5. Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? In 2005, Of Montreal's Kevin Barnes got himself so depressed E-mail artseditors@umich.eduf--- a ALBUMS ___r___n___p__p______n._From page lB J~N THE PARTY! Best Pekes Gouaoonteed ° tau ee eFor p u en s 551Ws Sell Trips, fEarn Caskand GFreel!! saeehundedseon ti Beak p st aJOBS!!H Winter Term Apply now at the Law Library- *Non-Law Studentsj *Law Students *S.l. Studentsv Minimum pay is $9.00 per hour! Apply at the hiring table outside room S-180 in the Law Library's underground addition. AA/EOE- 3. M.I.A. - Kala Don't mistake M.I.A.'s pop sensi- bilities for aestheticvapidness. The British-SriLankan artistkicked off 2007 with one of the year's most musically diverse offerings, with- out compromisingthebold political message she delivered on her 2005 debut Arular. Kala takes liteners from the disco streets of the Bolly- wood scene ("Jimmy") to the world of psychedelic '80s new-wave pop ("20 Dollar") to the unmentionable atrocities of third-world genocide ("Hussel") and then back to con- temporary Top 25-friendly Lon- don ("Come Around"). On "Paper Planes," she samples a series of disturbing gunshots, juxtaposed by the cha-ching of a cash register, overpowering an innocent chorus of chanting children. What message is M.I.A. tryingto send? You decide. In the meantime, M.I.A.'s addic- tive beats and powerful melodies are entrenching her well-deserved place in modern music. SASHA RESENDE 4. Panda Bear - Person Pitch I don't really care about The Beach Boys. I know they suppos- edly wrote the book on white-male vocal harmonies and their music is more complex than your average pop confection. The bottom line: Though Panda Bear often draws comparisons to the famed surf- rockers, you don't have to love The Beach Boys or be some kind of music scholar to enjoy Panda Bear. Person Pitch is a spiraling hypnotic album filled withlush melodies and buoyant rhythms. Songs like "Take the end making them some sort of demi-gods in the future. 4 Sure yanking people like Abra- ham Lincoln and Genghis Khan out of history might you know, alter the future, but we don't care in "Bill and Ted." Thankfully, logic has almost all but been left out of the film, leaving us only with clas- sic moments like Napolean frolick- Keanu Reeves: the early years. ing in a water park and calling the great Greek thinker "So-crates." The movie starts with a then unknown Keanu Reeves and the still unknown Alex Winter. Both perform adequately as the prede- cessors to stars of stoner buddy comedies such as "Dude, Where's My Car?" or "Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle." Even though this is arguably Reeves best roles, he has gone on to more box office success, if not critical acclaim. And Alex Winter? I think there was a kid in my high school named Alex Winter. That's all I've got. Modern comedies have a lot to learn from "Bill and Ted." It is a "journey" movie A la "Road Trip" and "EuroTrip," but it breaks from traditional shenanigans to incor- porate time travel and a subsequent smattering of historical icons. Sure, the entire journey might have actu- ally been in their heads as some sort of mushroom trip, but does that really matter at this point? that he sold the track "Wraith Pinned To The Mist (And Other Games)" to Outback Steakhouse. While the wisdom of that decision 4 is debatable, the quality of Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?, the other product of his depression, is not. An honest-to-God con- cept album, Fauna tells the story of Barnes' descent with striking clarity - at one point, he begs 4 his own serotonin for help. The record's upbeat electropop belies its thematic darkness, but rein- forces the chemical denial of the lyrics. MATT RONEY 6. Battles - Mirrored If there was ever any doubt that the members of Battles were hyper-intelligent androids sent from the far reaches of the Har- mony Galaxy, Mirrored erases it. Every moment of the metallic melodies is executed with laser precision while the group simul- taneously layers incoherent vocal lines to the mix, pushing the album farther toward an other- worldly realm. And yet, with an 4 album so alien, it seems comfort- ingly familiar, fitting squarely in the evolving indie-/art-rock scene. Lead single "Atlas" rides the danciest bounce this side of Timbaland while the poles "Race: In" and "Race: Out" bookend the d disc with sheer adrenaline and heart-racing percussion. Where they come from is irrelevant. They're here now. CHRIS GAERIG See ALBUMS, Page 4B THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY OF PARIS Summer 2008 in Paris A large selection of undergraduate, credit-bearing courses - One 7-Week Summer Term " Two French Immersion Sessions " International Studies " The Arts Learn self-defense and Olympic- style fighting improve conditioning and flexibility Teaching Martial Arts at UM since 1968 Register online at www.umnich.edu/~utove Taekwondo - 5- 6 PM tue, Thu CCRB- Rm#: 2275 Taekwondo I- 6- 7 PM Tue, Thu CCRB- Rm#: 2275 Also see www umich.edu/-umtkd or more information I I I I