If the Twin Cities has an answer to the literate, charmingly tuneful pop songcraft of Belle And Sebastian, or the Kinks songs that populate Wes Anderson movie soundtracks, it’s surely Walker Kong, which enlivened the Minnesota music scene with four albums of breezy indie-rock in the late ’90s and early 2000s. The band took a …
British fantasy author Terry Pratchett has spent nearly his entire career writing about the Discworld, a pancake-shaped land carried on the back of a giant cosmic turtle. Over the decades, his Discworld series has blossomed from a clever Douglas Adams-style parody of the sword-and-sorcery genre into a broad-ranging social satire that uses jokes about wizards …
When the electrifying, trancelike street music spearheaded by veteran Congolese band Konono No. 1 reached Western ears in the early 2000s, it sounded like something beamed in from Mars. Konono’s music was based around traditional instruments like the likembe thumb piano, but the need to use hand-built, jury-rigged amplifiers to be heard on busy Kinshasa streets brought …
Why it’s daunting: Everyone knows who Sherlock Holmes is, and it seems like everyone has written about him, too. It’s amazing just how much Holmes material is out there. The London sleuth, invented by Arthur Conan Doyle in the 1887 novel A Study In Scarlet, has come to personify the very idea of the private detective who …
Roky Erickson is a true rock ‘n’ roll survivor. Founder of the groundbreaking 1960s psychedelic band 13th Floor Elevators, Erickson fell into a spiral of drug and legal problems that culminated when he was committed to a hospital for the criminally insane. Even after his release, Erickson’s mental state was fragile, and his most productive post-Elevators …
An icon of modern British culture and the longest-running science-fiction TV show in history, Doctor Who has never been more popular than it is today, thanks to producer Russell T. Davies, whose revitalization of the series returns this month under the aegis of new producer Steven Moffatt. Matt Smith, taking over the title role from David Tennant, …
Twin Cities post-punk quartet The Chambermaids sounds like it might have stepped out of a time machine, freshly arrived from 1983. Its new seven-song Down In The Berries fits comfortably back-to-back with spiky, art-punk classics like Wire’s Chairs Missing or Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures, and though it’s undeniable that the band’s hardly breaking new ground by bringing that sound into 2009, it’s …
“I always loved the idea that music is something to cast a curse with.” Originally published in The A.V. Club’s Twin Cities edition, August 14, 2009. It’s no longer online there, so I’ve published it here. Over the course of three full-length albums and a smattering of EPs since 2006, Twin Cities quartet Vampire Hands has perfected …
St. Paul power trio The Blind Shake was already a pretty good band before it hooked up with Michael Yonkers, the psychedelic guitarist whose long-buried 1968 debut, Microminiature Love, was finally released in 2003 by Sub Pop, giving him a long overdue cult renaissance. The combination of Yonkers and his much younger brethren has been electrifying, both on last year’s Carbohydrates …
The late crime novelist Donald E. Westlake was notably protective of his most prominent fictional creation, the hard-as-nails master thief Parker, who starred in more than two dozen books written under Westlake’s major pseudonym, Richard Stark. Though the Parker books were adapted into films seven times, including the acclaimed Point Blank, Westlake insisted that the filmmakers …