Showing posts with label The Strokes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Strokes. Show all posts

Thursday, June 6, 2013

Inexplicable TV Review: Go Team Venture! (I guess!)


Confusion over Ivan Drago vs. Khal Drogo.

It only took about three years, but by god, the Venture Brothers are back on TV! For unexplained reasons, the show took a siesta from November 2010 to June 2, 2013, which made me think that the axe had fallen, despite claims from the creators that they were working the entire time. (And yes, they come across as dicks in that interview, but they did produce episodes, so good for them!)

All of that hard work though went into the greatest… Well, a pretty good episode. The fifth season debut, “What Color Is Your Clean Suit?”, was solid, but it wasn’t an all-time great episode or anything. The episode barely had any Brock Samson in it, after all, and the best moments involved a misunderstanding about sexual roleplay between The Monarch and Dr. Girlfriend.

Also, the fifth season is apparently just nine episodes, which doesn’t seem like much given the 2.5-year production time. Maybe that’s all they got the funding for… But if that’s the case, why did it take so god damn long? Ugh. I hate to keep harping on the huge production time of the show, but it bleeds into the series’ overall quality – It’s hard to build any momentum from a narrative standpoint if you’re essentially have nine to 13 episode seasons, with 18 to 29 months between seasons.

So yeah, there are some good jokes and sight gags. But I couldn’t help but let my mind wander after watching, and it came up with, “Is this it?” (Thanks for the assist, The Strokes.) The Venture Bros.is kind of the other extreme from forcing writers / showrunners / creators on unrealistic schedules – Sometimes, you just lose the previous momentum you had, and objects at rest tend to stay at rest.

Saturday, June 19, 2010

Belatedly Liking Stuff: "Yeah Yeah Yeah" by New Politics


I never quite know when new music comes out. For example, I heard the above song on our local alternative rock radio station, WBRU, late last night when I was coming home from the newspaper. It is by New Politics, and it is called "Yeah Yeah Yeah", which strikes me as a bit of a silly idea given the immensely popular band of the same name. (By the way, Karen O? I'd hit it.)

Suffice to say, if I'm writing about the band, you can guess that I'm a fan. "Yeah Yeah Yeah" has a sort of raw, loud energy that reminds me some of the bands I liked as a kid and teenager. You know, kind of like The Strokes or early Everclear, before they realized they could make $80 billion doing stuff like "Father of Mine".

Poking around the Internet, it seems like the single was just released in May, and they don't have a full album out yet. I typically worry that when I talk about a band I've recently started liking, it can be way after the fact that they actually started becoming popular. For example, Vampire Weekend has multiple albums out, but I wrote about them in February 2010 oblivious to this fact.

Therefore, let me recommend New Politics before they become super-duper popular. Heck, that video only has about 13,000 views on YouTube, which is several million short of what it should have. It's the pretty standard "low budget" video, with just the band singing in a room, but it works for the gritty rawness of the song. Check it out, fools! (And p.s., treat your mother right.)

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