Teaching The Indie Kids To Dance has a couple tracks from Ash guitarist Charlotte Hatherley’s forthcoming solo record Grey Will Fade, coming out August 9 in the UK (is there a North American release? Anyone? I’m a little behind the curve on this one). And man, is “Summer” aptly titled – catchy stuff for the season of the sun. Hooks galore, cute girl, ripping guitar – what could be better? I was never big on Ash, but I may have to pick this record up. You can also get an mp3 of the first single “Kim Wilde” off her website. And finally, Guitar Geek has a schematic of her guitar rig… if anyone cares. Besides me.

The lord high nutbar of them all (and pop genius, yes) Brian Wilson will be touring this Fall in support of the release of The Beach Boys’ Smile on September 28. Look for a Toronto date on October 7 at a venue to be determined. In the meantime, you can read this New York Times interview with the man (registration required) – he doesn’t like Summer. Who knew?

According to the House Of Blues, tickets for the Wilco show at the Mod Club August 3rd go on sale today and will run you $35 before shit-fuck charges. The paranoid in me wants to get the tickets ASAP, charges be damned, while the pragmatist thinks that Rotate This will have tickets by tomorrow, and since the show hasn’t even been announced in the mainstream media outlets, there’s not going to be a run on tickets in these first couple days. But both sides agree, frosted mini-wheats aren’t just for kids. And that I’m going to have my tickets one way or another before I head out west.

Update: Tickets did not go on sale today. They will go on sale through Musictoday tomorrow and the remainder through Ticketmaster on Thursday. Rotate This will have tickets on sale Thursday at 11AM, but recommends that anyone who wants to be sure to get tickets buy them online.

Update 2: From Wilcoworld.net: “TICKETS FOR TORONTO, GO ON SALE WEDNESDAY, JULY 7 AT 12 NOON EDST VIA WILCOWORLD, AND WILL GO ON SALE VIA TICKETMASTER AS SOON AS OUR ALLOTMENT IS SOLD. TICKETS FOR TORONTO, GO ON SALE WEDNESDAY, JULY 7 AT 12 NOON EDST VIA WILCOWORLD, AND WILL GO ON SALE VIA TICKETMASTER ON THURSDAY AT 10 A.M.”

MusicTap is reporting that the new Fountains Of Wayne album has a tenative release date scheduled for… April 5, 2005. So, uh, get in line now. I guess.

That Saddam is such a joker, even while he’s on the stand. Lowculture has some fun with the same pics.

np – Yo La Tengo / And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out

Dirty Pretty Things is the latest film from director Stephen Frears, and is a return to the darker, grittier tine he’s known for after making the music geek comedy High Fidelity (though you could argue that record store owners belong just as much to the underbelly of society as anyone else). This time, he’s telling the story of illegal aliens working under the radar in west end London. A quick synopsis – Okwe is a Nigerian exile working as a cab driver in the day and a hotel clerk at night, while Senay is a Turkish maid at the same hotel being targeted by immigration and a chance discovery in the hotel one night embroils them in an organ smuggling ring. Got it? Good. The film is a pretty low-key but tense thriller, being more about the characters and how they handle the situations they find themselves in rather than the situations themselves, if that makes any sense. It succeeds mainly on very strong performances by Chiwetel Ejiofor and Audrey Tautou, though the supporting cast is excellent as well. It’s a good watch and raises some interesting moral questions for both the characters and the viewer. Recommended.

Aging Welsh agit-rockers The Manic Street Preachers will release their seventh album Life Blood on October 4th in the UK. It was produced by longtime Bowie producer Tony Visconti. More info here. I used to be quite into the Manics but lost interest of late, but it’s a slow day so this qualifies as news.

It’s funny – for weeks now I’ve been complaining about the ever-growing backlog of reading material that sits on my coffee table, waiting to be gotten to. Books, magazines, comics, the daily newspaper, it just kept coming and I barely had the time to keep it from overflowing, let alone work the pile down. Well thanks to this four-day weekend, I have almost eliminated the pile – just in time for me to realize that I am going to need a good supply of reading material for my trip, as I’ll be spending a fair amount of time on planes, trains and ferries. So I have had to stop the reading so as to at least keep enough stuff on hand to get me through the flight out there. Which means I now have nothing to read…

np – Built To Spill / Ancient Melodies Of The Future

“…And your dog refused to look at it.” Looks like I’m going to inadvertantly have a Galaxie 500 theme running through the blog this week (check out the mp3 of the week if you haven’t already). Or at least for today. That’s okay, there’s worse fates. Happy 4th of July to our American cousins.

Last year for their 10th anniversary issue, Magnet compiled a list of their top 60 albums from 1993-2003. They’ve just now gotten around to putting it online. Josh Homme from Queens Of The Stone Age nabs the cover for the new issue out soon.

The Toronto Star has a piece on how the digital age is affecting comic book creators and publishers. Myself, I don’t like reading traditional comics on my computer – the aspect ratio is all wrong, the pages take too long to load if they’re at a decent resolution and I miss the Charles Atlas ads. However, fellows like Keaner.net, whom Kate introduced me to at The Beguiling yesterday at Free Comic Book Day, and local dude M@B are making good use of the online medium with sort-of comic blogs. I guess I just like my Spider-Man on Mando paper and mylar-bagged.

My West Coast trip is beginning to take some shape. After flying into Vancouver, I’m going to ferry out to Victoria for a couple days, then ferry down to Seattle and hostel it for a night or two, then Amtrak will get me back to Vancouver. All cheaper and probably nearly as fast as driving would. I figure I’ll still get to see the coastline from the train. I do need a new backpack to replace my ratty old one from university though, and am right now browsing through MEC’s selection. Do I really need one with an ice axe tube? I don’t know, better safe than sorry I guess.

I haven’t really started planning WHAT I’m going to do in these respective cities once I arrive, though. I figure the transportation and accomodations are more pressing issues. Here’s a question – if I’m going to arrive in Seattle at the ferry pier around 11:30 AM on Tuesday, is scheduling a departure at 6:00 PM the next day not giving myself enough time to have a decent wander around the downtown? Or should I plan to depart the next morning? Though now that I think about it, I don’t know what I’d do with that extra evening – if things close up at night, particularly on a Wednesday, then I may be better off just heading back to Vancouver that night. There’s no shows I’m interested in from what I can tell. Hmm. Oh, and where are the good record stores in Seattle?

np – Television / Television

It proved wise to start lining up for the Magnetic Fields show an hour and a quarter before the doors opened. There were just a handful of people sitting on the steps of the Trinity-St Paul’s United Church ahead of us, but within 15 minutes or so, a good-sized line-up of Toronto’s hipster elite (and some homeless people who were just hanging around) was stretched around the corner and down the street. It was a longer wait, but it was nice and warm out so there were certainly worse places to be. Paid off too, as when the doors open I snagged a fine second-row pew.

I knew nothing about opener Andrew Bird going in except that he played the violin… which was true, but a gross understatement of the man’s abilities. Though playing solo, he was like a one-man orchestra making use of a sampler to layer violin, guitar, glockenspiel and the most unearthly whistling you’ve ever heard. If you weren’t watching him do it, you’d swear it was a musical saw. Unbelievable whistling. He reminded me of Jeff Buckley live, in his songwriting style and stage presence and though he played a relatively short set, he certainly left a positive impression on me.

The Magnetic Fields trotted out onstage a little after 9:30 to great applause and seated themselves across the stage, Claudia Gonson on piano, John Woo on guitar and banjo, Sam Doval on cello and Stephin Merritt on ukelele. As expected, the set list drew heavily from their latest album i, but I think there was enough older material in the mix to satisfy the audience. Making good on their promise to play with minimal amplification, the set was very quiet and made good use of the church’s acoustics. Stephin and Claudia’s vocals and the cello sounded particularly rich and musical. Musically the performance was excellent, but the combination of the heat inside the church (and the band’s preoccupation with the heat), the quietness of the affair and dim lighting made for a cozier, dozier atmosphere than an exciting one. The band barely stirred from their seats except when Stephin got up to bring a fan onstage (an electric fan, not a concertgoer) and to fetch water for the audience (when someone requested beer, he wryly replied, “You can’t have alcohol in church – it just turns to blood”). Only when playing “Yeah, Oh Yeah!” in the encore did Stephin and Claudia get up and engage in some light theatrics, much to the delight of the crowd – not only because it was funny to watch, but because it was SOMETHING to watch. Anyway, that’s a minor complaint if a complaint at all. They’re wrapping up their short 11-show tour with a second Toronto show tonight and have promised a different set-list if anyone is tempted to go see them again. The lighting made photos difficult to take, even from my seat up-close, but I did what I could.

And so my “week of many concerts” comes to an end. Now if you glance over to the side, you will see I’ve gone from feast to famine, with barely anything on the schedule for the rest of the Summer. Which is fine, really – the Fall is almost certain to be an embaressment of riches, if the album release schedule is an indication.

Filter has a nice preview of the new Rilo Kiley album More Adventurous. The piece puts the release date as August 17, which is several weeks later than the July 27 date that had previously been floated around.

Today is Free Comic Book Day. Go to your local store and get some free comic books.

A shame about the passing of Marlon Brando. I have yet to see any of the early work with which he made his name, but won’t even attempt to argue his title of “Greatest actor of his generation”. I saw The Freshman, I know what he was capable of.

np – Sparklehorse / Distorted Ghost

It’s been no secret that I am an old-school comic book geek of the highest order. I’ve gotten letters published in comics, I know what a No-Prize is, I have longboxes upon longboxes of comics at home that vex my parents to no end and which I promise to move out of my old room someday. So I’ve been pretty gleeful about the sheer number of comic book movie adaptations that Hollywood has been churning out over the past decade, particulary since many have been good to great, with only a few stinkers. A far cry from the 70s and 80s where anything that drew inspiration from a comic book was almost guaranteed to be atrocious. So you know I’m not being casual when I declare Spider-Man 2 far and away the best comic book adaptation yet. Seriously.

I want to send Sam Raimi presents, I am so happy with what he’s done. The first Spider-Man film was terrific, very true to the spirit of the comic, and somehow the sequel takes it even further. It’s much heavier on the Peter Parker side of Spider-Man’s life, which might seem like it slows the film down some, but I found the fleshing out of his character invaluable – it provides a human dimension that helps give weight to the premise of a guy in a spandex spider costume. It’s funnier, too – Tobey Maguire gets some great comic moments and there’s an all-around sense of fun that the audience really picks up on. And what’s Spider-Man if not fun?

The selection of Doctor Octopus as this installment’s villain was also a wise one. While the Green Goblin is inarguably THE classic Spidey villain, the execution of the character in the first one left a little to be desired, particularly visually. This time around, Alfred Molina eschews Willem Dafoe’s scenery-chewing approach for a much more sociopathic, sinister interpretation, and with great results – though much credit must also be extended to the puppeteers and CGI artists responsible for the tentacles. They actually project sentience and menace of their own, particularly in the scene where an unconscious Doc Ock slaughters an operating room of doctors. And you know how I mentioned before how the film has a lot of non-action Peter Parker-oriented scenes? Well when hero and villain do throw down, it’s spectacular. I can’t imagine two characters better suited to cinematic fight scenes and while there’s little conventional hand-to-hand combat as such, the clash of their respective powers allows for some really amazing visuals.

It’s not just eye-candy though – the film delivers in all departments, weaving together several storylines into a cohesive whole, offering up solid performances from all principals (and giving them an opportunity to act, even!), stunning action sequences and special effects, humour, sadness (especially that final shot), the whole kit and kaboodle. I’m even willing to ignore the fact that it cribbed some of the plot straight out of Superman 2… It helps that conceptually, Spider-Man has never aspired to be more than it is – he was never meant as an allegory like the X-Men or to have great symbolic meaning like Captain America. He was just a guy who happened to have spider powers, trying to get by in the world, and once again Raimi has done the source material proud by succesfully recreating that spirit in the film. I know it sounds like I’m gushing, but I am – rarely have I walked out of any film so completely satisfied, let alone one that I have high expectations for. And anyway, I already admitted my bias for comic book movies so cut me some slack. I cannot wait for the third one, though I do hope they call it a day after that – none of the actors nor Sam Raimi want to return for any films after that, and Tobey Maguire will be 31 when the next one comes out in 2007… But back to more immediate concerns – I was surprised they were willing to telegraph the plot for number 3 so obviously, not that that will diminish my anticipation. I mean, for a guy that’s been around for so many years, he’s got a pretty weak rogue’s gallery after the Goblin and Doctor Octopus. Who’s left? The Rhino? The Sandman? Electro? Hydro-Man? Come on.

Salon reflects on the importance of Husker Du’s Zen Arcade on the occasion of its 20th anniversary.

Rolling Stone has some information on exactly what to expect from The Wilco Book, out in November. Looks like they realized how popular the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot demos bootleg was and figure they can make some money off the unreleased material this time around.

The Onion AV Club talks to each member of The Kids In The Hall on the occasion of the release of season one on DVD. And here’s the Kids In The Hall audio archive to whet your appetite. From Overeducated and Underemployed.

The Walkmen will be joining Modest Mouse on tour this Summer, but not on the their August 4 Toronto date – they will instead be here the following night for their own show at Lee’s Palace. Does that make sense to anyone else? No, didn’t think so.

The Magnetic Fields tonight! Tonight tonight tonight!

np – Matthew Sweet / 100% Fun