I can’t count the number of times I’ve had this conversation:

Random person: “Blah blah blah like in in Nightmare Before Christmas blah blah blah”

Me: “I’ve never seen Nightmare Before Christmas.”

Random person: “What are you, a crackbaby?”

But truthfully, I’ve never seen The Nightmare Before Christmas. I’ve been advised many times to remedy this, and people have even offered to help, but it hasn’t happened yet. Dunno why, just hasn’t. But now, at least, I have seen Corpse Bride.

First off, Corpse Bride is amazing to look at. I couldn’t believe it was all stop-motion clay animation (remember, I’ve never seen Nightmare so my best frame of reference for claymation is Gumby and Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer). The Gorey-gothic visuals and character design were wonderful, as was the animation. The whole thing was a feast for the eyes – at a few points, I even stopped listening to the dialogue so as to concentrate on taking everything in with my eyes. Which is just as well, because the story, while sufficiently cute and charming, is kind of rote and uninspired. A film that looked as good as this really deserved a script up to the task. Furthermore, I wasn’t sure if it was supposed to be a musical or not – there were only a handful of songs, and none were especially good at all, some were actually bad. But despite these reservations, it’s still a fun (if short) film – just not a classic.

Paste has an interview with Mike Johnson, one of the animation gurus behind Corpse Bride.

Christmas comes early for shoegazers this year. On November 14, Sanctuary will be reissuing all three Slowdive albums, including the long out-of-print and expensive Pygmalion. But that’s not the best part – both the Souvlaki and Just For A Day reissues will come with bonus discs chock full of rarities and EP-only material. This is the treasure trove of stuff that people were hoping would have appeared on the Catch The Breeze compilation earlier this year. The tracklists are as follows:

Just For A Day:

1. Slowdive

2. Avalyn 1

3. Avalyn 2

4. Morning Rise

5. Morning Rise

6. She Calls

7. Losing Today

8. Holding Our Breath

9. Golden Hair

10. Shine

11. Albatross

12. Catch The Breeze (Peel Session)

13. Song 1 (Peel Session)

14. Golden Hair (Peel Session)

Souvlaki:

1. Some Velvet Morning

2. So Tired

3. Moussaka Chaos

4. In Mind

5. Good Day Sunshine

6. Missing You

7. Country Rain

8. In Mind (Bandulu Mix)

9. In Mind (Reload Mix).

Half of the Souvlaki bonus tracks appears on the North American SBK edition, so that’s not quite as exciting (I still have to have it, of course), but the Just For A Day material is pretty much worth selling a kidney for. I don’t know if the albums themselves are getting any sort of remastering spit-and-polish, nor if there will be new liner notes, but either way – my cup runneth over.

And an extra early Christmas gift for me and me only – I finally got a copy of Ride’s Going Blank Again on LP. It’s en route from the UK right now. Double vinyl, baby. Sweet.

Carl Newman wonders to eye if maybe starting an east coast/west coast feud with Broken Social Scene might not be a solid career move for The New Pornographers. PopMatters also has an interview.

Pop (All Love) quantitatively and conclusively determines that Franz Ferdinand are the best band in the world. QED.

The week in shows at Torontoist. I was exhausted when trying to write this last night. It took forever and it shows.

np – Slowdive / Souvlaki