IF you poll random Brit youths, some may be acquainted with Grindie (Grime MC + Indie Rock — I know they don’t agree with this classification, but deal, they are) superstars Hadouken!, but here in the States, especially the “cultural wasteland” of California (dubbed by worldly East Coasters), you’ll get empty stares.
Let me help remedy that. Soooo…
IF you love slick speak, thick layered sounds, quick synthesizer bender-ing (think electronic slide whistle), look no further than Leeds’ Hadouken!’s debut, Music for an Accelerated Culture.
IF you want to be reminded that …

Don’t you hate it when bands you like — and you like them partially because no one’s ever heard of them — are featured on TV commercials? CSS’ ‘Music is my Hot Hot Sex’ serenaded some spinning iPod Touch, making me quite sad for a quite long twenty seconds, but then, who can stay sad when listening to CSS??
The skippity-skip drum beats, deft-like-ninja synth rolls, breathy buttery tones of lead singer/writer Lovefoxxx (she has one of those voices that you would listen to reading Twinkie ingredients; so velvety and …

M.I.A. You might have seen her in the Marc Jacobs ads. You might have heard her on the Vexille soundtrack or the Pineapple Express trailer. You might have heard her and thought she was Lady Sovereign getting funkified as I did when I first heard ‘20 Dollar’ last year, a mish-mash of part Pixies lyrics and part New Order riffs and heavy on the synth-adulation and through-a-tube-singing please.
I know this is blasphemy to some, including myself, but M.I.A.’s sample-set is almost as good as (and …

HE SAID
Unlike Diary of the Dead, the commentary found in Stuart Gordon’s latest is surprisingly subtle. Based on a true story, the film sees a health-worker hit a homeless man with her car following a late night dancing, drinking, drug session. Concerned with the loss of a possible promotion, she opts not to let anyone know of the accident and simply drives home, parking her car in her garage. But there’s one small thing. The man is still stuck in her car windshield. So starts a series of attempted cover-ups, …

Paying major tribute to Jans Svankmajer, the Leiser brothers’ Imagination tells the tale of two twin sisters, one a sufferer of Asberger’s Syndrome, the other legally blind, who share a tendency toward retreating into imaginary realms, their visions and schemes border on the prophetic. While certainly intriguing to an outsider, all this slightly disturbs their mother, who seeks their return to the agreed-upon normal world through psychiatric treatment. As the film starts, we find that treatment has not gone as expected, and the two twins have met a rather mysterious …

This review is so long overdue that a serendipitous run-in with the writer/director prompted a strict reminder. M Dot Strange (aka: Michael Belmont) is so completely casual and San Jose-centric that he frequents a local boba tea place, even today as he types out an article for Wired Magazine (August issue — be sure to get it!), sketches upcoming plans for a national mobile movie multiple moviemaker tour, and ruminates over two future screenplays (one is a crazy comedy highlighting hyphy, one a samurai satire). M Dot …

Murder Party
SHE SAID:
Somewhere there is a man who looks like Chris Elliot, but you will actually care if he dies. Chris Sharp plays Christopher S. Hawley, a totally blah, totally random alprazolam-popping traffic cop whose sorry socialization solely involves interactions with his cat. One Halloween, when the battle for the armchair is again lost to said cat, Chris’ video marathon is thwarted and he decides to uncharacteristically trek out to a mysterious “Murder Party” after claiming a discarded invitation on the sidewalk. In a nifty silent montage, we see his …

Michael Kang’s The Motel, an adaptation of Ed Lin’s Waylaid, is a painfully funny take on adolescence and the inherent isolation felt by those undergoing puberty. It is the tale of a thirteen year-old boy, Ernest Chin, whose family runs and lives in a low rate motel along a New Jersey bypass road. Being that the motel offers “weekly, daily, and hourly rates”, Ernest sees more than his fair share of questionable human interactions. His overbearing mother chides him incessantly, his grandfather calls him fat, his younger sister has a …

“It’s an understandable habit… what’s strange is that people ever quit.” Words of wisdom from shamen/orthodontist Perry (Keanu Reeves) right before he hypnotizes Justin Cobb (Lou Pucci), a 17-year-old chronic thumb abuser. “From now on, your thumb will taste like echinachea”, and it does. It “cures” Justin of his affliction, but not the addiction. He goes from one impulsion to the next, riding the temporary high of newfound experimentation.
On the surface, Justin is like any normal nonconformist niche kid, searching for acceptance and answers, yet is …

So we’re starting a new segment at Dreamlogic.net, reviewing short film submissions by local filmmakers. Our first Submission comes to us from San Francisco’s Jeffrey Lei. A mockumentary about a fictional Asian male porn megastar in the 1970’s titled, simply enough, Dick Ho: Asian Male Porn Star.
A mix of Big Foot documentary and television’s Unsolved Mysteries, the documentary covers Ho’s history in film,the attempted coverup by the porn industry, made quite uncomfortable due to the fact Ho, an Asian male, was bigger and better than the caucasian Holmes. Lei managed …

If Grace Slick (Jefferson Airplane/Starship) and Fiona Apple had a vocal offspring, it would be Chan Marshall, aka: Cat Power. If you know me, you know why this name initially grabbed me (wow go kitties!), but the exaggerated slo-mo stylings, bare-bones instrumentation and strange scraggly drawl-singing are what kept me listening.
So it’s mostly just a guitar, sometimes a bass and piano and/or bowed saw accompaniment, sometimes a clip of an impending thunderstorm that travels along Marshall’s narcoleptically melancholy tones. Her vicious octave thrusts mimic the bitter, …

The Corrs, BeeGees, now the DuPrees, better known as Eisley. What do these groups have in common? Sibling power! Imagine sharing your most intimate aspirations and errs with your kin and with your ever-supportive ever-videotaping father chronicling the entire process. Well, it doesn’t seem to bother the DuPree kids, who have been on tour before their album was even released, thanks to major interest from Coldplay’s Chris Martin who let them ride his coattails and who reportedly warms up by crooning Eisley songs.
So who the heck …

I didn’t want to like Ima Robot, but just couldn’t help it. I blame it in parts: 1/2 due to its pristine new wave heavy pop-punk revamp with 1/4 devoted to Jello Biafra soundalike (and ex-rapper) Alex Ebert, 1/4 ‘cos it makes vacuuming fun. Worried it would be a one-hit wonder album, I purchased it secondhand and shelved it for almost a year. When I finally ran it through (substituting it for the disappointing new Katamari Damacy videogame background tracks) I couldn’t deny my delight. …