After kicking around the local scene for a couple of years, Literature finally released a full-length last month, dropping it via bandcamp in the creative Chernobyl that extends roughly from December 26th to the middle of January. It's there now to download in any format at whatever price the buyer cares to pay, which is never not a good deal. more ›

Scarface was over an hour late, more than that if you count the time it took him to set up. It was to the point that people were leaving to move their cars out of the dwindling times on their parking meters. It’s not a good look if you’re a touring musician, especially in the notoriously-solipsistic rap-game. When he did finally emerge into the murky lights of the Mohawk, he made a half-hearted bristle about it being cold outside and slipped off his vest. “I thought it was gonna be an indoor joint” as his ridiculously-extended crew filled their spots around the stage. Scarface was the only one with a microphone, and ostensibly the only one on payroll besides the miniature DJ behind him. The most prominent member of his posse was a giant dude decked in all black - he had iPod earbuds poking out of his shirt and filling the side of his head, adding a deeper wrinkle to the never-ending mystery of what it’s like to be that guy. It didn’t phase anyone - why should it? This was teeth-gritted professional rap music from a guy who’s been in the business long enough to get by on prestige alone. Nothing less, but precious little more. more ›

Because it’s a cheerful holiday tradition and a chance for younger artists to build some performance experience, many dance companies put on their own version of The Nutcracker each year. Some productions are a little more dazzling than others, of course, and Austinites are dealt a pretty lucky hand with Ballet Austin’s staging of this familiar but always charming story. Capable dancers, fab costumes and top-notch musical accompaniment from the Austin Symphony Orchestra explain why this has become an unmissable December event for so many of us. more ›

They just don’t write them like they used to. That’s a grumpy old man’s repeated assertion, or a grumpy old Wilco fan’s common complaint, but both are true to a degree. more ›

Well is less a play, and more of a staging of well-shaken brain. A shabby living room has been transplanted to the Vortex into a void where Ann Kron, the playwright's mother, will watch as her daughter attempts to dramatically stage their lives (sort of like filming a documentary to show your Grandfather at his birthday). All the while, she steps in and out of the void as a way of conversing with Mom without having to actually talk to Mom. It's a perfect play for the holiday season, and the tension of too much family time. more ›

The 2011 Austin Film Festival has come and gone, and while many of the films shown there last week will sadly drift into relative obscurity, a few of the studio-backed titles will begin making the rounds at theaters soon. Here are a few we had a chance to see -- check out our reviews as you decide whether or not to spend your time on them once they return to town. more ›

After what seemed like a long wait, Annie Clark, a.k.a. St. Vincent, a.k.a. the object of every NPR-listening, vinyl-collecting indie boy’s desire, a.k.a. the recent creator of a record warmly wrapped in a choir of critical hosannas, finally walked out onto the dimly-lit Moody Theater stage. more ›

Friday night ACL Live hosted the taping of Fleet Foxes for Austin City Limits' 37th season. With their band's sophomore album Helplessness Blues released earlier this year, a subsequent tour with The Walkmen, and an appearance at Austin City Limits last month, the Seattle-based sextet had the small crowd anxious for an intimate show. more ›

We all knew that Bon Iver was a special project when singer/songwriter Justin Vernon, crafted his heart-torn 2007 debut album, For Emma, Forever Ago, in a cabin in Wisconsin’s wilderness. With that he captured all that cold, barren isolation and poured that sentiment into stripped down acoustic melodies and yearning falsettos that set chills up our spines as we listened along. What we may not have realized is that Bon Iver’s self-titled sophomore release set the stage for Vernon to return a new man, bold and brave and ready for a new venture of his creation. more ›

A lot can change in a little over a year. The last time Active Child was in Austin, Pat Grossi only had the stellar Curtis Lane EP to his name, and his touring outfit consisted of himself and multi-instrumentalist Startton Easter. However, when they opened for Islands, they sounded sure of their sound, hinting at something greater to come. Now, on the heels of the acclaimed You Are All I See and the addition of a percussionist to their live repertoire, Grossi and company have found their stride. Their triumphant performance at Emo's was more than ample proof of this, as they sounded confident and focused on making their first headlining show in Austin a memorable one. more ›

Sleep ∞ Over's debut full-length officially drops September 27th, more than a year after the band began accumulating buzz with the release of phantasmagoric haunters "Outer Limits" and "Your World Is Night". Pitchfork described them as "what Beach House might sound like if they played in a graveyard," which sounded about right at the time. Then, before recording began on the album that would become Forever, members Sarah Brown and Christa Palazzolo left to form Boy Friend, leaving Stefanie Franciotti the lone remaining member of Sleep ∞ Over. Hence the delay. more ›

Despite Rise intentionally setting itself up for sequels, it remains the story of how humans ultimately lost the world to apes. Fortunately, Wyatt and his team are more than up to the task of telling a compelling and often surprising story even though we already know the ending (if you don't, you may want to stop reading here and rent the 1968 film instead). So how does one tell the story of the end of the world as we know it when we all know exactly where Lady Liberty's head eventually ends up? Apparently, with care, precision, and a soft touch. more ›

To tide us over before the early 2012 release of his second full-length, the one-man bedroom-recording project that is Silent Land Time Machine released a batch of six songs under the name Summer 2011 Tour EP. Each piece begins from a single point - a plinked piano melody, a smirch of guitar feedback, a soft drum beat, an open space of whooshing silence - and builds upwards from that point, layering doleful viola, violin, cello, accordion, wordless vocals, percussion, ambient found sound and various other electronics until the original source is obscured in the electro-acoustic maelstrom. The results are haunting ear worms that feel ethereal and nearly fleeting, like you're remembering these songs as they bloom into existence. more ›

The 2,000 fans who bought tickets months ago to Arctic Monkeys' sold-out gig had to have known they were rolling the dice. An August 2 concert outdoors at Stubb's? The weather was less than cooperative, clocking in at 100 degrees at 9pm, with no sun in sight. The rowdy crowd did their best to rally, shouting football chants, bobbing their heads to the stoner rock blaring through the PA between sets, and unwisely trying to hydrate with beer. more ›

Every once in a while, you might stumble across the rarest of the rare: a blockbuster action film that’s more than just a whiz-bang collection of explosions and one-liners. Like unicorn or a double rainbow (ooh, or a unicorn riding a double rainbow!), when you find one you count yourself lucky. This summer, we might have to go buy some lottery tickets. We've already had the miraculous Super 8, Spielberg and J.J. Abrams’ kids-coming-of-age/misunderstood alien-on-the-loose story, and now we have Attack the Block. more ›

Fans of the comic will enjoy seeing Oa and the Corps rendered on the big screen, but newcomers will be lost in the murky back-and-forth between action and explanation. After superhero movies have come so far, there's no excuse for one that isn't epic or personal enough. more ›

Super 8 is the first film by writer-director J.J. Abrams not part of a preexisting franchise -- after rebooting the Mission: Impossible and Star Trek series respectively, it seems the time has come for the TV guru and blockbuster auteur to branch out into more heartfelt territory. With Super 8, he clearly succeeds, although calling the film completely original might be a bit of an overstep. more ›

Following Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) and Erik Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbender) on their divergent paths to becoming Professor X and Magneto (the respective mutant Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X), the X-Men: First Class is able to stay true to the now more-than-familiar ideological and personal struggles that first defined Marvel Comics while also treating its characters like human beings. more ›

Gore Verbinski's last two Pirates of the Caribbean movies represented a rare gem from Hollywood these days: an original studio big-budget trilogy, and one with more Errol Flynn than Batman at that. Verbinski's original Pirates films told an epic (and unpredictably tragic) sea fable that incorporated ancient mythology and history while managing to pick out the best parts of what blockbusters work. On Stranger Tides doesn't feel like it's part of the same series. more ›

If A Serbian Film aims to assess the current state of Serbia with the metaphor of sexual exploitation, it has only skimmed the surface. Pushing an envelope with a half-baked sense of purpose is almost worse than pushing it for no reason at all. more ›

For those unfamiliar with Reggie Watts, explaining his performances probably confuses more than clarifies. Watts is a comedian, musician, beat-boxer and improviser; his sets blend his intelligence and technical skill into a series of free-associative digressions. He has performed and toured with multiple bands (from Regina Spektor to LCD Soundsystem) and is active in experimental theater, but his current focus is on performing comedy solo. He's been touring extensively since last year's opening slot on Conan O'Brien's highly acclaimed tour, and his shows this past weekend at The ND Studios (as part of Fusebox Festival) were standard among Watts performances, which is to say they were remarkable. more ›

We THINK Austin Playhouse is running Three Viewings as their very special Halloween episode for their 2010-2011 season. This play comprised of monologues that snapshot several funerals in a small Midwestern town isn't scary in any way, except for maybe how realistically sad the sparse set is. In our post-Six Feet Under world a viewing room in a funeral home is obviously a great setting for comedy AND drama. But when this play premiered in 1996 it was a different game. That said, the evening managed to surprise us. more ›

Ghostland Observatory are something of an enigma - a group that describes themselves not as a band but as “an agreement between two friends to create something that not only heals their beat-driven hearts, but pleases their rock ‘n roll souls.” That may sound like a bunch of hippie mumbo jumbo, but it’s easy to see the two friend’s (Thomas Ross Turner and Aaron Behrens) desire to create just for the sake of creating. more ›

Nathan Rabin of the Onion A.V. Club coined the term "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" to describe the quirky, anachronism-obsessed creation of a lonely male writer's fevered imagination whose appearance litters romantic comedies. She exists, mostly, for the Neurotic Boy Outsider whom she inevitable encounters to pour his passions into, as she teaches him valuable lessons about what life is really all about. She can be bubbly, or she can be prone to fits of melancholy, but most importantly, she lacks a true inner life, and her emotions are only ever dictated by the actions of the people who are in love with her. more ›

Denton’s Midlake have taken a bit of a strange path to get to where they are today. Starting their career at the turn of the century as a jazz-funk band, they worked in relative obscurity until releasing their breakout LP, The Trials of Van Occupanther, in 2006—that record helped to build Midlake’s fan base slowly but steadily, as more and more people became aware of, and subsequently seduced by, the group’s deft interpretation of 70’s soft pop. After four years of crafting, recording, expunging, and re-recording, Midlake finally released Van Occupanther’s follow-up The Courage of Others this week, and it’s certainly another change in direction for the band. While The Courage of Others is just as rife with 70s-era references as its predecessor, singer Tim Smith and co’s attention has shifted to focus more on Jethro Tull and British folk than classic-era Fleetwood Mac. more ›

Ever had a fun nightmare? The Residents make yours come true. Talking Light, their first tour in two decades, descended upon Stubb’s Tuesday night, wracking brains and bodies of everyone from the fans who’ve waited twenty years for this moment, to the ten-year-old boy who evenly declared, “I’m not old enough to have seen them twenty years ago.” The wait yielded a writhing body in a wrinkled old man mask with a protruding nose, backlit in vertical stripes and black-and-white patent leather clown shoes. Though he introduced himself as “Randy,” we don’t know who The Residents are. Since 1976, they’ve been performing to cult audiences without revealing their identities. This is not the cloak of anonymity so much as a cohesive creature called The Residents which, despite the fluidity in line-up over the years, remains an unmistakable entity whose wild concept albums contort history and mythology the way their live frequencies mess with our ears. more ›

We would all like for our lives to be harmonious—that each individual part would arrange itself in such a way that it is pleasing and complimentary to everything else—but the wish and the reality are most often found to be incongruous. Harmony (Justin Rice, lead singer of Bishop Allen and star of another indie flick, Mutual Appreciation), the eponymous character in Robert Byington's new film Harmony and Me, is a study in that schism, finding his life pitched into discord when he is summarily dismissed by his girlfriend, Jessica (the knockout Kristen Tucker). more ›

In Cheever, A Life, Blake Bailey combines a biography with some literary criticism. Weighing in at 679 pages, it is an even-handed and meticulously researched picture of this fiction writer best known for short stories. Bailey’s authority comes from his knowledge of John Cheever’s writing and access to his unpublished journals. Although it pains me to say this, in general writers make boring nonfiction characters.They are of deep interest only to biographers and close family. In this case, however, the troubled man-boy who never finished high school made both a mess and magic out of his personal life, creating enough controversy to carry a story. more ›

Tom Brosseau has been peddling his austere, upper-Midwestern folk for the better part of this decade, and listening through his catalog up to his latest and best effort Posthumous Success, it feels as though he’s been searching for a voice. Figuratively, of course: his actual voice is his most unique trait. A high, thin, occasionally plaintive tenor, it’s immediately recognizable and can be divisive: listeners seem to fall into either the love or hate camps when considering his timbre. In his continuing effort to find that figurative voice, Brosseau’s new LP was apparently conceived as an edgy, modern reaction to critics that have pegged him and his music as anachronistic, and while “edgy” may be going a bit far in describing Posthumous Success, the record is a welcome departure from his past work. more ›