There's just something strangely cool about seeing the new Behemoth CD/DVD, Evangelion, advertised in the Sunday ad for Best Buy. Right next to upcoming indie-rockers and pop-start wannabes is this trio of corpsepaint-wearing Polish Satanists. Fucking awesome.

For the uninformed, Evangelion is the 9th release from Behemoth, and they've been working their way up the metal hierarchy with each release. They get tagged as "black metal" for their lyrical content and makeup, but they have a better sense of song than many of their comrades. Think of the scenes in 28 Days Later where the infected are rampaging through the streets, and you'll have some idea of the general feel -- it's frenzied, maddening, a little scary, and oh so enjoyable.

Singer/guitarist Nergal -- I know, but all black metal guys have silly names, I guess I've just gotten used to it -- has a great style, in that his playing borders on the flashy virtuoso edge but doesn't get to the level of "masturbatory." One person that must be praised is drummer Inferno (ease up, we already talked about the names), whose legs go at a pace that's the equivalent of Usain Bolt running after doing meth for a week. What he really excels at, though, is the cymbal work. The extra little touches that he adds can take an average track to the next level. One other step the band took was in hiring Daniel Bergstrand just to record the drums. His unconventional techniques give Inferno's sound the extra boost that only luminaries like Dave Lombardo and Chris Adler have reached.

Since Best Buy has this in their "Find 'em First" section, it's only $7.99, and that also includes a DVD of the making of the album. So, if you have an extra $8 and want the musical equivalent of a stampede of the undead, Behemoth's Evangelion is what you need to get. (Scott Whitt // 09/11/09)

Dillinger is Dead is called writer/director Marco Ferreri's masterpiece. It recently screened at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston as part of their Revival Series (http://www.mfah.org/films), a restored 35mm print that looks and sounds brilliant. This Saturday the theater was more than half full, but there was free parking, no lines, and no noisy crowds. In short, it's a much more comfortable cinema experience than the multiplexes and with reliably more interesting films.

The film opens with it's smartest scene, as Glauco (Michel Piccoli) and a coworker discuss their work as industrial designers of gas masks and how it relates to modern man's connection to nature. Glauco intimates that he wants to abandon his career and spends the afternoon working on a screenplay in a friend's office. Glauco arrives home to find that his wife (Anita Pallenburg) is asleep, and his maid (Annie Giradot) is drunk, so he continues pursuing art as a distraction from his real life. The film is largely silent, with only short aborted conversations between Glauco and his wife, and then later his maid, so the opening conversation about his intention to leave behind an obviously successful career is illustrated throughout.

Glauco is rapidly infantilized throughout the night. His afternoon of writing is followed by an admirable attempt at gourmet cooking, but as the night progresses, he loses focus and begins dancing senselessly, making shadow puppets against a film projector's images on his living room wall. He manically paces his house searching for a creative outlet to bind him to his life as it is currently structured. He frequently turns on radios, which play American music, perhaps suggesting his desire to start fresh in his life.

His early creative pursuits of scriptwriting and cuisine degenerate into child's play. He coos at the 8mm films he watches, he experiments with a rubber snake and his sleeping wife's genitals. He finds a pistol, paints it in red and white polka dots, and pretends to shoot it in infantile glee. His regression is complete when he shoots his wife to death, drives to a beachfront site with ancient ruins, and, naked but for a loincloth, enters the ocean. In a film heavy-handed with symbols, this can mean little else besides rebirth.

So, reborn in morning's light, he swims out to a very large wooden sailboat. The crew of the boat is performing a burial at sea. As Glauco dog-paddles in front of the wrapped dead body, he asks for a job replacing the dead crewman.

While the man may have achieved his goal, we are left unfulfilled, as we never felt sympathetic to his quest and certainly did not connect with his motivations. Ferreri impressed 1960s European audiences with his statement on modern man and his dependence on conveniences like refrigerators, gas stovetops, a Super 8 projector, and a home with a TV or radio in every room(!), but today's cinema audience turned off the ringers on their Blackberries when the film started and merely saw a common narcissist driven criminally insane by his desires. The film depicts a sight as overwrought and uninteresting as O.J. Simpson or Michael Jackson and offers a lesson as unfresh as either.

The real treat tonight was escaping to MFAH's immaculate Brown Auditorium Theater, which is Houston's longest-running repertory theater and celebrates its 70th year showing films not available anywhere else in Houston. This is the cleanest, most comfortable cinema in town, with the most interesting offerings. The Revival Series continues next month with Bigger Than Life, directed by Nicholas Ray, but there are movies every Thursday through Sunday year round. See the schedule here: http://www.mfah.org/films. (Creg Lovett // 09/11/09)

I've been dancing around it a while in my head, and I just can't think of a friendly, nice way to talk around it, so I'm just going to say it: I don't like the guitars on Electric Attitude's latest EP, Laser Laser Laser Beams. At least, I don't like 'em as much as I feel like I should.

And that sucks, because I do like a lot of the rest of it -- the songs themselves are nicely funky/sleazy, the bass is down-low and up-front, and the lyrics work better than they really should, considering frontman Blake Shepard is a skinny white guy talking about sex (and, tangentially, sci-fi and gettin' down on the dancefloor). Shepard himself, in fact, is a surprise just by the fact that he can actually pull this off, with a down-and-dirty howl/mutter that's equal parts Mick Jagger, Chris Robinson, and '80s glam-metal, all rolled up into an unassuming, t-shirt-wearing package.

That guitar, though... Guitarist Jordan Bell does just fine when he's throwing in funky whacka-chicka rhythms, definitely, but on every single track on here, right when the song gets rolling, he throws in an unnecessary, melody-line solo that doesn't really do much except to kill time and suck the momentum out of the song. I'm probably going to get punched in the face for it the next time I run into these guys, but that's just how it hits me. The rhythm parts are pretty good, but the soloing feels unnecessary and pointless.

On top of that, it just sounds too, well, clean for most of the disc. The best tracks on here, "Shot on the Dance Floor," "Robot Girl," and "Pistolwhip" are dirty and raw, and they work brilliantly because of it. Funk that's clean and slick is a seriously difficult thing to pull off, in my book, and it works a whole heck of a lot better when you dirty it up some, dragging the sound through the mud.

Which explains somewhat why I was more knocked over by Electric Attitude's live show than this EP; live they can play things loose and fuzzy and halfway messy, and I honestly think that's when they're at their best. They're a party band, a band that can grab hold of an apathetic crowd and get 'em dancing their asses off, and I was hoping more of that would translate to the tape.

I should note, though, that there is some truly promising, cool stuff here, stuff that points to hope for the future. "Shot on the Dance Floor," in particular, comes off like the Black Keys gone disco or the Black Crowes gone Eurotrash, with Kwesi Sackey's thundering bass and Adam Gilleland's stomping drums shoving the whole thing forward like an out-of-control tour bus while Bell's guitars roar and rumble and Shepard yelps and croons. It's distorted and bluesy, less overtly funky than some of the the rest of the tracks here, and it's got me stepping backwards for repeated listens. Hell, I even like the electronic "gunshot" drums they throw in at one point.

So, if I haven't already alienated the band, I've got one request/bit of advice for the Electric Attitude crew: skip the solos, let things sound a bit rawer and looser, and aim for more like "Dance Floor." Because an album's worth of that would be freaking great, I swear.

[Electric Attitude is playing 9/12/09 at The Festival at Mink, along with a bunch of other cool bands.] (Jeremy Hart // 09/11/09)

Electric Owls' Ain't Too Bright is an album that I'd recommend to a dope-smoking pre-pubescent. If nothing else, you can expand your street drug vocab. From the song "Kamiakin": "Summertime won't be so bad / We can all get high over at my uncle's trailer / He's a real cool guy / except for all of those sex toys that he never tries to hide"...damn, that's not nauseating or anything. The music and melodies here aren't that bad -- it's just the songwriting that too often gets in the way (but probably not if you're going through puberty while smoking massive quantities of dubbage...it's totally subjective, of course).

In the same song, Electric Owls songwriter/frontman Andy Herod (formerly of The Comas) continues, "Come on over to Gee's house / She knows how to fly / Y'know, I think she's got a baby / I have heard it cry" -- okay, that's a little revealing and a whole lotta scary. Nuff said. At least they properly titled the album... Herod explains in his mini-bio that he had to get away from the pressures of living in NY, and that touring with his former band was ruining his life. I'll throw him a bone for taking a reprieve and moving from the slime light of NYC to Asheville, NC, to eventually form Electric Owls. The band consists of eight members and an array of interesting instrumentation, including dulcimer, piano, glockenspiel, and Moog. Jason Caperton, guitarist from The Comas, has also joined Herod, and he was able to round up an additional four vocalists to assist on the album.

Herod writes, "the songs on the Electric Owls record came about in a 3-4 week period," and this is no surprise. "Cannibal Superstar" contains some listenable music, although I could live without the words therein, like "She came home and I shot her dead / put her favorite pillow case over her head ... I am not an evil man" -- okay, I guess homeboy don't know what "evil" is. His voice, unadulterated by the words, does have potential, though, and this song demonstrates that he can do some good crooning. Further on, "Us Weakly" is a personal look into girl troubles and a penchant for piles of cocaine: "Standing on the corner waiting for the cocaine man / I guess I didn't want those shoes or gas inside my van." I don't think he meant that to be funny.

"Put, The Candle, Back!" is the most poppy song and one that I could imagine hearing on Houston radio -- a three-minute exploration into a lusty love affair that most likely lasted just as long (in his head, that is) and includes the line, "All my friends be say'n that you're only a tease / but something more than that has got me weak in the knees / and I would do most anything to make you mine / even if it's only one time." Hmm...I wonder what's making him weak in his knees? In the wise words of the Church Lady, "could it be...Satan?" Not something that will be recorded in my memory for much longer than, say, one or three minutes. (SCR Staff // 09/11/09)

While there's nothing strictly wrong with the first two tracks of Fake Believe's five-song EP, Talk Speak, I'll admit they had me a little worried. The too-slick, hipster-ish dance-funk grooves on the verses of both "Pornography" and "Another Dead Romantic" didn't get more than a shrug out of me -- when there's enough of a Rapture-like edge to the danciness, this sort of thing can work, definitely, but here it just seems like it's killing time between the choruses, which are nicely fierce and rock-ish.

With "Card Homes," though, things really start to look up. It's a delicious, lush-yet-dark blast of synth-y pop-rock that gets manages to be ferocious and emo-boy raw while still holding onto that smooth, metallic sheen that covers the whole of Talk Speak; when the chorus comes, I want to drive fast and far away, howling along with guitarist/vocalist David Elbert's increasingly tortured voice, and surprisingly, it hits me the same damn way each and every time I skip back to the start of the track. There's just something about Elbert's voice that fits perfectly here, and it's hooked me hard.

"Warm Enough" continues in that vein, thankfully, ditching the proto-funk for more serious-sounding electro-rock as on "Card Homes," with those Anniversary-esque, sci-fi-sounding synths and the little electronicized production touches throughout giving everything a near-future, right-around-the-corner feel. The track starts quiet and almost Portishead-like, but soon enough the melancholy gives way to bitter, just-distorted guitars, only to collapse eventually into pianos and drifting clouds, finally coming back in sky-high and coolly majestic, soaring way the hell over everything below.

Things come back down to earth for "Temporary," which overstays its welcome just a bit, but even then I'm liking the layer-upon-layer way the band's crafted their sound. In the hands of a different band, sure, I'll grant that it might come off a bit self-indulgent, all the studio bits and the ultra-clean production and whatnot. On this EP, though, with these guys -- hell, it just sounds like it was meant to be this way. And then, I feel the need to hear "Card Homes" again.

[Fake Believe is playing 9/12/09 at Cactus Music and again at The Festival at Mink, along with a bunch of other cool bands.] (Jeremy Hart // 09/11/09)

It hit me in the car, on my way back to the house yesterday, and suddenly, it all seemed plain as day: it's Paul McCartney. That's who Fruit Bats' Eric D. Johnson reminds me of, more than anyone else, at least on the band's latest, The Ruminant Band. It was a bit of a surprisingly realization to come to, really, considering that the last time I heard anything the Bats had done, it was the awesomely eerie/beautiful "Silent Life," off 2005's Spelled In Bones, which was like a pastoralized Postal Service or electronicized Band of Horses.

On The Ruminant Band, though, if it weren't for Johnson's voice, I'd have a hard time guessing that this was the same band. They've ditched all the synths in favor of Elton John-esque piano, chipper-sounding '70s AOR guitars, and warm, friendly pop-rock feel, albeit holding tight to Johnson's always-erudite, thoughtful lyricism (which, obviously, is a very good thing). The guitars jangle and buzz nicely, at times edging towards funk and prog-rock (see the title track) or bouncing straight on down the road and dragging everyone else along with 'em (see "My Unusual Friend").

And yeah, it really, truly does sound -- with the exception of more overtly countrified tracks like the meandering hoedown of "The Hobo Girl" and the sweet acoustic gem of a story-song that is "Singing Joy to the World" -- like '70s pop reincarnated. Listening to The Ruminant Band, everybody from Harry Nilsson to the aforementioned Sir John and even Barry Manilow pop into my head unbidden, all smiles and fuzzy edges and primary-colored melodies.

Sure, The Ruminant Band is also well-informed by folks a little closer on the timeline; these days, anything vaguely earth-toned or '70s-sounding would have a hard time not pointing a finger straight on over to, say, The Push Kings, Fleet Foxes (especially on lead-in track "Primitive Man"), Band of Horses, the gospel-psych of The Moondoggies, or even The New Pornographers. Part of the charm of bright-spot track "Tegucigalpa" lies in its rambling, literate historicism, telling the story of the protagonist's (Johnson's) life in verse for whoever cares to listen, and for that it comes off like a cheerier, less-bleak Okkervil River or a less-baroque Decemberists.

But again, it's McCartney that hits me the hardest. Closing track "Flamingo" sounds for the life of me like it's a conscious rip of "Maybe I'm Amazed" in terms of melody, and through the entirety of the disc, I keep expecting Johnson to turn a corner and start belting out "Hey Jude." Johnson's voice just sounds like McCartney -- his phrasing, his sense of melody, the whole mess. I mean this as no slight, by the by; the man's a hell of a songwriter, and Johnson shows similar promise, stepping upwards towards that Master Songsmith plateau alongside folks like Okkervil River's Will Sheff.

There's the overall feel of The Ruminant Band, as well, that pulls me back to the McCartney comparison. I can't pinpoint why, but I've always had this image in my head of Paul McCartney as The Happy Beatle, the one who just can't help but smile even when there's pain and loss all 'round, and Fruit Bats seem to be the same way. The songs themselves aren't uniformly bright and happy (they'd be far, far too saccharine, if they were), but Johnson and company sing and play as if they are, pushing on through the dark gloom to find the warm, hazy place on the other side.

[Fruit Bats are playing 9/3/09 at Walter's on Washington, along with Death Vessel & News On The March.] (Jeremy Hart // 09/03/09)

So you say your band's releasing its new album only on cassette? That's so, er, early 2009, y'all. Want to really take a totally noncommercial, ultra-indie stab in the dark with your band's next release? Follow the example of strange, candy-like electro-hip-hopsters Ghost Mountain and release your new album strictly on VHS tape, each copy hand-made using a circuit-bent VCR. Anything less is utterly pedestrian, right?

Okay, so ultra-hipster kidding aside, it does take a set of cohones to put out something like this, no doubt about that. Ghost Mountain -- which is mostly duo Daniel Berkowitz and Stephen Farris -- put out Summer Tapes as a VHS-only release (with a CD-R included when you buy it, naturally), taking bizarre-yet-mesmerizing collages of old/awful cartoons and shows culled from thrift-store videotapes and setting a baker's dozen tracks to it. A handful of the songs I've heard before (I think the band's given earlier versions of a few tracks away for free in the past), but the music itself's still just as mesmerizing as the visuals.

There are two real "sides" to the band throughout Summer Tapes: there're the more heavily electronicized songs, where synth/electronics mangler Farris warbles in a vocoder-enhanced voice over bubbling, burbling layers of goopy, syrupy sound; then there's the more straightforward (relatively) tracks, which are more beat-heavy and feature geeky rapper Berkowitz meandering in a smart-kid haze through the halls of any dysfunctional high school you might've attended. Taken all together, Tapes plays like some late-night dream concert where Laurie Anderson and MC Paul Barman are up on a stage jamming out with The Beta Band and The Chemical Brothers, all at the same damn time.

And honestly, I can't say I dig one "side" more than the other, which is a very cool thing. Take the one-two hit of "Nap In The Woods" and "The Tree Wall," for example -- on the former track, Berkowitz flows self-consciously along about Harold & Maude, Why? songs, haircuts, and, um, Sesame Street, over Rentals-esque synths and bumping, stumbling beats; on the latter, on the other hand, Farris seemingly takes the lead, mashing Terminator X-ish samples together with spacey, robotic vocals and rapid-fire rhythms and coming off like a trippy, skittering Leftfield.

On both (and through the rest of the tape), the duo slather everything down with purplish psych haziness, heavy-lidded and somnolent as a waking dream you can't really find your way out of but are curious to follow further down into your subconscious mind. Best of all, these two kids sound like they could honestly give a fuck if what they're doing appeals to anybody but themselves; they're an awesomely innocent, teenage honesty here, evidence that Ghost Mountain are doing this not out of artifice but because, well, it's what they do. Keep it going, y'all.

[Ghost Mountain is playing 9/19/09 at Warehouse Live, along with Devin The Dude, Coughee Broz, Fat Tony, Guerilla Foco Clan, & DJ Meshak.] (Jeremy Hart // 09/18/09)

They don't make them like this anymore.

One of the most surprising things I found about Guess Who's Coming to Dinner was that I hadn't seen it yet.

A friend of mine (who knows I've see everything) just naturally assumed I had, in the lead-up to its screening at the MFAH on Monday, September 21, because it's one of those movies everyone has seen, like Casablanca. Or Star Wars. Except more important, obviously, because Guess Who's Coming to Dinner is a Message Movie. And in 2009, they only make one kind of Message Movie: the long, boring, artistic affair which you are told you need to see, because it's so important, but at the same time are so incredibly bored by even while consciously aware you're receiving a message. Maria Full of Grace. Babel. The Reader. Milk. Important films all, with a capital I, and all exceptionally well-made...but not exactly a jolly time out at the movies.

So rare is the entertaining Message Movie, in fact, that last year when somebody finally made an entertaining one, it was awarded a Best Picture Academy Award. And at the heart of Slumdog Millionaire, like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, is a romance. But while Slumdog dealt consciously and almost exclusively with matters of gender and economic standing, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner deals with absolutely everything, making it now, 42 years later, still, the gold standard of not just the Message Movie, but of anything examining the state of race relations in America.

Despite what we've seen lately, a film with a message, or at least a firm political point of view, need not be stoic and self-important. A movie in general, in fact, need not be so easily pigeonholed, and yet in the early 21st century, that's where we've ended up. Video stores and Websites divide movies casually into comedy, drama, action, horror, and foreign, and if you get a really progressive one, they'll throw in animation and alternative lifestyles.

In 1967, your white daughter marrying a non-white man wasn't just an alternative lifestyle, but was -- to use the most diplomatic word possible -- atypical. Just as unusual today as, say, if your white daughter announced she was going to marry someone else's white daughter. Whether it's your first viewing of the film, or your 10th, the parallels ring out so clearly that the movie doesn't seem dated at all. It doesn't need to be remade. It just needs to be re-released. Or watched again every few years, like all good social commentary.

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner is an important film, but it is also a genuinely funny movie, and not just because people really did dance like that in the late 1960s. It's a genuinely dramatic movie, and not just because a young, well-off white woman brings her black fiancé (a doctor) home to meet her parents. It is a genuinely foreign movie, because it takes place in San Francisco in 1967, a place as alien to us now as it was to the rest of America when the film was new.

Most important, however, is that it's a staggeringly well-made movie. Made in a time when directors came from live theater and not music videos or commercials, every shot is as carefully thought-out as the paintings hanging in the Museum of Fine Art where the film is being screened. In fact, some of the shots may even resemble paintings you've seen pass through its hallowed halls (notice an early visual reference to "American Gothic").

Director Stanley Kramer gives attention to every last millimeter of film, with even characters who have less than sixty seconds of screentime giving memorable performances. Pay close attention to the waitress at the drive-in -- in 2009, this is a throwaway part, but in Kramer's film, her every expression is as telling as anyone else appearing in the movie. Like it would be on the stage.

The film is genuinely entertaining in only the most positive meaning of the phrase, from a time when "important movie" and "good movie" were not necessarily mutually exclusive. And while being entertaining (the first reason any film should be made), it has important things to say about not just any racial hierachy, but economical, social, political, generational, and even sexual (it must not be coincidence, surely, that the mother and daughter at the heart of the movie are nicknamed Chris and Joey).

In spite of all this, the film never feels like it's trying to preach, as each character is so well-realized that even the climactic speech (though grandly shot) is as natural as anything else appearing in the film. It never talks to the audience, only with them. Or perhaps it's designed with the hope that they will talk, and listen, with each other.

At the risk of putting a pun forth, the discourse between cultures has always been more than just a black and white issue, but rather about all the shades of grey in between. Guess Who's Coming to Dinner is not an important film made to preach or showcase the talents of the filmmakers in hopes of winning Oscars (though Katherine Hepburn did)...it's merely a film which became important, designed to discuss over dinner afterwards, with whomever you happen to wish to invite.

And, of course, whomever they choose to bring with them.

Starring Sidney Poitier, Katherine Houghton, Isabell Sanford, Katherine Hepburn, and Spencer Tracy in his final film role.