I used to have a blog called In the Court of the Crisco Bandit. That’s all over now, but occasionally I’m gonna cannibalize stuff from it for ADDTF consumption. Here’s a review I wrote of King Crimson’s album Red. It’s good, is what I’m saying.

One of the great pleasures my post-Velvet Goldmine (the film that changed my musical life) explorations into the weirder side of classic rock have afforded me is stumbling across albums that actually meet the cliched criterion of sounding ten years ahead of their time. The Stooges, the MC5, the Velvet Underground, Roxy Music and (my hero) Bowie all had their fair share. A trip to my local used record store (the fantabulous Empire Discs) led me to another one: King Crimson, and their 1974 guitar onslaught Red.

Lead guitarist and mastermind Robert Fripp should be familiar to anyone who’s heard his often imitated, never duplicated soaring-siren guitar sound on Bowie’s “Heroes”; he’s also responsible for one of my top-five all-time favorite guitar solos, the relentless high-end trainwreck in the middle of Eno’s “Baby’s on Fire.” In addition, he’s credited with coining the term “dinosaur rock”–to refer to his own band, impressively enough.

But those of you who were already familiar with Fripp’s work don’t need me to tell you that in an oddly conservative era for solo-driven music, the guy was (to nigh-unforgivably understate things) something else. From start to finish, Red is a rhythmic and sonic assault on the ears, as licks and meters intersect, divide, and pile on top of one another with all the weird geometric mysticism of Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition. Bassist/vocalist John Wetton and drummer Bill Bruford provide a durable, mercurial rhythm section eminently capable of carrying Fripp’s riffs (kicking and screaming, it would seem) from one weird-time-signature section of each song to the next. Yet for all the non-grooviness, the album grooves; grooves in an inescapable, evil, “uh oh i know where this is going and it’s going to be scary” way. The effect is one that Tool (who toured with the Crimson last year) have harnessed to great effect time and again. (And even Bowie’s non-Fripp late 70’s work reflects the influence. Compare the structure of Red’s instrumental title track to that of Low’s opening instrumental, “Speed of Life,” for example.)

I’ve often seen the word “joyless” used by reviewers when they don’t like an album. However, to call Red joyless is to pay it a great compliment. This is serious, angry, strangely (almost existentially) frightening music. It means business.

When I first graduated from college I worked as a P.A. on various films and TV shows for about half a year. A P.A. is a “production assistant,” a Latin phrase meaning “indentured servant.” Like everyone on a film or TV crew, PAs work 12-14-16 hour days and run around like crazy people. Unlike everyone else on a film or TV crew, they do absolutely nothing creative and spend most of their time getting bagels, making copies, shuttling people from place to place, and picking up stuff at Home Depot. And oh yeah, they don’t get paid.

One of the films I PA’d on wasn’t so bad, because it was a micro-budget digital-video indie film, and NO ONE was getting paid. The film was called (at the time) Mondo Cruel, or Cruel World, and it told the story of two Hispanic brothers from Washington Heights and the various trials and tribulations the older brother (an ex-con) goes through to keep the younger brother (who just graduated second in his class from high school) away from their father (I won’t spoil the film, but there’s good reason for this). This was the first film I’d worked on since graduation, so it was a ton of fun seeing how all this stuff worked, even if most of it consisted of the skeleton crew that made it (myself included) riding around in the back of a cargo van, pretending to have permits from the Mayor’s Office for Film and TV, and marveling at the fact that no one above 100th St. gets their dogs neutered. It was a long hot summer and a challenging, involving film.

Now it’s called Manito, after the younger brother, and it’s apparently getting all sorts of good reviews and did well at Sundance and Tribeca. Hell, Slate is writing about it. I haven’t seen it myself, and now I’m all excited to do so. It’ll take me back to one of the only worthwile PA jobs I ever did–worthwhile in the sense that I was part of something good, and worked for good people. I wish them well.

(PS: Yes, Franky G. was a big dude.)

(PPS: Astute viewers of Manito might be able to spot The Missus in the graduation party scene. Hint: She’s the non-boriqua.)

A while back I mentioned that my boss’s assortment of action figures could convincingly be the touring company for a Cats revival. Looking around the office now I see that some additions have been made that might offset this somewhat. Butch-as-hell Orion and Darkseid, from Jack Kirby’s New Gods saga, are now here, and so is Batman. Of course, they’re all still in their boxes, instead of out and proud (so to speak) like their fellow figures. And Batman comes in a pack with Robin, who I’m pretty sure I saw attempting to teach the Dark Knight the cowboy dance from Madonna’s “Don’t Tell Me” video. But finally, and somewhat disturbingly, there’s an Eminem action figure, who’s been making threatening gestures in Mon-El’s direction. Green Lantern and Cyclops might have to get Stonewall on his ass.

So my Fergless weekend has proceeded much as predicted: With much eating of pizza and watching of movies with vomit in them. (For those who don’t know, the missus is emetophobic. The slightest glimpse of vomiting, dry-heaving, retching etc. in a film and she goes fetal for about half an hour. It’s unpleasant.)

Re: The Ring–holy moses! This is a frightening, frightening movie. Please do yourself a favor and watch it in the dark by yourself–boy, what a great time you’ll have! Dead faces in mirrors, bizarre noises, frightening phone calls–it’s a recipe for having a blast when you’re all by your lonesome!

Yeah, it scared the crap out of me. Which of course meant that I was delighted, since I am an enormous horror aficionado. I wrote my senior thesis on the types of imagery in horror films that I feel are the most effectively horrifying (as opposed to gross or jump-out-and-scare-you startling), and it’s as if The Ring’s filmmakers simply read it and applied everything I said. Plus, for a horror buff it’s just a smorgasbord: I caught allusions to The Shining, Hellraiser, Jacob’s Ladder, The Blair Witch Project, Shivers, Videodrome, Candyman, Psycho, The Silence of the Lambs, The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, Twin Peaks and Eraserhead (and Scream, but hey, they can’t all be winners*). This is a geniunely frightening film, and there aren’t a lot of those anymore.

Case in point: Ginger Snaps, the other movie I watched this Fergless weekend. It’s actually pretty bright: it’s an indie film that uses werewolves as a metaphor for female adolescent sexuality, menstruation, etc. A sharp concept is undercut by the fact that the filmmakers don’t seem to know whether they want the main characters to be sympathetic or not; you can practically feel their indecision as the film careens from mood to mood and ratchets up the violence with seemingly very little regard for pacing or believability. It has its moments–mostly clever ones rather than scary ones–and the monster’s behavior could compare favorably to Clive Barker’s monumental short story “Rawhead Rex” (in which the titular character is basically the final word in “monster runs amok” genre stories), but by the end of the interminable climax, you really don’t know what you’re supposed to be feeling, nor do you care.

Oh hey, she’s back! Hooray! Cold pizza for everybody!

*I actually liked Scream when I first saw it–which was at a drive-in with famed dopey-movie aficionado Kennyb, so that explains a lot. It was clever and scary, but it doesn’t stick in your mind any more than, say, Men in Black, and it was a terrible thing to base half a decade of horror movies on. Thank God for Shyamalan.)

Superhero comics do a lot of things well; depicting criminals realistically isn’t one of them. Multiracial vest-sporting gangs, bad attempts at dialect that consist primarily of leaving the d’s off the word “and” and the g’s off anything ending in “ing,” Mafia stereotypes that involve grandiose ring-kissing and boss-of-bosses crap that never actually happens–it’s what I’ve come to expect from all but the best costumed crimefighter comics that take a break from supervillains to delve into the underworld. So I picked up Kingpin #1, the first issue of a new series about the lord of organized crime in the New York City patrolled by Spider-Man and Daredevil, with expectations lower than the odds that Paulie Walnuts will live through Season 5 of The Sopranos.

I like the character–he currently makes regular, compelling appearances in Brian Bendis and Alex Maleev’s ongoing Daredevil title, alternately menacing and protecting his horn-headed archenemy in a pulp-fiction pas de deux. And it’s not that I doubted the talent involved in this particular Kingpin project. Writer Bruce Jones, the oldest “new kid” on the Marvel Comics block, has reinvigorated The Incredible Hulk, turning it into something creepy, mysterious, edgy and (get this) sexy–all while hardly ever showing the Hulk himself (it’s the threat of turning into the Hulk, Jones realized, that makes the life of Bruce Banner so interesting). Layout artist Sean Phillips turned in the best artwork for Uncanny X-Men in recent memory, while finisher Klaus Janson is rightly renowned for his legendary Daredevil and Batman collaborations with Frank Miller (the Daredevil books featured the Kingpin quite prominently), as well as his strong solo work (I particularly like his adaptation of Clive Barker’s best short story, “In the Hills, the Cities,” found in the recent collected edition of the Barker anthology comic Tapping the Vein). Nor was I echoing the kvetching of the continuity wonks, who’ve complained loud and long that the Kingpin series, taking place as it does during a time when both the Kingpin and his web-spinning nemesis are just starting out in their respective careers, is playing fast and loose with the strictly-monitored timeline of the Marvel Universe (in all his appearances up to this point, Kingpin appears to be much older than Peter Parker). I’ll buy anything if it gives me a good story and tells it with impressive art–but this was a crime comic set in a superhero world, and experience has taught me that instead of the usual comics-title superlatives (Amazing, Uncanny, Invincible, Ultimate), that kind of comic might as well be tagged with the adjective “Inessential.”

It’s great news, then, that the creators of this comic devoted to the meanest, most murderous bastard ever to cross paths with the tights-wearing set know that, like revenge, the Kingpin is a dish best served cold. This is a crisp, gritty, brutal book, indulging in no honor-among-thieves cliches and getting straight to the heart for whom power is an end in itself.

Still known as plain old Willie Fisk at the time of this story, the title character is an enormous, bald side of beef navigating the dangerous intersection of street gangs and the Five Mafia Families of New York. This first issue concerns his and his newfound lieutenants’ attempts to simultaneously wrest control of the gangs from the Mafia, consolidate the gangs they take over, and expand their drug-dealing territory into white areas of the city. To say much more would be to spoil nasty twists that surprised even a veteran what-passes-for-surprise-in-superhero-comics predictor like me.

It’s not just the story that makes this debut issue so strong: the devil, as is his wont, is in the details. The stark, expressionistic tints employed by colorist Lee Loughridge play up the irrationality and violence of young Fisk’s world, and imbue the deceptively cartoonish Phillips/Janson artwork with menace. The imagery takes unexpected turns: with the flip of a page one can find oneself immersed in the sensual, pulpy eroticism that’s fast becoming one of Jones’s strongest suits. A brief cameo by Spider-Man is largely silent and appropriately eerie–after all, the intrusion of such a gaudily costumed, inhumanly powerful being into the mean streets would be genuinely disconcerting to Fisk, and should be so to us as well. Even the layouts of panels on the page and objects within the panels, facets of comic art too often neglected in superhero books, are smart: After you read the book, take a good look at the first & last pages and see what they alone tell you about the man called Kingpin. As it stands now, I’m willing to learn as much about him as this bunch is willing to teach.

Just got an advance copy of a new Killing Joke album in the mail. As if the words “new Killing Joke album” weren’t surprising enough, who should turn up on drums but Dave Grohl! I guess Martin Atkins has thoroughly burned his bridges at this point.

Blogger Johnny Bacardi (working permalinks pending–try the home page) points out, in a recent round-up of some vinyl records he’s been listening to, that Bootsy’s Rubber Band, P-Funk/JB’s bassist Bootsy Collins’s ’70’s side project, is fricking awesome. People, listen to the man: he’s right on the money. One of the finest funk records I’ve ever heard is the Rubber Band’s Live in Louisville 1978. The band taps into the cosmic groove so deeply on this record it’ll make your hair hurt. When the horns kick in at the end of “Very Yes”–send in the weapons inspectors, because that shit is THE BOMB.

Johnny also talks a bit about Roy Wood, which, as anyone who’s heard “The Ball Park Incident” will tell you, is always a good idea.

Man, but I’ve been prolific with them long reviews lately! I promise I’ll get back to the usual brief, stupid crap. For example, why was there an O.B. tampon plastic wrap-band thingee on the floor of the men’s room today?

Everybody (Alien Deppey Doane Harris) is blogging about various recent Marvel comics, the Marvel Comics rating policy, and the trouble both are causing with squeamish retailers.

There are a lot of factors at play here. One is that it seems cheap to imply (as Alan David Doane and Dirk Deppey appear to) that the creators are somehow behaving sleazily by putting adult content into their books. Marvel’s T&A covers are one thing–in many cases they have little or nothing to do with the book behind them, and that is sleazy, particularly when the covers aren’t even sexy except to the stereotypical lonely fanboy–but a book like Bruce Jones’s Incredible Hulk is an intelligently written thriller for mature audiences, which features realistically disturbing violence and (in the Abomination story arc, and I swear I’m not kidding) realistically arousing sensuality. It’s not Jones’s decision to give an issue with an attempted rape scen a PG rating and a 25-cent pricetag in what seems to be an effort to get kids to read the thing. (As a side note, the very grown-up nature of Jones’s Hulk tales might actually make a second Hulk title make sense, if it were substantially differentiated from Jones’s by being geared toward a more all-ages audience.)

As for Chuck Austen’s The Eternal, well, the content is indeed strong stuff. Sex slaves, sadism, rape-murder, interspecies mating–“yuck” about sums it up. Of course, all this makes Austen’s depiction of the Eternals as racist marauding scum perfectly convincing, and in future issues I’d imagine we’ll see the main character set apart from this depravity. In addition, sleaziness is Austen’s strong suit: compare his riveting pulp mini-epic U.S. War Machine or this disturbing Eternal issue to the ponderous Captain America or preachy Uncanny X-Men (which, it should come as a surprise to no one, boasts a naked jump-rope scene as its most original and entertaining moment). Moreover, The Eternal is part of Marvel’s mature-audience MAX line, which the company has always made clear is not to be sold to children. And at any rate the sex scenes are in the book are filled with nudity and shocking in their way, but they’re certainly not explicit (a point Franklin Harris, in a post that correctly defends Jones and Austen, makes quite clearly). If this is explicit, Dave Cooper’s Weasel is a criminal offense. And look at the retailers’ reasons for objecting to the book: erroneous claims that it contains “graphic sex scenes”; complaints that, essentially, Marvel is breaking this guy’s favorite toys (coupled with the usual “Why should someone’s sexuality, which after all is merely a biological imperative inherent to every human being, enter into a story?” stupidity, as well an inability to come up with anything other than the CSI comic as an example of a good mature-readers title); taking offense at what is perceived as blasphemy (now that’s a good reason for taking something off your store shelves–provided you sell comics in Tehran, or Eric Rudolph’s backyard); pining for the halcyon days of the “consistent” Comics Code (folks, believe me, that antiquated piece-of-shit rubber-stamp quasi-ratings-system has died a death it richly deserved). Are these the people you want deciding what comics should be labelled “good,” let alone “mature”?

If there’s a problem, it’s not the talent, or with a clearly adults-only line like MAX–it’s inconsistency with which Marvel applies its ratings. High-profile books seem to get a free pass when it comes to highly violent or sexual content. Whether they use adult content intelligetly (Jones’s Hulk, Grant Morrison’s sexually charged and challenging New X-Men, Pete Milligan’s satire of Reality TV immorality X-Statix) or like an episode of The Man Show is beside the point–if you’re going to have a self-regulated ratings system, use it the way it’s meant to be used. It’s ridiculous to give J. Michael Straczynski’s adventure-romp Amazing Spider-Man the same rating as a seedy study of criminality like Jones’s Kingpin. And it won’t be surprising if retailers, in an effort to crack down on “dirty books” getting to minors, start throwing out the baby with the bathwater (if by “bathwater” you mean books with big-titted women punching each other).

It sure ain’t cool to say Beck isn’t cool anymore.

The parts of the new Radiohead album that I like, I like a lot: the “no no no no no no no no” part at the beginning of “A Punchup at a Wedding”; the high-pitched ahhs when Thom mentions sirens singing in “There There”; the quiet “sha na na nas” also in “There There”; the lines about the Big Bad Wolf threatening Thom’s kids if he “squeals to the cops” in “A Wolf at the Door” (these lyrics are probably appealing to me because of the Law & Order obsession I’ve got). I just think a lot of it is kind of lifeless.

One more thing. Since this blog seems increasingly dedicated to talking about whatever Dirk Deppey’s talking about, I just want to call attention to his characterization of the upcoming young-adult romance comic Trouble, by superstar writer Mark Millar:

QUOTE: “Millar’s work reads like it’s [sic] job is to produce a hit comic which leads to bigger paychecks on better projects.”

I haven’t read the book yet, and I plan on doing so because books for this audience interest me on a professional level, but hoo doggy, has Dirk pinpointed a problem with much of Millar’s work at this point. Good God, has there ever been a smugger comic-book writer? Or one more convinced that everything he touches turns to gold, which in turn will enable him to touch more soon-to-be-golden things? His self-satisfaction with his own work and relentless broadcasting of same would make the Stan Lee who called Fantastic Four “The World’s Greatest Comics Magazine” blush. There are a lot of great comics writers who evince a certain self-confidence in their own intelligence and abilities–for example, Alan Moore or Grant Morrison (Millar’s fellow Scotsman, as well as his mentor). But these guys are often making bold conceptual, stylistic and philosophical strides within their comics. Millar can write some killer superhero books (The Authority, Ultimate X-Men, The Ultimates), but when all is said and done they’re straightforward, if well-written and “decompressed,” slugfests, the sole philosophical underpinning of which is some tedious kneejerk-liberal “the smart, humanistic thing to do would be to have the army hand out Girl Scout cookies, because this would solve all the world’s problems” sophomore-year dorm-room pop politics. Lately Millar has taken to complementing this smug style with ridiculous overstated would-be epigrams, which bare not even a tangential relationship with reality, in his columns and interviews: to paraphrase, “There’s no racism to speak of in Scotland,” “There are no indie writers today that can even touch the best superhero writers in terms of quality,” “Comic book writers will be the dot-com billionaires of the next decade,” and so on.

It’s probably titanically idiotic to poo all over the biggest writer in an industry I hope to work in soon, unless of course Mr. Millar takes the same turn-the-other-cheek approach he espouses in his comics, where, for instance, he has lead X-Man Cyclops “forgive” Wolverine for trying to kill him in order to steal his girlfriend and then expects us all to sit around and applaud this course of action as “the gateway to the future of post-humanity” or somesuch gobbledygook. Really my point is that I love 90% of every comic I’ve read by Millar–I’m just worried that his head’s getting so big that if he ever writes his autobiography it’ll have to appear in The Journal of MODOK Studies.

(Jesus God, was that ever an inside geekjoke. I apologize to everyone.)

Mrs. Collins will be gone doing some teachery thing all night tonight and all day tomorrow. What this means is that I’ll be eating Cherry Cola Mike & Ikes, Dominos Pizza (including those delicious Dominos Dots), and perhaps even TGI Friday’s Bacon & Cheddar Potato Skin Chips. I’ll probably end up renting movies with graphic violence and vomit in them and watch those too. Normally all this would be a lot of fun for me, but not when it means that I’m doing it instead of snugglin’ my special lady friend.

Awwwwww.

Anyway, if The Ring is good, I’ll let you know.

Read James Taranto’s first item today. You see, the secret to comedy is that it’s funny, because it’s true.

STOP REPRODUCING

CALM THE EFF DOWN

I’ve got to cop to a certain bias when it comes to talking about Led Zeppelin, because quite frankly, I literally can’t imagine what my young life would be like without them. From attempting to decipher the mysteries of my dad’s vinyl copy of IV to wading repeatedly through the 4-disc box set Zep produced in the early ’90s to receiving The Motherlode, The Complete Studio Recordings, while a sophomore in high school, my musical, mental, and even physical development are inextricably linked to the band, who in Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones and John Bonham had quite simply the best singer, guitarist, bassist, and drummer in rock and roll history, period. Whether it’s epics like “In My Time of Dying” and “Ten Years Gone” or balls-out bullets of rock energy like “Heartbreaker” and “Living Loving Maid,” I’ve more deeply internalized Zeppelin’s music than any other band.

So words fail me when attempting to describe Led Zeppelin’s new triple-disc live album (are there seven more beautiful words in the English language?), How the West Was Won. This is because it is soooooooo heavy. Heaviosity, I realize, is an increasingly rare critical barometer of quality, but I find it as reliable as any other, and people, this monstrosity of rock is heavy. It’s “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath” heavy. It’s “The Thing That Should Not Be” heavy. It’s “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)” heavy. It’s, well, every song you ever loved by Led Zeppelin heavy.

Discovered during a trip through the vaults by Jimmy Page in preparation for the simultaneously released live Zep DVD, and consciously set up as an antidote to the band’s lackluster live album from the 70s, The Song Remains the Same (the record was left out of the Complete box, so if Led Zeppelin’s my religion in some sense, that’s the band’s apocrypha), the performances that comprise the album’s three discs were taken from post-IV, pre-Houses of the Holy shows in Los Angeles in which the band could almost literally do no wrong. I don’t know how many times that, upon listening to the live version contained herein of a Zeppelin classic I’d already heard three thousand times before, I burst into an irrepressible, idiotic grin. As if the lengths listed next to the tracks weren’t enough to get your rocks off (“Moby Dick”–19:23! “Whole Lotta Love”–23:07! “Dazed and Confused”–25:fricking25!), there’s the soul-crushing fury with which John Bonham pounds his drums during the opening riff for “Out on the Tiles,” which is used to kick of a searing rendition of “Black Dog.” There’s the warrior wails from Robert Plant throughout the album-opening “Immigrant Song,” which peel through the ether as though he’s reluctant to cut them short. There’s the unexpected ferocity with with Page, Jones and Bonham kick out the jams in the half-acoustic half-electric “Over the Hills and Far Away.” There’s the smile you can see in your mind’s eye, plain as day, on Plant’s face as he (one would assume) woos some pretty young thing in the audience by following up “Black Dog”‘s assertion that “big legged women ain’t got no soul” with the sly spoken admission “I could be wrong….” And, oh yeah, there’s “Stairway to Heaven.” (NOTE: When I saw Page & Plant close their first tour together in decades at Madison Square Garden some years back, they kicked off the 3rd or 4th encore of the night with the words “one more song!” Everyone thought it’d be “Stairway”; everyone was wrong (it was “Rock and Roll”). Hearing the infamous track on this record almost makes up for the taunt. Almost.)

Now that critics have decided that the highest calling in music is to rock with your cock out, as Zeppelin at their best so often did, dozens of sweaty bands in sweaty clubs in sweaty cities across America and the UK have been vying for “next big thing” status on the strength of their comparability to the big boys of yesteryear. One such band is NYC’s Yeah Yeah Yeahs, who’ve followed up an acclaimed and excellent eponymous EP with the new full-length Fever to Tell. Lead singer Karen O is often, and probably inevitably, the center of attention for this band, which is better known for her sex- and (literally) beer-soaked live performances than for any actual musical reasons. (The fact that the chorus of “Bang,” the song that kicked off the band

My boss is a big comic book fan. He’s also a sucker for tchotchkes: our office is so full of poseable action figure and ceramic statues and toy AT-ATs and such that it looks like Romper Room. Needless to say the combination of fanboyhood and disposable income leads to some intereting purchases, and Lord have mercy, the boss man has the gayest assortment of comic-hero action figures known to man. We’re talking glasses-wearing Tim Hunter from The Books of Magic, gothy Morpheus from Sandman, leather-wearing James Marsden replica Cyclops from the X2 movie toy line, black-spandex clad Green Lantern Kyle Rayner, and Superboy’s friend Mon-El. He’s just a Robin and an Aqualad shy of being able to accurately recreate the back room of the Metropolis franchise of the Cock.

Once again I’ve got to cop to bias when it comes to a band I’m writing about: As I detailed in this post, the (one-sided, imaginary) relationship Thom Yorke and I have been in for the past half-decade appears to have reached the point of irreconcilable difference.* The point I was trying to make with that article was largely missed, I think; I’m not angry or enraged or indignant or anything like that. I’m just sad, is all, sad that from now on, every time I hear this band I onced loved so deeply, I’ll be reminded that they think I’m either terminally gullible or irredeemably ruthless. (Both may be true, of course.)

So it was with trepidation that I bought Radiohead’s much-anticipated new disc, the bluntly titled Hail to the Thief. Advance critical reaction, as usual, had consisted of the kind of oddly undescriptive superlatives that indicate that the critic in question a) remembers Lit Crit 101 and b) can’t make heads or tails of the record. It’s a pattern that emerged in some quarters with the electrosoaked Kid A and became pandemic with the even more difficult Amnesiac. Aside from the agreed-upon angry political over/undertones (it depends on which reviewer you’re asking), therefore, I didn’t know what the heck I was getting myself into.

What Hail is, despite the rage that underlies it, is a strangely inert document of a time in which Yorke and his bandmates felt increasingly helpless. This in itself is par for the Radiohead course–since the first line on The Bends, “You can force it but it will not come,” powerlessness has been the band’s stock in trade–but for the first time the music seems to reflect the lyrics, shuffling nervously and never attempting to break free of its largely self-imposed chains. Yorke, who is blessed with the world’s most angelic set of pipes and cursed with the face of the kid from Deliverance, sings every note seemingly until he runs out of air, from long soaring cries to short breathy gasps; it’s as though he’s gunning for the title of World’s Worst Breath Support. His vocals often slide into incoherence, sometimes with the help of electronic de-enhancement, which reflects his increasing desperation but also makes Tori Amos’s diction seem like that of Walter Cronkite. With the exception of the rhythmic, sharp-as-a-knife repeated line “I don’t know why I feel so tongue-tied” in “Myxomatosis,” the album lacks the kind of chilling vocal directness that made lines like “This machine will–will not communicate” from The Bends’ “Street Spirit” so disarmingly effective. Moreover, quiet, semi-acoustic numbers like “Sail to the Moon” and “I Will,” despite their Beatlesque titles and optimistic lyrics (“Sail” speaks of a future President knowing right from wrong; “I Will” swears to view the world through “babies’ eyes”), are no respite from the static, claustrophobic gloom. Compared to similar numbers from the band’s past, like “Bullet Proof (I Wish I Was)” or “How to Disappear Completely,” there’s no shelter here.

Indeed, in that regard Hail closely resembles its immediate predecessor, Amnesiac. On both records, the gloriously soaring, cathartic moments of the bands’ earlier efforts, be they quiet and heartrending or loud and mindblowing, are nowhere to be found. There’s no attempt to ruuuuuuun (“Creep”), no aching guitar pile-up (“Blowout”), no ironically triumphant claim that everything is broken (“Planet Telex”), no flying like Peter Pan (“Bones”), no saving of lives (“Airbag”), no everlasting peace (“Exit Music (For a Film)”), no glacial majesty (“Treefingers”), no spinning round and round and round and round and round (“Morning Bell”). It’s when you put Radiohead up against their own catalog that you realize what a monumentally tough act they are to follow, even when it’s them doing the following.

The album achieves its greatest success when it makes its few genuine attempts at forward motion. The acoustic-strumming strive of “Go to Sleep” evinces the same heady blend of musical optimism and lyrical cynicism that distinguished Jethro Tull at their best (which only an idiot would believe isn’t a hell of a compliment). The album’s best tracks utilize R&B rhythms and techniques, as in the defiantly groove-oriented first single “There There” (which, if it had first appeared on The Bends, would have blown people’s minds), or the pissed-off but subtle strut of “A Punchup at a Wedding” (probably the album’s best song, it simultaneously evokes DJ Shadow’s “Building Steam with a Grain of Salt,” Isaac Hayes’s “Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic,” and Neil Young’s “Southern Man”). The aforementioned ode to communicable rabbit disease, “Myxomatosis,” features a pulverizing synthbass riff so propulsive it’s frightening, as it should be given the song’s violent content.

Hail to the Thief ends with “A Wolf at the Door,” Yorke’s account of the threatening phone calls he receives from the Big Bad lupine entity of lore. Singing quite convincingly like a frightened child, it’s probably Yorke’s best moment on the record, but you can’t help but wish that at some point during the album he’d have bit the bullet and let the wolf in.

All of which makes the Deftones’ eponymous new album all the more refreshing. Their last album, White Pony, was what Kid A would have sounded like if after OK Computer Radiohead had listend to less Aphex Twin and more Black Sabbath. Sonically expansive and thrillingly experimental for the work of a band that got its start touring with Limp Bizkit, White Pony‘s highly textural and emotional epics were easily the most intelligent and rewarding metal songs this side of Tool.

Deftones takes the process of morphing its musicians from rapping nu-metalheads to bold experimentalists gloriously further. The first minute of its opening track, “Hexagram,” contains more visceral joy, rage and energy that practically all of Hail to the Thief put together. “Worship, play, play, worship,” chants lead singer Chino Moreno frantically, as though he himself can’t decide which to do. “Minerva,” with its ascending chords and gutwrenching screams of “God bless you all for the song you sang,” is the most emotionally affecting postmodern power ballad since the title track of Nine Inch Nails’ The Fragile, and “Anniversary of an Uninteresting Event,” with vocals emerging from a lonely, watery place and a toy piano tinkling melancholically throughout, conjures up the bittersweetest adolescent memories you’d care to relive. And then, of course, there are wall-to-wall catharsisfests, like “When Girls Telephone Boys,” The overall product is one of intense emotional power, even at the album’s quietest.

Unfortunately, it’s an intensity too few music fans will experience. The Deftones have been largely ignored precisely by the kind of people who’d most enjoy them, primarily because of their long-time association with the baggy-pants crowd (Korn, Bizkit), their own frequent sporting of said pants, and the simple fact that they aren’t British. But the band has always admitted to musical influences that’d get booed right off the Summer Sanitarium stage, from Violator-era Depeche Mode to Pinkerton-era Weezer. Radiohead at their best also clearly shaped the band into its current brilliant form. With any luck, Thom will pick up Deftones on his next swing through the States, and the favor will be returned. It won’t be a moment too soon.

* (To digress for a minute, in a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Thom suggested that as bad as Saddam Hussein is, the weakening of the UN precipitated by the US and UK is worse. If I could I’d point out to him that the UN always did whatever the US (or, in its day, the USSR) wanted to do anyway, and that though it might now appear to be a counterbalance to the US’s power, perhaps an organization that puts Libya in charge of the Human Rights commission isn’t much of a moral arbiter. He also explained that the whole album stems from the sinking feeling he got while hearing the BBC report that Bush stole the 2000 election. I wasn’t thrilled about that at the time by any stretch of the imagination, but I’ll just say that if I were to record a politically-charged album between late 2001 and early 2003, I’d probably be focusing on a certain even that took place eleven months after that election. But that’s enough of that.)

Whoever’s in charge of Target’s advertising is a goddamn genius. Having worked in the business for a couple years now, I can tell you that ad campaigns that completely reinvent a company’s image and revitalize its sales are ridiculously rare. Cute clothes, hip music, punchy graphics, and voila–Target is now a place I shop at regularly. Well done. Also, they managed to use an Andrew W.K. (“Don’t Stop Living in the Red”) song in an appropriate fashion–i.e. unlike certain beer commercials (again with the commercials?–ed.) they don’t show a bunch of dimpy thirty year olds going to TGI Friday’s or whatever, drinking Coors Effing Light and playing pool and cheering for an NBA team and flirting with “hot” women while Andrew screams “IT’S TIME TO PARTY!!! LET’S PARTY!!!” in the background. That’s taking the name of Andrew WK in vain, people. When Andrew WK speaks of partying, he’s not referring to guys in khakis eating mozzarella sticks and flipping through Maxim–oh no. When Andrew WK parties, cars are driven into swimming pools–from the eighth floor of a hotel.

Anyway, I digress. Target ads good. But why, why, why are do they not sell clothes with the little red target logo on them? Does this not seem like a no-brainer to you? Those clothes are so cute! I’d wear ’em! Target, if you are listening, please make clothes with little red Targets on them. I don’t know how much clearer I could be about this.