Mediaboy Musings' best and worst of 2012...

Due to a, shall we say, "transitional" period in my work life this past year, I was afforded the opportunity to crank out a lot more writing for this blog than normal, which was a real pleasure. The 110 posts over the past 365 days far exceeded my previous highest total of 73 during the blog's first year in 2009, done over the course of the last six months of that year. Thanks to all who stopped by here for a read, as well as to anybody who left an always-appreciated comment (good or bad). 

As the year wraps up, I present my list of the best and worst in albums, films, and television. To refresh my memory as to the films I saw this past year, I used Box Office Mojo's compilation of movie grosses that lists every title released in theatres and was quite surprised to find only four non-documentary films that I viewed that I'd put in the classification of "great". Because I watch and review so many of them, documentaries are separated into their own category. There's no set structure to my picks - some categories will have one number of selections while another category will have a different number of picks, some categories won't have a corresponding category for one or two of the other art forms, and there's no significance to the order any of them are listed in. Any title underlined is linked to my review of it. And please don't bust my balls over the Taylor Swift pick - I can scarcely believe it's on here, either.  

Best albums: 
Carrie Underwood - Blown Away
Slash - Apocalyptic Love 
Dead Sara - Dead Sara (hands down, my favourite release of the year)
Holly McNarland - Run Body Run
No Doubt - Push And Shove
Bruce Springsteen - Wrecking Ball
Van Halen - A Different Kind Of Truth
Taylor Swift - Red (my second favourite album of the year, I must confess)
Danko Jones - Rock And Roll Is Black And Blue
Alanis Morissette - Havoc And Bright Lights
Garbage - Not Your Kind Of People
Prong - Carved Into Stone
Richie Kotzen - 24 Hours (actually released in November 2011, but I didn't discover it until January)

Worst albums:
KISS - Monster
Aerosmith - Music From Another Dimension
Madonna - MDNA

Most disappointing albums:
Heart - Fanatic
Soul Asylum - Delayed Reaction
Soundgarden - King Animal
Kid Rock - Rebel Soul
Glen Hansard - Rhythm And Repose
The Cult - Choice Of Weapon

Best television programs:
30 Rock
The Daily Show
The Colbert Report
Episodes
Breaking Bad
Real Time With Bill Maher
Boardwalk Empire
An Idiot Abroad
Veep
Enlightened
60 Minutes
Survivor
Key & Peele
PBS' American Masters and American Experience
Louie
Sons Of Anarchy

Worst television programs:
Life's Too Short
Portlandia
The Big C
Californication
Nashville
Any show on Fox News or with "Dancing" in the title

Most overrated television programs:
The Newsroom
The Walking Dead
Homeland

Promising new television programs to keep an eye on:
Girls
Enlightened
Web Therapy
Go On

Best non-documentary films:
The Dark Knight Rises
Cloud Atlas
The Sessions
Men In Black 3

Worst non-documentary films:
Rock Of Ages
The Dictator
Cosmopolis

Best documentaries:
Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory
Artifact
Marley
The Queen Of Versailles
The Invisible War
Beware Of Mr. Baker
Wish Me Away

Most disappointing films (including documentaries):
The Iceman
Detropia
An Affair Of The Heart
The Amazing Spider-Man
The Avengers
Prometheus
Total Recall
Safety Not Guaranteed

Films that weren't as bad as I was expecting:
The Hunger Games
The Expendables 2
John Carter

Happy New Year, folks.

Trent Severn - Trent Severn [album review]

Released in November

Named after the Southern Ontario waterway system, Trent Severn is a Stratford, Ontario-based female folk trio comprised of indie singer-songwriters Dayna Manning (on banjo and guitars) and Emm Gryner (playing bass and stompbox), plus fiddle player/violinist Laura C. Bates. Gryner's name should be familiar to anybody who's stopped by this blog more than once over the past six months, considering I've done three glowing blog entries about her over that period. The group is a labour of love for the women who have "...no interest in conquering markets outside of Canada", as Gryner recently said in an online interview. A couple of the trio's goals in their manifesto are to "Play instruments we can carry" and "Write songs that touch the hearts and tell the stories of our Canadian friends, neighbors, and legends". 

And albums don't get much more Canadian than Trent Severn, with six of the ten songs immediately standing out for their Canadian content titles: "Snowy Soul", "Bluenose On A Dime", "Like A Donnelly", "Muskoka Bound", "Mulroney Times", and "Truscott". The entire album is positively bursting with more Canuck references to The Tragically Hip and Gord Downie, the LCBO, the Arctic, NHL sweaters, the Toronto Maple Leafs, Montreal, Revelstoke and the B.C. shore, parkas, the northern lights, Kate McGarrigle, and John Livingston, the naturalist and voice of the Hinterland Who's Who television spots (talk about an out-of-left-field reference). And that's just scratching the surface. Most of the heaping portions of Canadiana will likely fly over the head of anyone not from this country, but there's enough other qualities to appreciate in Trent Severn's pleasing three part harmony vocals and instrumental interplay rooted in folk, old school country, and bluegrass music.  

Although I'm a huge fan of Gryner's music, that fact that I don't have a large appreciation for any of the aforementioned genres was a definite concern as I approached this album. As mentioned in my recent review of Carrie Underwood's latest album, classic country isn't exactly my bag, nor is folk music, and my interest in bluegrass begins and ends with Alison Krauss (and only when her and her band aren't in full-on hillbilly banjo music mode). Trent Severn unexpectedly fought its way past my general aversion to these genres, although it did take a lot of patience - the first three or four listens to the album were actually a major disappointment and by playthrough ten or so (far more listens than I'll normally give for an album to sink in), the ladies' talents had, by and large, managed to win me over.  

Opening track "Snowy Soul" was one of a handful of songs that immediately grabbed me. It was inspired by an overheard conversation by Gryner in her local bookstore by a man talking about his trip to the Arctic and features some interesting musical layers. The tone shifts from the sunny sounds of the musicians' amazing harmony vocals to the haunting violin lines and there's even a funky bass line underneath Bates' instrumental solo. Unsurprisingly, I found myself warming up a little quicker to the songs where Gryner takes the lead vocal lines, as she does on "Like A Donnelly", "Bluenose On A Dime", and the celebratory Celtic music-infused "Answers". When there is a lead vocalist (accompanying harmony vocals are never far away, though), it's Gryner and Manning who do the bulk of the work, with Bates taking her first ever lead vocal turn on "Wild One". Bates' voice lacks the presence and experience of her partners', however, which detracted somewhat from my enjoyment of the otherwise decent song. Some other observations: "Freedom" succeeds more for its winning chorus than its less memorable verse sections, "Road Less Travelled" evokes the soothing sound of Emmylou Harris, and album closer "Truscott" emerges as one of the LP's best tracks.

Along with enough celebration of Canadiana to make Stompin' Tom Connors proud, the harmony vocal-driven and simplistic, stripped down instrumental framework that Trent Severn rely on results in an intriguing musical venture that isn't perfect, but contains some great moments and makes for a quite satisfying album to wind your day down to. 

Rating: B-

Related posts: my "Get to know Emm Gryner" post from June and reviews from earlier this year of Gryner's Northern Gospel and Best Of albums

Richie Sambora - Aftermath Of The Lowdown [album review]

Released in September

Bon Jovi guitarist Richie Sambora takes a break from his main gig for Aftermath Of The Lowdown, his third solo album and first since 1998. Sambora undoubtedly felt the need to scratch his independent creativity itch, with the ability to fully dictate the creative direction of the music he writes and performs probably being one of the only things that the mostly democratic dynamic in the Bon Jovi juggernaut can't satisfyingly provide him with. That much is obvious after spending some time with his fine first two solo releases and Aftermath Of The Lowdown, an album that retains enough of the musical identity established by the musician over the past three decades, while also mostly departing from Bon Jovi's sound and exploring some interesting different musical avenues.

Unusually, the eleven track album is back-loaded with the best material, starting with song number seven, "I'll Always Walk Beside You". It won't win any awards for originality, but is still a standout with a great chorus and structure where the song's spare first half is accentuated by the full band kick-in on the last half. It's also representative of the deeply personal lyrical content that flows throughout Aftermath Of The Lowdown, as Sambora here pens a heartfelt ode to his daughter. The next three tracks lyrically explore more profoundly emotional territory for Sambora by looking squarely at the substance abuse-related struggles he's undergone over the past several years: "Seven Years Gone" is a more than agreeable slice of melodic hard rock, "Learning How To Fly With A Broken Wing" complements its raw subject matter with what may the heaviest sounding piece of music Sambora's ever had a hand in creating (perhaps only the exceptional and somewhat obscure Bon Jovi track "Good Guys Don't Always Wear White" would give it a run for its money), and the foot is eased off the gas pedal for the mid-tempo and very pleasant "You Can Only Get So High", which is the closest any of the material comes to sounding like Bon Jovi. It's followed by "World", the album closer and what I think is the LP's weakest song, wherein Sambora fully indulges his Beatles fetish.

It's Aftermath Of The Lowdown's "side A" that largely flounders, with too many substandard songs that fail to stick with you in "Takin' A Chance On The Wind", "Nowadays", "Weathering The Storm" (co-written with Elton John lyricist Bernie Taupin), and "Sugar Daddy", which features an interesting gritty guitar part set to maximum fuzz, but little else of interest. They're all preceded by "Burn The Candle Down", an average album opener where Sambora throws down some stellar guitar solos and "Every Road Leads Home To You", another moderately good song whose highly accessible sound made it a logical choice for the album's lead single.

I'm always curious to see how the solo projects of members from megabands is received by the paying public, because they're certainly not known for having a very good track record in terms of commercial success. Aftermath Of The Lowdown follows that same pattern, selling a paltry 3,000 copies in the U.S. during its first week of release and debuting at a rather embarrassing #182 on the Billboard 200 album chart. Even considering the aforementioned trend and the fact that the album was independently released (and therefore likely wasn't promoted like a major label release would have been), that number still completely shocked me, purely because of the size of Bon Jovi's following.   

After the 14 year gap between solo projects, it's nice to hear Sambora exercise his full musical talents here, with his excellent soulful singing voice, more varied songwriting that also looks to have been quite cathartic for the musician, and an opportunity to show off a little more guitar flash than is possible in Bon Jovi. I just wish the decent Aftermath Of The Lowdown had a little more quality consistency to it.  

Rating: C+

Related post: my November 2009 review of Bon Jovi's The Circle album

Carrie Underwood - Blown Away [album review]

Released in May (part of a perpetually ongoing series of reviews covering older releases that "fell through the cracks")

I dislike most things about American Idol, but I've got to give the show credit for providing a career springboard to talented artists like Kelly Clarkson, Chris Daughtry, Allison Iraheta, Kellie Pickler, and Carrie Underwood. Despite some massive success with her first three releases, I was fairly unfamiliar with Underwood's music until hearing the amazing "Remind Me", her duet with Brad Paisley on his This Is Country Music album from last year. Blown Away, her newest album, represents a definitive solidifying of my fandom of the Muskogee, Oklahoma-born artist, delivering an infectious collection of songs that show off Underwood's mighty vocal talents. 

After hearing Blown Away, I was quite surprised to hear Underwood say in an interview on CBC radio show Q earlier this year that she self-identified primarily as a country artist. Granted, most people would probably associate her first with that genre, but Blown Away leans far more in the direction of pop music, with only very light country touches throughout most of the album. The exceptions are "Do You Think About Me", a great stripped back number constructed of a bluegrass-style integration of acoustic guitar, mandolin, accordion, light percussive touches, and steel guitar, "Leave Love Alone", and "Cupid's Got A Shotgun". That last one - and this shouldn't come as much of a surprise based on the title - is a straight up honky tonk boot stomper featuring some blazing guitar work from Paisley. It and "Leave Love Alone" turned out to be two of the three tracks on Blown Away that I have no affinity for, which is more a reflection of my lack of interest in the old school country sound that they adhere to. Truthfully, I'm also a little bored with the habit of pop country artists including one or two obligatory "traditional" country-sounding songs on their albums. Acts I love, like Keith Urban, Lady Antebellum, Martina McBride, Sugarland, and Dixie Chicks are also guilty of it...Shania too, back when she actually put out albums. Call me cynical (and many have), but it seems like somewhat of a shallow effort to maintain both country roots and credibility in the genre. Speaking of credibility, Blown Away's only other dud comes up way short in that department. The limp "One Way Ticket" follows another unfortunate trend from pop country artists: the laid back and reggae-inflected party song, as popularized by the likes of Jimmy Buffet and Kenny Chesney. 

Nearly everything else on Blown Away, however, is decidedly exceptional. The handclap-happy "Good Girl" turns up the rock guitars a little more than on the rest of the album and sure took its sweet time to grow on me. I didn't care for the feisty track at all for the first four or five months that I listened to the album on a regular basis and couldn't understand why one of the LP's seemingly weakest tracks had been picked as Blown Away's first single. Underwood really elevates the mood level on two of the album's standout songs: the title track spotlights Underwood's soaring vocals, telling the tale of a girl huddled in her basement and hoping a tornado raging overhead carries away her alcoholic and abusive father passed out on one of the upper floors; the similarly ominous "Two Black Cadillacs" finds a woman and her husband's mistress uniting to murder him. Between the song's potently illustrative lyrics, Underwood's pipes, and the sensational instrumental performances (highlighted by a lavish symphonic score and a drama-heightening coda), the end result is something spectacular. It's also interesting seeing the dichotomy of Underwood's public persona of a wholesome girl and devout Christian who literally peppers her interview conversations with words like "gosh", "golly", and "dang" offset against her willingness to explore some more dark and sinister subject matter, as was demonstrated earlier in her career on the hit "Before He Cheats". The evocative "Good In Goodbye" features some of Blown Away's strongest lyrics and is far better than its rather cloying title might suggest, as the track's protagonist is thrown off balance by running into an old flame and finds comfort in realizing that life worked out pretty well for the both of them ("But we both ended up where we belong/I guess goodbye made us strong...As bad as it was, yeah as bad as it hurt/I thank God I didn't get what I thought that I deserved"). The album's two closing tracks send things out on a very high note, with the ballad "Wine After Whiskey" and Who Are You" (not a cover of The Who's classic), a song that is as commercially safe a track as you'll ever hear, but mightily uplifting and tremendous just the same.

Rating: A-

Savages [film review]

Released theatrically in July; now available on all home video platforms

Director Oliver Stone follows up 2010's underrated Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps with Savages, which sees the filmmaker returning to the flashy, sexed-up, and violent type of crime drama that he successfully crafted back in the 90s with U Turn and one of my favourite movies of the decade, Natural Born Killers. Savages once again implements, to a lesser degree, some of the hyper-stylized visual elements of the latter through the manipulation of both the film image and editing, plus the usage of graphics. Sometimes the director's choices work and other times they just come across as weird and self-indulgent, such as in the case of the fantasy scene set in a cartoonish-looking Paris where Stone gives himself a brief and jarring cameo, dancing around giddily with an umbrella.    

The film's premise: Chon (played by Taylor Kitsch, at least salvaging a little of his 2012 after starring turns in box office calamities Battleship and John Carter) and Ben (played by Kick-Ass himself, Aaron Johnson) are best friends who run a flourishing marijuana-growing operation in California. They're also knowingly and comfortably involved in an unusual love triangle with a woman named O (played by Blake Lively). When Chon and Ben turn down an offer to go into business with a Mexican drug cartel run by a woman named Elena (played by Salma Hayek), the proverbial guano hits the fan as Elena has O kidnapped in order to get the pair onboard with her business proposition. Double-crosses and much brutal violence ensues as O's men come after her.

Savages should probably crash and burn due to the underwhelming roles of its three leads. Their love triangle concept never quite seems fully formed and the characters feel flat, particularly Lively's. That becomes a problem when the film's main storyline involves Chon and Ben both risking their lives to get Lively's character back. The free-spirited O, who advances the narrative through an over-usage of voiceovers, just hasn't been written with enough substance to justify the pair's strenuous and desperate efforts. She's gorgeous, but that's about it. Stone and co-screenwriters Shane Salerno and Don Winslow (the film is based on his 2010 novel of the same name) also saddle Lively with some dreadfully clunky dialogue. In comparing her two men, she refers to the mellow Ben as a Buddhist and the intense Chon as "a baddist", and in reference to having sex with Chon, a former Navy SEAL, she says "I have orgasms, he has wargasms". Seriously, scribes? The film's wobbly ending also does it no favours.

Luckily, Savages can rely on an excellent secondary cast to pick up the slack. Hayek is fantastic as the beautiful and ruthless drug lord, with the writers nicely giving Elena a weak spot that allows for an intriguing vulnerability to inhabit her otherwise thoroughly vicious character. Benicio Del Toro, as Elena's crude and sadistic enforcer, contributes his signature brand of compelling weirdness and emerges as Savages' best character (while sporting a hysterical mullet). And in a rare quality role for him, John Travolta also appears in a limited capacity playing a corrupt DEA agent.

Savages, despite the significant hole at its centre with some far from dynamic primary characters, is still a decent enough thriller worth your time, mostly due to the very fine supporting work from Hayek, Del Toro, and Travolta. 

Rating: B-

Soundgarden - King Animal [album review]

Released in November

I don't know what the bigger surprise is: that Soundgarden held out from reuniting for so long (King Animal is the band's first release of new material since their acrimonious break up in 1997), or that when they did return, they'd put out such a bland album whose best feature, sadly, is its cover. Drummer Matt Cameron has fared just fine since the band split as the drummer for Pearl Jam, while bassist Ben Shepherd and guitarist Kim Thayil have done little of musical note over that period. The same could be said of singer Chris Cornell, although for altogether different reasons. Cornell's unfulfilling solo work and three album run with Audioslave found the musician struggling to find his post-Soundgarden niche. In the case of his 2009 solo album Scream (which I reviewed here), the outcome was downright disastrous. 

"Live To Rise", the band's theme song from this past spring's Avengers film, would prove to be a harbinger of what King Animal had in store - uninteresting songs completely devoid of the engaging qualities consistent with classic Soundgarden tracks like "Jesus Christ Pose", "Outshined", "Rusty Cage", "Like Suicide", or "Fell On Black Days", just to name a few. And don't misunderstand, I'm not even holding the band up to the lofty standards of songs like those. There simply isn't one track on King Animal that even remotely approaches anything on the level of their best work. Virtually all of these songs are more on par with the plentiful amount of filler that surrounded the great material on Soundgarden's older albums. The bluntly confessional "Been Away Too Long" ("You can't go home, no I swear you never can/You can walk a million miles and get nowhere/I got nowhere to go and it seems I came back") starts off as a decent enough statement-maker to open the album with, but gets bogged down by a mid-song interlude with clanging metal sound effects that totally saps the song of its momentum. "Non-State Actor", "By Crooked Steps", "Attrition", and "Worse Dreams" all similarly fall into the "somewhere below middling" level, unable to evolve their promising ideas into anything memorable. The rest of the songs turn out to be a huge chore to get through, especially the super-sludgey "Blood On The Valley Floor" and "Rowing".  

Most of the ingredients from the grunge gods of old remain intact: Cornell's banshee wail, Shepherd's rumbling bass, Thayil's unique guitar style, Cameron's tastefully busy playing, depressing lyrics, loads of those off-kilter Soundgarden rhythm patterns...they just failed to come up with a single song that truly ignites and makes the decade and a half gap between new Soundgarden albums worth the wait. King Animal is my biggest musical disappointment of 2012. 

Rating: D

Rock Of Ages [film review]

Released theatrically in June; now available on all home video platforms

Full disclosure: musicals are so not my kind of thing - they're just far too inherently cheesy. Frankly, I'd rather watch an episode of the gawdawful Here Comes Honey Boo Boo than spend any more than the ten minutes I took to see what all the fuss was about with the horrid Glee. I do love 80s hard rock, though, which is why I subjected myself to a viewing of Rock Of Ages, the film based on the musical that premiered at a small club in Los Angeles in 2005 and went on to become a Broadway hit. Now, that last sentence might have you hung up on the irony of someone being a hair band fan, yet casting dispersions of fromage upon musicals. I'll be the first to acknowledge the less-than-dignified aspects of the genre, but it comes down to degrees of cheese, you see. Mock it all you want (and I'll admit that the visual components of a lot of the acts and some of the more sex-obsessed songs deservedly opened things up to plenty of ridicule), but I'll staunchly defend the musical merits, both in terms of technical ability on their instruments and songwriting skills, of the majority of the bands from the era. 

The film's screenplay honestly couldn't have taken more than a night for the writers to whip together. The characters are thinly drawn archetypes cribbed from the lyrics of songs that the film celebrates and yes, I get that one isn't looking to a film musical for character depth and engrossing story lines. Even still, both aspects of Rock Of Ages are astonishingly unimaginative. The film's set-up is right out of Poison's "Fallen Angel" song and video, as a young woman from the American Midwest named Sherrie (played by Julianne Hough) makes her way on a Greyhound bus out to L.A. in 1987 to find fame and fortune as a singer. She ends up getting proverbially used up and spat out, eventually resorting to working the pole for employment - I mean, it is straight out of the Poison video. Getting back to the bus ride set-up...that opening scene in the film establishes the massively campy exploits to follow, as the innocent Sherrie lovingly flips through her Lita Ford, Aerosmith, and Poison records before breaking into song with Night Ranger's "Sister Christian", still fighting its way back to respectability from the ironic usage of the track in Boogie Nights (although many would argue that it never had any to begin with). Soon, Sherrie's fellow passengers join her in rockin' out by singing along and bobbing their heads in time to the song. If you somehow haven't managed to crack up at the hilarious absurdity of the scene up to that point then the part with the little girl turning around in her seat and solo singing the "You'll be alright tonight" line is sure to do the trick - I was absolutely howling. Oh, did I mention that Sherrie's last name was "Christian"? How accommodating. Ms. Christian's name actually turns out to be a convenience two-for-one, as she is later serenaded with "Oh Sherrie" by Drew, her romantic interest in the film (played by Diego Boneta). It should come as little surprise that the romance subplot with the pair is woefully underwritten. Drew is an aspiring musician (naturally) who lands Sherrie a job as a waitress at the rock club he works at, The Bourbon Room. 

The Bourbon Room, a legendary and grimy rock venue modelled after L.A.'s Whisky A Go-Go, is the hub of the action for Rock Of Ages. If there were any more examples needed to support my assertion of this movie's half-assed writing then consider these other three unoriginal details from the story: the club is in financial dire straits and the only thing that can save it is the windfall from a show starring Stacee Jaxx (played by Tom Cruise), who got his start at the club playing shows with his now-massively popular band Arsenal; the club is also in the crosshairs of the ultra-conservative Patricia Whitmore (played by Catherine Zeta-Jones) who, along with her church group, wants to clean up the sleazy Sunset Strip area where the venue is located; and shockingly, Patricia's husband (Mayor Mike Whitmore, played by Bryan Cranston) has his own set of kinky character flaws. 

Cruise, one of the very few positives involved with this film, is admirably gung ho as Jaxx. Decked out in long hair, leather, tattoos, and furs, Cruise appears to be channeling the spirits of Axl Rose and Bret Michaels, with demonstrations of hedonistic behaviour and amusing eccentricities, such as owning a pet baboon that accompanies him everywhere. The baboon, by the way, was responsible for the only laughs I had with this film, as opposed to at it. When it comes to pulling off the singing and performing requirements, Cruise does a surprisingly respectable job. His cocksure attitude and completely uninhibited stage moves play as believable and although his singing voice is a little on the thin side, I've certainly heard far worse (in this film, as a matter of fact). He also gamely takes on a very vocally demanding song in "Paradise City". I can't say that Cruise completely steers himself clear of the embarrassment that befalls everyone else in this camp-fest, however. I dare you to keep a straight face as he and Malin Akerman (playing a Rolling Stone reporter) copulate/interpretive dance while duetting on "I Want To Know What Love Is", or later on when he seduces Akerman's character again in a strip joint's private room area. The latter scene, another duet set to The Scorpions' "Rock You Like A Hurricane", makes the similarly staged scenes in Showgirls seem positively tasteful and restrained by comparison. You really have to wonder if Cruise was second-guessing his decision to sign on to the movie when you see him throwing himself around a stripper's pole and singing classically bad lyrics like "The bitch is hungry/She needs to tell/So give her inches/And feed her well" and Klaus Meine's high-pitched "Are you ready baby?" line. But again, kudos to him for taking on the acting challenge, throwing caution to the wind, and fully committing to the role, regardless of how daft he risked coming off. 

Rock Of Ages is a classic case of when bad movies happen to good and great actors. Along with Cruise, Cranston, and Zeta-Jones, Rock Of Ages features Alec Baldwin as Dennis Dupree, The Bourbon Room's crusty manager, and Paul Giamatti as Paul Gill, Jaxx's douchey manager. Both, wearing terrible wigs, are utterly wasted in their roles, to a degree where it's almost bizarrely admirable how botched the opportunity is by director Adam Shankman to have had two of the best actors on the planet appear in your film and not taken advantage of it. Giamatti mercifully only has a couple of lines to sing during the song "Here I Go Again" and acquits himself fairly well. Baldwin, however, has to sing way more than you'd like to hear - his voice is awful and the fact he "hated every moment of it" (as he told Total Film magazine of the singing portions) is not hard to pick up on. There's also a performance of "I Can't Fight This Feeling Anymore" he does with Russell Brand's character that is amazingly bad. Talk about your "for the paycheck only" acting gigs. Speaking of Brand, I can't top this great line about his hair in the movie that Entertainment Weekly magazine came up with, so I'll just regurgitate it here: "It requires a certain cluelessness to take Russell Brand, who probably looked like a rock star at birth, and put him in a fake ebony shag that screams poseur". Indeed.

If you're in the market for some grade-A schlock that is guaranteed to leave you slack-jawed multiple times over its duration, then Rock Of Ages is your film. 

Rating: F   

Late Toronto Blue Jays broadcaster Tom Cheek deservingly named to Cooperstown...

The name "Tom Cheek" and his legacy probably means nothing to you unless you were a baseball fan in Canada after the Toronto Blue Jays joined Major League Baseball in 1977. Cheek was the Jays' radio play-by-play announcer from the time of the club's inception through 2004, broadcasting 162 regular season games a year for almost three decades without missing a single one. That's a total of 4,306 straight ball games, which is an extraordinary achievement and doesn't even include all of the spring training games or the 41 playoff games that he called. He missed his first Jays game when his father passed away in June 2004 and many more that season after having a brain tumour removed just a little over a week following his dad's death. Cheek got better for a short period, but succumbed to the cancer the following year and I don't mind saying that I shed tears when I heard of his death. That's how much his work meant to me and many others who fell in love with baseball and the Jays with the help of the sound of his voice and partner Jerry Howarth's (yes, Tom and Jerry). "The voice of the Blue Jays", as many referred to Cheek, was as much a part of the identity of the Jays as anyone or anything else and in an era where every game wasn't available on TV like today (we were lucky to get one or two a week), Cheek's vivid depictions of the games was a fan's lifeline to their beloved team. Legendary Detroit Tigers broadcaster Ernie Harwell and Los Angeles Dodgers broadcaster Vin Scully are considered the gold standard for baseball play-by-play announcers - give me Cheek and his superlative work over them any day of the week. 

In an announcement yesterday that made my week (and actually got me a little emotional once again), Cheek was selected as the winner of the Ford C. Frick Award for excellence in broadcasting by the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, NY. It's a huge honour, considering the sizable and impressive list of other nominees, the fact that Cheek's career was less visible working outside of America, and because the Baseball Hall of Fame (unlike most other sports halls of fame) is exclusionary and not inclusionary. The induction standards for media figures and the game's off-the-field personnel aren't quite as stringent as they are for players, but any Cooperstown inductee still really needs to have been one of the best in their field to get in. It's great that the Hall recognized Tom Cheek more than met that requirement. 

No Doubt - Push And Shove [album review]

Released in September

If No Doubt never made another album after 2001's Rock Steady, that release would have been a more than honourable way to ride off into the sunset, as I considered it the band's best...at least until I heard their newest LP, Push And Shove. The extensive gap between albums was a result of the group needing a break, the desire of band members to start families, and the massive success of lead singer Gwen Stefani's solo career in the mid 2000s. All of that coincided with her further ascendance as a pop culture heavyweight via the launch of her own fashion line and a cosmetics endorsement that made her face seemingly ubiquitous in magazines and on TV screens. With all the glitzy distractions, my biggest take-away from Stefani's last decade is that none of her solo music came close to engaging me in the same way that her work with No Doubt bandmates Tony Kanal (bass), Adrian Young (drums), and Tom Dumont (guitars) had. And don't even get me started on the alienating effect of that weird human accessory flirtation she had with those Harajuku Girls. A lot of acts nowadays do a fine job of mining the 80s synth pop sound (three of them are right here in Canada with Stars, Metric, and Dragonette), but few do it better than No Doubt. Push And Shove finds the band returning to that comfortable territory, with an extra healthy measure of the familiar SoCal punk, ska, and reggae sounds they've always indulged in. 

Push And Shove is loaded with hit song potential, if that's something that has any meaning left in the pop music wasteland we currently reside in. The title track dabbles in trendy dubstep and if any band has demonstrated a deft ability to pull off the integration of different musical styles, it's No Doubt. I'm conscious while writing my reviews to not be too repetitive with my takes on things, which isn't always easy when you're writing regularly and sticking mostly to a review format. My last review for an album by Dead Sara comments on the considerable amount of genre mixing in their sound and it's nearly impossible to write a No Doubt album review and not mention this is well, so I've pretty much painted myself into a corner here in having to go to that same well once again. Along with the title track's dubstep explorations, the song also showcases heavy ska and dancehall reggae elements (and a vocal appearance by reggae artist Busy Signal), with everything anchored by a hooky pop-rock chorus. The ska and reggae sound dominates two other catchy tracks, "Sparkle" and the bouncy "Settle Down". It's a testament to this foursome's songwriting skills and musical execution that as someone who has no interest in ska, reggae (aside from Bob Marley), or most disposable 80s synth-based music, I can latch on so willingly to the group's stylistic crossovers. A more traditional pop sound is adopted for the summer love lament of "One More Summer" and the laid back, appropriately titled "Easy". "Gravity" and "Heaven" are a couple of other hugely infectious pop numbers, with gooey lyrics from Stefani for her hubby, musician Gavin Rossdale. Some of the affectionate words, such as references about "holding on", are also likely directed towards No Doubt's other three members. "Looking Hot", which lyrically appears to be taking a mild swipe at the paparazzi, is probably my favourite track. More highly pleasing melodies, Stefani's immediately identifiable and endearingly weird vocal style, a great mid-song reggae breakdown...what's not to love?

The musical chameleons of No Doubt pick right up, in terms of quality, where they left off 11 years ago. Push And Shove is the sound of a group that sounds creatively refreshed, loose, and clearly happy to be playing together once again. Love the album cover, too. 

Rating: A-

Dead Sara - Dead Sara [album review]

Released in April (part of a perpetually ongoing series of reviews covering older releases that "fell through the cracks")

Whilst perusing some of the audio and video clips on the site for Nikki Sixx's Sixx Sense satellite radio show earlier this spring, I came across a band I'd never heard of named Dead Sara who I thought I'd give a try. Truthfully, their acoustic performance of the song "Test On My Patience" didn't bowl me over, but I was interested enough to explore further and check out "Weatherman", the first single and video from their independently released self-titled debut album. Hot damn. I was immediately drawn in by the song's Rage Against The Machine-like main guitar riff, the raw vocals of frontwoman Emily Armstrong, and the video's dynamic visuals. Following a quick sampling of one more track, the iTunes store was eventually $9.99 richer and I was on my way to enjoying an album that I've found myself returning to more than any other over the past half year, during a period that has seen a ton of new album releases (especially in the past three months) that have been vying for my listening attention. 

Dead Sara contains 11 songs spanning 43 minutes and there's scarcely a weak moment over that running time, save for some sketchy lyrics I can't make heads or tails of as demonstrated in most of the lyrics from "Weatherman" ("His skin was soft as leather/I'm the Weatherman") or on a track like "Monumental Holiday" ("It's just a matter your violence/Save Jesus/Laugh loud, pretend to let go/Live your life like an Eskimo"). The L.A. quartet, rounded out by founding member and guitarist Siouxsie Medley (not her birth name, I'm guessing), and newest members Chris Null (bass) and Sean Friday (drums), mixes a variety of styles that includes blues, hard rock, grunge, hardcore punk, power pop, and alt rock. Armstrong's voice is the biggest reason why Dead Sara stand out, with its amazing ability to turn on a dime from a restrained delivery to a paint scraping roar. The moments where Armstrong is in that unhinged sing-screaming mode still have a controlled musicality to them, though, which makes them significantly more listenable than most of the tuneless, shredding vocals spat out by, say, a singer from a screamo band. She also has a mighty impressive falsetto that gets regularly employed; considering the obvious early 90s rock influence evident in Dead Sara's sound, I'd bet Armstrong has spent a healthy amount of time listening to Alice In Chains CDs. Interestingly, the numerous interviews I've read from Armstrong cite folk music and Fleetwood Mac as a major influence, although these musical imprints seem less obvious to my ears whenever I listen to her band's songs. The group's name actually derives from the Fleetwood Mac song "Sara", a much wiser pick than the name the band used in an earlier incarnation when they were known as Masturbation Salvation.     

The first five tracks on Dead Sara find the band laying down their musically diverse framework, veering from one style to another and regularly within the same song. Vibrant opener "Whispers & Ashes" practically jumps out of the speakers, driven by Friday's pounding drums and Medley's spirited guitars. "We Are What You Say" marries hooky pop melodies with punk energy and is one of the album's best examples of Armstrong's vocal flexibility. "Weatherman" has so many great moments I don't even know where to start: there's Medley's stupidly simplistic, yet badass main guitar riff (along with an awesome echoed scrape noise against her guitar strings), the intro's fade-in of Friday's manic drumming and his intense playing throughout the track, Null's groove-heavy bass line that's tasteful for the spaces where he's not playing, and Armstrong's magnificently primal singing. I must have watched their performance of this song from their June appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live a good 20 times on my PVR. "Dear Love", like "Face To Face" and "Sorry For It All" on the back half of the album (the latter's more fleshed out arrangement sounds miles better than the rather lifeless version that appeared on the band's debut EP), reveals a more subdued and introspective side of the band, although the songs still have their share of big and loud dynamics. I'd classify the monstrous "Monumental Holiday" as a balls out rocker if the genital-based analogy didn't fit so poorly. On an album packed to the hilt with so many great songs, it's the dark and creeping "Lemon Scent" that stands above the rest. As on "Weatherman", Medley applies a crudely efficient octave-rooted guitar riff while the rest of the band works their magic, resulting in one of my favourite songs of the year.    

Dead Sara feels even more impactful because of the disheartening dearth these days of good female-fronted heavier guitar-based rock bands. Frankly, I'm getting kind of tired holding out for a Veruca Salt reunion. Paramore? Evanescence? The awful Halestorm? Sorry, they're not cuttin' it. Hole/Courtney Love has also seen better days. Coincidentally, Armstrong was picked by Love to sing backup vocals on Nobody's Daughter, Hole's 2010 comeback album (which I reviewed here). Really, the only other decent female-led heavy rock act out there today I can come up with (and "decent" is a gross understatement) is England's Skunk Anansie, who are barely known over here in North America. 

Dead Sara, led by the gifted vocal talents of Armstrong, deliver one of the strongest albums of the year and the most resonant full-length rock debut release I've heard since 2002's Born A Lion from Danko Jones.

Rating: A+