Shaolin Funks page 1 – Music – Village Voice – Village Voice

The News Review:

- Shaolin Funks page 1 – Music – Village Voice – Village Voice
- Metal is back
- We Are the Romans
- Circle: Katapult < Music | PopMatters
- WWII death leads to bond years later

Shaolin Funks page 1 – Music – Village Voice – Village Voice
Village Voice – Sep 11, 2007
“We’re the Budos—we got a new album out and it’s got a scorpion on the front” exclaimed baritone-sax player and quasi-bandleader Jared Tankel from the cramped stage. He’s telling the truth: It’s a freakishly golden scorpion you might find crawling around the lava-spitting volcano that graced the cover of the band’s 2005 self-titled debut. These images combined with song titles like “Ride or Die” “Chicago Falcon” “King Cobra” and “rigin of Man” might lead you to peg the Budos as a gang of teenage wannabes shredding up some frustrated outer-borough death metal. Instead they’re a bunch of hirsute twenty- and thirtysomethings churning out gritty cinematic soul worthy of the most formidable go-go dancers. And while none materialized at Joe’s enough hipsters got their swerve on to suggest that if the band was allowed to spew its groove long enough some naughty shit would inevitably go down. Unfortunately a short sticky encore had to suffice forcing us to wait until the Staten Island Ferry system realizes they’ve found a perfect house band. In fact one of the best ways to experience the Budos raw is to take said ferry on a Monday night jump on the SIR to the Stapleton stop walk a half-mile or so down Bay Street—past the ratty bars pizzerias and decaying façade of the Paramount Theater—and take a right on Sands Street heading to the end of block specifically the white building with holy scripture painted on the side… Unfortunately a short sticky encore had to suffice forcing us to wait until the Staten Island Ferry system realizes they’ve found a perfect house band. In fact one of the best ways to experience the Budos raw is to take said ferry on a Monday night jump on the SIR to the Stapleton stop walk a half-mile or so down Bay Street—past the ratty bars pizzerias and decaying façade of the Paramount Theater—and take a right on Sands Street heading to the end of block specifically the white building with holy scripture painted on the side. If you don’t get your ass kicked by any number of metal bands bludgeoning the small confines of their rehearsal spaces you just might squeeze your ass into the Budos’ weekly practice abode. nce a Pentecostal church the building now houses rows of these training closets. The Budos practically need a giant shoehorn to squeeze instruments and all into theirs decorated with biker-chick pinups booze memorabilia and Christmas lights. The night I’m there the landlord is shaking the band down for several months of back rent refusing to leave until everyone offers up their beer money. nce he disappears they start woodshedding a new tune infused more with Addis Ababa than Isla de Staten.

Metal is back
NEWS.com.au – Sep 11, 2007
” Metal is one hell of a genre. Just as pop fans might split hairs over R&B versus bubblegum and their rock brothers and sisters quibble about alternative versus prog a metalhead can expound for hours in excruciating detail about the dozens of subgenres and their exponents. There’s metalcore hardcore nu-metal industrial metal stoner metal grindcore Norwegian black metal Swedish death metal power metal goth metal thrash metal shock rock early metal progressive metal and of course everyone’s cringe factor hair metal. Just to name a handful. Contrary to the misconception that metalheads are meatheads a study by the University of Warwick in the UK found the most intelligent teenagers at the school listened to loud heavy rock to cope with being gifted. “Saying all metal fans are long-haired black T-shirt-wearing yobbos is like believing all jazz fans wear berets” Satterly says. “The mainstream media still think metal musicians wear codpieces a la Spinal Tap… The Swans player says he is a metalhead because the artists are “entertainers not just a band”. “They are loud they are proud not so beautiful but bloody awesome” he told Music Network. Faddoul who works with decidedly un-metal acts at a music management company looks glam in her leopard-print jacket by day but sports her Motorhead T-shirt by night. She says there are more women in the metal moshpit (a far less scary place than at most rock concerts) than people would expect. “Without pandering to the cliches growing up in Wollongong had something to do with me becoming a fan because there was heavy music blasting from the bedrooms of most kids in the street” Faddoul says. “I love it because it’s uncompromising it’s loud it’s powerful. When I’m at a metal show I can’t think about anything else.

We Are the Romans
PopMatters – Sep 11, 2007
The first 1998’s American Nervoso was an enormously confident debut full-length but its follow-up would go on to be deemed deservedly a modern classic. Even though it was released mere weeks before the start of the new decade We Are the Romans remains the most influential album in extreme music over the last eight years. Just as At the Gates’ seminal 1993 disc Slaughter of the Soul influenced an entire generation of young bands that would adopt their melodic death metal approach the aggressive discordant style of We Are the Romans has been copied co-opted and bastardized to near overkill. There is no metalcore or noisecore band alive that is not indebted to Botch: Norma Jean Between the Buried and Me the End the Chariot Every Time I Die Underoath the Devil Wears Prada… the list goes on and on. Yet none of these bands has ever come close to equaling the towering visceral grotesque majesty of We Are the Romans. Today still one listen to the recently expanded and remastered album immediately renders the subgenre it spawned irrelevant. But just exactly why does it succeed where so many other pale imitations fail?1.

Circle: Katapult < Music | PopMatters
PopMatters – Sep 11, 2007
The Finnish band now 20-something albums into its genre-baiting career takes great delight in upsetting expectations confounding conventions and bringing opposites into alignment. In one sense Katapult is 39 minutes of “what the hell is this?” In another it is a boundary-less exploration of all sorts of music precise as clockwork annihilating as hurricane winds. Consider “Fish Reflection” a late album composition that balances as well as any the throat-punishing threat of metal with baroque complexity. It starts with a jackbooted bass riff—that’s Circle founder Jussi Lehtisalo perhaps the lone constant factor in the band’s 17-year run—grinding out the metallic foundation. The drums are fast precise and clattering nailing the same succession of snare sticks-on-rims kick drum over and over like some sort of wind-up contraption. Yet over this bedrock there are big blares of synthesizer throwing up undulating walls of new wave tone as if the keyboardist from the Cure had come out the wrong door and ended up on Motorhead’s stage… The very metal title “Black Black Never Never Land” is appended to one of the disc’s most pastoral cuts all vibrating synth tones and warm reverberating guitar tones. By contrast “Understanding New Age” is anything but yoga-calm with its heavy distorted bass riff and harsh muttering about “Death forever” and the Devil. Yet every one of these cuts contains its own contradictions and inner tensions the mesmeric power of repetition uniting hard rock clangor with delicate intervals mythic imagery with ordinary observations. (“Skeletor Highway” is as much about driving as it is about demons. )About half the cuts are instrumental ranging from the lyrical (“Trees on the Higher Mountain”) to the prog-abstract (“Four Points on the Compass” could be a Tangerine Dream outtake) to the post-rock complex.

WWII death leads to bond years later
San Diego Union Tribune – Sep 11, 2007
military transferred his remains to Normandy. But Connelly knew little about White's death until two Frenchmen – Jean-Luc Gruson and Jean Pierre – entered the picture. They are members of the Forced Landing Association French citizens dedicated to searching for the remains of missing servicemen to reunite them with relatives. In the past 12 years they have researched more than 150 crash sites and contacted 30 families. By their count more than 500 Allied servicemen remain missing in action throughout France… They visited the site and recovered charred debris and White's belt buckle which they sent to the dead soldier's brother. Connelly flew to France in 1995 where she was introduced to the farmer on whose land her husband's plane had gone down in a grove of trees. She visited the crash site and found bits of metal from his P-38 bomber. She has stayed in touch with the Gruson and Pierre families and visited them in 2004 when she was the guest of honor at a celebration by Dampierre villagers. They have preserved a cemetery memorial to her husband and two other Allied pilots killed there that day. Finally late last month the two Frenchmen and their wives came to San Diego for a reunion that Connelly hosted for her late husband's squadron the 367th Fighter Group. “They have become like family” says Connelly.