THE BIG PINK
TONIGHT (ALEX DROMGOOLE MIX)
(REMOTE CONTROL)
New Kids On The Block’s 1990 single Tonight never even made it to the top 10 in Australia, but it’s actually one of their more redeeming pop tunes. Despite not having cornered the tween market in pencil cases, sticker books and fully poseable Hasbro figurines, UK duo The Big Pink are making waves with a completely different tune of the same name two decades on from NKOTB. With a Happy Mondays lope and a nod to The Clash’s Train In Vain, the A Brief History Of Love version of Tonight has now been slightly tweaked by Alex Dromgoole (Bjork, Depeche Mode, Goldfrapp). A few of the industrial tassles have been removed (there’s less of a the meat-grinding abattoir ambience and the bass no longer sounds like an explosive bowel accident is imminent), but it’s still a ferocious pop tune. It’s like there’s an orgy in my ears and they’re giving my cochlea a reach-around.

THIS WEEK’S SINGLES PICKS INCLUDE:

HOLE
SKINNY LITTLE BITCH
(UMA)
At Sydney’s Big Day Out in 1999, Courtney Love invited Hoodoo Gurus guitarist Brad Shepherd on stage and stumbled through a cover of the Australian rock band’s Bittersweet. A decade later and with her career as patchy as Dave Faulkner’s hairline, Courtney Love now sounds like she’s plundering The Right Time for her demented Hole comeback single Skinny Little Bitch. It’s a feeble appropriation of her past glories, the former Miss World now broken and burnt. I was going to make a cheap joke as a parting shot, but having just listened to the power of Live Through This the comedy of Love’s new release turns to tragedy. Beyond fake.

EVERMORE
UNDERGROUND
(WARNER)
Even if this tune contained the secret code to getting in Katy Perry’s pants, you couldn’t get me to listen to it again. It’s like Evermore unearthed a Noiseworks B-side on their descent into pop limbo. Enjoy your stay, boys!

BRITISH INDIA
BENEATH THE SATELLITES
(SHOCK)
When they were young, they shone like the sun… I don’t even know what vim is, but when British India burst out of the Melbourne scene a few years back they had buckets of it. The cocky confidence was warranted – Black And White Radio and Tie Up My Hands were two of the finest indie releases of 2007 and often got by on nothing more than sheer energy. After tempering their spittle and venom with just the right amount of self-doubt and intrigue on their albums Thieves and Guillotine, suddenly British India have made a monstrous miscalculation with Beneath The Satellites. They’ve delighted in lifting from Blur and The Who in the past, but the chorus of Satellites is a career-stalling rip-off of polly wolly crappy Mavis’s tune Cry. The kids are all trite.

British India play Clipsal 500’s Jim Beam Track Sounds concert with Eskimo Joe and Galleon on Thu Mar 11.

His Two Cents: Yet another offering from director Tim Burton based upon material from another source (don’t you long for the far-off days of the wildly original Edward Scissorhands and Beetle Juice?), this is also one of his most flawed and frustrating, falling prey to the irksome notion that a fabulous star cast, major money and lots of technology (plus 3D innovations) will unfailingly create something brilliant. Cherry-picking beloved figures and situations from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass, we watch the improbably free-thinking and now-19-year-old Alice (Aussie Mia Wasikowska), escaping a marriage proposal and again falling down a rabbit burrow, banging her head and entering the realms of apparent fantasy, although this time there’s darker trouble afoot as a slightly Wizard Of Oz-tinged struggle between good and evil is afoot between the glam White Queen (Anne Hathaway) and the bizarrely-stunted and large-headed Red Queen (Burton’s offscreen partner Helena Bonham Carter, spiritedly stealing it). The Red Queen has control of the Jabberwock, the Bandersnatch and the Jubjub Bird and is preparing for a battle set to take place on the Frabjous Day, while the noble denizens of Wonderland (including Johnny Depp’s oddly unimpressive ginger-Scots Mad Hatter, Matt Lucas’ FX Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Stephen Fry-voiced Cheshire Cat and many others) are counting on Alice to help them, even if, in a rather tiresome but very Burtonesque conceit, she’s so estranged from her childhood dreams and fancies she initially can’t work out if she’s dreaming or (in a safely Disney fashion) losing it.
Although the original Alice stories are certainly episodic and stop-start (meaning that the many previous filmings have sprawled all over the place), this director’s shot takes too many liberties with the source, and wastes so much time making the Mad Hatter, the Tweedles and all the rest something more than mere caricatures (which they are) that everything winds up feeling lethargic and over-cluttered. And while the cast is undoubtedly amazing (other voicers include Timothy Spall, Alan Rickman and Barbara Windsor, just for starters), almost none of them are quite as amusing, grotesque or, ahem, three-dimensional as they really should be. And small Wonder.

Mad Dog

Her Two Cents: It's the film that knocked Avatar out of the top spot at the US box office, based on a novel by Nicholas Sparks (Nights In Rodanthe) starring two of Hollywood's rising romantic leads. It should be a slam-dunk success, but somehow in spite of such promise, it still manages to fall flat.
Home on leave for two weeks, conveniently named army man John (Channing Tatum) meets good-girl Savannah (Amanda Seyfried) and love ensues at Hollywood speed. Parting ways for the 12-month remainder of John's contract, long letters keep the pair together across the distance until everything is changed by the fall of the Twin Towers. John re-enlists, and the letters continue, but they become ever fewer until one final 'Dear John' letter officially bursts their bubble.
Punched from Sparks' form card of strained family dynamics and doomed holiday romance between the well-off nice girl and the working class boy with history (see also The Notebook, A Walk To Remember and The Last Song, out soon), pasts are hinted at but never explored while the future is tragically predictable, even when it wants to be a surprise. Wide-eyed Seyfried and stone-faced Tatum look the part but have zero chemistry and every awkward scene between the supposed lovers seems painfully forced.
There is an earnest and moving story buried somewhere under the banal prettiness, particularly the relationships around John's father and Savannah's friend Tim, but so many liberties have been taken with Jamie Linden's adaptation, the dig is barely worth it and once again the integrity of a foundation story has been tainted in favour of Hollywood romance.
Pretty and tragic, but also quite dull, the hopeless romantics may find something salvageable, but they might want to wait for the DVD.
Kat McCarthy

Jonathan Boulet is full of surprises. He has literally come out of nowhere, releasing his debut album at the end of last year with only a previous single release to his name. That single, A Community Service Announcement, has gone on to make big waves in the underground and mainstream communities alike. Heck, even Kanye West likes it! So it probably should have come as no surprise that on his debut headline tour of Australia, he would be rather good. And while he was rather good indeed, his first visit to Adelaide produced no great shocks.

At this point I must apologise to supporting acts Sooki and Jimmy & The Mirrors. I would have been there early enough to give you guys a write-up, but thanks to a new club night starting downstairs, venue priorities were focussed elsewhere and the media door list was running late at Rocket Bar. Que sera sera.

For a 21-year-old who hasn’t played many shows outside his native Sydney, Boulet exudes confidence on stage. After quickly introducing himself and his backing band, they launch into non-album noise ballad I Will Soldier On. An appreciative Boulet then thanked members of the crowd for the large turnout (it must have been close to capacity), and two audience members in particular for bringing their own maracas to the show.

For what started out as a project in his bedroom, Boulet’s solo material translates well to the stage. His fast-paced skiffle pop, in particular songs like 321 Ready Or Not and Continue Calling, get the crowd shuffling their feet and nodding their heads balancing well balanced with his slower stuff like 10 Billion Years.

In between songs he and his band jam together for what seems like an eternity, and this is the one big criticism of Boulet’s show tonight. Just after an energetic rendition of Ones Who Fly Twos Who Die, it’s a good few minutes before the next song starts and all momentum has been lost.  It’s clear he needs to tighten things up in this department.

Predictably, the band closed with A Community Service Announcement, complete with hand-clapping and sing-a-longs from the audience. A quite polished song on record, it comes alive when played in the raw and capped off an altogether solid performance.

It was perhaps unsurprising that Boulet’s live show would need a bit of ironing out, given that he’s only been on the road a short while. But you really can’t fault the lad too much. It’ll be interesting to see what he pulls out of the hat next.

Jimmy Bollard

His Two Cents: “More of this is true than you would believe” is the amusing title that opens this satirical extension of Jon Ronson’s book (it’s “inspired” by the non-fiction volume), and while the structure of the thing is a little screwy and too stuffed with flashbacks there is considerable comic kick from seeing such game major players getting their teeth into sometimes preposterous parts. A lowly Ann Arbor journo named Wilton (Ewan McGregor) interviews a local nut-job (Stephen Root as Gus Lacey) who improbably talks of having been a ‘psy’ soldier (and stopping a hamster’s heart) but then, after splitting up with his wife and foolishly journeying to Kuwait in the jittery, post-9/11 days of 2002, Wilton by chance meets Lyn Cassady (George Clooney, also a co-producer), the mysterious figure apparently behind such crazy stories. And once Lyn knows that Wilton isn’t the enemy, the two venture into the desert for reasons not entirely clear as a complex series of flashbacks (too many, really) commence detailing the Vietnam-era activities of Bill Django (Jeff Bridges), the slightly scrambled creator of the acid-indebted New Earth Army, Lyn’s former adventures therein (to the tune of Billy Idol and other ’80s stars), and how a formidable newcomer with supposedly astonishing and mind-bending abilities, Larry Hooper (Kevin Spacey, actually hardly in it), embarrassed them all on his way to becoming a major figure in the still-continuing efforts of the US military to harness the powers of the paranormal.

While it’s all a bit overextended and unfocussed in the hands of co-producer/director/Clooney pal Grant Heslov, there’s no doubt that there are some seriously funny (and odd) scenes here, and Clooney, Bridges and Spacey are all in top form while a more restrained McGregor is the voice of reason for the audience (his main function is to, however appealingly, stand about going, “What the…?!”). And yes, that title is indeed true: goats are stared at long and loonily.

Mad Dog

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