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A new documentary on the Doors called When You’re Strange is hitting theaters April 9th after opening to acclaimed reviews at Sundance 2009. Since its debut last year, director Tom DiCillo has added a megastar to narrate the film — Johnny Depp — plus tightened up the film’s editing to better tell the story of the psych-rock legends. In Rolling Stone’s exclusive clip from When You’re Strange, check out footage of Jim Morrison and Co. taking the stage in 1968, flanked by police officers prepared for a crowd riot.
“Watching the hypnotic, hitherto unreleased footage of Jim, John, Ray and Robby, I felt like I experienced it all through their eyes,” Depp said in a statement. “As a rock & roll documentary, or any kind of documentary for that matter, it simply doesn’t get any better than this. What an honor to have been involved. I am as proud of this as anything I have ever done.”
In the new issue of Rolling Stone, Peter Travers gives When You’re Strange a three-star review, writing, “Clips from a film Morrison made himself in the desert are alone worth the price of admission… New fans and old will find the experience hypnotic.” The documentary was produced by Law & Order honcho Dick Wolf, a huge fan of the Doors who was eager to share their story again on the big screen.
“They say if you remember the ’60s you weren’t there. I can state definitively that one of the things I do remember is buying the Doors first album the day it came out and then listening to it about 10 or 12 times in a row. Both sides. Every song. I’ve been a fan ever since,” said Wolf in a statement. “This movie is the story of the band but it is also an insight into a moment in time that will never be repeated.”
The doc’s soundtrack, which includes live tracks and studio cuts, arrived in stores yesterday.
– The second album by UK rock act Foals is called Total Life Forever and Sub Pop will release it in the U.S. on May 11 digitally and June 15 physically. The record is out in the band’s native country on May 10 via Transgressive/Warner.
– Pin Me Down is a new duo featuring Bloc Party guitarist Russell Lissack and singer Milena Mepris, who used to be in a band called Black Moustache. Their self-titled debut album is out April 19 in the UK– listen to single “Time Crisis” at their site. Lissack will also play guitar and keyboards with Irish power-pop band Ash during their upcoming UK tour, dates here.
– The seven-day Sensoria music and film festival goes down April 23-29 in Sheffield, England. Highlights include the UK premiere of Search and Destroy: Iggy & the Stooges’ Raw Power, Mogwai’s live film Burning, Sufjan Stevens’ The BQE, British Sea Power performing the live soundtrack to the film Man of Aram, and the world premiere of the Joe Strummer doc Strummerville.
Who: Heavy Swedish pop outfit fronted by manic 34-year-old singer Josephine Olausson, a fierce frontlady who has a fan in Karen O. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs singer likes the band so much it inspired her song “All is Love” on the Where the Wild Things Are soundtrack.
Sounds Like: The band’s insanely catchy new disc Two Thousand and Ten Injuries combines the sound of early Nineties grrrl-punk acts bands like Huggy Bear and Bikini Kill with warm Sixties pop harmonies. “Kungen” borrows from the Turtles “Happy Together,” but drowns it in rich psychedelia. “Bigger Bolder” is buzzing garage-rock, boasting fuzzed out bass and Olausson’s Björk-like vocals. “I usually just tell people we play rock music, because it gets too complicated,” Olausson tells Rolling Stone.
Vital Stats:
• The band’s name derives from a late-night TV session. Olausson was flipping channels at home in the working-class city of Gothenburg when she saw classic Sixties spy program A Man From U.N.C.L.E. In the episode, she remembers secret agents infiltrated a Manson-like hippie sect when she spotted her future band’s name on the creepy entrance gate to the compound. “It looked perfect,” she says, but the band didn’t go for it at first — and Olausson seems to regret her choice. “People say ‘You’re in a Beatles cover band?’ ” she says. “I realize now it’s kind of a retarded name,” she says. “I think you only feel that way once a week.”
• The band has some tangled romantic relationships. Olausson used to date drummer Markus Görsch, but after they split she married to San Francisco indie artist Wyatt Cusick in 2006. Cusick co-produced their new disc, but Olausson swears things weren’t awkward with her former flame. “I think to outsiders it’s weird,” she says. “We never had a major falling out or anything. If anything, we’re more brutally honest with each other and criticize each other.”
• The band is full of klutzes, which inspired the album title Two Thousand and Ten Injuries. Olausson smashed her nose when she fell down a narrow staircase a year and a half ago in Switzerland, and she helped break Görsch’s nose while the two were playing their one and only game of catch. Bassist Johan Lindwall is just always sick. “It seems like things go wrong a lot. We’re a very fragile band.”
John Eriksson: He’s not just the John of Peter Bjorn and John! On a couple of new projects, Eriksson breaks away from the PBJ drum kit.
First off, there’s Hortlax Cobra, Eriksson‘s classical/experimental solo project. Hortlax Cobra has a new series of three EPs out right now, each of them originally released on vinyl and limited to 222 copies, and also available digitally. Eriksson did all three EPs completely by himself. On the first, Everyone’d Talking About Hortlax Cobra, he focused on cassette recordings. The second, Nobody Knows Hortlax Cobra, is spacey and acoustic. And the third, Stop and Smell the Hortlax Cobra, is electronic.
Eriksson also plays guitar, piano, and percussion in the band Holiday for Strings, which also features Thieves Like Us member Pony. Favorite Flavor, the new Holiday for Strings album, is out right now on Sea You. It features covers of Arthur Russell’s “Calling Out of Context” and electro maestro Egyptian Lover’s “I Cry/Night After Night”.
John Eriksson: He’s not just the John of Peter Bjorn and John! On a couple of new projects, Eriksson breaks away from the PBJ drum kit.
First off, there’s Hortlax Cobra, Eriksson‘s classical/experimental solo project. Hortlax Cobra has a new series of three EPs out right now, each of them originally released on vinyl and limited to 222 copies, and also available digitally. Eriksson did all three EPs completely by himself. On the first, Everyone’d Talking About Hortlax Cobra, he focused on cassette recordings. The second, Nobody Knows Hortlax Cobra, is spacey and acoustic. And the third, Stop and Smell the Hortlax Cobra, is electronic.
Eriksson also plays guitar, piano, and percussion in the band Holiday for Strings, which also features Thieves Like Us member Pony. Favorite Flavor, the new Holiday for Strings album, is out right now on Sea You. It features covers of Arthur Russell’s “Calling Out of Context” and electro maestro Egyptian Lover’s “I Cry/Night After Night”.
Rolling Stone contributing editor Christian Hoard’s “Christian Rock” new music pick this week is Cornershop’s Judy Sucks a Lemon for Breakfast. The band — one of the great alt-rock bands of the ’90s — is led by Anglo-Indian frontman Avtar Singh and mixes drones, Velvet Underground-style guitars, sitar, bits of electronica and dub. The new disc leans more toward classic rock, which here serves as an inspiration and a loose theme (there are Rolling Stones riffs, soul divas and lyrics about the Beatles). One of Hoard’s favorite tracks on the disc is “Free Love,” five and a half minutes of sweet, blissful psychedelia based on sitar, non-English lyrics and a very pretty melody. Overall, the album is expansive, tuneful and warm. It closes with the churchy, soulful 16-minute “The Truth Is Turned On,” which features a fabulous mix of congas and guitars — it’s a fitting way to end an album that’s an argument for multiculturalism and Singh’s own brand of spirituality.
From Tall Dwarfs’ “Nothing’s Going to Happen” to Múm’s “Sing Along”, great music videos are bursts of sound and vision that leave an indelible impression. Director’s Cut is a Pitchfork News feature in which we chat with music video directors about their creations. The men and women behind the camera are often overlooked in today’s YouTube era, but this feature aims to highlight their hard work while showcasing the best videos currently linking around the internet. A little behind-the-scenes dirt couldn’t hurt, too.
This time, we talked to Andy Bruntel, the man behind Liars‘ recent lost-at-sea odyssey “Scissor”. The clip finds band leader Angus Andrew besieged by supernatural elements hellbent on destroying him. It’s dark, but also kinda funny! Over the past five years, Bruntel has helmed surreal and inventive clips for the likes of Stephen Malkmus, Modest Mouse, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, St. Vincent, and No Age, which are all available on his site. In our conversation, the director talked about being stranded in the middle of the ocean, the movie Cast Away, and Will Oldham.
Watch the “Scissor” video and read the Q&A below:
Liars: “Scissor” [Director: Andy Bruntel]
Pitchfork: Did you always plan on having Liars singer Angus Andrew star in this video?
Andy Bruntel: Originally, I had an actor in the raft instead of Angus, but he wanted to be the main character. I was a little bit nervous because it’s a pretty physical part. I was like, “Can he swim?” But he was totally down. He even had some story about diving off a boat to chase a blue whale. He’s a pretty adventurous guy.
Pitchfork: Did you shoot this video on location?
AB: Yeah, it’s about a mile into the ocean off of Marina del Ray. In movies that are shot out in water, you can often tell when it cuts from being the ocean to a stage. Like, I caught this movie Open Water 2 on TV– I didn’t watch it on purpose [laughs]. It’s about this group of friends that go out on a yacht. They all jump in the water but they forget to put the ladder down, so they’re all just stuck in the water next to this yacht. It’s a really bad movie, but something about being stranded in the ocean has a certain intensity.
Pitchfork: Were you inspired by “Lost” at all?
AB: I haven’t watched it for a while and I never once heard the band bring it up during the shoot. But they did talk about Cast Away a number of times– the movie where Tom Hanks talks to a volleyball. I haven’t actually seen it.
Pitchfork: I love the final shot in the video. Did you plan that from the beginning or was it something that came up along the way?
AB: That was in the original treatment, but there are multiple versions of the ending. There’s one where the boulder fully hits the boat and the camera goes underwater. For a while, the band was thinking about ending on the over-the-shoulder shot of the boulder coming towards him. Each ending leaves you with a slightly different feeling. When you see the rock completely hit the boat, there’s this huge sound and it’s funny. But the way it ends now leaves more to your imagination– it’s still funny, but there’s something a little off-putting about it, too.
Pitchfork: There’s some ambiguity.
AB: Yeah, something like this can come out so pretentious when you’re not careful. There are a lot of surreal narrative videos coming out now that are more on the pretentious side, like the one for [Broken Bells' "The High Road"] where they’re walking along this road, encountering all these symbolic visual things. But if you can make it fun, people will be entertained first and then they might watch it again and think about it some more.
Pitchfork: That was definitely my experience with your video for Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s “Cursed Sleep”, which is probably my favorite video of yours thus far.
AB: Thanks. While we were shooting that video, Will [Oldham] got a call that his dad had suddenly passed away. We were like, “If you need to be with your family, do whatever you need to do. It’s just a music video.” But he wanted to finish because he would’ve been sitting by himself at the airport otherwise. It’s hard for me to watch that video without remembering the experience.
Bonnie “Prince” Billy: “Cursed Sleep” [Director: Andy Bruntel]
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