Wicked and Weird

When I first started to write this thing that has become H&MS, I always said I’d try to keep the music and movie feedback to a minimum. However, this entry will contain nothing but, so my apologies in advance.

First up, the Buck 65 concert I saw a few weekends back. We caught him at one of my favourite music venues, King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut, a smaller venue which has hosted many well-known bands over the years on their way to bigger things. Oasis was famously signed after being spotted at King Tut’s by a record exec back in the early 90’s. Anyway, for the uninitiated Buck 65 is from Nova Scotia and categorised as a hip hop artist but I think it would be more accurate to say his music is poetry recited to a mix of country and hip hop beats. Our friends over at the Juno Awards clearly had no idea how to categorise him either, as he recently won the Juno for best Alternative Album of the Year (for Talkin’ Honky Blues, a truly excellent album). If the term "alternative" was vague back in the 90’s, what is it supposed to represent now? But I digress. His music is superb, and his songs tell the tales of various characters with the vividness of the best short stories. The cleverness of the lyrics rank up there with Morrissey in my esteem. And most importantly, his live show is incredible. I believe back in Canada, he tours with a band but oversees he is a one-man show (as he called it, “three-star karaoke”). The man can certainly engage the crowd - the anecdotes and the banter were just fantastic. Highly recommended, album and live show both.

Last night we caught New York’s Scissor Sisters at the Barrowlands. I guess they could be best summed up as a cross between 70’s Elton John, the Bee Gees and the Village People. The camp factor was high, but the fact of the matter was that the songs were solid and incredibly sing-able. They clearly know how to entertain (though the crowd was so adoring they could do no wrong) and they genuinely appeared to be having a good time on stage which is always infectious. They also do a cracking cover of Comfortably Numb which makes the Pink Floyd version seem so deadly dull.

As for movies, I finally managed to see the final piece of Lucas Belvaux’s Trilogie. The individual films (titled in the UK as One, Two, and Three) are a suspense, comedic farce, and drama respectively and can each be viewed as individual films in their own right. However, the twist is that each film takes place during the same week in Grenoble, France and the main characters of one film are the minor characters of the others. And each film contains scenes from the other two films, but when viewed in the context of the film you are watching take on a completely different slant. It’s only after seeing all three films that you fully understand the motivations of the characters and the story as a whole. What you think is going on after one film will not be what you think after seeing the entire trilogy. An absolutely brilliant vision, and well worth committing the time to.