Kimchee Records band Helms will be leaving Boston this June to head out on a European tour with The Nationale Blue. You can view the tour poster designed by band member Dan McCarthy here.
June
11: Netherlands, Alkmaar @ Odeon
12: Germany, Berlin @ Kastanie
13: Germany, Hamburg @ Hafenklang
14: Germany, Bremen @ Römer up
15: Germany, Halle @ Tanzclub Volkspark
16: Germany, Frankfurt a.M. @ Clubkeller up
17: France, Strasbourg @ Molodoi
18: France, Tours @ Le Napoléon
19: France, Nantes @ La Barakason
20: France, Amiens @ La briqueterie
21: France, Nancy @ Washington Bar
22: TBA
23: Austria, Vienna @ Fluc
24: Germany, München @- Kafe Kult
25: Germany, Karlsruhe @ Erdbeermund
26: Luxembourg, Bereldange @ Pitstop
*Helms: www.helmsmusic.com
*The Nationale Blue: www.thenationaleblue.com

While John Vansderslice just completed his first tour in support of his latest, Cellar Door, and Pedro the Lion is still on the tour just before the release of his latest, Achilles Heel, they’ve decided to get together and plan a tour together. Get your questions not about Jesus ready folks.

Here’s some dates:

June
02 Wed: San Francisco CA @ Bottom of the Hill
03 Thu: San Francisco CA @ Bottom of the Hill
04 Fri: Pomona CA @ Glass House
05 Sat: San Diego CA @ The Casbah
06 Sun: Los Angeles CA @ Troubadour
07 Mon: Los Angeles CA @ Troubadour
08 Tue: Phoenix AZ @ Old Brickhouse
10 Thu: Austin TX @ Emo’s
11 Fri: Dallas TX @ Tree’s
12 Sat: Little Rock AR @ Vino’s
13 Sun: Nashville TN @ Exit In
14 Mon: Atlanta GA @ Echo Lounge
15 Tue: TBA
16 Wed: Charlottesville VA @ TBA
17 Thu: Washington DC @ TBA
18 Fri: TBA
19 Sat: Philadelphia PA @ TBA
20 Sun: Brooklyn NY @ Northsix
21 Mon: New York NY @ Knitting Factory
22 Tue: Cambridge MA @ Middle East Downstairs
24 Thu: Toronto ON @ TBA
25 Fri: Buffalo NY @ Mohawk Place
26 Sat: Cleveland OH @ The Grog Shop
27 Sun: Detroit MI @ The Magic Stick
28 Mon: Chicago IL @ The Abbey Pub
29 Tue: Chicago IL @ The Abbey Pub
30 Wed: Minneapolis MN @ First Avenue
July
01 Thu: Milwaukee WI @ TBA
02 Fri: Iowa City IA @ Gabe’s Oasis
05 Mon: Omaha NE @ Sokol Underground
06 Tue: Denver CO @ Bluebird Theatre
07 Wed: Salt Lake City UT @ TBA
08 Thu: Boise ID @ TBA
09 Fri: Portland OR @ TBA
10 Sat: Seattle WA @ Showbox

As a reminder, Pedro the Lion’s release hits stores May 25th. JV’s release is old news.

*John Vanderslice: www.johnvanderslice.com
*Pedro the Lion: www.pedrothelion.com
*Achilles Heel: www.achilles-heel.net
*PhiLL(er) News 03/30/04: “Pedro the Lion Reveal Songs and More”
*PhiLL(er) News 09/06/03: “John Vanderslice Completes Album; Praises Japan“

While John Vansderslice just completed his first tour in support of his latest, Cellar Door, and Pedro the Lion is still on the tour just before the release of his latest, Achilles Heel, they’ve decided to get together and plan a tour together. Get your questions not about Jesus ready folks.

Here’s some dates:

June
02 Wed: San Francisco CA @ Bottom of the Hill
03 Thu: San Francisco CA @ Bottom of the Hill
04 Fri: Pomona CA @ Glass House
05 Sat: San Diego CA @ The Casbah
06 Sun: Los Angeles CA @ Troubadour
07 Mon: Los Angeles CA @ Troubadour
08 Tue: Phoenix AZ @ Old Brickhouse
10 Thu: Austin TX @ Emo’s
11 Fri: Dallas TX @ Tree’s
12 Sat: Little Rock AR @ Vino’s
13 Sun: Nashville TN @ Exit In
14 Mon: Atlanta GA @ Echo Lounge
15 Tue: TBA
16 Wed: Charlottesville VA @ TBA
17 Thu: Washington DC @ TBA
18 Fri: TBA
19 Sat: Philadelphia PA @ TBA
20 Sun: Brooklyn NY @ Northsix
21 Mon: New York NY @ Knitting Factory
22 Tue: Cambridge MA @ Middle East Downstairs
24 Thu: Toronto ON @ TBA
25 Fri: Buffalo NY @ Mohawk Place
26 Sat: Cleveland OH @ The Grog Shop
27 Sun: Detroit MI @ The Magic Stick
28 Mon: Chicago IL @ The Abbey Pub
29 Tue: Chicago IL @ The Abbey Pub
30 Wed: Minneapolis MN @ First Avenue
July
01 Thu: Milwaukee WI @ TBA
02 Fri: Iowa City IA @ Gabe’s Oasis
05 Mon: Omaha NE @ Sokol Underground
06 Tue: Denver CO @ Bluebird Theatre
07 Wed: Salt Lake City UT @ TBA
08 Thu: Boise ID @ TBA
09 Fri: Portland OR @ TBA
10 Sat: Seattle WA @ Showbox

As a reminder, Pedro the Lion’s release hits stores May 25th. JV’s release is old news.

*John Vanderslice: www.johnvanderslice.com
*Pedro the Lion: www.pedrothelion.com
*Achilles Heel: www.achilles-heel.net
*PhiLL(er) News 03/30/04: “Pedro the Lion Reveal Songs and More”
*PhiLL(er) News 09/06/03: “John Vanderslice Completes Album; Praises Japan“

Awkward: you’re a nerdy junior highschooler who has somehow convinced friends and some of their cooler friends to rent and watch a video at your house — True Romance, you all choose — and although your parents manage to stay out of the TV room for almost the entire time, your mother decides to walk in just as a young but no less tough-goonish James Gandolfini batters Patricia Arquette through glass and just about all over a hotel room. “Well that’s nice…” she scorns. It’s over, the guilt sets in as you witness the most graphic violence done by a man to a woman you’ve ever seen (even counting your health class videos). And your mom does not approve. At least she lets you all finish the film.

I didn’t know who Quentin Tarantino was at the time, and I wouldn’t find out until Pulp Fiction hit my small hometown in Northern New York a couple years later, but I had just prepped myself more than ten years in advance for the even more explicit, and more drawn out, tortures Uma Thurman would endure in the epic length serial film Kill Bill.

What distinguishes Arquette’s character, Alabama Worley, and Thurman’s, The Bride, from most other film heroines is their defiance of traditional female roles in the face of violence. Alabama dares Gandolfini’s character to beat her down, and he even expresses admiration for her grit. In Thurman’s Bride, Tarantino has isolated the anti-feminine spunk of Alabama and added perhaps the most concentrated dose of revenge-motive ever manifested on the screen.

Kill Bill, in both volumes, is essentially a non-linear string of crafted episodes chronicling the repeated crushing of a former female assassin’s body and mind as she seeks vengence on her former boss and lover, Bill (David Carradine). So now Tarantino’s archetype female protagonist not only takes and withstands viscerally expressed pain, but she deals it out, too, in buckets. Furthermore, Tarantino shatters any rigid genre boundaries by making The Bride’s womanhood central to the film’s visual and ideological scheme. The revenge-inducing scene, in which The Bride’s wedding rehearsal is interrupted by a four-person hit squad commanded by Bill, a violent man reacting violently to the loss of his love to another man, ends as he shoots her, pregnant, in the head. It is perhaps the most intense and unsettling shot in the film, and Tarantino places it carefully at the beginning of both volumes as a reminder. The ceremony becomes a massacre, an un-wedding. Visually, Tarantino suggests this early in Volume 2 as we see Thurman pacing away from the pastor and the altar, backwards down the aisle.

The icons at work here begin to relate: bride, wedding, wedding dress, pregnancy, motherhood, rape. But a series of clashes figure into the heroine, as well: kung fu, swordplay, killing, blood (lots), hate, revenge. The Bride represents a revolutionary gender presence in film, not only within the bounds of martial arts/action films, but in film as a whole. The meditative, philosophical Volume 2 teases out the aspects of Thurman that are traditionally feminine; she spends most of the film’s final chapter fulfilling the role of mother. In fact, the intensity of violence committed by Thurman systematically decreases over both volumes as they run in real time (chronologic time in a Tarantino film is a different beast). It is the best meditation on femininity in a puported action film since Aliens.

70s myth David Carradine carries Volume 2 most of its epic distance. His thoughtful monologues are delivered with a realism that only borrows from the conventions of the martial arts genre. He is a patient but sadistic killer, and Carradine mananges to balance both the tender and the sinister of his character. After viewing the entire film, no one but Thurman seems to fit the role of the Bride. She was made for it and it was made for her. She is revenge — torso, limbs and eyes. Michael Madsen and Daryl Hannah are also brilliant in their few precious moments.

At just over four hours, the entire expanse of Kill Bill is epic. In its subtle but drawn-out pacing, it recalls most vividly Sergio Leone’s two best westerns: The Good, The Bad, & the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West. Dialogue is often sparse, and delivered at a painstakingly (literally) retarded pace. (Scholars of Kubrick have noted this same technique as one of the late master’s idiosyncracies, that he slows down his scenes to the “speed of life.”) Tarantino draws out the intensity of every showdown by flooding the screen with t-zones: bloody stares of hatred, thick determination, and anguish. Hands and feet also get a lot of screentime.

The action and violence are filmed with a distinct tone. The fighting is definitely not realistic, nor is it cartoonish. It mixes the melodrama and grotesque impact of the best kung-fu movies with stylistic shot compositions and traditional rock-em sock-em staples. Every round of kicks or slashes seems just another vehicle for Tarantino’s visual inventiveness. It’s not that he wants to invent another way for the heroine to dismember five attackers in as many seconds, he wants to invent another way to show us those dismemberments with his camera.

The shot compositions, the score and soundtrack, cameos by genre legends like Carradine and Sony Chiba, and much of the “B”-style dialogue are likewise mere dressing on the surface. They link Kill Bill to its progentiors, the reels and reels of 70s action movies that Tarantino quotes like T.S. Eliot writing “The Wasteland”, but they also defy their genre-ness. Kill Bill is not necessarily an “art” film, but it is an artistic film. It is the expression of a film lover treating the collection of sounds and images in his experience like a great pop-cultural palate. It is entertainment, but it is innovative. It seems to be the only kind of film he can make, and in writing we call that a voice.

In fact, this technique of synthesizing elements of his film-going and cultural past likens Tarantino most to another artistic iconoclast of the film world, David Lynch. Lynch has been mining the images and textures of the American 1950s for years, in masterpieces like Blue Velvet and especially Mulholland Drive. He borrows from the trappings of genre, but only to suit his ends as a filmmaker. Tarantino and Lynch may prove that film is the genre in which it is most difficult to conceal one’s influences. And in Tarantino’s case, he flaunts them.

As the years go by, I am more and more embarrassed to admit it for some reason, but I remain a devotee of the punkers that won’t quit even if members of the group do, Bad Religion. That being said, they’ve created about 17 news stories recently. Here we go.

On April 6, 2004 Epitaph Records opted to digitally remaster and reissue the BR catalogue they had the rights to, spanning five albums and one video.

Replacing the out of print 80-85 with How Could Hell be Any Worse? (which had been the title of the band’s first full-length in 1982 and whose content was originally on 80-85 with the first EP Bad Religion and the third EP Back to the Known, while the second EP, Into the Unknown mercifully remains out of print). For whatever reason, the name 80-85 was dropped, and the content remains the same, just like, totally remastered and stuff.

1987’s Suffer and 1989’s No Control, and 1990’s Against the Grain will feature that neat remastering along with, gasp, new artwork!

1992’s Generator features the only non-remastering non-nomenclature content change, with two additioanl tracks of alternate album cuts.

Also seeing the light of day is the long lost video Along the Way, fetauring Darren Aronofsky level film editing of 20 concerts so every five seconds the colors of shirts change. Plus the neat band interviews where lead singer Greg Graffin espouses on some political theory and the other members of the band talk about how they really like Nintendo to someone with a heavy German accent. It’s weird, but then again I base this entirely on the pre- DIGITAL REMASTERING that likely brings to the forefront the NINTENDO!

In just plain digital mastering news, BR plans to drop a new album June 8, 2004 also on Epitaph. With the title The Empire Strikes First, it marks the second album (and first since 2000) since the return to Epitaph and former band member Brett “Mr. Brett” Guerwitz.

Get Your Tracklist On:

01. Overture
02. Sinister Rouge
03. Social Suicide
04. Atheist Peace
05. All There Is
06. Let Them Eat War
08. God’s Love
09. To Another Abyss
10. The Quickening
11. The Empire Strikes First
12. Beyond Electric Dreams
13. Boot Stamping On A…
14. Live Again - The Fall of Man

If all of this wasn’t enough they announced a headlining European Tour between the reissues and the new album and an announcement that they will (for the third time no less) be headlining the Warped Tour and making all the 14-year-olds ask aloud, “Why the hell isn’t Good Charlotte closing? They f’kin rokk!”

Tour Dates:

European Tour
————–
May
06: Helsinki, Finland Noustri
07: Stockholm, Sweden Arena
08: Oslo, Norway Rockefeller
09: Lund, Sweden Mejeriet
11: Dublin, Ireland Ambassador
13: Glasgow, Scotland Academy
14: Manchester, UK Academy
15: London, UK Astoria
16: Bristol, UK Academy
18: Tilburg, Netherlands 013
19: Brussels, Belgium Ancienne Belgique
20: Paris, France Elysee Montmarte
22: Madrid, Spain La Riveria
23: Barcelona, Spain Razzmatazz 1
25: Zurich, Switzerland x-tra
26: Bern, Switzerland Bierhubli
27: Milan, Italy Alcatraz
29: Munich, Germany Elserhalle
30: Essen, Germany Grughalle
31: Berlin, Germany Huxleys
June
02: Hamburg, Germany Grosse Freiheit
03: Hannover, Germany Capitol
04: Nürnberg, Germany Rock Im Park
05: Nürburg Ring, Germany Rock Am Ring

Warped, Non-European Tour*
————–
June, Again - Only Warped and Non-European
25: Houston, TX Reliant Center
26: Dallas, TX Smirnoff Music Center Lot
27: San Antonio, TX Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre
29: Las Cruces, NM N.M.S.U. Practice Field
30: Phoenix, AZ Peoria Sports Complex
July
01: Fullerton, CA Cal State Fullerton
03: San Francisco, CA Pier 30/32
04: Las Vegas, NV TBA
06: San Diego, CA Coors Amphitheatre
07: Ventura, CA Seaside Park
08: Sacramento, CA Sleep Train Amphitheatre Lot
09: Boise, ID Idaho Amphitheatre Lot
10: Seattle, WA Gorge Amphitheatre Lot
11: Portland OR Columbia Meadows
13: Vancouver, BC Thunderbird Stadium
15: Calgary, AB TBA
16: Bozeman, MT Gallatin County Fairgrounds
17: Salt Lake City, UT Utah State Fairgrounds
18: Denver, CO Invesco Field
20: Milwaukee, WI Marcus Amphitheatre
21: St. Louis, MO Bank Pavillion
22: Indianapolis, IN Verizon Wireless Amp. Lot
23: Cleveland, OH Tower City Amp. Lot
24: Chicago, IL Tweeter Center
25: Minneapolis, MN Metrodome Lot
26: Kansas City, KS Verizon Wireless Amp. Lot
28: Atlanta, GA Hi Fi Buys Amphitheatre Lot
29: Orlando, FL Central Florida Fairgrounds
30: Tampa, FL USF Sundome/Vinoy Park
31: Miami, FL Pompano Beach Amp. Lot
August
01: Jacksonville, FL Jacksonville Fairgrounds
02: Charlotte, NC Verizon Wireless Amp. Lot
03: Virginia Beach, VA Verizon Wireless Amp. Lot
04: Washington, DC Nissan Pavilion Lot
05: Pittsburgh, PA Post Gazette Pavilion
06: Philadelphia, PA Tweeter Center @ Waterfront
07: New York, NY Randall’s Island
08: Englishtown, NJ Old Bridge Township Raceway Park
10: Hershey, PA Hersheypark Pavilion
12: Quebec City, PQ TBA
13: Montreal, QB Parc Jean Drapeau
14: Toronto, ON The Docks
15: Detroit, MI Pontiac Silverdome
16: Cincinnati, OH Germain Amphitheatre
17: Columbus, OH Germain Amphitheatre
18: Buffalo, NY Darien Lakes PAC
19, 20: Boston, MA 3 County Fairgrounds

* Also featured on tour will be, among three thousand other angst filled names:
Yellowcard, Story fo the Year, The Vandals, Taking Back Sunday, Simple Plan, Piebald, NOFX, New Found Glory, Lillix (now with more comfortable contact lenses!), The (International) Noise Conspiracy, Guttermouth, Good Charlotte, Flogging Molly, Billy Talent, Anti-Flag, Allister, and The Aquabats

*Bad Religion: www.badreligion.com
*Epitaph Records: www.epitaph.com
*Warped Tour: www.warpedtour.com