For those wondering if there would ever be a follow-up to the brilliance of So…How’s Your Girl, the 1999 collaboration between Dan the Automator and Prince Paul, the answer is YES. Teaming up once again as Handsome Boy Modeling School, The Automator and Prince Paul will be releasing the album White People on November 9th according to Billboard.com. For those that can’t wait quite that long, a single titled “The World Gone Mad” which features Del the Funky Homosapien, Barrington Levy, and Alex Kapranos (Franz Ferdinand) is set to be released prior to the album.

The remaining tracks on the album will also be full of guests that include Kid Koala, Jack Johnson, Cat Power, RZA, Mike Patton, and even John Oates. As was the case on So…How’s Your Girl?, White People will have skits mixed in with the music and this time around they’re acted by Father Guido Sarducci and Tim Meadows as “The Ladies Man”.

Seeing the freak-folk team Animal Collective live is a lot like listening to their albums (2003’s Here Comes the Indian, 2004’s super good Sung Tongs) — while shoving your head inside a woofer (like some return to some sonic womb) and attaching high-voltage treble cables directly to your brain. And then there’s the darkened stage, the miner’s helmet-ed band member manically pounding things on the floor of the stage, and a severely mesmerized audience. Maybe it was just my first time seeing a show at the Bowery Ballroom, but “blown away” seems to be as much of an understatement as this understatement.

Stage-named Panda Bear and Avey Tare, the expanded duo also was joined by two fellow maniacs, Geologist and Deaken, on-stage to create some thrilling and experiemental folkmusic. Try to picture the physical postures of Animal (from the Muppets) playing the drums, and you have a notion of the mannerisms that power an Animal Collective performance. Like their songs, the players herk and jerk in seemingly hysteric entropy, while at some layer a definite coherence is sustained. While percussion duties are shared by all members at any given time, the band-member stationed in front of what is definitely an atypical drum-kit stood as he played, and when he played it was not with technical precision but with the controlled panic of an artist seized by the highs of creation. It looked/sounded like he was hitting stones, sticks, and logs rather than actual drums. Another Collective member spent most of the night on the floor with a keyboard (?- coudn’t see) and a miner’s light fastened across his forehead.

The highlight of their set came early when said squatting, head-lamped guy leaped up to assist the guitar player/singer in a tribal duet of grunts and chants, so common to the Animal Collective melange. The energy was unreal, telling of the genuine collaboration at the core of Animal Collective. The only song I could actually identify was the first track from their latest album Sung Tongs, “Leaf House.”

Not nearly as lush or acoustic as Sung Tongs ,the live show (at least last night) reflects the bands earlier leanings, which tend toward Black Dice’s latest leanings (note this connection now and recall it when you read the other paragraphs). On the Fat Cat Records site, the band’s intentions were originally to move “pop music in a direction that would place a heavy emphasis on sonic experience.” Their music is not quite so vague, and neither was the experience of seeing them. Microphone distortion was fundamental to all the performing acts, from openers Gang Gang Dance (My Bloody Valentine a la Talking Heads) on down. Somebody at the astoundingly subtle sound-station put the effect-works on all singers: the echo, the reverb, the being-karate-chopped-rapidly-on-the-back effect (Devendra Banhart sounds like this naturally). Layers, sweet layers of interest being applied not unlike flavor is blasted onto Goldfish. Most of their sound consisted of a few acoustic guitar chords played non-conventionally, hummed melodies puncuated by bursts of forest noise (grunts, hoots, howls), and earthy yet esoteric polyrhythms. Astounding. Then came the Black Dice.

An assault best describes Black Dice’s approach to live music, which is really really loud. Hipsters in the know bring ear-plugs, as did the band (cheaters), and the rest of us plebeians left with swollen, battered eardrums. But the violence of the music was a sublime thing, much more beautiful than the noise of war or hatred. The now-trio wheeled three tables onstage and placed upon these tables myriad distortion peddles, wires, knobs, and monitors. Manning the middle station, the lone guitarist would fiddle with the odd chord or scale now and then, at which point they would tweak, reverb, amplify, and dismantle the sound into a massive squall of arthymic electric-shrieks and howling feedback. For nearly fifty minutes the oppressively cool seige assailed the slowly dwindling audience. One girl managed to take a nap in one of the balcony’s back corners; how, I’m not sure. There were no clear demarkations between songs, but singular movements within the set were distinct. Some have called Black Dice pretentious, but I think abusive is a better adjective. Still, it was rather effective when the musician on the left waved his hand in some sort of pre-arranged signal and the stage fell silent for a second before sparse but enthusiastic applause followed the band off-stage. There are plenty of precedents, it turns out, to their approach. Musicians have been experimenting with pure noise since Edison invented feedback (or was it Bell?). At the very least, the band should take the praise of a fan as he departed just after the concert: THAT WAS THE LOUDEST THING I’VE EVER HEARD.

Maybe seeing Animal Collective and Black Dice in the same night is the concert-going equivalent of your mom walking in during the movie’s only sex scene. I’m sure had it been The Presidents of the United States of America or Joan Baez (two acts scheduled to appear at the Ballroom in the coming months), I would have been put more at ease by more conventional song structure and less abraissive acoustic assaults; on the other hand, I feel as though I have been led into a promising and unsettling valley of taste, basking in white sunshine that hurts my ears kindly.

Working on the follow-up to 2002’s Songs for the Deaf, Josh Homme, who is recording with Joey Castillo (Danzig), Troy Van Leeuwen (A Perfect Circle), and Alain Johannes (Desert Sessions collaborator) following the departure of bassist/vocalist Nick Oliveri, has been visited recently by other artists offering their contribution to the currently untitled album.

As posted on the official Queens of the Stone Age website, Homme was joined by ZZ Top guitarist Billy F. Gibbons. The five-hour session that took place between midnight and 5 am led Homme to declare Gibbons a “badass” while Gibbons shared the following sentiments with Billboard.com, “hey’re definitely some dedication fashioners of tone and taste and, clearly, no strangers to those bluesy wee hours. That’s when it’s the most rockin’ and those guys seem to be always ready to rock.”

In addition to the visit by Gibbons, Homme also recently recorded with Garbage’s Shirley Manson and his current girlfriend, Brody Dalle of the Distillers. Manson had the following to say about the new Queens of the Stone Age album, “It’s great. Really REALLY great. You’ll love it. And how Josh Homme is not yet a household name is quite beyond me.”

*QOTSA: queensofthestoneage.com
*Garbage: garbage.com
*ZZ Top: www.zztop.com

For those (like me) who blinked when Donnie Darko first tanked in theaters three years ago, the re-release of this brilliant coming-of-age sci-fi retro-80s masterpiece after the addition of twenty previously-cut minutes and several other re-adjustments by director/screenwriter Richard Kelly seems like the perfect opportunity to project backward-looking praise. If only a portal could open up and transpose this review back to 2001, simultaneously uniting two points in time, then maybe everything would make sense like it does to the title character in the opening minutes of the film as we see him awake after sleeping on a road on the top of a hill overlooking the woods skirting his town. (This knowing smirk gets repeated at the end of the film as Donnie awakes in his bed later that same night; but only after 27 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, and 12 seconds have elapsed).

Since this is a review of the director’s cut, less energy should be spent on what makes the film so indispensable. Briefly, Donnie Darko is remarkable in how it perfectly renders its period: 1980s refracted through its own culture. It’s a horror film set firmly in the reality of the Reagan-Dukakis debates and its main character’s fascination with The Smurfs and Back to the Future. Like Donnie’s own stumbling between hallucination and his abrasive environment, the film hazes between 80s-pop reality and timeless adolescent reality. The drowsy opening sequence of Donnie riding his bike home alone nails several 80s staples: E.T. (bike and hoodie), Halloween (he passes posters for his town’s Halloweenfest), and that great 80s-pop sound (Echo and The Bunnymen’s “Killing Moon”); but there is no denying the overall sense of alienation achieved between Kelly and the film’s star, Jake Gyllenhaal.

Only, given directorial license, we don’t hear the Bunnymen at the beginning anymore. He’s replaced it with a similarly themed tune that probably makes a more coherent connection to the film’s central concerns (fate, love, choice) — and perhaps it’s only because when you are wowed by something you don’t want any of it altered — but this is one of many small changes that detract from the charm of the sleeker original theatrical cut. It was a decision typical of this newer version: a detail that gathers what Kelly perceives as loose threads tighter. Only, his hooded sweatshirt doesn’t flatten out neatly from this tugging (do they ever?) and he succeeds mostly in just creating unsightly bumps in the fabric. Sure, some plot facts are clarified, usually to little more effect than before.

The core genius of the film remains undisturbed: the unrivaled “suck a fuck” sibling banter scene, the Sparkle Motion plot-tangent, and, the film’s pinnacle, the montage that begins with a sideways shot of the back of a school bus and proceeds to burst forth in glorious slo-mo to the utter synth-pop beauty of Tears for Fears’ “Head Over Heels.” Others might argue that the use of Duran Duran during the Sparkle Motion dance performance (intercut with the arson shots) is the climax, and a strong argument it is. Had any of these moments been tampered with, I would declare this version a crime.

What has been added are several minutes that develop the strange marital relations of Mr. and Mrs. Darko, who swim in flippantly argumentative dialogue yet are always shown to be physically affectionate. Drew Barrymore’s icy cerebral English teacher gets some more time, as Kitty Farmer’s ignorant campaign to ban Graham Greene from the syllabus succeeds in replacing it with Watership Down. “(A film about rabbits with human cognition who slaughter each other).” New sound effects accompany some of the old visual effects, most notably the Abyss-like water-projections that protrude from Donnie and his family as they watch football, and which lead him to his parent’s closet and, well… I don’t like the effects because they sound too artificial.

The only improvement is the inclusion of several new visual graphic effects, especially centering on a close-up of Donnie’s eyeball. Paragraphs from The Philosophy of Time Travel also flash up on the screen, seemingly as chapter markers. The text does help underline some of the film’s plot/visual structure, but they seem more like an annoying DVD feature that I might try once just for the information. I was most upset by the paragraph that comes toward the end that informs the audience that people who were directly involved in the time travel event might have some vague recollection (or have bad dreams) about the tragedy of what happened, but will never be able to fully recall anything. What follows, in the film’s quiet coda, is a panorama of the film’s cast in their respective beds, in the grip of some awful emotion: regret, fear, sadness. What was brilliant about the theatrical version was that this same montage occurs without that preceding visual footnote. The effect is the same, if a little more ambiguous, but shouldn’t that montage be ambiguous if the people in it have a likewise vague feeling penetrating their consciousness? If they cannot pin down what they are feeling (because a time warp has erased the actual plot that aroused/no-longer aroused those emotions) then why should the director pin it down for us?

Seems like a rant just snuck out there, but let me find composure enough to advise the purchase of the original version DVD, with plenty of notes and information in the extras section, so you can see and hear Donnie Darko in all its lean, original impact. Still gets my vote for Best Ever Use of Patrick Swayze.

R.E.M. will be playing twenty-nine dates in the US and Canada throughout October and November. The tour will be in support of their new Warner Brothers album Around the Sun to be released October 5th. The album, which features the first single “Leaving New York”, just received it’s official title on the 4th of August. The band, which just completed the “Swing State Tour” with Bruce Springsteen and Bright Eyes, will be announcing world tour plans at a later date.

October
13: Los Angeles, CA @ Greek Theatre
14: Santa Barbara, CA @ Santa Barbara Bowl
15: San Francisco, CA @ Greek Theatre
16: Irvine, CA @ Verizon Amphitheatre
19: St. Louis, MO @ Fox Theatre
20: Indianapolis, IN @ Murat Theatre
22: Nashville, TN @ Ryman Auditorium
23: Atlanta, GA @ Gwinnett Arena
25: Chicago, IL @ Chicago Theatre
26: Chicago, IL @ Chicago Theatre
27: Akron, OH @ Thomas Performing Arts
29: Boston, MA @ Fleet Center
30: Atlantic City, NJ @ Borgata

November
01: Washington DC @ Constitution Hall
04: New York, NY @ Madison Square Garden
05: Uncasville, CT @ Mohegan Sun
07: Pittsburgh, PA @ Palumbo Center
09: Toronto @ Hummingbird Center
10: Toronto @ Hummingbird Center
11: Ottawa @ Ottawa Civic Centre
12: Montreal @ Bell Centre
14: Thunder Bay @ Ft. Williams Gardens
15: Winnipeg @ Centennial Concert Hall
17: Calgary @ Pengrowth Saddledome
19: Seattle, WA @ McCaw Hall
20: Seattle, WA @ McCaw Hall
21: Vancouver @ Orpheum
26: Salt Lake City, UT @ E Center
27: Denver, CO @ Fillmore