Album Review: "Torches" by Foster the People

I’m trying to find a musical analogy to describe Foster the People’s sound ... at least one that doesn’t sound lame. The band certainly isn’t, but I find it difficult to put a relatable label on this indie pop trio.  The best I can come up with is “Abba meets Gorillaz.” I know that sounds like a pop culture abomination, but it’s the best I can do at the moment.

I first became aware of the band when I saw the video for their debut single “Pumped Up Kicks” on a satellite music channel. It seemed like a sort of polished garage rock at the time, so I checked out the album. Mind you, I am not a pop music fan by any definition of the word. I prefer dinosaur metal, progressive rock and Frank Zappa. There’s something about the album Torches that appeals to me, for some reason I can’t totally grasp. Their music and vocals are layered and somewhat dense, but they still produce a sound that is light and danceable. The lyrics are interesting and rather strange at times. The first single tells the tale of a trouble kid with a gun, while “Helena Beat” seems to be simply about getting through the day.  There seem to be a lot of simple truths covered in this album, and they are related in a way that often catches you off-guard, with the real meaning of the song hitting you on the second, third or even seventh listening. That’s a welcome change from a guitar hook or a drum beat in your face and an auto-tuned voice whining a mindless but commercially-viable chorus.

Foster the People’s sound is what I would have expected had half the good college/alternative bands of the eighties and nineties stayed around long enough to hone their craft and become something truly relevant. This band has reached that plateau with their first album, and quite honestly, this is one of the first good pop albums I’ve listened to in the past thirty years. 

Kaiju Review: Space Monster Dogora (1964)

Anyone who has known me for any length of time knows that I enjoy weirdness, especially in movies. Give me a goofy b-movie and I’m happy as a clam. Space Monster Dogora is one of those bizarre movies that I love watching.

It’s not the most well scripted film in the world, naturally. In fact, the story comes off as two separate movies that were filmed over at Toho Studios and then the directors just said, “What the heck, let’s put ‘em together!”  The movie starts with a scene of a NASA-like room full of technicians and consoles watching a satellite. Apparently Japanese TV satellites have been getting wrecked, but only on their sixth orbit. This satellite too is destroyed, by a cell-like creature that is vaguely reminiscent of the giant amoeba that Spock flew a shuttlecraft inside of during “The Immunity Syndrome” on the original Star Trek series.

Space Monster Dogora in ... well, space.



After the credits, the movie cuts to a jewel heist in progress, complete with a Rififi-esque crew of safecrackers. The police are drawn away by both the lovely Akiko Wakabayashi and a drunken salaryman, who is levitating through the streets on his side. The safecrackers are also levitated away from the safe, and off we go on a very strange celluloid journey.



Drunken guy floating to work. It is Japan, after all.

While the whole plot is somewhat segmented, it all does seem to work in a rather enjoyable way. Dogora consumed carbon, and isn't necessarily all the picky in what form the carbon is in; A string of diamond thefts around the world are later attributed to Dogora, since it does apparently like to get the purest form of the substance first. The diamond heist gang is angry because only one of the big thefts was their work, and is looking for whoever's cutting them out of the action. The rather shifty Occidental Mark Jackson (Robert Dunham) is also in the web, a lone wolf "diamond g-man" working for a special commission. His loyalties are unsure for most of the movie, as he's a thorn in the side of the crooks and Inspector Komai (Yosuke Natsuki).


Meanwhile, Dr. Munakata (Nobuo Nakamura), a professor of crystallography, has been tangentially connected to the diamond case because of his work with synthetic diamonds. He becomes more involved as after Komai and the professor's beautiful assistant, witness a colliery's coal supply being sucked into the sky. Munakata also theorizes that there's a possibility that the giant space cell could start being less discriminating in its lunch habits, noting that humans are carbon-based, too.


Munakata works with the military, led by an old friend of his, to develop a weapon to stop Dogora. Inadvertently, Dogora's end also closed the case for the diamond gang.




Dogora in the skies above Doikaiwan.

This is another film that proves that things don't always have to make sense to be fun. Dogora itself is an intriguing monster, but I think since its not a big lumbering, city-stomping lizard, we don't have the same sense of urgency about its appearances. Even when it destroys the Wakato Bridge, which is a great special effects scene for the period, there's not a lot of terror (or at least the fake terror you'd normally assume in these films). If the plot does have a flaw, its in the point that Dogora hadn't started eating people yet ... just lifting them up and moving them away from what he wanted to eat wasn't all that scary or intimidating. Dogora might as well have just said "Excuse me" first.


With these two plotlines showcased in the movie, the performances are a little stilted. The version I've watched is the original, subtitled Japanese version of the movie (I haven't gotten around to getting a copy of the American International Television cut yet), and everyone comes off pretty one-dimensional. The cast is excellent though, considering this being a monster movie. Akiko Wakabayashi has appeared in genre films before (Ghidrah the Three-Headed Monster and King Kong Vs. Godzilla) and is noted for being one of the first Asian Bond Girls (along with Mie Hama in You Only Live Twice). Robert Dunham has appeared in numerous Japanese movies, including Mothra, The Green Slime and the Mystery Science Theater 3000 favorite, Godzilla vs. Megalon. The cast is further bolstered by genre veterans Jun Tazaki, Hideyo Amamoto and Hiroshi Koizumi.


Space Monster Dogora, for its obvious limitations, is really one of those rare movies that can't be compared to any other film. It is a piecemeal work that somehow manages to become a greater, and goofier, whole. This sci-fi/monster/heist flick is definitely worth watching!

Rich's Random Reviews: The Grandmothers "Eating the Astoria"

The way I look at it, when in doubt, make your first blog about something interesting, odd and cool. So I'm starting with an record I recently listened to for the first time: The Grandmothers album “Eating the Astoria.” It qualifies under all three criteria.

The Grandmothers are a band composed of former members of the legendary Mothers of Invention. And just as there were many different incarnations of the Mothers, so has been the course for the Grandmothers. The primary forces behind the Grandmothers were Don Preston, Bunk Gardner and Jimmy Carl Black who formed the original band in the early eighties. The line-up has changed various times, and there were even two separate bands performing under that name at the same time at one point. The band has also had some troubles with Gail Zappa, the controlling interest of the Zappa Family Trust, who handle the music of the original Mothers of Invention, which was usually ascribed as being written by Frank Zappa.  Jimmy Carl Black makes a brief mention to this situation without mentioning any names at the start of this album.

This concert was recorded in 1998 at the London Astoria. The Grandmothers line-up on this album includes only two original MOI members, Jimmy Carl Black (“The Indian of the Group”) and Bunk “Sweetpants” Gardner. Steve B. Roney handles the drums, Sandro Oliva guitar and vocals, Ener Bladezipper bass and Maurio Andreoni plays keyboards. While this may not be the actual Mothers of Invention, don’t let the fact that there are a lot of different names in the band throw you; this is an excellent touring group who know this relatively difficult material through-and-through.

I have to say that most of the album gives me the feeling that I’m listening to a live swing big band. The highlight of the disc for me was “Brown Shoes Don’t Make It,” a relatively long song that Jimmy Carl mentions was played only a few times live with the MOI (but that they play every night). There’s a good cross section of MOI hits, including “Call Any Vegetable,” “Big Leg Emma” and “Uncle Meat.” The Italians in the band provide a couple of numbers, including “Teen-a-Peek-a,” about the omnipresent matronly aunt that chaperones the female interest in a lot Italian romantic flicks.

Jimmy Carl Black takes the vocal chores on quite a few of the songs, memorably the bluesy “Lady Queen Bee” and “The Great White Buffalo,” both songs he wrote or co-wrote. He also closed out the concert on a medley of “The Orange County Lumber Truck” and the Native American-themed “Trail of Tears.” It’s clear that everyone is having fun and giving the audience what they came for: The music of Frank Zappa and the original Mothers of Invention.

While it probably helps if you’re a Zappa fan, there’s nothing I can’t recommend about “Eating the Astoria” - it’s definitely worth a couple of listens by any fan of good rock music.