Word: selfe
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Beating a five-time platinum record isn’t easy. Coming off their wildly successful self-titled first album, Wolfmother had pretty lofty expectations to meet. While frontman Andrew Stockdale had been hailed as a pioneer of hard rock revival, he was in danger of getting locked into Nickelback syndrome, making a career out of rewriting the same song. On “Cosmic Egg,” however, Wolfmother—with an all-new lineup supporting Stockdale—prove they have the talent and creativity to sustain their remarkable success. With intense, intricate, and looping guitar...
Admittedly, “Cosmic Egg” does share a number of features with Wolfmother’s self-titled debut. Both albums’ tracks are filled with similarly rendered electric guitar sounds, the very occasional switch to acoustic segments, interspersed squeals, and hearty track lengths. Rapid beats are repeatedly counterbalanced with the scattering of double time, slower tempo sections. But “Cosmic Egg” takes a step towards even harder ’60s rock riffs and heavy metal intensity...
...protective psychological mechanisms remains one of the strongest points of the collection, underscoring both life’s pathos and surrealism. Ishiguro examines the absurdity of how humans protect themselves from the outside world and the moment in which this protection begins to wear down. Eloise McCormack, the self-professed virtuoso cellist who coaches young Tibor on his technique, eventually confesses that she cannot play the cello. She justifies this by claiming that other, less-gifted teachers would have destroyed her innate gift if she had taken lessons with them: “I knew I had to protect...
Left with an absurd amount of plot leeway, “All Saints Day” busies itself engaging in a self-referential elevation of campiness. While a great deal of the humor in the original hinged upon the brothers’ bungled attempts to recreate old action movie scenes, “All Saints Day” makes a conscious attempt to churn out fantastically outlandish fight scenes and hard-boiled, quotable one-liners. Murphy kicks off a killing campaign by cheekily remarking to his brother, “Let’s do some gratuitous violence...
...someone’s hands and feet... with bombs!” or, my personal favorite, “Let’s cut someone in half... with acid!”. Standard “Saw” tropes like head-mounted traps, automated shotguns, self amputation, and smashing extremities to escape bondage make up the bulk of the film, while the few original elements (such as a maze filled with hot steam) are the least interesting of the mutilation machines. But this indirect borrowing from previous films apparently wasn’t enough to fill...