The Wake

Goldmund - Philip Glass film scores on quaalude.
-Eric Brew, Editor-in-Chief

Ocrilim - Beautiful guitarfucking.
-Deniz Rudin, Editor, S&V

Scout Niblett
-Peter Poght, Contributor

Bangs - Take U To Da Movies

There is a recent and tremendous surge in the popularity, both general and youtubular, of the self-consciously or “ironically” bad, but people shooting for so-bad-it’s-good generally end up at so-bad-it’s-even-worse-for-trying. In this climate, Bangs’ gigantic and sincere awfulness is just the pick-me-up a serious camphound needs. Check out this fantastic video from Sudan’s finest rapper.

On Saturday, January 23rd, I had the privilege of going to see the gods of extreme death metal, South Carolina’s Nile, at Station 4 in St. Paul. For all the indie kids who comprise the bulk of the Wake’s readership, going to see Nile would be the equivalent of you going to see Wilco or Yo La Tango or something—Nile is a band widely regarded by metal aficionados to be at the top of their genre. Live, they are stunningly tight: they flawlessly replicate songs from six albums, material spanning over a decade (including last year’s Those Whom The Gods Detest, a punishing return to form after the minor whoopsiedaisy of 2007’s Ithyphallic).

Nile has been absolutely ruining skulls since 1993 with their highly technical brand of death metal. Off-meter blast-beats set the foundation for …

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ChatRoulette.com is the kind of website your parents warned you about when you first got dial-up in 1996: it’s chock-full of loose women, perverts, masturbation, pedophiles, and explicit language of the most vulgar and racist sort. It’s also got the ability to rope you in faster than you can say, “I’m failing out of college.” The concept is simple: it’s video chat with completely random strangers. If the person you get paired up with is insufficient in any way, no problem: just click the button that says “Next.” With at least 4000 users on the site at any given time, you never know what kind of freak show menagerie you might find; for every average Joe or cute girl, there are …

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Everyone, sit down. We need to talk. This Avatar business is getting out of hand. It was fine when you just wanted to go for the 3D glasses and special effects. The effects were epic and it is pretty sweet when a big-ass dinosaur gets all up in your face. But when you started painting yourself blue everyday that was my first clue that something was wrong. You’ve ruined all the bath towels, not to mention the sheets. The only thing you’ll listen to is the Avatar soundtrack, and every time I walk in the door I’m greeted with, “I see you.”

I want to help you, but I can’t understand why you think this movie is so important. You hate …

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10 Albums that I loved:

Agoraphobic Nosebleed – Agorapocalypse

Who would’ve thought ANb would put out an album with an average song length of over two minutes? The world’s fastest grind band slows down a little, with mindblowing results. Absolutely fucking insane thrash trades off with insanely heavy riffs, with the best drum programming in human history. This record has the perfect grindcore mood: pissed off and wild and gross, offensive just for the sake of it, and ultimately lighthearted, playful, and carefree. But what matters most is that this band has finally become more about the music than the spectacle, though they’re still further over the top than just about anybody else.

If you had to decide whether or not this is an album you are interested in based on only one track:
“Question of Integrity”

Andrew Bird …

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On Nov. 17th, MPR aired “The Future of Journalism,” a program that hoped to discuss concepts of media both new and old while exploring the possibilities of the future. Host Carrie Miller’s main question for the hour was “How will investigative journalism look in the future?” Miller’s question was directed at guests Tom Rosensteil from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism and Evan Smith of the Texas Tribune. Both guests’ stable positions in the media make their viewpoints less likely to be skewed by the need for survival or the threat of their business being made irrelevant.

Smith posits that the role of the journalist is moving farther away from the old metaphor of “gatekeeper” to the “keeper of the aviary.” What he …

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On Friday, Nov. 20 the Nordic community of Minneapolis lifted the cinematic curtains to unveil some of the best films from the region. It showcased films from Finland, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, and Greenland that chronicled Nordic culture, people, and politics throughout the weekend. In between screenings, presenters gave synopses and introduced the audience to the background milieu of the particular film. Taking place in the Parkway Theater, the atmosphere buzzed with foreign chatter, Cognac, and Swedish buns.

The premiere was entitled Prostitution Behind the Veil, in which an Iranian woman who fled to Sweden goes back to report on the lives of oppressed women who have no other way of sustaining themselves. Drugs, little children, and condoms scatter the house of two women …

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Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox is fresh and wonderful. Based on the Roald Dahl novel of the same name, it is what the child inside me has longed to see since The Nightmare Before Christmas. It’s witty enough in dialogue to keep adults entertained and playful enough to keep young children captivated.

Visually, Fantastic is radiant beyond imagination. The stop-motion animation gives it a unique feel; if it had been made with computer-generated animation like a Pixar movie, the cartooniness would have taken over. Sure, The Incredibles received great acclaim in its attempts to mimic a blockbuster, but it could have easily been shot as a live action film.

Anderson took advantage of the animation style to bring the audience closer to the film and perform shots “that you can’t do in live …

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The newly-formed supergroup Them Crooked Vultures carries a unique burden of high expectations. The band is composed of Josh Homme (Queens of the Stone Age), Dave Grohl (Foo Fighters, Nirvana), and John Paul Jones (Led Zeppelin; his first earnest foray into music since the band’s breakup nearly 30 years ago). Each member has his own pedigree and interests, but they seem to be united by a nonchalance and aversion to pretense that bleeds into the music they have produced. Their eponymous debut sounds less like an album and more like a series of catchy, impromptu jams cobbled together in five minutes and existing as an excuse for three high-profile musicians to get together on weekends. If that sounds like a knock against the group, it certainly is not. Them Crooked Vultures is …

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There are two commonalities among most of the television networks: they produce mystery crime dramas, and they all suck. Fortunately, NBC has come to the rescue once again with its new show Community.

Community derives its name from the location and premise of the show: community college. Perhaps by happenstance, but more likely on purpose, the show’s creation comes at a time when real community colleges are being put into the spotlight—TIME Magazine recently ran an article on the subject: “Can Community Colleges Save the U.S. Economy?”

This is all beside the point: the show is absolutely brilliant. Community takes a cliché and turns it on its head. Instead of having the high school quarterback be dreamy, the snarky lawyer be affluent, the old guy be a kook, and the geeky girl be, …

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The City, screened at Oak St. Cinema on Nov. 19, may sound like any other violent, low-budget, action flick trying to live up to Scorsese or Tarantino. But a clever premise laced with smart subtext and wicked humor makes this a film worth seeing.

“I’d like people to walk away questioning what it is by their nature that makes them entertained by certain aspects of media,” writer/director James Vogel says. “Why do we as an audience expect to see violence and sex in films, and why are we entertained by it?”

Vogel, and his co-writers and stars, Ezra Stead and Greg Hernandez, clearly put a lot of thought into the meaning behind the film’s graphic images. Their story tells of a screenwriting student who falls in love with a charismatic underworld figure while seeking experience to …

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The last thing crossing most consumers’ minds in a recession is: It would be awfully nice to fill some wall space with a nice piece of locally-produced art. Hmm…

But why is this? Galleries won’t stay afloat on their own – most continue their humble existence on donations and sales of the artwork they feature. Between Minneapolis’s free museums and innumerable art galleries, we’re an art-spoiled crowd – sometimes we need to be reminded of the careful world these galleries exist in.

Franklin Art Works

To your right hang a cluster of old cell phones. Occasionally one will start to buzz, which will grow into a low trembling roar until the entire suspended pile is in a frenzied vibration. But other than that, it’s a bare …

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Sunset frontman Bill Baird is not impressed by your iPhone. Baird is interested in what he can do, what he can feel. He makes an effort to swim in the creek by his house daily and he’s always on the lookout for a quality watering hole to dip into. Pictures of him always tend to take place in the woods or on the beach. But before you dismiss Baird as another goddamn hippie with a guitar, you owe it to yourself to check out the sounds that come out of his admittedly abnormal head.

Sunset’s new album, Gold Dissolves to Gray, was recorded on analog tape, and you can feel it in the sound. It’s one of the warmest records you’ll hear this year. The album rollicks and rambles and rolls along at its own pace, …

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“You know why they’re good? Because they’re brothers – they understand each other, man…” Thus began a conversation I once had with a friend about brother-bands. And, although he was referring to the Bee Gees (seriously), upon listening to instrumental post-rock band Lymbyc Systym’s new album Shutter Release, I finally know what that guy was blathering about. Lymbyc Systym consists of Jared and Mike Bell, two brothers from Arizona, but from the way Shutter Release sounds, you’d swear the band couldn’t possibly be just a duo. I haven’t heard such a grandiose sounding record all year, yet I also haven’t heard such an elegant one.

The thumping drumbeat backed by droning guitar and bouncy synth of the album’s opener “Trichromatic” sets a mood for the entire …

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