Review: 'The Godfathers of Horror Films'

I've read biographies of Boris Karloff and Peter Cushing. I've read a book about the professional and personal relationship between Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. But I've never read a book like Jennifer Selway's The Godfathers of Horror Films. 

Selway attempts to do a lot in just two-hundred pages. At its most basic, The Godfathers of Horror Films is a triple-duty biography of Karloff, Cushing, and Lee. While the three stars have several significant things in common—they're all British, they all became stars by making Frankenstein movies after many years of toiling away as bit players, they all had major and prolific careers as horror stars thereafter, they were all the faces of studios intrinsically associated with horror, they all fought in world wars—their careers overlapped infrequently enough to make weaving their stories together a challenge. 

Review: 'Frankenstein Lives: The Legacy of the World's Most Famous Monster'

Dracula may be sexier, but Frankenstein is the king of the monsters. His power, pathos, versatility, metaphorical possibilities, and iconic looks are all larger than manmade life. The story of his literary creation is much more legendary than that of Dracula's, and the subsequent tales he has inspired more profound. So it's only natural that this unnatural character has been the topic of many books.

Review: 'The Who Album by Album: Listening to You'

A few decades ago, The Who easily floated in the same atmospheric level as The Beatles, the Stones, and Led Zeppelin. They seem to have spent the subsequent years drifting back to Earth despite the tremendous quality of Pete Townshend's songs and the utter power and uniqueness of his, John Entwistle's, and Keith Moon's musicianship. So it's nice that a fan such as Dante DiCarlo still cares enough to devote a book to the albums this top-tier band made.

Review: Deluxe Edition of Elliott Smith's 'Figure 8'

One of the most subtly interesting things about his thoroughly fascinating career was how Elliott Smith gradually built up his sound from album to album. From the bare-bones guitars of Roman Candle to his additional embellishments of drums and bass on a few tracks of his eponymous sophomore album to the more consistent use of such band-like arrangements on Either/Or to the full-blown Revolver's-been-turned-over sound carnival of his masterpiece and Dream Works debut, XO. 

Smith's second album for Dream Works was even bigger and more polished than XO. Yet, as extroverted as it sounded, Figure 8 continued to express the inner life of a troubled and deeply introverted artist. That push-and-pull is what makes Smith's "big-production" period so appealing. Many artists make deliciously enjoyable music and many plumb the depths of their souls and dredge up dark stuff. Very, very few are capable of or willing to do both simultaneously. 

So, even more so than XO, Figure 8 is a record that's just as appropriate to blast at a barbecue as it is to meditate on through headphones by candlelight. And though the nearly hour-long album feels a bit like it should have been trimmed down, there's not too much any reasonable editor could justifiably cut. Even something as seemingly slight as "Everything Means Nothing to Me" is sweeping and grand and overwhelmingly moving (and it's my personal favorite track on the album).

Review: 30th Anniversary Vinyl Edition of the 'Clueless' Soundtrack

Saturday Night Fever's pivotal spot in the seventies notwithstanding, the nineties was the decade in which soundtrack albums really became as important as the visuals they accompanied. Chuck five seconds of a sellable pop song in a film, dump the entire song on a five-inch plastic disc, and a label just might move a metric ton of CDs. If those five seconds belong to an alternative rock group, you might even sell discs to kids who wouldn't be caught dead watching the visuals in question. No joke: Melrose Place may be stupid, but the Melrose Place soundtrack is unironically awesome!

Review: The Eyes' 'My Degeneration'

The Eyes are often lumped in with the freaky British mod groups like The Who, The Creation, and Small Faces, and their best-known tracks do sort of crib the riff from "I Can't Explain" and Townshend's pickup-flicking from "Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere". But with their sneering R&B vibe, The Eyes owe as much to the The Pretty Things. Tracks like the "I Can't Explain"-cribbing "I'm Rowed Out", the "Anyway, Anyhow"-cribbing "When the Night Falls", the "My Generation"-cribbing "My Degeneration", and "The Immediate Pleasure", which just might not crib anything at all, have the echoey, mysteriously seedy vibe of the Pretties during their "Can't Stand the Pain"/"£.S.D." heyday. The Eyes certainly sounded much tougher than their uniforms of stripey shirts affixed with pics of their own faces in eye-shaped fields might have suggested. I guess they would have to.

Review: 'Pink Floyd: Behind the Music'

Mike Evans tends to pen the kinds of rock and roll books in which visuals take prominence over text. When some of his previous subjects include The Who and David Bowie, two of rock's most electrifyingly visual artists, the formula works as it should, and the fact that Evans doesn't exude a ton of personality as a writer is not super consequential. 

Pink Floyd: Behind the Music is as visually oriented as Bowie Treasures or The Who: Much Too Much, but since the subject is a quartet of nondescript guys in t-shirts and jeans who tended to hunch motionlessly over their instruments, Evans has to haul more weight. 

Review: 'Buzz Me In: Inside the Record Plant Studios'

What do Electric Ladyland, There's a Riot Goin' On, Black Sabbath Vol. 4, Innervisions, Rumours, Cheap Trick '77, Parallel Lines, a spiffy 12-track machine, a room-size Moog, a suite of sex-fetish rooms, and 162 tons of cocaine have in common? They're all among the ingredients that made the Record Plant THE Record Plant. 

Founded by engineer Gary Kellgren, the Record Plant was the first successful studio by and for hippies. He decked the place out with high-tech equipment (a board capable of recording twelve tracks...twelve!) and, inspired by the perpetual skinny-dipping party at Peter Tork's house, an atmosphere of sexual and chemical malaise. It's where rock and rollers could escape the sterility of their grampa's recording studios to rock out, experiment, snort, and screw as much as their bodies and labels' budgets could bear.

Review: 'Stupid TV, Be More Funny: How the Golden Era of The Simpsons Changed Television-And America-Forever''

When a schoolmate convinced me that The Simpsons was more than just some fad prime-time kid's cartoon/T-shirt sales device, and I actually watched the show, I was hooked and I was amazed. Even three decades later, having watched all of the episodes from its eight-season "golden age" countless times, The Simpsons still seems like magic to me. How did the writers pack so many jokes into those first 178 episodes? How did the rhythm seemingly never go slack (especially when we're talking about seasons 2 through 7)? How did it pile in so much wit, originality, and genuine hilarity when every other comedy on TV was lucky to squeak out a couple of good laughs over the course of an entire season? Were its writers some sort of alien beings like Kang and Kodos? Had they been enchanted like some sort of pacifier-producing monkey's paw? Were they the biggest men in the world and covered in gold...14-karat gold?

Review: '501 Essential Albums of the '80s'

Late last year we got a swollen tome determined to canonize 501 albums from the 1990s. Alas, such a project was doomed to frustrate because by the 1990s pop music had wandered off into such disparate directions that simply enjoying nineties music in general signals a lack of personal taste instead of broadmindedness. In other words, anyone who'd go straight for the entry on Exile in Guyville could only suppress their barf reflex when seeing that Baby One More Time followed several pages later. In other other words, in attempting to please everyone the book seemed aimed at no one.