Review: 'Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas: Beyond Halloween Town'

Unlike a lot of Generation X'ers with similar sensibilities to my own, I was never overly enthralled with Nightmare Before Christmas because I don't think there's much of a story there. Jack Skellington's biggest problem is he's sick of Halloween? Sorry, but I cannot relate.

However, I think that a lot of the members of the massive Nightmare Before Christmas cult are mostly enthralled by the movie's images, and that is something to which I can relate. It's a friggin' great-looking movie, with delightful character designs brought to life with marvelously organic stop-motion animation. While I tend to zone out half-way through the movie (which I rewatch more than I would if I didn't have a kid), it's impossible to be a total Nightmare Scrooge because of its style, visuals, and technique.

While Emily Zemler's new book Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas: Beyond Halloween Town obviously can't convey the technique, it abounds with style and visuals and should scratch the itch for anyone like me who enjoys taking in the look of the film but doesn't really need to spend the full eighty minutes with it. 

For the many who do need that, this book will be even more appealing as it relates the tale of how the phenomenon started as a series of Burton's poems before Caroline Thompson developed them into a script and Danny Elfman developed it into a musical and the finished product developed a cult which then developed into the holiday-mega-merchandizing bonanza it is today. 

Because there are only 150 pages of content in this book, and text isn't its raison dêtre, I'd hesitate to call Zemler's book the definitive story of the making of Nightmare Before Christmas, but with its captivating images of concept art, behind the scenes puppetry, fan contributions, and merch that do, in their own way, tell the real story behind this film's deathless popularity, one could reasonably argue that Beyond Halloween Town is the definitive Nightmare book after all.

Review: 'Collecting The Simpsons'

As soon as The Simpsons went from being the thing that made people watch The Tracy Ullman Show to its own weekly entity in early 1990, the merchandising began. After all, no one new how long the bugged-eyed, yellow-faced dysfunctional family would last, so might as well strike while the inanimate carbon rod was still aglow. 

Five billion years later, The Simpsons is still on television, running half-assed Disco Stu cameos into the ground for the remaining cockroaches and a landfill full of plastic Bart Simpsons. 

But I'm getting ahead of myself. In the year 2023, we are merely on the series thirty-fifth season, and there are probably still a few humans watching the current crop of half-assed Disco Stu cameos. Not too much to get excited about there. But for those of us who remember when you could tune in one Thursday night and watch a spot-on Beatles parody called "Homer's Barbershop Quartet", and on the following one, take in Sideshow Bob stepping on rake after rake in "Cape Feare", and just seven days later see a bee bite Homer's bottom and make his bottom big in "Homer Goes to College", and do it all while snuggling a Bart Simpson doll, it seemed as though The Simpsons could pump out sheer comic brilliance and colorful, bug-eyed merchandise forever.

While the first part of that statement is wrong, the second one is right, although by Warren Evans's estimate in Collecting The Simpsons, "50 percent of the Simpsons merchandise that is still in circulation today was created and released within [the series'] first three years" of the series existence. That's just one of the fascinating factoids his and James and Lydia Hicks's book coughs up. Want to know why so much early Bart Simpson merch depicted the kid who only owns orange shirts in blue ones? It's in here. Want to know whatever happened to that life-sized Simpsons house that actually got built in Nevada in 1997? It's in here. Want to know Matt Groening's feelings about African-American appropriation of Bart Simpson as a cultural icon? It's in here. Want to know who really wrote "Do the Bartman"? It's in here. Want to know where you can get an actually-edible, Simpsons-accurate donuts the size of a small-child's head? It's in here.

That Collecting The Simpsons is more than just brilliantly colorful images of brilliantly colorful toys, banned T-shirts, fast-food premiums, Doritos bags, theme-park rides, kitchenware, bath products, games, books, comics, CDs, and clocks really justifies its existence, but those full-color pictures are what makes it an absolute joy. The writers' enthusiasm for and sense of humor about all this stuff doesn't hurt either. It's been 25 years since I've seen a new Simpsons episode that was really worth getting excited over, but Collecting The Simpsons definitely is. 

Review: 'Hardcore: The Cinematic World of Pulp'

Pulp had been at it for close to two decades when they finally joined the upper echelon of contemporary British pop with Different Class in 1995. For a band as erudite and self-aware, that kind of success doesn't go down easily, and their next album was an expression of that hard comedown.

Bleary and weary, This Is Hardcore is a weird centerpiece for a book like Paul Burgess and Louise Colbourne's colorful coffee table-ish Hardcore: The Cinematic World of Pulp. However, the album's artistic bona-fides make the choice less odd. The record spawned four lush music videos, inspired collages and paintings, and had one of the decade's most recognizable (and infamous) jackets, though Burgess and Colbourne mostly steer clear of exploiting that arguably exploitative image of model Ksenia Sobchak prone and in the buff. There is a completely hilarious image of the censored Malaysian version of that cover with an ugly gold sweater photoshopped onto Sobchak.

There are also lots of behind-the-scenes shots and stills from the "Party Hard", "Help the Aged", "A Little Soul", and "This Is Hardcore" music videos; a storyboard for "Party Hard"; examples of Pulpy artwork (most notably Sergei Sviatchenko's disturbing collages); and shots of the band on stage at the release party. 

The authors and several guests supply essays on the times, and director Garth Jennings conducts a very, very brief and unilluminating interview with band leader Jarvis Cocker that is almost comically split into two installments. Without question the most substantial piece of text in Hardcore is a 14-page interview with keyboardist Candida Doyle, who is unabashedly unenthusiastic about both the album and the era this book celebrates. However, her weariness over that period captures the temper of This Is Hardcore more honestly than most of the rest of this rather candy-coated book does. An essay by Pulp-documentarian Florian Habicht is also a must-read for the most horrifying interview-mishap tale ever told... that he was brave enough to recollect it in this book for posterior posterity is way more hardcore than anything on This Is Hardcore.

Review: Vinyl Reissue of Tommy Flanagan's 'The Cats'

With a quartet or his own simple, appealing tunes and one Gershwin classic propped on his piano, Tommy Flanagan led the session that produced his second album on April 18, 1957. However, he ceded credit to the one-off ensemble he put together for the occasion, which is probably what ones does when playing with such luminaries as Kenny Burrell and John Coltrane. Yet The Cats often is very much Flanagan's show. His searching, autumnal keys receive soft support from drummer Louis Hayes and bassist Doug Watkins on Gershwin's "How Long Has This Been Going On" while the rest sit it out. When the whole band joins in, which they do for the rest of these sides, they most definitely play as a very organized ensemble, Coltrane's melodic, tonally complex harmonies with trumpeter Idrees Sulieman providing much of the tangy flavor. 

The rhythmic variations among the numbers is what keeps The Cats eclectic and interesting, as the combo barrels through the Mingus-like "Minor Mishap", draws back everything for "How Long Has This Been Going On", gets rhythmically playful with "Eclypso", eases into "Solacium", and alternately skates and lurches through "Tommy's Tune", on which Burrell gets off some of his slickest licks. 

Originally released in late 1959, long after its recording date, The Cats has gotten several re-releases throughout the years, but I don't doubt that you'd be hard-pressed to hunt down a tastier one than the AAA-mastered edition that is now joining Craft Recordings' "Original Jazz Classics" series. The series has a pretty powerful track recorded of excellence, and this beautifully detailed, incredibly present piece of audio on perfectly flat, perfectly silent 180-gram vinyl maintains that record impeccably.

Review: Nirvana's 'In Utero' 30th Anniversary Box Set

After what seemed like an interminable wait, Nirvana finally released their follow up to Nevermind--the album that almost single-handedly plopped the pre-fab term "Alternative Rock" into the mainstream--in autumn of 1993. The band's purported goal was to shake off all the meat-heady fans they'd acquired since putting out a slick disc of metal-ish sounding drums and guitars and big sing-along choruses. Did it work? Well, although In Utero only sold half of Nevermind's figures, that's still pretty damn good, especially for an album so challenging and, despite some mixed notices, rewarding. Nevermind is a great record, but it lacks the personal atmosphere and unsanitized urgency of the record released just six months before the band's main voice took his own life. And that isn't just romanticizing a tragedy. Even before Kurt Cobain died, In Utero stood out for its perfect mix of classic melodiousness ("All Apologies", "Heart Shaped Box", "Scentless Aprrentice", "Dumb") and terrifying abrasiveness ("Scentless Apprentice", "Milk It", "Tourettes"), Steve Albini's massive and filthily organic production, and the tendrils of sadness twining through Cobain's grisly surrealism. 

That's a heavy legacy for an album being given the jolly 30th anniversary treatment, and it may account for why there is an almost total lack of text in this nine-pound-plus vinyl box set. The only reading on offer in the set's 48-page hardback book is a photo of Albini's letter to the band stating his working methods and expectations of the group. The rest is photos, graphics, and a few vellum pages. 

That leaves most of the talking to the music, of which there is eight-LPs worth. Leading the set is a new remaster of the core album, and compared to the Back to Black edition that has been the most common and affordable vinyl option for the past 15 years (and, frankly, the only copy I have for comparison purposes), I found this new remaster by Bob Weston (Albini's assistant engineer during the original sessions) to be much more dynamic, with better defined guitars, punchier bass and drums, and a deeper sound stage. It's also louder without being fatiguing on the ears.

Sitting in the other pocket of the main LP's gatefold is a disc with B-sides and compilation tracks on one side and a selection of live cuts from different sources on the other. The B-sides are an excellent assortment with such gems as Dave Grohl's menacing ballad "Marigold", the unbelievably catchy "Sappy" from the No Alternative comp, and the grinding "I Hate Myself and Want to Die" from the soundtrack of that Beavis and Butthead movie. The live cuts are mostly culled from a Rome show that was one of Nirvana's final concerts, but there's also a performance of "Milk It" recorded in Springfield, MA, and "Tourettes" from NY, both from '93. Despite some AI tinkering to exaggerate the separation between Cobain's and Pat Smear's guitars, the dinkiness of Grohl's usually elephantine drums, and the unsettling effect of having the audience's cheers almost completely muted, the Rome stuff sounds pretty good, as does that version of "Milk It" with extra-mumbly vocals from Kurt. "Tourettes", however, sounds like a low-grade MP3, quite possibly because of that AI business.

Which brings us to the next six-LPs in the set. There's a full set recorded at LA's Great Western Forum on December 30, 1993 and a nearly identical one from Seattle's Center Arena on January 7, 1993, both presented as triple-LP sets. While these recordings don't sound as gnarly as "Tourettes", they aren't ideal fidelity either. Of the two sets, the one from Seattle is less compressed with fewer artifacts. All in all, the sooner this current fascination with AI's ability to put people out of work and make old recordings sound weird comes to an end, the better. Nevertheless, the performances are terrific in spite of Nirvana's reputation for being an erratic live band during their troubled final year.

For the most part the vinyl is quiet, flat, and well-centered. Only the main album's bonus disc has a bit of a warp in the set I received, though it does not affect the sound. 

The packaging is certainly lavish, with that hardcover book, a clear acrylic panel featuring a print of the organ-exposing angel from the album cover, and a packet of goodies Krist Novoselic likened to the extras included with The Who's Live at Leeds. There are repros of concert tickets, posters, ads, fliers, and backstage passes. I was most impressed with the two live albums' triple-pocket jackets, the likes of which I'd never seen. Finally, a non-frustrating, non-chintzy way to store triple albums. Now there's something to celebrate.