Johann's Face Records has been around for over a decade, and in that time has brought the greater Chicago area some excellent stuff from second city stalwarts like Oblivion, the Smoking Popes and Lynnard's Innards. Even when not releasing the most fantastic records, they have always had an impressive DIY ethic and kept close ties with indie pillars like Underdog Zine and the Fireside Bowl.

Nonetheless, the last few releases might have left fans a bit unsure. With back-to-back God's Reflex entries and a record from the Get-Up-like Sig Transit Gloria, people may have been left to wonder if JF had become, well, not bad, but at least a little soft.

Their latest release, The Atari Star's "Moving in the still frame", should do away with those doubts. Although some may be quick to brand it with the diluted catchall "emo," it really falls somewhere in between folk rock and slow rock. The stripped-down, largely acoustic sound runs opposite to the stressed guitars and frivolous electronics of the current emo crowd, and the band's leisurely pace puts them closer to Cat Power or Ida than Alkaline Trio or The Promise Ring.
The most important difference is that where emo bands tear themselves to pieces with boatloads of angst, The Atari Star is much more sedately reflective: "You could read me, 10,000 pages, from the transcript of my life / And I would sit there, slack jawed in wonder, at the choices I have made."

The instrumentation is largely guitar/drums/bass with some piano, but the very sparse keyboard and tambourine sounds used on the album do an excellent job of accentuating the songs.
The really astonishing thing is that the singer/guitarist is none other than Marc Ruvolo, the oddly phonetic leader of punk patriarchs No Empathy. The stylistic distance between No Empathy songs like "Ben Weasel don't like it" and Atari Star songs like "I don't know where to begin" is impressive to say the least, and proves Ruvolo is a step above most of the punk rock/post punk converts. In an age when Blink 182 dominates the airwaves, perhaps a closer tie to quiet rock and folk is the most viable choice for new millennium punk bands.

Rating: 7849
Erick Bieritz

The Black Heart Procession
-three-
Touch and Go Records
PO Box 25520 Chicago, IL, 60625

If a band's name was ever an indication of what to expect from their music, the Black Heart Procession is certainly such a group.  The music is moody and dark, largely emotional and highly rhythmic, and on their third album, they have crafted an album that is both impassively negative and thoroughly enjoyable.

As relatively popular as quiet post-rock may be right now, few bands have put out a record that shows such a simple mastery of subtle, interdependent sounds.  Tobias Nathaniel's instruments, particularly the piano and pump organ, twist and turn through the songs until they've covered them without the listener even noticing.

Pall Jenkins has an equally impressive range of fonts for his eerie output, best of all his voice, which curves between cold-deadness and gaunt, soulful sorrow.  The ever-inventive lyrics, with the recurring nautical theme and broken love poetry, only serve to heighten the replay value of this album.  While the tracks are primarily sad love songs, the almost ambivalently melancholy delivery goes against any sense of poignancy one might expect from the clichéd commonplace.

But it is the instruments played by the two, aided by several other accomplished San Diego musicians, that really forms the soul of the record.  The quiet, minimal background gives the saw, clavinet, guitar, and "noises" the opportunity to flesh out their skeletal songs.  From the bizarre lurching noise in the first song to the 3-2-1 beat and scratchy, indecipherable vocals of the last, the album leaks captivating sounds despite its best efforts to drag itself into a grave of metronome drum beats and whispering guitars.

Whereas the like-minded Godspeed You Black Emperor's 2000 release turned outward with their epic, sometimes operatic sound, The Black Heart Procession turned inward with their lovely, immaculately resigned compositions on -three-.  Hopefully this group will continue on the path of Led Zeppelin-style-album-naming and gift their audience with a -four- to drown the incessant chatter of popular music in a wash of postmodern approaches and baroque styles.

Rating: 9478
Erick Bieritz

Brainstorm SHEEN
bs.3
Dunket Records
493 Clinton Street #2 • Brooklyn, NY 11231

"bs.3" is the latest- and presumably third- release from electronic blip-sorters Brainstorm SHEEN, and while it does present a few readily disseminated tracks, it's a mixed bag for those willing to tackle its more amorphous moments.
While the lazy critic can toss about comparisons to Eno, The Orb and Aphex Twin, Brainstorm SHEEN's loopy idles are much more in line with Chicago beat luminaries Emperor Penguin. Besides sharing a taste for quirky samples, the bands come together on some of the more zoned-out tracks, like the album's last three, which bear a heavy resemblance to the Penguin's electro odysseys. SHEEN's overall album length is a bit under the up-near-70-minute range favored by Emperor Penguin, but several of the songs do have the same stretched-out feel to them.

The tracks vary quite a bit in quality and overall style. "Hornicopia" is a strike-slip big band recut with some nice programming. "Gimmie some more" sounds like a Devo instrumental, right down to the primitive analogue feel and Mark Mothersbaugh-style vocal sample. "Pavorotten," with its male opera undulations and pithy backup, sounds like a lighthearted counterpart to one of Moby's vocal-sample success singles from "Play." On the downside, well-executed tracks like "The commuter" and "Lazy Day" end up being a bit forgettable, while "Brainstorm SHEEN (we love it)" is an overwrought piece of pop built around a somewhat insider-ish sample.

It would be easy to brand "bs.3" as video game music, and to a large extent, it is. But now, when more and more video games are being soundtracked by Powerman 5000 and Papa Roach, its all right and natural to be a little bit nostalgic for the cheery blips of the old Atari 2600. "bs.3" may cause drowsiness during mid-morning meetings and long drives in the country, but it is ideal for a few hours of "Pitfall!" or "Snail Against Squirrel."

Rating: 7752
Erick Bieritz

Congratulations on Your Decision to Become a Pilot
Self-titled
Aisle 2 Records
P.O. Box 157 • Neenah, WI 54957

With 8 words and 43 letters in their name, Oshkosh, Wisconsin's Congratulations on your decision to become a pilot has a very long name. It even outweighs the longwinded And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead in terms of letters (though not words).

The album begins with the charged "When we were kids we built a treehouse from our neighbors' windows and if you get far enough away it looks like a giant eyeball" (perhaps they thought they should have a song with a longer title than the name of the band). It is a shouty emo rocker in the Midwestern tradition, and sets the tone for the rest of the record. Many of the songs bear the most obvious resemblance to Braid, with the drawn out guitar chords, sudden time changes, and overlapping melodic vocals. At times the similarities can be a bit much, but the band gets away with it because a) it adapts well to different songs and b) they use it pretty effectively. Another good comparison would be fellow cheeseheads Insidious, although that group takes the somewhat harder approach to the post-punk thing.

The album continues through utterly oblique song titles like "Charity creeping around upstairs, pg. 265", "Room to swing a cat" and even "Why you should read books that don't exist", which sounds like a Joan of Arc song title if I've ever heard one. That song has a very nice distorted vocal plus poppy oohs chorus, but it is topped by the albums finest moment, "Orange impossible", which hits on just the right mix of heavy guitars and light auxiliary noises.

At 36 minutes on the dot, the album is proportionately shorter than its name but sounds about right lengthwise. While many of the extra effects used sound cool, a bit more experimentation structurally or a bit more focus might help tighten up their music. The band's relative success here is bringing just enough new stuff into the mix to skip nimbly out of the path of the train of emo mediocrity.

Rating: 6987
Erick Bieritz

Jets to Brazil
Four Cornered Night
Jade Tree Records
2310 Kennwynn Road Wilmington, DE, 19810

Mr. Schwarzenbach, I presume?
Blake Schwarzenbach is the singer/songwriter/guitarist for Jets to Brazil, whose 1998 debut "Orange Rhyming Dictionary" was a break with the members' past works, particularly Schwarzenbach's era-defining punk band Jawbreaker. "Four Cornered Night" is a yet another change of pace for the group.

Schwarzenbach has traded his wah-wah pedal in for a piano, and the apocalyptic smashups of songs like "Morning New Disease" and "I Typed for Miles" have led to the confident cruise of "You're having the time of my life" and slower self-doubters like "In the summer's when you really know". Lyrically, the band retains their ability to string together some clever melodies.  The tone has shifted from the stress/relief of "Dictionary" to a more reflective, lost-love perspective, and even Schwarzenbach's trademarked Richard Butler/Frankie Stubbs gravel voice sounds a bit relaxed.  The words themselves range from the clever ("There's a sign up ahead, that there's no signs for awhile") to the somewhat ponderous (the lengthy thank-yous on "All things nice and good").

Months before the album was released, studio guy and contemporary J. Robbins said it sounds "kind of like Wilco," and the symphonic pop trend certainly does.  The comparison goes deeper than just the sound, however; just like Jawbreaker's punk feel on, say, "24 Hour Revenge Therapy" yielded to what is essentially a pop-rock sound on "Four Cornered Night", pre-Wilco Uncle Tupelo's folk/alt-country mood from "Anodyne" eventually turned into the string-driven pop products of "Summer Teeth".  Furthermore, both bands retain bits and pieces of their old sound; just like hints of folk still show up on Wilco's slower songs, the Jets still have undeniable punk roots. As finely tuned and well thought out as the record is, none of it really feels quite as fresh as vintage Jawbreaker (and how could it?)  Even as the songs become catchier, they somehow become a bit less memorable, and nothing on the album really burns itself into the memory like "Jinx Removing" or "Accident Prone".  Of course, comparisons to Jawbreaker go on ad nauseam in Jets to Brazil reviews, and those who can leave their expectations at the baggage claim will find "Four Cornered Night" a moderately enjoyable album.

Rating: 6957
Erick Bieritz

Rebekah's Tape
is that summer
Makeshift Music
P.O. Box 232 • Minonk, IL 61760

Minonk, IL, a small dot just off Highway 51, is home to Rebekah's Tape, a loose conglomerate of artists and members of other bands who collectively produce some music rather geographically out of tune with the rest of Central Illinois. While their music has, in the past, been nearly as bizarre as their artwork and poetry, their addition of a few more rock conventions as well as their move to the studio for "is that summer" seems to have worked out well for this release.

Well none will deny the charm of the four track, the studio does provide a more polished finish to the nine songs on the album. While the band has retained the scattershot electronics and sometimes offbeat drum tempos favored by groups like the Storm and Stress and Joan of Arc, some of these songs have a surfy, almost 50s-ish rock sound to them. "Cornstarch Lombada" lands in this region, and after the experimentation comes off sounding like an early Man or Astro-Man? release. "Flag's at half mast" has some interesting piano and horn expenditures, and "Cigarettes in the yard", the album's best track, comes closest to pulling together the various ideas of the album. "Sue's skis" is also more of a straight rocker with some broken segments thrown in for good measure.

Most of the tracks follow this general formula, although "Drum man" and "Weather report" are more brief childhood nonsense vignettes ("Weather report" is actually sort of entertaining). "-------", the final track, is something of an uncertain "experiment," and although it doesn't really go anywhere, it doesn't hurt, either.

At just under a half an hour, "is last summer" doesn't have the length of some of Makeshift's more low-fi releases, but it does show some nice development for the band. Early, uncertain stabs in the dark like this one are the seeds of the Daydream Nations and OK Computers of tomorrow. The true challenge for Rebekah's Tape, like all rock groups trying to experiment dramatically with their sound, is bringing all the diverse pieces of the equation together into one unified theory.

Rating: 7400
Erick Bieritz

Shellac
1000 Hurts
Touch and Go Records
P.O. Box 25520, Chicago, IL 60625

Ooh, a tricky one.  At first listen, "1000 Hurts" sounds like a terrible, painful album.  After a few spins around the Discman or record player, however, it becomes clear that it is just a terribly painful album. Not that that's much solace to whatever unsuspecting listeners might be unlucky enough to come within its range.  Steve Albini and crew's most recent release isn't the nihilism of grunge, the anger of punk or the angst of emo, but a really cold, calculating sort of rage.  Like Mission of Burma might sound if they slowed down and pulled all the noise out of their guitars, or Dis- if they were really, really pissed off. It might have been cleverer to name the album "1000 Hertz", the implied homonym to "hurts," but this isn't the sort of album to sneak around being clever.  Shellac isn't afraid to bandy grammatical meanings in the lyrics, either: "Do you get the same jokes as me, do you get the jokes the same as me?"

Of course, Steve Albini and Bob Weston are both studio savants, so the record sounds as good as one would expect.  At the same time, the composition and production is 180 degrees from the lush arrangements one associates with audio gurus like Phil Spector or Brian Wilson. And you can bet nothing on here sounds remotely like "Wouldn't It Be Nice". The bad vibrations, um, reverberate throughout this record, and if there's any doubt, take a look at the lyrics: "He'll fertilize the rice in China, with the cinders of his remains."  Not a lot of ambiguity there.  When Albini begins "Squirrel Song" with the words "This is a sad fuckin' song", he's not kidding around.

As rough, slow and prickly as "1000 Hurts" may be, it is still a decent record.  A decent record that sounds like Ian MacKaye after being stuck in a well for three days, or Thurston Moore just after all his equipment has been stolen.  Or maybe, mostly vividly, John McEntire, after all the buzz from the coffee has worn off and he is standing there trying, just trying, to tell the gas station attendant that he lost his wallet and his girl left him and his dog got hit by a car and he would please, just please, like to use the phone.

Rating: 6855
Erick Bieritz

Charlie's Angels

Is it unprofessional to review a movie that I saw while drunk? Perhaps, but then I am not actually getting paid, so it doesn't matter anyway. Maybe it was the 5 O'clock Vodka talking, but I was surprised to find that I did quite enjoy Charlie's Angels. This remake, like the remake of Shaft, left out one of the key elements from the original that audiences felt would make the new version worthless. The new Shaft had a gun but no sex; the Angels had sex but no guns. But the ladies' lack of munitions did not ruin the legacy, nor did it lessen their sexual potency. In fact, the martial arts and Matrix-esque moves were a lot more engaging than the point-and-shoot style of their predecessors.

My favorite Angel was Lucy Liu, as she was the least goofy and most believable; Drew Barrymore had the best cleavage and Cameron Diaz was a double winner in the Weirdest-Looking and Most Annoying categories. She did redeem herself, however, when she got into Soul Train and shook her money-maker to not only "The Humpty Dance" but also the greatest rap song ever, "Baby Got Back." That scene alone compelled me to announce to rest of the theater that I would be purchasing the movie on DVD – although now, in retrospect, I am not sure if I will be going quite that far.

The prize of the movie is the appearance of the elusive Crispin Glover (best known as George McFly in Back to the Future) as the silent-but-deadly Thin Man, whose piercing ice-blue eyes and French smoking style were making female audience members swoon left and right. Bill Murray, as Bosley, leaves one thirsting for more of both his dry humor and that hilariously large mustache that he sports on Charlie's Angels billboards – but somehow never gets around to wearing in the actual film. Other actors of note included Tim Curry (as a sleazy bad guy), Tom Green (as Drew's boat-dwelling boyfriend), Luke Wilson and the dumb guy from Friends.

If there were holes in the plot – and I assure you there were – I don't care. Charlie's Angels isn't about water-tight story lines, or quality filmmaking, or even moral lessons. Charlie's Angels is about three foxy bitches that can't be distracted from their missions, who always walk away without a hair out of place, despite explosions, fifty-foot falls, or even LL Cool J masks.  

Rating: 7345
Allison Richmond

(also, check out the Crispin Glover poll)