Bang Camaro is the biggest band in Boston right now. The '80s-metal-throwback band was named best live band and best new band by Boston rock magazine The Noise. The song "Push Push (Lady Lightning)" was featured in Guitar Hero II. A documentary filmmaker follows the band members around.
Coming off the success of its debut, Funeral, Arcade Fire has delivered a worthy follow-up with Neon Bible. There are usually two ways for a band to go with its second album. One is sticking to the original formula that may have worked so well the first time.
Ishmael Beah; A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier; available now When Ishmael Beah appeared on "The Daily Show," Jon Stewart acknowledged Beah's incredible journey as a boy soldier and refugee in Sierra Leone but was wary of giving him any more credit: Stewart pointed out that he had done his entire show with "a pretty bad cold.
Black Snake Moan; in theatres March 2 In Black Snake Moan, Samuel L. Jackson plays an old southern Christian man who attempts to heal a sick and distraught girl (Christina Ricci) by chaining her up to his radiator while she's unconscious. If this method of healing sounds unconventional, so does just about everything in Craig Brewer's fantastic and bizarre-looking film set in the sexy and sweltering south.
!!!; Myth Takes; available Mar. 6 The dance-punk band known as !!! but pronounced "chk chk chk" returns with Myth Takes, its first studio album since 2004. The first single, "Heart of Hearts," needs to be played loud to be appreciated-and needs to be seen live to be truly comprehended.
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan; available March 6 "Very nice. How much?" No, he's not talking about antique furniture, Corvettes or jewelry. Borat is talking about women ... and making "sexy time." Sacha Baron Cohen is crude, offensive, outrageous and, most of all, hilarious.
Swati doesn't play by the rules. When the New York singer/songwriter was offered a trombone scholarship at Julliard, she left playing classical music behind and traded in her trombone for a 12-string acoustic-electric guitar. "I was constrained playing in a symphony," Swati said in an interview with The Beacon after a show at Toad in Porter Square.
When creating her exhibit Nation Building, Karen Finley, Emerson's School of the Arts visiting artist-in-residence, said she asked herself, "What can I be doing to further the conversation to get it to be a discourse, to get it to be a political work?" She certainly did just that in her artistic response to the conditions of power in the United States and the war in Iraq.
The yardstick for Zodiac, an expansive and captivating look at a real-life American horror story, is clearly All the President's Men. Or Dirty Harry. Or The Silence of the Lambs. Less than a year since the direct-to-DVD release of The Zodiac, a fictionalized retelling of the infamous murders, comes Zodiac, a well-financed version from Warner Bros.