Thursday, August 25
Academy Annex, 95 North Sixth St., 718-218-8200, 6:00
Other Music, 15 East Fourth St., 212-477-8150, 9:00
www.matadorrecords.com
On “Tigers,” the opening track on Mirror Traffic (Matador, August 23, 2011), the brand-new album from Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks, Malkmus sings, “Trust me because I’m worth hating.” We’ve been trusting the king of indie pop since the early 1990s, when he was blowing our minds with such records as Slanted & Enchanted and Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain as leader of the seminal band Pavement. We hated when that group broke up, but they recently got back together and are rereleasing expanded editions of their classic discs, so it’s all good again. It’s also good that Malkmus’s fifth album with the Jicks, which currently also includes guitarist Mike Clark, bassist Joanna Bolme, and drummer Jake Morris, is another terrific effort, filled with pop gem after pop gem. On “Senator,” Malkmus may claim, “My duty to the Republique / is to use double speak because the Halo’s off,” but there’s little double speak by the indie god on these fifteen songs, from “No One (Is As I Are Be)” and “Brain Gallop” to “Stick Figures in Love” and “Gorgeous Georgie.” The songs travel all over the indie spectrum, sometimes within a single song, courtesy of another indie god, Beck, who produced the record. Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks will be at Terminal 5 on September 26 with Holy Sons, but you don’t have to wait that long to see them, as they’ll be doing free in-store acoustic performances on August 25 at Academy Annex in Williamsburg at 6:00 and Other Music at 9:00, first come, first served. And as of this posting on August 24, you can stream the new album for free on NPR by clicking here.
Writer-director Brad Bird won Oscars for his animated features The Incredibles (2004) and Ratatatouille (2007), but the Simpsons veteran first made his mark with the charming 1999 sci-fi cartoon The Iron Giant. Based on the 1968 book The Iron Man by Ted Hughes, the animated film is set during the Cold War, with the general populace and the military fearful of a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. So when rumors that a fifty-foot-tall iron giant (voiced by Vin Diesel) has fallen from the sky, the government wants to destroy it, but it is being hidden by young Hogarth Hughes (Eli Marienthal), who has saved its life. Hogarth keeps his new best friend a secret from his mother (Jennifer Aniston) and federal agent Kent Mansley (Christopher McDonald) with the help of the town beatnik, Dean McCoppin (Harry Connick Jr.), who takes a liking to Hogarth’s mom. The screenplay, written by Tim McCanlies (Secondhand Lions), plays with various genre clichés just enough to avoid being clichéd itself, instead making The Iron Giant a delightful, nearly flawless twist on the E.T. mythos, mixed in with a little Androcles & the Lion, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and even Frankenstein and King Kong. The film, which also features the voices of Cloris Leachman (Mrs. Tensedge), John Mahoney (General Rogard), and M. Emmet Walsh (Earl Stutz), is a treat for children and adults. Bird, meanwhile, has graduated to live action; his next movie will be Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol, starring Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, and Simon Pegg. The Iron Giant is screening for free on August 23 at dusk as part of the Red Hook Summer Movies series in Valentino Pier, which continues August 30 with Pump Up the Volume (Allan Moyle, 1990), September 6 with Highlander (Russell Mulcahy, 1986), and September 13 with the viewers choice selection, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (Tim Burton, 1985).