Highway Tunes

Summer Road Mix: The best 2010 songs for a road trip warrior

Yes, you want these guys in your car. MGMT's "Congratulations" is a must play.
Forget where the open road will take you, it's all about what you're listeningto along the way.
Gaslight Anthem has a lot of Springsteen in their sound — which make themperfect for the road.
The boys from Vampire Weekend are made for summer.

As you get ready to hit the road for you summer vacation destination, you need to have the proper tune-age to ease you on down that road (and drown out the kids/in-laws/insert-your-own-annoyance-here screaming in the back seat.)

With that in mind, here is a list of the best songs of what’s been a particularly fruitful first six months of 2010. Now get downloading, or else prepare to, heaven forbid, make conversation in the car.

“Crown On The Ground” by Sleigh Bells

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We’re going to start off with a little cheat here, because this was actually released as a single last year. But we’ll allow it because the album which contains it came out just last month, and because its thunderously catchy beat might act as a homemade hydraulic system for your car.

“Bloodbuzz, Ohio” by The National

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Quite simply the best song from the best album released so far this year. Plus it gives us a one-two start from bands based out of Brooklyn, even though The National’s darkly compelling beauty bears little similarity to Sleigh Bells in-your-face bounce.

“Horchata” by Vampire Weekend

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This was a band made for the summer, and the breezy, marimba-fueled groove they concoct here practically conjures up warm breezes by the force of its will. It’s only when you listen closer that you notice the melancholy aftertaste of Ezra Koenigs’s lyrics.

“Kiss Like Your Kiss” by Lucinda Williams with Elvis Costello

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I guess it’s impossible to avoid vampires this summer, so let’s slow it down a bit with this lovely duet from the True Blood soundtrack. When these two vets harmonize, they summon heartache that you don’t need to be undead to feel.

“Melancholy Hill” by Gorillaz

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"Plastic Beach" was a triumph for Damon Albarn’s comic-book collective. Here he steers clear of the hip-hop and guest stars that permeate much of the album and delivers a picture-perfect pop song, all wistful and gorgeous.

“Bushwick Blues” by Delta Spirit

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It’s unusual to hear an indie band leave cynicism at the door, but this single is full of open-hearted romanticism, and it’s quite refreshing. Coupled with the tightness of their guitar attack, you’ve got an irresistible track that deserves a big audience.

“Crash Years” by The New Pornographers

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If a mad scientist went into a lab with the intention of creating a band that was made for car stereos, he would likely come out with these Canadian power-poppers. With Neko Case on lead vocals, this one has more hooks than a pirate convention.

“The Suburbs” by Arcade Fire

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They’ve been slowly leaking tracks online, whetting everyone’s appetite for the early August release of their third full-length. For my money, this moody song, with piano borrowed from 10CC and suburban outlook borrowed from David Lynch, is the best of those four killer preview tracks.

“Congratulations” by MGMT

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Many people didn’t know what to make of the prog-rock moves of this buzzy duo’s second album. Too bad, because it’s a trippy winner. But if you’re one of the timid, you can stick with this song, the album’s title track and most accessible song of the bunch, a clever ode to the pitfalls of believing your own press clippings.

“You Must Be Out Of Your Mind” by Magnetic Fields

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Summer can’t be all roses and sunshine. You need a little bit of Stephin Merritt’s acerbic humor, here combined with a Baroque-pop arrangement and his unerringly catchy songwriting skills, to balance things out.

“Hurricane J” by The Hold Steady

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This Minnesota band’s latest set was a bit of a step backward as a whole from the heights they had reached on their previous albums. This song, however, a hard-charging tribute to a girl whose self-sabotage knows no bounds, is an undeniable winner.

“Old Haunts” by Gaslight Anthem

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Like the Hold Steady, this group has a lot of Springsteen in its sound. On this swaggering rocker they find a groove all their own, as frontman Brian Fallon spits out verses warning about the dead ends of nostalgia.

“The Ghost Inside” by Broken Bells

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You’d never guess that James Mercer could be funky from his work with The Shins. Thanks to the influence of producer and collaborator Brian Burton, aka Danger Mouse, Mercer channels Prince on this bumping track, even pulling out a knockout falsetto.

“Take Care” by Beach House

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What better way for a summer mix to go out than with a band named Beach House? This is also the perfect closer because of its dreamy atmospherics and the way Victoria Legrand’s voice cuts through it all with the sweet promise, “I’ll take care of you.”

If that doesn’t cure you of road rage, you’re beyond help, my friend. Have a great summer!

Movie Review

Meta-comedy remake Anaconda coils itself into an unfunny mess

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda

Photo by Matt Grace

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda.

In Hollywood’s never-ending quest to take advantage of existing intellectual property, seemingly no older movie is off limits, even if the original was not well-regarded. That’s certainly the case with 1997’s Anaconda, which is best known for being a lesser entry on the filmography of Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez, as well as some horrendous accent work by Jon Voight.

The idea behind the new meta-sequel Anaconda is arguably a good one. Four friends — Doug (Jack Black), Griff (Paul Rudd), Claire (Thandiwe Newton), and Kenny (Steve Zahn) — who made homemade movies when they were teenagers decide to remake Anaconda on a shoestring budget. Egged on by Griff, an actor who can’t catch a break, the four of them pull together enough money to fly down to Brazil, hire a boat, and film a script written by Doug.

Naturally, almost nothing goes as planned in the Amazon, including losing their trained snake and running headlong into a criminal enterprise. Soon enough, everything else takes second place to the presence of a giant anaconda that is stalking them and anyone else who crosses its path.

Written and directed by Tom Gormican, with help from co-writer Kevin Etten, the film is designed to be an outrageous comedy peppered with laugh-out-loud moments that cover up the fact that there’s really no story. That would be all well and good … if anything the film had to offer was truly funny. Only a few scenes elicit any honest laughter, and so instead the audience is fed half-baked jokes, a story with no focus, and actors who ham it up to get any kind of reaction.

The biggest problem is that the meta-ness of the film goes too far. None of the core four characters possess any interesting traits, and their blandness is transferred over to the actors playing them. And so even as they face some harrowing situations or ones that could be funny, it’s difficult to care about anything they do since the filmmakers never make the basic effort of making the audience care about them.

It’s weird to say in a movie called Anaconda, but it becomes much too focused on the snake in the second half of the film. If the goal is to be a straight-up comedy, then everything up to and including the snake attacks should be serving that objective. But most of the time the attacks are either random or moments when the characters are already scared, and so any humor that could be mined all but disappears.

Black and Rudd are comedy all-stars who can typically be counted on to elevate even subpar material. That’s not the case here, as each only scores on a few occasions, with Black’s physicality being the funniest thing in the movie. Newton is not a good fit with this type of movie, and she isn’t done any favors by some seriously bad wigs. Zahn used to be the go-to guy for funny sidekicks, but he brings little to the table in this role.

Any attempt at rebooting/remaking an old piece of IP should make a concerted effort to differentiate itself from the original, and in that way, the new Anaconda succeeds. Unfortunately, that’s its only success, as the filmmakers can never find the right balance to turn it into the bawdy comedy they seemed to want.

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Anaconda is now playing in theaters.

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