Meet the Culture Wars

Meet Culture Wars: Rising alt-rock band adopts new name and edgier direction

CultureWars performs at White Oak Music Hall this week.

Other than Nickelback, whose trajectory no good music writer can explain, it’s pretty obvious early on whether a new band has the goods to convert the music into an actual career. Austin electro-rock act Culture Wars is one group with the potential to hit the big time. The band is set to make an impact with its self-titled EP, released this month.

While only five songs, each one could sit comfortably on alternative rock radio charts. From the soaring Imagine Dragons riffs of “Hideaway,” to the Alt-J via Depeche Mode styling of “Bones,” and the Nine Inch Nails-meets-T. Rex stomp of standout “Money (Gimme Gimme),” there’s not a dud among them.

Culture Wars hits White Oak Music Hall Thursday night after a long gestation period in the studio, ready to ply their hard work into a live experience the band promises to be special. Be there to say you knew them before they blew up.

The band's guitarist Mic Vrendenburgh recently checked in with CultureMap following a studio session where the band is working on new songs for a future full length.

Five things to know about Culture Wars:

Culture Wars rose out of defunct Austin five-piece The Vanity and all three members have been playing music for years. Fun fact: Vrendenburgh holds a graduate degree in cello from University of Texas.

Mic Vrendenburgh: The three core members came together after the demise of The Vanity. That band phased out sometime last year and we started writing music that was very different from that, which we decided to call Culture Wars at some point. The other two band members have known each other for a little longer than they’ve known me, but I’ve known them for about three years now. I got really close to them and when the time came to start a new band, I was very happy to keep going with them because they had become my best buds.

The name Culture Wars came from a long list of names, ultimately decided on because it fit the new direction of the music.

MV: It had a bit of an edge to it when a lot of other names didn’t and we felt it represented the new music better, it’s a little more aggressive and experimental. As far as the political ideology that comes to mind with the term "culture wars," there wasn’t really anything like that in creating the name. But that being said, we do like to draw from a lot of different places when we write music, so it kind of works that way too.

The band’s EP, produced by Rob Sewell, features a cache of tracks with the ability to get into your head, including first single,“Money (Gimmie, Gimmie).”

MV: (After The Vanity), we had the conscious thought that we still wanted to write really great music but we wanted to give every song the chance of being someone’s favorite song on the radio, not something experimental song structure-wise. I think it takes a certain discipline to really make something with the fat trimmed off, that has that pop sensibility and still keep your own character in the sound. That’s really what we were going for.

The EP was mixed and mastered by Alan Moulder who has worked on a ton of classic albums by artists you love, including Nine Inch Nails, The Killers, Depeche Mode and Interpol, and Manny Marroquin, who worked on albums by Kanye West and Imagine Dragons.

MV: It’s a dream come true. We have a great manager, Kevin Womack, here in Austin that has helped us out through the whole process in creating a new band. He had a good relationship with Manny and made it happen. It wasn’t a sure thing but we thought, "Why not?" It worked out and ended up being really cool.

Not surprisingly, Culture Wars is influenced by those bands and others that incorporate electronics into their rock sound.

MV: Depeche Mode is definitely a big influence. Tears for Fears too. A lot of them are what you would call synth-pop bands. We used a lot of synthesizers on this EP, which is different for us because we were guitar-based before and now we combine everything and pull out all the stops.

Culture Wars performs at White Oak Music Hall on Thursday, Aug. 24 with Houston act Deep Cuts and Austin DJ Charles Mxxn. Doors open at 8 pm. Tickets are $10.

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Movie Review

Avatar: Fire and Ash returns to Pandora with big action and bold visuals

Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios

Oona Chaplin in Avatar: Fire and Ash.

For a series whose first two films made over $5 billion combined worldwide, Avatar has a curious lack of widespread cultural impact. The films seem to exist in a sort of vacuum, popping up for their run in theaters and then almost as quickly disappearing from the larger movie landscape. The third of five planned movies, Avatar: Fire and Ash, is finally being released three years after its predecessor, Avatar: The Way of Water.

The new film finds the main duo, human-turned-Na’vi Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and his native Na’vi wife, Neytiri (Zoë Saldaña), still living with the water-loving Metkayina clan led by Ronal (Kate Winslet) and Tonowari (Cliff Curtis). While Jake and Neytiri still play a big part, the focus shifts significantly to their two surviving children, Lo’ak (Britain Dalton) and Tuk (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss), as well as two they’ve essentially adopted, Kiri (Sigourney Weaver) and Spider (Jack Champion).

Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who lives on in a fabricated Na’vi body, is still looking for revenge on Jake, and he finds help in the form of the Mangkwan Clan (aka the Ash People), led by Varang (Oona Chaplin). Quaritch’s access to human weapons and the Mangkwan’s desire for more power on the moon known as Pandora make them a nice match, and they team up to try to dominate the other tribes.

Aside from the story, the main point of making the films for writer/director James Cameron is showing off his considerable technical filmmaking prowess, and that is on full display right from the start. The characters zoom around both the air and sea on various creatures with which they’ve bonded, providing Cameron and his team with plenty of opportunities to put the audience right there with them. Cameron’s preferred viewing method of 3D makes the experience even more immersive, even if the high frame rate he uses makes some scenes look too realistic for their own good.

The story, as it has been in the first two films, is a mixed bag. Cameron and co-writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver start off well, having Jake, Neytiri, and their kids continue mourning the death of Neteyam (Jamie Flatters) in the previous film. The struggle for power provides an interesting setup, but Cameron and his team seem to drag out the conflict for much too long. This is the longest Avatar film yet, and you really start to feel it in the back half as the filmmakers add on a bunch of unnecessary elements.

Worse than the elongated story, though, is the hackneyed dialogue that Cameron, Jaffa, and Silver have come up with. Almost every main character is forced to spout lines that diminish the importance of the events around them. The writers seemingly couldn’t resist trying to throw in jokes despite them clashing with the tone of the scenes in which they’re said. Combined with the somewhat goofy nature of the Na’vi themselves (not to mention talking whales), the eye-rolling words detract from any excitement or emotion the story builds up.

A pre-movie behind-the-scenes short film shows how the actors act out every scene in performance capture suits, lending an authenticity to their performances. Still, some performers are better than others, with Saldaña, Worthington, and Lang standing out. It’s more than a little weird having Weaver play a 14-year-old girl, but it works relatively well. Those who actually get to show their real faces are collectively fine, but none of them elevate the film overall.

There are undoubtedly some Avatar superfans for which Fire and Ash will move the larger story forward in significant ways. For anyone else, though, the film is a demonstration of both the good and bad sides of Cameron. As he’s proven for 40 years, his visuals are (almost) beyond reproach, but the lack of a story that sticks with you long after you’ve left the theater keeps the film from being truly memorable.

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Avatar: Fire and Ash opens in theaters on December 19.

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