This Week In Music

This week in music: The Suffers team up with Newport Folk Fest for Harvey relief show

For those on the naughty list hoping to get in good with Santa, a live music event to help Hurricane Harvey relief might be the solution.

A relatively quiet week in music surrounding Christmas Day means local music fans can practice some holiday giving to Houstonians in need. Organized by members of rock-soul collective The Suffers with the help from the acclaimed Newport Folk Festival, the With A Little Help From Our Friends concert on Friday, December 22, will benefit those who are still recovering from the impact of Hurricane Harvey.

The killer line-up features My Morning Jacket songwriter Jim James headlining, Americana troubadour Shakey Graves and indie-rockers Wild Child, both from Austin, Delta Spirit lead singer Matthew Logan Vasquez, the 60s-retro sounds of singer-songwriter Nicole Atkins, rising Dallas rockers The Texas Gentlemen, the artful sounds Joshua Asante and of course, hometown heroes The Suffers.

All proceeds from the show will go towards the Hurricane Harvey Relief Fund established by Mayor Sylvester Turner and County Judge Ed Emmett. The Greater Houston Community Foundation oversees and administers the grant distribution process and 100 percent of the donations received will be distributed to the community for immediate and long term relief efforts, according to a statement.

“It’s amazing that we have so many great acts on one bill coming together for a great cause,” said Adam Castaneda, bass player and co-founder for The Suffers. “It may feel like the hurricane happened a year ago, but it hasn’t. Neighborhoods are still torn apart and people still need help.”

The idea for the show came about shortly after the story hit in early September. The Suffers were set to head to the airport to play a festival slot in Charleston, South Carolina when strange things started happening. Band members started experiencing car trouble and another had a leaky roof from a busted pipe. The increasingly ominous forecast led them to cancel the appearance.

“The universe was telling us not to go to this festival and we are glad we didn’t,” Castaneda said. “We took that financial loss and stayed at home. Our families and our city needed us.”

Band members spent the next few weeks working at shelters, delivering food and dealing with their own clean-up. The one ray of sunshine and hope: percussionist Jose Chapy Luna and his wife welcomed a baby girl, named Valentina, the day Harvey came to town.

The group soon met and started to discuss a more impactful way to help rebuild the community. They decided to reach out to their friends at the famed Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island, an event they played in 2015 and in 2016 as an off-shoot concert. Their idea was to curate a concert that could really assist those in need, not just in the weeks following the storm, but in the months after the news cycle moved on.

“We decided to lend a hand not only because it is part of our mission, but because that's what families do for each other in times of need,” said Jay Sweet, Executive Director of the Newport Festivals Foundation, “And everyone involved in this event is Newport Folk Family.”

Newport helped book the acts and Fender put up some of the organizational costs, in addition to working to replace instruments lost in the floodwaters.

“All the acts are donating their time and presence to do the show,” Castaneda said. “Having someone like Newport on our side definitely gave some clout to booking these bands.”

The event will feature a live auction and hopefully the money raised will help bring some families some much needed Christmas cheer.

“We could have done something in the first few weeks but we felt like we wanted to help people who would need it a few months down the line,” Castaneda said. “People still need that help and there is no shame in asking for it. There are resources there for them.”

Newport Folk Presents & The Suffers: With A Little Help From Our Friends, a benefit Hurricane Harvey recovery, takes place at House of Blues on Friday, December 22. Doors open at 6 p.m. Tickets start at $45 plus fees. For more information on the Hurricane Harvey Relief Fund, visit https://ghcf.org/hurricane-relief/nonprofits-grants/.

Houston's The Suffers will take the stage at House of Blues on December 22. Courtesy photo

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Movie Review

New horror movie Faces of Death puts a modern twist on cult classic

Photo courtesy of of IFC Films

Dacre Montgomery in Faces of Death.

True horror fans will likely be familiar with the 1978 cult film Faces of Death, which purported to be a documentary showing real-life killings in gory detail. It didn’t, of course, but that didn’t stop rumors from continuing to spread for decades. Now, almost 50 years and multiple sequels later, comes a new version of Faces of Death, an actual movie that pays homage to the original in interesting ways.

Margot (Barbie Ferreira) works at a YouTube-like company called Kino as a content moderator, flagging videos that violate the company’s policies. This means her job often involves seeing some truly despicable things from all manner of depraved people. One day, though, she comes across a video that seems a little too real, and after seeing more similar videos, she starts to believe they’re genuine murders.

Going against her company NDA, she starts to investigate the videos on her own, which puts her on the radar of Arthur (Dacre Montgomery), who is actually kidnapping people and killing them on camera through methods seen in the original Faces of Death film. It’s not long before Arthur tracks her down, with a plan to make her one of his next victims.

Written and directed by Daniel Goldhaber (How to Blow Up a Pipeline) and co-written by Isa Mazzei, the film is not so much scary as it is creepy, with the occasional gross-out sequence. The idea of having someone emulate the killings in the cult film is a good idea, and pairing it with the modern-day attention economy — in which content creators go to increasing lengths for clicks — is a clever twist on a concept that other films have done.

The film as a whole is a commentary on how social media and video sharing sites have often decided to prioritize profits over the well-being of their users. Margot is shown allowing videos involving violence and sexual assault to stay on the site while nixing ones depicting how to use Narcan or demonstrating putting on a condom on a banana. Josh (Jermaine Fowler), Margot’s boss, is even explicit in the company mandate that outrageous videos drive views.

While Arthur has the makings of a good villain, there are few attempts to make him seem truly diabolical. His kidnappings often seem more spur-of-the-moment than calculated, and even though he has a well thought-out dungeon at home, the house’s location in the suburbs seems to make him vulnerable to easy discovery. Goldhaber and Mazzei leave more than a few unanswered questions along the way that take away from the intensity of the story.

Ferreira is yet another actor from Euphoria who’s capitalizing on her exposure from that show. She plays Margot’s increasing anxiety well, and when the action ratchets up in the final act, she meets the moment in a satisfying way. Montgomery returns to the vibe he had while playing the evil Billy on Stranger Things, and even though his character doesn’t fully live up to his potential, Montgomery sells his evil for all it’s worth.

The new Faces of Death may not be what some are expecting given the reputation of the previous films, but it’s a solid horror/thriller that uses the brand as a launching pad into something different. It doesn’t make much of a dent in the scare department, but it does give its violence and gore a degree of relevance in today’s often desensitized world.

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Faces of Death is now playing in theaters.

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