Soul psych, blue jasmine and jazzfest by proxy

This was one of those very long lead, maybe-for-print type reviews, so I sort of forget about what the record sounded like but it seems like I must have liked it.

KING KHAN AND THE SHRINES
Idle No More
Merge

BY JENNIFER KELLY

It’s been six years since King Khan and the Shrine’s soul-psych extravaganza What Is?, where the Montrealean garage revivalist channeled an acid-tripping Sam and Dave or, perhaps, a Syd Barrett duck-walking in shiny pointed dress shoes. Khan has apparently spent the early teens honing a sleeker, denser, more Spector-esque sound, the raw scrape of, say, “Torture” moussed and primped into a wall-to-wall swirl of sensation. At its best, for instance in the unstoppable “I Got Made,” Khan balances a sharp, swaggering attack with the pillow-y lushness of a Morricone score. Or he allows bumping 1960s Motown bass-lines and crackling Blaxploitation wah wah solos to simmer under the giddy crescendos of girl-group-y “Thorn In Her Pride.” And single, “Bite My Tongue” (in the video a profanely hilarious Batman vs. Jesus duel) has the slanted drive of a Nuggets garage anthem, embellished with the brass and string swells lifted from James Brown.

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We went to see Blue Jasmine on Sunday, and Cate Blanchett should totally get the Oscar for it. She can go from poised to poisoned in about 3 seconds -- and she has can add 20 years to her face just by the way she holds her mouth. The most squirm-worthy scene -- and also maybe the best -- is the one where she explains her sordid situation to two tweener boys she's babysitting at a diner over cokes. Amazing. Bobby Carnavale is pretty great, too, and Sally Hawkins. (Alec Baldwin is doing a variant on Jack Donaghy, but he's good that that, so why quibble?)

Sean called late Sunday to tell us that he'd gone down to Chicago Jazzfest with a pack of his friends and he wasn't sure what he'd seen (Robert Glasper, apparently), but LUPE FIASCO had come on stage!!! Very cool that he's getting the best out of the city...kind of jealous that he can just saunter over to the park for things like this.

Not the greatest video but... (it's not Sean's. I found it on the internet.)