The Donnas- yeah, they’re Bitchin’

Finding out the Donnas had parted ways with their record label earlier this year was a big disappointment because it led me to wonder when we’d hear from them again. Thankfully, the answer was soon, and they’ve reemerged with a vengance (and one hell of an album to boot!) The girls are the spiritual successors to KISS and 80’s hard rock/hair metal bands. There’s a sense of familiarity listening to album as though it should have been cranking out of the radio years ago. There’s no bother with ballads or romantic love songs of any type, this is party based, hook-up rock and roll, done better than 95% of bands out there. Allison Robertson is perhaps one of my favorite guitarists around today because of her ability to channel 1970’s Ace Frehley solo licks and then take them farther than Ace ever did. (Speaking of Kiss, the title track does a quick quote of the Love Gun riff- so there’s a pretty clear influence there).

Bitchin’ is a high-octane, fun, party inspiring record that will get your head banging and fist pumping- it’s great for putting the pedal down and crusing down the interstate with the top down and the music blaring. These girls are so much more than their pretty faces, though it doesn’t hurt when Bret Anderson sings, “Don’t bother saying please if you want to ravage me” in Like an Animal. Standout tracks include “Save Me”, “Smoke You Out”, and Don’t Wait Up For Me”. If you like straight ahead rock and roll, but this album. You won’t be disappointed.

Upcoming Reviews 9/14/07

Just a brief update of reviews I’ll be posting over the next week or so.

In music, you can expect to see reviews for the following:

K T Tunstall – Drastic Fantastic

James Blunt – All The Lost Souls

Mark Knopfler – Kill To Get Crimson

Steve Earle – Washington Square Serenade

Bruce Springsteen – Magic

Reba McEntire – Duets

Joe Nichols – Real Things

In books:

Tom Piccirilli’s Midnight Road

Brian Knight – Broken Angel

Greg Gifune – The Bleeding Season

John McClay – Dreadful Deliniations

 In DVDs:

Blades of Glory

Death Proof

300

Robot Chicken Season 2

 I’ll also be reviewing the Flock browser now that I’ve begun playing around with it. I’ll also look for other web sites or web apps to review to try and keep the site better rounded. If you’ve stumbled here by accident, I hope you’ll come back. I promise my ability to review will improve with time. If there’s anything you’d like me to do a review for, feel free to leave a comment and let me know.

Mary SanGiovanni’s “The Hollower”

I won’t deny it- I am a fan of debut novels, and for a number of reasons. Partially, it’s getting to discover someone new, to add to the already large list of authors whose work I try to read regardless of genre or publisher. Another main reason is I simply like a different voice with a new song or a different take on an old idea. Mary Sangiovanni has been around in horror circle for a while, but this is her first novel and my first chance to read her work.

From the opening pages, SanGiovanni, sets the tension bar high by leading off with a suicide. After the killing shot is fired, she reveals, empty footsteps trailing out an open door. Her main characters are all broken people- a recovering coke-addict, a barmaid who was  molested as a child, an alcoholic and his mentally unstable younger sister, an emotion-fearing cop, and a young boy whose father died early. The common ground between them is a “man” wearing a black fedora, trench coat and gloves that comes to expose their deepest fears. This man has no face, but instead a smooth, blank canvas where its features should be.  All our characters are tormented by this creature who becomes known as the Hollower and pursue it back to its lair, the home of the novel’s opening-scene suicide. Here, they are forced to fight through their vices and fears to bond together and vanquish their enemy.

SanGiovanni avoids the standard monster-from-another-world horror cliches and turns in a very impressive debut, taking her characters through intense challenges of willpower, resolve, and strength in order to actually fight for their survival rather than curling up and submitting to the terror against which they are faced. The writing is strong, the plot solid, and the characters sympathetic in a realistic rather than exaggerated manner.

Overall, 8.5 out of 10. I find myself looking forward to SanGiovanni’s next project and hope to see it soon.

Frisky Dingo returns tonight!

One of the best new series Adult Swim has produced in the past year, Frisky Dingo, returns for its second season tonight. Full review later…

Perfspot.com – Something Old, Nothing New, Very Borrowed, Left me Blue

My friends over at KnightKnetwork were doing some research on Alexa and noticed that in the past month, Perfspot.com was spiking in terms of its web traffic (in fact, 1.4% of all global users are tracked as viewing this site). So, curious as to what the big deal was, they asked me to do some looking around and churn out a useless review.

At first glance , Perfspot.com looks like a souped-up  ad for the Iphone. The welcome page has a prominent spot in the center of the viewing area for their “Featured Business,” and as a result, the Iphone is right in your face (as though it wasn’t already). Other than that, you are presented with a list of “Channels,” as well as a selection of featured music, videos, news, and blogs that relate to the current page. The channels are just another excuse for more ads and don’t really present anything different from the main page to grab your attention. Just a lot of nothing as far as I was concerned.

After clicking through the channels for a while, I finally noticed the link for “myPerfLife” and clicked on it. Now I was finally able to understand where the hits were coming from. my PerfLife is an almost picture perfect mySpace clone. As a matter of fact, the individual profile pages were almost cookie cutter copies of a mySpace page (the biggest difference I could notice was the presence of photo albums directly on the profile page rather than on a separate link).

Like mySpace, Perfspot has made sure to market itself as a launching pad for musical acts (are there any bands out there nowadays that don’t have a mySpace presence?). As far as I could tell there’s no option to download mp3s if the artist allows it, but there is an advantage in that bands aren’t limited to only posting four songs (though why would you post the entire album for free if you want people to actually buy it?). The problem was that I couldn’t find any bands of note. Perhaps this was due to the relative infancy of the site, but I can’t believe that’s the real reason.

In all honesty, I can’t see how this site can realistically hope to compete with mySpace as a networking hub. Sure, someone will eventually be able to do that (see Facebook), but they’ll have something original to offer, some new wrinkle that mySpace never considered, and they’ll do it in a way that’s so unique that people will rush to take advantage (and effectively join the bandwagon). Perfspot is just a weak copy of an already established formula, not the next big thing. The only thing it has over mySpace is three friends (Ashley, Rob, and Carmen) for your new account instead of just Tom on mySpace, and that just doesn’t cut it. Given that the majority of the hits come from South America, perhaps Perfspot is being more agressively marketed there, and perhaps it will become a viable product for that region of the world, but in my opinion it’s much ado about nothing. If you’re on mySpace already, don’t waste your time, and if you aren’t already on mySpace- you probably don’t care about a site like this anyway.

Everything needs a beginning…

Welcome to the first post from Useless Reviews. In the coming days/weeks/months I’ll be posting my reviews of Books, CDs, Movies, web sites, video games, and practically anything else I can think of to talk about (as long as I feel like I have a valid opinion on the subject). If you have a product you’d like me to, please don’t hesitate to let me know.

Useless Reviews