Drillbit Taylor movie review (Detroit Metrotimes and Baltimore Citypaper)

The idea of a screenplay co-written by Seth Rogen that focuses on three hapless high school kids may promise Superbad-style laughs, but Drillbit Taylor is lacking much more than McLovin. Dredging up the same three teenage archetypes that inhabited Superbad — including the mouthy fat kid/Rogen doppelgänger — the boys in this movie are trying to get revenge on two relentless bullies. They hire Drillbit Taylor (Owen Wilson), who’s supposed to be in the Special Forces, but’s really just a homeless Army deserter. Their protector is, of course, just pulling one over on them. Disappointingly, the primary conflict here isn’t between the kids and the bullies, but between the boys’ faith in Drillbit and his duplicity. With little of the raunchiness and fewer of the laughs that helped Superbad redefine the teen-sex comedy, Drillbit Taylor sags under the weight of Wilson’s listless acting and some unbelievably ham-fisted direction by Steven Brill (Mr. Deeds). Unsurprisingly, the script delivers more than a few laughs, many of which sound to have been written specifically with Wilson’s distracted, deadpan delivery in mind. But the sweet, PG-13 situations in which those lines are delivered ultimately prove too incompatible for them to be truly effective.

First appeared March 26, 2008 in Baltimore Citypaper and Detroit Metrotimes.

Chicha Libre: Sonido Amazonico CD review (Broward-Palm Beach New Times)

Kicking off with a statement of intent — a cover of the Los Mirlos track, “Sonido Amazónico” that opened the groundbreaking 2007 Barbés compilation of Peruvian psych-funk Roots of Chicha — Brooklyn-based Chicha Libre make it abundantly clear that they do not intend to break much new ground on their debut album. In the same way that their fellow Brooklynites at Daptone have resurrected classic soul, funk, and Afrobeat sounds that are deeply faithful to the genres’ original presentation, the folks at Barbés Records (an offshoot of the multi-culti hipster bar of the same name) seem to intend their label to do the same thing with underground international music. Headed up by Barbés club owner Olivier Conan, Chicha Libre is devoted to holistically recreating the sonic vibe that partygoers in Lima experienced when grooving on the original cuts from Roots of Chicha. Considering the wobbly fidelity and the laid-back musicianship, they succeed quite well; in fact, any of the cuts from Sonido Amazónico could have surreptitiously been slotted into that compilation and nobody would have known the difference. While it’s yet to be seen if Chicha Libre will go on to take the same stylistic liberties that a group like Antibalas did with Afrobeat, the good time they’re having with what they’re doing now makes that question almost beside the point.

First appeared March 26, 2008 in Broward-Palm Beach New Times.