This weekend (Saturday and Sunday, March 13 and 14) Seattle area comics fans have a big old funny book hootenanny to party at inside the Washington State Convention Center. There are some panels and huge rooms full of comics and toys being sold. Also, dealers of another kind: I found the bootleg soundtrack to the Aussie skinhead flick Romper Stomper there last year! Right before a dark cloud of Suicide Girls turned a long table's corner and crashed into a swarm of Star Wars Storm Troopers. I am not making any of this up. It was freaking awesome-possum.

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Avant-indie rockers Animal Collective seem to elicit either a "YAY" or "nay" response from people. You either love 'em or hate 'em. I happen to fall in the head-over-heels category, and was super interested to hear of their collaboration with filmmaker Danny Perez on a feature film entitled ODDSAC.

Perez is no stranger to weirdo musicians, having worked with the likes of Black Dice and Panda Bear. The film stars the members of Animal Collective, and features an original score by the band and visual projects and art from Perez. ODDSAC is a supposed visual album, with all the songs original and exclusive to this film release. It walks the line between music, digital art and really explores the relationship between sound and visual images during the course of an album.

Screenings are scheduled for several US cities, including Seattle, and will feature members of the band and Danny Perez available for questions. The film will be officially released on June 29th, but don't wait until then to get a peek at this groundbreaking project! It's sure to be strange, intensely beautiful and certainly not for everyone.

More information and pictures can be found at www.oddsac.com.

Screenings:

March 17th   Chicago IL, USA  --  Music Box Theatre  $15  7pm, 9pm

March 20th   Minneapolis MN, USA -- The Cedar  $15  7pm, 9pm

March 22nd   Los Angeles CA, USA -- ArcLight Cinerama Dome  $15  7pm. 9pm

March 25th   San Fransisco CA, USA -- Sundance Kabuki Cinemas  $15  6:30pm, 8:30pm

March 29th   Portland OR, USA -- Cinema 21  $15  7pm, 9pm

March 30th   Seattle WA, USA -- The Egyptian Theatre  $15  7pm, 9pm

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It is my pleasure to present a brand new video from Athens, GA's Casper & the Cookies for the song "Sharp!" from 2009's Modern Silence (one of my favorite albums of last year).  I just love this 70's glam influenced song that's really funkier than it has any right to be. Shake it!

And, if that wasn't enough, they have a bunch of tour dates coming up (including a lot of SXSW awesomeness and a TBA Seattle date)!

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{Alice in Wonderland opened in Seattle Friday, 3/5, and is playing at The Neptune, The Meridian 16 and the IMAX}

I love pretty much everything Tim Burton does (outside of Planet of the Apes), but I admit: I was a little worried about this based on the previews. I went in expecting an over-the-top slap-sticky version of Alice, and ended up being pleasantly surprised. Except for one dance scene that takes place at the end, as a whole I thought it was pretty great.

Taking place 13 years after she originally falls down the rabbit hole, a quirky doesn’t-quite-fit-into-Victorian-England-19-year-old Alice (Mia Wasikowska, who was clearly born to play this part) stumbles into Wonderland, or Underland, as the residents call it, while fleeing from an arranged marriage to a floppy aristocrat.

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I'm usually quite hesitant to recommend shows that have already sold out, but I'm quite excited for tonight's show at the Showbox with The Whigs and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. It is a really good pairing because both are garage rock bands that are smart enough to know better than trying to reinvent the wheel.

The Whigs hail from Athens, GA and are releasing their latest album, In the Dark, on a week from Tuesday. I've been enjoying the title track, especially, as of late because it descends into a glorious wall of noise and distortion in its final moments. Still, though, The Whigs are closer to The Rolling Stones or a great Southern rock band than they are to My Bloody Valentine. In the right context, their songs can be anthemic, but almost always catchy. The video above has the band treating Neil Young as their biggest muse to their song (coincidence?) "Already Young".

BRMC has been one of my favorite live rock bands to watch. Just how good the vocals from Peter Hayes and Robert Been are can be missed on first listen when they're drowned out in reverb but they really do have a great sense of harmony. Like The Whigs, they're a power trio with a new album forthcoming (Beat the Devil's Tattoo is out on Tuesday) and I'll expect they'll be playing a lot of songs from that album, but I can't wait to feel like all is right in the world when they play "Whatever Happened to my Rock and Roll?"

Fortunately, that rhetorical question will surely be answered later tonight.

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{Little Boots plays at Neumos on Saturday, March 6 with Class Actress and Dragonette.}

When I saw Little Boots perform last fall, it was the final stop on her brief US tour, at the Independent, a 500-person capacity club in San Francisco. The show, like every stop on that tour, was sold out, even more impressive that it would be almost six months before her excellent debut album Hands would land in US record stores. It was a very exciting set by a gifted performer that could very well become a big pop star in the United States and certainly worth the price of airfare and lodging.

Little Boots is Victoria Hekseth, a twenty-five year old pop ingénue from Blackpool, UK and has quickly become one of my favorite pop stars today, enough so that I would fly to San Francisco to see her perform a week and a half before another trip to the Bay Area for Kylie Minogue’s first ever US show and that I took the name for my pop music blog from one of her songs. Her songs are irresistably catchy and well-constructed and easy to get lodged in your brain for hours at a time.

Her music is straight-forward electro dance pop, with much emphasis on memorable hooks and choruses, or to borrow a line from my favorite Lady Gaga song, "glamourphonic, electronic, disco, baby". Hands was released in June of 2009 in the UK, where it charted as a top five album. It was released in the US just this Tuesday (March 2). The album is full of great, well-produced, -written and -polished pop songs, with the best songs (or at least my favorite) being the singles "New in Town" and "Stuck on Repeat."

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