malkav11

Downloaded Rammstein's new album, Rosenrot. I'll be buying it virtually the second it hits US shelves, not to worry. But I can't handle what could be months of waiting. And sure enough, it's excellent. Reminds me of why I love the band so much. Lots of gorgeous background music and the occasional offbeat instrument. Deep, gravelly singing from Till Lindemann. Lyrics that sound about as innocuous as German ever does, but upon reading a translation prove to be deeply disturbing. (For example, "Benzin" is about pyromania. "Spring" tells a lovely story about a man who got up on a bridge to admire the view and was surrounded by a crowd who expected him to commit suicide...and wouldn't let him leave until he did. "Hilf mir" is about the consequences of playing with matches..). New to this particular album is a totally unexpected veer into salacious, Spanish-language music (I couldn't tell you what genre, exactly.).

Also, in the spirit of Halloween, went to see a collection of short Asian "extreme cinema" films. "Three... Extremes". All three directors involved had talent, and there were some lovely images. When it came right down to it, though, none of them were especially shocking, and two of the three ran overlong and were not entirely comprehensible, plotwise. Even Takashi Miike, who's normally pretty out there in even his more tame films, was surprisingly subdued. For real squirms I'd recommend "Audition" or "Ichi the Killer" over any of the shorts in "Three... Extremes". Though I suppose you may be more freaked out by the contents of the dumplings in the "Dumplings" segment than I was.