World Racketeering Squad Blog

Here is your daily Summer Glau:

From Summer-Glau.net

And speaking of pixels, here is Doctor Horrible's Sing-a-long Blog Act 1 recreated as an 8-bit videogame!

Here is your daily Summer Glau:

Here's a trailer for another movie Summer Glau has coming out soon: "Legend of Hell's Gate: An American Conspiracy".

"Burning the highways with terror, always one step ahead of the fuzz, are the friends of Shanty Tramp.  This unusual and abnormal motion picture makes those Swedish movies look like a Sunday school show." 

It's tough to create a new and interesting plot for a rock and roll biopic because there's basically one trajectory they all take:

"Band is young and naive, they get popular, take a lot of drugs and are torn apart by their egos".

If the story is that familiar, it basically comes down to the script and the performances to make it interesting. Also it helps if the characters are hot girls strutting around in tight clothes.

I didn't find the script of "The Runaways" to be anything special, but there are some pretty good performances in the movie.  

Dakota Fanning was pretty convincing at Cherie Currie, the baby-doll singer of the first all-girl hard rock band.  Michael Shannon creeped me out as Kim Fowley, the band's svengali.  

And somehow, without really saying much, Kristen Stewart seemed to embody the role of Joan Jett--her drive and passion to create music.  Cherie Currie was recruited into the band by Fowley, but Stewart really made me believe that Joan Jett was going to succeed no matter what, because music is her life and her obsession.

The songs of The Runaways don't stand out too much to me, but the film had a really stylish and sensual look, very much in tune with the concept of the band--sexy young girls playing ballsy rock-and-roll music. 

 Our buddy Dave Novak is not only an excellent engineer and mixer, he's also drummer for San Antonio's Phonolux - and he has announced on Facebook that they stream their band practice!

Their site doesn't seem to allow directly linking to it, but visit www.phonoluxmusic.com and click on "Live Streaming".  They practice Tuesdays and Thursdays and you can tune in and listen.

What do you think, would you want to listen to a WRS practice streamed?

 We're going back into the studio this weekend to record the last few songs for our first album.  It's pretty exciting!

We've been recording at 18ohThree Recording, with our drummer the eminent Bruce Chandler.  Engineering has been a dream with Dave Novak of San Antonio's Phonolux running the mixing board, with assists from Austin's own Matt Burnett.

We recorded a few songs early on but we kinda fell out of the practice.  We'd started a traditional style of recording pretty complex arrangements with overdubs of several layers of guitars, vocals, and keyboards and other instruments. 

Sounded good in theory but we just weren't ever able to get them mixed properly. 

We then spent the next year and a half performing those songs, getting better at playing them live, and at honing the arrangements and figuring out what works.

We decided to strip it down and go into the studio to record a live arrangement.  We play the songs as a band, and overdub the vocals.  That's the extent of it.

So we've got less to mix, less to produce, and the result sounds more like our live show now anyway.  We're pretty happy with it so far!

We have three more songs to record in the studio tomorrow, and then the recording will be completed for the first album!  

We will post more details about the release when we are ready.

Here is your daily Summer Glau: