Sem Síndrome de Peter Pan

Estes rabiscos simplistas aí à esquerda são a capa de "Where I'm Going", novo single dos australianos do Cut Copy. A música precede o álbum que está sendo gravado e deve ser lançado em Janeiro do ano que vem. A parte boa é que ela está disponível pra download gratuito no site do trio. A parte ruim é que parece que o Cut Copy está em franco processo de adultização do seu pop mezzo eletrônico mezzo indie. Em "Where I'm Going", a banda resolveu investir numa levada que o MGMT abandonou já no segundo disco, ou seja, uma espécie de neo-psicodelia não tão cabeçuda quanto um Syd Barrett e tão acessível quanto um The Who. Espero que o Cut Copy não perca o frescor de faixas como "Hearts On Fire" e "Far Away", ou corre o risco de entrar pro seleto grupo de malas sem alça que todo mundo se rasga de elogios mas ninguém aguenta ouvir mais de uma vez.

Nota: 4
Pra quem gosta de: The Presets, The Golden Filter, tecnopop
Links: site oficial, Twitter, MySpace, Facebook

"Where I'm Going":

De Volta Para Casa

The Suburbs, novo álbum dos canadenses do Arcade Fire é o disco do ano. Ninguém vai vir com algo tão bom assim em 2010. Situado entre "dois pólos extremos de rock e eletrônica" pelo multi-instrumentista Will Butler e ainda definido por seu irmão (também principal vocalista e compositor da banda) Win Butler como "um mix de Neil Young e Depeche Mode", o disco é o terceiro capítulo na impressionante discografia do grupo e sai oficialmente dia 02 de Agosto. The Suburbs tem seções de cordas magistrais - característica mantida com extremo bom gosto desde sua estréia em 2004 com Funeral. Os arranjos aproveitam sem exageros a diversidade de instrumentos e timbres usados; aqui tudo é funcional e ambicioso. Use a faixa-título como amostra. Piano, violão e bateria numa base viciante, cellos e violinos em contraponto ao refrão com os vocais em falsete de Win, a melodia triste mas contida. Tudo isso pode ser ouvido com igual impacto na faixa "Deep Blue". Agora pense que num mundo onde existe um subgênero musical chamado emotional hardcore, o Arcade Fire mostra em canções como essas como não soar emocionalmente estúpido e vazio como os representantes do rótulo emo. "Ready To Start" e "Modern Man" trazem camadas sobrepostas de guitarra, discretos efeitos eletrônicos e principalmente a lembrança de que uma banda que é chamada de alternativa pode compor canções de apelo pop sem precisar abrir mão da palavra "criatividade". Num mundo onde existe um subgênero musical chamado post-rock, o Arcade Fire mostra como não soar  insuportavelmente inaudível como a maioria dos representantes desse rótulo inexplicável. O pedaço Neil Young do disco salta fácil aos ouvidos com a pegada alt-country de "Wasted Hours", assim como a fatia Depeche Mode é apreciada numa levada disco-espacial em "Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)", com vocais da esposa de Win Butler, Régine Chassagne. Perca-se em faixas sublimes de arranjos bem pensados como "We Used To Wait" e aprecie com toda atenção o pianinho killer golpeado à Jerry Lee Lewis, as cordas e o contratempo da bateria. Desfrute igualmente de músicas mais enérgicas com guitarras de timbre limpo e côros emocionantes ("Suburban War"), surpreenda-se com mini-sinfonias de bolso ("Rococo"). O Arcade Fire entrega mais um álbum inacreditável, de fantasia pungente e poética, extremamente acessível e de uma originalidade assombrosa para os dias de hoje.

Nota: 9
Para quem gosta de: Radiohead, Manic Street Preachers, Coldplay
Links: Site Oficial, Facebook, Twitter

"The Suburbs", faixa-título do álbum que possui oito variações para a capa abaixo:

Penelope Cruz

Nicknames: Pe
Birth Date: 28 April 1974
Birth Place: Madrid, Spain
Height: 5'6"
Weight: 47Kg
Eyes: Hazel
Hair: Brown
Sign: Taurus
Education: Secondary Studies (dropped out)
National Conservatory Madrid Spain (majored in Classical Ballet) Cristina Rota's School in Nueva York (4 years)
Profession: Actress


"The most difficult thing in the world is to start a career known only for your looks, and then to try to become a serious actress. No one will take you seriously once you are known as the pretty woman."
- Penelope Cruz.

Gisele Bundchen Top Model

Nicknames: Gisele Bundchen

Birth Date: July 20, 1980

Birth Place: Tres de Maio, Brazil

Height: 5'10"

Eyes: Blue

Hair: Light Brown

Nationality: Brazilian

Profession: Supermodel, actress

Popular As: The four-time Vogue Magazine covergirl in 1999

Contact Information:

c/o IMG

304 Park Ave South

New York, NY 10010, USA.

"I love volleyball. I trained until I was 14, which was when I left home. My dream was to be either a volleyball player or a veterinarian, because I love animals."

Charlize Theron

Nicknames: Charlie
Birth Date: August 7th, 1975
Birth Place: Benoni, South Africa
Height: 5' 9½
Eyes: Blue
Hair: Blonde
Sign: Leo
Education: Boarding school in Johannesburg, South Africa
Studied dance and performed with New York's Joffrey Ballet
Profession: Actress, model, dancer
Fan Mail: C/O United Talent Agency
9560 Wilshire Blvd. Suite 500
Beverly Hills, CA 90212
USA

C+B=M²

Não se sinta culpado por não ter achado Further nada de mais. O novo álbum do Chemical Brothers, lançado mês passado, é mais do mesmo. Soa irremediavelmente como auto-paródia, uma repetição das fórmulas vencedoras de seus seis discos anteriores. Pode ouvir, está tudo lá: o tecnão 4x4 recheado de vocoders, samples bizarros  (embora me pareça meio óbvio que uma faixa chamada "Horse Power" contenha relinchos de cavalo) e as rajadas de teclados nervosos que deram as cartas em Surrender aparecem em "Escape Velocity" e "Horse Power". O rock reprocessado do fantástico Dig Your Own Hole está bem nítido nas baterias explosivas e guitarras sujas de "Dissolve" e "K+D+B". Timbres alienígenas e vocais indie/preguiçosos também sempre estiveram presentes no trabalho de Ed Simons e Tom Rowlands, e em Further a faixa "Another World" cumpre esse papel - com vocais da cantora e compositora americana Stephanie Dosen. Aliás, eis uma novidade no trabalho do Chemical Brothers: este é o primeiro disco da dupla que não traz vocalistas convidados, à exceção de Stephanie que colabora em algumas faixas. Os vocais (onde há vocais) estão todos a cargo de Tom Rowlands. A melhor faixa do disco e primeiro single oficial, "Swoon", tem um riff de sintetizador que lembra muito a linha melódica de "Lush 3-1" do Orbital, o que não deixa de ser uma ótima referência. O álbum encerra com "Wonders Of The Deep", aquela mesma viagem lisérgica/progressiva que encerra os discos do Chemical Brothers. Further não é, de maneira nenhuma, um disco ruim. Ele mantém o alto padrão de qualidade das produções da dupla inglesa, mesmo que não apresente nenhum caminho diferente do que estamos acostumados quando ouvimos um álbum dos Brothers. Além do mais, surpreendente mesmo seria esses caras aparecerem com um disco de jazz ou rumba, o que definitivamente não deve acontecer.

Nota: 6
Pra quem gosta de: Prodigy, Fatboy Slim, Underworld, The Crystal Method
Links: site oficial, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter

"Swoon":

Ultrapassando os Limites

Em primeiro lugar: esqueça o rótulo IDM que carimba o trabalho do Autechre. A sigla inglesa para Intelligent Dance Music é uma bobagem, porque coloca no mesmo saco artistas como Aphex Twin, LFO, Ulrich Schnauss, Amon Tobin e u-Ziq, e todos tem muito pouco a ver entre si. O que os torna parecidos é um certo gosto pelo experimentalismo eletrônico, mas isso não significa exatamente Dance Music Inteligente, porque a maior parte do material desse pessoal nem é dançável. A dupla britânica Autechre existe desde 1987 e sua extensa discografia ganhou esse ano mais dois discos: o álbum Oversteps lançado em fevereiro (download) e Março (CD/LP) e o EP Move Of Ten disponibilizado para download em Junho e no formato físico em Julho. Rob Brown e Sean Booth são uma usina de idéias, fato comprovado pela diversidade dos experimentos (e principalmente dos acertos) em Oversteps. Eles não facilitam nada a vida do ouvinte, e mesmo assim é difícil não ficar hipnotizado com a batida desorientadora e os timbres subterrâneos de "r ess", ou com o rolo compressor de distorções em "ilanders". Soando como uma banda de jazz eletrônico que constrói, desenvolve, destrói e reconstrói os temas, as faixas de Oversteps apresentam incursões de música ambiental como na chuva de cristais sintetizados de "see on see", ou na impressionante "known(1)": aqui os timbres sugerem uma espécie de koto robótico que ajudam a criar a atmosfera oriental da música, da mesma forma que "O=0" lembra algo como um xilofone cibernético explorado por mãos cheias de chips e placas de circuito. Já o EP Move Of Ten é imediatamente menos acessível que Oversteps e investe pesado em desconstrução rítmica ("Etchogon-S"), techno encorpado ("M62") e faixas sombrias e opressivas; ora carregadas de ruídos inaudíveis como em "Cep puiqMX", ora trazendo um clima de desolação contemplativa ("nth Dafuseder.b"). Só não estranhe os títulos das canções convertidos em códigos indecifráveis pelo Autechre: a qualidade das composições é tão boa que a música realmente dispensa símbolos de identificação imediata, como letras.

Notas: 8 (Oversteps), 6 (Move Of Ten) 
Pra quem gosta de: Kraftwerk (fase 70), qualquer coisa do Richard David James, Squarepusher
Links: Warp Records

"known(1)":

ELLE June 2010

Kristen Stewart has reality fright. On-screen, her unleashed energy captivates and her face offers no unfortunate angles. But off-screen, her discomfort is palpable. In her endearingly unpolished public appearances, she fidgets, scratches, runs her fingers through her hair, and generally bungles her words. Her awkwardness seems to arise from a profound distrust of the media, the limelight, and especially of her considerable recent success as the female lead of the billion-dollar-grossing Twilight movie series. Still, uneasiness this extreme is surprising in an actor, someone who has signed up for a lifetime of being watched.


Then again, extreme also describes the maelstrom into which Stewart and her costars, Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner, have been thrust. Not since the heyday of the Brat Pack in the 1980s has a constellation of teens incited such hysteria. “It’s a crazy anomaly, this teen-idol phenomenon. I can’t think of any like it since the Beatles,” says David Slade, director of Eclipse, the third installment in The Twilight Saga, which arrives in theaters at the end of this month. “We’d be [shooting] in a remote location, in the middle of a forest,” he continues, “and fans would be at the side of the road with flowers at five in the morning.” Twilight mania is such that even those who haven’t seen the films, in which Stewart plays Bella Swan, the all-too-human love interest to Edward Cullen’s blood-starved teenage vampire (Pattinson), know that “KStew” may or may not be dating “RPattz,” her consumptive-looking, bushy-browed costar.

Stewart arrives in the ornate lobby of California’s Four Seasons Hotel Westlake Village, a venue chosen for its proximity to a middle-class section of the San Fernando Valley where Stewart was raised, the only girl among a bevy of brothers. There’s Cameron, her biological brother, who is 24; Taylor, who is Stewart’s age and was adopted at age 13; and Miles and Obie, friends of Cameron’s “that we’ve like helped along the way,” she says. “I’ve always said I’ve had a bunch of brothers because we have a bunch of boys who are like family.” Cameron is a film grip; her parents, John and Jules, also work in the industry (Mom is a script supervisor, Dad a stage manager).

“It’s insane! Once somebody finds out, you have to get the hell out of wherever you are,” she says emphatically, attempting to convey the madness that has become her life. “People freak out. And the photographers, they’re vicious. They’re mean. They’re like thugs. I don’t even want to drive around by myself anymore. It’s fucking dangerous.” It’s a sweltering late-summer afternoon, and Stewart is dressed entirely in black, from her Joy Division T-shirt to the polish on her short nails—the usual teenage suit of armor. Her hair is also black, dyed and chopped into a retro-modern mullet to play Joan Jett in The Runaways, a film she has just finished shooting. As she talks, her words tumble out in knots; she edits herself, starts over, restates her (often wryly funny) point, so that many times it’s made through the accumulation of half-uttered phrases. She fiddles with the multiple silver rings (including one made from a spoon handle) on her skinny fingers. Throughout the interview, she bounces one knee.

Stewart, who turned 20 in April, has worked consistently for the past decade, often in independent films, but she admits the Twilight frenzy has taken her by surprise. “Somebody knocked on my hotel room door and asked for a light, then said that they were a big fan. I was like, ‘Do you really need me to light your cigarette? How do you know what room I’m in?’ ” She mourns the loss of her privacy. (“I can’t be by myself, and I like being by myself,” she says.) “Who wouldn’t who has a soul?” says Jodie Foster, who starred with an 11-year-old Stewart in Panic Room. “It’s a very different time from when I was growing up. We didn’t have those lenses that were 150 feet long, or maybe we had them, but there was still a real delineation between the public and the private.”

What’s mystifying to Stewart—and likely to anyone with either a shred of empathy or a tendency to clam up in public—is the looking- glass reality in which her manner, rather than eliciting sympathy or mere shrugs, has made her a figure of derision. “I think it’s funny that when I go onstage to accept an award, they think I’m nervous, uncomfortable, and awkward—and I am—but those are bad words for them,” Stewart says. She still frets about her MTV Movie Awards appearance last year, during which she fumbled her award, a carton of golden popcorn (then blurted, “I was just about as awkward as you thought I was going to be. Bye!”). “I fucking flung my award on the stage…and I was like, Everything I just said? Gone. Gone. I might as well have just erased it. And they were like, ‘I love how she goes up there and tries to be so serious. She is so pretentious. Why does she always try to sound so smart when she’s not smart?’ ”

Stewart conveys her star-system discomfort (or maybe tries to deal with it) in ways that tend to be perceived not as self-protective, or even self-expressive, but as rebellious. Especially since her choices often thwart mainstream expectations of young women in Hollywood—particularly one who portrays a character beloved by millions of preteens and their mothers. She attends events in sneakers. She was photographed allegedly puffing from a pipe on her front stoop in broad daylight, and in a bikini with a marijuana leaf decorating each breast. She swears like a trucker, just because. “I have a bit of an authority issue,” Stewart replied when David Letterman asked her, in that now-famous 2008 interview, whether she had “any interest in going beyond high school. Maybe college or something?” Let it be said that she has a loyal cohort who love her for all this, but they’re less vocal than her critics. “[I]f a woman isn’t happy and un-opinionated and long-haired and pretty, then she’s weird and, like, ugly,” she sighs, “And I just don’t get it.”

“Let’s go smoke,” she finally announces. We walk outside to a balcony overlooking a faux waterfall. She removes two cigarettes from a pack of Camel Lights, noting that she doesn’t care if people “go onto the Internet and say I’m ugly.” She minds only when they criticize “the effort I put in.” She lights a cigarette, leans forward, and talks with the forbidding intensity evident in her work. “I hate it when they say I’m ungrateful, and I fucking hate it when they say I don’t give a shit, because nobody cares more than I do. I’m telling you I don’t know anybody who does this that gives a shit more than I do.”

“There’s a threat to her health in the way she works, in that she can’t project feelings she doesn’t feel herself,” Weitz says. “If you shoot a scene in which she has a nervous breakdown, that’s potentially what you’re going to get. I have found myself concerned for her at moments.” During the filming of Twilight, studio executives found themselves concerned about Stewart and Pattinson. “Both of them have the tendency to go deep, to find the emotional core of a scene,” says the first movie’s director, Catherine Hardwicke. “I think the producers were worried—and they were right in some ways— that it was going to be one-note, all brooding, all serious.” At the mention of this, Stewart swings: “Well, they’re thanking their lucky stars now that we were serious about it,” she says. “They wanted us to smile more. They literally just thought it was not light enough, not fun enough, that it wasn’t like a love story. But I’m sorry, when you’re in love with someone, you’re not laughing. Well, maybe you are. But not in this story.”

A recurring theme among the directors of Stewart’s films—a steady stream since an agent spotted her singing “The Dreidel Song” in a school pageant at age eight—is her honesty as a performer, her finely calibrated compass for authenticity. “She has a great bullshit detector,” says Greg Mottola, director of Adventureland. “Kristen has an unflinching sense of truth. She doesn’t lie,” says Mary Stuart Masterson, who directed Stewart in The Cake Eaters. “She has to truly believe what she is doing…which is a great gift but can also feel like a curse, because then the material has to be something you believe in too.” Hardwicke adds: “Kristen especially likes to feel good about her lines, as though it would really come out of her mouth. Respecting that would have me doing quite a bit of rewriting on set.”

Stewart tends to play adolescent women who are independent-minded yet still uncomfortable in their own skin, much like she is. Telegraphing their neuroses is, in fact, her strength as an actor: Her characters can be truly discomfiting to watch. Yet she also projects a riveting precociousness. Anyone who has seen Into the Wild will find it hard to forget a young, gangly Stewart as 16-year-old Tracy Tatro, perched on a bed in white cotton underwear, vulnerable as a colt yet trembling with need, offering herself to Emile Hirsch’s clueless, idealistic Christopher McCandless. “Kristen can express all that longing and desire and anxiety with a look or a smile,” says Jon Kasdan, director of In the Land of Women, in which Stewart portrayed a teenager with a crush on her twenty-something neighbor, played by Adam Brody. “She doesn’t have to say, ‘Oh, I’m so filled with longing’—she can just do it.”

Enter Bella Swan. Bella is the epitome of longing. She is yearning when every other quality has been stripped away. Stewart’s ability to convey this to the near-total exclusion of all other emotions is surely responsible, at least in part, for the immense popularity of the Twilight franchise. The (mostly) female fan base may be pining for Edward Cullen in the wispy form of Robert Pattinson or Jacob Black in the decidedly more buff embodiment of Taylor Lautner, but Bella is the vessel for the audience’s collective desire. Stewart calls Bella “the most sort of undeveloped character I’ve played” and notes, “I had to bring myself to [the part].” But whatever real-life aspects she transferred to Bella, the unsung brilliance of her performance is that she also left her sufficiently skeletal so that viewers can do the same. “I think that’s partly why the movies are the phenomenon that they are, and it feels like she’s not getting a tremendous amount of credit for that,” Kasdan says. “Yes, women love the guy and so forth, but they’re loving him through her.”

A few months later, Stewart and I meet again, this time in the corner booth of a dimly lit hotel restaurant in Hollywood. Again she is dressed all in black—her hooded sweatshirt reads nuns with guns: praise the lord and pass the ammunition—but her hair is lighter and longer, and she seems calmer, not as tightly coiled.

The Twilight pressure is off, for the moment anyway—at least until Eclipse arrives in theaters and inevitably arouses the scary lunacy its predecessors did. This time around, Bella learns “that there are, like, different levels of loving someone,” Stewart says vaguely. Or, as David Slade puts it: “Bella is at the verge of the abyss in this film, and she knows she has to step off.…” Two hours of good, cathartic longing.

But Stewart is looking not so far beyond this month to the fall release of “the coolest movie ever,” Welcome to the Rileys, directed by Jake Scott. She plays a 16-year-old stripper-prostitute, “an open wound” of a girl, as she says, befriended by a middle-aged couple (Melissa Leo and James Gandolfini) grieving the death of their daughter. The premise sounds like indie sap, but it works, and the sparely written script showcases the actors’ talents. Stewart renders her wild, damaged character with a complexity and control not evident in her previous performances. To prepare, she lived on junk food, learned to pole dance, chain-smoked, and stayed up all night. The rough living took its toll: Her legs bloom with bruises and her sallow skin with blemishes, all of them real. It’s difficult to imagine another young actress subordinating her looks so completely to her performance. This may well be the role that loosens the association between Kristen Stewart and Bella Swan, poster child for teenage angst.

For the moment, though, there are plenty who see her as Bella. Preteen girls begin to cluster in the booth across from ours, birds of prey gathering to examine their find. The ecosystem of the restaurant has altered. Stewart knows she’s been sighted. I nab the moment to ask her the question on everyone’s mind: “In real life, would you be Team Edward or Team Jacob?”

“Oh my God, did you seriously just ask that?” She laughs. “Shhhh.” Those buzzwords make her nervous; she’s been mobbed before. “I would never cheapen my relationships by talking about them. People say, ‘Just say who you’re dating. Then people will stop being so ravenous about it.’ It’s like, No they won’t! They’ll ask for specifics.” (A possible clue exists on the Kindle she has brought with her: Among the downloads is Guy de Maupassant’s Bel-Ami, the movie version of which Pattinson is filming.)

“I want a cigarette,” Stewart announces. It’s almost a dare. The little girls swarm. She poses for a picture with them. Cigarettes in hand, she slips out the door.

Robert Pattinson

Name : Robert Pattinson
Birth name : Robert Thomas-Pattinson
Nickname : Rob, Rpattz
Date of birth : May 13, 1986
Place of birth : London, England
Profession : Actor, model
Height : 6' 1" (1.85 m)
Trade Mark : Messy hair


He is an excellent musician playing guitar and keyboards.
He attended Harrodian private school in London.
He has two older sisters, Lizzy and Victoria.
Was taught how to scuba dive for his role in "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" in 2005.
He takes interest in Football(soccer), Skiing, Snowboarding, and more.
His acting inspiration is Jack Nicholson.
He was ranked #23 on Moviefone's 'The 25 Hottest Actors Under 25'(2008).
He was chosen by the Hollywood Film Festival Award Committee as the recipient of the 2008 New Hollywood Award.
He was awarded Best Actor 2008 at the Strasbourg Film festival for his performance as Art in the film How To Be.
He beat 3,000 people to play Edward in the movie 'Twilight'.
He was named as Yahoo's Top Movie Heart Throb of 2008.
He was named as Rolling Stone Magazine's Hottest Actor of 2008
He was named by Entertainment Tonight (ET) as their top hunk of 2008.
He was named as one of the LA Times Breakout Stars of 2008.
He was named as one of Forbes Breakout Stars of 2008.
Awarded Hello Magazine's Most Attractive Man Award of 2008.
Invited an obsessive fan out for dinner when he was having a bad day.