| The Muslims and Crooked Cowboy show reviews | |
| ~ The Muslims at Pehrspace ~Not long before The Muslims came to play Los Angeles for the first time, I read something in an article that didn’t really hit me until they showed up. In the article the writer, a Britain native visting Southern California, describes a conversation she ends up having with an older woman on a beach. As the topic turns towards the subject of children, the older woman asks the writer if she had any back in England. When the writer says, “No,” the old woman replies, “You better start, The Muslims are breeding. Soon they’ll have the whole of Europe.” As I stood there watching The Muslims shake down the crowd at Pehrspace I couldn’t help but wonder how fantastically prophetic the old neocon’s words could, should or would be. It all finally made sense to me, and although I couldn’t confirm or deny that The Muslims did in fact harbor any Napoleonic intentions, I could say for sure that they had a foothold in Los Angeles and that taking the beach in Copenhagen would only be a matter of time.
~ Crooked Cowboy - Eagle Rock ~ As many regular readers of mine may well know, context and local color contribute a considerable amount to my perspective regarding music groups. Sometimes a performance can open my eyes to a new way of viewing an environment, and other times the environment itself can play into my overall feelings about a performance. Crooked Cowboy was able to represent and convey both of these realizations with a graceful sense of aural stability that exists without rival. With songs that gallop and haunt, seemingly not unlike those found in the steppe marinara cinematic exploits of Sergio Leone, Fred Zinnemann and Clint Eastwood, it would be an easy error to pass off the Crooked Cowboy sound as simply revivalism. There seems to be something that sits just outside of the obviously Morricone-influenced compositions. Crooked Cowboy also seems to be presenting a vast urban expanse as a relative contrast. They do not delineate the two often opposing environments separate from one another; rather they hem them together as equal settings for the same existential conflict. They respectfully relate the desert that sits just below the urban vastness as the opposing side of a singular coin. – J. Galsow |
 #1 the Softhands p.2, the Primos p.5, Anchors for Architects p.7, Guy Debord’s “The Society of the Spectacle” p.1, “Nanotechnology” p.6, Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Dirty Hands” p.4, “State and Response of the Dulled Senses” p.8, Jacob Lawrence (back page art) . .  #2 Timonium/Pehr Interview p.1, Werner Heisenberg p.7, Michael Frayn’s ”Copenhagen” p.8, DeLay It Yourself p.5-6, Tussle p.2, Dear Ask Point Break p.4, Henry Miller (back page art) .. . . . . .  #3 The Muslims/Crooked Cowboy–p.4, Huell, Low Income Houser–p.7, Gamma-ray Burst–p.8, Pullman’s “Blue on Blue”–p.5-6, LACMA’s Lost Volumes–p.2, “Digest Classifieds”–p.1, New! Page .9 Blurbs |