Kanye West has announced a listening event for his upcoming album Donda 2. According to a post on the rapper’s Instagram, the listening event will be held at Londepot Park Stadium in Miami on the album’s prospective release date, February 22. He also revealed that tickets for the event will be available on February 14, 12 p.m. EDT. Check out the post below.
West confirmed the release of Donda 2 on January 27, revealing that Future serves as its executive producer. Earlier yesterday, West said that his longtime collaborator Kid Cudi will no longer be on the record due to his friendship with “you know who” – apparently a reference to actor and comedian Pete Davidson, who is reportedly dating Ye’s ex-wife Kim Kardashian. Responding ion Twitter, Cudi wrote, “We talked weeks ago about this. You’re whack for flipping the script and posting this lie just for a look on the internet. You ain’t no friend. BYE.”
Australian three-piece Camp Cope appeared on CBS Saturday Morning earlier today, performing several songs for the program’s Saturday Sessions series. They played three tracks from their upcoming album Running With the Hurricane: the title track, the early single ‘Blue’, and the closing track, an unreleased song called ‘Sing Your Heart Out’. Watch it below.
Camp Cope’s new LP is set for release on March 25 via Run For Cover. ‘Running With the Hurricane’ and ‘Blue’ both landed on our Best New Songs segment.
Kevin Devine has released a new song, ‘How Can I Help You?’, taken from his forthcoming album Nothing’s Real, So Nothing’s Wrong. Along with the track, he’s also announced a spring 2022 US tour with Pronoun, Kississippi, and Kayleigh Goldsworthy. Listen to ‘How Can I Help You?’ and check out the list of dates below.
In a press release, Devine described the new track as “a dance song for wallflowers, body music for the brain, a gently caffeinated disco gallop arpeggiating through the last aspirational sliver separating a relationship from its end.”
Nothing’s Real, So Nothing’s Wrong, Kevin Devine’s 10th LP, is due for release on March 25 via Triple Crown Records. It includes the previously released single ‘Albatross’.
Kevin Devine 2022 US Tour Dates:
Wed Apr 6 – Baltimore, MD – Ottobar *
Thur Apr 7 – Cleveland, OH – Mahall’s *
Fri Apr 8 – Buffalo, NY – Mohawk *
Sat Apr 9 – Toronto, ON – Velvet *
Sun Apr 10 – Detroit, MI – Shelter *
Tue Apr 12 – Minneapolis, MN – 7th Street Entry *
Wed Apr 13 – Chicago, IL – Lincoln Hall *
Fri Apr 15 – Brooklyn, NY – Music Hall of Williamsburg *
Sat Apr 16 – Boston, MA – Sinclair*
Fri Apr 29 – Philadelphia, PA – FU Church !
Sat Apr 30 – Columbus, OH – A&R Music Bar !
Sun May 1 – Nashville, TN – Mercury Lounge !
Tue May 3 – Dallas, TX – Tulips !
Wed May 4 – Austin, TX – Antone’s !
Fri May 6 – Phoenix, AZ – Crescent Ballroom !
Sat May 7 – Los Angeles, CA – The Roxy !
Sun May 8 – San Diego, CA – Soda Bar !
Mon May 9 – San Francisco,CA – Great American !
Wed May 11 – Portland, OR – Doug Fir !
Thu May 12 – Seattle, WA – Chop Suey !
Sat May 14 – Salt Lake City, UT – Kilby !
Sun May 15 – Denver, CO – Bluebird !
Tue May 17 – St. Louis, MO – Off Broadway !
Thur May 19 – Orlando, FL – Soundbar !
Fri May 20 – Atlanta, GA – The Masquerade !
Charli XCX has shared a new video for her latest single ‘Beg For You’, a collaboration with Rina Sawayama. Check out the Nick Harwood-directed clip below.
‘Beg for You’, which arrived two weeks ago, is set to appear on Charli XCX’s upcoming album Crash. Last year, the singer previewed the album with ‘Good Ones’ and ‘New Shapes’, which features Caroline Polachek and Christine and the Queens. Crash, the follow-up to 2020’s how i’m feeling now, arrives March 18.
Nat Ćmiel is no longer interested in covering up imperfections. There was a time when the Singapore-born, London-based artist, who has inhabited the yeule moniker since 2014, would hesitate to release a song if something as much as a vocal crack stuck out in the mix. Following the success of 2019’s Serotonin II – an excellent full-length debut that introduced yeule’s enigmatic persona as well as their brand of digitized art pop, captured most brilliantly on the single ‘Pixel Affection’ – the project has come to serve as a means for Ćmiel to document and relate back to their own experiences in a multi-disciplinary fashion. To that end, despite having greater access to professional equipment, their process now often involves leaving in mistakes and accepting that some of their best material might still come to life in the space of their bedroom as opposed to a studio. Originally inspired by a Final Fantasy XII character caught ceaselessly between death and rebirth, yeule – as both a concept and a musical outlet – continues to occupy a liminal and temporal space but has undergone a clear evolution.
On their second album, Glitch Princess, co-produced with PC Music’s Danny L Harle, yeule adjusts their stylistic framework while remaining committed to the goal of yielding purity out of chaos. In an interview with the FADER, Ćmiel said they “wanted to depart from this natural earthy Gothic Renaissance-esque world that I built with SerotoninII” by entering a more “neo-technical, cyber-Gothic” realm; though conceptually and narratively focused, the record itself is less heavy-handed and more direct about its approach (“I like short sentences that say everything I felt at one go,” they declare on the opening track, which is largely reflected in the lyrical content of the album.) The way this shift manifests musically is palpable, too: While the atmosphere of Serotonin II was airy enough to land yeule on the cover of Spotify’s ‘Ethereal’ playlist, Glitch Princess distorts some of that dreaminess by injecting it with a language of violence, eroticism, obsession, and disassociation – elements that have been present in yeule’s music in the past, but never so uncompromisingly brought to the fore. The result is powerful: as challenging as it is infectious and as introspective as it is majestic.
Those qualities are entangled from the very beginning. “What makes you uncomfortable?” yeule asks on ‘Flowers are Dead’, and your answer may in fact lie in what has preceded it. Opening the album is ‘My Name Is Nat Ćmiel’, a confessional of sorts in which the cyborg-like character lists a number of things they find pleasure in at a particular moment in time. We can assume at least some of them still apply – “I like the way some music makes me feel/ I like making up my own worlds” – but the temporal distance between recording and listening, yeule’s glitched-up voice, and the specific intimacy of some of the statements have an uncanny effect. Throughout the album, yeule blurs the line between what is unsettling and exhilarating as a means of interrogating what it means to feel – to transcend the limits of both the digital and embodied self and achieve a boundless sense of freedom.
Their creative toolbox is appropriately varied. The second song, ‘Electric’, properly kicks off the album with a rapturous hook that’s drowned in distortion. The emo pop of ‘Don’t Be So Hard on Your Own Beauty’ is at once one of the album’s most conventional and hopeful moments, with yeule singing of tenderness as the antidote to the gaping void: “You still/ Hold me even though/ I’m made of fire burning through.” At times, its aesthetic sounds less akin to Arts Angel-era Grimes than the horror game-inspired sounds of an artist like Yiiki, conjuring eeriness through off-kilter piano melodies and queasy electro-pop on a track like ‘Eyes’. But then there are overwhelmingly euphoric songs like ‘Bites on My Neck’ that power through their disorienting, blown-out structure to demonstrate the true scale of yeule’s ambitions, or ‘Too Dead Inside’, which evokes the existential questions that can creep into your mind when you’re trying to dance them away.
Ćmiel treats Glitch Princess as a kind of storage unit where realities both external and internal – including dreams and dangerous fixations – can coexist. It is raw yet carefully crafted, to the point where some of the errors that are integrated into it may actually be not accidental, but manufactured. That is the nature of the love that courses through the album: it hurts, it fades, and to make the experience less painful, you might as well cause the destruction yourself, especially when granted the option of staying alone with the ‘Friendly Machine’ that “Pretends to wipe my memory clean/ Pretends to make it all go away/ Pretends to make me feel quite ok.” The song that ends things off, ‘Mandy’, is ambiguous but jarringly confrontational, suggesting a sort of system failure – and hence, perhaps, a liberation.
But you can’t really put it in context unless you take into account the actual closing track, a four-hour-forty-four-minute ambient piece titled ‘The Things They Did for Me Out of Love’. (The promo copy I received did not include this track, but for the purposes of this review, and since it comes with all digital versions of the album, I listened to it once in full). Like an alternate reality, it’s easy to get sucked into it and lose track of time – fragments materialize and float in and out, synthetic vocals blend in with a human voice lost in sleep. Around the halfway point, the whole thing stops and starts life anew. “I had to walk into the fire to know how to feel,” Ćmiel sings over and over again on ‘Bites on My Neck’. This final act, then, can be read as an attempt to rise from the ashes after finally taking the plunge. More than that: it feels like it.
Maren Morris has released her new song ‘Background Music’, which is set to appear on her forthcoming album Humble Quest. The track was co-written by Laura Veitz and Jimmy Robbins. Check out its accompanying video below.
“I wrote ‘Background Music’ about the beauty of the temporary, which is inevitably all things,” Morris remarked in a statement. “The romanticism of eternity sounds nice, but I like to think I savor things better when I know I’m not entitled to it in perpetuity. It’s a love song that addresses mortality but it’s also promising someone that even when we aren’t cool anymore, I want to grow old with them and laugh about the times we thought we were.”
Humble Quest, the follow-up 2019’s Girl, is set for release on March 25 via Columbia Nashville. Maren Morris previously shared the single ‘Circles Around This Town’.
Big Thief have shared a new video for ‘Red Moon’, the track that kicks off the second disc of their just-released double album Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You. The clip, filmed by Adrianne Lenker’s brother Noah and edited by Slopehouse, captures the live take of the song, which was recorded during the last of four sessions for the LP at Scott McMicken’s studio in Tucson, Arizona. Watch it below.
Future is back with a new song called ‘Worst Day’, a track about Valentine’s Day. It arrives with a Daps-directed video, which you can check out below.
Future recently featured on Gunna’s latest album DS4Ever, appearing on the songs ‘Too Easy’ and ‘Pushin P’. According to Kanye West, he is also serving as executive producer on the upcoming project Donda 2.
What can be said about The Giant Claw (1957) that hasn’t been said before? Well, quite a lot, actually. For a film that boasts a bird “as big as a battleship”, it’s something of a shame that the minimal critical attention it’s received has been backhanded at best and derisive at worst.
But let’s get things straight before we begin. The Giant Claw isn’t one of the best of its decade. I don’t plan on arguing that it’s an overlooked gem; rather, it’s simply fine! It’s a decent monster-on-the-loose picture that’s somewhat undeservingly borne the brunt of scorn. Indeed, Alan Jones, reviewing the film for the RadioTimes, called it “one of the most inept monster movies ever made”, and said that it featured “atrocious special effects.”
Little attention gets beyond its giant bird marionette, and discussion is often stifled by myriad inaccuracies that go uncorrected. In part, this arguably comes down to generalisations placed upon 1950s science fiction. In describing all these films as “cheap B-movie fluff”, the incentive isn’t there to report with robust scrutiny.
So, dear reader, what I offer here is an appraisal of The Giant Claw that seeks to offer a bit of nuance. As Criswell states at the beginning of Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959), “we are giving you all the evidence, based only on the secret testimony of the miserable souls who survived this terrifying ordeal.” All of this and more in celebration of The Giant Claw.
THE GIANT BIRD IN THE ROOM
For the uninitiated, The Giant Claw is a 1957 science fiction monster film about a giant bird, possibly from some “godforsaken” anti-matter galaxy in outer space. Having wrecked planes, trains, and automobiles, a plan is enacted to destroy the bird’s anti-matter shield so that conventional weaponry can kill it.
Most of the attention The Giant Claw receives focuses on its special effects. This isn’t surprising, per se, for the giant bird marionette is certainly a sight to behold. In an interview with Tom Weaver, Jeff Morrow, the film’s lead, recalled the following: “we poor, benighted actors had our own idea of what the giant bird would look like – our concept was that this was something that resembled a streamlined hawk, possibly half a mile long, flying at such speeds that we could barely see it.”
The actual bird has an elongated neck, flared nostrils, wild eyes, spiky hair, and gangly legs.
The giant bird in the room.
All sorts of inaccuracies have run rampant about the bird’s origin and cost. Most common is the claim that the film’s producer, Sam Katzman, had it made in Mexico for $50. However, no source exists to completely verify that claim. In fact, Jeff Morrow himself joked that it cost “$19.28”. Interestingly, in the same interview, Morrow gives a ballpark price estimate for a “really good bird” at $10,000 to $15,000.
Morrow’s co-star, Mara Corday, also spoke with Tom Weaver about the special effects. She said that Sam Katzman had raved about “the wonderful special effects people in Mexico that he had hired” and that he’d allegedly spent most of the budget on the special effects. Was this just enterprising producer Sam Katzman exaggerating? Quite possibly. After all, fellow Columbia producer Charles Schneer – who had produced Earth vs. The Flying Saucers (1956) with Katzman – remembered him as being “skinflint” in an interview in Starlog #150.
In May 1957, Sam Katzman was interviewed in Variety, where it was reported that his films at the time cost between $250,000 to $500,000. While these films were made through Columbia’s B-unit, they certainly had more money to play with than other genre contemporaries.
And this is where the exploitation masters at American International Pictures (AIP) help to shed light on the dubious $50 claim. During their early years, back when they were known as the American Releasing Corporation, AIP had made The Beast with a Million Eyes (1955) with maverick producer Roger Corman. While the film’s poster depicted such a wild creature (it’s a truly fabulous piece of art), the first version of the film featured no such beast. The idea, of course, was that an alien mind creature had possessed the bodies of animals to be its eyes and ears, thus becoming the beast with a million eyes. This did not satisfy the film’s exhibitors, who had invested in the project on the basis of its lurid advertising.
Enter Paul Blaisdell, AIP’s chief monster maker in the 1950s. Roger Corman had turned to Forrest J. Ackerman (future editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland Magazine) to connect him with effects artists. Having turned down the suggestion of stop-motion maestro Ray Harryhausen due to cost, Corman was put in touch with Blaisdell. This would be Blaisdell’s first film job, having previously worked as an artist for science fiction magazine covers. Blaisdell took up the project, and was paid just $400 by Corman to produce an 18” puppet, nicknamed “little Hercules”.
The Beast with a Million Eyes cost just $30,000 according to Roger Corman, a far cry from the money Katzman was playing with at Columbia. Given that the marionette in The Giant Claw is far more sophisticated than that which appears in The Beast with a Million Eyes, it would be fair to assume it cost at least more than $400.
Of course, this is all conjecture based on incomplete evidence and contemporary productions, but it should illustrate that information is out there which allows us to report on these films with more detail than is usually afforded.
One last thing to examine is the ubiquitous claim about outsourcing the effects to a Mexican company. Although both Jeff Morrow and Mara Corday mentioned this nebulous Mexican effort in their interviews with Tom Weaver, the special effects are actually credited to three men: Ralph Hammeras, George Teague, and Lawrence Butler (who goes uncredited in the opening titles). As pointed out by genre historian Bill Warren, these technicians had all worked on more expensive A-pictures. Indeed, Butler is credited for special effects on Casablanca (1942), while Teague worked on the visual effects for 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954). Granted, “special effects” credits at the time often referred to pyrotechnics and other on-set effects (as opposed to stop-motion, for example) but their involvement is still worth considering. So, who’s right and who’s wrong? Did Katzman indeed outsource to a Mexican company? Evidence suggests it’s possible, but perhaps not for just $50. Nevertheless, by at least presenting “all the evidence” (as Criswell would say), we can understand films like The Giant Claw unbound from sensational or belittling rumours.
THE FILM AS A WHOLE
The Giant Claw is certainly no masterpiece, but it wasn’t intended to be. As Sam Katzman said in his interview with Variety, “a picture that makes money is a good picture – whether it is artistically good or bad. I’m in the five and dime business and not in the Tiffany business.” Indeed, the film itself is fairly standard in structure and form for a genre picture of its decade. There is the initial creature sighting, followed by disbelief, a second and more destructive appearance of the monster, realisation of its existence by the disbelievers, and a struggle for a means to destroy it.
The film leans into expository narration often, and stock footage from prior Katzman efforts like Earth vs. The Flying Saucers pads the proceedings. The archaic social dynamics of its day are also on full display. This certainly isn’t up there with the decade’s standout genre pictures like I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958), let alone better Katzman efforts like The Werewolf (1956).
But it is entertaining.
Mara Corday, star of other genre classics like Tarantula (1955) and The Black Scorpion (1957), is always a joy to watch. Unsurprisingly, she lights up any scene she’s in with a sly smile and smooth delivery. Jeff Morrow is a similarly pleasant sight for genre fans, having also appeared in This Island Earth (1955) and The Creature Walks Among Us (1956). While both Corday and Morrow’s other science fiction appearances handed them better material, they’re still very comforting to see in The Giant Claw. And while that comfort may be elusive for viewers unfamiliar with ‘50s sci-fi, Corday and Morrow have more on-screen chemistry than many of their contemporaries – even with the ugly veneer of ‘50s sexism and misogyny that’s peppered over the script.
Jeff Morrow and Mara Corday.
And as for the bird? This author likes it. While the bird marionette is certainly goofy, it has a great deal of character in its wild eyes and constant shrieking. Indeed, its range of movement is rather impressive. Even though the bird almost certainly cost more than the flimsy claim of $50, this was still a low-budget picture made by a producer eager to save money. That the bird looks as animated as it does – eyes moving, nostrils flaring, etc. – is at least worth remembering. Moreover, we get to see lots of it, much to the chagrin of Jeff Morrow, who recalled shrinking into his theatre seat when the bird appeared on screen and the audience erupted into laughter. You can’t say you don’t get your money’s worth of the monster, even if it isn’t what you – or Jeff Morrow – were expecting.
As it stands, not every critic has been so harsh on the enormous bird. While the likes of Leonard Maltin have described it as “laughable”, the UK’s Monthly Film Bulletin commented that the special effects were “better than usual” when the film was reviewed in January 1957.
A FILM AS BIG AS A BATTLESHIP
While The Giant Claw certainly isn’t a shining example of ‘50s science fiction, it isn’t nearly as bad as some would have you believe – least of all because of its giant bird. However, exaggerated rumours and myths continue to circle. This does a disservice not just to The Giant Claw, but its contemporaries, too. Wild stories that sensationalise low budgets turn these films into little more than jokes, with scant consideration of all that went into them – let alone what they mean in their cultural landscape.
I’d argue that the various stories from the filmmakers and actors involved turn these films into fascinating artefacts, not all easily painted with the same brush. I don’t expect you, dear reader, to suddenly consider The Giant Claw as a masterpiece or even an overlooked gem. The film is still fraught with issues from the bafflingly complex origin of its monster to its ubiquitous stock footage. However, if we can consider The Giant Claw and its contemporaries on an individual basis, taking their often-fascinating production histories into account, we’ll have richer experiences when we watch them. We can also report more accurately on how films like The Giant Claw were made, referring to actual testimony (and some informed conjecture) rather than half-truths and rumours.
So, give another look to The Giant Claw, confident in the knowledge that there’s more to this bird than meets the eye.
A huge thank you to Daniel Hartles for providing this article’s accompanying artwork. You can see more of their work via their Twitter page.
Earlier this week, Moderat – the electronic project of Sascha Ring, Gernot Bronsert, and Sebastian Szary – announced they will be returning with their first album in 6 years. More D4ta, the follow-up to 2016’s III, is set for release on May 13 via Monkeytown Records. Today, Moderat have previewed the LP with a new song called ‘Fast Land’. Check it out via the accompanying video below.
