The Duchess is a film based on Amanda Foreman’s biography of Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess the Devonshire.  And surprise, surprise, Keira Knightley is in it.  (Is there a law that states that she automatically gets top-billing in every costume drama that comes down the pike?)  Unfortunately, though the movie theoretically has enough plot to work with—there is the uncaring, cheating husband, the betraying best friend, and star-crossed lovers—The Duchess just isn’t emotionally involving.   The acting and pace is a bland, often boring affair…and pretty much everything about the movie is upstaged by the real stars of the show, the sumptuous costumery.

Synecdoche, New York marks Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut.  It’s the story of a Caden Cotard, a theater director whose life is falling apart: his marriage is a wreck, his health is failing, and reality just ain’t what it used to be.  Though being awarded a MacArthur genius grant seems like an upswing for the beleagured Cotard, it only really sets the stage (literally, as it leads to him to build a scale model of New York in a spatially-improbably warehouse) for an intensified search for meaning in an increasingly incomprehensible world.

I’ve seen Synechdoche, New York described as “tragicomic,” but while watching the film I had a difficult time locating the “comic” portion.  This is a very depressing movie that seems to depress the experience of time itself–I was sure I had been in the theater, wallowing in Kaufman’s existential mire, for about three hours and was surprised to see that the movie was only about two hours long.  And somehow when I left I felt thirty years older.  And none the wiser.  And yet I kind of enjoyed the experience.  Just don’t make me watch it again soon, okay?

Weep’s Never Ever marks Doc Hammer’s return to the world of music from the world of The Venture Bros.  Though he’s probably better known for his work on the sharply satiric Adult Swim cartoon, Hammer is no stranger to making music of the darkwave persuasion; Hammer was a founding member of goth darlings Requiem in White and Mors Syphilitica.  Even with that pedigree, any expectations are likely to be misplaced as Weep’s sonic aesthete differs greatly from that of his earlier projects.  Whereas Requiem in White and Mors Syphilitica both relied upon layers of sound as the backdrop for operatic female vocals, Weep focuses on a driving combination of gothic rock and shoegaze sensibilities and features Hammer’s own reverberating, understated vocals.  Never Ever shows the influence of 80s post-punk, but has enough subtle embellishments to make this more than a retread.  Plus, the disc looks like a tiny record and comes in a LP-like sleeve…can’t beat that.

Katzenjammer Kabarett doesn’t transcend genres so much as explode them wholesale.  Musically, the group mixes cabaret, deathrock, synthpunk, and goth conventions with cockeyed abandon—post-punk guitar tones, Weimar-inspired piano, and Euro-electro sythesizers all manage to find a place in the sonic palette.  Ideologically, Katzenjammer Kabarett borrows their aesthetic ideas from a similarly diverse body of artistic thought—Dadaism, fin de siecle Decadence, Futurism, Symbolism, and post-modernism all seem to have left their mark on the band’s two albums.  On their self-titled debut and the recently released Grand Guignol & Varietes, the group picks up the wild brand of dark experimentalism initiated by Andi Sexgang and runs wild with it, bending that particular avenue of rhizomatic freakishness to the beat of their own (prefab) drummer.  Of the many new acts who are picking up on the old-school Bat Cave tricks of the past, Katzenjammer Kabarett are one of the few bands that move beyond homage or pastiche—everything old is new again with these Katzenjammer Kids.  Arty, weird, and brilliant.

On their self-titled debut, Roma Amor offers eleven tracks of folksy, European cabaret.  Though the band weaves together the expected melange of accordion, throbbing bass, acoustic guitar, and decadent female vocals, they offer something new to the cabaret revival; instead of presenting a polished sound that recalls The Blue Angel or the Kit Kat Klub, Roma Amor sounds more like the kind of band you would stumble upon playing on a street corner or a forgotten beergarten somewhere in Old Europa.  The atmosphere they invoke is more old world than modernist, more volk than elite.  As such, their album is a bit raw.  (Some or all of the tracks may have been recorded live—I can’t tell because the liner notes are all in Italian.)  And yet, where an uneven, rough-edge sonic palette is often a distraction to my ear, it fits the music perfectly.  Bonus points for covering both Marc Almond and Jacques Brel on the same record!

Religulous is a documentary film that follows comedian Bill Maher as he interviews and questions people who hold a variety of religious beliefs.  The results won’t surprise anyone: faced by Maher’s rationalist skepticism of spiritual certainty, the religious folks often collapse into empty, unthinking rhetoric.  Of course, this means that the film isn’t likely to make an impact on either side of the debate; Maher’s fellow agnostics will agree with his critique, while the religious will retreat to whatever mumbo-jumbo they use to support their belief in an Invisible Sky Daddy.  So, what use is this film if it isn’t likely to break the polarized division between the faithful and the faithless?  Well, it’s frequently funny…and that’s something I can believe in.

PS – I still miss George Carlin.

Though The Cure started off as an odd offshoot of the British punk scene, and quickly became the unwilling standard bearers of a certain morose post-punk scene, over the last thirty or so years they have perfected a style that can only be described as “Cure-music.” You simply know it when you hear it. 4:13 Dream is a particularly insistent version of Cure-music; though the songs alternate a bit between the darkly emotive (”Underneath the Stars,” “The Hungry Ghost”) and the dangerously manic (”Freakshow,” “Sleep When I’m Dead”), the album is lean, vibrant, and almost spoiling for a fight. Though this is likely to disappoint fans of the band’s sprawling gloomfests and death-defying dirges, taken on its own merits it makes for tight, compact listening experience. 4:13 Dream won’t bump Pornography or Disintegration off anyone’s list of desert island discs, but it is an amiable record that displays the continued relevance of the sound that is uniquely The Cure’s: that unmistakable guitar tone, Robert Smith’s lost boy yowl, the bass line that always manages to slip into the lead. While at this point it is all formula, perhaps even a veritable sonic institution, it’s still a formula that is hard to argue with.

Luminescent Orchestrii are postmodern gypsy musicians: like musical magpies, they see fit to borrow melodies from a variety of cultures and bend them to modern ends, resulting in a fierce, joyous bricolage. On Neptune’s Daughter traditional Moldavian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Greek, and Cuban songs sit comfortably next to the band’s original compositions. (”Nasty Tasty” and “Kombucha Monster” even give nods to Luminescent Orchestrii’s homegrown brand of gypsy hip-hop.) Build mostly of viola, violin, stand-up bass, resonator guitar, and occasional melodica–all the band members take a turn at vocals at various points in the album–the songs on Neptune’s Daughter are powerful, heartfelt, and always thrilling. Over the past year, I’ve seen them play five times; at each show one thing was obvious: they truly love playing music. That love comes through on Neptune’s Daughter, loud and manic and clear.

I can still remember the first time I heard The Devil’s Bris—as someone who came to the Goth subculture by way of reading the fiction of Ann Radcliffe rather than that of Anne Rice, Voltaire’s music struck me as essentially “Gothic” in a way that the EBM-based dance floor fodder that continues to dominate the club scene could never be. I was impressed by three aspects of Voltaire’s music in particular: it is unique (no one else really sounds like Voltaire; his music is immediately identifiable), it is old world in style (influenced by gypsy rhythms, instead of reiterating the self-reflexive tropes of “Gothic music”), and its darkness is tempered by humor (let’s face it, there is something inherently funny about a bunch of people dressed like dead folks dancing around like they can’t hear the beat).

To the Bottom of the Sea is largely a return to the style of music Voltaire created with The Devil’s Bris, and yet it even exceeds that album in delving into old world gypsy influences. Along with the expected acoustic guitar and strings, on his first self-released album Voltaire has added accordion, piano, tin whistle, darabuka, mandolin, and a roughshod chorus of friends. The songs are united by a somewhat vague concept that runs throughout most of the album; there’s something going on in the fictional country of Vorutania involving a peasant uprising, pirates, and sea monsters. Fans of concept albums will be best pleased, but each song does stand on its own merits. My favorite songs on the album are “The Industrial Revolution (And How It Ruined My Life),” a paen to the time before Starbucks and rampant consumption, the fatalistic “Happy Birthday (My Olde Friend),” and Voltaire’s duet with Julia Marcell on “This Sea.” Of course, Voltaire’s brand of wry humor is also present. Tracks such as “Coin Operated Goi,” a riff off The Dresden Dolls’s “Coin-Operated Boy,” and “Death Death (Devil, Devil, Devil, Devil, Evil, Evil, Evil, Evil Song)” are sure to get a chuckle. In the end, Voltaire is still more classically Gothic than his contemporaries: To the Bottom of the Sea invokes images of peasants armed with torches and wooden stakes, ships capsizing on the cruel sea, the devil, robber barons, and hungry sea serpents. Ann Radcliffe would be proud.

Faun Fables is one of those rare musical endeavors that lives and breathes entirely within its own self-created, eccentric world, and their music is a lullaby for fey children and weirdling backwoods folks. By turns tribal and welcoming, lullaby-esque and nostalgic, experimental and eerie, epic and haunting, the four songs on the A Table Forgotten EP weave together disparate sonic textures from guitar, bass, violin, flute, harmonium, uncanny percussion, and Dawn McCarthy’s otherworldly Weird Sister vocals to form a tableau of singular, iconic vision. And oh, what theremin playing! Meredith Yayanos’s theremin on “A Table Forgotten” is most brilliant use of that peculiar instrument since…Meredith Yayanos’s work on the Revue Noir. Though McCarthy’s playfully odd theatrics might be a bit much for some, the music on A Table Forgotten is equally perfect for a romp through the haunted Appalachians or tea with slyphes, satyrs, and other creatures of the thorny imagination.