Issue 7 Preview

A little look into the upcoming One More Robot Issue 7: "The Pop Issue"

Joe Tangari looks at Brandy and Monica's 1998 hit single to help him get to grips with the meaning of the expressions "pop music".



How legendary pop-artist Andy Warhol wielded more influence than he ever knew.



On unironically enjoying Miley Cyrus and her take on a much loved teen anthem.



Hardly a household name, we examine how Roger Troutman has influenced 30 years of pop music.



Seán McTiernan argues that Karmin's stripped down take on hip-hip makes them the nothing more than their generation's Me First and the Gimme Gimmes.



How UK grime music has become one of the nation's most popular forms of pop music.




Our spotlight shines on the terrific synthy shoegazers, Oh Minnows.



Album reviews include Beyoncé, Tom Vek, Death Cab for Cutie and Kreayshawn.



And a whole lot more besides. New issue out in July. For the latest news check back here, here and here.

Stevie's Stonkers #6: 'Queen of Hearts' by Fucked Up

I’m a cynic. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. So when I hear the oxymoronic term “Punk-Rock Opera” being knocked about to describe a record, I want to puke. I’m all for a band being ambitious, and evolving, but I don’t want a ridiculously straight up deadly punk band like Fucked Up going all amateur dramatics-dinner theatre on me. I’m old school like that. Luckily, in making their high concept hardcore Tommy for 2011, David Comes To Life, they have compromised nothing, and have in fact made their best LP to date. 'Queen of Hearts' is the perfect intro to the record that sees the glass gargling, vicious vocals of lead screamer Pink Eyes sound positively uplifting when he hits the chorus with that soaring guitar line. --Stephen Rogers

Vinyl Issue Available on Ebay

Latest One More Robot now available on Ebay.

See you after the jump: http://bit.ly/jRbnfn

'The Thespians' Teaser

Friends of One More Robot Paul Dodd and Alan Hopkins have put a trailer together for their upcoming internet show The Thespians. They're our mates, so we wouldn't lie to them: It's really funny.

'I Am Going To Thailand'

Back in issue 3 we named BJ Novak one of our top 10 cult actors working today. A DJ has obviously recognised his genius, taking one of his best monologues from The Office and remixing it into a stompin' dubstep track.

Mad by Name, Mad by Nature

Matthew Jaffray on why Mad Max 4 is the most cursed film in Hollywood.

Nambia, February 2003. Mad Max 4: Fury Road is in the middle of pre-production. Millions of dollars have been spent hiring hundreds of people, building expansive sets, scouting locations, leasing trailers and developing the film. The shoot is a few weeks away, and Mel Gibson is set to bring back to the screen one of cinema’s most iconic action heroes. But none of that matters because production will soon be shut down.

It seemed like the timing was perfect. The films that were a cult success in the eighties had blossomed into revered classics and Gibson was at the height of his Hollywood clout, meaning this time, there was to be a colossal budget to the tune of $104 million. To put that into perspective, all three previous films cost a combined total of under $20 million.

Security concerns regarding the war in Iraq (hello? Different continent!) saw things put on hold for a year. Ultimately though, things were scrapped altogether a few months later. This was just another disaster in a production history that would make even Terry Gilliam cringe.

In a way it’s a miracle that the now Oscar winning director George Miller even got the enthusiasm to set himself on the long road of creating a new Mad Max film. Close friend and fellow producer of the series Byron Kennedy was killed during pre-production on Beyond Thunderdome in a helicopter crash while scouting locations.

Devastated by the loss, Miller stepped down from the director’s chair to be replaced Geroge Ogilvie, though he was later persuaded to come back and film the action sequences. The result was a noticeably uneven film which remains by far the weakest of the trilogy.

When Miller eventually came round to the idea of doing the third film, there was a lot of wrangling to get the rights. Warner brothers had released Mad Max 2 and Mad Max 3 in America, but Miller wanted to do Fury Road at Fox, who offered him a huge budget, creative control and had a deal with Gibson’s company Icon. Finally, the dispute was settled when Miller agreed to step down from directing Warner’s Contact with Jodie Foster, to be replaced by Back to the Future creator Robert Zemeckis.

With the issue of the rights put to bed, Miller spent the next three years writing a script which would have to be re-written following Gibson’s departure from the role in 2004 citing his age as his desire to further his directing career as the main reasons.

Things seemed dead in the water. But in 2006, Miller declared he wasn’t finished with Mad Max and proposed to do Fury Road with a re-vamped script and a new actor cast in the role of Max Rockatansky. Tom Hardy was cast in 2009, quite a while before Inception made him a bonafide star, as well as Charlize Theron. Production was slated to begin in 2010, this time in Australia.

Yet again no camera’s rolled. Not one scene was filmed. Just days before shooting was to start, the heavens opened and a rainfall of biblical proportions dampened any chance of production. As Miller put it: "it rained the heaviest it had in 10 years. I’ll never forget the first day — we were holed up in a big sort of shed watching the rain. We couldn’t shoot."

Details of the story of Fury Road have been hotly guarded for a decade now. The casting of Tom Hardy suggests it will not be chronologically the fourth instalment but a reboot. All that’s known of Charlize Theron’s role is that she plays a one-armed woman. While the only leak about the production so far has been form a stuntman who said there are 298 stunts scheduled involving 130 vehicles and as little CGI and green screen work as possible.

Will Mad Max: Fury Road ever see the light of day? According to Miller, yes. "All the contracts are signed. It’s a locked-in film. It has been for 18 months now. We will restart pre-production later this year and begin early next year — weather permitting." But similar sentiments have been made before, after the Nambia shoot fell apart. Meanwhile Tom Hardy’s role as Bane in The Dark Knight Rises has pushed back production another few months. While the decision to shoot in 3D pushes the budget up significantly. There have even been rumours that Miller now intends to shoot two Mad Max films back to back. That it has taken 20 years to get this far, this seems quite ambitious, but here’s hoping he pulls it off.

Webcrawler

Originally Appears in Issue 6

In each issue Declan Aylward dives head first into the weird and wonderful world of the web, and reports back with his findings.

Echo Bazaar
http://echobazaar.failbettergames.com

Three decades ago, London was stolen by bats. That, intriguingly, is the stage-setter for Echo Bazaar, a ‘10 minutes a session’ browser game that bases itself on your Twitter or Facebook account, but won’t gain you the pitying and vaguely irritated looks a Farmville addiction can bring on from your friends and co-workers. Part of this is because Echo Bazaar keeps its spamming of your friends to a discreet minimum. It’s more a polite cough of an aged butler than a raucous, marketplace screech most of its ilk use to announce their presence. Mostly though, it’s the setting that will get its hooks into you. Set in an underground, alternative world that feels like Neil Gaiman and Terry Gilliam collaborated on a HP Lovecraft theme park under the supervision of Terry Pratchett, the curiously genteel Fallen London is rife with flirtatious devils, melancholy curates and, of course, the mysterious Masters of the Bazaar themselves. The game is essentially card-based and once you’ve been dropped into the Neath you use the opportunity cards you draw to find accommodation, earn what passes for money this close to Hell, uncover hidden plots or even invite your friends to social events in your spiffing new lodgings. The game’s focus on storytelling and intrigue over violence and mayhem has even earned it attention from a mainstream gaming industry fast becoming bored with hulking space marines mowing down hordes of hapless aliens. Pay a visit to the Bazaar and, who knows, you might even hang up the blaster rifle yourself in favour of an expertly wielded bag of fierce mint humbugs!

Smodcast
http://www.smodcast.com

Has anyone else been wondering what Kevin Smith is up to these days? Well, apart from writing and directing a pretty creepy looking horror movie called Red State, he has been hiding out at a place called Smodcastle. Billing itself as the world’s first and only podcasting theatre, Smodcastle is Smith’s LA venue for a whole host of internet events that those of us too pasty and freckled to spend time in the City of Angels can catch at smodcast.com. Every day of the week a new podcast is available on the site. Some are recorded live at Smodcastle, some rare ecorded studio-style off the premise. But all are hilarious, interesting and, needless to say, very offensive to the lemonade-and-buns brigade.

The podcasts on offer cover a host of topics, but whether you’re listening to Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier shooting the shit in the titular Smodcast, catching up with movie industry news in ‘Hollywood Babble-On’ or indulging an inexplicable ice-hockey fascination with Puck Nuts, the banter will have you chuckling to yourself like a crazy person on the bus. If you really crave your Jay and Silent Bob fix, every Wednesday ‘Jay and Silent Bob Get Old’ gives you a chance to hear about how our heroes are doing now that they are both settling down and maturing. Mature is a relative term though, and anyone who doesn’t find endless, graphic dick jokes entertaining should really pass this site by and renew their subscription to Justin Bieber’s no-doubt squeaky clean podcast instead.

Mystery Solved!
http://www.mysterysolvedcomic.com

He may not have a psychedelic van and a talking great dane, but Colonel Randall Thaddeus Winchester IV of the Mystery Solved! webcomic certainly gets the job done. Created by Zack Kruse and drawn by a different artist for each of his adventures, the good Colonel and his trusty manservant Jenkins travel the globe investigating and disproving phenomena like alien cattle mutilation, bigfoot and fairies. The comic delights in showing the wilful ignorance that must persist for most myths to survive, and contrasts this with the Colonel’s sound science. I would be lying if I said that sharing a smug sense of superiority with our intrepid investigator wasn’t part of the appeal. The fact that each adventure is illustrated in a different style keeps the comic fresh. It’s fun to watch how far in the air each artist manages to stick Jenkins’ nose, but the wacky, almost Beano style writing maintains a firmly consistent feel. While it might not have the cutting edge satire of Penny Arcade or the relevance to modern singletons that Girls with Slingshots has mastered, Mystery Solved! is a reminder that sometimes it’s nice just to settle back for a simple Scooby Doo style adventure and a pat on the back to ourselves for never believing in ghost stories in the first place. The comic is updated every Thursday so check back regularly to keep abreast of the Colonel’s most recent debunking.

Goldrush

Originally Appears in Issue 6

Rubicon, a critically acclaimed conspiracy-thriller, is set to debut this year on BBC4. However, disappointing US ratings mean the show won’t be coming back for a second season. Derek Owens laments how TV drama is under threat as networks join the rush for instant hits.

Perhaps appropriately for a show with more moments of subdued tension than gunshots or explosions, Rubicon died with a whimper: a statement from its network, AMC TV, praised the story of a defence analyst who discovers a sinister conspiracy involving his employers, API, but confirmed that the programme would not return with a second series. The news wasn’t particularly surprising. The show had been troublesome to produce – original creator and show runner Jason Horwitch was replaced in mid-production by Henry Bromell – and ratings hadn’t been spectacular. Still, the cancellation of the critically-acclaimed show after a single series is a worrying sign of a short-termism that’s crept again into the decision making of American network execs. Even as, officially, we still enjoy a golden age of TV drama, the desperation to achieve instant success in the hyper-competitive environment could yet kill it off.

Few would claim, of course, that Rubicon was a perfect show. The series lead, Will Travers (The Pacific’s James Badge Dale), reacted to learning of a terrifying conspiracy with the passive befuddlement of a man trying to locate his car keys. The script had the occasional lines of exposition and import that just didn’t come off naturally, and the occasionally head-scratching plot point – this was probably inevitable in any conspiracy thriller cut short.

However, Rubicon was a show with real promise. Horwitch and Bromell borrowed more than just a bag of themes from classic seventies paranoia films like Three Days of the Condor, All the Presidents Men and The Conversation – they lifted the hybrid of intimate camera-work, a minor key tension-building soundtrack and slow building of tension to create a real throwback to these demanding but deeply satisfying stories. They also brought in some extraordinary actors, including stage veteran Michael Ivan Cristofer (whose ‘villain’ Truxton Spangler is visceral, peculiar, and wonderfully complex) and lesser-known talents like Jessica Collins and Dallas Roberts as Will Travers’ deeply troubled colleagues.

More importantly, the show had started to really find its feet in later episodes, branching into the private lives and troubles of Will Travers’ colleagues. Issues of power and its abuse were being teased out. And something actually got blown up. Oddly, but entirely in keeping with the programme’s personality, the big explosion happened off-screen, in the penultimate episode – a substantial ratings drop for the finale a week later probably sealed Rubicon’s fate. Even as critics praised the show for its uniqueness, visual brilliance and strong finish, most acknowledged that a second series was highly unlikely.

Rubicon, however, wasn’t the only highly-regarded show this year to be culled from the broadcast schedules after failing to achieve instant, Mad Men-esque success: Terriers, a tale of two private detectives scratching out a living, was also ditched by FX after only one season, while Fox’s Lone Star (an intriguing series about a Texan con-man struggling to keep his double life together) gave up the ghost after only two poorly-rated episodes. The fact that the show was in the same timeslot as NBC’s The Event, Dancing with the Stars and CBS’ inexplicably successful Two and a Half Men probably doomed it from the start.

Fierce competition is, frankly, killing new shows: at the height of the US’s autumn season, 16 new shows premiered in one week – when season premieres of existing shows were taken into account, nearly 50 new episodes were battling for eyeballs on the major American networks. The powers that be in TV land are responding to – and feeding – this glut in one of three ways. Some are sticking to tried and tested shows, however critically reviled and problematic they may be to make (the aforementioned Two and a Half Men, though its continuation since axing Charlie Sheen is yet to be confirmed). Some, like AMC, are chucking short runs of oddball shows at the wall and hoping that they stick – after Rubicon finished up, the network had a hit with post-apocalyptic zombie thriller The Walking Dead. Meanwhile, others are committing to shows with mind-blowing budgets and A-list talent in the hope of outgunning the opposition: Boardwalk Empire, HBO’s Scorsese-produced, award friendly period gangster piece springs to mind.

However, networks following that third path are in the minority, and there was even some doubt about whether HBO would bring Boardwalk Empire back for a second season: with the market for high quality TV as competitive as it is, it appears, executives don’t have the luxury of waiting for secondary characters on a show to come into their own and connect with viewers, or for a show to find its feet after tweaking its formula. This is understandable, but lamentable. After all, would The Wire have become a seminal show if we hadn’t been allowed to emotionally invest in Omar (or indeed any character besides Jimmy McNulty) by a network that believed in the series enough to renew it despite middling ratings? And indeed, had Fox not allowed Matt Groening to switch the focus of The Simpsons from Bart to Homer, the programme wouldn’t have become half as successful as it did. These are, of course, radically different shows, but they illustrate a core truth – few programmes, if any, get it right immediately. They need time to bed down and refine their formula, but the current environment means that only exceptionally strong-willed executives will give a series that breathing space if it hasn’t been an instant hit.

This changing environment probably won’t result in the deluge of TV offal that some critics fear. Of course, we’ll still have shows like Two and a Half Men, but many networks will continue to commission innovative shows in the hope of unearthing another Mad Men. The downside is that, unless the quirky show that captures your heart is an instant hit, you’ll probably have to content yourself with a single series, a topic to bore people silly about, and a dream of how good the programme could have become if networks had a bit more backbone.

One More Robot - Issue 6

ISSUE SOLD OUT
 
Featured Articles

For The Record
With new formats coming and going every few years, why does vinyl continue to survive?
by Dean Van Nguyen

Living in the Crates
How the definition of ‘crate digging’ is changing as new technologies alter our listening habits.
by Jonathan Bogart

Chopped ‘n’ Screwed
How sampling has been embedded into the fabric of hip-hop since its inception, and why it continues hold importance with modern rappers and producers.
by Seán McTiernan

A Hidden History on Vinyl
Hidden in record stores, antique malls and basements, there is an alternative history of music waiting to be discovered.
by Joe Tangari

Gold Diggers
Some of our favourite people hand pick their favourite vinyl records for your enjoyment.

Digging for Abba Gold
Discovered at Blackrock Market, 10 very different records are evaluated.
by Brendan O’Dowd

The Crate Escape
Our essential guide to the record labels, old and new, every wannabe vinyl collector should become accustomed to.
by Ronan Hunt-Murphy

Day of the Indies
A look at the rise and rise of Record Store Day, with a preview of the upcoming festivities happening this April 16th.
by Brendan O’Dowd

Also Includes

The Meaning of Charlie Dean Van Nguyen examines why Charlie Sheen’s recent breakdown has proved irresistible to watch.

Time for a Re-Up: The Hip-Hop Takeover Trisha Doyle on why nineties hip-hop has experienced a revival of late.

Webcrawler More cherry-picked internet sites from Declan Aylward.

Kiddie Car-Crashes Derek Owens counts out his top five child stars to fall desperately from grace.

Goldrush Jittery US television executives are pulling the plug too early on quality new programmes, argues Derek Owens.

Ah Sure, Look It Niamh King describes a day spent selling door-to-door.

Half Nelson Jason Robinson on how a generation of nerds are becoming some of Hollywood’s more prominent leading men.

& Much More

One More Robot Magazine Launch Party

To mark the release of our upcoming, bumper-sized, special edition 'Vinyl Issue', we're hosting an evening of live music on Friday, April 1st, featuring the combined talents of The Fundamentals, Ken O'Neill, Let's Set Sail and Jennifer Mangan.

The Lower Deck is the scene (map is here) and the cost is €10 at the door, with a copy of the new issue waiting for you upon arrival. Hope to see ya'll there!

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