Noiseless Chatter Archive

We’re all in this together. Track List: The Squirming Coil Reba My Sweet One Split Open and Melt The Oh Kee Pa Ceremony Bathtub Gin Run Like an Antelope Lawn Boy Bouncing Around the Room I know it’s been a while since I reviewed Junta for this series, but there’s a good reason for that. I hadn’t heard Lawn Boy in its entirety in several years, and though I remembered it being a strong contender for my least favorite Phish album, rediscovering it has felt great. I still think it might be my least favorite Phish album, but it has more to offer than I’d originally remembered. Like Junta it suffers from being the product of a band that knew exactly what to do on stage with little to no idea what to do in a studio. Here, however, we do at least see signs of the band exploring the possibilities, with noticeable overdubs, vocal manipulation, and sound effect gimmickry throughout. It leads to a clumsy product, for sure, with none of the things that I just listed being good ...

  ALF Reviews: “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” (season 2, episode 18) Way back in episode six of season one, something incredible happened: I liked an episode of  ALF . Since then I’ve enjoyed a few others to varying degrees, but “For Your Eyes Only” still stands out to me, simply because of how unexpected a treat it was. It was a funny episode that took a touchy subject and handled it cleverly. It didn’t hurt that it also introduced (and heavily featured) a great character: Jodie. Jodie was a blind woman who lived alone. She and ALF met in that episode and bonded over their shared isolation, and it was lovely. It really was. While Jodie’s actress did a nice job with what she was given, the real surprise was the big leap in quality of the writing as well. The writers not only set themselves with a challenge — writing comedy about the blind without being needlessly flippant or cruel — but they  rose to it . Since then I’ve been told that Jodie makes a return appearance…a ...

Vimeo now has Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes available for rent or purchase. That’s fantastic news in itself, but the best part is that they’d like to make more episodes available in the future…episodes that have never been legally available due to rights issues. Their catalogue right now consists of 80 episodes…which is plenty to keep people busy, but also more than enough to overwhelm the uninitiated. Episodes are an hour and a half long, after all. It’s an investment of time to decide whether or not you even like the show…and the fact is that they’re not all created equal. Each episode features a riff of a complete movie , which is what causes distribution rights issues, and also either boosts or restricts the comic mileage. Some films are ripe for riffing, others…not as much so. I want people to support these videos, as this might be the only way we do get proper releases of long-missing episodes. At the same time, I want the people who support them to…y...

  ALF Reviews: “Someone to Watch Over Me: Part 2″ (season 2, episode 17) Alright…so I scheduled this post incorrectly, keeping all of you (ALL OF YOU) in suspense for another week as to how this crrrraaaaazy caper would play out. I’m sorry to have done that, because this episode doesn’t even tell you. Last week’s cliffhanger — which saw ALF trapped in the Ochmonek living room while police were outside, or something — is resolved off camera. Yep, “Someone to Watch Over Me: Part 2” opens with Mrs. Ochmonek angrily explaining to Willie that the burglar was in her house again, and as block captain he screwed up big by letting him get away. We then cut to ALF, hiding upstairs with Brian, and… …oh, okay. You caught me. That was the giveaway. God knows Brian’s not going to be involved with whatever the fuck happens here. No, the “resolution” to the cliffhanger takes place over the course of this entire episode. I have a few things to say about that, but we’ll get to that later. The screen...