The Shins Shake Up Millennial Nostalgia Trip by Bashing Through Their Classics: Concert Review

Thania Garcia La Macarena in Colombia has a long history of hosting boisterous energy. The stadium has served as a venue for both concerts and bullfights since 1945, but on the weekend of Sept. 9, the ring was populated by Medellín native Salomón Villada Hoyos, otherwise known as Feid.  The reggaeton singer-songwriter sold out three consecutive nights at the stadium – a feat that not even two other hometown heroes, J. Balvin and Karol G., can claim (yet). Feid also famously beat out the late “Ídolo de México” Vicente Fernández, who performed there for the last time in Colombia in 2012.  Tickets for all three nights of Feid’s “Nitro Jam” shows sold out in just two days, while tickets for opening night sold out in two hours, according to El Colombiano.  

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Freddie Freeman was hitting homers down in San Diego, so it was up to visiting superstar Lady Gaga to keep the on-base percentage exceptionally high Saturday night at Dodger Stadium, site of one of the last stops on her “Chromatica Ball” outing. Surprises were few, this many weeks into a mega-tour whose production values were already known among the legions of Little Monsters who’d long since put curious paws to Googling Gaga’s setlists and setpieces. Anyway, knowing what’s coming doesn’t quash the overpowering effects of a savvy performer who’s determined to look as cold as inhumanly possible while also, conversely, sounding like the warmest superstar you’ve ever encountered. Does that count, in ballplaying terms, as a slider?

NBC’s ‘New Amsterdam’ To Be Remade In Turkey

A.D. Amorosi Jay-Z waxed outraged, last Thursday on social media, at having been called a ”capitalist” for his diverse business ventures and their wild fiduciary successes  — this after having once famously said, “I’m not a businessman. I’m a business, man.” But watching the fruit of Hova’s labors where his Made in America music festival was concerned, if making money and bringing together crowds for prime hip-hop and chart-topping Latin artistry is wrong, who needs to be right?

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Nick Lowe and Shakespeare were wrong, about having to be cruel to be kind. A tour stop Tuesday in Anaheim that had Lowe supporting headliner Elvis Costello as an opening act before eventually joining him for three climactic duets was kindly and 100% cruelty-free, reuniting the two former studio workmates in a fashion that made it seem as if no 40-year intervals had passed at all, except for the incidental actually-getting-better factors. (You’re not getting older, you’re getting Basher, etc.) Not that the show at the City National Grove of Anaheim — one of several SoCal appearances this week by Costello, with and without Lowe in tow — needed its crowning dream-teaminess to come up aces. Costello’s current sets with the Imposters represent the best example rock ‘n’ roll has at the moment of a vast catalog of classic material played with improvisational vigor by one of the great bands the medium has known, augmented by fresh material that can stand proudly alongside the vintage. “Indoor Fireworks” was one of the quieter songs performed Tuesday, but it’s an apt description of what’s occurring on this can’t-miss outing (with apologies to the shed stops where the group pyro happens outdoors).

John Hopewell Chief International Correspondent Adding to its slate of auteurs from all over the world, Raphael Berdugo’s Cité Films has boarded “The Fire Doll,” from Chilean director-to-track Niles Atallah (“Rey”) and “Left Over,” from San Sebastian Gold Shell winning Turkish director Yesim Ustaoglu (“Pandora’s Box”). Produced by Catalina Vergara at Chile’s Globo Rojo Films, “The Fire Doll” (“La muñeca de fuego”) is one of the 14 projects to be pitched at this month’s San Sebastian Europe-Latin America Co-Production Forum, one of the Spanish festival’s centerpiece industry events. Atallah, whose second film, “Rey,” won a Rotterdam Special Jury Prize in 2017, turns in “The Fire Doll” to the transformation process experienced by a 9-year-old girl, Aurora, who loses part of her memory and goes to her the countryside to spend Easter wither father, an alcoholic in remission.

A.D. Amorosi For a band that busted apart nearly a decade ago, My Chemical Romance — the toast of the 21st century’s emo-glam-empowered power-pop crowd — never lost a beat in regards to packing in millennials, and those even younger, to its 2022 reunion tour. Youthful ebullience and loud adoration were immediately noticeable when attending MCR’s Monday night packed-to-the-rafters concert at Philadelphia’s Wells Fargo Center, a live showcase postponed for two years due to the pandemic’s slowdown.  Playing to an overwhelming majority of teen (and just-post-teen) faces — many dressed in the New Jersey band’s one-time brand of red and black — singer-lyricist Gerard Way’s school of song was, as always, dedicated to the disenfranchised, the alienated and the outliers. Taken from albums such as 2002’s “I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love” and 2006’s “The Black Parade,” each MCR moment of the past spoke to the present-day concerns of mental health, self-awakening and freedom from fear and shame.

Lily Moayeri The Brookside Golf Club at the Rose Bowl has seen a lot of foot traffic over the last few months, much of it unrelated to the sport. The expansive course has become a convenient setting for several music festivals and cultural events, including This Ain’t No Picnic, which touched down in Pasadena this past weekend. The all-ages, family-friendly, two-day festival — named after the Minutemen song — boasted a bill that read like an NPR playlist. A clear replacement for Los Angeles’ defunct, and sorely missed FYF Fest, This Ain’t No Picnic had a musical something for everyone — pop, hip-hop, dance, punk and rock were well-represented genres — and featured the sort of left-of-center artists who’ve become darlings of the indie scene, like Phoebe Bridgers, Wet Leg, Beach House, Courtney Barnett (pictured above), and of the last 20 years, as represented by Le Tigre, Caroline Polachek, and headliners the Strokes and LCD Soundsystem.

The Only Way Is Essex star Yazmin Oukhellou was involved in a horrific car crash in July that left her with serious injuries. The reality star, 28, was in Turkey with her on-off boyfriend Jake McLean at the time of the accident and tragically he lost his life. Jake, who died aged 33, was understood to have been driving at the time when he lost control of the car in Bodrum, south-west Turkey.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music CriticOn the second evening of his two-night-stand at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, Father John Misty sang “Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings” early on in the show, as he does nearly every night on his current tour, and then confessed that, on the previous night, he’d blown a significant portion of the lyrics. At a loss to explain that uncharacteristic lapse, he attributed it to that particular song choice maybe being so on the nose that thinking about it kind of threw him a little.If he were a more woo-woo kind of person, maybe he’d have attributed it to the assembly of local spirits messing with him, for daring to be so meta as to finally play a gig on the hallowed-grounds-turned-entertainment-venue he named a song after.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music CriticIn the annals of popular music, has there ever been a more successful confluence of two existing solo brands than Robert Plant and Alison Krauss? Pretty much as a rule, duos start out in that configuration, then crash in clashes of egos; they’re not things that begin 20, 30, 40 years into respective careers. The long-lost fad of CSNY-style supergroups is one thing, but superduos never really became a thing at all, at least in that same joining-of-the-titans sense.