Halloween comes with a few certainties. Costume parties happen, girls dress like prostitutes, haunted houses go up, and another wretched Saw movie will (inevitably) hit the Century in Evanston. What’s not certain? Finding a scary movie that doesn’t completely blow (unless you’re into that, in which case, Saw V is for you). If you’re looking for a cinematic scare this Halloween, it’s best not to be picky about genre. Scary comes in all shapes and sizes, so you can (and should) hit the horror, suspense, thriller and maybe even romantic comedy sections when picking the perfect scary flick. To help you in your quest, here are ten of the best films across all genres to scare you this All Hallow’s Eve.

10. The Devil’s Backbone (2001)
The token “modern creepy film” on this list wasn’t a mega-success when it first hit America, so people often overlook it when the haunting season rolls around. When it was released around the time of 9/11, scary films weren’t doing all too well at the box office, and the story of a boy living in a haunted orphanage in 1939 Spain wasn’t exactly uplifting. Del Toro is a master of dark suspense, and creates unmatched tension in Backbone. In his better-known 2006 venture Pan’s Labyrinth, Del Toro mixed the fanciful with the violent; Backbone ditches the fanciful for gloom and despair.

9. Halloween – 1978
This was the first of the three extremely popular, genre-defining horror series (the others being Friday the 13th in 1980 and A Nightmare on Elm Street in 1984). While Friday had a great twist of a villain in Jason, Nightmare, with villain Freddie Krueger, felt lackluster, and neither could touch the eerie feel of Halloween. With Michael Myers, a simple psychopathic killer, as its antagonist and Jamie Lee Curtis playing a helpless babysitter, the kills get delivered in effortless style. Films with serial murderers who gorily kill victim after victim have become tired and cliché, but with Halloween, you actually get the worthy original.

8. The Blair Witch Project – 1999
This movie has been pummeled so badly since its release that it’s often forgotten how achingly refreshing it was upon its first release. This is a horror film that screened at Cannes in 1999, with its nauseating camera work and exploitation-level marketing scheme. The filmmakers employed the age-old idea that what’s scariest isn’t what’s on the screen, but what’s lurking unseen just out of frame. The movie showed us the direction that horror could have gone — in if Japanese remakes didn’t make so much goddamn money.

7. The Exorcist – 1973
Filmmakers spoof it more than possibly any other horror film, but as the old adage goes, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. While it doesn’t hold up as well as some of the other demon child films of the time (Rosemary’s Baby is perhaps made better, but hey, it’s Polanski), it has more moments that beg you to close your eyes. There are gross-out scares, sound scares and quick-cut scares. Toss in Linda Blair’s overwhelming performance as a demon-possessed little girl, and you have one hell of a horror film.

6. Jaws – 1975
The father of the modern blockbuster film sent beach attendance plummeting during the summer of its release. That’s how scary the hydraulic shark was in Spielberg’s breakout film. The opening scene with the skinny-dippers puts the audience in a relaxed mood… until the shark strikes. It takes so long for Spielberg to finally show the shark that when he finally tips his hand while the late Roy Scheider is scooping chum into the water, we’re knocked flat.

5. Alien – 1979
A monster movie in space — that’s essentially all Ridley Scott’s best film is. The simplicity of the film is executed with such terrifying precision that it’s astounding. A mining ship picks up a distress signal and investigates on the ground, only to later discover that they’ve picked up a stowaway creature that attaches itself to the face of a crew member. The ensuing hatching of the alien is pure horror classic, and Sigourney Weaver’s stardom was made on the back of this single, powerful female performance. There’s no damsel in distress here, Ripley straight-up kicks alien ass.

4. Audition – 1999
I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: This is the only film that has ever scared Rob Zombie, director of House of 1000 Corpses and The Devil’s Rejects, both lurid gross-out horror cult classics. The most horrifying element of Audition is that, for the first half, it’s a romantic comedy depicting a widower who works for an entertainment company, staging an audition to look for a possible girlfriend. The girl he finds seems nice, only something about her is a little off. In a single shot, director Takashi Miike takes the odd love story into disturbing territory that leads to torture, a dream sequence you can see coming from a mile away (but that can’t make it stop), a severed foot and a horror classic.

3. The Silence of the Lambs – 1991
Only three films have ever won Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, and Screenplay in one year. Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs is the most recent (the other’s being It Happened One Night and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest). Anthony Hopkins is only on screen for a small portion of the film as Hannibal Lecter. Scenes with Lecter and FBI agent Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) are tense, but they are contrasted with the lecherous serial killer Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine). While Starling remains an innocent center to the story, everything that revolves around her is frightening and intense, building to a climax that proves Starling’s mettle as an agent. Hopkins also delivers some of the most famous lines in a thriller, especially the penultimate “I’m having an old friend for dinner.”

2. Psycho – 1960
Hitchcock is the undisputed heavyweight champion of suspense. There never was and never will be a director that can match Hitchcock’s intuition for what makes an audience squirm and duck under a seat. He did the unthinkable in 1960 by killing his top-billed star (Janet Leigh) in the first act, but the shocks didn’t end there. Anthony Perkins gave the performance of a lifetime as Norman Bates, getting typecast forever after as a psychopath obsessed with his mother. There’s a reason Psycho holds such a respected place in horror despite its tame-by-modern-standards content: It’s simply an arresting thriller with terrifying writing and perfect performances.

1. The Shining – 1980
Stephen King hated the liberties Stanley Kubrick took in this film so much that he made his own TV miniseries to get everything his way. That version couldn’t even come close to Kubrick’s hauntingly long takes down the hallways of the Overlook Hotel and Jack Nicholson’s incredible performance of a man spiraling downward into insanity. The Amityville Horror did the patriarch-goes-insane idea just a year earlier, but The Shining busted in with auteur style, classic one-liners from Nicholson, and some of the creepiest sounds ever in a film. Kubrick may have pissed off Stephen King, but he crafted a masterpiece of terror.

This time, Lewis isn’t so much concerned with playing a different genre but changing a perception. Rabbit Fur Coat created a good-girl image; here she deconstructs that image, dirtying it up and doing her best to go bad. Much like Under the Blacklight created a seedy, unfamiliar atmosphere for Rilo Kiley, this album is darker than her debut.

For whatever reason, a good amount of records this year start off with lackluster tracks, and Acid Tongue unfortunately falls into that category. The worst offender is “The Next Messiah”, an eight-minute-plus medley that sounds like the black-sheep child of The Who and an American Idiot-style punk operetta. It packs too many undercooked ideas into one track. For the first four songs, Lewis sounds constrained and overly caught up in trying to force a change in her listeners’ perception of her.

Thankfully, the title track shifts gears completely. “Acid Tongue” is the catharsis needed to shake off the frills and heavy production clogging the album’s early songs. Lewis has performed many of these songs live for several years, and they sound well-traveled. Backed by a country-tinged chorus of helping voices, Lewis strips everything down to a real image of herself, as in the line “To be lonely is a habit / like smoking or taking drugs / and I’ve quit them both / but man, was it rough.”

From that point on, Acid Tongue is tranformed. It sounds freer, going for broke and having fun while maintaining an edge. “Carpetbaggers” is a standout, reminiscent of the country twang of Rabbit Fur Coat but rocking harder than any track on that album, while the macabre storytelling of “Jack Killed Mom” maintains the darker progression of Lewis’s career.

Where gospel marked her debut, Lewis uses the sounds of soul music on Acid Tongue’s later tracks, and she isn’t afraid to let her voice explore that style. But after two records, it’s still hard to gauge whether Lewis is better off without her band. There certainly aren’t full arrangements on the album that couldn’t have used a little guitar meddling from Blake Sennett, but with a guest list including Elvis Costello, M. Ward, Zooey Deschanel and Lewis’ boyfriend, Jonathan Rice, there’s no shortage of star power. Lewis has the chops to create a cohesive and compelling tune on her own, but Acid Tongue stumbles out of the gate with a few weak songs. That isn’t to say there aren’t very strong tracks later in the record, but one wonders if those kinks could’ve been worked out with help from her full band.

There are few bands with as much mystique as Kings of Leon. Brothers, and sons of a preacher, Caleb (vocals), Jared (bass, synthesizer) and Nathan Followill (drums) along with cousin Matthew Followill (guitar) play the devil’s music — to sum it up. They had a critically-acclaimed debut, an acclaimed follow-up and an epic, daunting third record. After all the alleged drug use, promiscuous sex and rehab the group has gone through, the hangover has finally hit. Their newest foray, Only By The Night, is a record best experienced in a candlelit room with a partner.

Their sound occupies more space this time around, with voices echoing off into the air and guitars lingering in reverb. Caleb’s voice is much less of a growl or a drawl like on past projects, and more of a croon, especially in songs like the verses of “Use Somebody.” You keep waiting for the band to kick the tempo up a notch, but it never comes and you never seem to mind. They’ve slowed their songs down and made them very night-friendly.

Kings of Leon have always been overtly sexual, even when including religious imagery. Just take a look at the song titles (”I Want You,” “Sex on Fire,” “Use Somebody”). “17” is dripping with Lolita-esque eroticism as it ponders an underage sexpot (eerily similar to “15” by Rilo Kiley, albeit from a first-person perspective) singing lines like “So I could call you baby, I could call you” about a likely underage, depending on the state, girl whose “Spanish tongue…made me wanna stay.” There aren’t many loud come-ons, just slow burning croons that seduce over time; it’s a delayed release of lust over the course of 45 minutes.

Caleb’s voice, no matter how quavering, always has an air of desire. I can see a ton of these songs being used over sex scenes in indie movies for years. It’s a really solid record from beginning to end, even if there aren’t many popping singles. Only By The Night works as an album, played all the way through during the night and, as a very atmospheric work, it succeeds greatly.

With the exception of “Sex on Fire”, which plays like a good, if significantly less metaphoric or subtle, companion piece to “Molly’s Chambers” [the hit first single from their first album, Youth and Young Manhood], the entire record plays like different variations of rock slow jams. Think southern-fried rock mixed with R&B. Kings of Leon maintains its air of classic, southern rock its members have become known for, and they’re not breaking sonic ground with this stuff, but nobody’s ever accused Kings of Leon of being forward-thinking. They’re not revolutionaries, they’re just really good at what they do.

A lot of odd things were said about Kings of Leon through their early years. They got unfairly and inexplicably compared to Lynyrd Skynyrd for being a good rock band from the south, and were allegedly virgins on their first tour; but four albums in, they’ve established themselves as a very strong force in rock. This album saw the exploration of a completely new kind of sound within their parameters, and it begs excitement for whatever direction the band chooses to go in next.

Takei appears as Kaito Nakamura on Heroes. Photo courtesy NBC.

Takei is the most prominent gay Asian-American actor in America and has gotten to that point on impressive talent, not through demeaning caricature roles. He was born five years before World War II, and as an Asian-American living in the western U.S., was subjected to life in two different internment camps during the war. In an interview with North by Northwestern, Takei said he was affected by the Yellow Peril of the time, created by newspapers, which contributed to racism following the Pearl Harbor attacks. “When others are made one-dimensional, it becomes easy to do horrible things to them,” Takei says.

After the war, he acted in school plays, but initially studied architecture at the University of California–Berkeley on the advice of his father, who was in real estate. After two years there, though, he said he had developed a case of the “coulda, woulda, shouldas.” He wanted to act, and prepared for a conversation with his father to convince him about changing career paths. “My father was prepared for this, though,” Takei says, “and wanted me to get a degree.” Takei then enrolled at UCLA in the theatre department, where he obtained a bachelor’s and master’s in theatre.

Attending UCLA was fortuitous, and got him started in professional acting. “A casting director saw me in a student production,” he says, “and that’s how I got cast in my first feature, Ice Palace.” Warner Brothers liked his performances, and put him in guest-starring roles on shows such as Hawaiian Eye. He also landed roles in films alongside Cary Grant, Alec Guinness and James Caan, until 1965, when he was cast in a small science-fiction show called Star Trek, which ensured his place in popular culture.

More than 40 years later, he landed the role of Kaito Nakamura on NBC’s popular sci-fi show Heroes, which came in a roundabout fashion. “A Star Trek fan e-mailed me about a character on the show who is a Star Trek fan,” he said, referring to Hiro Nakamura, the show’s time-and-space-bending character. “Sometime later I was called for the role of Hiro’s father, and they sent me a script.” However, the studio had sent him a script entirely in English, when he was reading for a character who speaks entirely in Japanese, he says. “They wanted me to translate it, to prove I could speak Japanese fluently.”

Takei announced his engagement to manager and longtime partner Brad Altman this week. Photo courtesy GeorgeTakei.com.

Though Takei’s career is going strong, he has been in the spotlight recently for showing personal aspects of his life. Since an interview in Frontiers magazine in 2005, Takei has been openly gay (though during his career he didn’t make attempts to deny it), and has been a highly active member in the LGBT community on the issue of equal rights. He has been featured many times on The Howard Stern Show before and after its switch to satellite radio, and starred in a comedic public service announcement on Jimmy Kimmel Live! in response to former NBA player Tim Hardaway’s comments regarding gay basketball players.

In recent years, Takei has appeared in many shows and films, but has been able to (for the most part) inhabit his roles instead of just being George Takei onscreen — his parts rarely mirror his personal life as a gay Asian-American. His career has demonstrated that gay actors, or Asian-American ones, don’t have to be boxed into media stereotypes. To gain equality, Takei believes there needs to be a shift “away from stereotypes to real people,” making it more difficult to pass legislation to restrict the rights of the LGBT community.

“There was literal barbed wire around Japanese-Americans, but there is legalistic barbed wire around the LGBT community,” says Takei. To him, the issue of gay marriage is not unlike the issue of interracial marriage. “The discrimination of orientation will be as oppressive to us as the racist oppressions of fifty years ago,” he said.

Takei’s career has been multi-faceted, and he has remained in the public eye for years in a different way than his Star Trek co-stars. His persona today is more like Leonard Nimoy than William Shatner; a well-respected actor and performer who is given roles for his talents instead of his pop culture significance. And it seems that his life can only get better: Just one day after the California Supreme Court ruled in favor of gay marriage last week, Takei and his partner announced their engagement.

Let’s start with the monster. “I Will Possess Your Heart,” the lead single of Death Cab for Cutie’s new album, is nothing short of mammoth. Following in the footsteps of great long tracks by Yo La Tengo and Built to Spill, it starts slow, small and simple, and builds in a seemingly endless fashion before revealing front man Ben Gibbard’s vocals, alone in the spotlight as he inhabits the mind of a stalker unwilling to let the love of his life go. It is chilling in its build, its reveal, its march down from the zenith. In a stretch of eight-and-a-half minutes, Death Cab has found its artistic drive again.

When the band made the leap to a major label after success on The O.C. and prominence as Seth Cohen’s favorite band, they stumbled slightly with their 2005 release Plans, though they achieved hits in “Soul Meets Body” and “I Will Follow You Into the Dark.” Something was off: The bigger budget hadn’t given rise to a new approach or a growing sound. The band just put their normal sounds to tape. No artistic risk, no artistic reward. Three years later, they’ve emerged from a difficult and diverse studio experience with an album that propels them off a creative cliff.

Narrow Stairs is not a happy record by any stretch of the imagination, filled to the brim with dark lyrics and darker characters. Even the most upbeat track, “No Sunlight,” declares an absence of light and optimism. On Plans, the band sounded completely clean; all of their parts were fully polished and easily digested. Narrow Stairs sees the band’s music careening around, letting the echoes of their instruments hang in the air. It is a grittier, dirtier record that sounds as though it has taken a few punches.

Gibbard has always had a knack for heavy-handed, overly dreamy lyrics (see “Marching Bands of Manhattan” or “Crooked Teeth”), but here he mostly remains grounded, forming a wide range of dark characters. He shifts through a strong-headed stalker, a friend of a broken-hearted woman (“Your New Twin Sized Bed”), and a man watching a woman marry the wrong guy (“Cath…”). All of these narrators are anonymous, but Gibbard finds a way to once again develop characters in the way he used to have mastered (see “Styrofoam Plates”).

The sequence of the record is not unlike the trajectory of the sound in that mammoth second track, “I Will Possess Your Heart.” The first four songs bleed into each other fantastically, but then in “Talking Bird” and “You Can Do Better Than Me” the band gets a little bored, even while Gibbard’s lyrics delve deep. It helps that those two tracks are two of the shortest on the album, as they head into a five-track closing sequence that ends the record on just as high of a creative note as it started.

Even with those few blemishes, the album is held together by its travel down a darker path, one that the band previously seemed content to stare at, unable to walk down. They suffered from stagnation on their previous few releases, but here they’ve regained momentum. Perhaps it was a critical backlash against Gibbard’s voice or the band’s inevitable super-saturation in pop culture with their previous hits, but something made these men focus. Hard. It’s certainly paid off, with an almost spotless record that eases Death Cab out of their comfort zone. Hopefully they’ll continue down this more dangerous road, because adventurous music is so much better than the same sounds over and over, and on Narrow Stairs Death Cab have finally embraced that fact.

Final verdict: A-

The moment everyone at the A&O Ball knew that this wasn’t your normal show was when someone in the crowd threw a pair of panties at Adam Duritz. What was even stranger was that Duritz didn’t even react to the drawers striking him, perhaps too inebriated to notice or care. He certainly showed his mental state later in the night when he couldn’t remember the name to one of his songs (“On a Tuesday in Amsterdam Long Ago”), even after describing the situation of his writing it in Amsterdam.

Counting Crows are the product of two seemingly unlike parts. On one hand, there’s the band, made up of tight, professional musicians capable of busting out great solos, bass lines and back beats; on the other sits enigmatic frontman, singer and main songwriter Adam Duritz. Over the course of a 90-minute, 20-song set at the Riviera Theatre, Counting Crows provided Northwestern students of all attitudes with a satisfying show while subtly displaying some of the interesting inner workings of the group.

Thursday night’s show was not what you’d expect from a Counting Crows set. The opener, Wild Sweet Orange, sounded like a Southern U.S. version of the Danish quartet Mew, and the expansive sound was a great contrast with what was to come.

A lot of people probably expected Counting Crows to simply run through Films About Ghosts, its “best of” album released a few years ago, maybe sprinkling in tracks from its newly released concept album, Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings. However, the band’s set was almost devoid of its biggest songs. Sure, they played “Mr. Jones,” but as a throwaway at the beginning. There was no “Accidentally in Love,” “Round Here,” “Colorblind,” “American Girls,” “Omaha,” “Hanginaround,” “Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby” or “Big Yellow Taxi.”

Instead, the crowd got deep cuts off of 2002’s Hard Candy, such as “If I Could Give All My Love (Richard Manuel Is Dead),” and seven of the eight tracks from the Sunday Mornings side of the Crows’ new album. This worked for and against the band. It showed its willingness to eschew its success and use its set to display its new work, but at the same time alienated audience members who were there because they knew the band’s hits.

Adam Duritz is an enigma of a performer. He is a surprising sexual icon, famous for his numerous, whirlwind celebrity romances. These actions have caused his own recognition to be astronomically larger than the rest of his bandmates, and this distinction creeps into their performances onstage.

All of the Crows but Duritz function as a well-oiled machine: Duritz fits in only some of the time. On the rockers he works right in, and it is on the upbeat, loud tracks that the band excels. When they slow down, and Duritz takes the limelight, something extremely odd happens. Duritz’s lyrics are extremely emotive, but at concerts he doesn’t share these emotions with the audience through intimate performance. Instead, he retreats inward, closing himself off as a performer and making it harder to connect with his words. During the seven-song journey through the second half of the band’s newest record, the din of talking concertgoers drowned out the song onstage, so much was the disinterest of the crowd.

I commend the band for exploring its catalog and playing an unconventional set, and the musicians behind Duritz for how tight instrumentally they are as a band, but Duritz was the wild card of the night. His slower songs failed to get across in the way his previous hits have, and his erratic behavior left those sober and intuitive audience members wondering why exactly this band still plays together. Duritz battles bouts of depression, and this disconnect from the band shows the wear it has on them as a group, which is unfortunate. He careens between highs and lows of emotion onstage, perhaps best encapsulated by a line at the apex of Saturday Nights standout “1492”: “I am the king of everything/I am the king of nothing.” Duritz can’t decide who he is.

The show Thursday night had something for everyone in attendance: for the drunk party-goers, it had great rock songs; longtime fans saw rarely played tracks live as well as an in-depth performance of Counting Crows’ newest albums; and intuitive observers got a look at the complicated inner workings of a group with a confusing frontman seemingly separated from the rest of his band. A&O has done a great job securing intriguing acts for this year, and other groups are following suit. Here’s hoping that Mayfest has got something just as fantastic up their sleeves for Dillo Day.

It’s an indie-kid’s wet dream: Doe-eyed actress Zooey Deschanel showing off the pipes she gave the world a preview of in Elf on an entire album, in collaboration with guitarist M. Ward with a grammatically incorrect group dubbed She & Him. That has to be the equivalent of the now infamous six-word movie pitch for Will Ferrell’s Talladega Nights: “Will Ferrell as a NASCAR driver.” As with all heavily anticipated and internet-hyped indie albums, the duo’s debut Volume One is not pop perfection, but it delivers a confidant, filled out album of solid pop music.

Deschanel’s lyrics and delivery are simple and serene, and that fits her just fine. She’s not trying to cross over into the big time like Hilary Duff, Lindsay Lohan, or Paris Hilton. She ’s just an actress trying her turn at singing, and she makes the most of it.

Most of her movie roles have been as witty, romantic sidekicks, and the few leading turns she’s had in films like Winter Passing have all had a decidedly melancholy aspect to them. Her songs sound as though they could be on the soundtrack to a few of her films, and I mean that in the nicest way. They are short, simple, self-contained nuggets of pop melancholic romance. Tracks like “I Thought I Saw Your Face Today” and “I Should Have Known Better” represent the album’s repetition of lovers who just can’t get past that one guy. You can almost see Deschanel staring at old pictures as she sings, conjuring up her memories of love as she laments loss. Even the brighter emotional moments like the 60s girl group doo-wopping of “I Was Made For You” are songs of trying to attain love, not being in it. The album’s three covers are all slowed down takes on the originals, keeping with the demure tone of the whole record.

Find out more about She & Him on their MySpace.

Ward does a great job fleshing out the tracks as he always does as a producer/guitarist. Deschanel is front and center for the album, but Ward moves subtly into different moods, hitting a little country in some places, while getting a tinge of Hawaiian sound on others. His background vocals fill in at just the right places, and he really knows when to flesh out a track or just leave it as sparse as can be. The empty production of “You Really Got A Hold On Me” give the impression of the two of them on an empty stage, with one spotlight bathing the two of them in brightness, crooning away. The album almost seems effortless, with a deliberately slow tempo to it, as though the music simply flows out of Deschanel and Ward naturally.

That the album is named Volume One certainly gives off the idea that the two of them would like to continue their experiment of the actress and the troubadour, and with this accomplished first effort, that may not be such a bad idea. Deschanel proves herself to be not only competent, but entertaining and mysterious at the same time. Listening to her sing makes me want to hear her do more, wonder what else the two of them can accomplish. I’d be willing to listen to as many volumes as this newly minted duo want to send out into the world.

FINAL VERDICT: A-

Every summer belongs to a song. In 2006 that song was Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy.” Their debut album St. Elsewhere was a monument of originality, with rapper Cee-Lo delivering the most introspective lyrics of his career backed by DJ Danger Mouse’s ever-psychedelic production. Mystique surrounded the duo as they always performed live or did photo shoots in costume, choosing never to appear as themselves but as caricatures.

As with any hot, critically-acclaimed debut, expectations were unnaturally high for Gnarls’ second album. Their sophomore effort The Odd Couple isn’t a great leap forward for the duo, but it never really had to be as it delivers solid, far above average hip-hop. Ever since Danger Mouse shook up the music world with The Grey Album, he’s been providing amazing beats for anyone and everyone who wanted his help. His production on the second Gorillaz album Demon Days elevated the fake animated band out of being a kitschy retread, and he’s never laid down a bad beat for Gnarls Barkley. He continues his amazing production on The Odd Couple with tracks like “No Time Soon” and lead single “Run.”

The latter has production value not unlike old songs on American Bandstand, and fittingly the video (featuring a cameo from a wigged Justin Timberlake) is a modern take on an American Bandstand live performance. His ability as a producer has always been an almost unthinkable number of sounds over each other, and not simply using them superfluously. Every little sprinkle in the background fills its place for a purpose; Danger Mouse paints tracks like a painting on canvas, filling every spot with paint to create a full landscape.

Cee-Lo’s voice mixes well with the beats, except for his nasally whine on the album’s one indisputable clunker “Whatever.” Where Danger Mouse upped his game and kept the punchy beats coming, Cee-Lo delivers pretty much in the same way he did on Gnarls’ debut, though there’s no standout track here like “Crazy” was back in 2006. He’s always been a better singer than a rapper, and the gospel-like quality of his wailing voice give the duos songs a nice tinge of James Brown to them. The sound here is much more muted than it was on their debut, with Cee-Lo crooning more instead of hitting swooping highs.

The album title isn’t really an accurate description of the duo or their music. Fat man/thin man duos have been around since black and white television, and have even made the transition into space with C-3PO and R2D2 in Star Wars. Danger Mouse has coupled his beats with numerous different sources and proven they match up together well.

But Cee-Lo and Danger Mouse have always sought to distance themselves from normality. They claim their name has nothing to do with Charles Barkley, never appear as themselves, and presume to be an odd couple. That they are unsatisfied with being normal is an admirable desire as musicians continually looking to better themselves and perfect their art, but at some point trying to say you’re so much different from everyone else gets a little tired.

Gnarls Barkley are unlike any other hip-hop group, rapper, or producer making music today, but even they can’t make a classic twice. The Odd Couple is a great second record, it just isn’t odd, groundbreaking, or eye-opening the way St. Elsewhere was for the industry. That isn’t to say that The Odd Couple isn’t solid, but somewhere down the line being original in the same way for too long could lead to a little too much monotony. Nobody wants to see that happen, so here’s hoping the duo have a few more tricks up their sleeves for the next go-round.

FINAL VERDICT: B+

1. Edward Scissorhands – Edward (Johnny Depp) & Kim (Winona Ryder)
No girl would ever want her man to have the ability to shear her in half accidentally with his ginsu-knife laden hands, no matter how good he is at styling hair. Anthony Michael Hall suffers at the hands of Depp in the film, and his hands might end up making things painful for Winona Ryder.

Scissors are not necessarily sexy. Photo from dreamagic.com.

2. Fatal Attraction – Dan Gallagher (Michael Douglas) & Alex Forrest (Glenn Close)
Cheating on your wife with a colleague is bad. When that colleague decides she wants you to herself and turns violent, it’s worse. But Glenn Close is NUTS! She BOILS a rabbit! If your relationship resembles this one in any way, run for the hills.

3. Chasing Amy – Holden (Ben Affleck), Banky (Jason Lee), & Alyssa (Joey Lauren Adams)
She’s lesbian, then she’s not, then she is again! Jason Lee has a crush on Ben Affleck, but talks a big game with the ladies! Who is gay? Who loves whom? Who knows?

4. Gone With the Wind – Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) & Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh)
Has anyone noticed Rhett and Scarlett hate each other for almost the entire film, even when they are married? Rhett jokes about a miscarriage; Scarlett is in love with another man and then changes her mind. They are indecisive, vindictive and unkind, which still doesn’t overcome the on-screen chemistry of Gable and Leigh.

5. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – Anyone (Joel (Jim Carrey), Clementine (Kate Winslet), Stan (Mark Ruffalo), Patrick (Elijah Wood), Dr. Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson), Mary (Kirsten Dunst))
There’s not a single healthy relationship in this film. It’s a work of pure romantic genius, but there’s no way you’d want to take part in any of these romances. Joel and Clementine erase each other from their memories. Patrick manipulates Clementine when her memory is erased. Mary’s love for Dr. Mierzwiak has been erased, but she chooses him again over Stan. It’s basically a guidebook for how not to act in a relationship.

6. Audition – Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi) & Asami (Eihi Shiina)
He tries to get a girl by holding a fake casting call for a movie. She turns out to be a psychopathic torture queen with a dismembered (yet still living) man trapped in a burlap sack in her apartment. If that’s not bad enough, the film happens to be a light romantic comedy for the first 45 minutes, then– in a single shot– turns into the only movie that has ever scared Rob Zombie.

7. Fight Club – Tyler Durden/The Narrator (Brad Pitt/Edward Norton) & Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter)
Both parties in this relationship are so depressed that they attend support groups (yes, groups) for diseases they don’t suffer from. On top of that, Edward Norton is bipolar to the extent that he has no recollection of his relationship with Helena Bonham Carter. He doesn’t love her, his imaginary other self does; he doesn’t have sex with her, his imaginary self does while he agonizes over the sound in another room. Even if Brad Pitt wasn’t a figment of Norton’s imagination, Tyler and Marla would still have a number of issues to work out.

Cinema has given us plenty of relationships bad enough to cheer any Valentine’s Day Scrooge. If you’re feeling down about February 14th, rent one of these and count your blessings.

Most of the time, bands don’t get too much mainstream press before they actually release an EP or album of material, but New York outfit Vampire Weekend isn’t your everyday band. The quartet of recent Columbia grads broke all over the net with an EP last year and got so much buzz before the release of their debut that Rolling Stone put one of their songs on their Top 50 of 2007. Heavily talked-about bands from NYC like The Strokes and Interpol have endured this kind of premature media attention with varied results, but now that a record has finally been released, count Vampire Weekend among those that have survived the hype and put out a seemingly effortless and wonderful record.

The band is led by singer/guitarist Ezra Koenig, who paints various northeastern scenes with his lyrics throughout the album. The band is clearly influenced by Afro-pop, with African-tinged beats and elements on almost every song. Bands have included this element before, most notably Dispatch, but Vampire Weekend uses the Afro-pop style in a completely different way.

Vampire Weekend eschews traditional indie-rock, opting instead for a very pop-oriented sound. Their songs are, at first glance, very stripped-down. Koenig’s guitar doesn’t hang around in lasting chords, but pulses in staccato sounds over a snaking bass line and thumping drums. Songs like “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” and “Mansard Roof” exhibit the African influence very clearly, but always subtly, in an element snuck into the back of the production. Album standout “A-Punk” boils down the best parts of the band’s style into a single, two-minute piece, and its accompanying video is evidence enough to show that low-tech styles have re-invigorated the art of the music video. The song and video are a simple kind of pretty, washing over the audience with an assured calm of its high quality.

While most of their songs appear to be very simple, there is always one buried element that makes the songs stick out. A string arrangement here, electronic sounds there, a little garnish on every song that elevates the track into a realm of originality. Vampire Weekend hasn’t crafted a masterpiece of a debut, but they have given themselves a great blueprint to work from. The album would be very easy to put on and listen straight through, not realizing it has finished, then wanting to immediately put it back on and listen through again. It’s too early in the year to think about what will stand in December, but Vampire Weekend’s first record is a very good starting point for the band, and hopefully is a sign of great things to come.