LCD Soundsystem Release Trailer For SHUT UP AND PLAY THE HITS

Premiering at this year's Sundance Film Festival in Park City, UT is a film by the title of SHUT UP AND PLAY THE HITS. The "part concert film, part documentary, part intimate narrative" marks the end of LCD Soundsystem as a band, with James Murphy and company packing it in with a final performance at famed Madison Square Garden.

Watch a trailer down below and find more information, including a director's Q&A with The Creators Project (which is an amazingly cool website by the way). Hopefully, we'll get to check this out soon here in Austin. Looking at you SXSW...

Tonight: Pavement & Guided By Voices Documentaries Being Shown at Alamo Drafthouse

Every Monday, the downtown Alamo Drafthouse teams up with End of An Ear to show music documentaries as part of their Music Monday Series (check out their upcoming schedule). Starting tonight at 9:45, there's not only one doc, but two. First up, Bank Tarver's film about Guided By Voices entitled, 'Watch Me Jumpstart' and then Lance Bang's documentary about Pavement called 'Slow Century'. Keep in mind, it's only $2! Purchase tickets here. (via)

Don't forget both bands will be in town this week. Tomorrow evening Pavement will be performing a SOLD OUT show at Stubb's with Woven Bones. And then on Thursday Guided By Voices will be playing at East Side Drive with Times New Viking.

Blur Documentary "No Distance Left To Run" (Trailer)

Taken from Blur's official site:

A feature length documentary film telling the story of blur is due for cinema release on January 19th. “No Distance Left to Run” is directed by 32 (Dylan Southern & Will Lovelace) and is a Pulse Films production.

Filmed throughout the band’s 2009 rehearsals and acclaimed summer tour, No Distance Left To Run finds all four members of Blur together for the first time in nine years. With previously unseen archive material alongside new interviews and reportage, the film recounts the highs and lows of a very British band from the late 80’s to their headline return at Glastonbury and Hyde Park. The result is a musing on Englishness and identity and a portrait of friendship and resolution.

"The Beatles on Record" Premieres Tonight on the History Channel

Tonight at 10 (ET), the History Channel will premiere a new documentary entitled "The Beatles On Record". We already have our DVR set and so should you. For a sneak preview, watch the first nine minutes down below.

Taken from the History Channel website:

In 1962, an unknown group from Liverpool entered Abbey Road Studios to record their debut single. During the next eight years they created what is arguably regarded as the greatest collection of studio recordings of the 20th century. This special charts The Beatles' extraordinary journey in the studio from "Please Please Me" to "Abbey Road" and reflects on how they developed as musicians, matured as songwriters and created a body of work that sounds as fresh in 2009 as the time it was recorded. Narrated entirely by John, Paul, George, Ringo and Sir George Martin, the documentary features over 60 classic songs, rare footage and photos from The Beatles' archives and never heard before out-takes of studio chat from the "Abbey Road" recording sessions.

Pitchfork TV Showing Arcade Fire's Documentary "Mirior Noir" For Free, One Week Only

Starting today P4K TV is showing Arcade Fire's new documentary Mirior Noir for one week only and it's FREE. The 70-minute film includes live concert footage of the band's Neon Bible tour and takes us in the studio during the recording of their sophomore album. It was directed by the band themselves and Vincent Morisset, with camera work by Vincent Moon.

[Watch Mirior Noir]

The movie is currently available across a bunch of different formats, including digital, DVD, and limited edition. Purchase those here.

[Arcade Fire Myspace]
[Arcade Fire Official Site]

Justice Releases Trailer For "A Cross The Universe" DVD

Today, Justice released a trailer for their new documentary A Cross The Universe, which comes out November 24. Roman Gavras, So Me, and Justice all worked on the doc. According to NME, "the DVD is in the style of the Dig! documentary, that featured Brian Jonestown Massacre and Dandy Warhols." The trailer is NSFW by the way.

Here's an older trailer featuring more footage.

Flight of The Conchords @ SXSW - A Documentary

The Flight of The Conchords are so original, so talented, and above all, absolutely hilarious. They came to SXSW in 2006 and made a video. It gives you an insight to the festival if you've never been. If you have experienced SXSW before, it just gets you excited. Our good friend, Julio, from Cause=Time is even in the video (20:07 mark). He sure is becoming quite the celebrity, first in documentaries and now hanging out with Woody Paige from the Denver Post. The video is here, it's 44 minutes, but it's so worth it. (Thanks Brooklyn Vegan)

New Joy Division Documentary

Arriving at the best possible moment, this documentary about groundbreaking postpunk band Joy Division is playing festivals alongside "Control," music-video master Anton Corbijn's well-received feature on the band. A solid, well-presented history of the English group's brief career, "Joy Division" has appeal for music buffs but could get mileage in theaters from a smart coordination with the feature film's release.

Placing a straightforward, chronological account of the band's existence in the context of Manchester, a city whose re-emergence from post-industrial gloom is credited to the pop music explosion Joy Division helped start, the docu contains plenty of testimony from all the surviving key musical players. (Singer Ian Curtis hanged himself in 1980; producer Martin Hannett, credited with inventing much of the group's distinctive sound, died in 1991.) Happily, TV host-turned-music entrepreneur Tony Wilson, who died last month, is among the interviewees. (Wilson was the colorful subject of Michael Winterbottom's "24 Hour Party People," which would make a fan-pleasing triple feature with "Joy Division" and "Control.")

Veteran music critic Jon Savage wrote the film, which makes sure to recount seminal moments like the 1976 Sex Pistols show that inspired so many bands, but it's group member Bernard Sumner who makes the most eloquent cultural observation about the shift from in-your-face Pistols-style punk to the more introspective music Joy Division helped instigate: "Sooner or later somebody was going to want to say more than 'f--- you' . . . to say 'I'm f---ed.'

"A good assortment of vintage performance clips chart the quick evolution of Joy Division's style, which was not only a matter of sound but also of Curtis' spasmlike movements at the microphone, a dance that evoked possession by malevolent spirits and foreshadowed the epilepsy that struck the singer suddenly, near the end of his life. As one who witnessed those shows puts it, the onstage surrender was "like he sacrificed something for you" in order to follow his muse.

Little of this material will be news to devoted followers of the band, though even they might be interested to know that Sumner never liked listening to their debut album "Unknown Pleasures" and that Peter Saville, who designed that iconic record sleeve, hadn't even listened to the music. For the rest of the audience, just the right amount of narrative detail, archive footage and analysis is included.

Director Grant Gee, known for the Radiohead film "Meeting People Is Easy," does little out of the ordinary here, outside of the appealing way he accompanies audio-only archive material with cleverly stylized waveforms. For a group whose influence had so much to do with the unintuitive manipulation of familiar sounds, that's a knowing touch.

Director/director of photography: Grant Gee; Writer: Jon Savage; Producers: Tom Astor, Tom Atencio, Jacqui Edenbrow; Music: Jerry Chater, Rashad Omar; Editor: Jerry Chater

(Via The Hollywood Reporter)

Below is a trailer.