Minsk, Coliseum, Baroness. Three mismatched Relapse Records acts who occupy distinct spheres of heavy music, they span a wide spectrum from dirge-like drones to hoarsely delivered shouts to harmonized twin guitar solos.

Chicago’s Minsk led the night, playing to a nearly empty room that filled up with a gradualness that matched their glacially paced music. Their music defies traditional song structure; the two leads created a dense swirl of darkly opaque atmosphere between a mini-moog stack, a severely down-tuned guitar and dual vocals that alternated between baritone melody and gruff, uninhibited shouting. You could see the veins popping out from keyboardist Timothy Meade’s neck with every ripping scream.

The use of extreme dynamics was refreshing: for every chugging power chord there were two intricate passages of delicately fingerpicked arpeggios; for every daub of Neurosis a stroke of Pink Floyd. Underneath it all, the rumbling bass riffs and driving tribal beats propelled otherwise formless songs with a strange urgency. Melodic but without a need for hooks, Minsk come close to sounding like the scorching of cities. By the end of the set, there was nowhere to stand. The barflies had come up from below, beckoned by the band’s otherworldly call.

Guitarist/vocalist Chris Bennett tells me a new album is in the works for a mid-2009 release. Fans of heaviness, take note.

Rounding out the rear as headliners, Baroness have developed quite a following for a band with only one award-winning full-length and three earlier EPs on their resume. Hailing from Savannah, GA, they look like a bunch of hairy young woodsmen, all gangly posture and wildly unkempt facial hair. Their sound is inimitable, a crazy blend of southern blues, shameless prog-worthy virtuosity, hushed shoegazey glimmer and flat-out stoner doom that’s every bit as heavy as High on Fire and tight as Mastodon. They can sing in major thirds so high you’d swear they were a schoolgirl choir or growl low enough to make your bowels move.

How do these guys keep going song after breakneck song, each with seemingly endless passages of complexly harmonized counterpoint and shifting time signatures? Watching them was exhausting, even without touching the mosh pit.

“My voice just gave out,” singer/guitarist/album artist John Baizley admitted between songs toward the end of the marathon set, and I could identify: my own voice was shot just from cheering them on.

So it’s easy to forgive Coliseum for getting a bit lost in between their stagemates. Maybe the best thing that can be said about them is that they almost kept up, simply by not letting up. As one of their fans says on last.fm, “JUST PUT GODDAMAGE INTO THE CAR STEREO AND GET RIPPING DOWN THE HIGHWAY, RAM A FUCKING PIG AND HEADBANG UNTIL YOUR SKULL FALLS OFF.” Lacking a car, a pig and the desire to lose my skull, maybe I just didn’t get to experience them as they’re meant to be experienced.

Tracks to try: Minsk – “White Wings” (The Ritual Fires of Abandonment), Coliseum – “ HYPERLINK “Defeater” (No Salvation), Baroness – “Rays on Pinion” (The Red Album)

Photo by Derrick Koo

Luckily, between the tepid sing-along singles and painfully earnest near-acoustic ballads, they occasionally let some surprising influences shine through, filling the makeshift auditorium with lengthy instrumental passages and washes of reverb-soaked distortion. These moments, accompanied by banging heads and stage acrobatics, showcased Lifehouse at their most absorbing—and demonstrated a rawer, jam-influenced side of their sound that’s rarely heard on their overproduced studio albums.

The audience knew the score. Their choruses were sometimes as loud as those of frontman Jason Wade, whose laid-back demeanor and friendly patter make him resemble Charlie Pace from Lost’s fictional band, DriveShaft. Throngs of adoring fans lined the front of the stage with cell phone cameras, adding their own constant camera-flash lightshow. The feel of the show was steadfastly civil and polite, a rock gig devoid of all negative power or edginess.

The squeaky-clean arpeggios and lovey-dovey lyrics crooned with closed eyes sparked a passion in the audience that seemed largely missing from the band’s own staid presence. It was only when they cranked up the distortion and stepped away from the mics that they really got invested, whipping up the audience into near-frenzy before soothing them back down to that steady, civil hum. It makes this reviewer wonder what kind of band Lifehouse could be if they abandoned the firewall and gave into that wilder, more aggressive sound. Could they bring the rock if they wanted to?

But then, they don’t claim to aspire to that, and their many fans like things just fine the way they are. After four chart-topping studio albums and hundreds of successful radio-sponsored shows, you can’t blame Lifehouse for resting on their laurels.

Tracks to try: “Broken” (Who We Are, 2007), “Blind” (Lifehouse, 2005)

Lanegan possesses the voice of God, if God chain smoked and had a penchant for single malts, and his gravelly, rumbling baritone—capable of dipping so low you can feel it in your chest—is The Gutter Twins’ single best asset.  But Dulli’s melancholic, chameleon-like vocals complicate the texture, frequently layering over his partner’s voice in thick harmony.  This complex sound—like a slab of dangerously black marble with a beautiful sheen—is what transforms this band’s otherwise pretty generic grunge rock songs into something special.

Their Thursday show at Greenpoint’s Warsaw mostly showcased the band’s darker side, roaring out the gates with the crunchy triple-guitar attack of their debut album Saturnalia and rarely letting up until some light piano balladry toward the end. Songs from previous lives, including updated cuts from The Afghan Whigs, The Twilight Singers and Lanegan’s prolific solo career, mixed well with the Twins’ bluesy, mid-paced, minor-key anthems of failed love, loneliness and desperation.

The many fans packed into Warsaw’s small theater seemed not to mind the sameness that sometimes crept into the long set, jumping and flailing limbs with each heavy groove, egged on by Dulli’s sarcastic bravado and Lanegan’s quiet brooding. The Twins are all about atmosphere, and their music approaches a gothic bleakness that seems more profound than their lyrics of longing and lost loves suggest. That inky, irresistible blackness, as they sang in unison during a cut from their recent Adorata EP, “comes creeping, comes swallowing everything in its wake.”

Tracks to try: “The Stations” (Saturnalia, 2008); “Belles” (Adorata [EP], 2008)

If this metaphor sounds lewd, it’s apt for this movie, which basks in every slimy four letter utterance. But lewdness does not equal freshness, and unfortunately there’s little fresh to be found in Zack and Miri. It’s that same hip combo of crude male-centric slapstick with a sensitive heart—of Seth Rogen as the doughy, ambitionless slacker growing up to snag the improbably gorgeous blonde, in this case the sharp-tongued yet lovely Elizabeth Banks.

The whole concept—Zack and Miri as grown-up childhood friends producing a porno to relieve their mounting debts—is a secondhand vehicle for the type of sex-inflected romantic comedy pioneered by Apatow and his buddies in movies like Knocked Up and The 40 Year Old Virgin.

Which brings us to this movie’s saving grace and its most confounding dilemma: that it was created by Kevin Smith, whose movies have been lewdly hilarious since Judd Apatow was still writing episodes for The Larry Sanders Show (let’s forget, for the moment, the black stain on Mr. Smith’s past that is Jersey Girl).

It’s a little jarring to see Smith fawning over Apatow’s brand, especially when one considers that his earlier movies—Clerks, Mallrats, etc.—probably had just as much influence on Apatow’s first efforts. Zack and Miri, with its parody porn clichés and dirty one-liners, has little of the wit that made those earlier movies so memorable, and none of the emotional plausibility that gives Apatow’s movies such universal appeal.

But that doesn’t stop it from being absurdly funny much of the time. The buddy dynamics of the film crew, the coffee shop porn scenarios, Jason Mewes lisping hoarsely while play-fornicating with real-life porn stars Traci Lords and Katie Morgan—it all just barely hangs together, and you’ll smirk even as you slap your forehead at the queasiest, cheesiest romantic comedy contrivances.

This is easy money for Kevin Smith: borrow someone else’s winning formula, add Smithian signatures (Star Wars references, Randal from Clerks), subtract Bennifer, stir in curses and slapstick sex, sprinkle in some popular actors, cash the checks. In this sense, Zack and Miri doesn’t try too hard, and doesn’t excel nor disappoint. But is it so wrong of me to ask for something a little more ambitious from the man who once gave us the brilliance of Dogma?

This play’s first production in 1988 was completely overshadowed by the fact that Madonna starred as its leading lady. Now, in this first-ever Broadway revival, fans of cable TV drama have their day as the stars of Entourage, Mad Men and Pushing Daisies comprise the entire cast. Yes, that’s Jeremy Piven reprising his TV role as lovably abrasive Hollywood agent, Elizabeth Moss reprising hers as meek but quietly ambitious secretary, and Raul Esparza just being fucking angry all the time. Get that man some coffee, please.

The plot is barely there. Charlie Fox (Esparza) delivers to his boss Bobby Gould (Piven) a big-time movie star contract to make a loud, dumb, “titillating” action film. Temp secretary Karen (Moss) almost foils their plans by sleeping with Gould and trying to get him to produce an artsy novel about the end of the world. We all know who wins in a play this cynical, and the plot is beside the point. People see Mamet plays because of the dialogue, right?

As with any good Mamet play, the dialogue moves so fast that you often won’t have time to register what anyone’s saying. Roughly half of it consists of characters cutting each other off mid-sentence. What you do hear drips with sarcastic wit and disdain for Hollywood and its market-driven business models. “Make the thing everyone made last year,” Gould explains to his naïve secretary. “It’s more than what they want. It is what they require.”

Speed-the-Plow is a diatribe that speaks through its characters. Gould patiently explains to Karen the concept of the “courtesy read”—he reads the artsy book so he can have something intelligent to say about it when he inevitably rejects it. The final third act is the most riveting as his crisis of conscience, brought about by Karen’s sincere enthusiasm for the book (well, maybe the sex, too), results in a three-way battle between him, Karen and Fox, who flies into rage when he learns that Gould wants to jettison him to make the art film.

Punches are thrown, blood spatters, bullets of sarcasm fill the air, catching poor, hapless Gould in their crossfire. He just wants to do something good, he says pathetically, something important…who wouldn’t understand that? He doesn’t get it; Fox does. What’s good in Hollywood is the moneymaking.

I suspect people who see this already know they’re seeing a play instead of a movie, right? In that sense, Mamet isn’t winning anyone over, but this wicked little show is just the thing to get those audience members punching the air and yelling “amen!” at every zinging barb he chucks toward Hollywood’s bigwigs.

Here’s Manohla Dargis, that trusted backbone of the New York Times movies section, claiming that “Synecdoche, New York is one of the best films of the year.” Great. Let’s see it. But wait—right next to her is Rex Reed of the New York Observer warning that “no matter how bad you think the worst movie ever made ever was, you have not seen Synecdoche, New York.” What the hell?

This dichotomy says a lot more about Synecdoche, New York than you might think. Charlie Kaufman is a polarizing figure, but even people who didn’t fancy seeing Nicholas Cage’s face doubly in Adaptation could find something to identify with and like in that film. Now, with Synecdoche, Kaufman has raised the stakes so high that you can’t just say that you kind of liked it, except for Philip Seymour Hoffman’s bald cap. You have to call it the best movie of the year, or the worst movie of all time. It comes down to a basic, divisive question of human nature, one which strikes at the very core of why we watch movies.

Do you think that great art is necessarily challenging, that it must say something profound that resonates with the deepest unknown corners of everyone’s dark soul—and that you can recognize and appreciate great art even if you have no idea what the hell is going on? Then Synecdoche, New York is one of the best movies of the year.

“It’s extravagantly conceptual but also tethered to the here and now,” gushes Manohla, “which is why, for all its flights of fancy, worlds within worlds and agonies upon agonies, it comes down hard for living in the world with real, breathing, embracing bodies pressed against other bodies.” And if you understand what she’s talking about, then this movie is for you.

If, on the other hand, you believe that movies should be enjoyable or at least watchable—that they must contain something concrete to empathize with even if you understand the humor in rhyming Schenectady with “synecdoche”—then perhaps Rex is more your guy.

“There is no lack of seriousness in Synecdoche, New York,” he says, “just a lack of psychological development and narrative flow, and that is just about all the cinema needs to battle the demons of doubt and death waiting outside in the real world while we dream a bit in the dark about a more benign and orderly universe.”

Right on, Rex. I don’t want to escape the insanity of the world I live in only to get grabbed by the throat and tossed into the even more disturbing and confusing insanity of Charlie Kaufman’s. If you, too, feel this way, consider steering clear. There’s more to life than forcing yourself to enjoy something just because it’s supposed to be great art.