LA Weekly:"haunting"Miami Herald:"full of dark intensity and black humour"LA Times:"mesmerizing""nastily seductive"Vanity Fair:"Can the Mississippi River dead zone ever be alluring?" Artinfo Magazine:"Glam Rock Environmentalism" The Brooklyn Rail:"The Rocky Horror Picture Show for the coming apocalypse?" Gothamist NYC:"Dark and satirical performance"Exeunt Magazine:"Genre-defying sound" Neat Beat:"A spectacle worthy of your eyes and ears" arts.meme"neo-Oscar Wilde dandy"Timur and the Dime Museum TIMUR - lead vocals Daniel Corral - keys, electronics, vocals Matthew Setzer - electric guitar, vocals David Tranchina - electric bass, vocals Andrew Lessman - drums Additional vocals: Ryder Bach (Fertilize My Heart) Spoken text: Genevieve (Demon Chora), Kate Vandegrift (Fertilize My Heart) Composed by Daniel Corral Executive producer, engineering, mixing and mastering - Nick Tipp Producer - Nick Urata (DeVotchKa) Vocals producer - Ryan Bach Album cover by Sandra Powers, with images by Jesse Gilbert Recorded at Infrasonic, Los Angeles, CaliforniaARTINFO MAGAZINEGlam Rock Environmentalism: Timur and the Dime Museum Bring “COLLAPSE” to BAMBY ANNELIESE COOPER “COLLAPSE,” described in turn as a “glam-rock requiem for the natural world” and a “perverse postmodern mass for a planet in crisis,” is nothing if not intriguing. First conceived for Los Angeles’s REDCAT Theater as the brainchild of local band Timur and the Dime Museum, fronted by eponymous Kazakhstan-born opera singer Timur Bekbosunov, the show combines an environmentally conscious message with the format of a Catholic funeral mass and the performance style of a glam rock concert — plus, video projections by Jesse Gilbert, which incorporate live footage, culled clips, and manipulable interactive components.At first, the project sounds a little ridiculous: “Goddamn the Atlantic Salmon!” Bekbosunov bellows, the implicit gravitas of his operatic timbre shooting the whole enterprise straight to “Monty Python” levels of absurd. “Don’t eat the Atlantic Salmon! Don’t feed the poison farms!” But the more the song builds — through frantically upbeat hooks, slamming power chords, a Mercurian falsetto flight or three — the harder it becomes to deny that something cool is going on here. Sure, the technical talent of the musicians is evident, as they flip effortlessly between styles — punky shouts, gooey synths, oldies swagger, sometimes all in one song. But there’s also something inherently eerie about squeezing an actionable political message into the pomp and clatter of a rock opera. “Go back to sleep / we’re not to blame / this is not happening,” Bekbosunov croons on “Heat, Beat and Treat” — as much a lullaby as it is an indictment. Ultimately, “COLLAPSE” proves an exceedingly catchy, if exceedingly odd concept album, à la the glam tradition of yore — all the more reason to throw it up on stage, to let its theatricality strut and fret in costume. ARTILLERY MAGAZINEInto the Widening Gyreby Ezrha Jean Black Thinking back to the wrath and fury evoked by passages of certain Haydn masses, I wondered if that “Demon Chora” recitation might have worked as well in the ‘Kyrie.’ Collapse is structured and played out as a requiem mass, along the formal liturgical lines of the Roman Catholic rite with songs (I want to say ‘arias’ because that’s what they are–essentially rock arias) corresponding almost exactly with the rites and recitations of the Latin mass. But just as Timur is not a typical operatic tenor, this is not a typical requiem. Nor for all of its theatricality is it anything like Verdi’s Requiem. It might be regarded as a rock opera (Lou Reed’s Berlin comes to mind as a point of comparison); but what it really is, is nothing less than a multi-media spectacle. This is a rite of mourning played as dark celebration, a satanic mass for our plainly satanic self-satisfaction. Petrochemical disasters and ocean suffocating plastics may threaten entire sections of oceans (“Pacific Gyre Holiday”), but what the hell? Just another gorgeous day to relax at the beach for the rest of us. (Gilbert and Powers fill the screen here with 1960s-era beach blanket/surfer nostalgia.) Corral is flexing his music muscles here in a few different directions, veering some distance from The Dime Museum’s familiar eastern European cabaret inflected art rock turf, to a broad range of styles from hard blues rock to minimalist avant-pop to proto-punk (with toes dipped along the way in the English music hall (in the manner of the Kinks) to the suave and ironic art rock style of Roxy Music, to the Beach Boys (“Pacific Gyre”) and Broadway. In other words, for all its structural fidelity to a form that was once a vehicle for the likes of Bach, Haydn and Mozart, this is something quite different. It’s a coherent, even cogent, but stylistically unwieldy sequence of songs. It takes a special talent to impart that cogency, that urgency. (Did I just write that? You see how exhausted I am? – I actually felt hopeful for a second.) I can’t think of many operatic tenors up to the challenges of this chameleon avatar-officiant role. (And I just saw a terrific tenor (Saimir Pirgu) tear through the last act of Lucia like a flaky croissant.) And here’s another difference between Timur and, say, Pavarotti. Timur can rock. I could easily reach back to Bryan Ferry, Morrissey, even Iggy Pop – you hear those antecedents, as much in the music as in the delivery – but Timur eludes easy comparisons. He is simply Timur; and Collapse is a vehicle ideally suited to his virtuosity and versatile musicianship, and innate theatricality.