Here we find ourselves at the conclusion of another year that I feel ill-equipped to summarize as far as movies go. I saw stuff, and I enjoyed stuff, though not nearly as much as I'd hoped (on both counts) at the beginning of '08. Nevertheless, I didn't want list-making season to pass without a chance to comment on a few things.
My favorite movie of the year, without a doubt, was Rachel Getting Married. No question. It's stuck with me the longest, and the most vividly, and it's the film I'm most keen on revisiting. I can understand why it annoyed other people, but the melodrama touched me deeply, as did the joy, the humor, the music, the beauty, and finally, the love. Decidedly the right movie at the right time for me.
Contrary to what knocked me out most about Snow Angels when I first saw it, the image from the film that's haunted me for months now is that final shot of Sam Rockwell and Kate Beckinsale together in the woods. The creepy-crawly combination of rage, delusion, a diseased kind of love/familiarity, and suffocating self-hatred is absolutely devastating.
I know I'm not alone in thinking so, but several months after its release, the very fact of Wall-E's existence still seems like something of a minor miracle.
I went on my customary year-end movie binge this past weekend since I have several days off work and not much else going on right now. I may or may not get around to writing about the lion's share here later, esp. the ones that I could do some serious carping about, but the two that hit me hardest (at least initially--who's to say how long they'll linger?) were Happy-Go-Lucky and The Wrestler. The thing that seems most awesome about Happy-Go-Lucky is the fact that it's just such an improbable subject for a movie that nevertheless feels as taut and irreducible as the most ingeniously plotted caper film. A girl with an eternally sunny disposition gets her bike stolen and so decides to take driving lessons? That's it? That's the movie? And yet of course it's so much more--about what it is to be a true teacher, about how our subjective view of the world is indistinguishable from our experience of the world and colors our interactions with other people, about family of birth and family of choice, about being open to the strangeness of the Other and the greater ramifications of your relative willingness or unwillingness to be so. Beautiful stuff. And The Wrestler, unless I'm way off the mark, seems like the perfect companion piece to There Will Be Blood with which to bookend 2008, another anguished meditation on American bullshittery, pride, failure, and redemption. The use of the term of endearment "brother" throughout endlessly delighted me, and the fact that Marisa Tomei's character makes a Passion of the Christ reference was so inspired it nearly left me breathless with both laughter and brain-tickling wonder. You can read a billion other reviews that'll tell you all about how good Mickey Rourke is--and they're probably all right. One of those performance-of-a-lifetime kinda deals; we're talking some Norma Desmond shit up in here.
As long as we're making lists, I might as well make final mention of a few other things that have been important to me this year.
Books: the Scott Pilgrim series (initial impressions here), Suketu Mehta's Maximum City (my review here), May Sarton's Journal of a Solitude, and Dainin Katagiri's Each Moment Is the Universe.
Concerts: Radiohead at Lollapalooza, and, as mentioned in my year-end musical summary, Caribou at the Empty Bottle and the Tomorrow Never Knows festival at Schuba's. Also, on quite the other end of the spectrum, Scott Weiland headlining Q101's big Twisted Christmas finale show at the House of Blues, for being one of the most impressively awful shows I've ever seen.
Food: I had amazing dinners at the Green Zebra here in Chicago this spring and Grezzo in Boston over Labor Day weekend. Also, I didn't eat solid food from mid-June to mid-July while I was on a 30-day "juice feast." One of the most difficult and most rewarding things I've ever done, and I'm pretty sure it's the primary reason why my doctor was finally able to take me off my high blood pressure medication.
People: I went to a bunch of weddings. I went on a bunch of dates. I became casually friendly with a handful of genuine rock stars. I read a bunch of smart stuff on the internet written by both friends and complete strangers, much of it via weird and difficult-to-explain (to the uninitiated, at least) new media like Tumblr and Twitter. I voted for some skinny biracial dude from Chicago who's gearing up to become the leader of the free world on January 20.
All in all, it was a singularly weird year. But a memorable and important one. Have fun tonight, kittens, and I'll see you back 'round these parts in 2009.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Best Music of 2008
My darlings. It's that time again, time to share with you some thoughts about some songs that sorta define my year in music. If you need a reminder of where we've been, you may also be interested in referring to years 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007. For those of you who are waiting for copies of this mix to be delivered to you, in person or in the mail, I'll ask you to sit tight for another week or two. I'm having the liner notes professionally printed, and it's just going to take a while to finish up with production.
For reasons that will probably be clear as you read on, my number-one album this year is Bon Iver's For Emma, Forever Ago.
It's always a pleasure to get to share my thoughts with you. Thanks as always for coming along for the ride.
And herewith, my notes on my favorite music in 2008. I've called the comp In Some Small Way We're All Traitors to Our Own Cause. Enjoy.
*
My year-end mixes are always baldly autobiographical/sentimental of course, but this time it feels moreso somehow. I'm enormously pleased with how it turned out and feel it's as even-handedly representative of my musical year as these things ever are/can be, yet when I look at the track listing, I flush a little to myself, feeling like I'm standing in front of the class in my underpants, trying to give a straight-faced book report on The Red Badge of Courage despite my goods being on display for all the world to see.
Truthfully, and probably tellingly, I resisted the prospect of choosing tracks for this comp when the time came around to do so. It was difficult for me to nail down a definitive listing, and I was constantly swapping in and out songs that seemed sexier or more like they "should" be on the mix. When I eventually settled on these 17, I was happy with the overall vibe and flow, yet felt like most of these songs were interchangeable with a handful of others that got seemingly arbitrarily jettisoned.
Yet the more I lived with the track list, the more I realized this batch solidified the way it did because all the songs feel intimately tied to very specific points along the continuum of this emotionally turbulent year for me. They may not be the hippest bangers off their respective albums, and their association with my life may be more cerebral than temporal/experiential, but a deep and definite connection is there for me nonetheless.
As I was beginning work on these notes, I transcribed into my notebook, as a kind of inspiration, guiding light, mantra, and gentle reminder, a quote from Carl Wilson's magnificent 33 1/3 offering Let's Talk About Love:
But a more pluralistic criticism might put less stock in defending its choices and more in depicting its enjoyment, with all its messiness and private soul tremors--to show what it is like for me to like it, and invite you to compare.
I'll do my best to uphold the noblest parts of that sentiment for you now. And if I fall short, at least there's the music--there's always the music.
*
1.) My Favorite Year--Destroyer
Once you break the surface of a Destroyer song, to say nothing of a Destroyer album, there's this wide open expanse on the other side, and you can just keep traveling deeper and farther into it if you choose to do so. The songs morph and twist and bend, becoming oracles, holy writ, pratfalls, piss-takes, and all of these simultaneously sometimes. It's this both/and quality in the music that I find so terribly appealing--Dan Bejar is both utterly serious and full of shit, and, on Trouble in Dreams especially, exposing the dark heart of the world while providing an ultimately illuminating aesthetic experience. The tension is irresistible, and, in this year that's seen so much fall apart, with the potential for so much redemption within our grasp, invigorating and instructive.
I listen to this song and hear within it, like peering into some kind of aural snowglobe, a collapsing of past and present as well as a strain toward growth that, despite best efforts and intentions, can't help but loop back on itself, wandering, homeless, vamping ad nauseum without progress or resolution. It's familiar but unsettling, rotted through at its core but all the more beautiful for the rift cleaved into its heart. Of course it also contains my favorite line in perhaps the whole of Destroyer's output, certainly my favorite line from any song this year, the line that gives this comp its name.
The whole point of everything may be the moving on, but I kept obsessively returning to this song. Some patterns you choose to repeat.
2.) Fools--The Dodos
I can still smell the damp, achy spring thaw hanging like misty condensation around the vibrations of the guitar strings in this song. I can still feel the dull thud of pavement in the soles of my feet with every floor tom beat down. I can still feel a confused and desperate romantic pinch in my heart with every one of Meric Long's ferocious yelps. What else can I say--the Dodos' Visiter was a singular soundtrack to my long walks around and through my city this spring. The album is a bit too long and betrays a still-young band's self-indulgence, but the sexy tribal heave of "Fools" does everything just right.
3.) After Hours—Caribou
I've, historically, not been known among close friends as a crier. So, one of the most unexpected, and, in some ways, welcome, developments of '08 was my transformation into, well, something of a basket case, frankly. Name an event, and chances are I've sobbed through it this year: movies, concerts, sex, meditation, and, in Caribou's case, laundry. Yep, Caribou made me cry doing laundry. It was the morning after their transcendent springtime concert, and as I sat watching my clothes tumble dry, I got to mulling, and then tearing up, over the previous night's events: the pastel wonderland the normally dark and scuzzy Empty Bottle became under the magical influence of the band's psychedelic projected backdrop and what a warm, welcome, enveloping setting it was, if only for a few hours, after an exaggeratedly pain-in-the-ass winter in Chicago; the musicians' genial ferocity as they tore through an inspired selection of songs from Andorra and The Milk of Human Kindness; and how thankful I was to be there to witness the phenomenal brilliance of the propulsive double drum attacks between sit-in drummer Ahmed Gallab and the polymusically gifted Dan Snaith. The exotic, weirdly circular drum pattern here always brings me back to that gray Saturday morning in April when I was overcome by the beauty of the remembrance of what had just passed and the sweet yet forlorn sadness that came with knowing I couldn't share my enthusiasm about it with one of the few people who ever would have truly understood and appreciated it.
4.) Cotillion Blues--White Rabbits
One of the most important things I did, both musically and creatively, this year was cover four of the five nights of the annual Tomorrow Never Knows festival for Daytrotter. It was my first time ever being on a guest list at the door (it's the little thrills, kittens) and it introduced me to a lot of the music that would come to define my 2008. I wasn't exactly bowled over by the White Rabbits' performance that weekend, but at least it led me to this track, which has brought me months of pleasure. Aside from the excitement of the slightly unhinged vocal performance, the sleazy/drunken horns, and the burlesque bounce of the drums (yes, I was a whore for beats this year, even more than usual), the thing that thrills me most about this song is the way it always makes me feel perhaps irrationally wistful for the days when everybody did the Stroll at weddings and other formal dances instead of the Electric Slide.
5.) Right as Rain--Adele
In some ways--OK, many ways--it's a bit embarrassing to be closing in on one's thirties and yet still be so acutely affected by an album called 19 because that's how old the singer was when she wrote the songs. And yet I found myself repeatedly drawn to Adele's debut this year, as much for the chance it gave me to wallow for a bit in its moony emotional landscape as for her tastefully dewy blue-eyed-soul crooning. Plus, despite her age, I really appreciated the remarkably insightful observation in this song that sometimes it's so much easier and more comfortable and even more exciting to embrace the feeling that you're totally alone and that the world's against you than it is to wait for the fleeting moments when everything's going right.
6.) Gardenia--Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks
Two minutes and 53 seconds of jangly indie rock perfection from one of the inventors of the genre. I just can't find anything not to love about this song, which in some ways is the flower pressed in the campaign journal in the rucksack, etc., etc., of Real Emotional Trash--a tiny, unexpected burst of color preserved with care and not a little poignancy in the midst of all the lengthy, discursive rockers.
7.) Cuddle Fuddle--Passion Pit
And sometimes, contra Adele, everything does go right in your life for a few brief moments. It's fall in the city, you're happy and having fun, and things are good. When I first heard this song, I described it as feeling like roller skating on the best acid trip ever. But no, it's walking, just walking, one foot in front of the other, but with a bounce in your step and your head in the clouds and a smile in your heart. When that last layer of bass finally kicks in at 2:03, it's sublime.
8.) Mess Your Hair Up--White Denim
Another Tomorrow Never Knows band. The American version (Exposion) of their first full-length finally came out at the end of this year, but, truthfully, I had so much more fun combing the internet for stray MP3s all spring after I nearly wore a hole in their 2007 EP Let's Talk About It. Equal parts goofy and snotty, this band yields itchy post-punk pleasure that surprises and delights me every moment that it doesn't just completely fall apart.
9.) Ramblin' (Wo)man--Cat Power
This is a slick, dusky, red-eye, cross-country flight of a song. It's somehow both otherworldly and supremely tactile, confident and apologetic, East Coast and West Coast, male and female, cover and original--name a duality and this track is stuck somewhere in the middle of it. This unsolvable/unresolvable quality is a large part of what, ultimately, left me cold on the album as a whole, but it's also probably what kept me coming back to this cut repeatedly all year. Sexy and lonely, chilled out and anxious . . .
10.) While You Wait for the Others--Grizzly Bear
I've never been the biggest Grizzly Bear fan, despite all the ways that their sound and sensibility seem tailor-made to appeal to me, but I find this song pretty captivating. I think it's something to do with the chord progressions leaning a little more toward '70s AM radio sunshine and Dan Rossen's vocals leaning a little bit away from the queer aesthete's languor that usually dominates Ed Droste's contributions. But, perhaps the biggest compliment I can pay this song is the fact that it's actually weirdly difficult for me to pay attention to it, regardless of how many times I've listened to it. I constantly find myself getting lost in all that space, blissed out in some kind of four-and-a-half-minute meditative state. I hear the lyrics and the grand cymbal crashes and the warm blankets of woah-oh harmony, sure, yet I don't internalize them. They float past, leaving a pleasant bit of residue behind, but not much else. It's pop song as conduit for pure presence, less waiting for the others than it is waiting for Godot.
11.) Grapevine Fires--Death Cab for Cutie
This isn't the most immediately attention-grabbing or flashy song off DCFC's severely slept-upon and underrated Narrow Stairs, but its deceptive simplicity is the very thing that endeared it to me. Just listen to how ridiculously finely honed and efficient the songwriting is. Gibbard's got all these different strands woven together: the majestic terror of West Coast wildfires, a new and ambiguous relationship, and the kind of ephemeral sense of hope and peace that's usually impossible, and pointless, to try to articulate. As each detail is carefully unpacked, the song becomes like a tiny studio apartment, where every piece of furniture serves at least two or three separate functions with a beautifully seamless sense of minimalism. Much like profoundly deep love or natural disaster, hearing a gifted artist operating near the top of his game, like Gibbard is here, provokes a certain uncanny surrender to something that's simultaneously completely natural and existentially terrifying. The mind boggles.
12.) Doo Right--Man Man
Every time I think I know what my favorite line in this song is, I invariably find myself writing out all the lyrics to the whole damn thing. The hysterical romantic desperation here is deeply funny (think John Cusack howling "Charlie! You fucking bitch! Let's work it out!" in High Fidelity, but with less misogyny) and deeply touching. Man Man may be best known for their crazy circus arrangements and onstage antics, and lord knows I'd never change that about them now that I've seen how powerful their performances can be, but it's good to be reminded every once in a while what's always at the center of it: a man at the piano, exposing his voice and his wit and his heart for all the world to see.
13.) Cheap and Cheerful--The Kills
Now this is a pep squad rallying cry I can get behind. For me, when Alison Mosshart sings about being crazy or mean, it's really not about endorsing petty or hurtful behavior; it's a black-leather-pants way of saying "be true to yourself, even if it's ugly." I'm sure we've all had the experience of being with a person when she lets her mask slip a little bit. And it's glorious, isn't it? Finally hearing someone's true voice and not her cheap cheerfulness? Life's too short for bullshit, our time together too brief to waste on meaningless pleasantries and empty generalities.
14.) Golden Age--TV on the Radio
For all my bitching about how overrated I think Dear Science is, I haven't really given myself room to talk about how much I actually like the album and genuinely enjoy listening to it. It's full of many muscular and velveteen pleasures, rounded valleys and craggy edges and midnight blue depths giving way to occasional pastel washes of pulsing illumination. And "Golden Age" seems fairly emblematic of all these things, the warm beating heart of optimism in an otherwise angry and even cynical album. Plus, in my mind, I'll always think of it as "the Obama song," so it's hard for me not to feel incredibly enthused every time I hear it.
15.) Green Light--Jamie Lidell
When I find myself in moments of internal emotional crisis, especially when they're precipitated by my own lack of mental clarity rather than any genuine external stimulus, it's often helpful to step back and give myself permission to fall apart or be a little bad or follow some weird obsession or fixation to its logical conclusion if it speaks to a deeper part of my soul. Maybe it's lame and new agey, but as a kind of sister sentiment to the theme of "Cheap and Cheerful," this kind of "green light" can be a powerful tool to stop myself from continuing to lie to myself or trying to be something I'm not. Amusingly enough, this dramatic arc played itself out in miniature as I was trying to decide which Jamie Lidell song to feature on this mix. For months I was convinced it would be the Son Lux remix of "Little Bit of Feel Good" (aka "Just the Sound of Your Voice")--it was fun and funky and witty and would have provided a nice burst of energy. But when I started dragging and dropping tracks into a new "best of '08" playlist, my cursor instinctively reached for "Green Light." And that was that. There just wasn't any point in denying that, yes, this was the song I'd want to listen to on repeat for years to come. Between the emotional tenor of the lyrics and Jamie's sweet and soulful delivery of them--when something's right, it's just right.
16.) San Bernadino--The Mountain Goats
This song became something of a running joke in my own head this year: could I ever listen, I mean, truly listen, to it all the way through without crying? To the best of my knowledge, it hasn't happened yet. And it's not like there's one line that reliably triggers me every time (though "I pulled petals from my pocket / I loved you so much just then" usually can do the trick)--the story is just so well painted and evocative and powerfully performed that it's essentially capable of doing a control-alt-delete on whatever else may be happening around me at the time when it's playing, leaving me all alone with John's voice and Erik Friedlander's ridiculous cello and a quiver in my chin.
And speaking of John's voice, that may be the most startling talking point around Heretic Pride and the Satanic Messiah EP, if anyone were actually talking about it: it's old news by now to rave about his lyrics, but who'd ever have anticipated, post-Get Lonely, his transformation into such a warm, controlled, yet still heartbreakingly emotive vocalist?
17.) Re: Stacks--Bon Iver
Have you ever had to forgive yourself? Not for some dumbass thing you may have said or done while you were drunk or distracted, but for not having had enough compassion for the pain in your own heart? Bon Iver made a bridge for me with his music this year between a winter of darkness and a summertime of healing, and, standing in Union Park at the Pitchfork Music Festival in July, listening to him play most of For Emma, Forever Ago at dusk, I was able to forgive myself in a way I don't think I've ever truly experienced before. Catharsis isn't even the word for it. I think it was actually something closer to the essence of what he means when he sings "your love will be safe with me," one of the most beautiful benedictions I could hope to leave you with. It's my sincere wish that you find an occasion to say that to someone, be it yourself or someone else dear to you, in 2009.
*
Honorable mention this year goes to the Walkmen's You and Me (esp. "Donde Esta la Playa"), Shearwater's Rook, Fuck Buttons' Street Horrrsing, the Raconteurs' Consolers of the Lonely, Estelle's "American Boy," King Khan and the Shrines' "Took My Lady to Dinner," the Sea and Cake's Car Alarm, Juana Molina's Un Dia, and Blitzen Trapper's Furr, not to mention the exciting new stuff put out by my local faves Aleks and the Drummer, Jeff Harms, Bound Stems, Baby Teeth, and King Sparrow.
For reasons that will probably be clear as you read on, my number-one album this year is Bon Iver's For Emma, Forever Ago.
It's always a pleasure to get to share my thoughts with you. Thanks as always for coming along for the ride.
And herewith, my notes on my favorite music in 2008. I've called the comp In Some Small Way We're All Traitors to Our Own Cause. Enjoy.
*
My year-end mixes are always baldly autobiographical/sentimental of course, but this time it feels moreso somehow. I'm enormously pleased with how it turned out and feel it's as even-handedly representative of my musical year as these things ever are/can be, yet when I look at the track listing, I flush a little to myself, feeling like I'm standing in front of the class in my underpants, trying to give a straight-faced book report on The Red Badge of Courage despite my goods being on display for all the world to see.
Truthfully, and probably tellingly, I resisted the prospect of choosing tracks for this comp when the time came around to do so. It was difficult for me to nail down a definitive listing, and I was constantly swapping in and out songs that seemed sexier or more like they "should" be on the mix. When I eventually settled on these 17, I was happy with the overall vibe and flow, yet felt like most of these songs were interchangeable with a handful of others that got seemingly arbitrarily jettisoned.
Yet the more I lived with the track list, the more I realized this batch solidified the way it did because all the songs feel intimately tied to very specific points along the continuum of this emotionally turbulent year for me. They may not be the hippest bangers off their respective albums, and their association with my life may be more cerebral than temporal/experiential, but a deep and definite connection is there for me nonetheless.
As I was beginning work on these notes, I transcribed into my notebook, as a kind of inspiration, guiding light, mantra, and gentle reminder, a quote from Carl Wilson's magnificent 33 1/3 offering Let's Talk About Love:
I'll do my best to uphold the noblest parts of that sentiment for you now. And if I fall short, at least there's the music--there's always the music.
*
1.) My Favorite Year--Destroyer
Once you break the surface of a Destroyer song, to say nothing of a Destroyer album, there's this wide open expanse on the other side, and you can just keep traveling deeper and farther into it if you choose to do so. The songs morph and twist and bend, becoming oracles, holy writ, pratfalls, piss-takes, and all of these simultaneously sometimes. It's this both/and quality in the music that I find so terribly appealing--Dan Bejar is both utterly serious and full of shit, and, on Trouble in Dreams especially, exposing the dark heart of the world while providing an ultimately illuminating aesthetic experience. The tension is irresistible, and, in this year that's seen so much fall apart, with the potential for so much redemption within our grasp, invigorating and instructive.
I listen to this song and hear within it, like peering into some kind of aural snowglobe, a collapsing of past and present as well as a strain toward growth that, despite best efforts and intentions, can't help but loop back on itself, wandering, homeless, vamping ad nauseum without progress or resolution. It's familiar but unsettling, rotted through at its core but all the more beautiful for the rift cleaved into its heart. Of course it also contains my favorite line in perhaps the whole of Destroyer's output, certainly my favorite line from any song this year, the line that gives this comp its name.
The whole point of everything may be the moving on, but I kept obsessively returning to this song. Some patterns you choose to repeat.
2.) Fools--The Dodos
I can still smell the damp, achy spring thaw hanging like misty condensation around the vibrations of the guitar strings in this song. I can still feel the dull thud of pavement in the soles of my feet with every floor tom beat down. I can still feel a confused and desperate romantic pinch in my heart with every one of Meric Long's ferocious yelps. What else can I say--the Dodos' Visiter was a singular soundtrack to my long walks around and through my city this spring. The album is a bit too long and betrays a still-young band's self-indulgence, but the sexy tribal heave of "Fools" does everything just right.
3.) After Hours—Caribou
I've, historically, not been known among close friends as a crier. So, one of the most unexpected, and, in some ways, welcome, developments of '08 was my transformation into, well, something of a basket case, frankly. Name an event, and chances are I've sobbed through it this year: movies, concerts, sex, meditation, and, in Caribou's case, laundry. Yep, Caribou made me cry doing laundry. It was the morning after their transcendent springtime concert, and as I sat watching my clothes tumble dry, I got to mulling, and then tearing up, over the previous night's events: the pastel wonderland the normally dark and scuzzy Empty Bottle became under the magical influence of the band's psychedelic projected backdrop and what a warm, welcome, enveloping setting it was, if only for a few hours, after an exaggeratedly pain-in-the-ass winter in Chicago; the musicians' genial ferocity as they tore through an inspired selection of songs from Andorra and The Milk of Human Kindness; and how thankful I was to be there to witness the phenomenal brilliance of the propulsive double drum attacks between sit-in drummer Ahmed Gallab and the polymusically gifted Dan Snaith. The exotic, weirdly circular drum pattern here always brings me back to that gray Saturday morning in April when I was overcome by the beauty of the remembrance of what had just passed and the sweet yet forlorn sadness that came with knowing I couldn't share my enthusiasm about it with one of the few people who ever would have truly understood and appreciated it.
4.) Cotillion Blues--White Rabbits
One of the most important things I did, both musically and creatively, this year was cover four of the five nights of the annual Tomorrow Never Knows festival for Daytrotter. It was my first time ever being on a guest list at the door (it's the little thrills, kittens) and it introduced me to a lot of the music that would come to define my 2008. I wasn't exactly bowled over by the White Rabbits' performance that weekend, but at least it led me to this track, which has brought me months of pleasure. Aside from the excitement of the slightly unhinged vocal performance, the sleazy/drunken horns, and the burlesque bounce of the drums (yes, I was a whore for beats this year, even more than usual), the thing that thrills me most about this song is the way it always makes me feel perhaps irrationally wistful for the days when everybody did the Stroll at weddings and other formal dances instead of the Electric Slide.
5.) Right as Rain--Adele
In some ways--OK, many ways--it's a bit embarrassing to be closing in on one's thirties and yet still be so acutely affected by an album called 19 because that's how old the singer was when she wrote the songs. And yet I found myself repeatedly drawn to Adele's debut this year, as much for the chance it gave me to wallow for a bit in its moony emotional landscape as for her tastefully dewy blue-eyed-soul crooning. Plus, despite her age, I really appreciated the remarkably insightful observation in this song that sometimes it's so much easier and more comfortable and even more exciting to embrace the feeling that you're totally alone and that the world's against you than it is to wait for the fleeting moments when everything's going right.
6.) Gardenia--Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks
Two minutes and 53 seconds of jangly indie rock perfection from one of the inventors of the genre. I just can't find anything not to love about this song, which in some ways is the flower pressed in the campaign journal in the rucksack, etc., etc., of Real Emotional Trash--a tiny, unexpected burst of color preserved with care and not a little poignancy in the midst of all the lengthy, discursive rockers.
7.) Cuddle Fuddle--Passion Pit
And sometimes, contra Adele, everything does go right in your life for a few brief moments. It's fall in the city, you're happy and having fun, and things are good. When I first heard this song, I described it as feeling like roller skating on the best acid trip ever. But no, it's walking, just walking, one foot in front of the other, but with a bounce in your step and your head in the clouds and a smile in your heart. When that last layer of bass finally kicks in at 2:03, it's sublime.
8.) Mess Your Hair Up--White Denim
Another Tomorrow Never Knows band. The American version (Exposion) of their first full-length finally came out at the end of this year, but, truthfully, I had so much more fun combing the internet for stray MP3s all spring after I nearly wore a hole in their 2007 EP Let's Talk About It. Equal parts goofy and snotty, this band yields itchy post-punk pleasure that surprises and delights me every moment that it doesn't just completely fall apart.
9.) Ramblin' (Wo)man--Cat Power
This is a slick, dusky, red-eye, cross-country flight of a song. It's somehow both otherworldly and supremely tactile, confident and apologetic, East Coast and West Coast, male and female, cover and original--name a duality and this track is stuck somewhere in the middle of it. This unsolvable/unresolvable quality is a large part of what, ultimately, left me cold on the album as a whole, but it's also probably what kept me coming back to this cut repeatedly all year. Sexy and lonely, chilled out and anxious . . .
10.) While You Wait for the Others--Grizzly Bear
I've never been the biggest Grizzly Bear fan, despite all the ways that their sound and sensibility seem tailor-made to appeal to me, but I find this song pretty captivating. I think it's something to do with the chord progressions leaning a little more toward '70s AM radio sunshine and Dan Rossen's vocals leaning a little bit away from the queer aesthete's languor that usually dominates Ed Droste's contributions. But, perhaps the biggest compliment I can pay this song is the fact that it's actually weirdly difficult for me to pay attention to it, regardless of how many times I've listened to it. I constantly find myself getting lost in all that space, blissed out in some kind of four-and-a-half-minute meditative state. I hear the lyrics and the grand cymbal crashes and the warm blankets of woah-oh harmony, sure, yet I don't internalize them. They float past, leaving a pleasant bit of residue behind, but not much else. It's pop song as conduit for pure presence, less waiting for the others than it is waiting for Godot.
11.) Grapevine Fires--Death Cab for Cutie
This isn't the most immediately attention-grabbing or flashy song off DCFC's severely slept-upon and underrated Narrow Stairs, but its deceptive simplicity is the very thing that endeared it to me. Just listen to how ridiculously finely honed and efficient the songwriting is. Gibbard's got all these different strands woven together: the majestic terror of West Coast wildfires, a new and ambiguous relationship, and the kind of ephemeral sense of hope and peace that's usually impossible, and pointless, to try to articulate. As each detail is carefully unpacked, the song becomes like a tiny studio apartment, where every piece of furniture serves at least two or three separate functions with a beautifully seamless sense of minimalism. Much like profoundly deep love or natural disaster, hearing a gifted artist operating near the top of his game, like Gibbard is here, provokes a certain uncanny surrender to something that's simultaneously completely natural and existentially terrifying. The mind boggles.
12.) Doo Right--Man Man
Every time I think I know what my favorite line in this song is, I invariably find myself writing out all the lyrics to the whole damn thing. The hysterical romantic desperation here is deeply funny (think John Cusack howling "Charlie! You fucking bitch! Let's work it out!" in High Fidelity, but with less misogyny) and deeply touching. Man Man may be best known for their crazy circus arrangements and onstage antics, and lord knows I'd never change that about them now that I've seen how powerful their performances can be, but it's good to be reminded every once in a while what's always at the center of it: a man at the piano, exposing his voice and his wit and his heart for all the world to see.
13.) Cheap and Cheerful--The Kills
Now this is a pep squad rallying cry I can get behind. For me, when Alison Mosshart sings about being crazy or mean, it's really not about endorsing petty or hurtful behavior; it's a black-leather-pants way of saying "be true to yourself, even if it's ugly." I'm sure we've all had the experience of being with a person when she lets her mask slip a little bit. And it's glorious, isn't it? Finally hearing someone's true voice and not her cheap cheerfulness? Life's too short for bullshit, our time together too brief to waste on meaningless pleasantries and empty generalities.
14.) Golden Age--TV on the Radio
For all my bitching about how overrated I think Dear Science is, I haven't really given myself room to talk about how much I actually like the album and genuinely enjoy listening to it. It's full of many muscular and velveteen pleasures, rounded valleys and craggy edges and midnight blue depths giving way to occasional pastel washes of pulsing illumination. And "Golden Age" seems fairly emblematic of all these things, the warm beating heart of optimism in an otherwise angry and even cynical album. Plus, in my mind, I'll always think of it as "the Obama song," so it's hard for me not to feel incredibly enthused every time I hear it.
15.) Green Light--Jamie Lidell
When I find myself in moments of internal emotional crisis, especially when they're precipitated by my own lack of mental clarity rather than any genuine external stimulus, it's often helpful to step back and give myself permission to fall apart or be a little bad or follow some weird obsession or fixation to its logical conclusion if it speaks to a deeper part of my soul. Maybe it's lame and new agey, but as a kind of sister sentiment to the theme of "Cheap and Cheerful," this kind of "green light" can be a powerful tool to stop myself from continuing to lie to myself or trying to be something I'm not. Amusingly enough, this dramatic arc played itself out in miniature as I was trying to decide which Jamie Lidell song to feature on this mix. For months I was convinced it would be the Son Lux remix of "Little Bit of Feel Good" (aka "Just the Sound of Your Voice")--it was fun and funky and witty and would have provided a nice burst of energy. But when I started dragging and dropping tracks into a new "best of '08" playlist, my cursor instinctively reached for "Green Light." And that was that. There just wasn't any point in denying that, yes, this was the song I'd want to listen to on repeat for years to come. Between the emotional tenor of the lyrics and Jamie's sweet and soulful delivery of them--when something's right, it's just right.
16.) San Bernadino--The Mountain Goats
This song became something of a running joke in my own head this year: could I ever listen, I mean, truly listen, to it all the way through without crying? To the best of my knowledge, it hasn't happened yet. And it's not like there's one line that reliably triggers me every time (though "I pulled petals from my pocket / I loved you so much just then" usually can do the trick)--the story is just so well painted and evocative and powerfully performed that it's essentially capable of doing a control-alt-delete on whatever else may be happening around me at the time when it's playing, leaving me all alone with John's voice and Erik Friedlander's ridiculous cello and a quiver in my chin.
And speaking of John's voice, that may be the most startling talking point around Heretic Pride and the Satanic Messiah EP, if anyone were actually talking about it: it's old news by now to rave about his lyrics, but who'd ever have anticipated, post-Get Lonely, his transformation into such a warm, controlled, yet still heartbreakingly emotive vocalist?
17.) Re: Stacks--Bon Iver
Have you ever had to forgive yourself? Not for some dumbass thing you may have said or done while you were drunk or distracted, but for not having had enough compassion for the pain in your own heart? Bon Iver made a bridge for me with his music this year between a winter of darkness and a summertime of healing, and, standing in Union Park at the Pitchfork Music Festival in July, listening to him play most of For Emma, Forever Ago at dusk, I was able to forgive myself in a way I don't think I've ever truly experienced before. Catharsis isn't even the word for it. I think it was actually something closer to the essence of what he means when he sings "your love will be safe with me," one of the most beautiful benedictions I could hope to leave you with. It's my sincere wish that you find an occasion to say that to someone, be it yourself or someone else dear to you, in 2009.
*
Honorable mention this year goes to the Walkmen's You and Me (esp. "Donde Esta la Playa"), Shearwater's Rook, Fuck Buttons' Street Horrrsing, the Raconteurs' Consolers of the Lonely, Estelle's "American Boy," King Khan and the Shrines' "Took My Lady to Dinner," the Sea and Cake's Car Alarm, Juana Molina's Un Dia, and Blitzen Trapper's Furr, not to mention the exciting new stuff put out by my local faves Aleks and the Drummer, Jeff Harms, Bound Stems, Baby Teeth, and King Sparrow.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
King Sparrow, Tonight at Bottom Lounge
This just in: my boys King Sparrow will be playing the Q101 Twisted Christmas/Eagles of Death Metal afterparty at the Bottom Lounge tonight. Details here. I'm actually, hilariously, going to the Q101 Twisted Christmas show at the House of Blues (Cold War Kids, Eagles of Death Metal, and Scott Weiland headlining--yup, I'm 17), so this is just extra geekily exciting icing on the cake. Chicagoans, this should be a good way to warm your hearts and loins on this cold, cold December night. Check it out!
(Also, confidential to Jakob: happy birthday! I wanted to e-mail or send a text, but couldn't find any of your info. Hugs!!)
(Also, confidential to Jakob: happy birthday! I wanted to e-mail or send a text, but couldn't find any of your info. Hugs!!)
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Twilight
Wait, what?
No, I mean: seriously? This is the pop culture phenomenon everybody's going bozo over?
Not sure exactly what compelled me to, but I took in a matinee showing of Twilight today. (Despite even my own active skepticism about the thing.) It's...I don't even know where to start. This is a singularly bizarre movie. I sort of loved and despised it in equal measure. OK, "loved," maybe not. But...found curiously appealing? Begrudgingly respected for the way it succeeded in what it was trying to do? Was intrigued by some of the more salient features that have, evidently, made so many other people love it? And despised it in equal measure.
About a quarter of the way into the movie, I couldn't help but think of this bit from High Fidelity: "People worry about kids playing with guns or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands, of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery, and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?" I think the same goes for the effect on girls' psyches of utterly poisonous movie love stories like this.
I don't know how he comes across in the book (and I don't plan to find out), but there is nothing, I repeat nothing, appealing about the Edward Cullen character, except the fact that he's played by the oddly attractive Robert Pattinson. I understand that this is a story about vampires and that vampires brood. I also understand that this is a story about teenagers and that teenagers brood. I also understand that this is a story about first love and that first love is often an experience filled with brooding. Clearly, the Venn diagram where all these things overlap is very, very broody indeed. But still? Ack. Why do we continue to romanticize this hunky, tortured archetype? I am as big a sucker for teenage romances as they come, and my burgeoning status as a cougar-in-training knows no shame when it comes to objectifying delectable young morsels, so I was absolutely primed to go all swoony-moony for this guy. But instead, I just kind of wanted to punch him. People, this guy's a dick! For rizz! His mood swings and emotional abusiveness and control issues/possessiveness appalled me. It'd be one thing if I felt like the movie was trying to make some comment about the emotional truth of what being young and in love for the first time feels like--that it can be all-consuming and exciting even when it's stupid and reckless and otherwise not a "good" idea, literalizing the metaphor in the great way that Buffy always did--but I feel like we're really supposed to go unironically, uncritically ga-ga for this love story. Sure, he's just the next in a long, grand tradition of wrong-side-of-the-tracks lust objects, and it's a continually irresistable fantasy for a girl to be "the one" to penetrate the cold, cold heart of a guy like this, so I guess I'm willing to concede the film's success in using these tropes effectively and accurately. But, I suppose what I'm getting at is this: that's a completely fucking damaging fantasy. (And I say this as one who has indulged in it in her own life.) I know that, just because I'm bitching about it, Hollywood's not going to all of a sudden start giving us viable romantic alternatives to rebels with a heart of gold on one hand and schlubby, lovable losers (a la Apatow's boys) on the other, but...c'mon already! A huge part of what I loved so much about the teenage love story subplot of Snow Angels was the fact that the kid felt so real, like the kind of young dude a girl could actually meet in real life and convincingly fall for. Aside from Edward's sexy danger, and the fact that he was all flatteringly hot and heavy for her, I really, honestly didn't understand why a girl who seemed as smart as Bella would go so bonkers for a guy like that. It's like a way dumber version of the Rory/Jess arc in Gilmore Girls.
And yet............
There's something kind of special about the feel of this movie. Every time I'd get my nose up about the most disgusting aspects of Edward and Bella's "relationship," I'd somehow find myself reeled back in by the very somber, dead-serious tone. It's another way of doing what Brick did so well, as far as respecting the intensity of teenage emotion without making light of it or implying "oh, but they'll grow out of it; we all did, didn't we?" Adults get to have stuff like In the Bedroom that wins scads of awards and critical praise, so why shouldn't teenagers be entitled to the same, on their own playing field?
I've missed the last few Harry Potters (mostly because, well, you know), so this is, as far as I'm concerned, Pattinson's debut. Folks have been falling all over themselves to compare him, in this role at least, to James Dean. The comparison's slightly off, though not wholly inaccurate. The comparison people are actually looking for, I think, on a surface level, is Brando in The Wild One: sexy, dangerous, volatile, still kind of out of nowhere. There's a sensitivity in Dean's style, especially in Rebel Without a Cause, that doesn't get acknowledged as often as it should. (I think people get distracted by the word "rebel" and then let our general pop cultural shorthand for what "James Dean" signifies take over from there.) But. I only bring this up in order to say...Pattinson's performance here is really reminiscent of James Dean. By which I mean, it's nothing like what I expected it to be, and there's this nervous, Method jitteriness inside it that's almost more interesting for what it says about the actor than what it says about the character, which, in turn, gave my experience of the movie this weirdly enjoyable other dimension. So much of anyone's experience of this movie, at least right now, is necessarily going to be informed by the media juggernaut surrounding it, and so bringing this sort of king-making extra-cinematic narrative to bear on my initial impressions of his performance was almost literally the only thing that made me sympathetic in any way to his character.
Another thing I wasn't expecting out of this movie was how fucking nice all the minor characters were! It's almost funny to think about, especially when you know that Stephanie Meyer is (or at least was raised) Mormon. But, I really, genuinely enjoyed the time we, as viewers, spend with all the kids that Bella goes to school with, as well as the various townspeople.
And, far more than any aspect of the love story, or even the family drama with Bella and her father (which should have really gotten to me), the thing that made my heart ache most was the Pacific Northwest setting. Ohhhh, kittens, you know I'm a city girl and you know I love Chicago, but something about that area of the world really calls to me.
Most of the soundtrack was kind of whatever, but I thought the use of Iron & Wine's "Flightless Bird, American Mouth" over the last scene was (say it with me) unexpected and very nice, and hearing Radiohead's "15 Step" explode over the ending credits was a great trick that hearkened back to the use of Yorke's "Analyze" after the final blackout of The Prestige.
(Plus, and this is totally stupid and barely worth mentioning, but my friend SB works at a doggy daycare, and his coworker owns a chihuahua named Bella that they let roam around the office, so whenever anyone in the movie said her name aloud, I couldn't stop cackling to myself thinking of the stories he used to tell me of Bella hopping up on the desk to help him check his e-mail. "Bell-uh! Bell-uh!")
So, for those of you who've been wondering "what is the deal with Twilight?" I'm more than happy to have taken one for the team here. It was a diverting way to spend a Sunday afternoon, both for the pure experience of watching the film and for the stew of "she's my sister, my daughter, my sister, my daughter!" ambivalence that it brought up in me afterward.
No, I mean: seriously? This is the pop culture phenomenon everybody's going bozo over?
Not sure exactly what compelled me to, but I took in a matinee showing of Twilight today. (Despite even my own active skepticism about the thing.) It's...I don't even know where to start. This is a singularly bizarre movie. I sort of loved and despised it in equal measure. OK, "loved," maybe not. But...found curiously appealing? Begrudgingly respected for the way it succeeded in what it was trying to do? Was intrigued by some of the more salient features that have, evidently, made so many other people love it? And despised it in equal measure.
About a quarter of the way into the movie, I couldn't help but think of this bit from High Fidelity: "People worry about kids playing with guns or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands, of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery, and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?" I think the same goes for the effect on girls' psyches of utterly poisonous movie love stories like this.
I don't know how he comes across in the book (and I don't plan to find out), but there is nothing, I repeat nothing, appealing about the Edward Cullen character, except the fact that he's played by the oddly attractive Robert Pattinson. I understand that this is a story about vampires and that vampires brood. I also understand that this is a story about teenagers and that teenagers brood. I also understand that this is a story about first love and that first love is often an experience filled with brooding. Clearly, the Venn diagram where all these things overlap is very, very broody indeed. But still? Ack. Why do we continue to romanticize this hunky, tortured archetype? I am as big a sucker for teenage romances as they come, and my burgeoning status as a cougar-in-training knows no shame when it comes to objectifying delectable young morsels, so I was absolutely primed to go all swoony-moony for this guy. But instead, I just kind of wanted to punch him. People, this guy's a dick! For rizz! His mood swings and emotional abusiveness and control issues/possessiveness appalled me. It'd be one thing if I felt like the movie was trying to make some comment about the emotional truth of what being young and in love for the first time feels like--that it can be all-consuming and exciting even when it's stupid and reckless and otherwise not a "good" idea, literalizing the metaphor in the great way that Buffy always did--but I feel like we're really supposed to go unironically, uncritically ga-ga for this love story. Sure, he's just the next in a long, grand tradition of wrong-side-of-the-tracks lust objects, and it's a continually irresistable fantasy for a girl to be "the one" to penetrate the cold, cold heart of a guy like this, so I guess I'm willing to concede the film's success in using these tropes effectively and accurately. But, I suppose what I'm getting at is this: that's a completely fucking damaging fantasy. (And I say this as one who has indulged in it in her own life.) I know that, just because I'm bitching about it, Hollywood's not going to all of a sudden start giving us viable romantic alternatives to rebels with a heart of gold on one hand and schlubby, lovable losers (a la Apatow's boys) on the other, but...c'mon already! A huge part of what I loved so much about the teenage love story subplot of Snow Angels was the fact that the kid felt so real, like the kind of young dude a girl could actually meet in real life and convincingly fall for. Aside from Edward's sexy danger, and the fact that he was all flatteringly hot and heavy for her, I really, honestly didn't understand why a girl who seemed as smart as Bella would go so bonkers for a guy like that. It's like a way dumber version of the Rory/Jess arc in Gilmore Girls.
And yet............
There's something kind of special about the feel of this movie. Every time I'd get my nose up about the most disgusting aspects of Edward and Bella's "relationship," I'd somehow find myself reeled back in by the very somber, dead-serious tone. It's another way of doing what Brick did so well, as far as respecting the intensity of teenage emotion without making light of it or implying "oh, but they'll grow out of it; we all did, didn't we?" Adults get to have stuff like In the Bedroom that wins scads of awards and critical praise, so why shouldn't teenagers be entitled to the same, on their own playing field?
I've missed the last few Harry Potters (mostly because, well, you know), so this is, as far as I'm concerned, Pattinson's debut. Folks have been falling all over themselves to compare him, in this role at least, to James Dean. The comparison's slightly off, though not wholly inaccurate. The comparison people are actually looking for, I think, on a surface level, is Brando in The Wild One: sexy, dangerous, volatile, still kind of out of nowhere. There's a sensitivity in Dean's style, especially in Rebel Without a Cause, that doesn't get acknowledged as often as it should. (I think people get distracted by the word "rebel" and then let our general pop cultural shorthand for what "James Dean" signifies take over from there.) But. I only bring this up in order to say...Pattinson's performance here is really reminiscent of James Dean. By which I mean, it's nothing like what I expected it to be, and there's this nervous, Method jitteriness inside it that's almost more interesting for what it says about the actor than what it says about the character, which, in turn, gave my experience of the movie this weirdly enjoyable other dimension. So much of anyone's experience of this movie, at least right now, is necessarily going to be informed by the media juggernaut surrounding it, and so bringing this sort of king-making extra-cinematic narrative to bear on my initial impressions of his performance was almost literally the only thing that made me sympathetic in any way to his character.
Another thing I wasn't expecting out of this movie was how fucking nice all the minor characters were! It's almost funny to think about, especially when you know that Stephanie Meyer is (or at least was raised) Mormon. But, I really, genuinely enjoyed the time we, as viewers, spend with all the kids that Bella goes to school with, as well as the various townspeople.
And, far more than any aspect of the love story, or even the family drama with Bella and her father (which should have really gotten to me), the thing that made my heart ache most was the Pacific Northwest setting. Ohhhh, kittens, you know I'm a city girl and you know I love Chicago, but something about that area of the world really calls to me.
Most of the soundtrack was kind of whatever, but I thought the use of Iron & Wine's "Flightless Bird, American Mouth" over the last scene was (say it with me) unexpected and very nice, and hearing Radiohead's "15 Step" explode over the ending credits was a great trick that hearkened back to the use of Yorke's "Analyze" after the final blackout of The Prestige.
(Plus, and this is totally stupid and barely worth mentioning, but my friend SB works at a doggy daycare, and his coworker owns a chihuahua named Bella that they let roam around the office, so whenever anyone in the movie said her name aloud, I couldn't stop cackling to myself thinking of the stories he used to tell me of Bella hopping up on the desk to help him check his e-mail. "Bell-uh! Bell-uh!")
So, for those of you who've been wondering "what is the deal with Twilight?" I'm more than happy to have taken one for the team here. It was a diverting way to spend a Sunday afternoon, both for the pure experience of watching the film and for the stew of "she's my sister, my daughter, my sister, my daughter!" ambivalence that it brought up in me afterward.
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Confession
I confess to feeling less than inspired about the current round of year-end pontification over 2008's music (not to mention books, film, and what have you). Scott at Pretty Goes with Pretty posted insightfully about the lack of trust surrounding this year's best-of lists, and I'm so wishy-washy I can't even trust my lack of trust. Feh. Oh sure, I'm still making my annual mix CD (e-mail now to reserve yours! esp. if'n you think I might not have you on the list or if your mailing address has changed in the past year), and I'll post some thoughts about it here soon enough. But mostly I'm feeling quiet and not particularly eloquent or reflective about, well, anything right now. As such, take everything that follows with the proverbial grain of salt.
I visited Austin for the first time over Thanksgiving, and, while I was there, Bren and I caught Blitzen Trapper at the Mohawk (pics from the show, if you're interested, are here). Despite all the blowed-up hype surrounding them, mostly thanks to P-fork's raves, last year, I'd managed stay ignorant of them and their music until that day, so was pleasantly surprised by their performance. Their sound, approach, and aesthetic are throwbacky, sure, but they commit to it fully and do it well and make it work. Furr has been on nearly continual repeat since then. The title track contains several of the most satisfying melodic/lyrical turns of phrase I've heard this year.
While in town, Brendon and Catharine also made sure to take me to the famed Alamo Drafthouse for some food, booze, and film, where we saw Australia. I'll go to the mat for Moulin Rouge! any day of the week and think that Luhrmann is way smarter and more in control of what he's doing than most people give him credit for, but Australia left me a bit cold. It has its moments, I guess--most of which involve the camera's male-gaze fetishizing of Hugh Jackman's body instead of Nicole Kidman's--but trying to shoehorn his signature sentimentality about love and destiny, etc., etc., into a story involving national identity and the Stolen Generations (not to mention World War II) felt a bit overly naive (plus also maybe a bit unintentionally racist?). It's epic, sweeping, romantic, and paced exactly like a Luhrmann movie (goofy comedy that segues into flushed-cheek love story that segues into searing tragedy), but still, for all that, and its inflated running time, it seemed to be lacking that special something.
Slumdog Millionaire on the other hand is 100% delightful, so much so that I'm willing to forgive Boyle his missteps with Sunshine, if that's what he needed to do to get to the point where he could make this film. Aside from the fact that the movie itself is sweet and touching and scary and melodramtic in all the right ways, I cannot overstate how lucky I felt to have just finished reading Maximum City before I saw it. The context that it gave me about the slums, religious tension, gangs, police interrogation techniques, and dreams of the people (both singularly and, as various groups, collectively) in Mumbai enriched my enjoyment of the film immeasurably. It feels like a Danny Boyle film in all the best ways, with the happy addition that, as he did in Millions, he demonstrated again that he can be a gifted director of children. Plus the Bollywood dance sequence at the end is fucking golden; it was so perfect yet so unexpected that it probably made me cry more than anything else in the rest of the movie. Highly recommended, kittens.
I caught the Bound Stems at a late-night show at the Empty Bottle last weekend. I'm happy to say that The Family Afloat has grown on me tremendously, as I suspected it would, since October--so much so that I had trouble, in my sleepy and slightly tipsy state, distinguishing which songs appear on that album from which appear on Appreciation Night. Given how much I adore Appreciation Night, that's high praise indeed coming from me. Pics from the show posted here.
And speaking of fave-rave Chicago bands, I hope you've had a chance to check out Baby Teeth's second Daytrotter session. I've been listening to "I Hope She Won't Let Me" obsessively since downloading the tracks. I heard them play it when they opened for Jamie Lidell in early October and it absolutely knocked me out. I can't wait to have an official studio version in my grubby little paws. From what I understand, it should be on the forthcoming-in-'09 release Hustle Beach. Get excited.
Also! Chicagoans, you should get excited about THE RETURN OF THE DOLLAR STORE! Maestro Jonathan Messinger announced it on his blog the other day, and I've been convulsing with glee ever since. You can bet your ass I'll be at the Hideout on January 9, nerding out in style.
I visited Austin for the first time over Thanksgiving, and, while I was there, Bren and I caught Blitzen Trapper at the Mohawk (pics from the show, if you're interested, are here). Despite all the blowed-up hype surrounding them, mostly thanks to P-fork's raves, last year, I'd managed stay ignorant of them and their music until that day, so was pleasantly surprised by their performance. Their sound, approach, and aesthetic are throwbacky, sure, but they commit to it fully and do it well and make it work. Furr has been on nearly continual repeat since then. The title track contains several of the most satisfying melodic/lyrical turns of phrase I've heard this year.
While in town, Brendon and Catharine also made sure to take me to the famed Alamo Drafthouse for some food, booze, and film, where we saw Australia. I'll go to the mat for Moulin Rouge! any day of the week and think that Luhrmann is way smarter and more in control of what he's doing than most people give him credit for, but Australia left me a bit cold. It has its moments, I guess--most of which involve the camera's male-gaze fetishizing of Hugh Jackman's body instead of Nicole Kidman's--but trying to shoehorn his signature sentimentality about love and destiny, etc., etc., into a story involving national identity and the Stolen Generations (not to mention World War II) felt a bit overly naive (plus also maybe a bit unintentionally racist?). It's epic, sweeping, romantic, and paced exactly like a Luhrmann movie (goofy comedy that segues into flushed-cheek love story that segues into searing tragedy), but still, for all that, and its inflated running time, it seemed to be lacking that special something.
Slumdog Millionaire on the other hand is 100% delightful, so much so that I'm willing to forgive Boyle his missteps with Sunshine, if that's what he needed to do to get to the point where he could make this film. Aside from the fact that the movie itself is sweet and touching and scary and melodramtic in all the right ways, I cannot overstate how lucky I felt to have just finished reading Maximum City before I saw it. The context that it gave me about the slums, religious tension, gangs, police interrogation techniques, and dreams of the people (both singularly and, as various groups, collectively) in Mumbai enriched my enjoyment of the film immeasurably. It feels like a Danny Boyle film in all the best ways, with the happy addition that, as he did in Millions, he demonstrated again that he can be a gifted director of children. Plus the Bollywood dance sequence at the end is fucking golden; it was so perfect yet so unexpected that it probably made me cry more than anything else in the rest of the movie. Highly recommended, kittens.
I caught the Bound Stems at a late-night show at the Empty Bottle last weekend. I'm happy to say that The Family Afloat has grown on me tremendously, as I suspected it would, since October--so much so that I had trouble, in my sleepy and slightly tipsy state, distinguishing which songs appear on that album from which appear on Appreciation Night. Given how much I adore Appreciation Night, that's high praise indeed coming from me. Pics from the show posted here.
And speaking of fave-rave Chicago bands, I hope you've had a chance to check out Baby Teeth's second Daytrotter session. I've been listening to "I Hope She Won't Let Me" obsessively since downloading the tracks. I heard them play it when they opened for Jamie Lidell in early October and it absolutely knocked me out. I can't wait to have an official studio version in my grubby little paws. From what I understand, it should be on the forthcoming-in-'09 release Hustle Beach. Get excited.
Also! Chicagoans, you should get excited about THE RETURN OF THE DOLLAR STORE! Maestro Jonathan Messinger announced it on his blog the other day, and I've been convulsing with glee ever since. You can bet your ass I'll be at the Hideout on January 9, nerding out in style.
Sunday, November 30, 2008
The Ballad of Vina and Italo
Monday, November 17, 2008
Synecdoche, New York
Sigh. Well, kittens, here's another movie I feel like I'm going to be defending to its many vehement detractors for a good long while.
Seems like consensus is that Synecdoche, New York is a mess, but my god, what a wonderfully beautiful mess. Aside from the various and sundry easily recognizable Charlie Kaufman mindfuck tropes, it's also full of his signature "the unknowable-ness of the other" pessimism, but it's rendered delicately enough that, though I disagree with the spirit of the argument, I didn't mind it at all. It actually feels positively Kubrickian in its depiction of a unit destroying itself from within--the unit being Philip Seymour Hoffman's body, mind, and soul. In fact, I intuitively sensed I'd love the film as soon as I read Owen Gleiberman's dismissive review in Entertainment Weekly, which was so reminiscent of his totally-missing-the-point write-up of Eyes Wide Shut back in the day. And, wow, is the comparison ever apt: there's the fantasia version of a blandly stage-y New York on one hand and, on the other, there's the odyssey of a man wandering and fucking his way through a landscape of gorgeous, powerful women, most of whom end up being dreamlike, endlessly recursive stand-ins for each other--for whom he's no match physically, emotionally, sexually, or intellectually--while at least one vaguely ominiscent, or at least omnipresent, man tracks his every step. (Not to mention the subplot involving a lengthy trip to Berlin, which even links it to the German-language source material Traumnovella.) There's also shades of the highly controversial ending of AI, when Hoffman's character reveals his desire to re-perform and thus re-live "the happiest day of his life." I hated much of AI, mostly for the places that Spielberg's influence was felt heaviest, but I've always been a staunch defender of that "happy" ending because I feel that everyone misinterprets how darkly Freudian it actually is. Far from feeling like Synecdoche rides off the rails about halfway through, I felt like the weirdness it just keeps descending into actually becomes richer and deeper and more rewarding, even as it becomes more and more willfully incomprehensible. The actor-priest's monologue near the end may be a wee bit on the nose, but I was thankful for its paving the way for the introduction of the summarizing notion that "everyone is everyone," which set up that final scene in which Hoffman pathetically yet tenderly apologizes to a near-stranger who's clearly a stand-in, for, well, everyone. Then again, I'm a sucker for that kind of thematic/narrative trick.
And, fuck me, what a cast. Hoffman is brilliant as ever (the role is actually a perfect companion piece to what he's doing in The Savages), but, as mentioned above, the women are especially phenomenal. I never tire of watching Catherine Keener (like Mary-Louise Parker and Frances McDormand, she's becoming impossibly foxier with every year she ages). It's been a while since I've seen Samantha Morton in anything--I forgot how marvelous she can be, and her slightly plump physique felt like a welcome breath of reality. It seems, after her appearances here and in Brokeback Mountain and I'm Not There, that Michelle Williams is happily turning into quite the actress, and, as she's lost the Dawson's Creek-era baby fat in her face, she's becoming more and more heartbreakingly lovely, somehow evading the dreaded too-skinny stickbug look, ending up somehow slim yet womanly. As I mentioned in my review of The Nines, Hope Davis is always a welcome presence, even in the tiniest role, and getting Emily Watson to double Morton was both hilarious and inspired. And, saving Dianne Wiest's appearance for the end was the absolutely perfect flourish to an already incredible roster of talent.
Longtime Wrestling Entropy readers know that I tend to prefer and privilege these ambitious movies that swing for the fences, even when they don't succeed 100 percent of the way, so it should be no surprise that I adored Synecdoche. It's deeply, deeply sad, but really worth it. As CTLA always used to say, I laughed, I cried, I took notes.
UPDATE, Jan. 15, 2009: For those of you who may have stumbled through to this blog by Google searching for "priest monologue synecdoche, new york," I'm happy to (finally) be able to point you to a transcription here.
Seems like consensus is that Synecdoche, New York is a mess, but my god, what a wonderfully beautiful mess. Aside from the various and sundry easily recognizable Charlie Kaufman mindfuck tropes, it's also full of his signature "the unknowable-ness of the other" pessimism, but it's rendered delicately enough that, though I disagree with the spirit of the argument, I didn't mind it at all. It actually feels positively Kubrickian in its depiction of a unit destroying itself from within--the unit being Philip Seymour Hoffman's body, mind, and soul. In fact, I intuitively sensed I'd love the film as soon as I read Owen Gleiberman's dismissive review in Entertainment Weekly, which was so reminiscent of his totally-missing-the-point write-up of Eyes Wide Shut back in the day. And, wow, is the comparison ever apt: there's the fantasia version of a blandly stage-y New York on one hand and, on the other, there's the odyssey of a man wandering and fucking his way through a landscape of gorgeous, powerful women, most of whom end up being dreamlike, endlessly recursive stand-ins for each other--for whom he's no match physically, emotionally, sexually, or intellectually--while at least one vaguely ominiscent, or at least omnipresent, man tracks his every step. (Not to mention the subplot involving a lengthy trip to Berlin, which even links it to the German-language source material Traumnovella.) There's also shades of the highly controversial ending of AI, when Hoffman's character reveals his desire to re-perform and thus re-live "the happiest day of his life." I hated much of AI, mostly for the places that Spielberg's influence was felt heaviest, but I've always been a staunch defender of that "happy" ending because I feel that everyone misinterprets how darkly Freudian it actually is. Far from feeling like Synecdoche rides off the rails about halfway through, I felt like the weirdness it just keeps descending into actually becomes richer and deeper and more rewarding, even as it becomes more and more willfully incomprehensible. The actor-priest's monologue near the end may be a wee bit on the nose, but I was thankful for its paving the way for the introduction of the summarizing notion that "everyone is everyone," which set up that final scene in which Hoffman pathetically yet tenderly apologizes to a near-stranger who's clearly a stand-in, for, well, everyone. Then again, I'm a sucker for that kind of thematic/narrative trick.
And, fuck me, what a cast. Hoffman is brilliant as ever (the role is actually a perfect companion piece to what he's doing in The Savages), but, as mentioned above, the women are especially phenomenal. I never tire of watching Catherine Keener (like Mary-Louise Parker and Frances McDormand, she's becoming impossibly foxier with every year she ages). It's been a while since I've seen Samantha Morton in anything--I forgot how marvelous she can be, and her slightly plump physique felt like a welcome breath of reality. It seems, after her appearances here and in Brokeback Mountain and I'm Not There, that Michelle Williams is happily turning into quite the actress, and, as she's lost the Dawson's Creek-era baby fat in her face, she's becoming more and more heartbreakingly lovely, somehow evading the dreaded too-skinny stickbug look, ending up somehow slim yet womanly. As I mentioned in my review of The Nines, Hope Davis is always a welcome presence, even in the tiniest role, and getting Emily Watson to double Morton was both hilarious and inspired. And, saving Dianne Wiest's appearance for the end was the absolutely perfect flourish to an already incredible roster of talent.
Longtime Wrestling Entropy readers know that I tend to prefer and privilege these ambitious movies that swing for the fences, even when they don't succeed 100 percent of the way, so it should be no surprise that I adored Synecdoche. It's deeply, deeply sad, but really worth it. As CTLA always used to say, I laughed, I cried, I took notes.
UPDATE, Jan. 15, 2009: For those of you who may have stumbled through to this blog by Google searching for "priest monologue synecdoche, new york," I'm happy to (finally) be able to point you to a transcription here.
Wednesday, November 05, 2008
A New Beginning
In stark contrast to the morning after last time, the sun is out today, the sky is bright blue, the air is unseasonably warm, the trees are still full of glowing, fiery foliage, and, as I wrote here, TV on the Radio's "Golden Age" was the first thing that popped into my head when I woke up and opened my eyes. Let's not get ahead of ourselves or anything, but damn. This feels good. Proud of Chicago, proud of us all.
Monday, November 03, 2008
Early November Pop Notes
SB asked me recently, "don't you have to write about the TV on the Radio show on your blog?" Truth is, I wasn't really planning on it. I just didn't feel like I needed to pile on them again after my Dear Science review. As I mentioned to Parowpyro over email, I can't think of another band I like as much as TVotR that's left me as resoundingly underwhelmed as they have recently (aside from perhaps Bloc Party--I could barely get through Intimacy). I'm glad I finally had a chance to see them live and all, but the show did absolutely nothing for me. Unlike a lot of folks, I actively enjoy Sitek's overstuffed production aesthetic, so the songs, translated live, were missing quite a bit of oomph for me, even when they brought a whole shitload of people onstage for a percussion jam and sent the horn section up into one of the boxes. I swear, I'm not trying to be stubborn or contrarian or whatevs, I just wasn't feeling it.
Openers the Dirtbombs fell a little bit to one side of the too-loud/too-heavy spectrum for my taste to make me want to listen to their stuff on a regular basis, but they were enjoyable enough live. The one thing that really endeared them to me, though, was the way they utilized what's usually just dead-air space after their set: their lead singer/guitarist and one of their drummers (yes, sigh, one of their drummers) started to unplug and pack up their gear as the lights came up, while the other guitar player, the other drummer, and the bassist continued to vamp on a nice little groove. As the bassist, and then the guitar player, began to drop out, splinter off, and pack up, the drummer kept his backbeat steady, even as the roadies began to disassemble the drum kit out from underneath him, until he was just banging on the side of the kick drum. It was a highly amusing use of that transitional time, and a fun challenge to see how long they could keep it going. I cheered way louder for that stunt that I did for any of their other songs that night. I just appreciated that extra little bit of silliness and playing with the form of "rock show opening set."
Movie-wise, I made damn sure to get my ass out to see Rachel Getting Married and loved it, loved it, loved it. I don't know if it's just because I've been to four weddings this year since mid-August (with a fifth coming up this weekend!), but it just totally wrecked me. A handful of the people I've talked to about the film have complained about the meandering pace and the ridiculously idealized/utopian vision of the attendees, the music and other entertainment at the reception, and of course the wedding itself. Aside from the fact that I have an inherent soft spot for these kinds of movies where so much of the pleasure of the piece is derived from watching beautiful, talented people give of their beauty and talent in what feels like real time (it reminded me a lot of sentimental fave The Anniversary Party), I think it's precisely those elements that are key to the film's success. You need them to be able to breathe a bit, to unwind from all the horrifyingly tense scenes of family drama. It would just be too relentlessly unpleasant, claustrophobic, and even melodramatic otherwise. I just felt like it was extraordinarily well paced, both from scene to scene and from front to back, especially as information about Rachel gets parceled out. The right to happiness you see she's earned so dearly by the time she's ready to walk down the aisle absolutely destroyed me. It just hit me in a deeply personal place. Seriously, I was a mess there in the theater. I wouldn't say that Anne Hathaway is brilliant, though she's used extremely effectively and certainly has scenes of brilliance (the cringe-inducing speech at the rehearsal dinner stands out especially). Kudos to the ever-enjoyable Bill Irwin for elevating what could have been a boring patriarch character (the malaprop "hungabungas" for "hamburgers"--whether improvised or appearing in the actual script--made me want to barf with glee, it was such a perfectly dead-on one-word encapsulation of his genial suburban dad attitude), and, all my recent carping about TVotR to one side, I thought the casting of Tunde Adebimpe was inspired. He's clearly very attractive, but not in an over-the-top kind of way (imagine if the part had been played by Taye Diggs or whoever--egad), and he's got such a quiet, gentle strength in his onscreen presence that was absolutely necessary for getting you to connect with the otherwise underwritten character. I'm not necessarily recommending this movie to you--if your expectations are too high from all the glowing write-ups it's received already, I don't want to contribute to the disappointment they'll probably engender in you if/when you eventually see it. Plus, I'm just not in the mood to fight about it too much, because, as I said, I loved it, full stop, and just kind of want to keep my warm feelings about it for a little while longer.
I also had a chance to catch up with Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, which I'd been hoping would be a teenage, indie rock Before Sunrise set in New York, but ended up being more like a millennial indie rock Adventures in Babysitting set in New York without the urban scariness (the city is definitely a benevolent presence throughout in that by-now cliched "the city is another character!" kind of way). Not that that's entirely a bad thing, but...expectation management and all. Cera's charm, while not exactly wearing thin quite yet, could just use a fresher environment to flourish in; I'll be eager, for obvious reasons, to see how he fares in the Scott Pilgrim movie.
I just can't get enough of the Sea and Cake's new one. Honestly, I now think a lot of my indie rock fatigue from last month was really just disappointment that none of those new releases was Car Alarm. After growing to love Everybody so much last year, I didn't really realize how much I was looking forward to the follow-up. It's dandy. Just really easy on the ears--and I mean that as the highest possible compliment. My dad and a fellow musician friend of his always used to say of their favorite jazz soloists "they play it the way you want to hear it played," and I think the same is eminently true of the Sea and Cake in general.
Juana Molina's Un Dia has also gotten quite a bit of play recently. Kittens, this is music to blow the remaining autumn leaves right off the treetops. Either that or to keep those lonely ones left over plastered right where they are, melancholy but vibrant, lit from inside with a dying fire, in perpetuity. Everything I've ever read about Molina has led me to believe I'd respond really well to her work, and I'm happy not to have been wrong in that assumption.
"And then, he DJ'ed the afterparty." Hallelujah. Bring it.
Openers the Dirtbombs fell a little bit to one side of the too-loud/too-heavy spectrum for my taste to make me want to listen to their stuff on a regular basis, but they were enjoyable enough live. The one thing that really endeared them to me, though, was the way they utilized what's usually just dead-air space after their set: their lead singer/guitarist and one of their drummers (yes, sigh, one of their drummers) started to unplug and pack up their gear as the lights came up, while the other guitar player, the other drummer, and the bassist continued to vamp on a nice little groove. As the bassist, and then the guitar player, began to drop out, splinter off, and pack up, the drummer kept his backbeat steady, even as the roadies began to disassemble the drum kit out from underneath him, until he was just banging on the side of the kick drum. It was a highly amusing use of that transitional time, and a fun challenge to see how long they could keep it going. I cheered way louder for that stunt that I did for any of their other songs that night. I just appreciated that extra little bit of silliness and playing with the form of "rock show opening set."
Movie-wise, I made damn sure to get my ass out to see Rachel Getting Married and loved it, loved it, loved it. I don't know if it's just because I've been to four weddings this year since mid-August (with a fifth coming up this weekend!), but it just totally wrecked me. A handful of the people I've talked to about the film have complained about the meandering pace and the ridiculously idealized/utopian vision of the attendees, the music and other entertainment at the reception, and of course the wedding itself. Aside from the fact that I have an inherent soft spot for these kinds of movies where so much of the pleasure of the piece is derived from watching beautiful, talented people give of their beauty and talent in what feels like real time (it reminded me a lot of sentimental fave The Anniversary Party), I think it's precisely those elements that are key to the film's success. You need them to be able to breathe a bit, to unwind from all the horrifyingly tense scenes of family drama. It would just be too relentlessly unpleasant, claustrophobic, and even melodramatic otherwise. I just felt like it was extraordinarily well paced, both from scene to scene and from front to back, especially as information about Rachel gets parceled out. The right to happiness you see she's earned so dearly by the time she's ready to walk down the aisle absolutely destroyed me. It just hit me in a deeply personal place. Seriously, I was a mess there in the theater. I wouldn't say that Anne Hathaway is brilliant, though she's used extremely effectively and certainly has scenes of brilliance (the cringe-inducing speech at the rehearsal dinner stands out especially). Kudos to the ever-enjoyable Bill Irwin for elevating what could have been a boring patriarch character (the malaprop "hungabungas" for "hamburgers"--whether improvised or appearing in the actual script--made me want to barf with glee, it was such a perfectly dead-on one-word encapsulation of his genial suburban dad attitude), and, all my recent carping about TVotR to one side, I thought the casting of Tunde Adebimpe was inspired. He's clearly very attractive, but not in an over-the-top kind of way (imagine if the part had been played by Taye Diggs or whoever--egad), and he's got such a quiet, gentle strength in his onscreen presence that was absolutely necessary for getting you to connect with the otherwise underwritten character. I'm not necessarily recommending this movie to you--if your expectations are too high from all the glowing write-ups it's received already, I don't want to contribute to the disappointment they'll probably engender in you if/when you eventually see it. Plus, I'm just not in the mood to fight about it too much, because, as I said, I loved it, full stop, and just kind of want to keep my warm feelings about it for a little while longer.
I also had a chance to catch up with Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, which I'd been hoping would be a teenage, indie rock Before Sunrise set in New York, but ended up being more like a millennial indie rock Adventures in Babysitting set in New York without the urban scariness (the city is definitely a benevolent presence throughout in that by-now cliched "the city is another character!" kind of way). Not that that's entirely a bad thing, but...expectation management and all. Cera's charm, while not exactly wearing thin quite yet, could just use a fresher environment to flourish in; I'll be eager, for obvious reasons, to see how he fares in the Scott Pilgrim movie.
I just can't get enough of the Sea and Cake's new one. Honestly, I now think a lot of my indie rock fatigue from last month was really just disappointment that none of those new releases was Car Alarm. After growing to love Everybody so much last year, I didn't really realize how much I was looking forward to the follow-up. It's dandy. Just really easy on the ears--and I mean that as the highest possible compliment. My dad and a fellow musician friend of his always used to say of their favorite jazz soloists "they play it the way you want to hear it played," and I think the same is eminently true of the Sea and Cake in general.
Juana Molina's Un Dia has also gotten quite a bit of play recently. Kittens, this is music to blow the remaining autumn leaves right off the treetops. Either that or to keep those lonely ones left over plastered right where they are, melancholy but vibrant, lit from inside with a dying fire, in perpetuity. Everything I've ever read about Molina has led me to believe I'd respond really well to her work, and I'm happy not to have been wrong in that assumption.
"And then, he DJ'ed the afterparty." Hallelujah. Bring it.
Sunday, November 02, 2008
Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found
Quite simply one of the best books I've read in a long damn time.
If you're the type of person who's likely to initiate a conversation with me by asking "so what are you reading these days?" you've inevitably been bored by the response I've been giving since about mid-June: "still slogging through that book about Bombay." Despite being employed in the publishing industry (or perhaps because of it), my reading habits are ridiculously erratic, and, even though I've been eager to check this book out since I first read the wonderful interview with author Suketu Mehta in the February 2008 issue of The Believer on the plane home from visiting my brother in San Francisco, I had a hard time tackling this 556-page behemoth. Partly, it was because of the book's structure: nearly half is dominated by the front-loaded section entitled "Power" that focuses on riots, gangs, cops, politics, Muslim vs. Hindu tension and other sensitive issues that inspire such brutality on the city's streets. It's fascinating stuff, and insanely well reported, but just not all that inherently interesting to me. It was only when the book finally opened into part two, "Pleasure" (and then beyond that into part three, "Passages"), that I felt myself becoming truly drawn in. Of course, the deeper I got into the book, the more I realized how ingenious the structure actually is. Like some sort of journalistic interpretation of Zeno's dichotomy paradox, it makes its way across this incredible distance by dividing itself in half, then in half again, then half again. And, much like a too-long, too-much Bollywood movie, with every chunk of prose that Mehta churns out, giving you pages and pages about a character or an issue, not exactly numbing you as a reader, but lulling you into a false sense of placid receptivity, he'll then cap the section with an incredibly potent paragraph or page that cuts to the juiciest, bloodiest part of the heart of the matter. I got somewhat addicted to that wonderful feeling of being intellectually punched in the throat, feeling more than a little breathless with emotion, marveling at his pacing and his ability to give you the exact punctuation that you didn't even know you needed. The book is littered with these gems, and if you look at my copy of the book, you'll see dog-eared corners marking them (beginning, yes, about halfway through), like little winks or high-fives, to myself or to Mehta or maybe both of us, I can't quite tell. Earlier this year I picked up the Jane Jacobs classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and, um, failed to finish it. Not for lack of interest--I'm sure I'll go back to it again one day, perhaps sooner rather that later--but it just wasn't the right book for me at the right time. It's polite and wonderfully sensible, and even a bit droll in places. But, with my recently renewed and reconfirmed passion for cities and the type of life it's possible to live in them, I think I wanted it to be more like Maximum City: absolutely pulsating with life, crying out in extremes of despair and ecstasy and every possible recombinant variation of the two, a profound meditation on the atomic essence of people, places, and things at their most raw and unfiltered. Highly, highly recommended, kittens.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Man Man, Live at the Bottom Lounge
Scott at Pretty Goes with Pretty has written insightfully recently about the "cluster of impressions" you often form about a particular artist or band before you've ever heard their music based on the general way other people talk about it (usually reductively, usually in a way that makes you think it's not for you). On a somewhat related note, I had the joy of discovering this weekend what it's actually like to see Man Man perform live, which was so much more interesting than what I'd been assuming it would be like to see Man Man perform live over the past three years that I've been trying to get to one of their shows. Sure, there's the white clothes and the warpaint and the circus pirate Salvation Army band Looney Tunes song structures, but does anybody talk about how smart these guys are? Even when I'd heard a million times over that old chestnut "they're so much better live," I just assumed that was a testament to their energy or insanity or a general anything-goes unpredictability. But I wasn't really prepared--at least until I read Honus Honus's comment in a recent issue of Magnet magazine that his intention was to make the band a musical version of the Jodorowsky film The Holy Mountain--to be confronted with this overwhelmingly intelligent controlling consciousness humming behind and in the spaces between the notes. These dudes know exactly what they're doing, and, three albums and many, many tours into their career, they've gotten absurdly good at doing it. (I was at the early show on Saturday night and have no idea how they were going to do all that again immediately thereafter.)
It's not exactly that they're hiding how smart they are or anything--it's more that their chosen aesthetic allows them to work on two levels simultaneously. The cliched, received-wisdom-about-Man-Man level is the level that allowed all those fourteen-year-old boys to flail around in a mini-mosh pit at the lip of the stage, just buzzed out of their gourds on the electricity in the music and performance. (And let me tell you--I very rarely ever wish I were a fourteen-year-old boy, but I sure as hell did on Saturday night. It would have felt surpassingly awesome to be able to participate, and reciprocate, with the show in that way.) That's the level you expect, the level you can predict. But the second level, the quieter level that you'll never really see until you're present in a room with them when they're doing their thing live on stage is the level that...what? I'm having a hard time even conceptualizing what it is. It's a level of confidence, I suppose--their own confidence that they're in complete control of what they're doing, which in turn gave me as an audience member the confidence to trust them to take me where they were going to take me. (This is the same confidence I felt last summer when I saw of Montreal play for the first time at the Pitchfork Music Festival, and in many ways I think the comparison is apt.)
This confidence also binds together all the disparate elements that compose the standard Man Man talking points (the aforementioned white clothes, warpaint, etc.). When someone starts describing those aspects of their performances, it tends to sound like the most eye-rollingly hipsterrific collection of willfully random yet somehow artsy/pretentious affectations smashed together to give an overall impression of "OMG, crazy!" But it's actually all remarkably, even precisely, balanced in practice, like some sort of exquisitely spiced curry that plays sweetness and heat and savory elements off each other until your primary impression is just "holy fuck, I don't know what this is, but I know I want more of it."
And for as much as I've been enjoying Rabbit Habits this year, the album is almost rendered obsolete by my desire to never listen to their music anymore unless I can hear it live, so overwhelmingly satisfying is the complete live performance package. Almost--because one of the spices in the curry is the fact that these guys are amazing musicians, and, shit, just listen to them play. CTLA and I always become enamored of Chris Funk's proficiency on multiple instruments whenever we see the Decemberists play live, and it's like Man Man has three Chris Funks in the band. The marimba parts, the Django Reinhardt-aping guitar lines, the squawking horns--the casual mastery is thrilling. Plus, of course, Pow Pow is an insanely gifted dervish on the drums and Honus Honus is pure sex, a young Tom Waits soundalike that mightily resembles Jason Schwartzman in The Darjeeling Limited, 'stache and all.
I realize their aesthetic may not be for everyone, and I realize that my attempt to describe what they're doing here is only contributing to the problem, adding to whatever cluster of impressions you've formed around them, but I would seriously encourage you to check out their show if they tour anywhere close to where you live in the near future.
Opener Tim Fite was likewise a welcome surprise, a wonderfully oddball combination of Shockheaded Peter-era Tiger Lillies and O Brother, Where Art Thou?, capable of getting a roomful of hipsters to sing "Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes" not just once, but twice in the course of the show. Um, and then he rapped?
The rest of my pictures from the night are posted here.
I also did make it out to that Jamie Lidell/Baby Teeth show at the Metro I was pimping a few weeks back, and it was every bit as fantastic as I was expecting. Baby Teeth played a shitload of new material that sounded awesome, and Lidell's band has indeed tightened up since the beginning of their tour in June. And Jamie's voice is just...wow. "Rope of Sand" always kind of gets ruined for me on the album because of those breathy female ah-ahs that get layered in toward the end of the track, but hearing him sing it live just totally destroyed me in the best way possible. There's a certain point at which this guy is just so talented that it's like he's sneezing diamonds. Pics from that show here.
Tuesday, October 07, 2008
Welcome, Facebookers
I don't know who linked to me on Facebook, but to those of you who are visiting from behind those garden walls, I say welcome.
Sunday, October 05, 2008
New Music, Fall '08
I really resent the seasons when new music releases start to bottleneck. It makes me hate all my music, makes my music consumption feel like just that--consumption. I'm sucking up album after album, not really liking anything, even when it's stuff by artists I happen to be fond of or admire. My eyes and ears glaze over, and I just keep reflexively hitting "shuffle" on my iPod because I can't bear to make the effort to try to emotionally or intellectually connect with another new album qua album. It usually happens in the late summer, but through whatever trick of scheduling fate, it's hitting me now. So, if you're in the mood for some (mostly) crabby, dismissive, unfair, and kneejerk reviews, read on.
TV on the Radio, Dear Science
Is there anyone on earth who can convince me that this album is actually as good as it (and everyone else) thinks it is? My relationship with TV on the Radio's music is kind of all over the place. I got into them through Cookie Mountain, and I dig the hell out of that album. But then earlier this year, as some of you may remember, I went backward and started listening to Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes a lot, almost accidentally. And it's just so dark and twisted and sexy, esp. in the way that it almost dares you to dismiss it as ugly with its harsh electronic skeletons jutting out all over the place and its slowly maddening water torture beats. Great stuff. And now, though, Dear Science? I was put off by it the first few listens, then felt myself start to relent a little bit, but now I'm back to being hugely skeptical. You know what always snaps me out of my momentary lapses of generosity? When I think to myself: what if Bjork had released this album? A not so small part of me would have died inside. Everyone would have trashed it for being so, so horrible. But because it's TV on the Radio, it seems like we're all trying to will them into being a Big, Important Band through the collective force of our praise. I mean, they're pretty great, but I don't think they're anywhere near to maxing out, or even meeting, their potential yet. (I loved this interview, esp. the bit when the interviewer says, "I demand perfection from this band. I truly believe that they are capable of becoming a great band. Their combinations of genres and influences, their sonics and vocals. They could become like Radiohead." I really kind of agree at this point.) The unfortunate "We Didn't Start the Fire" (nevermind "It's the End of the World As We Know It") chant in "Dancing Choose" just makes me so embarrassed for them. "Family Tree" is just about as un-pretty and uninteresting as a supposedly pretty/meaningful song can get. The fact that they not only built a song around the phrase "shout me out" but also use it as the song's title? Unforgivable. (It just makes me think of that awful MySpace-era phrase that always curdles my blood a bit: the bon mot "hit me up!" Gag.) I give them credit for what they're trying to do with "Lover's Day," but really it just seems like an inferior rewrite of the much more arousing and affecting Desperate Youth album-closer "Wear You Out." "Red Dress" does have some pretty genuinely nice funk to it, and parts of "Halfway Home" (esp. the chorus) are exciting. Mostly, though, this album reminds me a lot of the Decemberists' Picaresque: it sounds exactly like what you'd expect it to sound like, with some high points here and there, while still managing to be deeply boring on the whole. Hopefully they'll give us their equivalent to The Crane Wife the next go round.
AND SPEAKING of the Decemberists, does anybody actually understand what's going on with their new "singles series"? I'm pretty savvy about downloads and the like, but all this multiple version, multiple release date crap just makes me feel old and crabby because I'm finding it impossible to remember what comes out when and when I can gain access to it.
Bound Stems, The Family Afloat
I really like the Bound Stems, and I really like to be able to support a hometown band, and there's nothing...wrong with this album, so I don't know why I'm not loving it more. Maybe I just need to give it time. They've trimmed the stray threads off all the patchwork pieces they cobble together to create their songs, which gives it a bit of a slicker, poppier sheen, belying its complexity. I love all the big, multiple voice singalong parts, and hearing Janie Porche repeatedly coo the title phrase in the context of the relentlessly building "Sugar City Magic" is a really great suckerpunch that left me breathless with emotion on the first listen.
Cold War Kids, Loyalty to Loyalty
I've been an unapologetic Cold War Kids fangirl from the beginning and am pleased as punch on their behalf to see that their upcoming show in Chicago sold out almost instantly (even before I could manage to get a ticket; I haven't been able to see them live since the Hideout in October '06 for this very reason). The songs sound great, though there are no immediate standouts on a par with "Hospital Beds," "We Used to Vacation," or "Hang Me Out to Dry." But, again, it's hard for me to bring myself to put this album on. I'll be scrolling through my iPod, and I'll see it sitting there, just waiting for me, but there's nothing really pushing me over the edge to dig into it. Maybe if it had come out earlier in the summer, in isolation, away from all these other albums clamoring for my attention, I would've been able to get more excited about it.
Kings of Leon, Only by the Night
I know it's deeply uncool to like Kings of Leon, but I just love how barfy they are. I'm willing to be patient with this one a little while longer because it took me quite some time to really hear what Because of the Times was doing. At the outset, though, I'm enjoying it on a shallow level. "Manhattan" is proving to be a standout.
King Sparrow, Derailer EP
Here's another Chicago band, this one pretty new on the scene. I haven't had a chance to hear them live yet, but based on their wonderfully crunchy forthcoming five-song EP, I've already put their November 15 show at the Double Door on my calendar. (Full disclosure: singer/guitarist Eric Georgevich is a pal.) It's refreshing to hear a young band come out of the gate with such a full, confident spectrum of sound--subway rumble bass lines hurtling past scuzzy dump truck drums, gritty guitars playing cat and mouse with splashy, insistent cymbal crashes, while the sweetly melodic tenor vocals curve and twist above it all, like a brightly colored flag planted on top of this whole hill of noise. The songs are pretty immediately ingratiating, with the taut and chugging "Sightseers" (my personal fave so far) opening it all with a bang. Keep your eyes and ears open for these kids!
Thieves of the Night
And, one last one for the Chicagoans. There's no music here, just a must-see promo video that's not even two minutes long. You really should imagine double penetration.
TV on the Radio, Dear Science
Is there anyone on earth who can convince me that this album is actually as good as it (and everyone else) thinks it is? My relationship with TV on the Radio's music is kind of all over the place. I got into them through Cookie Mountain, and I dig the hell out of that album. But then earlier this year, as some of you may remember, I went backward and started listening to Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes a lot, almost accidentally. And it's just so dark and twisted and sexy, esp. in the way that it almost dares you to dismiss it as ugly with its harsh electronic skeletons jutting out all over the place and its slowly maddening water torture beats. Great stuff. And now, though, Dear Science? I was put off by it the first few listens, then felt myself start to relent a little bit, but now I'm back to being hugely skeptical. You know what always snaps me out of my momentary lapses of generosity? When I think to myself: what if Bjork had released this album? A not so small part of me would have died inside. Everyone would have trashed it for being so, so horrible. But because it's TV on the Radio, it seems like we're all trying to will them into being a Big, Important Band through the collective force of our praise. I mean, they're pretty great, but I don't think they're anywhere near to maxing out, or even meeting, their potential yet. (I loved this interview, esp. the bit when the interviewer says, "I demand perfection from this band. I truly believe that they are capable of becoming a great band. Their combinations of genres and influences, their sonics and vocals. They could become like Radiohead." I really kind of agree at this point.) The unfortunate "We Didn't Start the Fire" (nevermind "It's the End of the World As We Know It") chant in "Dancing Choose" just makes me so embarrassed for them. "Family Tree" is just about as un-pretty and uninteresting as a supposedly pretty/meaningful song can get. The fact that they not only built a song around the phrase "shout me out" but also use it as the song's title? Unforgivable. (It just makes me think of that awful MySpace-era phrase that always curdles my blood a bit: the bon mot "hit me up!" Gag.) I give them credit for what they're trying to do with "Lover's Day," but really it just seems like an inferior rewrite of the much more arousing and affecting Desperate Youth album-closer "Wear You Out." "Red Dress" does have some pretty genuinely nice funk to it, and parts of "Halfway Home" (esp. the chorus) are exciting. Mostly, though, this album reminds me a lot of the Decemberists' Picaresque: it sounds exactly like what you'd expect it to sound like, with some high points here and there, while still managing to be deeply boring on the whole. Hopefully they'll give us their equivalent to The Crane Wife the next go round.
AND SPEAKING of the Decemberists, does anybody actually understand what's going on with their new "singles series"? I'm pretty savvy about downloads and the like, but all this multiple version, multiple release date crap just makes me feel old and crabby because I'm finding it impossible to remember what comes out when and when I can gain access to it.
Bound Stems, The Family Afloat
I really like the Bound Stems, and I really like to be able to support a hometown band, and there's nothing...wrong with this album, so I don't know why I'm not loving it more. Maybe I just need to give it time. They've trimmed the stray threads off all the patchwork pieces they cobble together to create their songs, which gives it a bit of a slicker, poppier sheen, belying its complexity. I love all the big, multiple voice singalong parts, and hearing Janie Porche repeatedly coo the title phrase in the context of the relentlessly building "Sugar City Magic" is a really great suckerpunch that left me breathless with emotion on the first listen.
Cold War Kids, Loyalty to Loyalty
I've been an unapologetic Cold War Kids fangirl from the beginning and am pleased as punch on their behalf to see that their upcoming show in Chicago sold out almost instantly (even before I could manage to get a ticket; I haven't been able to see them live since the Hideout in October '06 for this very reason). The songs sound great, though there are no immediate standouts on a par with "Hospital Beds," "We Used to Vacation," or "Hang Me Out to Dry." But, again, it's hard for me to bring myself to put this album on. I'll be scrolling through my iPod, and I'll see it sitting there, just waiting for me, but there's nothing really pushing me over the edge to dig into it. Maybe if it had come out earlier in the summer, in isolation, away from all these other albums clamoring for my attention, I would've been able to get more excited about it.
Kings of Leon, Only by the Night
I know it's deeply uncool to like Kings of Leon, but I just love how barfy they are. I'm willing to be patient with this one a little while longer because it took me quite some time to really hear what Because of the Times was doing. At the outset, though, I'm enjoying it on a shallow level. "Manhattan" is proving to be a standout.
King Sparrow, Derailer EP
Here's another Chicago band, this one pretty new on the scene. I haven't had a chance to hear them live yet, but based on their wonderfully crunchy forthcoming five-song EP, I've already put their November 15 show at the Double Door on my calendar. (Full disclosure: singer/guitarist Eric Georgevich is a pal.) It's refreshing to hear a young band come out of the gate with such a full, confident spectrum of sound--subway rumble bass lines hurtling past scuzzy dump truck drums, gritty guitars playing cat and mouse with splashy, insistent cymbal crashes, while the sweetly melodic tenor vocals curve and twist above it all, like a brightly colored flag planted on top of this whole hill of noise. The songs are pretty immediately ingratiating, with the taut and chugging "Sightseers" (my personal fave so far) opening it all with a bang. Keep your eyes and ears open for these kids!
Thieves of the Night
And, one last one for the Chicagoans. There's no music here, just a must-see promo video that's not even two minutes long. You really should imagine double penetration.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Sunday, September 14, 2008
DFW
RIP times one million, David Foster Wallace. Not to compare them in the same breath or anything, but between him and Heath Ledger, the amount of potential talent we've lost this year is completely, astonishingly sad. I won't comment or speculate on the circumstances of his death, for mine is not to judge, but I'm super fucking broken up about it. Guess I finally have to get around to reading Infinite Jest now. I wish I could immediately put my hands on a favorite passage from one of his essays to quote here in memoriam, but the breadth of his brilliance makes it hard to come up with a quick few lines off the top of one's head. Please post in the comments if you can come up with anything.
Tuesday, September 09, 2008
Recent Concert Roundup
Kittens, I've been to a number of concerts in the past month that, for one reason or another, I haven't had a chance to tell you about yet. Let me do so now.
Early in August I made the last minute decision, prompted by an invite from work pal MS, to catch the She & Him show at the Park West. I hate to get all backlashy about it, esp. given how much I genuinely like that album, but . . . I'm gonna do it anyway. First off, the audience was ridiculous. It's the same problem I had the two times that I've seen Eddie Izzard perform live--everyone there is just a bit too amped to see the celebrity on stage, which skews the energy in the room all out of whack. The performer isn't required to win anyone in the crowd over, which, unless you're, I dunno, Nick Cave or somebody, means you're probably going to pander a bit. Zooey's got an undeniably fine voice (which comes off even better than expected live, despite the fact that she definitely oversings, a la Adele), but with the audience ready to go into ecstasies over every note out of her mouth, she was able to hide behind her charm a bit more than I would have liked. Give the people what they want, I guess.
That being said, I'm convinced that there is no more generous musician working in the loosely defined realm of indie rock right now than Matt Ward. Seriously, you guys, for as enormously talented as the dude is, there seems to be not a shred of ego in him. Even though he's at least 80 percent of the draw, for me, to this group, he was just hanging back at the side of the stage in a truly supporting, one might even say subordinate, role. It's really a beautiful thing to watch him make so much space for Zooey to shine. It's truly a testament to how much he clearly adores her and believes in her talent. And not just her talent, but the talent of all the musicians he's surrounded himself with. I can't remember what the last song before the encore was ("Sweet Darlin'" maybe?), but he pulled his by now familiar leaving-the-stage-before-the song-is-over move, which allowed the band to jam on the outro and receive all the audience's (well deserved) adulation at the end of the song. From anyone else (like, say, Beyonce), it would feel shrewd and bordline manipulative ("it's my spotlight to give and now I will give it to my underlings"), but it always comes off as completely classy with him.
Becky Stark of Lavender Diamond opened and sang backup for most of She & Him's set. Talk about a fucking dynamo! She was totally gorgeous and endearingly batty. With her old timey songs, upscale thrift shop fashion sense, and aw-shucks stage demeanor that was so painfully earnest it felt like there just had to be some wickedness underneath it all, she came across as nothing so much as a burlesque performer minus the striptease. I'm definitely planning on checking in with her Lavender Diamond material.
Later in the month came my favorite musical one-two punch in recent memory: Joanna Newsom performing Ys with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on Friday, then Aesop Rock at the Abbey Pub on Saturday. At first blush, of course, they couldn't seem more opposed, but it didn't take long for me to realize how truly complementary they are--two supremely gifted wordsmiths exploding the boundaries of their chosen genres, making slobbering fanboys and -girls out of diehards and casual listeners alike.
As for Joanna at the Symphony Center--what a treat. I find myself returning to Ys in the oddest moments (such as the early morning prep time of my juice fast earlier this summer), and the brilliance of its through-line as a musical/thematic statement was utterly undeniable in a live setting. I just sobbed and sobbed during personal faves "Sawdust and Diamonds" and "Cosmia." I paid a little bit of extra money for a better seat with some good sight lines, and, boy, was it ever worth it. I've steadily warmed to her unconventional voice over the past few years and will now officially no longer hold truck with anyone who talks smack about it. There's just everything a person could want in a vocalist there: warmth, character, spirit, sensitivity, not to mention killer intonation.
Aside from the overhwhelming brilliance and clarity of the CSO buoying her throughout the performance of Ys, she also brought along four other musicians who contributed to those songs, then accompanied her on a bunch of stuff from The Milk-Eyed Mender, as well as some more recent material, after a brief intermission. Drummer Neal Morgan particularly blew me away for his ability to get more music out of a kick drum, floor tom, and some cymbals than I've seen a lot of jackasses get out of a full guitar rig. Plus, he plays barefoot in a three-piece suit, which is, OMG, like totes adorable in its twee mash-up of high-brow earthiness. I also couldn't help but smile at the thought that this was probably the first time out at Symphony Center for a lot of the greasy haired indie rock kids in attendance, which has to count for something.
Aesop totally lit me on fire the next night. The fact that he performed "Fumes" would have been enough to make the show worthwhile in itself (remember those 27 perfect songs with a five-star rating? yeah, that's one of 'em), but dude is such an amazingly magnetic performer it would be hard to overstate just how enjoyable he is to watch. (Plus also, tall.) The genius of his lyrics, the sly, twisty sophistication of his character sketches and narratives, and the devastating sexiness of the soda-pop fizz in his voice all hardly need to be mentioned, but I just couldn't get over how much fire he puts into his physical performance on stage. (Check out my pictures from the night and hopefully you'll see a bit of what I mean.) On the basis of the crowd's reaction, I was definitely one of the few neophytes there. Everybody was loving the stuff off None Shall Pass, without question, but the place really went bonkers whenever he started spitting rhymes from the previous two albums, with call-and-response all over the place, no matter how intricate the syntax and meter. I've also acquired new artwork for the apartment, which always makes me happy.
Oh. I also went to a wedding. And it was fucking awesome.
Early in August I made the last minute decision, prompted by an invite from work pal MS, to catch the She & Him show at the Park West. I hate to get all backlashy about it, esp. given how much I genuinely like that album, but . . . I'm gonna do it anyway. First off, the audience was ridiculous. It's the same problem I had the two times that I've seen Eddie Izzard perform live--everyone there is just a bit too amped to see the celebrity on stage, which skews the energy in the room all out of whack. The performer isn't required to win anyone in the crowd over, which, unless you're, I dunno, Nick Cave or somebody, means you're probably going to pander a bit. Zooey's got an undeniably fine voice (which comes off even better than expected live, despite the fact that she definitely oversings, a la Adele), but with the audience ready to go into ecstasies over every note out of her mouth, she was able to hide behind her charm a bit more than I would have liked. Give the people what they want, I guess.
That being said, I'm convinced that there is no more generous musician working in the loosely defined realm of indie rock right now than Matt Ward. Seriously, you guys, for as enormously talented as the dude is, there seems to be not a shred of ego in him. Even though he's at least 80 percent of the draw, for me, to this group, he was just hanging back at the side of the stage in a truly supporting, one might even say subordinate, role. It's really a beautiful thing to watch him make so much space for Zooey to shine. It's truly a testament to how much he clearly adores her and believes in her talent. And not just her talent, but the talent of all the musicians he's surrounded himself with. I can't remember what the last song before the encore was ("Sweet Darlin'" maybe?), but he pulled his by now familiar leaving-the-stage-before-the song-is-over move, which allowed the band to jam on the outro and receive all the audience's (well deserved) adulation at the end of the song. From anyone else (like, say, Beyonce), it would feel shrewd and bordline manipulative ("it's my spotlight to give and now I will give it to my underlings"), but it always comes off as completely classy with him.
Becky Stark of Lavender Diamond opened and sang backup for most of She & Him's set. Talk about a fucking dynamo! She was totally gorgeous and endearingly batty. With her old timey songs, upscale thrift shop fashion sense, and aw-shucks stage demeanor that was so painfully earnest it felt like there just had to be some wickedness underneath it all, she came across as nothing so much as a burlesque performer minus the striptease. I'm definitely planning on checking in with her Lavender Diamond material.
Later in the month came my favorite musical one-two punch in recent memory: Joanna Newsom performing Ys with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on Friday, then Aesop Rock at the Abbey Pub on Saturday. At first blush, of course, they couldn't seem more opposed, but it didn't take long for me to realize how truly complementary they are--two supremely gifted wordsmiths exploding the boundaries of their chosen genres, making slobbering fanboys and -girls out of diehards and casual listeners alike.
As for Joanna at the Symphony Center--what a treat. I find myself returning to Ys in the oddest moments (such as the early morning prep time of my juice fast earlier this summer), and the brilliance of its through-line as a musical/thematic statement was utterly undeniable in a live setting. I just sobbed and sobbed during personal faves "Sawdust and Diamonds" and "Cosmia." I paid a little bit of extra money for a better seat with some good sight lines, and, boy, was it ever worth it. I've steadily warmed to her unconventional voice over the past few years and will now officially no longer hold truck with anyone who talks smack about it. There's just everything a person could want in a vocalist there: warmth, character, spirit, sensitivity, not to mention killer intonation.
Aside from the overhwhelming brilliance and clarity of the CSO buoying her throughout the performance of Ys, she also brought along four other musicians who contributed to those songs, then accompanied her on a bunch of stuff from The Milk-Eyed Mender, as well as some more recent material, after a brief intermission. Drummer Neal Morgan particularly blew me away for his ability to get more music out of a kick drum, floor tom, and some cymbals than I've seen a lot of jackasses get out of a full guitar rig. Plus, he plays barefoot in a three-piece suit, which is, OMG, like totes adorable in its twee mash-up of high-brow earthiness. I also couldn't help but smile at the thought that this was probably the first time out at Symphony Center for a lot of the greasy haired indie rock kids in attendance, which has to count for something.
Aesop totally lit me on fire the next night. The fact that he performed "Fumes" would have been enough to make the show worthwhile in itself (remember those 27 perfect songs with a five-star rating? yeah, that's one of 'em), but dude is such an amazingly magnetic performer it would be hard to overstate just how enjoyable he is to watch. (Plus also, tall.) The genius of his lyrics, the sly, twisty sophistication of his character sketches and narratives, and the devastating sexiness of the soda-pop fizz in his voice all hardly need to be mentioned, but I just couldn't get over how much fire he puts into his physical performance on stage. (Check out my pictures from the night and hopefully you'll see a bit of what I mean.) On the basis of the crowd's reaction, I was definitely one of the few neophytes there. Everybody was loving the stuff off None Shall Pass, without question, but the place really went bonkers whenever he started spitting rhymes from the previous two albums, with call-and-response all over the place, no matter how intricate the syntax and meter. I've also acquired new artwork for the apartment, which always makes me happy.
Oh. I also went to a wedding. And it was fucking awesome.
Thursday, August 28, 2008
This Just In: I'm Full of Shit!
OK, I'm willing to eat my words here: Shearwater's Rook is an incredible album. I kind of hate the term 'grower', but that's clearly what it is. I just needed to learn the contours of the music better before I really could hear what it's doing. I've been listening to it a lot these past few days, and it's fucking epic. The piano lines sound, in places, like EST (RIP!), the guitar lines churn like Lake Michigan in a thunderstorm, and the little spikes of various reed instruments throughout give me tingles. All that being said, however, I still do think Meiburg over relies on his falsetto. I just have trouble with the preciousness of it. Trouble is, I get the sense that he thinks it's one of his selling points as a singer/musician, that he thinks he's really bowling us over when he pulls it out. But, I just don't hear it as an instrument in the same way, say, Justin Vernon's is. When Vernon uses his, I hear genuine pain. When Meiburg uses his, I hear an overeducated young man emoting with maximum self-consciousness. Meiburg's a very fine singer; his full-throated howls are resonant and exciting. But there's something slightly, unfortunately one-dimensional about his falsetto, kind of like getting out of the pool and wrapping yourself in a soggy towel. But anyway. I'm glad to have been proven wrong about the album; it's become a good companion for me (esp. with my previously mentioned fetish for listening to a full tracklisting in one sitting on the train in the morning).
Oh yes, and how about the Walkmen's new one? I didn't have my hate on for A Hundred Miles Off the way a lot of folks did, but I, weirdly, appreciate it even more now for the way it seems like such a clear dress rehearsal for the more mature, refined, almost elegant sound they've got going on with You & Me. Their talent for cracking open their albums with tightly coiled menace and desire continues unabated; "Donde Esta La Playa" instantly made me go "woah, hold on a second here..." when it first came rumbling into my headphones. That combination of the midnight bebop perambulations of Barrick's drums and the saline midrange of the beyond-mellow organ is the doorway to exactly the kind of sound and exactly the kind of songs the Walkmen have always meant to be playing and writing. This might prove to be a career-definer for 'em.
Other recent highlights from my personal Class of '03? Well, the fucking Stills, OK? They're such a superlative B+ band. It is an uncomplicated affection I have for them! I just like Tim Fletcher's voice and find their rhythm section consistently inventive.
Oh yes, and how about the Walkmen's new one? I didn't have my hate on for A Hundred Miles Off the way a lot of folks did, but I, weirdly, appreciate it even more now for the way it seems like such a clear dress rehearsal for the more mature, refined, almost elegant sound they've got going on with You & Me. Their talent for cracking open their albums with tightly coiled menace and desire continues unabated; "Donde Esta La Playa" instantly made me go "woah, hold on a second here..." when it first came rumbling into my headphones. That combination of the midnight bebop perambulations of Barrick's drums and the saline midrange of the beyond-mellow organ is the doorway to exactly the kind of sound and exactly the kind of songs the Walkmen have always meant to be playing and writing. This might prove to be a career-definer for 'em.
Other recent highlights from my personal Class of '03? Well, the fucking Stills, OK? They're such a superlative B+ band. It is an uncomplicated affection I have for them! I just like Tim Fletcher's voice and find their rhythm section consistently inventive.
Friday, August 22, 2008
The Nines
Remember the first couple times you saw Pulp Fiction in high school and you had a bunch of pseudo-philosophical conversations with your friends afterward discussing the possible theories of What Was in the Briefcase and Why Marcellus Wallace Wore the Bandage on His Neck? Well, imagine if someone took a composite of all those conversations and turned them into a feature-length movie, and you'd be pretty close to the experience of watching The Nines. Lowbrow, Hollywood-insidery, vaguely meta, self-consciously straining to be a Donnie Darko-esque mindfuck, and ridiculously yet sophomorically pretentious--this movie is a veritable Arthur Murray instruction manual of post-Tarantino cinematic missteps.
Kittens, this movie is a mess and I can't in good conscience recommend it to anyone, but I found myself inexplicably delighted by it anyway. Maybe it was the sheer joy of having a free night at home alone to watch some piece of shit DVD on my couch in my jammies with a glass of booze in hand or maybe it's because it reminded me a bit of my old fave Dead Again (which I haven't seen in ages but am pretty sure I'd despise if I saw it for the first time now), but I just couldn't bring myself to get too riled up by it, despite the fact that it continued to go exactly in all the most obnoxious directions I was mentally begging it not to go. Even though it was missing the erotic Eurotrash patina that usually distinguishes these horrible train wrecks I find so fascinating, I think it also was reminding me of movies like The Wisdom of Crocodiles and Birthday Girl in the way that it was committing with poker-faced abandon to the insanity of its own attempt at a distinct internal logic.
It was also buoyed by a really remarkable, well-chosen cast and a superb series of performances from Ryan Reynolds. Is he the North American Jason Statham? Or is he the Ryan Gosling of B-movies? Either way, the smartest thing The Nines does is begin with Reynolds in character as a hot, cocky, drug-addled TV star on a bender--which is to say, a persona akin to how you probably think of the real-life Ryan Reynolds, if you think about him at all. Then the movie shifts into its second layer of narrative and he appears as a gay screenwriter trying to get a new TV pilot on the air, and damn if the genuine subtlety and range he shows all of a sudden doesn't completely upend how you'd just mentally oriented yourself to the world of this movie and your perceptions of his talent (or lack thereof). I'm absolutely sure this must have been an intentional choice, very much of a piece with the film's whole theme of questioning/destabilizing how well you truly know yourself and the people closest to you in your life. Like I say, it's probably the smartest thing the movie does over its 99-minute running time. The character is apparently based, loosely autobiographically, on writer/director John August, so who knows how much of the performance is just an impression, but I'm not sure how much that matters to me, especially given that Reynolds goes one further in the third and final vignette and shows a real, sweet gentleness as the bearded video game-designer dad.
The movie simultaneously goes too far and not far enough in its attempt to use Melissa McCarthy to make some sort of comment on perceptions of weight in Hollywood and society, but hey, a chance to watch Melissa McCarthy carry a leading female role is still a chance to watch Melissa McCarthy carry a leading female role, so I'm not inclined to complain too much. The perennially underused Hope Davis is also a welcome presence.
I'm a huge, huge, huge fan of Go but had a lot of problems with the insipid daddy issues and faux-profundity about "storytelling" in Big Fish (two of the most prominent features previously written by August), and it's amazing how much The Nines feels like the exact intersection between the two (with a few heaping tablespoons of Soderbergh's incredibly irritating Full Frontal thrown in for good measure). So, little wonder, then, that I found myself drawn in and repulsed by it in equal measure. For better or worse, though, I kind of can't get it out of my head today, which I always, ultimately, take as a good sign.
Also, koalas are telepathic and control the weather. Best throwaway line this side of Spike's bitchy, sotto voce sneers in Buffy.
Kittens, this movie is a mess and I can't in good conscience recommend it to anyone, but I found myself inexplicably delighted by it anyway. Maybe it was the sheer joy of having a free night at home alone to watch some piece of shit DVD on my couch in my jammies with a glass of booze in hand or maybe it's because it reminded me a bit of my old fave Dead Again (which I haven't seen in ages but am pretty sure I'd despise if I saw it for the first time now), but I just couldn't bring myself to get too riled up by it, despite the fact that it continued to go exactly in all the most obnoxious directions I was mentally begging it not to go. Even though it was missing the erotic Eurotrash patina that usually distinguishes these horrible train wrecks I find so fascinating, I think it also was reminding me of movies like The Wisdom of Crocodiles and Birthday Girl in the way that it was committing with poker-faced abandon to the insanity of its own attempt at a distinct internal logic.
It was also buoyed by a really remarkable, well-chosen cast and a superb series of performances from Ryan Reynolds. Is he the North American Jason Statham? Or is he the Ryan Gosling of B-movies? Either way, the smartest thing The Nines does is begin with Reynolds in character as a hot, cocky, drug-addled TV star on a bender--which is to say, a persona akin to how you probably think of the real-life Ryan Reynolds, if you think about him at all. Then the movie shifts into its second layer of narrative and he appears as a gay screenwriter trying to get a new TV pilot on the air, and damn if the genuine subtlety and range he shows all of a sudden doesn't completely upend how you'd just mentally oriented yourself to the world of this movie and your perceptions of his talent (or lack thereof). I'm absolutely sure this must have been an intentional choice, very much of a piece with the film's whole theme of questioning/destabilizing how well you truly know yourself and the people closest to you in your life. Like I say, it's probably the smartest thing the movie does over its 99-minute running time. The character is apparently based, loosely autobiographically, on writer/director John August, so who knows how much of the performance is just an impression, but I'm not sure how much that matters to me, especially given that Reynolds goes one further in the third and final vignette and shows a real, sweet gentleness as the bearded video game-designer dad.
The movie simultaneously goes too far and not far enough in its attempt to use Melissa McCarthy to make some sort of comment on perceptions of weight in Hollywood and society, but hey, a chance to watch Melissa McCarthy carry a leading female role is still a chance to watch Melissa McCarthy carry a leading female role, so I'm not inclined to complain too much. The perennially underused Hope Davis is also a welcome presence.
I'm a huge, huge, huge fan of Go but had a lot of problems with the insipid daddy issues and faux-profundity about "storytelling" in Big Fish (two of the most prominent features previously written by August), and it's amazing how much The Nines feels like the exact intersection between the two (with a few heaping tablespoons of Soderbergh's incredibly irritating Full Frontal thrown in for good measure). So, little wonder, then, that I found myself drawn in and repulsed by it in equal measure. For better or worse, though, I kind of can't get it out of my head today, which I always, ultimately, take as a good sign.
Also, koalas are telepathic and control the weather. Best throwaway line this side of Spike's bitchy, sotto voce sneers in Buffy.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
False Musical Memories
Obviously, I know that, to some extent, everybody associates certain music with certain specific times of their lives. But does anybody else have false musical memories? Everytime I listen to Death Cab's "We Laugh Indoors" (and, to a lesser degree, "A Movie Script Ending") I'm all, "oh yes, this takes me right back to that fall I spent with Holly in Seattle." Except I totally wasn't listening to that album at least until three years later. What the hell, Gibbard? Way to distill the exact emotional and experiential tenor of the Pacific Northwest and write it directly into the spaces in and around your songs. The same goes for pretty much the entirety of the Clientele's Strange Geometry, which feels so much like the summer I spent studying abroad in London during college that I can all but smell the pee and exhaust fumes from the Underground when I listen to it on my iPod. That album came to me in the dead-freezing cold of January 2006, so, again, I have no idea how the combination of Alasdair MacLean's songwriting and the muted haziness of the production in general can evoke my wistful, romanticized, undergraduate's sense of London so uncannily. I'm thankful for it, though. It's nice to be approached and kind of waved at by one's own past in these unexpected places.
Kids, I hope you're not sleeping on the Kills' Midnight Boom this year. It came out in March, and now that I've been living with it for a few weeks, I'm lamenting that I didn't pick it up sooner. It's so ballsy and smart and sexy. I want to get the lyrics to "Cheap and Cheerful" tattooed down the length of my torso: "I want you to be crazy 'cause you're boring, baby, when you're straight / I want you to be crazy 'cause you're stupid, baby, when you're sane."
On the total other end of the spectrum, Adele's 19 (thanks again for the rec, Giddy) has an amusing way of turning my life into some kind of Bridget Jones-esque romantic comedy every time I listen to it. Something about the sound of a British soul singer crooning over tastefully produced horns, I guess. She oversings like mad, but there's such a purity in it, like she's just discovered what she can do with her voice and is hollering at the top of her lungs to keep herself company. The fact, too, that pretty much all her songs are about being lonely but hopeful about love is hitting me in just the right places in the moments when I need that squishy kind of reassurance and commiseration. Plus, if one has to make a Britney-vs-Christina choice between her and Duffy, well, give me the cute chubby girl any day of the week.
Kids, I hope you're not sleeping on the Kills' Midnight Boom this year. It came out in March, and now that I've been living with it for a few weeks, I'm lamenting that I didn't pick it up sooner. It's so ballsy and smart and sexy. I want to get the lyrics to "Cheap and Cheerful" tattooed down the length of my torso: "I want you to be crazy 'cause you're boring, baby, when you're straight / I want you to be crazy 'cause you're stupid, baby, when you're sane."
On the total other end of the spectrum, Adele's 19 (thanks again for the rec, Giddy) has an amusing way of turning my life into some kind of Bridget Jones-esque romantic comedy every time I listen to it. Something about the sound of a British soul singer crooning over tastefully produced horns, I guess. She oversings like mad, but there's such a purity in it, like she's just discovered what she can do with her voice and is hollering at the top of her lungs to keep herself company. The fact, too, that pretty much all her songs are about being lonely but hopeful about love is hitting me in just the right places in the moments when I need that squishy kind of reassurance and commiseration. Plus, if one has to make a Britney-vs-Christina choice between her and Duffy, well, give me the cute chubby girl any day of the week.
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