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.

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.

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.

Awesome Things About Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea...

...that have nothing to do with the music:

That Lalitree Darnielle photo of Dave Berman on the back of the CD case. I love concert photography, and I love photos of people looking happy. Double word score.

"Just put your fingertips on the polar bear noses + strum."

The fact that it's only 33 minutes long means that I can listen to the entire album during my commute in the morning. Music nerd OCD.

Radiohead, Live at Lollapalooza

No less than the best concert I've ever been to.

I know I tend to be the little boy who cried wolf of hyperbole, but you guys gotta take my word on this one. It was incredible. Magical. Transcendent. I almost can't talk about how good it was.

I was certainly digging it for the first four or five songs (S'gum's got the setlist) but wasn't feeling terribly transported and thought, since this was my first time ever seeing them in concert, maybe reports of their live chops were vastly overrated or that maybe I was simply expecting too much. But then they played "Weird Fishes/Arpeggi," which started me on an emotional roller coaster similar to the one I experienced two weeks ago during Bon Iver's set at Pitchfork, where my personal emotional associations with the song melded with whatever groove the band was finally settling into, and then I just bubbled over into full-on fangirl freakout mode for the remaining hour and a half. The band achieved liftoff at that point as far as I'm concerned, kittens. How does one band manage to be so perfect? They're not doing anything, really, but, in that, they're doing everything. It's spectacle without hokum, virtuosity without undue pretension.

Of all the songs to bring me to tears, I started crying during "No Surprises." Not quite sure why, other than that it's so damn pretty, and, circumstantially, that I found it incredibly sweet that a bunch of people in the crowd were evidently also moved enough to start pulling out their lighters. Not really being a sports fan, and not being so politically active that I go to too many protests or rallies, it's easy for me to forget the power there is in being part of such an enormous group of people focusing all their attention and positive energy on one thing, at the same moment in time. The crowd was totally squirrelly before and after the set, but I gotta give credit, at least in my small little patch of the field, to everyone for honestly, enthusiastically, and basically politely engaging with the music and the performance while it was happening. And as that song was ending and I was wiping my eyes, I heard some dude near me exhale kind of dreamily, "the city looks really great tonight," which totally choked me up all over again.

I haven't even mentioned yet the most remarkable part of the night: the fireworks display that started up at the beginning of "Everything in Its Right Place" and then peaked during the big swell in the middle of "Fake Plastic Trees." Apparently the fireworks were connected to some other event going on over at Soldier Field, but the effect couldn't have been more magical if it had been intentional. The crowd flipped out. I started laughing, and then crying a little again, and then laughing some more, and just couldn't stop. Pure, pure joy and wonderment. I absolutely couldn't, and kind of still can't, believe that I was lucky enough to be there, to be a part of such an amazing moment.

And lucky is indeed the word for it--I didn't pay a cent for the pleasure of any of this. I hadn't bought tickets in advance, preferring instead to take my chances on the street and see what I could get from a scalper beforehand. As I was scoping out the territory, though, I totally coincidentally ran into my boy Tito and his brother as they were getting ready to enter the park with their wristbands. Once inside, Tito slipped his off and sent his brother back out to give it to me. We made it inside with no trouble at all. Those of you who know him (and to know him is to love him, as they say) will of course not be surprised that Tito insisted the only thing I owed him for it was a hug.

Before Radiohead went on, we caught Bloc Party's set. Which, yes, hilariously, makes this the third time I've, basically accidentally, seen them live. Other bands I've seen live three times? The Long Winters, the Divine Comedy, the Decemberists, the National, Andrew Bird, Laura Veirs...in other words, my favorite artists. Apparently Bloc Party is my indie rock equivalent of 10 Things I Hate About You, ie, something I now have a reluctant and slightly guilty fondness for because I get sucked into it anytime it's on/around. I mean, I'm not sure when "This Modern Love" became my jam, but fuck if my heart didn't start racing a bit when they kicked into that little rocking horse intro. What a gorgeous and affecting song. They were playing with a replacement bassist, which was slightly unfortunate since their rhythm section is so unbelievably tight, but I guess I can allow it since Gordon Moakes was back home in England with his parter, who was having a baby.

I wished I could have heard more of Grizzly Bear when we arrived at the park, esp. given that they debuted a bunch of new material, but what I could hear as we were headed across the grounds sounded fabulous. Likewise Malkmus/Jicks, who played between Bloc Party and Radiohead, on the most immediately adjacent stage, just barely within earshot. At least I got to hear a couple snippets of "Gardenia" on the wind.