From the Balcony

Comic Review: Perfect Game

2011-01-15T23:19:00.000-08:00

PERFECT GAME, Charlie Huston’s just-completed Marvel miniseries, is a small, disposable thing, and all the better for it. As low-key as a story about a super-villain can realistically be, it takes a mostly-forgotten piece of retconned Marvel lore -- that assassin-for-hire Bullseye was originally a young phenom pitcher, slated for the Major Leagues -- and follows up on it, detailing the possibly-apocryphal story of his “lost year,” when he makes his return to baseball as the most dangerous man in the world.

The thread of the plot is extremely thin. Bullseye, bored after having accomplished every sort of unlikely stunt assassination imaginable, takes a contract to eliminate a journeyman ballplayer, a long reliever for some last-place club. Rather than do it the easy way, he doffs his famous costume and spends a year riding his 110 MPH arm up through the minor league system to the big show. He’s planning the perfect kill: it’s not enough to off this guy on the field -- he wants to murder him from the mound.

And that’s pretty much it. The set-up is a shaggy dog story, following Bullseye through his careful, methodical planning, leading up to a stunner of a punch line, a twist that’s both entirely unexpected and perfectly fitted to its protagonist and theme.

In Huston's version of the character, Bullseye’s primary trait is his boredom. Having achieved everything, proven himself again and again the world's greatest and most creative killer, he's got nothing left to chase. In a clever subversion of the usual use of a splash page -- for flashy, iconic moments -- we see an inert Bullseye loafing slump-shouldered on the couch, eyes null, listless with achievement, impassively rifling a deck of cards (his some-time murder weapons). The thrill is long-gone, and there’s nothing left to do but chase the dragon and hope for one more good shot, something that stands outside time and intention, a perfect moment to redeem all the tedium.

Shawn Martinbrough’s rich pencils and muted colors complement the story nicely, often forsaking panel-to-panel storytelling in favor of layers of tangled memory, matching the rambling, folksy tone of the narration. It looks far more like a baseball story than a superhero story, and its somber visual tone is part of what makes it work. Both writer and artist deserve credit for taking their somewhat silly concept very seriously.

Where most superhero comics aim for melodramatic sturm & drang, PERFECT GAME is a pocket-sized story, character-driven, simple and timeless. Like Brian Michael Bendis used to, Charlie Huston knows the virtues of smallness and specificity. It’s utterly unburdened by continuity, by consequence, by the perpetual motion machine of falling dominoes that so often characterizes the Marvel universe. It could take place at any moment, in any time, and has no bearing on the world outside of its pages. With no ambition but with great ease, Huston does what more superhero scribes ought to do: he picks and chooses threads from the rich history of backstory available to him (Bullseye‘s past as an athlete, the existence of fans and spectators for the assassin‘s career), and takes the bits he needs to tell a story all his own. He makes good use of the Marvel mythology without leaning on it. It may not be a perfect game, but it’s a solid win.

Comic Review: Acme Novelty #20 (LINT)

2010-12-01T09:45:00.001-08:00

The subject of “LINT” is Jordan Wellington Lint, a previously minor character in Chris Ware‘s universe, last seen as a high school bully tormenting Rusty Brown back in Acme Novelty #16. Lint is a person of little consequence -- just a dude muddling his way through the complexities and disappointments and pleasures of the standard-issue human life: big dreams that fizzle and fade, replaced by smaller joys of work and family; lust, love, marriage, divorce; a successful career eventually marred by scandal and greed. Jordan is kind of a prick -- cocky, self-pitying, impulsive, mendacious -- but it’s nothing of great note, and I can discern no real point that Ware is making about Lint’s personality. He’s just telling his story, with great compassion and care but an unflinching and pitiless eye, no rooting interest whatsoever.

There’s a wonderful tension between the towering ambition that Ware brings to this project and the smallness of the story it tells. There’s no high drama, no intrigue -- everything is pitched at the level of the kitchen sink. But Ware gives every ounce of his dizzying talent to Lint’s little life, entirely breaking down the barriers between word and image, scene and sensation, trying his damndest to write the human experience from the inside out. His pages don't read from left to right -- they branch off in multiple directions, wrap back around, contradict themselves. They are obsessively detailed pictograms of the way the mind works: in associations, reflections, digressions, fixations. They aren’t scenes, they’re memories, and in one of the book’s main plot points we realize that they are often wrong.

Frozen moments are the medium here. Between Jordan’s birth on the first page and his death on the last, Ware captures hundreds of snapshots in between. The book’s title, LINT, is almost too apropos -- as time sweeps Jordan along we see the little fuzzy bits that cling to him: recollections, fading sensations, the ridiculous passions and meaningless instants gradually accumulating into a history, an identity held together, like all identities are, by nothing but spittle and memory.

A brand new driver's license; a low-riding muscle car; an incandescent blaze of searing of red light; "Starway to Heaven" blaring from the AM/FM radio. These elements all dance and intermingle on the page, sweeping you inexorably forward with an emotional rather than narrative thrust. Ware treats comics like a hieroglyphic code, a language for unlocking some unspeakable truth. Every memory, every sensation is depicted here as minimally as possible, boiled down into its essence: all the momentum, every thrum of surging teenage fervor captured in one spread as the car barrels down the empty highway and a sixteen-year-old Jordan gets his first taste of feeling like a man.

Chris Ware is regularly criticized for being gloomy and morose, and this book is certainly a dark and a sad one. Ware doesn’t seem particularly fond of his protagonist, and yet he’s the most fully realized character he’s ever created. Jimmy Corrigan was a cipher. Rusty Brown is a parody. Jordan Lint is the genuine article: a frustrating, utterly ordinary human. He’s not a hero with a tragic flaw. We don’t watch his downfall. He’s a guy who acts like a jerk half the time and we watch him win and lose money, lovers and friends, the stakes always relatively small. It’s a credit to Ware’s unremitting genius that such mundane material reads as impossibly vivid, alive and even thrilling. It takes a great insight and imagination to write neither kindness nor judgement, embracing the multitudes that even the most average person contains. The callous man who abandons his first family is the same little boy who hides in a closet and weeps over the death of an ant. In some sense these are formative and important experiences, but it often feels like they’re just the things he’s dragging behind him, barnacles clinging to his hull.

In Ware’s world life is just a bunch of stuff that happens, decisions made, consequences enjoyed or endured. Look for meaning and you’ll wind up frustrated -- Jordan Lint’s life is a bunch of sound and fury, signifying nothing. It meanders around, leading only and inevitably to the grave. But the breadth of humanity between the sensitive child hoping for a pair of stilts for his birthday and the sex-obsessed narcissist who sabotages himself at every turn is stunning and flawlessly imagined. “LINT” may be empty of meaning, but it’s full of truth.

I'm About to Shock the World...

2010-12-01T09:43:00.000-08:00

...and post some content on this bloated corpse of what used to be a blog!

Why Can't We Be Friends?

2010-05-18T07:22:00.001-07:00

This video speaks to the nature of this blog in a way nothing else does.

Vindication!

2010-04-28T12:08:00.000-07:00

WSJ:

Contrary to popular belief, the Yankees are only the fifth-most despised team in the majors, according to an Internet algorithm built by Nielsen Co. that analyzes how people feel about certain things.

Fuck You, Curt Schilling

2010-04-27T09:26:00.000-07:00

Seriously:

"I never, ever thought the move to New York the first time was a good one, and I didn't think this (move) was good as well. I don't think he suddenly learned how to pitch when he went back to Atlanta and dealt last year," Schilling said. "It's hard to say this without sounding disrespectful, and I don't mean it that way - the National League is an easier league to pitch in, period, and some guys aren't equipped to get those same outs in the American League. And he's one of those guys."

...

"(Vazquez) thrived in Montreal and he thrived in Atlanta, and those are both second-tier cities from a baseball passion perspective. He's not a guy that I've ever felt was comfortable in the glow," Schilling said. "... You're seeing what you're gonna get from him consistently all year. Having said that, he could turn around next week and throw a one-hitter with his stuff. I just don't see him being a consistent winner in the American League."

That being said, Javy has stunk up the joint. But we will not allow even our shittiest starting pitcher to suffer under the verbal lash of Curt "Ketchup Sox" Schilling.

Updating Fight Songs?

2010-04-26T19:48:00.000-07:00

Over at Bats, the NEW YORK TIMES asks if it's time to re-write the fight songs for NYC baseball teams, then posts the lyrics to "Meet the Mets" and "Y.A.N.K.E.E.S." I don't know that they need a rewrite:

Meet the Mets

Oh, the butcher and the baker and the people on the streets,
Where did they go?
To meet the Mets!
Oh, they’re hollerin’ and cheerin’ and they’re jumpin’ in their seats,

Y.A.N.K.E.E.S.

Everyone knows they play to win, ’cause
They’re the New York Yankees.
Show them today why you’re the Yankees.
No other way when you’re the Yankees.

Revision seems unnecessary.

WUT.

2010-04-22T13:29:00.000-07:00

Joni Mitchell on Bob Dylan:

Bob is not authentic at all. He's a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception. We are like night and day, he and I.

There's Still Hope

2010-04-19T13:45:00.000-07:00

Sort of:

Beisbol!

2010-04-05T14:35:00.000-07:00

Can I get a FUCK YEAH?

Metropolis: Annual Android Auction

2010-03-31T14:00:00.000-07:00

One of the most aesthetically compelling music videos I've seen in a long time. It's less a video than a reflection on profoundly black themes: people as commodities, music as individual expression and collective longing, and dance as liberation. Worth your time.

Bootylicious

2010-03-29T08:02:00.000-07:00

An incredible Erykah Badu video, where she takes off her clothes while walking around downtown Dallas. The captivating thing about the video isn't Badu's body, but the interplay between her need to project cool confidence and the evident discomfort and vulnerability on her face.

Meet the Mets?

2010-03-27T11:12:00.000-07:00

The New York Mets apparently failed to check this Wikipedia article before doing irreparable, if hilariously ironic, damage to the phrase "written in stone."

The Cute Gauntlet Has Been Thrown

2010-03-23T15:24:00.001-07:00

Your move, doctor.

I Wish That I Could See You Soon

2010-03-22T09:17:00.000-07:00

Herman Dune is trying SO HARD to be cute... and it's working, I kind of want to snuggle with him.

She & Him: Volume Two

2010-03-21T16:37:00.000-07:00

She is Zooey Deschanel, the indie-film dream-girl of ice-blue eyes and sardonic manner. Him is M. Ward, the singer-songwriter with the sepia-toned voice whose old-timey tunes sound like they ought to be broadcast through a phonograph cylinder. Together they created one the most delightfully unexpected musical treats of 2008, a relic of mellow 70s AM gold, blending rich girl group harmonies with fragile Laurel Canyon folk-pop. What looked like yet another movie star vanity record sounded instead like a lost classic by Carly Simon or Carol King. Deschanel’s untrained voice was pretty and blithe, straightforward and unpretentious yet little distant and mysterious. The songs on Volume One didn’t carry a lot of emotional charge -- they sort of added up to a long, breezy sigh -- but there was so much hazy prettiness in Ward’s Spector-like arrangements and so much warmth in Deschanel’s performance that it didn’t matter. The record was the soft summer wind that always carries traces of nostalgia and regret.

Now they’re releasing Volume Two, and I can’t help but wonder whether we really need another one of these things. It’s certainly not a bad record -- to the contrary, it’s bright and tender and catchy. But Volume Two is the right name -- it plays like the second half of a double album that ought to have been squeezed onto one disc. I'm okay with a little more of the same -- played in sequence on a blurry Sunday morning these albums give you time to make breakfast, do the dishes and half-heartedly fill out a crossword puzzle while you let your hangover fade. But enough already -- once the vintage charm wears off, it starts to feel repetetive and a little bit thin.

Ward has an unmatched ear for abandoned 20th century musical forms, and the ease with which he refurbishes late sixties/early seventies girl-pop is almost eerie. It’s certainly impressive, but after a few listens you start to wonder whether he might not be doing Deschanel’s songs a disservice; She & Him sometimes feels less like a band than an idea for a band, executed with astonishing precision. All the rough edges have been filed away. How about an angry song, or at least a fast one? Or a big weepy ballad? The She & Him aesthetic is a little too tasteful for such messy emotions -- everything has to be so understated and pleasant. It’s a weird thing to say about a record that sounds so organic and warmly textured, but I’ll be damned if there aren’t moments when it starts to feel a little processed and formulaic, particularly when viewed in its context as a second record of the exact same stuff.

Don’t get the wrong idea -- I like the way the record sounds. But two albums of this material is plenty. Deschanel has a voice of rare self-possession and grace and an easy way with a wry lyric -- Ward is one of the most talented producers, songwriters and musicians in the indie rock today. Their vision is charming and lovely and idiosyncratic, but their seemingly slavish devotion to their mission statement is starting to feel like an anchor on their talent. When you get this good at something, when you make it look this easy, that usually means it’s time to try something new.

Miley Cyrus and B.I.G.

2010-03-21T07:44:00.000-07:00

There's a doctoral thesis in there somewhere.

Who By Fire - Leonard Cohen & Sonny Rollins

2010-03-13T16:22:00.000-08:00

Weird and wonderful.

Phantogram: Eyelid Movies

2010-03-05T15:08:00.001-08:00

Apparently the atmospheric indie duo Phantogram hails from Saratoga Springs and records in a barn. I'll take their word for it, but few albums sound as California as their debut, Eyelid Movies. Stealing equally from Portishead, Massive Attack and Sonic Youth, the record evokes an inviting big-sky sunscape laced with underlying menace, like the state that counts Brian Wilson and Charles Manson as equal icons. The title fits -- these tracks are daydreams that trend uncomfortably towards the nightmarish. They're rich, lovely and alienating.

A lot of Phantogram's power lies in Sarah Barthel's ravishing vocals, which blend equal measures of syrup and cyanide into a wraith-like Beth Gibbons lilt. Despite a certain icy detachment in tone, her vocals can inhabit a wide variety of moods, from paranoid agitation to sensuous rapture. At her best she's siren-like: appealing, vulnerable and dangerous -- Little Red Riding Hood with sharp teeth all her own. She baits her hooks against a loosely trippy atmospheric background, and powers the songs with an almost off-handed melodic momentum.

I'd be tempted to call Eyelid Movies a trip-hop album, if it weren't for the fact that trip-hop is now a decade out of fashion and Phantogram sounds so unassailably hip. Josh Carter's immaculate production strips back the adornments and fuzzes things up. The dryly echoing three-note phrase that underpins “When I'm Small” – which so far has my vote for the greatest guitar riff of 2010 – is downtuned so low the pitch wobbles, ominously thunking out the rough-hewn foundation for their danceably dangerous single.

That guitar line exemplifies Carter's M.O. Instrumentally, Phantogram tends to favor thudding, monotonal drones that jerk themselves repeatedly upwards before being sucked immediately back down to the bass line (think the guitar line in the Velvet's "Waiting For My Man") played over repetetive breakbeat drum machine rhythms that pulse, double, drop in and out of the track. On paper it sounds dull, but in practice it's pretty hypnotic, thanks to the easy precision of the arrangements and Barthel's breathy lost-girl vocals. Eyelid Movies is trapped a constant push-and-pull between indulgence and minimalism, between the lush and the hushed. The record is dreamy and immersive, but Carter resists the urge to allow his arrangements to get too zonky or druggy or baroque and the result is an intriguingly spartan psychedelia.

The album starts to show its seams around the edges. Things slow down when Carter sings on his own -- his voice is nothing special, a sort of generically androgynous indie-rock mumble. "You Are the Ocean" has a haunting melody and a neurotic synth howling through the background like a car alarm -- it could have been a great track if Barthel were singing. At eleven songs, the record starts to blend together (though for an atmospheric album like this that may not be a bad thing). They tend to find a slicky eerie groove and run it into the ground, which is sometimes hypnotic and sometimes a little bit dull.

But all told, Eyelid Movies does what good albums ought to do: it fabricates a little musical universe, complete with its own weather (cold fog, blistering sun), settings (seedy clubs in the San Fernando Valley, the backseats of black cars), and moods (paranoia, sexual ecstacy, hungover ennui). And by the time you reach the final track, the surprisingly traditional piano ballad “10,000 Claps,” you'll be torn between the desire to linger there and the urge to see what new and uncomfortable places Phantogram might be able to take you.

Matt Pond PA: The Dark Leaves

2010-02-24T15:10:00.000-08:00

Oh, competence! Sweet, dull, well-meaning competence -- you are Matt Pond's greatest virtue and you are the noose around his neck. Look what you have made of this man with a fine melodic ear and an admirable work ethic: you have rendered him catatonic. His pleasant, well-executed milquetoaste yup-folk can barely summon the energy to penetrate the stereo's speakers. Competence, your flawlessly inoffensive siren song has turned a human into a bran muffin.

Matt Pond PA will drive you to the airport. It will loan you twenty bucks when you're down on your luck. It will let you borrow its books and never bug you about returning them. But when you've got a good bottle pf whiskey and a long Friday night stretching out in front of you, it's not the band you call, unless you're looking for a designated driver.

Which is weird, because his new record The Dark Leaves is clearly supposed to be a cigarettes-and-Jack-Daniels kind of thing. From the eerily distorted pastoral scene on the cover to the darker lyrical content and the high school-level poetry in the press kit (in order to make this album Pond apparently "hacked off a piece of his own fate," whatever that means), it seems this album is supposed to be Pond's harrowing dark-night-of-the-soul Nick Drake moment. Instead, it's pretty much more of the same lush, tour-ready indie rock tunes that MPPA has been trafficking since they actually lived in PA.

That's not bad thing, exactly -- despite the almost toxic level of snark in the preceding paragraphs, I think Pond does what he does fairly well, and his work is just as good as or better than that of more famous analogues like Pete Yorn, Sondre Lerche and Badly Drawn Boy. He can construct a catchy mid-tempo shuffle better than most, and his simple pop melodies have an easy momentum buoying them. At his best he blends melancholy folk-rock with infectious, polished pop, as in the catchy opener “Starting.” "Specks" is a bright and hopeful love song with a melody so warm and sweet and pleasant that you want to take it home to meet your parents. "Sparrows" is driven by a jangling chord progression and shambolic tambourine, a chiming guitar solo, a memorably simple sing-along chorus, and a lot of sha-la-las. It's as unassuming as a song can get, and it's the most appealing thing on the record. There’s good stuff buried here and there among the dross, and more than one of these melodies might get stuck in your head.

But even the songs I’ve just praised feel somehow blank and flat. Pond’s strength is also his weakness. One one hand, he clings stubbornly to his radio-ready songwriting chops, unable to lay down his skills for even a moment, to let things bleed and seethe. On the other, he’s too melancholic and disaffected to embrace the transcendent possibilities of empty pop.

The real problem is that The Dark Leaves is a half-measure. Everything on it is somewhere in between. After all these albums, Pond still can’t decide what he wants to be – hell, he’s still got “PA” is in his name despite moving to Brooklyn. He ought to drop the love-sick poses or lose the studio sheen. Strip naked or cinch up his tie. Weep or exult rather than plod tunefully through mid-tempo expressions of his indecision. Anything else is unworthy of our time.

Literal Eclipse of the Heart

2010-02-21T13:28:00.001-08:00

Warning: this level of hilarity is not for those of weak constitution.

Richie Lawrence: Melancholy Waltz

2010-02-17T16:29:00.000-08:00

The songwriter and pianist Richie Lawrence is no newcomer to making records. He’s been sporadically employed as a sideman and session player since the late seventies, with mainstreams groups like the Tim Goodman Band and obscure acts like the theatrical polka act Rotondi. Now he strikes out on his own for the first time with Melancholy Waltz, a mellow singer-songwriter record, and the results are mixed.

His vocals make it immediately clear why he’s never tried to make it as a solo artist before. His voice is flat and dull, and the big, open notes he favors always seem slightly off key. He seems to know this, though, and compensates accordingly – nearly half the tracks are instrumentals, and he doesn’t challenge his vocal chords with tricky melodies or large intervals. This is very much an album by a pianist who happens to do a little singing and accordion playing.

It's hard to think of an album with a warmer, richer piano sound -- put on headphones and it begins to feel as though you're curled up inside the belly of that centenarian baby grand. His voice is too flat and dull to carry the singer-songwriter material, but there's a generosity of spirit in these creaky songs, and no lack of love lavished on the instrumental tones, the plaintive wheeze of the accordion, the easy leaning on weathered, sturdy old melodies. To his credit, he doesn't rely too heavily on his weak vocals, letting the Steinway do most of the talking in its fluent, graceful baritone. His playing is loose and wry, virtuosic but never boastful. The production is crisp and clear, but the songs are barrel-aged and smoky.

It's not a great album by any stretch of the imagination -- it's too predictable and pedestrian for that. But there is something here -- a deeply personal statement of melancholy serenity from a figure who's spent three decades lost on the backstreets and byways of the music industry. Now he's taking his turn in the spotlight, and even if he never quite seems like he belongs there, he stands in it bravely, offering up his unadorned voice and sweetly unpoetic lyrics, his elegant playing and his battered yearnings. Melancholy Waltz is not a particularly great album, but it is a particularly truthful one. And, listening to it now as I watch Philadelphia slowly disappear under a heavy blanket of snow, that seems like more than enough.

In Defense of Jennifer's Body

2010-02-08T18:34:00.000-08:00

There's a place in cinema for the shameless roar of the crowd. The vengeful animus that motivates the characters in Inglorious Basterds is the rage born of a complicated, contingent existence shattered by unthinking violence. However, the movie self-consciously avoids engaging the interiority of the characters it presents, presenting them as cut-outs enacting the righteous judgment the Nazis so clearly deserve. (They're Jews, they hate Nazis. The end.) In that, it mirrors the process it depicts.

Jennifer's Body attempts a similar stunt. Like the Basterds, Jennifer has a perfunctory history, but remains a blank slate who isn't so much presented to as inflicted on the audience. And like the Basterds, Jennifer represents a revolt: a fantasy in which the powerless wield the very characteristic that makes the powerless against their oppressors.*

The feminine self as subject is more or less taboo in Hollywood. Women tend to be objects: foils or conquests, always occupying a position of dramatic subservience to men. When they are subjects, the roles fall within a safe rom-com definition of womanhood: marriage, fidelity, motherhood. Female characters that stray outside those boundaries are be demonized within the context of the film. Diablo Cody takes that trope to its absurd conclusion, offering us a female character who is hyper-sexual precisely because she's been turned into a demon. (The how and why of that development is the film's one moment of in-your-face self-awareness.) Notably, Jennifer is also a literal maneater--the male characters barely have time to wriggle out of their skinny jeans before she's chewing off their penis.

There's something refreshing in the lack of pretense.

Put another way, Juno--Diablo Cody's first movie--was erected atop an edifice of bullshit far more tortured than the one underlying Jennifer's Body. The main difference between the two is that Juno taps into our retrospective need to see our teenage selves as more aware, witty and hip than history might indicate. With its leaden dialogue, awkward sexuality, and petty drama, Jennifer's Body approaches the reality of adolescence far more accurately, and is arguably a worse movie because of it. If Juno is a paen to who we wanted to be in high school, Jennifer's Body is who we were.

*A point of clarification: this is not an attempt to draw an equivalence between "female roles in movies" and "Jews during the Holocaust." Rather, the point I'm trying to get at is that both movies trade in ill-defined characters whose main draw seems to be that they are powerful in the narrative in a way that is/was at odds with reality.

Rush: Working Men

2010-02-03T15:56:00.000-08:00

Rush’s new Working Men is a really odd package – live albums are basically Greatest-Hits-Plus-Crowd-Noise already, and this live album is made of tracks culled from three previous live DVDs and albums, which I guess makes it a Greatest Greatest Hits DVD. Sure, there’s a previously unreleased track (“One Little Victory”), but that’s just another version of a song that’s been on multiple previous live records, and it’s almost indistinguishable from the existing versions. This is back-catalogue flogging and repackaging hoodoo of the highest order.

So who is this album for? Is it a primer for potential Rush fans, listeners who don’t want to leap headfirst into the thick of one of the other live albums, which are all two or three discs long? Is it meant to be a gift from bald-spot-and-ponytail uncles to their metalheaded nephews? That’s certainly the charitable view – the only other demographic I can think of is the small cult so slavishly devoted to Rush that they’ll buy a whole album just because it has a previously unreleased live version of a song they’ve already heard a million times, and marketing to those helpless completists seems almost like taking advantage of the mentally ill. Anyone who likes Rush probably has all these songs already. Anyone who doesn’t like Rush is probably not in the market for Rush products. This DVD could evaporate into thin air and nobody would care but a handful of crazy people.

Should I review the music? I’m tempted not to – it seems like that would be playing right into Atlantic Records’ moneygrubbing hands. Because, yeah, it’s Rush, the most committed power trio since Cream, and they sound pretty damn good, more or less just like they always did. Geddy Lee’s epic howling-chipmunk vocals are entirely undimmed by age, and the many close-ups on Alex Lifeson’s flurrying fingers show that his chops are sharper than ever. Rush are probably the catchiest, most radio-ready prog-rock band there ever was, and working the same style for three decades doesn’t seem to have diminished their joy or enthusiasm at all. There’s a cornily delightful visual appeal to the performance, and the arena-rock trappings – flashing strobe lights, smoke machines, lasers, moving video screens, Neil Peart’s nine-billion-piece drum kit – are at hilarious odds with the three aging music nerds in the middle, cranking up their gloriously precise din. But that’s always been part of Rush’s appeal – watching three nebbishy guys conquer the world with soaring math-rock. Thus, we have the fan-service instrumental close-ups, which are far more worthwhile and impressive than the same shots in concert footage of less virtuosic bands. It’s all in good fun.

There – Atlantic got me. I said a bunch of fairly nice things about this bald-faced cash-grab of a disc. But reader, don’t buy it. Save your money for the stuff Rush puts out on Roadrunner, their new label. If you simply must have it, I might suggest that there are, ahem, cost-free ways of obtaining the contents. If you spend money on this thing, you’re only encouraging the bastards and the bean-counters.

Birds & Batteries: Up to No Good

2010-01-31T14:17:00.000-08:00

Birds & Batteries new EP Up to No Good is very seventies – not the familiar hemp-and-Zep era of revivalists like the Black Crowes and Kings of Leon, but the paranoid, coked-out decade of George Romero, Charles Manson and Travis Bickle. They marry jittery Funkadelic guitars to slick drum machine beats and jammy/experimental keyboard flourishes, then blend it all into some kind of ungodly apocalyptic disco. (Their touchstone is clearly Goblin, toward whose cheeseball soundtrack grandeur they aspire.)

The whole thing works better on paper than it does on the record. The EP is filled with some great bits and pieces – the gaspingly manic bass line of “Sneaky Times,” the chiming guitars that spiral down through “The Villain” – which don’t quite fit to form a compelling whole. If the album is a horror movie – which I think is what it wants to be – it’s a great setting, atmospheric cinematography, a few strong performances in search of story with some real scares.

The music is oversaturated and indulgent, though that's not really a criticism – they've clearly built an intentional aesthetic out of oversaturated indulgence. The problem, in fact, is that it’s not indulgent enough – they feel like they're holding back. Cracked-out stuff like this needs to be committed, the teeth need to grind and the pulse needs to jump. There's a slick detachment in the vocals that's probably supposed to be coldly ominous, but it's mostly just boring.

The kiss of death, in other words, and the reason the album doesn’t work for me is this: these guys sound sober.

Susan Boyle: I Dreamed a Dream

2010-01-13T14:07:00.000-08:00

It's not so bad, really. Her voice is fairly pretty. The songs are mostly classics. The arrangements don’t drown everything in Splenda. It's not much -- it's a trifle. It is eminently listenable.

None of that can explain the following: Susan Boyle's I Dreamed a Dream was the best-selling album of 2009, and the best-selling debut for a female artist. Ever.

That is, in and of itself, far more interesting than any of the actual music. The album's just a showcase for Ms. Boyle's vocals, which are certainly nice, and surprisingly versatile, if a little dry and fluttery for my tastes. Bur I can't bring myself to believe that this pedestrian voice has sold over three million albums. It seems much more likely -- obvious, even -- that this is more about context than content. Ms. Boyle owes her astonishing success to one legendary viral video. (The album, hilariously, features an "as seen on YOUTUBE!" sticker.)

I hate to be ungentlemanly or crude, but a zeitgeist-defining rush of money and fame like this demands honest evaluation; Susan Boyle has gone multi-platinum thanks to her ugliness. It’s not extraordinary ugliness, just good old-fashioned fifty-something-lady-you-see-at-the-laundromat frump, but by the standards of the music industry that makes her some kind of loathsome, hunchbacked ogre. Like a funhouse-mirror reflection of a traditional pop star, she owes her success not to her talent but to her looks.

Ms. Boyle is the ultimate exemplar of a celebrity culture flipped all topsy-turvy. Long gone are the days of Joe DiMaggio and Elvis and Grace Kelly, great Olympian stars worshipped for their beauty and grace and talent, shrouded in secrecy, far removed from the unwashed rabble below, their feet never touching the base clay. Instead we read articles on TMZ about the size of Tiger Woods’ penis and the chemical contents of Anna Nicole’s corpse. Our stars live in the particle accelerator of the paparazzi panopticon. We watch and cheer as the temple burns. And from the smoldering ash rises Susan Boyle.

In our increasingly narcissistic modern age we have become very sensitive to being out-classed. Boyle is a star with whom we can be comfortable; she won’t make us feel self-conscious about our less-than-flat tummies and unfortunate body hair. And the fact that she’s a good-not-great singer might actually add to her appeal – her singing is strong enough to be pleasing, but not so powerful or skillful that it distracts from the true drama being played out here: the Ugly Duckling story.

It’s an inspirational narrative we’ve so internalized that it almost comes pre-packaged. Watch Ms. Boyle’s YouTube debut carefully. She’s openly mocked by the crowd and the judges, clearly humiliated. But she’s barely two notes into “I Dreamed a Dream” when the palpable disdain turns into rapturous applause. The company line is that she won the audience over with her astonishing talent, but it takes more than a few milliseconds to be moved by a song, or even to know if the singer is any good. Boyle exceeded condescendingly low expectations. Make no mistake, the crowd was applauding the fact that the fat chick managed to start off on-key.

The deification of Susan Boyle has almost nothing to do with Susan Boyle, and everything to do with a culture so childishly eager to believe in miracles that it doesn’t require that they actually be miraculous. We just want to see one of us – the sweaty, schlumpy throng – raised up and covered with garland, and Boyle is half-way talented enough to fill that need. Of course, the irony is that she’s no longer one of us: now she’s a multimillionaire pop star, whose next effort will more than likely be greeted by a great collective yawn.

I Dreamed a Dream finds Ms. Boyle casting about for some kind of musical identity. Is she the husky-voiced, regretful chanteuse of "Cry Me a River?" The fresh-faced, pure-hearted choir girl of "How Great Thou Art?" The operatic Broadway ham of the title track? No, no and no. But that’s okay; we don’t want her to forge an artistic identity. We won’t even let her be Susan Boyle, whoever that actually is. She’s a totem; a patsy; a mirror.

She’s the quintessence of modern celebrity: for better of for worse, Susan Boyle is you and me.

Tyler Perry's Madea Takes An Urban Geography Class

2010-01-11T12:28:00.000-08:00

Click pictures to enlarge.

Big Eyes Family Players: Warm Room

2010-01-05T12:57:00.000-08:00

Warm Room begins with a loose harmony of strings, violins and cellos, as picturesquely ominous as a deep forest on a winter night. Before long the lovely, fluttering melodies are overwhelmed, almost subsumed by a loud, atonal bass drone. The prettiness is in the background -- the centerpiece of the song is that bass note, a changeless hum that forces you to struggle to make out the fragile prettiness underneath.

That's the tension that makes The Big Eyes Family Players so interesting: the graceful richness of classical composition and the haunted simplicity of folk music rub uncomfortably against their avant-garde tendencies, their resistance to melodic resolution, their urge towards oddness and difficulty. They bury their best melodies deep in the mix, under hypnotic cracked harmonies and restless, knotty discord.

It’s an interesting and unusual technique, and it makes for some spectrally memorable moments, as when anxious drums ascend the chiming, sitar-like guitar scaffold of "A Lick and a Promise," or when frozen triplets from a distant piano ring through the cavernous “Woodenwheel.” Ultimately, though, I’m not quite sure what this music is for – it’s too odd and dissonant to sound good in the background, but it’s too simple and repetitive to reward careful listening. More than anything it sounds like the score for a very strange movie, something fantastical and discomfiting, maybe by Jan Svankmajer, or Guillermo Del Toro in a languorously stoned mood. Maybe, in fact, the best use of the record is as something to fall asleep to, an eerie adult lullaby; despite all of its experimentation the record is quite soothing, and its lush empty spaces seem to invite visions and dreams at once uncanny, grotesque and beautiful.

Ike Reilly: Hard Luck Stories

2009-12-08T14:17:00.000-08:00

What makes for a good E Street rip-off band? When the 21st century began, copping moves from the Boss suddenly became critically acceptable, as bands like the Hold Steady, Marah and The Gaslight Anthem garnered praise and some mainstream exposure. That never happened for Ike Reilly, and I'm not sure why. He might just be stealing the wrong stuff -- the aforementioned groups mimic the adrenal, fist-pumping sounds of Born to Run and Born in the U.S.A, while Reilly tends towards the looser, more playful early stuff like Greetings From Asbury Park and The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle. Before Springsteen decided to save your soul with rock and roll he had a loveable persona as a charming, boozy beach-bum poet, a jazzier, more eclectic sound and a propensity for tall tales. That's pretty much the vein that Reilly's been mining for eight albums and counting, with little to show for it besides a small cult following and a bunch of really good songs. But hey, what the hell... Bruce's early stuff didn't sell either at the time, and those albums were terrific too.

"Hard Luck Stories," Reilly's newest record, opens with "Morning Glory," a loose, shaggy pop tune driven by a shuffling backbeat, colored by jammy keyboard flourishes and brief harmonica sighs. It's not a love song, it's a sex song, or more specifically a lack-of-sex song -- the narrator is sleeping on the floor, trying to scheme his way into the bed by morning. The song is clever, fun, and a little bit sleazy -- a pleasant way to start an album that for all its humor and musical jubilation is mostly, true to it's title, a bunch of hard luck stories.

"Lights Out, Anything Goes," is the both album's most infectious tune and its most devastating tale, an obtruse story of a hapless father watching his relationship with his son disintigrate for reasons neither he or the listener quite understand. ("I had a boy, I gave him my name -- he gave it back when he moved away.") The story's tough to parse -- a broken circuit shuts the power in their house, the kid becomes a Jesus freak, at some point there's a dead body somehow involved. But the track is joyous and propulsive, driven by handclaps, a buzzing synth and an ominously stalking Marc Ribot-style guitar line. That's Reilly's trademark dissonance -- rapture and resignation, ecstasy and self-destruction all collide. The baffling nature of the lyrics works perfectly -- the song's narrator can't quite figure out where everything went wrong, and neither can we. Like him (and maybe like Reilly) we're "always mixing up the saviors and the fakers."

Hard Luck Stories isn't a masterpiece -- there are almost as many misses as hits -- but it's a very strong piece of work, filled with good yarns and catchy tunes. He sounds like a slacker, but there's a hidden ambition in Reilly's bohemian bar-room poetry. He's trying to wrap his arms around the whole damn thing: hope, anger, love, death, dissolution, sex -- mundanity and transcendence, dreams and defeat. Hard Luck Stories will be dismissed by most as dad-rock, and I can't really defend it against that charge -- Reilly's most recent influences are older than I am, and I'm closer to thirty than twenty. But Christ, who cares? It all sounds really good; the songs are catchy as hell, and the lyrics stories are dark and funny, big-hearted and well observed, sad and sweet. That ought to be enough.

In "The Ballad of Jack and Haley" an amiable, sunny melody obscures a touching and devastating story of a man passionately devoted to two things: his daughter and the high-grade marijuana plantation he's cultivating in his basement. Jack's a single dad, getting by and getting high until he gets busted and sent upstate and Haley's shipped off to live with her aunt. In his letters Jack writes, "Don't waste your money on ditch-weed, honey, I'll be out before you know, and I'll plant another indoor garden for you and we'll watch it grow." Jack is the iconic Ike Reilly character: full of hopes and schemes and love -- alive, awake and longing -- and doomed to make the same mistake twice.

The Best Albums of the Decade

2009-12-04T10:26:00.000-08:00

...as determined by science.

50. Black Keys: Thickfreakness
49. Destroyer: Rubies
48. O'Death: Head Home
47. Vic Chesnutt: Skitter on Take-off
46. Amy Winehouse: Back to Black
45. Warren Zevon: The Wind
44. Smog: A River Ain't Too Much to Love
43. Libertines: Up the Bracket
42. Beck: Sea Change
41. Hoots and Hellmouth: The Holy Open Secret
40. Mirah: Advisory Committee
39. Fiona Apple: Extraordinary Machine
38. Dr. Dog: Fate
37. William Shatner: Has Been
36. The Waifs: Up All Night
35. Vampire Weekend: Vampire Weekend
34. Flaming Lips: Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots
33. Modest Mouse: Moon and Antarctica
32. Drive-by Truckers: Southern Rock Opera
31. Art Brut: Bang Bang Rock and Roll
30. Mendoza Line: 30 Year Low
29. Eminem: Marshall Mathers LP
28. Franklin Bruno: Kiss Without Makeup
27. Spoon: Gimme Fiction
26. Outkast: Stankonia
25. Sufjan Stevens: Illinois
24. Decemberists: Her Majesty the Decemberists
23. Ryan Adams: Heartbreaker
22. Okkervil River: Stage Names
21. Josh Ritter: Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter
20. Gnarls Barkley: St. Elsewhere
19. Walkmen: Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me is Gone
18. Nick Cave: Murder Ballads
17. Strokes: Is This It
16. Hold Steady: Separation Sunday
15. Dresden Dolls: Dresden Dolls
14. Elliott Smith: Figure 8
13. Bright Eyes: Fevers and Mirrors
12. Brian Wilson: Smile
11. Of Montreal: Skeletal Lamping
10. Mountain Goats: Tallahassee
9. Johnny Cash: American Recordings IV
8. M. Ward: Transfiguration of Vincent
7. Killers: Hot Fuss
6. Tom Waits: Real Gone
5. Radiohead: Kid A
4. Marah: Kids in Philly
3. White Stripes: White Blood Cells
2. Bob Dylan: Love and Theft
1. Arcade Fire: Funeral

Sometimes Things Are Too Perfect

2009-11-24T12:44:00.001-08:00

Vic Chesnutt: Skitter on Take-off

2009-11-20T20:50:00.000-08:00

Up until a few months ago, everybody seemed to have forgotten about Vic Chesnutt. That's kind of a weird thing to say about someone that most people have never heard of, but the singer and guitarist did have a brief moment in the sun -- the indie sun, at least -- in the mid-nineties. At the Cut, released in September, garnered Chesnutt some sudden press, partly because it was a rough, uncompromisingly gut-churning album, partly because it featured Guy Picciotto and members of Godspeed You Black Emperor. Less than a month later, he dropped his follow-up, Skitter on Take-off, like a crumpled receipt fluttering out of his pocket as he reached for his wallet. Lost in the rush of deserved praise for At the Cut, Skitter on Take-off seems to have gone largely unnoticed. That’s a shame, because the album is brilliant.

Where At the Cut was rich and fairly heavy, Skitter on Take-off inhabits a pervasive, haunted emptiness matched only by Smog's Bill Callahan. The entire album sounds off-handed, casual, like Chesnutt is literally making up each song as he goes along. This is underlined by the fractured poetry of his lyrics and his simple but unusual melodic sense. His melodies refuse to resolve, lingering nervously, repeating themselves, but his resigned tone, contemptuous and wounded, animates them with a cold authority. Chesnutt has an affinity for anti-romantic, even ugly turns of phrase like "I was taking little chunks of your love and squirreling them away," lines that read terribly on the page but sound uncomfortably appropriate in his ragged, tremulous voice. “Feast in the time of plague,” he laments on the opener. “You were a beautiful pig.” That's the despairingly practical attitude that pervades the album: mournful and lonesome but harder, wise now, and ready to move on.

Skitter on Take-off makes astonishing use of silence -- it's everywhere on this record, oppressively still, gathering, and Chesnutt's unadorned music, his warped guitar and thin voice are barely a candle flickering against the black. Jonathan Richman's production is brilliant, and it's hardly even there. Always a master of minimalism, he strips away every ornamentation, every unnecessary element, making the greatest use yet of Chesnutt’s oddly skeletal, almost chord-free plucking style. Richman virtually leaves the state -- Chesnutt sounds so utterly alone on the album that it's hard to believe there actually was a producer, or even another soul within a hundred miles. Outside of some distant brushed drums on a few songs and Richman's mumbled voice on the introduction to “Dimples” (an inclusion that adds to the casual, DIY spirit of the record but ultimately damages its aesthetic of remoteness and alienation), the album is all Vic Chesnutt, a man alone, making a heartsick sound with just enough notes to be considered music. You can feel the hunger, the disquietude and unease in the small muscles of your neck. Skitter on Take-off is not a fun listen -- it's not good background music – but it's very powerful.

It takes an extraordinarily rare talent to compel and captivate with no tools, no tricks, no impressive displays. Chesnutt doesn't perform or entertain -- it sounds like he made the record by mysterious compulsion and he doesn’t even know you’re listening. Skitter on Take-off is in the mode of Robert Johnson's recordings -- quiet, worried-man blues glowing hesitantly in the dark, shaky, uncertain, spare -- just enough song to keep the devil at bay. Barely at bay, and only for the moment, but for the moment that’s enough.

Carrie Underwood: Play On

2009-11-13T14:45:00.000-08:00

From the first few slicked-up yet grungy electric guitar chords, we know we’re in for more of the same: angry bad-boyfriend songs and gelatinous ballads, a little bit country, a little bit rock ‘n roll, everything sounding very, very expensive. The writing is insanely professional, and each track is so thoroughly baited with hooks it’s hard to hear the song underneath. Play On is a focus-group pop album, a hothouse flower, bioengineered at great cost to thrive on S.U.V. radios and in the endless replay of tweenage iTunes. But there’s no great single to be found, so instead it withers and dies.

"Cowboy Casanova," the catchy opening single, is an icy kiss-off to a phony dive-bar Romeo, and it sort of works, as far as it goes. Why? I’m not sure, precisely; this album adheres so slavishly to its (admittedly proven) formula that it's awfully hard to tell what, exactly, the difference between the good songs and bad songs are, since they all sound pretty much the same. So you'll have to take my word for it when I say that "Cowboy Casanova," while foot-tapping and high-spirited, lacks the elemental power of the towering single "Before He Cheats," a very similar rocking psuedo-feminist guilty pleasure, Underwood's greatest achievement to date, a radio monster that demanded to be turned up. An album like this needs exactly one of those to be a success. Play On is a failure.

It’s not all unremittingly awful; generally all the faux-shitkicking glossy country Bon Jovi stuff is half-way listenable. But brother, do the ballads ever suck. Underwood apparently has no volume knob -- she can belt angrily over polished electric guitars or she can belt sweetly over swooning strings. She blows all of her incredibly tenuous feminist credentials on "Mama's Song," which finds her saying, essentially, “Mom, you don’t have to take care of me anymore because I found a man to do it instead.” On "Change" she harangues us tunefully about being a bunch of jerks for not giving more money to charities and panhandlers. “Temporary Home” is a disgustingly manipulative ballad about orphans, single moms and old sick people, and how it’s okay that their lives suck because soon they’ll die and go up to heaven and get to play badminton with Jesus forever and ever. The slow songs on the album have, collectively, the emotional depth of a banana-walnut pancake. They will brook no sadness that can't be instantly transformed into hopeful triumph by a hooky chorus and a multi-tracked vocal.

"Someday When I Stop Loving You" is the sole exception; it's not a particularly good song, a by-the-numbers countrypolitan weeper, but by sheer virtue of being legitimately sad it's incredibly refreshing, a break from the stridently, almost obnoxiously inspirational tone of the record. Underwood can’t sell it, though -- she sings it like she's back on Idol, and the song is nothing but a showcase for her killer pipes. Underneath the everywoman hard-knock posturing, Underwood is a first-place finisher (this was proven on national television); she’s got no idea what to do with a song about losing. And if you’re not ready to lose, maybe country music isn’t the place for you.

But back to the bread and butter: "Songs Like This" is a fairly solid track, another in Underwood's endless array of kiss-offs to bad boyfriends, building to a nice turn of phrase in the chorus. ("If it wasn't for guys like you, there wouldn't be songs like this.") The rocker "Undo It" is probably the best thing on the album, despite being pretty much a wholesale rip-off of Lucinda Williams’ "Joy." We're back into Carrie's comfort zone here -- outside of her looks and her large vocal range, kicking douchebags to the curb seems to be her main talent in life. (What does it say about our culture that our most populist female stars [i.e. Idol winners] seem to find their greatest successes, artistically and commercially, in revenge songs?)

Play On is definitely not good, not horrifyingly bad, and precisely what you imagine it to be. There’s no great single, nothing that even approaches the awesome “Before He Cheats” or half of the stuff that Kelly Clarkson’s been putting out. It’s not going to happen, but it’d be awfully nice if Underwood would look to people like the aforementioned Lucinda Williams – a bad-ass independent woman who wasn’t afraid to show her vulnerability or her sense of humor – as more than a source of pilfered tunes. She needs to start looking around for somewhere to borrow a personality.

Charles Fetherolf: Giants in the Earth

2009-11-09T08:52:00.000-08:00

It begins in darkness. Four black horizontal panels, then another four on the facing page. Then two black rectangles of equal size, then a full black splash. We're five entire pages into Charles Fetherolf's "Giants in the Earth," and we've yet to see a single drawing. Then, turning the page, we're faced with a double-spread explosion -- a chaotic spray of white against the dark, flattened and radiating like an egg on a frying pan, encircled by a thin ring expanding ever outwards. It's the act of creation, the beginning -- the Big Bang -- and it seems to have been summoned into existence by the tense and heavy emptiness of the five black pages. Fetherolf took his time, and then he said "let there be white."

"Giants in the Earth," a standalone self-published comic, is a bravura performance that attempts to and largely succeeds at telling a wordless history of the universe and the planet Earth from the dawn of the world to the dawn of man. Milky gasses expand and condense in a void, forming into planetoids. Planetoids attract and collide; one will become the earth, and another will become the moon.

If you paid any attention in your high school biology class, the rest of the story will be largely familiar. Out of the smoldering magma and simmering nutrient bath single-celled organisms form. They eventually become membranous sea creatures, which in turn develop into amphibians and struggle tentatively onto dry land. Reproduction, consumption, mutation, and creation; evolution carries through its mindless, beautiful, myriad pathways, and we watch in silent contemplation.

The concept and storytelling are ambitious and admirable enough, but what really sets "Giants in the Earth" apart from other experimental comics is the raw, simple elegance of Fetherolf’s art, his softness and grace of his inking, the richness and truth he finds in simple, austere images. His art is out of step with the times – there’s nothing hip or modern about it, none of Chris Ware’s sleek intricacy or the photo-realistic high dudgeon of recent superhero books. His work most resembles the late John Buscema: elegant, almost athletic forms, carefully observed and detailed but always spare, never an unnecessary line or shade.

The stubbornly anachronistic nature of Fetherolf’s art (along with his generally unappealing and unrepresentative cover illustrations) might go some way towards explaining why his work hasn’t been met with wider acclaim, but it’s a minor travesty. Why can companies like Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly find space for so many idiosyncratic voices and oddball styles (some of which are, frankly, quite bad), but nothing for an audacious creator working without a net, albeit in a slightly unfashionable style? Fetherolf’s storytelling is masterful, but his use of time and space are his greatest gifts. The images that stick with you are the fraught, tense ones, where a single moment is broken into uneasy slivers: the black tentacles of a menacing octopus wending hungrily and sinuously across a stretch of panels; dinosaurs looking up past the trees at incandescent meteors that arc gracefully down towards their Triassic paradise; a lightning crack that starts a forest fire, set above the haunted eyes of early man.

“Giants in the Earth” is alive, evolving, in constant motion. It’s everything that comics – and art in general – ought to be: a world in miniature. It just so happens that this time, that world is our own.

Sondre Lerche: Heartbeat Radio

2009-10-31T15:47:00.000-07:00

The Norwegian transplant Sondre Lerche, a music industry veteran at only 27, possesses considerable talent, but his new album Heartbeat Radio finds him working too hard toward no discernible end. The album is about love in its most mundane forms – passing the morning paper back and forth over tea, squabbling, driving, chatting. It’s a minor work for minor moods, but it mostly fails to achieve even its modest intentions.

There's a sort of ill-fitting grandiosity to the overall aesthetic -- strings swoon, Lerche's vocals keen, the arrangements build gradually to thundering crescendos -- but it's an empty largeness, music like an airplane hanger. Why all the drama? These aren't desperate or urgent songs. Lerche's virtues -- tight, varied instrumentation; gentle, literate guitar pop; smart and simple song construction -- are the virtues of smallness and care. The arrangements are admirable – odd, precise, elegant, the many modular transitions sudden yet seamless – but all the passion and bombast feel phony, put-on, manipulative. Lerche leans too hard on his pose as a wounded young Romeo.

The lyrics are barely worth mentioning, neither positive nor negative. Lerche knows how to fit words into song forms, inserting syllables and phrases with the same almost classical-minded precision he brings to his arrangements, but he seems to select words for their crisp and delicate phonetics, their graceful rhymes, with little regard for their meaning. This could work wonderfully if he would really abandon communication, turning his lyrics into tone-poems that interlock, puzzle-like, with his latticework songs, but instead he stays within a very dull mode of heartsick musings and pseudo-sophisticated mumblings. (The one notable exception is “Like Lazenby,” which is built around a baffling but somewhat delightful metaphor about the one-time James Bond.) His delivery is clipped and dry, almost sarcastic, and the conflict between his detachment and the gorgeous, endlessly swooning strings is a little bit intriguing, but I'm not sure that such dissonance is something that Lerche intended.

He’s at his best when he drops the Rufus Wainwright shtick and lets his natural charm and naivety shine through. “Words and Music,” his sunny little slice of Paul McCartney pop, tastes like biting into a cool, ripe orange. It’s the best song on the album, vulnerable and sweet and affectionate. It is, in its way, a masterpiece in miniature, perfect for a certain sort of warm, quiet moment, and it’s likely to find a small but permanent place in my life. It’s the exception, though; in general, the love songs don’t sound urgent, and the heartsick songs sound like they stem from an artful pose rather than any real pain. The aesthetic he seems to be pursuing is elegance at any cost; he achieves it handily, but the price is far too high. He sacrifices truth, sincerity, magic, and danger. While there are enough wonderful arrangements and flashes of brilliance to point the way towards a potential masterwork in the still-young Lerche’s future, Heartbeat Radio isn’t much more than supremely well-constructed background music. The album is smothered by care and clockwork.

The radio plays on and on; the heartbeat flat-lines.

Bob Dylan: Christmas in the Heart

2009-10-14T15:10:00.000-07:00

It opens with sleigh bells and a jaunty backing choir, and we're off into a fully realized Norman Rockwell painting, complete with roaring fireplace, children in stocking feet, and the jolly old grandpa around whom they've gathered. The grandpa is Bob Dylan, and yes, Bob Dylan is jolly. Holly jolly, even.

From the Currier & Ives-esque cover illustration to the Andrews sisters soundalikes singing backup, Dylan's charity album Christmas in the Heart is a full-on fruitcake. It's earnest and wholehearted and brimming with good cheer. There's a palpable joy in the man's withered croak, as he hobbles his crumbling voice over the some the most familiar terrain in American song. Dylan, he of the sharp jaundiced eyes and love-sick nihilism, has got the Christmas spirit, and he's got it bad.

Self-producing under his oft-used and suddenly very appropriate pseudonym Jack Frost, Dylan delivers the most straightforward Christmas album imaginable, dusting off the stalest pop forms, mothballed tropes and hoariest roasted chestnuts of Christmas' past. Outside of a few delightfully bizarre choices – the breakneck accordion polka of “Must Be Santa,” the tinge of a fake Hawaiian accent on “Christmas Island,” the way he sounds like a crazed street-corner vagrant haranguing the children in “Winter Wonderland” – he delivers the kind of lush, chintzy holiday showcase that’s generally better left to the likes of Michael MacDonald. The dissonance between his rough voice and smooth arrangement makes the album feel like something that you imagined in a dream.

It's a double shot of straight sentimental corn syrup, and it's the closest Dylan has come to crooning since "Nashville Skyline," his lovely 1969 country ode to domesticity. The years and cigarettes have had their way with the man's larynx, and he can't match the warm honeycomb baritone that surprised and confused his fans three decades ago – frankly, he often comes off as a lunatic warbling carols with almost terrifying conviction – but nevertheless, his damaged voice is full of warmth and sweetness. "Although it's been said many times, many ways… Merry Christmas to you," he sings, and he sounds like he means it more than Mel Torme ever did. For all the world, the record doesn't feel like a charity album or a goofball lark or an odd experiment -- it just sounds like the work of a dude who really, really loves Christmas.

Dylan doesn't strip the songs down, doesn't transform them into his signature dusted roots music. To the contrary: his smooth, stolid productions make the Bing Crosby versions sound spontaneous and lo-fi. There's something so wonderfully odd about the tension between Dylan's timeworn growl and the thick carpet of garland and wreath lain about him; it's as though a hard-bitten riverboat captain wandered into Macy's on December 23rd and swooned into a Yuletide trance, marveling at everything he saw, convinced that the old alcoholic in the red trim and fake beard was, in fact, Santa Clause. Dylan surrenders himself completely to the corniness, the sentiment, the whole Christmas ham without a wink. He sounds more committed, in fact, than he did on his last couple of albums. Christmas in the Heart is, in no particular order: delightful, silly, intimate in a somewhat phony way, gentle, cornball, crazy, dated, baffling and lovable. It’ll be played in my house throughout the month of December. For all of its goofiness, the record is a big, resounding affirmation: loud and clear, it says “Yes, Virginia.”

O Pioneers!!!: Neon Creeps

2009-10-08T12:56:00.000-07:00

O Pioneers!!! may not have many similarities with Walt Whitman, the great American poet from whom they take their name, but do have one thing in common: they are animated with joy. These Houston punks always sound like they're having a hell of a time playing their simple cranked up shout-rock, rendering even lyrics like "Forget about all the depression and all of the debt... I know I'm gonna die from it" anthemic and somehow redemptive. Their palpable pleasure is almost enough to carry their Neon Creeps LP. It's punk with the right attitude, a sense of humor, none of the finger-wagging politics or emo self-seriousness, and just enough melody to carry you from one fist-pumping chorus to the next. They're happy and angry and restless and all of the things a bunch of hopped-up kids should be. You like them, and you want to like their album.

Ultimately, though, it's only okay, marred by too many weirdly annoying moments and precious song titles. (See "Saved by the Bell Was a Super Good Show," the chorus of which is the word "DRAMA" sung over and over again, the singer inexplicably placing the accent on the word's second syllable.) Still, I'd like it if there were more records out there in this quotidian vein -- fleeting, honest, unself-conscious, funny, direct. Even another obnoxious title like "Chris Ryan Added Me on Facebook" obscures one of the most truthful kiss-offs this side of Bob Dylan. ("See I'm older now, and I don't give a damn if I ever talk to you again.") Like I said, I don’t really like the album – Eric Solomon’s voice kind of sucks, some of the tracks go on too long, everything starts to feel kind of samey, etc… But give it a shot anyway, maybe late at night on an empty highway. Your mileage may vary.

Drivin 'N' Cryin: Great American Bubble Factory

2009-09-25T13:47:00.000-07:00

Pop music vocals are odd things -- no one has any idea what makes them good. I love Craig Finn, Leonard Cohen, Lou Reed, and Jello Biafra, none of whom can sing a lick. Why? I don't really know. I'd like to think it's that they sound personal or truthful or alive, but it's probably just that their tones resonate with something inside my skull. Either way, I won't argue about voices -- the ear has reasons that reason cannot know.

In other words, my problems with "Great American Bubble Factory" by veteran southern rock band Drivin 'N' Cryin are entirely my own -- I just don't like the way this dude sings. His name is Kevin Kinney, and he's still rocking the same adenoidal pop-punk-with-a-twang voice he debuted back in the mid-eighties.

In fact, Drivin 'N’ Cryin sound largely like they did in the Reagan era, aside from a little newly acquired and ill-fitting studio sheen. They're still skillfully mixing hard rock, folk, punk and country -- they're still singing about being broke and pissed, about American rust and spiritual rot. It worked a quarter of a century ago and it works now -- rather than frantically chase the moving zeitgeist, Drivin 'N' Cryin sat stubbornly in place, waiting for the clock to come back around to midnight. It did, and "Great American Bubble Factory" sort of serves as a makeshift concept album about the economic collapse, though its songs of struggle and disappointment, of one step forward and two steps back, could have come from any album in the DNC catalogue.

Though their jaundiced view of late-period capitalism is focused and unflinching, their music is very wide and versatile, wrapping its long arms around Skynyrd, Townes Van Zandt, KISS, the Cars, Brian Wilson, Springsteen and ZZ Top. The sounds can be scattershot, even a little incoherent, but the theme brings it all together. If it ultimately works it’s due to the force of Kinney’s vision, the underdog status he’s entirely earned through decades of trying and failing to bust out of the bar-rock C-list.

The album’s best moments are its unexpected touches: the pedal steel in "I See Georgia" tunelessly dragging down the fretboard, less a musical flourish than the howl of a dying animal; the ragged Beach Boys harmonies in "Get Around Kid"; the soulful and cheesy Eddie Van Halen guitar solos that first make you cringe and then, unexpectedly, move you a little. Even Kinney’s voice, which still bugs me, is undoubtedly his own, wholly unapologetic in its nasal flatness. There’s an stubborn insistence, a sort of sneering southern pride, and it somehow renders their anachronisms and unhip characteristics moot.

“Great American Bubble Factory” is a work of enormous personality and sincerity, a rueful opus trying hard to embrace a hopeless future. We need more art like this, and even if I can't say I really love the album I want to stand up in support of guys like Kinney, men with big battered hearts on their sleeves and hands white-knuckled on the wheel. In the face of an indifferent music industry and a starry-eyed Clinton decade, they adhered to their vision and stuck to their guns: by spending two generations standing perfectly still, Drivin 'N' Crying have somehow found themselves ahead of the game.

Willie Porter: How to Rob a Bank

2009-09-16T12:02:00.000-07:00

Willie Porter is best known for his acoustic finger picking, and rightly so – his guitar lines are naturalistic, haunting, difficult and complex without ever turning into any of that boastful nonsense that gets labeled “shredding” or “chops.” He’s got a nice voice too, a rich, rueful baritone that’s both pliable and sturdy. He’s got a way with a simple melody, and his lyrics have an understated, restrained poetry. He brings all of these wonderful qualities to bear on his new LP “How to Rob a Bank,” and as I listened I was almost too busy admiring his craftsmanship to notice that I was kind of bored.

It’s hard to identify exactly what the problem is here, but somehow the record sounds less like an aesthetic object with its own internal life than a demonstration of Porter’s enviable talents. There's an unnecessary sheen to the recordings -- the treble is mixed too low, flattening the arrangements; the over-mixed bass lines are needlessly complex, distracting from the vocals, which sound too multi-tracked. Aural richness is the order of the day, and while it works wonderfully for mellow meditations like the rueful "Learning the Language" or the dreamy ditty "The Lemon Tree," most of Porter's lovely songs could stand to be stripped down, a little more rattle and a little less hum. The harmonies are always pretty, but they're overused. This MOR production doesn't do justice to the organic looseness of these songs, the bluesy honesty of Porter's vocals. Porter needs a producer who isn't afraid to get a little mud on his boots

The best songs are the ones that don't sound so goddamned nice. "How to Rob a Bank," the one legit folk song on the record, steals its sound and content shamelessly from Woody Guthrie -- get a seat on the board of directors is the answer to "how" -- and yet it's the most original and unpredictable track on the record. Something about this cute little throwaway homage loosens Porter, relaxes his pretty voice into a charming chuckle, and the production follows suit, stripping away the stodgy, lulling bass, burping open the tupperware, letting things jangle. Porter must have known he was on to something here – he named the album after the song, and the title promises a much more thrilling ride than it delivers.

I'm picking nits here, only because I think that Porter has a considerable talent, and I hate to see it wasted in albums designed as showcases for his pretty singing and virtuosic guitar playing. It's an easy trap for highly gifted yet traditional-minded musicians to fall into -- precision and clarity become the watchwords, instruments are overdubbed half to death, and you end up with a lot of prettiness and not a lot of life. The music is pressed behind glass.

I don't mean to imply that Porter is just another skillful adult-rock sleepwalker, even if elegantly arranged snoozers like the album closer "Barefoot Reel" might sound that way. There's something vital in his melodies and his guitar lines, and here and there some urgency emerges through the mellow haze that obscures what could have been a terrific album. His lyrics are poetic and searching, as in “Too Big to Sell,” his melancholy ode to the European painters who’ve inspired him. “They broke all the rules and they gambled on love,” he sings of Monet, Rosseau, Van Gogh. But all of those artists were reaching for something invisible and uncanny, something somewhere outside of their grasp. There’s always a price for this kind of hungry and restless ambition – poverty or depression or addiction or an ear – but these artists were willing to pay it. Willie Porter, singing and strumming away inside his comfortable wheelhouse, would do well to heed their example.

Final Thoughts on District 9 [Spoilers]

2009-09-08T13:13:00.000-07:00

After a consultation with Dr. Teeth, I've decided to post a few more thoughts on District 9. First and foremost, I want to talk about how great it is to see the moribund science fiction genre getting a facelift. I'm tempted to locate the start of this trend around the 2002 Soderbergh remake of Solaris. Solaris, a 4 hour, thoroughly impenetrable Tarkovsky film from the 1970s, was a pretty huge project to take on. The 2002 remake flopped, but the fact that it was made at all may have been indicative of renewed interest in the genre.

Since then we've had a run of decent-to-great scifi movies: 28 Days Later, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Shaun of the Dead, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Serenity, War of the Worlds, Children of Men, Sunshine, Cloverfield, Star Trek IX, Moon, and District 9.

I want to single out Sunshine and District 9 here, because they share a very important similarity: they both fall down on their premise.

The first half of Sunshine is compelling because the crew has so little agency. They're constantly reacting to the latest disaster thrust on them by an uncaring solar system, and that struggle to survive (and concurrent emotional/social accommodations the crew must make) is what keeps the audience involved. Then, inexplicably, they introduce an implausible malefactor into the mix. Not only is it unnecessary, it at odds with the entire tone of the movie up to that point. The change is jarring enough that it takes the audience entirely out of the flow of the movie, resulting in unpleasant metacommentary: why doesn't this dude have any skin and why God why would that make him super-strong?

District 9 also includes some strange shifts in tone. The movie begins as a documentary, and we're introduced to the setting through interviews with experts, witnesses, and of course, Wikus. At some point, however, it becomes impossible to tell the story in documentary form. Wikus goes off the grid and the movie shifts dramatically in tone, becoming an action/adventure flick. That wouldn't be a problem, except that D9 then reverts back to a hybrid format of news/documentary for the final 10-20 minutes. It's an odd choice, as it draws attention to the abrupt shifts in tone without really adding all that much to the movie. The final moments of the movie use documentary interviews to ask really obvious questions (basically, "will there be a sequel?") and tie up a few loose ends. A side effect of this choice is that we lose some of the immediacy of the action (it turns out that a guy tearing shit up in an alien battlesuit is less compelling when seen from a helicopter and framed by a chyron) and the questions posed by the talking heads are glaringly obvious--I'm not sure we needed them asked directly into the camera.

Klosterman Revisited

2009-09-08T12:54:00.000-07:00

A long time ago, I wrote something critical about Chuck Klosterman. You can't slag on soccer like this without agitating the blogosphere:

To say you love soccer is to say you believe in enforced equality more than you believe in the value of competition and the capacity of the human spirit. I would sooner have my kid deal crystal meth than play soccer.

Today, while I remain sentimentally attached to the term "Klosterfuck," I'm man enough to admit that I didn't have all the information. I recently finished reading Fargo Rock City, Klosterman's ode to the metal bands of the 1980s.

Fargo Rock City has two things going for it. First, it's sincere. CK is responding to the retrospective condemnation heaped on his childhood heroes by a critical establishment that neither appreciates nor understands the joys of brainless rock and roll. Occasionally that defensive posture leads him into dangerous waters, as it does when he clumsily tries to argue that 80s metal wasn't sexist. The strongest part of the book is the epilogue, where he grapples with the subjectivity of music criticism and the way that same tendency skews his own work.*

That's the second thing that makes the book great. Chuck's voice is so strong that you're always aware that these are his thoughts. To his credit (and in marked contrast to the soccer quote above) he never dresses them up with sham objectivity. In other words, there's room for disagreement without having to defend your position on "enforced equality" or other bullshit terms. It's a fairly simple premise: Chuck Klosterman loves 80s metal and he's going to explain why. What you do with that is up to you.

*He also memorably trashes the idea that your revealed preferences as a 17 year old are indicative of some deeper truth of your being. When you were 17, you were a pain in the ass and that's about it.

District 9 [Spoilers]

2009-08-20T06:51:00.000-07:00

Briefly, the plot of District 9 is that an alien mothership drifts to a halt above Johannesburg, and after three months humans penetrate the interior to find a group of starving, malnourished aliens inside. They promptly relocate these unfortunates to the Soweto-like D9. There, tensions build between prawn and human until the government authorizes the mediocre-yet-sinister Multinational United to conduct a second round of resettlement to an encampment 200 miles outside the city.

Now, before I get all serious on you, I'd like to take a moment to reassure you that I did, in the darkness and comfort of the movie theatre, say things like "dude needs an AA for arm-eating" and "what the fuck are you doing Wikus, strap the fuck in!" In neither case did the movie disappoint. As a storming-the-barricades-with-energy-weapons tale of righteous redemption, it's everything you could hope for.

When you dig a little deeper into the scenery, however, District 9 starts to decay a bit.

The film juxtaposes the "honest" savagery of the Nigerian gangsters in D9 against the corporate condescension of MNU. The Nigerians relentlessly and shamelessly exploit the prawns, but they never turn on their own, and they seem to have a pretty sweet racket going on. They get to charge exorbitant prices for cat food, amass alien weaponry, and ritually consume the occasional prawn appendage. It's a living.

In contrast, MNU is possessed of a relentless hunger that's unchecked by any bonds. Throughout the movie, every act of brutality carried out by the Nigerians is matched or exceeded (either in scope or cruelty) by MNU. At the most basic level, this points to a problem of motivational incoherence on the part of MNU. Like the similarly-named Umbrella Corporation in the Resident Evil series, Multinational United completely embraces the "why do this right when we could do it EVIL?" approach to corporate decisionmaking.

Aside: Resident Evil 2 is the most baldfaced demonstration of that ethos. For those of you who aren't familiar with the Mila Jovovovovovich vehicle, the plot goes something like this: a bumbling Umbrella Corporation strike team unleashes the zombie apocalypse. An Umbrella corporate overlord decides to "handle" the situation by using Raccoon City as a proving ground for their most advanced bioweapon, and their very first test of that weapon involves straight-up murdering the entire Raccoon City police force.

Something rather similar occurs in D9 when the bigwigs decide that they need to liquify every ounce of Wikus' biomass to "get his DNA." (What?) Conveniently, they make this decision over the restrained-but-conscious Wikus, who somewhat predictably hulks out and escapes. It's also worth noting that one of the oligarchs is Wikus' father-in-law, who, two scenes later, demonstrates a heretofore unseen level of cunning by lying to his daughter ("Can I see Wikus?" "No." "Okay.") about her husband's condition. You'd think he might've had the presence of mind to plot the blenderizing of his son-in-law behind closed doors.

In other words, D9 capitalizes on cheap anti-corporate sentiment. Now, I'm not an expert, but in my experience most corporations don't randomly choose to diversify into the lucrative "horrible atrocities" market. The CEO of Whole Foods is not terribly popular at the moment, but not because he announced that he uses the tears of unborn children as a sweetener in the 365 line of products. By the time D9 gets around to MNU's poorly-secured alien corpse-fucking division the movie has already established a rich tapestry of disgusting colonial attitudes around MNU and the entire scene feels unnecessary.

In the end, D9 commits its greatest sin by mapping basic textures onto complicated themes. By the end of the movie we have a white corporate strike team storming a black tribal compound so that they can fuck up a racial/corporate Judas wearing an alien battlesuit.

On the other hand, I would (and did) pay $10 to see that.

Neil Hamburger: Western Music and Variety

2009-08-18T14:11:00.000-07:00

Western Music and Variety with Neil Hamburger will be shelved under COMEDY, alongside DVDs by George Carlin and Jerry Seinfeld and Weird Al Yankovich. Go ahead, watch it all the way through – you won’t laugh once. But that’s okay. Hamburger – or Gregg Turkington, the deep-cover actor who portrays him – couldn’t be less interested in chuckles. He’s after bigger – or at least stranger – game.

But what game is that, exactly? He wants to irritate you, that much is sure. Between his sour, pinched face, his broken comic timing and his baffling jokes (“Why are M&Ms filled with chocolate? Because it would be illegal to fill them with shit.”), watching or listening to him perform is an almost viscerally unpleasant experience, and intentionally so.

He’s been doing this absurdist anti-comedy bit for a while now, and it’s possible he’s beginning to run out of steam. Thus we have Western Music and Variety, in which he dons a bolo tie and Stetson hat and attempts a fairly straightforward C&W western album in his tuneless, warbling screech, punctuating the between-song banter with lines that are less jokes than inexplicable howls of hate. (“Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, finally joined the Mile-High Club… Yeah, he raped a woman in Denver!” Buh-dum-ching.) The bathos of the Hamburger persona feels surprisingly natural in a country music setting. And unlike the jokes, a few of the songs are actually sort of funny. At the very least, we can be grateful that there is now a song entitled "How Can I Still Be Patriotic (When They've Taken Away My Right To Cry)?"

But ultimately, the humor is incidental. Hamburger is less a comedian than he is a piece of performance art, a character study. But it doesn't quite work because he leans too hard on the jokiness of the persona, always reaching for the broadest possible bit of loathsome self-mockery, to the point where Hamburger is clearly a shtick, a one-note joke, not a character we can believe in or engage with.

While Andy Kaufmann’s anti-comedy persona Tony Clifton, Hamburger's closest analogue, was every bit as vile and hateful, he also seemed eerily familiar. Like most great satire, he was a recognizably figure -- the narcissistic, rageful small-time club performer whose overwhelming arrogance and self-love are exceeded only by his self-hate -- pushed barely beyond the boundaries of reality. Turkington, in his eagerness to annoy and disgust, has pushed his Hamburger character too far -- he's continually clearing his throat, gargling phlegm into the microphone, hocking his loogies into the same drink from which he continues to sip. For all the praise he gets from fans and magazines, for all the talk of meta-comedy and envelope pushing, Hamburger is an archetype older than Sophocles: he's the fall guy, the stiff, the bufoon. If we laugh, it's out of relief – bad as we might feel, at least we’re not him.

The most compelling moments are when Hamburger drops the pretense of humor and lashes out at the crowd in authentic anger. "Fuck you, you son of a bitch! Fuck you, you zipper-lips!" he roars at an unamused audience member. There’s something real in his tone, something authentically vengeful and horrifying, and for a moment we can see that the real appeal of Neil Hamburger isn’t comic, it’s tragic. He follows each laughless joke with a weird little beaten-dog whimper, a high-pitched, closed-throated squeak that betrays the bottomless pain underneath the snarling hate. There’s something there – I’m just not sure whether it’s worth digging through all the irritation and unpleasant mugging to find it.

Asleep at the Wheel: Willie and the Wheel

2009-08-13T08:28:00.000-07:00

Legends run the risk of becoming gimmicks. When Aretha Franklin, befitted in her enormous hat, is trotted out at Obama's inauguration to sing the National Anthem, the effect is less musical than it is contextual. It's not about Aretha singing the anthem, it's about "Aretha" singing the "anthem." A voice that's iconic and unique and immediately recognizable can actually become a weakness. The voice will never be subsumed into the music, supporting and communicating the song. You will always be a celebrity first, and an artist second.

Willie Nelson has chosen an odd but effective strategy to combat this mummification of his image: debasement. If he duets with anyone and everyone in earshot, his singing can never become sanctified or inert. In a way, it's a canny strategy. The "legend" tag, while entirely earned and deserved, has always been somewhat at odds with Nelson's low-key persona as the ramblin' singer and guitar-picker, lover of life and devoted pot-head. So he just does everything, devaluing his myth by singing with Rob Thomas and Snoop Dogg, appearing in the Dukes of Hazzard, and campaigning for Kinky Friedman. It takes the pressure off and keeps the mothballs at bay.

His life looks like a hell of a lot of fun, but the resulting art isn't always good. His new album with western swing revivalists Asleep at the Wheel is a nice ride, as far as it goes. It sounds lively in the background -- all swingin' horns and jazz guitar underlying Willie's quicksilver voice -- but there isn't much there to listen to. There are a handful of great moments -- the brass-band carnival on "Hestitation Blues," the goofball joy of hearing Nelson sing lines like "I ain't gonna give nobody none of my jelly-roll" -- and Willie's in rare form throughout, loose as ever, richly amused, making the most unusual phrasings sound natural and obvious. But the album's ultimately predictable, polished, even a little phony. It has nothing to do with the outlaw country that made Nelson a star. It's great stuff for middle-aged people to put on at cocktail parties. I intend this as less of a condemnation than it probably sounds, but I don't mean it as a compliment.

To be fair, there are one or two terrific performances -- "Bring it on Down to my House, Honey" is a legitimately great hootenanny, freewheeling and alive -- but Willie and the Wheelcould have used more of the DIY, punky spirit of Springsteen's Seeger Sessions, which deflated what could have been a staid tribute by cranking everything to eleven, by playing it wild and loose. Asleep at the Wheel are far too expert for all that. A lot of the fun feels like "fun" -- studied, polished replicas of the kind of music that people loved without taking too seriously when it was organic and new. On "Oh! You Pretty Woman," When Jason Roberts sings "she made my heart go boop-boopy-doop" squeaking goofily on the last syllables, it sounds pandering, po-faced, like the mugging, forced mirth of a children's entertainer. It sounds self-conscious; It sounds like a recreation.

Respect and seriousness are poison to this kind of music. There's an almost finger-waggingly schoolmarmish quality to the goings on here, as though we're being told to eat our vegetables, when this stuff should be cotton candy, disposable, lighter than air, teeth-rottingly delightful. Willie brings everything he's got to bear, acquiting himself admirably in an otherwise miscalculated effort. He's the ideal singer for this sort of material -- but a magical voice like his just doesn't belong in such mundane, stilted surroundings.

500 Days Of Summer

2009-08-09T09:18:00.000-07:00

500 Days of Summer is another entry in the catalog of indie-rock movies that, were any of them old enough to join "My Best Friend's Wedding" on the broadcast TV circuit, would be labeled [Comedy/Drama] with [Hipster Themes]. The movie consciously self-defines as a paen to the nostalgia and hip self-awareness of TV and music literate millenials everywhere.

Summer Finn [Zooey Deschanel] and Tom Hanson [Joseph Gordon-Levitt] connect over memories of Knight Rider and boozy karaoke [Here Comes Your Man, by the Pixies] and the film follows their romance through comfortable tropes of twenteen existence: do-nothing jobs that we all suspect are beneath us, but are too lazy to leave. A trip through the Scandinavian depths of Ikea, including a detached, "scenes-from-a-normal-life" tour of the superstore's display rooms. And, of course, record stores.

Let me be clear: I've seen both Transformers movies, and I'll see the G.I. Joe movie--not because I expect (or expected) them to be good, but because they are the touchstones of my childhood. I'm moderately-to-severely annoyed in a summer featuring both a Transformers and a GI Joe movie, neither Arthur Burghardt (Destro, Devastator) nor the shambling corpse of fellow Jersey Boy Chris Latta (Cobra Commander, Starscream) were able to get any work. But, hey, Michael Bay gave Devastator some Trucknutz (tm), so there's that.

In other words, I'm the target audience for 500 Days of Summer, and I enjoyed it. While Zooey Deschanel plays the movie's eponymous character, the real star is Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Summer remains a cipher, a cardboard cutout standing in for every quirky, good-looking girl you've ever dated. An early sequence goes to great lengths to establish her as the object of widespread (but undoubtedly non-derivative, authentic, indie-pop-loving) desire. We never really find out why that's the case, and the subtle objectification of Summer is one of the lingering flaws of the movie. As a result, we never truly understand the bond between the two characters; Summer exists as a commodity to be won, enjoyed, and (when lost) recovered.

To some extent, these are flaws inherent in the genre. The schematic of a human relationship is rarely an interesting document, and often lacks the sort of broad appeal that translates into box office success. 500 Days of Summer falters when it tries to straddle that divide, offering both the comforting architecture of a comedy/drama and an elusive whiff of authenticity. The result is jarring--moments of brilliance undermined by a structure that can't quite support them.

Modest Mouse: No One's First and You're Next

2009-08-05T16:20:00.000-07:00

Modest Mouse’s fourth album, 2004’s Good News for People Who Love Bad News, appeared at an odd, off-kilter moment in pop history. The walls between the mainstream and the underground had come unexpectedly tumbling down. Suddenly the freaks were storming the gates and such unlikely stars as the Arcade Fire, the Walkmen and Death Cab for Cutie were garnering radio play and album sales. The cause is unclear – it’s possible that the teen melodrama The OC is a much greater cultural arbiter than most of us would like to admit, or else it’s just a cyclical thing, no different from the grunge explosion that had the record-label suits raiding the Pacific Northwest, signing everybody in a flannel shirt and dirty jeans, or the early seventies, when the hippies and weirdoes reigned supreme. In any case, we had such a moment about five years ago, and it led to the supremely weird spectacle of slouch-eyed, misanthropic indie heroes Modest Mouse being covered by the entire cast of American Idol in a Ford commercial.

Singer Isaac Brock and his band of unmerry men walked right into the bright lights, unblinking. Good News… happened to be their catchiest and most accessible album, but it didn’t represent a major departure from their jerky sound or ramshackle aesthetic of millennial dread, speedball anxiety and gut-bucket poetry. It did boast the single "Float On", an ice cream cone of a song, their most delicious and hopeful track to date, a magical pop number by a little indie band that improbably found its proper home on the radios and in the ears of millions of listeners. But "Float On" was an anomaly – becoming the owners of a smash hit single didn’t turn Modest Mouse into a pop group. By the time their next album, We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank, debuted at #1 on the Billboard charts (!) they were largely back to their old miserablist antics.

Their new album, No One’s First and You’re Next, is a collection of odds and ends, recent singles, B-sides and outtakes. These are leftovers? They don't sound like castoffs to me -- they sound like album tracks. Half of the songs here are as good as anything on We Were Dead…. Impressively, these eight songs that didn’t make it onto the LPs could serve as a primer for Modest Mouse, showing a skillful and idiosyncratic band at the height of its powers.

Brock's trademarks -- his half-swallowed yawp, his catchy little melodies that get bitten off before they're able to resolve -– have been slightly toned down, but they’re still ever-present. "Guilty Cocker Spaniels" is one of the best showcases yet for his charming bozo squawk -- he yelps the talk-song at you, lending the shaggy-dog lyrics a palpable urgency. Brock sounds like the cranky drunk at the end of the bar, holding forth hilariously and slightly annoyingly on his philosophies and grievances, until, out of nowhere, a battalion of Johnny Marr’s buzzing guitars storm the place, nearly drowning out the semi-coherent rambling. It’s an unexpected moment, two unrelated songs suddenly colliding like ships in the night, neither willing to give way to the other; they somehow carry on together, half broken, sailing slowly off into the dark as the pieces fall away.

The rollicking, melodic “Autumn Beds” proves that even on auto-pilot, Modest Mouse can deliver the goods. Armed with little more than a lovely meandering banjo figure, a mellow country-rock rhythm and an endlessly repeated lyric ("We won't be sleeping in our autumn beds."), the track is unassumingly beautiful, pretty in a way that the group rarely is. Brock's increasingly willing to lay down his quirky vocal tics and just sing, reaching for something elegiac and lovely, if only for moments here and there. It’s a track that reminds you just how little these people need in the way of tools. Their usual moves – Brock’s anxious staccato guitar lines and odd vocals, Jeremiah Green’s rubbery, jazz-influenced drumming, strengths on display throughout the record – are conspicuously absent for this one track, and it’s one of their best. Maybe that explains the little grace notes, the sly smiles, the hints of increasing mellowness and accessibility that have begun seeping into Modest Mouse albums. Growing more comfortable with their talents, maybe they’re learning that you don’t always have to work so hard and worry so much. Sometimes, you can just float on.

The Waifs: From The Union of Soul

2009-07-25T13:02:00.000-07:00

The Waifs are changeless. Their sound -- seemingly born in the dirt, forged on long dusty roads -- emerged fully formed: weathered, lovely and durable. Aussie sisters Vikki Thom and Donna Simpson have a little of the weird old America somewhere in their bones, and multi-instrumentalist Josh Cunningham textures their haunted roots music without flourish, underlining and coloring their powerful yet delicate voices and loose, graceful songs.

There's no formal play, no experimentation, no clever hook. This music is extremely conventional, which is the kiss of death for folk-rock in the freak-dominated aughts. In the nineties pretty pick 'n strum stuff like this had a shot on commercial radio, and the Waifs would fit more comfortably between Sheryl Crow and the Dixie Chicks (though they're far better than either of those) than between Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsome. Their strengths are their versatility, their sincerity, their beautiful melodies, their sweet and strong singing -- unhip virtues all. Despite an acclaimed (in Australia) career stretching back for a decade, and a tour opening for Bob Dylan, a search for their name on Pitchfork turns up no results at all. The Waifs have missed their moment. Barring some sudden reinvention of their sound or unexpected shift of the musical tides, they will become no more popular or wealthy than they are this very minute.

On their new live album Live From the Union of Soul they sound less than concerned. To the contrary: there's something valedictory about the tone of the concert, and deservedly so. The Waifs have never garnered the audience they might have, and they probably never will, but over five albums and thirteen years they've built an impressive and wide-ranging catalogue of songs that aspire to be nothing more than beautiful and affecting pieces of music. Their show has a casual and intimate feel, despite what sounds like a fairly large venue. The Simpson sisters are funny and relaxed – they sound utterly at home on the stage, off-handedly improvising new melodies, chuckling mid-lyric, shifting effortlessly between genres and moods.

They make it all sound so easy. A haunting, heartrendingly delicate folk rendition of Paul Kelly's beautiful Australian protest ballad "From Little Things Big Things Grow" sits comfortably alongside the jazz-inflected honeydew-sweet torch song “Stay,” which could have been written at any point in the last hundred years, and the radio-ready country rocker “Take It In.” Their generic pastiche might be scattershot if it weren’t for their tremendous vocals. There's nothing waif-like about these full-throated voices, earthly and belly-deep, haunting and wispy or wild and free. They make modern Americana without bothering to hide their outback inflections. It reminds you just how similar are the American and Australian mythologies: the wide open spaces; the cowboys; the hard livings carved from unforgiving land; the bounties of God and the toll of labor. Just as well that the Waifs have missed their moment: they sing for a vanishing world.

Man And Ball: An Existential Crisis

2009-07-24T08:23:00.000-07:00

This can't be happening! Are you real? Am I? Is this just a dream? A nightmare?

It Works On So Many Levels

2009-07-23T13:52:00.000-07:00

NASA Knows My Weakness

2009-07-20T20:34:00.000-07:00

Space-baseball. STAY ON THE BASEPATHS NEIL, JESUS CHRIST.

Luka Bloom: Eleven Songs

2009-07-18T14:13:00.000-07:00

The Irish troubadour Luka Bloom made his name on the back of his unpredictable and electrifying live performances -- a fact that seems almost hard to believe, listening to the polite and peaceful vision represented on his new record, Eleven Songs. You know the stuff: spare, echoing strings and keys, shuffling brushed drums, occasional flourishes of concertina or xylophone, melodic protestations of love and heartsickness and the impossible beauty of it all. It's a familiar formula, to be sure, but it's one that’s been used to great effect by people like Leonard Cohen, Aimee Mann, John Darnielle, etc... The problem here is that Bloom doesn't have enough personality to make such formulaic proceedings feel interesting or relevant or new.

It's all pleasant enough. Bloom's lovely and supple (if somewhat characterless) voice settles back into the mellow acoustic surroundings, tepidly trying to seduce you or sing you to sleep (in the world of folk-rock balladeers there's not always a difference). The record's few strong moments are the ones that take advantage of the singer’s off-handed, casual vibe; "I Love the World I'm In" is wonderfully understated, slithering in on eerie tom-toms and a furtive, snickering bass line. The prosaic lyrics can't diminish a track this underhandedly atmospheric, and if Bloom spent more of his time trying to hypnotize you with his dreamlike sound, we might have had a good album on our hands. Instead, he relaxes mostly into a half-hearted mid-tempo groove and just lies there, inert.

He can apparently be stirred out of his afternoon nap only in service of some larger social cause, so we get the token rocker "Fire," a forced, cringe-inducing piece of protest music with laughable lyrics like, "We know that we were lied to for another stupid war,” and “Everybody's gone online where nothing is real."

Awful as they are, at least the lines above are startling in their badness -- they make you notice them. The rest of Bloom's words feel cut-and-pasted: portentous and the clichéd, filled with generic pastoral images, inscrutable epigrams, extended metaphors, and more uses of the word "love" than anybody singing love songs should be allowed.

Belittling this album brings me no joy. It feels like Kurt Vonnegut’s description of criticism: donning a full suit of plate-mail to attack an ice cream sundae. If there were ever an innocuous, ingratiating album, undeserving of scorn, Eleven Songs is it -- well arranged, earnest, skillfully recorded, pretty, melodic and graceful. Bloom's talents – his soothing songs, the warmth of the acoustic space they inhabit, his lilting, melodic brogue -- are not insignificant, they're just mundane. You need real strength of personality to pull this stuff off. You need to be saying something or struggling with something -- you need to be able shake people, to make them hear something besides yet another Irish lullaby. Otherwise you end up like Luka Bloom: shooting for Van Morrison, landing on Damien Rice.

Arctic Monkeys: Live at the Apollo

2009-07-10T10:57:00.000-07:00

The Arctic Monkeys first appeared on American shores acrest a tidal wave of hype. They were the Band that Blogs Broke, scruffy Scouser kids who'd found a way around the record label payola machine that favored the packaged and processed over the immediate and honest. They'd distributed their album for free online, garnered a few well-placed fawning reviews, played a series of triumphant, sold out London shows, and suddenly they were the latest and greatest Saviors of Rock. With a little help from the independent label Domino, they'd proved that an enormous amount of publicity could be generated almost free of charge. They were the gleeful, punkish David to the lumbering, sickly Goliath of the record industry. Suddenly it seemed that grass roots could grow into tall wheat overnight.

And the story was true, as far as it goes. But despite all the hyperbolic reviews and opinion pieces using the band as an exemplar of how The Internet Will Change Everything Forever, there's not much that's particularly fringey or independent about the Artic Monkey's sound. It's the same brand of fast, sneering guitar rock that's always dominated the post-Libertines UK. Their impressive Horatio Alger story is weakened by the fact that they're precisely the sort of group that would likely have had great success under the the traditional label system -- it just would have taken a little longer. They write catchy tunes with clever lyrics, slam out stiff rhythmic chords on electric guitars, and deliver the goods with a cheeky bounce. And so now, one LP and one EP out from their debut (which the unremittingly hyperbolic, almost self-parodying magazine NME declared the fifth best British album of all time), the fervor has largely died down, leaving a solid, unassuming lad-rock band standing in its wake. And on their newly released DVD, "Live at the Apollo," they come home to Liverpool, still blinking the stardust from their eyes.

Let's give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they're still a bit addled from the sudden rush of fortune and glory. Despite all the playful charm of his lyrics and the sardonic sneer of his vocals, lead singer Alex Turner displays exactly zero stage presence, staring blankly out at the crowd, casually tapping his foot with the beat as though he's waiting for a crosstown bus. Director Richard Ayoade seems to be under the impression that Turner has some kind of star quality, because he mostly keeps the camera fixed firmly on the frontman as he stands there, inert. I'm not looking for Pete Townsend windmills and powerslides, here -- is the occasional smile or sneer or shimmy to much to ask? Some bands can be forgiven for aloof, frosty temperaments, but this isn't Radiohead or Sonic Youth or Leonard Cohen -- we're talking about blistering British pop-punk here. A little showmanship and energy are called for. Even when they speed up the tempo to a breakneck pace, it feels less like they're tearing it up than rushing slap-dashthrough their set-list, eyes firmly fixed on the afterparty. "Thank you," Turner mumbles between songs. "I really enjoyed that. No, I mean it. I really mean it." He convinces no one.

It's a shame, because the music isn't half bad. Turner has a way with a stuttering staccato melody and a gift for the clever, biting turn of phrase. The subject matter -- run-ins with cops and classmates, dancefloor hookups, hometown claustrophobia -- is the shallow and adolescent stuff that's at the pulse of rock 'n roll. Turner has a writer's eye for detail and a sharp ear for tuneful storytelling, and he brings both to bear in his up-tempo odes to the gloriously stupid nihilism of youth. It’s a mature and observant mind turned to immature and fleeting subject matter, and the band commits to it, bringing you into their world. For the moment, though, their world seems like a jaded and empty place. Glorious stupidity without pleasure is just joyless yammer. The Arctic Monkeys have been through the full cycle of hype, from fawning to yawning, and they’ve come out the other side hollow and hesitant.

Alex Turner is twenty three years old. What’s that in blog years?

Lenny Kravitz: Let Love Rule

2009-06-16T19:41:00.000-07:00

I prize innovation far less than most music critics. Though those who push boundaries are to be admired, newness in and of itself has very little to do with quality. In these very pages I have recently praised both Ian Tyson and the Black Crowes for albums that simply execute generic tropes very well, offering nothing new. Novelty is by definition transient. A good album sounds good today, and it’ll sound good in twenty years.

So why do I hate Lenny Kravitz so much? This is the question I pondered as I listened to the 20th anniversary re-issue of his debut album, Let Love Rule. The passing of time should be kind to an inveterate thief like Kravitz. Pop history has a way of blurring in the rearview mirror – what came first and who influenced whom seem to matter less and less. Time often reclaims groups that once seemed shallow and fleeting – it seems almost hard to believe that in their day the Beach Boys, Buddy Holly, the Bee Gees and Burt Bacharach were widely considered disposable. Kravitz is a tremendously skilled instrumentalist and an expert showman – he seems like the kind of guy who’s ripe for a critical reappraisal. So why, with each passing year, does his music sound more plastic, inert and – to use a word that invites accusations of rockism – phony?

His virtuosic musicianship might be part of the problem. Kravitz is a one man band and a notorious control freak, rarely allowing other musicians to appear on his albums. Listen to his bluesy piano trills on “My Precious Love,” or his jittery drums on “Flower Child” – the dude can flat-out play. (“Flower Child,” I should note, is actually quite a good song.) He’s a particularly terrific bassist, building his Prince-lite grooves from the ground up. (He may have missed his true calling when he became an eclectic superstar auteur instead of a bad-ass bassist for a grimey funk band.) But for all the monstrous talent on display, his songs feel inorganic, constructed from a blueprint instead of emerging organically. Where Prince is raw and slithering, Kravitz is calculated, clean and precise. If good artists borrow and great artists steal, Kravitz rents by the hour.

And then there are the lyrics. Oh God, the lyrics. The titular “Let Love Rule,” the single that launched Kravitz’s tremendously successful career, informs us that “Love is gentle as a rose, and love can conquer anyone. It’s time to take a stand – brothers and sisters join hands. We’ve got to let love rule!” It’s almost always unflattering to quote song lyrics out of context, but man, it just goes on and on. Six minutes of this tripe? Really, Lenny? He just takes John Lennon’s soggiest epigrams and multiplies them exponentially, with none of the counterbalancing effect of Lennon’s brutal, bloody-sleeved honesty. Twenty years into his career, it’s still the only thing Kravitz has ever sung about: Love is good. We should love. More love please. He seems to believe that this is some kind of radical sentiment. (His last album was the clunkily titled It Is Time For a Love Revolution. Kravitz is apparently as staunchly anti-contraction as he is pro-love.)

This re-issue is a quickie money-maker, without notable bonus features or new songs. The six extra tracks consist of random demos and rough mixes of songs that appeared in better versions on the album proper (do we really need three versions of the interminable “Let Love Rule”?) and a horrifying castrated version of Lennon’s viciously truthful “Cold Turkey.” Where Lennon sings “Cold turkey has got me on the run,” Kravitz amends it to “Cold turkey has got me on the FUCKING run.” And that’s Kravitz in a nutshell – his vision of transcendence is mewling about love, and his vision of edge is dropping an F-bomb.

The Black Crowes: Warpaint Live

2009-05-27T14:32:00.000-07:00

The Black Crowes were the unwitting victims in a minor scandal last year, when Maxim magazine, in a remarkable display of true journalistic integrity, somehow managed to review Warpaint , an album that the band hadn't yet finished recording. When accused of fraudulent reporting, Maxim offered the ridiculous defense that their review was an "educated guess."

While distasteful and unethical, this lapse is somewhat understandable for two reasons. For one thing, I assume that the Maxim offices are filled with distractingly jigglesome fake boobs. (In my imagination they're not even attached to people -- they're just bouncing arbitrarily around the room, like that Star Trek episode with the tribbles.) And for another thing, the Black Crowes sound (as well as their clothes and hair) have been almost completely changeless since the group first appeared. Hilariously, Maxim's uninformed and dishonest review happens to be a fairly accurate assessment of Warpaint .

And now it falls to me to write a review of an album that I really COULD discuss without ever listening to it: Warpaint Live. As the title indicates, it sounds just like Warpaint , except live. (And dressed up with a few covers and back-catalogue tunes.)

Whether you’ll like it depends on whether you like the Black Crowes’ thing: it’s forever 1974. The last 30 years of pop music never happened. The sky is thick with incense, and hippified country-rock rules the airwaves.

I will say, though, that advancing age and a diminishing fan base suit these guys – they began their career affecting the pose of the grizzled, drunken road warriors of rock, and have gradually earned the reputation to which they once pretended. Two and a half decades and a dozen albums deep into their workmanlike careers, they’re as good as they ever were – maybe even a little better.

When they get their hands on a good melody, as in "Josephine," they play the living hell out of it, all earnest, unembarrassed rock-star passion. A warm and pleading vocal is welded to a powerfully simply guitar line, and they speed the whole thing up into a wild Freebird jam at the end. Sure, you’ve heard it before – it sounded good then, and it sounds good now.

Two discs of this stuff, though, starts to feel a little repetitive and formulaic. Verse! Chorus! Pseudo-Page guitar solo! There are a lot of great moments along the way, but the Crowes would do better to follow their myriad influence a little farther down the highways and byways of Aquarian pop. They steal a lot of terrific stuff from the Byrds, the Grateful Dead, Sly and the Family Stone and the Flying Burrito Brothers, but they blend it all into their familiar Allman/Zep/Skynyrd axis of searing guitar rock. They've worked hard to perfect the Black Crowes sound, but perfection and complacency are two sides of the same coin.

They're at their best when they lean harder on the Allman side of the equation. The Robert Plant rock star posturing feels a little tired, but the plaintive white-boy soul of Chris Robinson's voice is compelling and enveloping. Tracks like the lovely heartsick ballad “Locust Street,” which sounds for all the world like a great lost Gram Parsons song, makes you wonder why rock bands don’t still write songs this mournful, emotional, and yet restrained. Rich Robinson’s guitar sound is vocal and expressive in a way that’s unfashionable, anachronistic and still moving. The lack of froofy artistry and self-conscious innovation is refreshing – they’re more craftsmen than auteurs. And yet, their arena rock never feels calculated or impersonal; despite their adherence to formula, nothing feels rote or tossed off. After all these years they still play it like they mean it, and that’s saying something.

Hoots and Hellmouth: The Holy Open Secret

2009-05-21T15:58:00.001-07:00

Who needs a drum kit? The Philadelphia rock/alt-country/gospel outfit Hoots and Hellmouth generally eschew any percussion that can’t be easily transported to the front porch, choosing washboards, tambourines, spoons and footstomps over the usual snare, bass and high hat, yet their sound is no less raucous or irresistibly danceable for the substitution.

Their second album, The Holy Open Secret, is a worthy follow-up to their barn-burning first record. Producer Bill Moriarty has become something of a local Phil Spector, svengali-like in his ability to steer acclaimed homegrown acts to the cusp of national attention. His records with groups like Man Man and Dr. Dog elevated them from the house party and church basement circuit to appearances on network television and reviews in Rolling Stone. In the process he’s developed an idiosyncratic Philadelphia indie rock sound, characterized by constantly shifting instrumental textures, rich harmonies and dense arrangements that somehow still sound chaotic and wild – complex houses of cards, always on the verge of glorious collapse.

Moriarty’s arrangements are a perfect fit for Hoots and Hellmouth’s odd hodgepodge of influences. Despite the tossed off hootenanny atmosphere they cultivate, their songcraft is extremely ambitious, almost schizophrenic in its breadth and reach. “What Good Are Plowshares if We Use Them Like Swords” is a hard, razor-edged Motown single, chugging along on a viciously simple and ominous guitar riff, before segueing into the laughing Tom Waits kitchen sink stomp of “The Family Band.” “You and All of Us” is a wonderful mess: imprecise harmonies, an impossibly catchy, almost rag-time guitar line, and drunken, woozy hollering. The songs come at you from twelve directions at once, and your defenses are useless. They win you over.

The album wrings a lot from the tension between the band’s two songwriters and vocalists, Sean Hoots and Andrew "Hellmouth" Gray. Hoots’ songs are generally the better ones. His melodies move in more unexpected directions -- the soulful gospel vibe and bluegrass rhythms seem to be his contribution. In comparison, the Hellmouth tracks -- mostly contemplative singer-songwriter ballads -- seem very routine and predictable. Still, with Hoots throwing such a wide variety of sounds into a blender and coldly snarling his way through oblique lyrics, there's something warm and personal about Hellmouth's delivery, his broad chords and dusty melodies, the creakily expansive, oaken timbre of his voice. Amidst all of Hoots' tight arrangements, falsettos, bible quotes and whiplash key changes, a well sung, simply stated lyric like "in this kitchen all I see are a thousand dishes and me" isn’t just prosaic -- it's intimate, familiar, true.

Gray doesn't possess even half of Hoots' impressive talent, but his well-worn folk holds an important place on the record. Without it, Hoots' hyperactive musical imagination and surplus of ideas might grow wearying, even unpleasant.

Hoots is the kite. Hellmouth is the string. The Holy Open Secret tugs you skyward.

Ian Tyson: Yellowhead to Yellowstone

2009-04-14T13:14:00.000-07:00

It's been an awfully long time since Ian Tyson, as one half of Ian and Sylvia, had a huge hit with the folk-rock ballad "Four Strong Winds." Soon Sylvia left, the record sales dropped, he bought a ranch in Alberta and soldiered on. Thirty five years and over a dozen albums in to his solo career, he releases his new Yellowhead to Yellowstone and Other Love Stories to little fanfare. His voice is muzzled, perpetually tormented by a catch hanging in the back of his throat. He sounds gravelly and raw to the point where you begin to worry about his health. Though there's no indication that Tyson is ill in any way, he sounds like Townes Van Zandt on Sanitarium Blues -- an unassuming country singer in his final days. There's nothing particularly impressive about the album, no pyrotechnics on display. The production is basic and workmanlike and sometimes overly slick. The lyrics aren’t full of wordplay or beautiful imagery. (Some of the lines, in fact, land with a clunk.) And yet somehow Tyson's harrowing, weathered voice and simple, sturdy sensibilities tie the whole thing together into much more than the sum of its parts. The songs are sentimental, but his voice is flinty and unflinching, haunted by ghosts and yet undistracted from the task at hand. It's an unassuming album in praise of unassuming virtues: devotion, resiliency, commitment, care. It's honest and defiant and lovely; it deserves more attention than it will receive.

Golem: Citizen Boris

2009-04-07T09:59:00.000-07:00

It’s an increasingly familiar technique: take some traditional form of music, crank up the volume, season with snarling punk rock intensity. What the Pogues did with Celtic balladry, O'Death does with Appalachian hillbilly bluegrass, and Hank Williams III does with his grandfather's flinty country music, the Brooklyn-based group Golem does with that old-time Hebrew sound. To their credit, they stir up a considerably more jumbled concoction than the aforementioned bands. Incorporating Romany folk, accordion-driven klezmer songcraft, and bits of Russian dance-pop, they spit and belt their lyrics in a semi-coherent mix of Yiddish, English and various Slavic languages. (Lead singer Annette Ezekiel seems to be at least septa-lingual.) Their breakneck delivery ends up sounding less like Israel than New York City, or more specifically Brighton Beach -- an atavistic, self-segregated and yet diverse corner of the melting pot.

I've never seen Golem perform, but, based on their albums, I'd wager they put on a hell of a show. Their combination of manic wildness and instrumental density is compelling, and their Jewish/Euro-folk salad approach provides a wide enough variety of moves and textures to keep you guessing. Still, as with many of the bands that use the old folk/punk dialectic, they suffer from being pressed onto compact disc. While live performance favors musicianship, attitude and theatrics, records demand a level of songwriting that Golem can’t quite deliver.

Which is not to say that their new album, Citizen Boris, is entirely free of hummable tunes. “Train Across Ukraine” rides in on rolling drums and wonderfully discordant horns that summon up the chaos of an overcrowded immigrant train-car. “Zingarella,” the world’s most ominous and murderous wedding song, builds to a vicious climax and Aaron Diskin’s voice, sometimes gratingly histrionic, sounds howlingly desperate. There are some fairly half-hearted concept album trappings here about an Eastern European man journeying to the US, but the conceit never quite takes hold, and seems to be dropped halfway through the record. That, really, is indicative the album’s fundamental flaw: though there’s tremendous musicianship on display here, and many moments are joyful, funny and even glorious, in sum the thing feels a bit thrown together, unfinished, half-formed. And their new emphasis on English lyrics, probably intended to garner a wider audience, is ultimately a mistake – it draws attention to the weakness of those lyrics, and underlines what I’ll call the Borat Factor: a creeping feeling that this might all be some kind of condescending joke. (Are the accents fake? I can’t tell, but I’m suspicious that this be an American group doing a skit.) When a band names one of their albums Fresh Off Boat, it’s hard to feel that there’s not a wink lurking somewhere in the background.

They're at their best when they quit it with all the mugging, stop shoving their thick moustaches in your direction, and let their alternately thrilling, menacing and adrenal music carry them away. On the beguiling and lovely Yiddish/English ballad "Come to Me," vocalists Diskin and Ezekiel trade pick-up lines and rebuffs, propositioning one another and dancing off into a haze of shuffling drums and mysterious modal brass melodies. They can't resist carrying every idea to its logical conclusion, though, so they spoil the delicate sensuality and tension of the song by blanketing the ending with Birkin & Gainsbourg-style orgasmic squeals. It’s this relentless need to please, this urge to reach for the nearest punch-line, that likely makes them a riveting live act. It also, unfortunately, prevents Citizen Boris from being much more than a mediocre album.

Rating: 3.5/10

Rusty Truck: Luck's Changing Lanes

2009-02-16T13:55:00.001-08:00

There are at least three very good reasons to hate Rusty Truck's album Luck's Changing Lanes without ever listening to it.

1. It's a vanity project from celebrity photographer Mark Seliger, a brazen attempt to cross the line between member of the media and actual celebrity.

2. It's studded with unearned guest appearances from icons like T Bone Burnett, Sheryl Crow, Jakob Dylan, Lenny Kravitz, Willie Nelson, Rob Thomas, and Gillian Welch. Any album with liner notes that read “Sheryl Crow: Accordion” is not one I’m particularly eager to listen to. It implies that showing off your famous buddies is more important than, you know, finding an actual accordion player. Also: Rob Thomas?

3. Finally, it's the "second album" from Rusty Truck despite containing almost the exact same material included on their debut, Broken Promises. A couple of new songs are tacked on, a bonus disc of music videos is thrown in, and viola! A sophomore album. The decision to repackage the same material under a new title is inexplicable at best, and cravenly calculating at worst. It's hard to think that Seliger's label Rykodisc isn't hoping get a few extra purchases from Rusty Truck fans who don't realize they're buying the same album for a second time.

With all of this weighing against it, I did my best to hate this album. I’m sorry to report that the album ain’t bad. It’s not exactly good either, and it nearly buckles under the weight of Mark Seliger’s Amazing Superfriends, but there’s a fair amount of pleasure to be taken in these melodic, unassuming country songs.

Seliger has a way with a vocal hook and a melancholic turn of phrase. It’s all simplistic, derivative in the extreme, but that somehow becomes a strength. A song like “Never Going Back,” driven by soft pedal-steel and high, lonesome vocals, feels both generic and eternal – it could as easily have been sung by Townes Van Zandt, Conway Twitty, or Garth Brooks. It’s a microcosm of the album as a whole: what it lacks in originality it makes up for with warmth and familiarity.

Still, there’s a bizarre feeling of wealth and excess that’s entirely at odds with the mood of these songs. The sound is slick and crystal clear, when these songs would be better served by a sort of hazy back porch low fidelity. Seliger’s high and tuneful voice is rather thin, and producer Jakob Dylan overcompensates by repeatedly overdubbing the vocals, effectively thickening them up and stripping them of immediacy and personality.

And while most of the celebrity cameos are successfully subsumed into the album’s mood – Ms. Crowe, it turns out, plays a perfectly fine accordion – there is one disastrous misstep: on the lovely, heartsick ballad “A Thousand Kisses,” he attempts to duet with Willie Nelson. The moment when Seliger’s voice is replaced by Nelson’s effortlessly affecting twang and jazz-like phrasing, a shiver runs down your spine. And, if you have any taste at all, you suddenly wonder what you’re doing listening to this middle-of-the-road pablum when you could just dig out your copy of “Red Headed Stranger” and crank up the volume on the genuine article.

Today in Awesome, Terrifying Science

2009-02-07T08:13:00.000-08:00

Have you ever looked at a cobra and thought, "Okay. I get it. You're creepy, slithery, have big-ass fangs, and your skin makes for some kickin' boots. But you, snake, are simply insufficiently giant-sized."

Well, Gentle Imaginary Reader, your prayers have been answered, presuming you either own a time machine or are reading this blog from the early Cenozoic era. Because scientists in Columbia have discovered the bones of a snake that weighs as much as a car.

Yes, at forty-two feet long and over a ton, the Titanoboa cerrejonensis (Latin for "super evil megasnake of bed-wettingly nightmarish proportions") makes an excellent pet for those of us who look at the Sphinx and see a potential housecat, or look at a beluga whale and see a nice midnight snack. The upside of all this is that we now know what became of the Mayor of Sunnydale.

Seriously, guys, this bastard is huge. Over a ton! A ton is two thousand pounds, which is many, many more pounds than usual for a snake. I bet even you don't weigh that much, Gentle Imaginary Reader, and everyone knows that you're really, really fat.

In conclusion, I want these motherfuckin' snakes out of my motherfuckin' prehistory.

Gotta Jet

2009-02-06T08:26:00.000-08:00

In the mood for a hilarious piece of hackery? Read William Garvey's spirited Op-Ed defense of corporate jets. Mom, apple pie, baseball, and frivolous corporate spending: the things that make America great.

Blackout Beach: Skin of Evil

2009-02-05T15:58:00.000-08:00

Carey Mercer sure has a lot of bands. Frog Eyes; Blue Pine; Swan Lake (his supergroup with Dan Bejar and Spencer Krug, who each have many, many bands of their own); Blackout Beach -- it could be hard to keep track if it weren't for the uniquely odd, disjointed pop sensibility he brings to each of his records. Little shards of melody are jumbled, repeated, strung together, mixed around until they no longer resemble any familiar musical progression. He howls, whispers, thunders, rambles and mumbles, lending his experimental compositions the tone of a drugged-out conversation.

On his new release from his side project (or are they all side projects?) Blackout Beach, "Skin of Evil," Mercer finds a new restraint. His live shows are largely showcases for his massive voice, and he often steps away from the mic, filling the room with his booming, unamplified a capella baritone; but here he finds a quieter, more haunted mood, invoking the choked-out, swooning cabaret theatricality of a Nick Cave or a Scott Walker being strangled by a silk glove.

Though "Skin of Evil" might be called a concept album (or, at under 30 minutes, a concept EP) -- the record supposedly follows the story of a bewitching beauty named Donna, with one song devoted to each of the eight men she leaves in her wake -- the overwhelming feel of the record is atmospheric, not narrative. It's unusually minimal for Mercer, built around bare, echoing guitar chords that lean heavily on the flange pedal and a quietly ticking and whooshing drum machine. The rest is all eerie ornamentation: off-kilter harmonies, distant chords hammered out on a busted bar-room piano, a few washes of howling or buzzing synth.

It's not an easy listen -- Mercer's pop instincts are suppressed even more than usual, and he dials back the vocal pyrotechnics. No longer splitting the difference between opera singer and carnival barker, he comes off here as a sort of bipolar Springsteen on methadone -- strung out, worried, restless, anxious, fidgety, and desperate. And though the album does not exactly demand to be replayed, it does create a captivatingly grim world, somewhere between the Old Testament and a bleakly snow-gray cityscape. "Skin of Evil" is not unlike Mercer himself -- prickly, unfriendly, demanding, but fascinating and compelling just the same.

Brian Wilson: Lucky Old Sun

2009-02-03T12:15:00.000-08:00

I, for one, have been enjoying the gradual breakdown of Brian Wilson’s voice. The pure, shimmering tenor of old has weathered and rusted into something more pedestrian. The incredible technical precision is gone, and his tone wobbles as he attempts to hold a high note. But there’s a new warmth and sadness, the kind that can only be attained with age. The almost child-like, innocent tone of his phrasing is the same, but it sounds sun-baked, leathered, faded. The same guy from Pet Sounds is in there somewhere, struggling to express himself through a half-busted larynx and somewhat addled mind. The effect is moving and heartbreaking.

Wilson’s recent song-cycle “Lucky Old Sun” leans heavily on that tension, looking backwards with an aching nostalgia. The album sounds like one long sigh, half joyful and blissed-out, half sorrowful and resigned. In one sense his new record continues the career renaissance that began with the near-perfect “SMiLE” from 2004. In another sense it feels overshadowed by its predecessor, self-consciously dressing up its lovely, simple songs in heavy orchestration and concept-album trappings that seem intended to validate the “genius” tag that’s been applied to Wilson since the mid-sixties. The music is continuous, one song flowing directly into the next or linked together by the album’s most heinous offense, cringe-inducing segments of spoken word poetry celebrating the history and culture of southern California. (No one, and especially not Brian Wilson, should be required to recite lines like “Venice Beach is poppin’, like live shrimp dropped on a hot wok,” and “I mean, are we not all actors, and the whole wide world our stage?”) Unlike “SMiLE,” which was modular, cyclical and deeply, deeply weird, “Lucky Old Sun” sounds like a handful of good-to-great songs haphazardly glued together in an attempt to create the impression of an experimental pop symphony.

His new DVD release of the same title bundles a live-in-the-studio performance of the album with a hackneyed, workmanlike making-of documentary that doubles as a lengthy commercial for Capitol Records. The only interesting moments are the glimpses of Wilson and company at work in the studio, but these segments are frustratingly few and brief. The rest is given over to dozens of talking heads rehashing the same old clichés about Wilson’s tortured genius and his music’s place in the culture, interrupted by pointless and portentous title cards outlining bits of Los Angeles history. Do we really need Billy Bob Thornton to tell us that Wilson’s albums made California sound like a fun place to be? Everyone who’s ever listened to the radio knows it already – but hey, I guess until Bad Santa says it it’s not really true.

The live performance, similarly, doesn’t offer much that couldn’t be heard on the original album. The studio setting is sterile and dull (and not improved by overcompensatingly frenetic camerawork), and Wilson's carefully orchestrated, dense compositions leave no room for improvisation. The only real visual dressings are incredibly cheesy animated/CGI sequences that accompany the terrible, humiliating, awful spoken-word segments, slavishly following the lyrics like a Youtube fan video. (The poem mentions an old beatnik sitting by the side of the road… hm, what image would go well with that? Ooh, I know, let's show an old beatnik sitting by the side of the road!)

Still, there’s a tremendous amount of pleasure to be taken in these songs. For every embarrassing misstep like “Mexican Girl” (“Te quiero muchacha – can’t you see that I want ya?”) there’s a masterful Beach Boys recreation like “Good Kind of Love” or a delightful Dixieland-meets-doo-wop experiment like “California Role.” The tone suddenly shifts on the final song, “Southern California,” a spare, mournful piano ballad that’s raggedly honest, nostalgic and yet powerfully alive. Though the album and DVD performance are both only half-successful experiments, there’s such sensuality, such creativity and elation on display here that we can be sure that “SMiLE” wasn’t a fluke; after years of frustration and banality, Wilson seems to have found his footing as a songwriter, arranger and performer. And though the DVD is almost the dictionary definition of inessential, I’d recommend it to any real Brian Wilson fan. For years we’ve been watching a beloved artist suffer through mental illness and creative drought, and there’s something in the empathy and openness of Wilson’s music that makes many us take his struggles personally. For those who’ve ached and rooted for him over the years, there’s something enormously powerful and redemptive in seeing him as the leader of a huge orchestra, delightedly perched behind his keyboard, joyfully pointing his finger and pumping his fists, rejuvenated, glorying in his position at the center of all this lush, jubilant noise.

Thought for the Day:

2008-12-08T16:16:00.000-08:00

Sunday was Pearl Harbor Day, so it feels fitting to give a shoutout to the Ace of Aces, a legendary dubya-dubya-eye-eye pilot whose obit shared the front page with news of the Hiroshima bombing. His name? Dick Bong, leading to the (now) hilarious headline:

"Jet plane explosion kills Major Bong, Top U.S. Ace."

In this post-9/11 world of heavy, unironic patriotism, I think we could all stand to remember that there was a time in our history when we revered Major Dick Bong.

Gallery Piece

2008-12-01T09:19:00.000-08:00

Ta-Nehisi Coates on dating, interracially and otherwise.

Worth a read.

Thought for the Day:

2008-11-19T20:53:00.000-08:00

Fuck Chuck Klosterman.

Dear Chuck,

About GNR: if you like GNR, when you hear an awesome GNR song, you don't immediately shove three fingers up your butt and use your other hand to write a long-winded review of the album. Acceptable alternatives to the Klosterfuck?

1. Drink Heavily
2. Air Guitar
3. Uh, Drink Heavily?

(If you must meta-appreciate, play Sweet Child of Mine on Guitar Hero or watch Heavy Metal Parking Lot. Work in #1-3 as circumstances permit.)

If Axl Rose is who you say he is, I hope the two of you meet in a dark alley someday and engage in a loving 69 of forward-looking musical/critical insecurity. Maybe have John Woo nearby to release some pigeons at the moment of climax. You know, for gravitas.

Chuck Klosterman: History's Greatest Monster?

"At this juncture in history, rocking is not enough."

FUCK. YOU.

Repeal Prop 8!

2008-11-17T17:02:00.000-08:00

... so members of the 1985 Rams can get married.

You know, I could write more jokes, but they would just distract you from the homoerotic glory that is THIS:

Fuck Joe Lieberman

2008-11-10T19:15:00.000-08:00

Seriously, fuck that guy.

For those of you who haven't been keeping up on the Saga of Lieberman, he endorsed John McCain on December 17th, 2007. If you're keeping score, that was way before McCain even looked like he had a shot at winning, which I guess means that Lieberman had the courage of his convictions. Chief among those convictions is that we shouldn't be backing out of our hideously tragic, financially ruinous war with Iraq. I'm sure Joe has his reasons, but no matter what your premises you should never be able to argue yourself into putting your penis in a blender, much less keeping it there once you've punched the "liquify" button.

So Joe, lover of national-dick-in-blender foreign policy, gave a speech at the GOP convention, hurled a lot of slime at Barack Obama, and skulked around in the background during McCain's concession speech. In other words, he chose poorly.

Now he's trying to mend fences, and hopefully continue to drape his saggy posterior over the chairmanship of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs committee. Barack Obama has appealed for a less vindictive solution that keeps Lieberman in the Democratic Caucus, and Harry Reid is in talks with Benedict Joe. As Kos points out, there are essentially three outcomes for Joe:

1. No comeuppance--Joe keeps his chair, keeps his seniority, gets to pick Harry Reid's nose.
2. Some comeuppance--Joe loses his chair, keeps his seniority, has a good sulk before the new congress convenes.
3. Maximum comeuppance--Joe loses his chair, loses his seniority, is dragged down 1-95 by a sled team of cannibals.

Joe, with typical prescience, has indicated that everything except option 1 is unacceptable. That's essentially the equivalent of putting all your money on "Harry Reid is a wuss. D'you hear that Harry, you big wuss?!" Unfortunately, Lieberman's bargaining position is highly dubious. With an absolute majority short of 59 seats in the Senate, the Democrats need for a little Joementum has never been less acute. Of course, Joe has the weapon of last resort: he can hitch his wagon to the party that's compared BHO's volunteer corps to Soviet forced labor practices and the Holocaust. Oh, and let's not forget the incoherent GOP ravings about some sort of Obama-sponsored Marxist gestapo.

Yeah, that'll get him re-elected.

There is an alternate possibility. I'm sure Rahm Emanuel is pulling for option 3, possibly in the hopes of rustling up a replacement finger. Barack Obama may be burnishing his huggy bipartisan credentials while encouraging Reid to hang Lieberman out to dry. When Lieberman eventually walks the plank, Obama can be gravely disappointed while acknowledging the legislature's right to police its own. Reid gets a much-needed spinal graft, Obama isn't seen as vindictive, and Joe Lieberman and Ted Stevens can give each other reacharounds in hell.

Strategy and Tactics

2008-11-07T21:02:00.000-08:00

One of the recurring notes throughout this campaign has been the invocation of jargon like "strategy" and "tactics" as a way to establish foreign policy chops. John McCain attempted to do this during a presidential debate when he asserted that "Senator Obama doesn't know the difference between a strategy and a tactic." It would've been a real zinger if he hadn't thereby implied that THE SURGE was a strategy.

You can think of any large-scale military endeavor on a couple of levels. First, there are the minutiae of combat: how do I kill those guys 300m away using the capabilities I have at my disposal? You can expand the lens of tactics to larger scale considerations as well, including securing an area so that supplies can move freely, and so on and so forth.

We can conceptualize a strategy as a plan for victory. A solid strategy contains an internal logic that propels it toward the accepted definition of victory for the current conflict. Because of its broad nature, a strategy influences decision making at many levels, from battlefield tactics to logistics.

This is all a little arcane, so let's take a look at these concepts in (hot, napalm-y) action: the Vietnam War. General Westmoreland implemented a strategy of attrition according to which the massive US military machine would be used to drive up costs on the North Vietnamese until they decided "fuck it, this communism shit just isn't worth it" and leave South Vietnam alone. Victory! All of the horrors of the war were to some extent connected by this strategy. Everything from the Rolling Thunder campaigns to free fire zones, from kill counts to My Lai could be seen in the context of a war of attrition. It didn't really matter who you killed, because murdering the fuck out of anyone would make life worse for the North Vietnamese. Anyway, you can see that the strategy was driving the tactics, and the strategy itself was pointing at a condition that we (mistakenly!) believed would cause N. Vietnam to break off hostilities.

As an aside, much like strategic bombing campaigns, these "morale breakers" didn't really work. When you slaughter the fuck out of someone's village, the survivors are A) completely dependent on the government and B) hate you with the fire of a thousand suns because you just destroyed their livelihood and their family. When there's a ready-made national unification movement for them to hitch their wagon to, things tend not to go so well for you.

Anyway, Iraq is a bit atypical because we have no clear idea of what victory looks like. Yes, we'd like it to be fully democratic, pluralist and free, but it's a bit unclear how we use the Marines to do that. The problem is that the internal logic of our occupation was a bit weak. To wit:

1. Topple Saddam.
2. ...
3. Democracy!

There's obviously no purely military solution to our problems in Iraq, but we can understand the Surge (tm) as part of a unified political and military strategy to allow national reconciliation. The problem is, that with the election coming up relatively soon after the Surge was announced and the Iraq War, the President and the GOP deeply unpopular in the United States, the incentive structure for Maliki was, shall we say, skewed. Did pissing on fires all over Iraq give us any increased leverage over Maliki that might lead him to share power with the other factions in Iraq? Probably not. On the other hand it definitely improved the optics of the Iraq War at home in the United States, enabling John McCain to run on the "Surge=Victory" platform and eventually make it to a debate in which he idiotically called out his opponent for not knowing the difference between a strategy and a tactic.

On a larger scale, the problem with the Surge is simple. If I were a betting man in Maliki's shoes, and some unpopular lame duck came to me and said "I'm going to fill your country with soldiers, calm shit down and suchlike and in the meantime I want you to make nice with these other factions." My answer would be "Sure thing, Hoss! How much longer will you be running things over there?" Then, immediately after our conversation I'd set about entrenching myself in power and building alliances with people who share my interests so that once he's quenched the fires with American blood and gone home, I would be in a position to outmaneuver my rivals and run the country as I saw fit.

Obviously, the situation is a good deal more complicated than that, and I'm not sure exactly how it will play out in '09 and '10. I am prepared to offer the following bit of sound tactical advice to the readership: don't turn into a snake. It never helps.

The Utley Award

2008-11-05T12:13:00.000-08:00

So, Newsweek has had this "Special Election Project" running for some time, where reporters were embedded with the campaigns and their reports embargoed until after election day. They seem to have unearthed some gems, including this one from our 44th President:

So when Brian Williams is asking me about what's a personal thing that you've done [that's green], and I say, you know, "Well, I planted a bunch of trees." And he says, "I'm talking about personal." What I'm thinking in my head is, "Well, the truth is, Brian, we can't solve global warming because I fucking changed light bulbs in my house. It's because of something collective."

Collective, eh? Socialismo o Muerte! Seriously though, I'm very happy this guy is going to the White House. So on behalf of all of use at FTB, I'd like to congratulate Barack Obama for being the first recipient of the Chase Utley Award for Excellence in Dropping the F-Bomb.

Get Outta Here!

2008-11-04T09:11:00.000-08:00

Hey you! Yeah, you, Imaginary Reader! What are you doing reading this stupid blog? Turn off your computer and go vote for Obama, unless you want this to be second in line for the Oval Office.

What's that you say? You're only imaginary and, thus, don't have a voter registration card? I DON'T CARE! Go vote your imaginary little heart out, or I'll stop directing you to so much awesome music to put on your imaginary iPod.

O'Death: Broken Hymns, Limbs and Skin

2008-11-04T08:51:00.000-08:00

Listen to the frantic, sawing fiddle; the high and wild twang of the vocals; the murderous Southern gothicism of the lyrics; the gut-bucket thunk of the banjo and bass. Listen to how they fuse yowling hillbilly blues with the snarling intensity of punk rock. Close your eyes; can you tell where these guys are from?

If you're an avid follower of indie rock, you've probably guessed that they, like most sub-par salsa and alt-country bands, hail from the genre's great mecca, Noo Yorg Citay.

Who cares, you ask? Uptight music critics, that's who. You can almost hear the eyes rolling as Pitchfork pronounces them "the latest of a long line of New York traditionalists who look to old-time music as a place to hang their contemporary quirks." "I tend to get a bit skeptical when a bunch of dudes get on stage for a good ol’ hootenannie hoe down —- in Brooklyn," deadpans Joe Tacopino of Popmatters. "They seem to embody the jug band farce of suburban kids dressing as 19th Century beet farmers." Elevating context over content, these critics tend to ignore the joyful, apocalyptic fury of O'Death's sound in favor of a liberal arts graduate's hyper-sensitivity to acts of cultural appropriation. Is Amy Winehouse performing in modernized blackface? Did Paul Simon Gershwinize African Isicathamiya music on Graceland? The answer to both of those questions is probably "yes," but the more important question it begs is "so?" There's something condescending about all of these ivory tower critics defending the integrity of provincial forms. There's a whiff, even, of Sarah Palin's notion of "real America," the patronizing idea that rural poverty is the only true bestower of authenticity. O'Death play it like they mean it, and you don't have to spend time in a barn to stir up a good barnburner. Purity is incestuous anyway -- great artists tromp gleefully across boundaries, laughing at the furrow-browed guardians below, forming little fences out of their term papers.

O'Death aren't great artists -- Broken Hymns, Limbs and Skin, their new record, begins to shows the limitations of their shtick. Their press package claims a wide-ranging assortment of influences, from Prince to the Microphones, but such eclecticism is nowhere to be heard. Their music functions according to simple plan: take traditional country/bluegrass and crank the amps to eleven. It's the exact same M.O. that animates the Pogues and Gogol Bordello, applied to a different traditional form. Here on their third album, they're tilling the exact same soil as when they first materialized, fully formed, on the Brooklyn scene that both loves and loves to sneer at its phony rednecks. They're either unable or unwilling to expand their range beyond the furious, snarling murder ballads that tend to kill at their shows.

O'Death is an unmissable live experience -- constantly cracking the whip over the crowd, these five maniacally sweaty guys keep upping the ante: harder, drunker, faster, dirtier. Non-stop catharsis, though, while great for a whiskey-fueled hoe-down, becomes wearying when pressed onto a disc. Embracing the Crazy Horse side but not the Harvest Moon side of his Neil Young-ish yelp, singer Greg Jamie never finds or even reaches for anything like the ragged, heartbreaking balladry of Shane MacGowan, which served to underline and expand the Pogues’ punk aesthetic. Songs like "Home" and "On an Aching Sea" open slowly and thoughtfully, but O'Death can't resist the urge to build every damned track into a wrecking-ball psychobilly freakout, which renders even the good songs unmemorable in their sameness.

Their albums, taken together, provide an excellent soundtrack for the coked-up slaughtering of livestock, but not much else. Some of the individual tracks, though, are monsters, shining a shadowy light on the more sinister places of American folklore, the southern Gothic we all carry around somewhere in the backs of our minds. "Low Tide," the opener, is a vicious shanty, building an eerie plucked banjo line into a howling churn, as brutal and sudden as a swelling electrical storm at sea. It segues into "Fire On Peshtigo," where Jamie makes the most of his pinched, nasal voice, chanting staccatto lines about a wild-fire in Wisconsin with the urgency of a newsreel voiceover. These are the two best and most interesting songs on the album, and once they're over we're left with a lot of stuff we've heard before, some of it terrific, some of it only okay, none of it bad, but none of it surprising. As glad as I am to have a new album from a band that I like a lot, I find myself far less excited for their fourth album than I was for their third. I’m rooting hard for these guys to switch up their sound a make a few unexpected moves, because I want the uptight critics, more interested in biographical authenticity than in dancing their feet down to the bone, proven wrong. Like O’Death, I’m from New York City, and I want the world to know that our salsa can be spicy as a motherfucker.

Ryan Adams: Cardinology

2008-10-28T12:17:00.000-07:00

I fell for Ryan Adam's first solo record, Heartbreaker, in 2001. Its fragility, passion and melancholy aestheticism were a perfect match for my post-adolescent depressed narcissism. With no pretense of formal innovation or lyrical brilliance, Adams offered up his sadness and vulnerability unadorned, achieving a kind of haunted fragility that’s profoundly rare outside of Nick Drake albums. Also, there was "To Be Young," which is still the only piece of music I've ever heard which successfully rips off the wild mercury sound of Highway 61, even outdoing it in some ways. Though Adams' voice made me hesitate -- as an obsessive fan of Dylan and Lou Reed, I distrusted its ease and prettiness -- there was something truly despairing and brave about the record, a desperately life-like quality that I still hear when I play it today.

Which is what makes it so difficult to review his new snooze-fest Cardinology; aside from the addition of the Cardinals, the terrific backing band he's worked with on his past several albums, it's not notably different from Heartbreaker. Adams is still plumbing the depths of his melancholy with loose, mid-tempo country that splits the difference between alt- and trad-. It's just that those depths seem a little shallower every time. The Adams pose -- the wounded, beautiful Romeo -- has always seemed a little bit silly, but the old Adams drew strength from it, stubbornly insisting that you believe in his personal drama. Now he just sounds tired, stultifyingly confident, eminently nice. Melodic and pleasant to a fault, the orchestration always rises to a calculated swell at just the right moment. There's none of the undercurrent of real pain and self-loathing that gave Heartbreaker its depth. A perfectly serviceable turn of phrase like "Look what I did to you, look what you did to me," is sung without real emotion – instead there’s a sort of singerly “passion” that's now his rote style. What did he do to her? Because it sounds like he just bored her and wasted her time. The Adams portrayed on this album sure ain't a heartbreaker. If Kevin Barnes wants to fuck you, Ryan Adams seems to want you to soothe his furrowed brow with a damp washcloth. His method of seduction is to appeal to the worried mother in women.

There are sparks of life here and there. “Evergreen” is a haunter built around a lovely guitar figure, slinking into your brain and stubbornly remaining there when the rest of Cardinology has been forgotten (i.e. five minutes after the album stops playing), and “Magick”, the sole tonal shift on the whole damned album, is a cheerful, likeably disposable arena-rocker that would have sounded more at home on the failed-but-fascinating Rock N Roll. (As Adams' career has gone further and further awry, his most critically reviled albums, experiments like the Love is Hell EP and the aforementioned Rock N Roll, have consistently been his most engaged and interesting.) But mostly the thing just lies there, dead in the water. Which wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that Adams clearly has oceans of talent, a fine melodic ear, and strong craftsmanship. He releases more albums than anyone this side of Robert Pollard, and while his prolificacy is in some ways a compelling display, one that clearly speaks to a love of song writing, it also might explain why he continually makes the most obvious choices, why his style has become easy to the point of soporific. Adams can write songs like this in his sleep -- on this album it sounds as though maybe he did. His fluency with generic styles and tricks, once a strength, has become a crutch.

Pity, pity the poor Cardinals. They're the best backing band a guy could ask for -- tight enough to play loose, Band-like in their versatility, Dead-like in their ability to make long, noodling solos interesting and compelling. And here they are, locked in holy matrimony to this tired hack.

I understand why this music is popular. (Adams' popularity seems to be steadily growing, and I imagine if he didn't flood the market with so much product every year his albums would chart much higher.) It's relentlessly pretty, always well-crafted, and asks nothing of you, not even your attention. It's great music for people who don't want to feel anything, but don't yet want to admit that they've lost the ability to feel. That's why Adams seems to have replaced Jeff Buckley as the singer-of-choice for dramatic TV montages -- music that's truly affecting would distract the viewer from, say, a Zack Braff monologue summing up an episode of Scrubs. The music on Cardinology is perfect for such moments; it's in an emotional mode without possessing any affecting content. It's less a sensual experience than a familiar emotive cue for the listener.

The music is so empty that it attains a kind of apocalyptic mood -- one imagines that in the end times, when pop is gone, rock is gone, punk and rap and jazz are gone, music this mind-numbingly dull, picturesque and automated will linger on, permanent as polystyrene, scoring the slow and endless fall of ash onto the dry, dissipated earth.

"The war is over," Adams sings over and over again in the refrain of "Sink Ships." No, Ryan, it's not. You've just stopped fighting.

Concert Calendar Updated

2008-10-22T14:32:00.000-07:00

We've got a whole new batch of great events up on the calendar. These good-to-bad-ass shows should keep your mojo rising up through Thanksgiving. I'll be expanding it as more dates are announced. I do it all for you, my gentle imaginary reader.

The can't-miss dates for me are Of Montreal on Halloween (I hear their stage show includes a live horse), The Hold Steady with Drive-by Truckers at the Electric Factory (schlubby middle-aged populist rock stars unite!), and Dr. Dog's triumphant return to the city of brotherly love on November 28th. I hope to see you there. (Though seeing imaginary readers may be cause for concern.)

Of Montreal: Skeletal Lamping

2008-10-21T12:03:00.000-07:00

"It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash."

That's H.L. Mencken elucidating with precision my attitude towards music criticism. Actually, that's my attitude towards GOOD music criticism -- flap and doodle, marked by a grandeur of badness, is the state towards which music criticism aspires. "But," you, gentle imaginary reader, say, "aren't you Dr. Teeth, that guy who writes all the lame music reviews on this site?" Yes, but I m also that guy who smokes cigarettes and masturbates regularly; a compulsion is a compulsion, and like a good nicotine rush or lesbian porn-induced orgasm, a rumbling, bumbling crawl through an abysm of pish can be a very nice, if hollow, pleasure. I'm old enough now that I no longer expect rock albums to save my life -- I'm perfectly comfortable, most of the time, with using them as nothing more than sensual treats, intellectual curiosities, and occasions for extended bloviation.

But sometimes an album refuses to be reviewed. A record feels too big and artful and strange to be crammed into a four hundred word essay. You find yourself unable to assume that unearned voice of authority that makes criticism comfortable. So you write a largely incoherent, rambling introduction riffing on H.L. Mencken in order to delay the inevitable. Then you write a bizarrely self-aware second paragraph discussing your first paragraph to delay it further. All because you don't want to write a review that's less criticism than shrill, hyperbolic hucksterism.

I should really stop here. One shouldn't review an album while still in the puppy days of salad love. It's the music critic's equivalent of going to the supermarket hungry: you come home and realize that your shopping bags are filled with nothing but Oreos and adjectives. (Third paragraph now, and still no mention of the album. I'm starting to think I can make it all the way through this thing without talking about anything but myself.) So, please, don't think of the following as a music review. Think of it as an exhortation, a shill, a terrorist demand.

----

The odd, pop-minded non-Canadian band Of Montreal tread into odder, funkier territory on their wondrous new record Skeletal Lamping, released today on Polyvinyl. Structured less as a traditional album than a series of mash-ups, frontman and general mastermind Kevin Barnes spits hooks at a breakneck pace, rarely slowing long enough for his jagged little shards of song to sink in or even fully register. The fifteen tracks on the disc seem to be divided somewhat randomly, and perhaps a more accurate track listing would reveal the album as hundreds of tiny songs, united by their thematic elements: sex, psychosis, paranoia, sex, the multiplicity of perception, and sex. Gleefully blowing the doors off of the polite mausoleum that much of indie rock has become, Barnes crafts a vision of human sexuality that's both titillating and frightening in its candor and danger. Prince-like in both his obsessive, live-wire sexuality and his ability to craft impossibly itchy, spine-tingling hooks, he's pulling a Justin Timberlake for the hipster set: he's bringing sexy back.

As with all Of Montreal albums, there's a fair amount of cognitive dissonance between the delectably catchy sound of the music and the tortured, schizoid nature of the lyrics. Unlike their previous records, though, here this stylistic tic works in sync with their conceptual vision. Like sex itself, the album is overwhelmingly pleasurable, but anyone who looks a little deeper can see what's underpinning the ecstasy: a complex cocktail of fear, guilt and desperation, so ugly that it attains a weirdly transcendent beauty. A lyric like "I confess to being quite charmed by your feminine effects; you're the only one with whom I would role-play Oedipus Rex," reads as funny and gross on the page, but coming in the middle of the garden of sensual delights that is "Plastis Wafers," it sounds complex, disturbing and admirable in its honesty. There's an intense sexual narcissism about the album -- rather than navel gazing perhaps we should call it penis gazing -- but it's a necessary narcissism, a narcissism without which this level of dizzying self-examination and -awareness would not be possible.

In my usual reviews, this would be the moment when I attempted to describe the sound of the music, perhaps using phrases like "glissando bass lines" or "cascading piano arpeggios" to create the illusion that I know what the fuck I'm talking about. But on an album as instrumentally rich, multifarious and fractured as Skeletal Lamping, it's almost impossible to do (at least in a few paragraphs). Shifting styles as quickly and easily as he does sexual identities, Barnes will ram a disco earworm head on into an Abbey Road piano singalong, then suddenly deke into a nasty, bass-driven, white-boy funk jam, all in the space of two minutes. There’s no way this should work, and at best I should be describing it as some sort of glorious mess, but somehow there’s nothing remotely messy about this record. There’s a unity and coherence to Skeletal Lamping that belies the modular, restlessly ADD construction. It’s a rich treasure trove of wildly different sounds and moods and melodies, yet somehow it feels all of a piece, a Major Work in the sense that people used to use to discuss new albums by the Beach Boys or Beatles, back when widely accessible pop was taken seriously as art. Lately the bands that are taken seriously have become the ivory tower bands, locked far away from the mindless masses, performing impressive feats of musical esotericism for their enlightened listeners. Bands like Deerhoof and No Age and Grizzly Bear, all of whom have in-born tendencies towards excellent pop, tend to smother those instincts in alienating dissonance by way of apologia, as though they feel guilty for their ability to give pleasure. Kevin Barnes, though, is a showman at heart, and his drive to entertain is at least as strong as his drive to challenge his audience. Based on its construction, Skeletal Lamping should be a frustrating, difficult album -- melodic and rhythmic fragments that would qualify as major discoveries for most bands, around which singles and even entire albums could be built, are thrown away in a few seconds -- but the sheer volume of musical ideas contained on the record is staggering and awesome, as is Barnes’ willingness to treat magical, hypnotic melodies as mere ornamentation, appearing and then immediately vanishing into the flood. There's hardly anything resembling a chorus on the record -- once a section is over, it's generally gone for good, as though with this much ground to cover there's no time to reprise anything. In most songs a line like "I want to make you come two hundred times a day" would sound like a joke or a silly boast, but, coming from the creator of an album this sensually rich and dense, it sounds like a good-faith promise.

I suspect that, due to the incredibly bizarre, explicit lyrical content and unusual construction, Skeletal Lamping will not find the wide, boundary-crossing audience it deserves. We will continue to live in an indie-rock landscape in which Art is for the educated and the masochistic, and pop is not supposed to have experimentation, depth or meaning. I’d like to hear "Plastis Wafers" remixed to blare in hip-hop clubs, "Id Engager" in regular rotation on top forty radio. That’s why this is less a review than a form of advertising – I really want you to go out and buy this album. I want the masses to embrace the unusual in a way that they haven’t since the release of OK Computer. Otherwise, this strange and beautiful album will be relegated to the indie rock fans, who will doubtless be suspicious of its overwhelming melodic appeal and immediacy. (Like everybody’s favorite hipster douchebags, Pitchfork, who just hours ago rated it a mediocre 5.9. Sorry, did I say hipster douchebags? I meant to say “hire me please!”)

So, to reiterate: reviews are dumb, and I’m a shill, but don’t let that stop you from going to the store on and buying a copy of Skeletal Lamping. Buy several copies. Give them to your friends as gifts. Keep two for yourself, so you can listen to it in the bedroom and kitchen at the same time. Normally here I’d try to find some clever or poetic line with which to sum up my review, but I’m not trying to be a writer right now; I’m just a fan, telling you about something he loves. So I’ll sign off, in the manner of obsessive, hectoring fans, by repeating myself: buy this album. Even if it doesn't make you come two hundred times a day, it’ll make you feel alive.

The Division Series

2008-10-06T20:15:00.001-07:00

Over at the Atlantic, Ross Douthat has a series of thoughts about the AL/NLDS, and is vaguely in favor of increasing the series to seven games.

I have to agree, and not because I think it's unfair but rather because I find it psychologically boring. There's so little development to the series. A couple of bum starts and suddenly you're in do-or-die territory. Great baseball stories barely have time to take root before they're resolved. Now, I don't have a problem with the way the various DSs played out. The Angels stranded an absurd number of runners against the Sox and gave up a 3 run single (the first ever in postseason history) by failing to call a ball in shallow center. Kendrick (a culprit in that play) also bobbled an easy DP opportunity that brought a run around to score. I'm not saying that John Lackey's whining is justified but I understand where he's coming from. The Cubs flat-out sucked and the White Sox just weren't up to handling the Rays.

Now, I'm hoping for a little Yankees methadone in the WS, with Torre finally completing his first Mandarin hand ("Mandhands") with a Dodgers ring. Although I doubt Torre could've managed the '08 Yankees to the postseason this year, it still hurts a little to see his craggy face in the dugout for another team. I think, however, it'll be Phillies/Rays in the Serious, with the Rays walking away with it all. And quite honestly, I'm fine with that, since the Rays worst-to-first story in the AL East is a narrative I can get behind. I'm sure the novelty will wear off in a few years. The ALCS should be a lot of fun. It'll be interesting to see whether an injured Beckett and a lights-out Lester can handle the depth and strength of the Rays.

The Postseason

2008-10-02T20:36:00.000-07:00

As every member of this blog has been postseason disenfranchised, I think I can say this after the NLDS LA/CHI game 2: WHAT THE FUCK CUBBIES, GROW A PAIR! Also, as much as the Mets have suffered in the past two years, consider the travail of Yankees fans everywhere. This is the first time we've had to deal with missing the postseason since the early-to-mid 90's. You guys can't possibly understand what that feels like. It's like pulling your head up from a bump of coke, looking around and realizing your life is a shambles. The Mets have been passed out in the gutter since 2000, so they're used to it.

Dr. Dog: Fate

2008-09-22T09:41:00.000-07:00

It sometimes feels as though there are, in the world of indie-rock, only two available attitudes towards the past: reverence and scorn. In the former corner you have the retro-punks, the tie-dyed jam bands, the alt-country troubadours lovingly curating the mud cakes on their vintage cowboy boots. In the other corner there are the innovators, self-consciously crafting glockenspiel-driven polkas in quintuple time, steering their industrial-hobo-bop twelve-pieces out in search of the musical hinterlands, a border vanishing so rapidly that by now only the most willfully obscure and sadistically unpleasant tunesmiths are allowed entry. Caught between stultifying nostalgia and forbidding futurism, indie-rock, unlike pop, rarely seems to exist in the here-and-now.

Forgive Philadelphia's Dr. Dog if they seem less than concerned with such music-writerly quandaries -- they're too busy touring behind their wonderful new album Fate, which, rather than carefully recreating the past, opts to drag it kicking and screaming into the present. Unrepentantly derivative and deliriously catchy, the band happily cops moves from the Beach Boys, the Band, the Kinks and the Coasters, brewing them together into a jumbled, overloaded retro-rock stew. It is, admittedly, an album that would sound most at home on seventies FM radio, but it has a gathering urgency that wipes away any trace of nostalgia. While a lesser group might pay homage to their favorite bands, Dr. Dog just swipes their sounds and makes them their own. "I'll take what I want," goes the chorus of "Army of Ancients," and it could be Dr. Dog's manifesto. Or, to paraphrase Mark Twain: lousy bands imitate; great bands steal.

Which isn't to say that Dr. Dog are great band -- not yet, anyway; Fate can be muddled at times, and even some of its better songs are oddly forgettable -- but they sure are pretty damned good. "The Breeze" opens the album, riding a hazy, folky snatch of melody into a voice-drenched Brian Wilson chorus before dissolving into an odd, circular woodwind riff. In "Hang On," the album's best song and the band's greatest accomplishment to date, the staccato verse glides downriver into the passionate yet exhausted refrain: "What you thought was a hurricane was just the rustling of the wind," sings frontman Scott McMicken, splitting the difference between relief and disappointment. That's the big theme of the album: inevitability, and the disillusionment and consolation that it brings. The price, in other words, of fate: "Down down down, moon gonna fall down. Thump thump thump, house gonna fall down. Chop chop chop, tree gonna fall down. Down down down, down to the bottom," McMicken cheers on the ironically titled "Old Days," sounding grimly delighted by the certainty of all this destruction and decay. It's a grand literary theme, and the lyrics don't quite do it justice -- thankfully, though, they treat it with a light touch, invoking heavy questions about mortality and freedom of choice, then dismissing them with a cheerful shrug and an infectious hook.

Dr. Dog has always drawn much of its power from the tension between order and chaos. The woozy, mid-afternoon haze of their sound masks the underlying craft and the density of arrangement. The songs are heavily layered, overstuffed with harmonies and piano riffs, vocal hooks and bridges -- an effect that could easily lead to stultifying bloat if it weren't for the palpable joy and good humor that bubble up through even their most multi-tracked productions. Their Brian Wilson tendencies are undercut by their post-punkish love of a good sonic mess. The whole ramshackle house of cards feels constantly on the verge of collapsing, but each song manages to hang together for long enough to deliver Fate's repeated message: We're all doomed anyway, so let's go out singing, drinking and laughing.

If I were Brad DeLong, I'd call this a death spiral

2008-09-20T20:45:00.000-07:00

I'd like to say I've been following the situation in Zimbabwe with great interest, but I've basically been getting all my information from Chris Blattman's excellent development economics blog. However, it does seem to me that you shouldn't, in the course of a single article, credit a man for "successfully negotiating peace resolutions in Congo, Sudan, and, most recently, Zimbabwe", and then immediately claim that he "earned ignominy ... for refusing to join other world leaders in condemning Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's brutal and ruinous rule", as if these two things existed in entirely separate, unrelated universes.

In this case, though, it might not be the Washington Post's fault exactly, but rather our stupid, stupid world for being a place where Mbeki has to take crap for resolving a crisis Zimbabwe when everyone else was standing around with their thumbs up their asses.

Rah-Rah Rasputin

2008-09-19T14:19:00.001-07:00

Over the past couple of weeks, the Russians have been up to their old tricks: helping Cuba build a space program, selling military technology to Iran and Venezuela, test-firing a new long-range missile, sending a fleet into the Carribean and claiming dominion over the North Pole. (That said, once you've planted a flag on the Arctic seabed it's all good.) Oh, right, and the whole "invading another sovereign nation" thing.

Russia's recent shenanigans prompted Secretary of State Condi Rice to scold the Russians at length for their military adventures and assorted ne'er do well tendencies. I particularly enjoyed this part:

Russia’s attack on Georgia merely proved what we had already known – that Russia could use its overwhelming military advantage to punish a small neighbor... Russia’s invasion of Georgia has achieved – and will achieve – no enduring strategic objective... their choices could put Russia on a one-way path to self-imposed isolation and international irrelevance.

In a display of appalling racial insensitivity, the Russians in the audience burst into laughter and began banging pots and kettles together while chanting "black, black, black." Let me put it another way: when people talk about America's diminished standing abroad, they are referring to our inability to use the limp noodles of international norms/law to chastise other nations (or get others to do so on our behalf with a straight face). What I'm getting at is what every IR nerd secretly loves about the Russians: they just don't give a shit. Human rights? Fuck 'em. Democratic norms? Don't care. Rule of law? Go take a flying fuck at the moon. Which we own.

The last Russian leader to actually give a shit was Gorbachev, and that didn't really work out so well for him. Point being, this is not a new line of Russian foreign policy. From Tsarist times through the fall of the USSR, Russia has always played bare-knuckle politics with the rest of the world, and is ideally positioned to do so in the next few years. The interesting question is why they've started up again, and while I'm no commie-ologist, I'll speculate a bit below.

1. Opportunity--For a long time after the fall of the USSR, the balance of forces was so lopsided that the Russians, with virtually no relevant institutional power (not in NATO, etc) was basically unable to successfully oppose US measures in Europe and the Middle East. What coalition did they have? As they would see in the march to Iraq, the UK would bugger itself with a harpoon to avoid pissing off the US, and while France and Germany weren't that extreme, their strategic interest coincided with US interest far more than it did with Russian interests. In short, they couldn't insert themselves into the Cold War old boys network, because that network was built for the express purpose of not including Russia. The US misadventure in Iraq means that our forces are insufficient to either deter or contain Russia's ambitions vis-a-vis third rate countries like Georgia. In the end, while Condi talks a good game, she's basically saying to Europe "we got shit, it's up to you guys."

2. Strategic Interest--The "color revolutions" and NATO expansion have sharply curtailed what was traditionally Russia's sphere of influence. While NATO is no longer explicitly a hostile military alliance, we can forgive Russian strategic thinkers for feeling a little bit hemmed in by nations of questionable friendliness. It turns out, one way of opening a region up is to take it over and build bases/install friendly leaders. Another way is by building friendly relations with other powers opposed to the dominant paradigm.

3. Nationalism--Inasmuch as the end of the Cold War was a victory for the USA, it was a defeat for Russia. Although many sectors of Russian society railed against the oppressive policies of the USSR, there was a profound sense of national humiliation that spread throughout the Russian Federation in the aftermath of the fall. I wouldn't posit nationalism as a cause of Russia's ambitions, I would say that the legacy of that humiliation means that Russia flexing its muscles on the international stage is unlikely to meet a great deal of criticism at home. In short, it functions as an enabler.

The real question is how the international community will respond to these provocations, but my feeling is that it's hard to punch someone while you're busy grabbing your ass with both hands, but we'll see. One of the problems with the current US-led order is that there's no #2 to hold the fort while we're busy fucking up half a world away.

Post-Baiting

2008-09-16T07:25:00.000-07:00

Tannhauser has stupid dogs and tried to spin it into some larger bullshit point.

James Fallows On My Dick

2008-09-12T08:41:00.000-07:00

James Fallows makes similar points, without the use of the Terminator. We are therefore reluctantly forced to regard his post as inferior. But seriously, read it. It's a good post.

Intro to Just War Theory w/the Terminator!

2008-09-11T21:45:00.000-07:00

Now, anyone who's taught anything in a formal (in other words, graded) environment is intimately familiar with the expression on Sarah Palin's face when she's asked about the Bush Doctrine. It's the expression every student wears when they're asked a question they have no fucking idea how to answer. It's the facial analogue to the thought "Oh fuck, I'm fucked now. Time to look attentive and talk about something vaguely related to the question and see if I can salvage anything from this mess." We've all worn it, and we've all seen others wear it.

Still, seeing someone who could potentially be President of the United States of America wearing it when confronted with a fairly elementary foreign policy question does not inspire a great deal of confidence.

That aside, Sarah Palin's interview provides the opportunity for me to do one of my favorite things: explain irritatingly complex concepts in a simple fashion using pop-culture iconography. So, when Mrs. Palin is asked about the Bush Doctrine, her response is:

"Charlie, if there is legitimate and enough intelligence that tells us that a strike is imminent against American people, we have every right to defend our country. In fact, the president has the obligation, the duty to defend."

That statement actually makes a terrifying amount of sense, and is a position well-supported by international law and just war theory. It's a sane position to take. The problem is, it's not the Bush Doctrine. The Bush Doctrine is about preventive war, not preemptive war. The crucial difference is the idea of "imminence." Arnold Schwarzenegger will explain, in the thickest Austrian accent he can muster (you might want to read this section aloud for maximum enjoyment):

FTB: So, Arnold, when you were sent back in time to kill Sarah Connor, would that be analogous to preemptive or preventive war?

AS: That would be a lot like preventive war. You see, the goal was to terminate Sarah Connor in order to prevent John Connor from being born, thereby ending the threat he would later pose to Skynet as an adult leader of the resistance. Paradoxically, our attempt to kill Sarah Connor ended up creating exactly the situation we were trying to prevent. [ironic, vaguely threatening laughter]However, the situation was a little more complicated because of time travel--I had certain knowledge that John Connor would be a threat to Skynet because I came from the future.

FTB: And why would that course of action be frowned upon in the international community?

AS: Well, you see, in a world as complex as ours it is hard to accurately project the costs and consequences of our actions over a long period of time. If a nearly omniscient and singleminded artificial intelligence and its time-traveling nearly-indestructible cyborg assassin couldn't prevent one measly human female from conceiving a rebel leader, what hope can there be for a disjointed herd of puny humans striving to accomplish a far more ambitious goal? And, in the meantime, I murdered a lot of innocent people who were only tangentially related to event I was programmed to prevent.

FTB: You the terminator, or you the Governor of California?

AS: Yes.

FTB [Nervously]: So, uh, can you give us an analogy or example of preemptive war?

AS: You will remember that scene in the nightclub when I am advancing on Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese is at the bar, and he shoots me with the sawed-off shotgun right before I shoot her with my gun? That is preemptive war. I am about to kill her, and Kyle has a limited number of options and a sharply limited timeframe in which to consider them. In other words, the threat to his charge is imminent. In this case, his application of force against my robust hyperalloy endoskeleton was his only hope for seizing the element of surprise and perhaps disrupting the otherwise imminent termination of Sarah Connor and thus protected under international and intertemporal law.

The next time you're hitting on a hot chick at an IR conference and she flips her hair and asks you what the difference between prevention and preemption is, you can refer back to his handy explanation and work your best Ahnold impression. And who knows? She might even overlook your flabby midsection, pasty skin and watery, nearsighted eyes and decide to go for it.

Nah.

The Bullshit Express

2008-09-11T20:42:00.000-07:00

Does Sarah Palin have "foreign policy experience?" Honestly, I can't believe this is even a question. Let's take a moment to savor some of the arguments advanced by the GOP and various talking heads.

1. Sarah Palin has FPE because Alaska is next to Russia.

2. Sarah Palin has FPE because Alaska is next to Russia. [Cindy McCain Trance Remix]

I'll address these two "arguments" together. I'm man enough to admit that from time to time I wake up sweating in the night, my sleep disturbed by a vision of Putin's long and sinister shadow obscuring the moonlight from my bedroom window. But let's be clear, that shadow is cast from Moscow and not Kamchatka. Alaska has as much to fear from the ~~USSR~~ Russian Federation as Los Angeles had to fear from the Boer War.

3. Sarah Palin has FPE because she is Commander in Chief of the Alaskan National Guard [Tucker Bounds: America's Strategic Schadenfreude Reserve]

As Campbell Brown so ably points out, overseas deployment of the National Guard is handled by the Pentagon, not Sarah Palin. And, as he was happy to clarify, the commander of the AKNG also has a fairly substantial say in what his men and women do with themselves.

4. Sarah Palin has FPE because she learned it through osmosis.

Learning through osmosis was my undergraduate euphemism for "sleeping through calculus class." To put this absurdity in perspective, a former roommate of mine has a Jindo that was bred in South Korea. Now, if we're going to subscribe to the "clouds of foreign policy expertise clustered around foreign hotspots" theory it would seem like we might reasonably expect there to be great roiling fogs of it throughout Korea. Seems like that dog ought to be up to speed on theories of deterrence, nuclear nonproliferation policy and the balance of power in Northeast Asia. Except, OH WAIT THAT'S NOT HOW SHIT WORKS! DOGS CAN'T TALK!

But seriously, I've spend a lot of time in planes, where the air is positively thick with aeronautical expertise. I still look out the window at the flaps and think "how quaint, the wings are moving." And I'm sure the world is just full of people who spend a significant portion of their days riding around in cars and have accordingly developed vast reserves of mechanical expertise. So let's be clear:

THAT BULLSHIT IS BULLSHIT.

A Great Article

2008-09-03T10:15:00.000-07:00

Ken Tremendous on Bruce Jenkins and his mediocre defense of complete games. However, in spite of Bruce's deeply retarded arguments, I still really enjoy watching a pitcher finish a game.

Since the general election is underway and Sarah Palin has provided numerous opportunities for me to rant about "foreign policy experience" I promise we'll get back to politics soon.

Well, Fuck.

2008-08-27T07:05:00.000-07:00

[Homer and Bart are chasing the rolling rotisserie pig. It rolls through some bushes]
Homer: It's just a little dirty! It's still good, it's still good!
[the cart falls off the edge of a drainage culvert, and the pig floats down the stream]
Homer: It's just a little slimy! It's still good, it's still good!
[the pig reaches a dam at the end of the stream and plugs the drain hole. The water pressure builds up behind it, until it launches out of the hole into the air]
Homer: It's just a little airborne! It's still good, it's still good!
Bart: It's gone.
Homer: I know.

A Worry-Filled Week

2008-08-26T14:22:00.001-07:00

As we kick off the penultimate Yankees-Sox series, Yankees fans everywhere have to decide whether or not they're true fans. Although recent Yankee history has been filled with first round exits, the idea of missing the playoffs altogether is not one that they've had to face since before I had a single manly hair on my body. This series will separate the bandwagon fans from the bleeding pinstripes crowd.

In honor of this series, the good people at Bronx Banter have collected a number of articles about the history of the Sox/Yanks rivalry. Among those tales of heroes and villains I found this Pedro Martinez quote. As much as I hate to admire an ex-Sock, current Met, this is probably the right way to look at George Steinbrenner:

Martinez replied, "He'll probably buy the whole league. But not my desire and not my heart. He's not going to put any fear in my heart."

Official Blog Anthem

2008-08-12T14:51:00.000-07:00

God Bless America.

h/t: Dan Drezner

Yankee Doodle Dandy at the Deadline

2008-07-30T15:21:00.000-07:00

In a daring midnight raid, we at FTB have obtained secret audio recordings from the inner sanctum of Steinboro, the secluded underground palace of the Steinbrothers. Our team of trained monkeys labored in bananaless conditions for over 12 hours to transcribe them for your reading pleasure:

Hal: After years of feigning weakness, we have lulled our enemies into a false sense of security. First there was our inspired scrub out against the Indians in the ALDS, codenamed Operation: Kenny Lofton's 25 Bitches. Then we dumped Joe Torre overboard, but not before filling the water with chum. Finally, we opted to pass on Johan Santana and stick with The Big Three--if you square them, you get their ERA! Now we make our move! (cackling)

Hank: (smoking) Brian, have you purified yourself in those fuckin' oils yet? Those midwestern types won't jaw with you unless you've nanced yourself up a bit. They like their New Yorkers a bit whiffy, you know. Confirms all their fuckin' prejudices.

Brian: Yes, my lords. I am prepared to depart for Pittsburgh to do your bidding.

[Unfortunately, we were not able to place an agent at the meeting in western PA, but our sources indicate that Brian Cashman was able to call in some markers. A posse may have been involved, but reports are spotty. We were able to insert a small recording device into Brian Cashman's lapel when he brushed up against us in a familiar manner on the 4 train on his way to Detroit.]

Brian: Now I know what you're thinking. You're thinking "why is he holding a bag of poop?" But watch... Look! It's on fire! And this is no ordinary bag of poop--it will burn for a thousand years and light your diamond from a cheery perch atop the pitcher's mound. Now in return for this fecal miracle we ask for only one thing: that washed up 'roid-rod you keep behind the plate. In return, I give you my word--my word, mind you--that this poop will burn forever, and that you will never be left holding a bag of slightly charred offal at some point in the near future. What do you say to that, gentlemen?

(Loud yelling and whooping, cries of "Long Live the Poo!" and--faintly--the sound of Kyle Farnsworth weeping into his hands.)

Cashman's put together a real contract year, folks. Marte, Nady and iRod for some blocked prospects and a relief pitcher who's name inspires a shiver of hatred throughout the Yankees Universe (TM).

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog

2008-07-16T11:07:00.000-07:00

If I may direct your attention away from the stupid, stupid All-Star Game (bite me, AL), there is some major shit going down on the internet. As Serious Newscaster Man intones in the preview for The Happening, "There appears to be an event happening here."

Joss Whedon has released what's sure to be hailed as one of the top supervillain internet musicals of the last five years. Joss Whedon + supervillains + Doogie Howser + singing = ?? I challenge you to fill the right side of that equation with anything that is not largely synonymous with "OMGAWESOME."

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog stars Neal Patrick Harris as the titular low-rent mad scientist, working out of a shabby apartment/lair with his nefarious-yet-helpful roommate Moist ("You need anything dampened? Or made soggy?"). He's intent on joining something called the Evil League of Evil, but as of yet their leader Bad Horse ("He rules the League with an iron hoof!") hasn't responded to his application. Also, he's in love with and nerdishly stalking a woman at the local laundromat. Adorably/creepily, he's invented a freeze ray which he sings can "stop the world" so he can "find the time to find the words" to win her heart. He's like a sad, evil puppy dog, and it's hard not to root for him. Especially once you meet his nemesis: the preening, macho hero Captain Hammer (played by Whedonite Nathan Fillion), whose costumes seems to consist of nothing but a pair of comically over-sized gloves and a shit-eating grin.

Anyway, it's ridiculously wonderful, and sure to get better from here. Act I is online now, with Acts II and III to premiere over the next several days. Seriously, watch it. If you liked the Buffy musical (which you almost certainly did, as From the Balcony readers are known for their discerning-yet-geeky taste) you will laugh. Then you will say "Awww," when Doogie looks at laundry-chick with those evil puppy eyes. And then you will laugh some more. The show opens with Dr. Horrible practicing his mad scientist cackle, then explaining that it's just a work in progress, and he's been working with a vocal coach. If that doesn't appeal to you, then you just don't have a human soul.

2008-07-15T22:14:00.000-07:00

Good points all around about Bonds. As I type this, the All-Star Game has entered the 14th inning and the AL has only one pitcher left: our very own Scott Kazmir! The same light-out lefty who has a 3.04 ERA and 91 strikeouts in 83 innings this season! *sob*

[UPDATE: Kazmir just got out of the top of the 15th inning. AL has no pitchers left, and Barry Bonds will swap caps with Mr. Met before he comes out for another inning.]

Anyway, I would like turn your attention to women's golf. Yes, I am serious. Jemele Hill over yonder at ESPN's Page 2 has written an interesting article on Michelle Wie and the state of women's golf. Michelle Wie is of course the (former?) golf prodigy who took the amateur circuit by storm by winning a major tournament when she was only 13 years old. The last few years have not bee kind to her. She has never won a professional women's tournament since leaving the amateur ranks in 2006. In 2007, Wie withdrew mid-game from a LPGA tournament and was heavily criticized by Annika Sorenstam, who questioned her professionalism and respect for other golfers.

Wie's been struggling to find her swing ever since. She withdrew from Stanford University this year to focus full-time on golf, but hasn't made the cut in any major tournament. On the other hand, she is 19-years old now and pervy men everywhere have the green light to consider her hot.

Meanwhile, as Hill points out, other young female golfers are rising up to take her place as the poster girl of women's golf. Most notably Cheyenne Woods, niece of Tiger Woods, is dominating the junior amateur circuit.

Okay, this is all fine and good, but do I really care about women's golf? No. So why am I bringing all this up and boring you half to death? Because of a question Hill poses at the end of her article. Hill blames Wie's recent failures on her quick rise to the pro ranks. The other young golfers such as Woods built up their resumes one amateur tournament at a time, going pro once they were ready. Wie, by contrast, was so talented that she basically skipped straight to the pros - and has floundered because she did not develop her skills properly.

Why did she go so fast? Hill blames Wie's father, who served as her manager and caddie, for trying to make the quick buck:

"Certainly no one can blame Wie for accepting the millions Nike and others supplied. But if you're Wie, which would you rather have right now, another seven-figure check or the promise of a meaningful career?"

Way to fuck up a great article, Hill. $30 million??? How can you possibly blame Wie for going for the quick bucks? Wie has set up herself and her family for a generation. Wie is not the archetypal basketball prodigy who declares for the draft too early and flounders out, getting drafted in the second round, and disappearing from the game soon after. She already made more than most women pro golfers make in their entire careers. And hell, she's only 19 years old! Even if she never makes another dollar from golf again, Wie can most certainly go ahead and have a 'meaningful career' in whatever she wants.

She's smart too! She went to Stanford! She's already accomplished two things on every Korean parent's wish list: gold championship and Ivy-equivalent school. Maybe floundering in golf is the best thing that could happen to her. She can go forward now and complete the Asian trifecta by becoming a doctor or a lawyer, and create even more parental pressure for Korean kids everywhere. You go, girl!

Update: Who Needs Him?

2008-07-13T15:35:00.000-07:00

Eight wins in a row. Who needs Bonds when you have the illustrious Fernando Tatis?

The Mets are like tuna. I love it when they're on a roll.

2008-07-10T22:44:00.000-07:00

Ooh, can From the Balcony use its crazy chameleon magic to turn into a Mets blog now?

Much like you did with Young, I must acknowledge your larger point while arguing with your logic. By the numbers, Bonds would be a terrific acquisition for the Mets. Ask yourself this: are you more confident with Alou or Endy in left? Alou looks pretty rickety out there, but plug him into the lineup and it suddenly starts to look a lot like a meat grinder. Alou seems like a less and less of viable option, and if Bonds can replicate his 2007 season (admittedly a big if), he's an even better hitter than Moises. With Beltran zooming around center on his motorcycle we can afford a left fielder without range. Even better, unlike all the other sluggers on the market, he doesn't cost us anything (besides cash, and possibly not THAT much). I love Endy like a brother, but he doesn't offer too much with the bat. Bonds' stellar offense more than offsets his horrid defense. The Mets sign Bonds and instantly become a better team.

So why don't I want them to do it?

Because if they did we'd have to have Barry Bonds on our team.

I see Bonds as a tragic, almost Shakespearean figure, a victim of his own character. I feared and admired him in his Pirate days. He was the best player I'd ever seen play the game. He had blazing speed, hit scorching line drives, and his eight gold gloves have something to say about your claim that he's always been a sub par fielder. He had a great baseball lineage, and there was no reason why his name shouldn't have gone down in history alongside the likes Mantle and Mays and DiMaggio.

Then there was McGuire, and suddenly everyone in America was weeping and rending their garments for the new Home Run King. Bonds had more talent in his pinkie toe than McGuire had in his whole fence swingin', strikeout lovin', grounder-bootin' body. But were people knifing each other in the stands over Bonds' home run balls? McGuire was the golden boy, and Bonds, the any fair measure the greatest player of his generation, was jealous.

So he shot crazy drugs up his ass until he turned into the loathsome, hulking knuckle-dragger we see before us today. He lost the ability to walk without hobbling, his head swelled up too big for his helmet, (also, presumably his balls have fallen off or something by this point) but man did he start pounding the fuck out of the ball. He hit more home runs than any body had ever hit before.

Wow-ee.

The press misses the point when they talk about the unfair advantage that steroids gave Bonds. The real story here is that steroids DESTROYED Bonds. Because we celebrate flash over substance, the macho, fascist home run over real athleticism, our generation was denied an athlete for ages. Mention Mickey Mantle in a room of older people, and somebody will smile and say, "I saw him play." When we're sitting in our rocking chairs and somebody mentions Bonds we'll shake our heads and say, "I saw him wither." Kids watching the game today don't even know what Bonds used to be. That's how we'll remember him -- the sickly, musclebound freak, smacking dingers, yawning in the outfield and failing to run out pop ups. All because he wanted the applause we gave to McGuire.

And that's why I don't want Bonds on the Mets. Because he's depressing. Even in his diminished state he's probably an upgrade over Endy, but I don't want a left fielder that I can't look at without thinking about the corrosive aspect of the American dream. That's the opposite of why I watch baseball. Also, Bonds is a pretty big douchebag, and I only support douchebags if they are already on the team and have achieved the status of Beloved Douchebag. (See: Paul Lo Duca.)

But seriously... Young thinks we should sign Bonds because the crazy media circus will help us somehow? That is CUH-RAZY. Even for a sportswriter.

2008-07-10T01:15:00.000-07:00

It is now July 10th and Barry Bonds is still unemployed.

This is not ot surprising, of course, considering his legal woes. Still, Bonds and his agent are confident that he will play this year. He's been working out at his secret mountain lair and select scouts have been invited to come see what a 44-year old baseball superfreak can do. So who will sign this man?

How about the Mets? That's what Eric Young, former ballplayer and current ESPN analyst, suggests in his Baseball Tonight Clubhouse post. Now now, stop laughing hysterically and put away that syringe and straight-jacket. The man did hit 28 home runs in 126 games last year - with the season halfway done, David Wright leads the Mets with only 17 bombers. So he'd help out with the power numbers. Bonds also posted an outworldly on-base percentage of .480 with 132 walks: mmmm, yummy RBI's!

Okay, so there is an intelligent case to be made for Bonds. Mr. Young's argument, unfortunately, is anything but. A cardinal rule in baseball is that its analysts are dumb and uninformed - the "Joe Morgan Rule", if you will. So let's have at it.

First, who are the Mets?

"This is a team that has the talent to not only win the National League East, but to run away with it. I believe the best way for this team to do that may be by making one more big headline this summer. That would be by signing Barry Bonds."

So far so good. The Mets have been a disappointment this year. Two years ago they came within one game of making to the World Series. Last year the team was visibly hungry for the title and maintained their NL East dominance throughout the season, except they infamously blew a 7-game lead to the Phillies with only 17 games left in the season. Just to give you a sense of how improbable this was, I remember convincing myself that everything was going to be fine because the Mets had 97.5% chance of making the playoffs with only one week to go. That was heartbreaking. This year, the Mets were flat coming out of the gate. They are hovering near .500 and have not been able to pull together a dominating stretch, despite the fact that they added the Best Pitcher on the Planet to the team.

Mr. Young, please continue:

"This is a move that would help this team in several different ways. First, this is a team filled with quiet guys who are having to deal with the circus that comes with playing in New York. The signing of Bonds would put all that pressure on him and allow the rest of this team to just play ball the rest of the season."

Duhrrrrr, what? Forget injuries, lack of clutch hitting, mistakes on the field, and the continuing implosion of the bullpen. The Mets are not playing well because of the New York media circus. This is a common charge. Anytime a New York athlete or team fares poorly, it's always because of the big scary wolves of the New York dailies are ripping on them for every single decision... especially when the bile and hatred is richly deserved.

Mr. Young's solution: bring in Bonds as the patsy! The man is hated so much already by the fans and the media that all the boo-birds of Shea Stadium will target their shit-bombs on Barry's ginormous head. Reporters will flock post-game to Bonds and grill him on his pending criminal charges, giving Wright, Reyes, Beltran and crew the chance to tip-toe their way out of the lockerroom and make a getaway on the team bus.

But how will Bonds contribute, besides as a decoy?

"Second, this gives the Mets not only the most potent offense in the National League, but in all of baseball. The Mets could trot out a lineup that started out like this: Jose Reyes, Luis Castillo/Damion Easley, Carlos Beltran, Bonds, David Wright and then Carlos Delgado. In the later innings, they could pull Bonds for Endy Chavez, a better defensive outfielder who could also help rest Bonds' knees."

That Castilo/Easley platoon sure is fearsome, no? Nah, I won't criticize Mr. Young too much on this point. That line-up sure sounds scary. The good news: Reyes is on track to post his career-best numbers and Wright is one the last stage of his metamorphosis into God. Beltran is Beltran: quitely racking up the number while playing excellent defense at center.

No, the real problem with the line is that old age has taken its toll on the veterans. Alou is out until god-knows-when, and Delgado completely fell off the wagon. The 2008 Mets are exhibit #1 for the theory that when you gamble with veterans, be prepared for the worst. Bonds will turn 45 sometime this season. He's not the kind of player who can take to the field every day.

The real flaw in Mr. Young's analysis, however, is that he completely omits defense. Baseball analysists (or at least TV analysts) bring in defense only when they want to hype up a player - the Derek Jeter Syndrome, if you will - and leave it out entirely when it leads to inconvenient conclusions. Let me say it loud and clear: Bonds is a terrible outfielder. His defense was always sub-par, but at this point he can't run, he can't dive, and he could never throw very hard. Expect flyballs to drop in the outfield like M.I.R.V. warheads falling on Soviet cities.

The Mets cannot afford Bond's defense, of all the teams out there, because our whole strategy for winning depends on outfield defense. We spent hundreds of millions of dollars on flyball pitchers and Gold Glove outfielders to take advantage of Shea's spacious outfield: Johan Santana, Pedro Martinez, and Olivier Perez give up flyballs, and Endy Chavez and Carlos Beltran turn 'em into outs. That's Mets baseball. That's the highest flyball-to-out defense efficiency in the league. That's how we win.

So yeah, we might not want to add a doorstop to the outfield and hope and pray and cringe everytime the ball heads to the leftfield. Bonds will find gainful employment somewhere, to some other team with loads of cash mired in mediocrity (ahem, the Yankees). But he won't be wearing the blue and the orange anytime soon.

Words of Wisdom

2008-07-09T01:03:00.000-07:00

"The only choice for the final roster spot on the 2008 American League All-Star Team is Jason Giambi. He not only represents the great Yankees dynasty previously led by the likes of Reggie Jackson -- the father of the mustache in modern-day baseball -- but Giambi represents the hopes and dreams of the previously downtrodden mustached American, a breed that was on the U.S. Endangered Species list as recently as 2005. Clearly, the voting public must take into account Giambi’s powerful lip fur, as it signifies great intellect, good looks, and the ability to stare down the most powerful of martial arts gurus." -- The American Mustache Institute

An Ode to the B-Movie [Part 1]

2008-06-30T17:00:00.000-07:00

We'll come out and admit it: having passed the quarter century mark, we here at FTB can't help but feel a twinge of that "they don't make 'em like they used to" feelin'. We feel this most acutely when thinking about the movies and cartoons of our childhood.

The Early Filmography of Arnold Schwarzenegger: In addition to boasting the highest governor to actor ratio of any movie, many of Arnold's early adventures in film possess a schlocky grandeur that you'd be hard pressed to find in the modern cineplex. I'd be a lot happier in life if I could revisit these scenes at least once a day:

-Commando: "Remember when I said I'd kill you last? I lied." An early classic, and an example of what would become a defining feature of Arnold's career.

-Any scene in Total Recall in which someone's face bugs out due to the martian atmosphere. Scared the shit out of me when I was six, and I still get a little bit of a thrill whenever I see it. Honorable Mentions--the prostitute with three boobs (three boobs!) and one of the earlier Arnold one-liners: "see you at the party, Richter" while holding Richter's severed arms. Michael Ironside, our movie-going lives are poorer without you.

-Predator: In many ways, Predator is the perfect storm of 80's B-moviemaking. Rugged manly men in the jungle, plenty of stereotypes, Carl Weathers, minimal character development, just the right amount of primitive special effects, and plenty of blood. Although Arnold is a little light on the one-liners in this movie, the rest of cast carries him along with lines like, "I'll bleed you, real quiet" and "It'll make you a sexual tyrannosaur."

-The Running Man: The dystopian future is a popular topic for filmmakers and Blade Runner, Logan's Run, Death Race 2000 stand as testaments to its powerful attraction. However, there will always be a special place in my heart for Ben Richards, the conscience burdened pilot who refuses to bomb a food riot. After being framed by his government for his recalcitrance, our noble savage is forced to play a hellish gameshow to earn his pardon or die trying. In addition to featuring Jesse Ventura as the cowardly Captain Freedom, The Running Man moves in a structure familiar to all children of the 80's--plot development, problem solving, boss fight--life as understood through Megaman 2.

-The Last Action Hero: Arguably my favorite Arnold flick, it's hard to imagine a movie of his that so effectively combines schlock, self-referential humor, and genuine pathos. It gently pokes at the formulaic nature of Arnold's performances while including just enough heart to keep the audience engaged.

The closest we have come an heir to Arnold is the Rock (or "Dwayne" as he now fancies himself), who strayed from his promising early ventures (The Rundown, The Scorpion King) into family-friendly fare, which was certainly not the Game Plan (a-hyuck!) I had in mind. So take some time to watch or revisit the inimitable Schwarzenegger of the 80's and early 90's.

2008-06-25T18:46:00.000-07:00

The world is one fucked-up place.

This is the lesson that I have learned from law school. Place millions of strangers into a region, leave them free to interact with each other, and call it a society. You are bound to find that the most horrifying, tragic, and unlikely events will become the norm.

A "dwarf" woman was arrested last week for pimping out a 15-year old runaway. Clients paid $250 per sex-session and $100 for oral sex services. When interviewed, her neighbors "were not surprised by the arrest": one Reginald Ford told CBS News, "I didn't know she was a pimp, but I'm not surprised." (Ed: Reginald? Bubbles?!?)

Let that soak in for a while.

He wasn't surprised? Why not? Did this woman flash jewelry and wear purple suits? Was she known in her community as a person of unscrupulous morality? If so, how? Did the reporter walk around her neighborhood asking, "Sir, could you kindly tell me what you think about this woman? In your opinion, is she a pimp?" Questions, people, questions!

Cases like this are sadly commonplace. Not the physical deformity part - rather, the runaway turning to tricks. The lady pimp here is in a world of trouble. On top of promoting and soliciting prostitution, she has been charged with child endangerment.

What about aiding and abetting rape?

We all know (or should know) that having sex with a minor is a crime. What many people do not know, however, is that it is a strict liability crime. This means that anyone who has sex with a minor is guilty of a crime, regardless of whether the minor consented, looked old, or even lied about age.

As far as I know, no one has been charged with rape for having sex with a minor prostitute. Of course, it is already a crime to patronize prostitutes, and in New York the severity of the punishment rises when the sex worker is a minor. However, there is a strange wrinkle in the law: while it is a more serious crime to obtain the services of underage prostitutes, it is an affirmative defense that buyer "did not have reasonable grounds to believe that the person was less than the age specified." (See, New York Penal Law s. 230.07)

Just to be clear, a 45-year old man who has sex with a 15-year girl who lies to him about his age can be convicted of a felony, but the same man can buys a 15-year old runaway might be guilty of only the 'vanilla' prostitution charge (a misdemeanor) if the girl "looked old".

Let's not dwell on this any longer. This is what happens when the governor of the state acts the pimp and ends up resigning in disgrace.

RIP George Carlin, 1937-2008

2008-06-22T23:20:00.000-07:00

Rest in peace, you glorious bastard. Enjoy life in comedy heaven, getting wasted with Richard Pryor and Lenny Bruce while making Mitch Hedberg your bitch.

And above all, have a nice day.

Silver Jews: Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea

2008-06-10T17:34:00.001-07:00

I saw David Berman headlining at the Pitchfork Music Festival two years ago. He was in the midst of the first tour of his two-decade career, and the adoring throng in Chicago's Union Park may well have been the largest audience he'd ever faced. He took the stage nervously, stumbling a bit and carefully placing a folder of what looked like hand-written lyrics on a music stand in front of him. He mumbled and stuttered his way through “Albermarle Station” and a couple of other forgettable songs, each of which was met by thunderous applause from an extremely supportive, forgiving crowd. He finally found his voice on "Trains Across the Sea," intoning the lyrics hypnotically as the El went rattling by and the sun dropped into the water behind the bandstand. By his last encore, he seemed supremely confident, embellishing his deadpan croon with playful phrasings and ornaments. David Berman, who has gotten more lyrical mileage out of physical and spiritual discomfort than anyone this side of Lou Reed, sounded downright at ease.

Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea, released today on Drag City, sounds like it was made by this fitter, happier Berman, with all the good and bad that implies. The change is one of tone, more than content. All the Silver Jews ingredients are there -- esoteric, viciously sarcastic lyrics wedded to cracked, off-kilter country rock, the acidic, somewhat tuneless baritone. But Berman's albums have often luxuriated in their own unfinishedness, the ramshackle, messy quality that lent them their immediacy -- this is the first that sounds finished. Polished, even.

Which is not to imply there's anything slick or complacent about the songs -- "Aloysius, Bluegrass Drummer" explodes out of the gate with a drum-roll and a frantic piano riff and refuses to cool as Berman sneers his way through a vengeful, twisted little romantic comedy. And I don't even mean that the songs sound happier -- "Suffering Jukebox", a heartrending lament for a neglected jukebox in a dingy bar, has to be one of the saddest songs ever written about an inanimate object. It floats in on a cloud of pedal-steel smoke that sounds like a cliché until you realize that it perfectly expresses the deadening misery of a life spent repeating the same old lines to distracted drunks. ("They never seem to turn you up loud, there are a lot of chatterboxes in this crowd.") "My Pillow is the Threshold" begins as a romantic lament from a guy who can only be with a girl in his dreams, then turns out to be about suicide ("Now I'm here for good, I won't leave you anymore,") -- a fact that only becomes clear in the last moments, when the mindless drone of the deep bass rises to overwhelm the song, illuminating a frightful foreboding that's been hidden in the music all along, somehow just beyond our notice like the twist that ends the slasher movie. So when I describe Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea as "polished," I'm not referring to the sound or the content -- I mean that it sounds less like a desperate cry from the center of Berman's soul than an artfully conceived, well-crafted record.

The album is filled with idiosyncratic story-songs, which have never before been the Silver Jews' favored mode of expression. “San Francisco B.C.” is a brilliant, cinematic caper involving a jewelry heist, a murdered barber and a mysterious Oriental named Mr. Games. “Party Barge" is the heroic tale of, well, a party barge and the Coast Guard that tries in vain to shut the party down. (That song features a great call-and-response bit between the barge-partiers and the cops.) There are no devastating, laid-bare Berman tracks, no “Dallas” or “Pet Politics” to be found here, and it would be easy to shrug the album off, concluding that Berman does his best work when his life is on fire. Instead, he takes on a more writerly voice, exploring characters and ideas rather than his own personal pain. The razor-wit is there -- even a Silver Jews-by-numbers song like “Strange Victory, Strange Defeat” can contain a wonderfully sharp couplet like "What's with all the handsome grandsons in these rock band magazines? And what have they done with the fat ones, the bald and the goatee'd?" -- the miserablism has just been leavened slightly.

But, to my ears, there's always been something slightly redemptive about Berman's music. Something he glimpsed out beyond the despair -- beauty or light or even death -- that made all the doom and gloom at least halfway worthwhile. Even great downers like "Smith and Jones Forever," about glue-sniffing killers sentenced to the electric chair, have a grandiose quality -- not by way of apologia, but by way of sincere commitment to the story of these born losers who disappear into a self-destructive holocaust entirely of their own making. The story is nihilistic in the extreme, but the portrait is humanizing, even slightly touching. There’s warmth, empathy behind all the misanthropic sarcasm, and it’s clearer on this album than ever before.

Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea closes with "We Could be Looking for the Same Thing," a heartsick plea for love -- derivative, familiar and entirely unclever, but moving just the same. We're reminded that behind all the wordplay and mystery, behind the prophetic junkie persona, the fundamental reason we connect with Berman's albums might be that we share his exquisite sense of longing and the hope -- the tattered, distant, extremely Jewish form of hope -- that tinges all the despair. Berman is who he is because he's able to affect us even when he comes before us with no tricks and no tools. Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea is the first Silver Jews album that has ever left me feeling bright, even uplifted. Whether we call that breaking new ground or losing his edge says less about Berman than it does about you and me.

Shearwater: Rook

2008-06-06T17:08:00.000-07:00

Okkervil River leapt to quasi-fame last year with the release of The Stage Names, an album chronicling the miseries, frustrations and rare pleasures of life on the indie rock's B-list. The Stage Names debuted to rapturous critical praise and sold over 10,000 copies in its opening week. Last month, keyboardist and multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Meiburg announced he was leaving Okkervil River to focus on the Shearwater, a project he co-founded with OR lead singer Will Sheff. (Sheff is no longer with the band.) Just as a rising tide was carrying all ships, Meiburg decided to jump overboard and make haste for the ocean floor. It's an admirable decision, one that officially declares that Shearwater is nobody's side project.

Their new album, Rook, makes it clear why Okkervil River's direction didn't jibe with Meiburg's vision. Instead of the solid, meaty songwriting, the clever lyrics and catchy choruses in which Sheff specializes, we have an album made up of bits and pieces, ebbs and floes of incidental noise and repeating loops -- not a sing-along in sight. It's less than six degrees away from melancholy cocktail party music -- for a moment it's tempting to dismiss the album as lovely sonic wallpaper, the sort of pretty, fragile snoozer that bands like Iron & Wine and Death Cab for Cutie churn out by the dozen. The first track, "On the Death of the Waters," is delicate, haunting, and barely audible -- it would fit comfortably on any number of lesser indie rock records -- until a deafening hi-hat crash, discordant horn blast and manic keyboard arpeggio rip unexpectedly through the quiet. Before long the volume falls out and we're left only with a distant tinkling piano, but notice has been served -- this will not be another album to fall asleep to.

The opener is immediately followed by the title song and single “Rook”, with its resolute percussion, and carefully enunciated vocals, understated yet confident, even commanding. The bridge is provided by a ominous trumpet sounding off in the distance somewhere -- an intruder from another song, come only to issue a few spacious brass notes of foreboding, then beat a hasty retreat back to the set of "For a Few Dollars More." Brimming with unexpected oddball moments like this, Rook is the rare album that that's quiet and mournful without once feeling lazy, predictable or detached.

Of course, all the starry-eyed abstraction can be a little much, and I sometimes miss the cinematic immediacy of Okkervil River. The lyrics are half balderdash, with a lot of psuedo-Keatsian rambling about falconers and leviathans, interrupted by sudden moments of startling, devastating directness. On "Home Life," when Meiburg sings "When you were a child you were a tomboy, and your mother laughed at the serious way you looked at her," the words feel much more lived-in and honest than all of his elliptical meditations on the natural world. (Meiburg is an ornithologist with a masters degree in geography, so his dedication to the land is at least genuine.) Mundane lines like these redeem all the poetry -- "Home Life" is an epic of nearly 8 minutes, and by the end, when the instruments begin to fall away and Meiburg sings "Horse without rider, lungs without breathing, day without light, a song without singing... a song," the words are both darkly frightening and warmly enveloping. The music is slinky and furrow-browed, and the singer sounds utterly lost. The poetry feels natural, not written, and we feel enraptured and alive, glad to be adrift in Meiburg's strange dream.

Ultimately, this effect of lyrical inconsistencies and shredded, patched-up songs feels less like a flaw than a unique vision. Rook is a troubled, difficult album, an album that resists intent listening and yet refuses to fade into the background. The way the soporific butts up against the electrifying in these etched-out, discordant lullabies creates the sense of twisting the radio knob on a dream. And if Meiburg’s radio-dreams are all of seascapes and archipelagoes, of birds plunging down through clouds that cling to salty cliffs -- Freudian clichés, to be sure, but lovely ones just the same -- we're no less lucky to be invited in through all that static, spume and spray.

Music Calendar

2008-06-03T11:10:00.001-07:00

Dearest Loyal Imaginary Reader,

I've posted a music event calendar up here. It's that thing you see on the left, clogging up the blogrolls and looking generally horrible and amateurish. I hope to find a way to make it into a link, and thereby less stupid-looking. I've been whacking my computer with an ice cream scooper for the better part of an hour, but it doesn't seem to be doing anything.

There's no real guiding principle behind the calendar besides "Here are some events I might go to/am going to." Mostly in Philly and some New York, with a few tempting roadtrips like the Pitchfork Festival in Chicago thrown in for good measure.

It's fun making a calendar like this -- you find out about shows you might have missed otherwise. For instance, I had no idea that Daniel Johnston and O'Death were playing World Cafe on June 22. If you see me there, gentle imaginary reader, you should dance with me. I'll be one of the many hairy shirtless sweaty guys shambling around. (Really putting the "no such thing as bad publicity" theory to the test there.)

[Update: Okay, I've moved the event calendar to the bottom of the page, where it looks less ridiculous but is also harder to find. Does anybody know how to do that thing where a link takes you to a different place on the same page? You know, like Wikipedia does?]