Turbo Croutons Unite!

Late 2011 Update: Things I Love Right Now

2011-10-25T14:49:00.000-07:00

Hi! Here's five new things I like and five old ones:

Newish

Oldish

Making It Easy To Root For Evil

2011-01-25T11:25:00.000-08:00

Yeah I know, this is what woke my year+ blogging slumber, but so be it.

Musical concerns aside, this is one of the worst album covers in history, right? The faux-metal thing is clearly a joke -- it has to be -- but it's a joke that's funny only to people who know that Deerhoof sound nothing like Megadeth. Which is obviously millions of people. And by "millions of people" I mean "hundreds of bloggers"

Today's Three Awesome Things, And My Super-Brief Top X List For 2009

2009-12-03T11:06:00.000-08:00

I need to get that fuckhead from WAVVES off the top of my precious blog. How about we allow some awesomeness to ensue? Is that something you'd be interested in?

* Andrew W.K. was already a made man for "Party Hard," but this GIF (old, but I only discovered it now) ought to give him a get-out-of-jail-free card for one, if not two, felony charges:

Seriously. He can commit two murders, and he'd still be in the black, morality-wise. This is so enthralling. I can't stop watching it. It's like if the Zapruder film were fun!

* French juggernauts Phoenix have contributed three videos to the semi-improvised and semi-acoustic Les Concerts à Emporter series. "1901" is below, while equally awesome versions of "Lisztomania," "One Time Too Many" and "Long Distance Call" are elsewhere at La Blogothèque.

Phoenix - 1901 - A Take Away Show from La Blogothèque on Vimeo.

There will be at least one more mention of Phoenix before Christmas. Assuming I actually bother with a year-end list. As I said in the comments a couple posts back, I kinda feel like abandoning the listmaking process, washing my hands of it entirely, is the ultimate tribute to this particular year.

* To reiterate a comment on my recent Passion Pit post, Stereogum's list of upcoming 2010 releases. Just a cursory glance at this list is enough to place 2010 way, WAY above 2009 as far as quality goes. It's like night and day. And that list doesn't even include May's rumored Arcade Fire album!

My point: given those developments, and the objective impending awesomeness of at least 8-10 of those releases, why spend more time thinking about 2009 than absolutely necessary,? Am I right? I can check out We Were Promised Jetpacks and call it a year.

* In fact, fuck it. We're going 2005-style on this list. Off the cuff, no thought, and very little explanation:

Best Album

1) Passion Pit - Manners (best front to back)
2) Phoenix - Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix (genius songs, but sags in places)
3) The Decemberists - The Hazards of Love (most underrated)
4) Franz Ferdinand - Tonight (totally awesome & unfairly underrated)
5) The Flaming Lips - Embryonic (their best in forever)
6) Metric - Fantasies (fun poppy throwback)
7) the xx - xx (nice new-wavey debut, potential one-offs)
8) Noisettes - Wild Young Hearts (made them super-famous in the UK this year)

I can't even think of ten albums that I'd want to list. Art Brut, A.C. Newman, Trail of Dead, and Royksopp get honorable/partial mention. Tegan and Sara get an incomplete for me not listening to it yet.

Best Songs

1) "Little Secrets" by Passion Pit
2) (tie) "Lisztomania"/"1901" by Phoenix
3) "Daylight" by Matt & Kim
4) "The Heartbreak Rides" by A.C. Newman
5) "Gold Guns Girls" by Metric
6) "Two Weeks" by Grizzly Bear
7) "Don't Upset The Rhythm" by Noisettes
8) "Crystalised" by the xx
9) "Watching The Planets" by The Flaming Lips
10) "Ulysses" by Franz Ferdinand

And my annual Most Awful award should be self-explanatory.

That's it. That is literally how much effort I want to put into 2009. And now I'm done with it. Off to the airport; time to fly into 2010!

Shitgaze: The Rare Indie Rock Subgenre That Actually Is What It Says It Is

2009-11-27T10:53:00.004-08:00

This idiot is why cocaine is bad, kids.

The only thing about indie rock more disappointing than its music is its labels. Inventing some nonsense term like "blipcore" or "nu-jungle" or whatever to describe indescribably odd music is so facile that the labels aren't even relevant. I got to the point where I could speak these terms (sort of) by realizing that you basically just smush words together in some vivid-sounding manner depending on how you feel. It's basically a bunch of arrogant crap. It's a rare pleasure to encounter a classification that actually works, that isn't just the verbal equivalent of "you got chocolate in my peanut butter."

A few minutes ago, while reading an excellent write-up of highly recommended 1000 Times Yes reviewer Christopher R. Weingarten, I was introduced to a word so fantastic that I felt compelled to share. It even gets its own paragraph. Behold:

"Shitgaze."

Holy hell, is that a fantastic term. In a sea of names whose sounds are better than their meanings, I believe this is the most accurate that I've ever come across. Every single band that qualifies as shitgaze is, in fact, very shitty! No Age? Sucks! Vivian Girls? Unlistenable! WAVVES? Goes without saying! Combine "shit" with the evocatively deprecatory -gaze suffix, and you've got maybe the biggest face-forward diss possible. It would be like inventing a subgenre for Animal Collective and Neon Indian and stuff called "overratedgaze" or "waste of fucking timegaze," and then having the label stick. I can't imagine what I'd do if that happened. [Ed. note: not true; what would happen is I would get an erection.]

Anyway, shitgaze calls out the vast majority of the laziest, most unfairly overexposed indie acts on the planet, the bands that can't help but appear in my worst-of lists. It's a real thing, and it's awesome. Sure, many of these bands could adopt the term ironically, or as a compliment, but I prefer to pretend that it's nothing but an insult. I hate the music, but I love the word. My day is better thanks to shitgaze. So there.

My Blogging Habit Has Been Blown... To Kingdom Come

2009-10-21T19:57:00.001-07:00

Holy jalapenos in a hot pocket... it's been almost six months since I said a damn thing. The last thing I said was "Grizzly Bear is awesome," and the only activity is a gaggle of Google-ogling haters reminding me that my Hate Binky post is the #1 search result on Google for "Animal Collective sucks." Not complaining about that per se... cause hey, fight the powers that be. But I have hit blog bottom, and it smells like moth balls down here. Time to bust out the biscuits and strike up the band.

So let's see what I've been up to, culture-wise:

DINING & TRAVEL

I ate cream cheese on a bagel. I ate smoked mackerel. I ate at one of Las Vegas's finest buffets, shortly after eating the best Egg McMuffin I have ever had. I drew a picture of myself with blood pouring out of my mouth in crayon at a $30-an-entree restaurant. I ordered filet mignon shortly after drawing said picture. It was delicious. The filet mignon, not the drawing. The drawing was underdone. Those things happened over the past six months.

FILM

My Netflix queue has become a cesspool. I still haven't finished my Best Movies of 2008 post, and it's almost 2010. Not that I'll be writing a 2009 post from the look of it... I have seen exactly one film in a theater since the last time I posted anything here: the sixth Harry Potter movie. It was great, until the end, when it absolutely blew. How do you make the most devastating moment in the series totally boring and matter-of-fact? Makes me want to puke in a sorting hat.

TV

Lost. That's about it. Almost done with season two, and so far it's everything I'd hoped for. Mad Men's been awesome, but that ain't news.

MUSIC

Kind of a blah year for Teh Rock. To invert a Louis CK truism, nothing is awesome, and everyone's happy. Really? We're happy that Animal Collective and Dirty Projectors are the only things we can really hang our hats on this year? We're fine with that being the direction of music?

The only real victory of the year, musically speaking, the only true, top-to-bottom legitimate contender for Best Album of 2009, is Manners, from Cambridge's own Passion Pit. Continuing the burgeoning trend of New Order/Devo fixation, as epitomized by the likes of Cut Copy and Holy Fuck and Hot Chip, Passion Pit have brought the synth-heavy sound to bright, fun, bouncy new places. There's nothing complicated or challenging about them... I don't see PP changing the game or blazing new trails in music or anything. But I don't care. Manners is flat-out incredible from start to finish. All the words being used to describe Merriweather Post Pavilion that I hated so much? "Danceable," "universal," "accessible," and so forth? Those words describe Passion Pit.

Behold:

"To Kingdom Come"

"Little Secrets"

"The Reeling"

See? Isn't that some fun-ass fun? You know it is.

(Also of interest is Andrew Kuo's thoughts, visualized, on a show of theirs last year as well as their debut EP, Chunk of Change.)

Basically, this is the one breakout masterpiece of the year. Manners is the only front-to-back excellent album of the year; even Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix has its uncompelling moments. It'd be great to hear another breakout pop album before Christmas but I'm not holding my breath. It's not that kind of year. (Embryonic doesn't count, cause Embryonic is fucked up.)

It's bad enough that my primary musical fascination since the beginning of the summer has been late 70's/early 80's punk (Buzzcocks, Wire, Minutemen) and post-punk (Gang of Four, Mission of Burma, Pere Ubu) and neither (Elvis Costello). I've gone 30 years back in time to find something that moves me. I don't think I'll be able to do this again next year.

But until then... Double Nickels On The Dime, you are fabulous.

Cats And Dogs, Living Together

2009-05-27T19:01:00.001-07:00

I never thought I'd say these words, but here goes:

I like Grizzly Bear's new song, "Two Weeks." I like it a LOT.

I'm as shocked by this as anyone. I'm supposed to hate that song with the flame of a thousand cases of gonorrhea. And yet I don't. What's wrong with me???

I hate Grizzly Bear as much as anyone else. They're a quartet of effete, self-serious twats who make Vampire Weekend look like the fucking Dropkick Murphys. I could rant for hours about their meritless rise to stardom, fueled by a legion of headphone-riddled professional-ish bloggers. They are exactly what's wrong with indie "rock" at the present moment, forcing me to put rock in double quotes.

Here's what I wrote about their breakthrough LP in late 2006:

Worst Album Of The Year
Grizzly Bear - Yellow House

No contest. After several tries, I remain entirely confused by Yellow House's critical success. It's a boring, meandering, unremarkable turd. Even their idea (beautiful lo-fi pop) is a piece of shit, never mind the fact that they failed to execute it. Since when did Beach Boys harmonies become the indie scene's top priority? This band sucks.

Put it this way. Car trouble caused them to miss a gig here in DC. opening for TVOTR, back in October. Their absence on that night ranks as one of the luckiest things that happened to me all year.

Ouch. Gotta love the Beach Boys slam, which seems particularly prescient prior to the preponderance of Pet Sounds preoccupation amongst pundits pertaining to Panda Bear's putrid, pallid personal project, Person Pitch. But yeah, Yellow House sucks harder than a thousand pounds of barnacles. It's as unlistenable as my alliteration is unreadable.

The impending release of Veckatimest set all my early alarms off. The reception of Merriweather Post Pavilion gave me an idea of what was to come from the blogosphere and criterati; already primed to hate Veckatimest and anyone who didn't, I planned to skip the album and the entire conversation.

Then something unexpected happened: they wrote a Wolf Parade song. That buzzing keyboard, jutting out into the main hook, would fit in nicely on Apologies To The Queen Mary. It brings a rough edge to a band that is typically soft to the point of detriment. Good thing too, because unlike every lifeless, flaccid millisecond of Yellow House, "Two Weeks" actually has some verve to it. Congratulations boys, you realized what effect music is supposed to have on people.

But even though it's fucking "Hey Jude" compared to their earlier output, it isn't nearly as effective as it could have been. It's an old chestnut of mine: when the song's natural momentum gets throttled by design, in order to draw attention to the painstaking musical design, you fucked up. Sure enough, the drum work, which is otherwise far improved, drives the energy backwards, not forwards. I feel the music being pulled back when I listen. I guess it's interesting that I can feel that so vividly, but I dunno.

I found it interesting that the premise of the video, i.e. the lugubrious facial tics, the digitally-enhanced slo-mo drag of eye blinks etc., is a digital representation of what I hear the drums doing. You are waiting impatiently for the eye to come all the way up, just like you're waiting impatiently for the song to catch up with what your brain expects.

It's just more evidence that the band's conceit, to drag music downtempo, to suck the urgency out and proceed as carefully and deliberately as possible, is what's holding "Two Weeks" back. With a more talented ear at the helm, "Two Weeks" would be a legitimate sensation, but instead it's just a likable curiosity. One need look no further than Girl Talk's amazing remix of "Knife" from a couple years back to hear how brilliant GB's songs can be when taken out of their boring-ass hands. In someone else's hands, you could be looking at seriously classic shit.

Instead, as fits GB's raison d'etre, the song has been soaked in milk. That slower pace to the vocals; their trademark, gimmicky church harmonies; the almost clunky interplay between drums (livelier than anywhere else in GB's recent work) and piano/keyboard... it's all part of the playbook. "Knife" is their mission statement; the suffocation of "Two Weeks" is just a reminder.

This is why I have the degree of bile I have for this band: it's frustrating enough for their addictive hooks to be straight-up bungled, but they are actually given MORE credit for doing it wrong than anyone else gets for doing it right! It's just amazing.

Odd that after 700 words I've spent this much time bitching about a song I ultimately like. Reminds me of my take on "My Girls," which I also enjoy freely. I think so little of AC that I've graded "My Girls" on a curve, thus crediting them for making a half-decent song more than they deserve, all while hating their guts. Likewise, the fact that "Two Weeks" is merely listenable had me sprinting to my Blogger dashboard to spill out all this internal conflict. I can't just like/dislike their music at face value, because in the end I want much more from them than this. Whatever that all means.

But ultimately, I have to hand it to them. It's a goddamn ear worm. I can't stop thinking about it, or humming along to it. They did exactly what they needed to do to win me over: something different from that thing that made me wish sterility and cancer upon them. Something that actually speaks to what I like about music. It's a legitimate pop tune. Well done.

As for the other tracks on Veckatimest... I haven't made up my mind on the entirety of it, but it's not as unpleasant an experience as Yellow House. Not by a longshot. Not only am I not bored out of my gourd, I'm actually leaning positive on it. I know one thing for certain: I won't be putting them in the "Worst Of The Year" category this year. Upset of the new century, by a country mile.

Now, of course, I have a new problem: who is left for me to bestow that dishonor upon? To destroy Freddie Mercury's sentiment... can anybody find me somebody to loathe? I never thought I'd say THESE words, either, but I sure hope Deerhoof or Clap Your Hands Say Yeah puts out new music soon...

Stuff I'm Loving Right Now

2009-03-25T22:10:00.002-07:00

Accentuate the positive, that's what I always say...

Phoenix - "1901"

New song from a band I completely missed the boat on last time around. 2006's It's Never Been Like That is a great album. How I screwed up so royally, I don't know. In sports terms, me letting Phoenix past me in 2006 is like Carlos Beltran letting strike three go past him against the Cardinals in the NLCS. Inexcusable.

Anyway, what I've heard of Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix has sounded just as good. It's exactly what MGMT does, but they've been doing it longer and they have all the kinks worked out.

As a remedial Phoenix-is-awesome lesson, here's the audio to "Napoleon Says":

Metric - "Gimme Sympathy"

Seems like Canada hasn't been mined for all its sunny pop yet. This is the catchiest song I've heard in ages. I seriously can't stop hearing it. I'm hearing Cylon activation messages. IT'S IN THE FRAKKIN SHIP!!!!! It's incredible how jacked up I get about one teeny, tiny alteration in the synth riff, where it goes way up high towards the end of the chorus. Totally eating that one part up.

I feel like I say this a lot about a lot of bands... but why aren't chick-driven bands like Stars and Metric HUGE bands? Why isn't Gimme Sympathy all over the radio and prime-time chick shows?

Here's why: their kickass alt-rock sound is very late-90s. It only furthers my theory that Canada is just like America, but 12 years ago. Metric should be the Letters to Cleo of this era; Emily Haines should be its Kay Hanley.

Röyksopp - "Happy Up Here"

The song is pretty simple and fun. The video is fucking awesome. That's all I got to say on that.

CAWK KACAWK KACAWWWWW!

2009-02-20T13:57:00.003-08:00

Tweet of the week goes to famous blogger Jason Kottke, who taught his infant son to perform the ~~inimitable~~ apparently imitable after all Gob Bluth chicken dance.

Kottke provides linkage but just in case you forgot a single occurrence of the chicken dance:

Blogging By Linking Always Sunny Videos Theater, Part III

2009-02-20T13:55:00.001-08:00

My favorite It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia sequence of late has been Charlie's official job title as the group's "wildcard," after three seasons of doing it pro bono. Hilarity, as it always does, ensues.

The other 12 seconds of this ep that I didn't show here are also very funny. Solid episode all around. And it really makes you think...

I Discovered An Uninteresting Coincidence

2009-02-20T13:43:00.001-08:00

Discovered for myself, anyway. While randomly watching the video for one of my all-time desert island songs, "The Laws Have Changed" by my beloved New Pornographers, I found a not-really-famous face from Battlestar Galactica posing as the video's faux singer. I think you can see her in the preview still right now:

You can tell this was filmed somewhere around the miniseries/first season because she's not a shrewish, unfaithful, drug-addicted, post-pregnancy nutjob. Kidding! (UPDATE: I'm not kidding.)

Franz Ferdinand: Tonight: Franz Ferdinand

2009-02-18T11:01:00.001-08:00

Five years after "Take Me Out" burst into the mainstream on the strength of its rough, post-punk guitars and high-hat disco beats, becoming perhaps the biggest indie-to-mainstream rock hit of the current century, it's evident that very few indie bands nowadays really, really rock. Certain explosions in popularity stand in stark contrast to the raw, in-your-face rock of Franz Ferdinand, the last true rockers to break out of the indie ghetto.

They've been chomping at the bit to expand their palette since "Take Me Out" made it big. You Could Have It So Much Better is littered with a desire to change the band's direction, although the results when they did were thoroughly lousy. ("Eleanor Put Your Boots On" is irredeemably awful.) There was much to love, but those departures really, really didn't work.

So I was understandably saddened by the rumors, two years ago, that Franz Ferdinand would be going heavy on the synthesizers for their follow-up. Goddammit... MORE changes. One of the few bands that really understand how guitars work, and who had as of that moment done no wrong, had announced their intention to ditch what worked for them. My response at the time was that it was "not good news until proven otherwise."

Tonight is otherwise.

Turns out that Franz Ferdinand's signature sound works as well on keyboards as on guitars. Just as Dear Science proved that TV On The Radio's identity can be felt across lots of different sonic landscapes, Tonight proves as much for Franz Ferdinand.

Though their intention to abandon the guitar was a bit jarring, but their changeover from funky guitar to disco synths really isn't. In practice, it's more that they've made an entire album of tracks based on You Could Have It So Much Better standout "Outsiders." It's laced with colorful funky, disco-ish flourishes, but it's still rock.

The track ordering shrewdly integrates their departures into what we hear as the album progresses, avoiding any feeling of what could have been jarring changes. Early tracks "Ulysses" and "No You Girls" are more heavily dependent on guitar stomps. "Twilight Omens" and "Bite Hard" are the first synth-driven songs we hear, and we've been prepared by the time they arrive. By the time full-blown disco tracks "Live Alone" and "Lucid Dreams" come around, you barely notice or care. That gradual progression helps sell us on the expansion of what works for them, letting us come around slowly if need be.

This change isn't always a good thing, though. Pre-release track "Lucid Dreams" as presented here late last year is a rollicking, classically Franz track. The track as found on Tonight has been transformed and digested into a techno epic that lacks the sheer awesomeness of the leak, despite its charms. The differences evident in this one song are a microcosm of the entire changeover... you yearn wistfully for the old thing when they're mostly just doing the new thing.

But in the end, this is still an excellent, excellent pop album. After being somewhat randomly associated with The Killers for so long simply because their arrivals came at the same time, Franz Ferdinand has made the Killers album we've all been waiting for since Hot Fuss.

I give Tonight: Franz Ferdinand a rating of four assassinated archdukes out of five. Well done.

Live: Frightened Rabbit

2009-02-15T13:00:00.001-08:00

Let's have a change of pace: happy thoughts! We gotta stay positive...

Frightened Rabbit
January 18, 2009
Great Scott, Allston, MA

After three songs of solid singing and whoo-ing along to Frightened Rabbit, lead singer Scott Hutchison looked at the mic and said "tonight's gonna be a good one." He was right.

They apparently didn't see many packed houses on this tour; in fact, their heavily front-loaded set list seemed to expect an audience to become distracted if they didn't keep them hooked from the get-go. That wasn't the case last month at the sold-out Great Scott.

And it's not going to be the case again if they keep this up. Seeing these guys up close and personal, on a stage that had no private entry or protection, was a treat unlikely to be repeated. If they continue to pop up on network pap like Chuck and Grey's Anatomy, it'll take a lot more work to see them from the front row again.

Given the crowd, and their popularity even as a fledgling outfit, that train might have already sailed. Hundreds of true believers braved a crippling winter storm to show up and rock out. The crowd was a lot more die-hard than I expected; their energy and sing-along skills drove the performance to surprising heights. It's hard to have much of a stage presentation in such a tiny setting, but they managed to show serious presence anyway. By covering each of The Midnight Organ Fight's eleven proper songs, and clearly, clearly busting their asses in the process, I don't think they would have let anyone leave disappointed. They really gave it their all.

While their music is nothing particularly special in structure, the amount of heart that Hutchison (and his brother, Grant, on the drum kit) pours into the music makes it special. In my Best Of 2008 post, I drew a comparison between them and Neutral Milk Hotel based on those very qualities. So it was no surprise when Frightened Rabbit busted out a cover of "Song Against Sex," from On Avery Island, during their encore. The only less surprising covers would have been "The King Of Carrot Flowers" and "Holland, 1945." Anyway, as a big NMH fan I was glad to see someone playing their music. (I've got a post on NMH in my draft folder; sit tight.)

Anyway, I left the show completely satisfied. Thanks to the storm, it took me two hours to traverse what is normally a 30-minute trip. Exhausted as I was, it was worth it.

Set List

The Modern Leper
Fast Blood
Old Old Fashioned
I Feel Better
Good Arms Vs. Bad Arms
The Twist
Backwards Walk
Head Rolls Off
Floating In The Forth
The Greys
Square 9

Poke (acoustic)
Song Against Sex (NMH cover)
Keep Yourself Warm

Opening Acts

Not much to report. Pants Yell! was okay, not too shabby for a local band. David Karsten Daniels, on the other hand, seemed preoccupied with his elaborate foot-switch setup when he should have been connecting with the crowd. When the material doesn't line up with the crowd or the other two acts, but you still need to keep someone else's crowd amused, you really can't be taking minutes between songs to draw attention to your bells and whistles like that. He lost me after two songs.

The Hate Binky: Why Animal Collective Sucks

2009-02-14T13:51:00.006-08:00

subtitle: "And Why Their New Album Sucks As Much As Anything Else They've Done"

Sometimes I think the world would be a better place if I was Robert Christgau. Universally respected, receiving dozens of promotional CDs every week, holding the taste of American music nerds beneath my thumb, saving my audience from devolving into musical ignorami. Whenever the blogosphere echo-chambers itself into an insulated consensus on something that is plainly, clearly crap, this desire dominates my thoughts.

That has been my state of mind since the release (actually, since the online leak) of Animal Collective's new album, Merriweather Post Pavilion. I personally believe Animal Collective is the worst popular band on the planet. This includes the likes of Katy Perry, The Fray, and such. Those acts are treated as what they are. Animal Collective is very much not; they are praised to high heaven for things that they very plainly are not doing.

Of late, it has been impossible to read a music blog without encountering some sort of moronic embellishment of AC's place in American culture. (Actual importance: zero.) And after two solid months of this, I'm on my very last nerve.

I have taken a lot of time to think this through. My dislike for AC is very much a rational, cold-blooded loathe. I do not like them, Sam I Am. There are things they've done that I like, but these are very clearly an exception. They stand for everything I despise in music. I simply wish they did not exist. I wish they'd never met each other. I wish at the very least that they each had the goddamn common sense to listen to the "music" they make together and never lift a microphone again.

But more than the music itself, their place in conversation irritates me to no end. I'm flatly shocked that anyone who knows a single fucking thing about music would be ignorant enough to consider them anything more than a curiosity. They are built to appeal to a minority of weirdos, to be taken with an entire shaker of salt. You don't see people clamoring for mainstream acceptance of Aphex Twin, or Squarepusher, or other freak electronic acts.

And yet that is the tenor of any discussion when it comes to AC. They are extremely popular within an insular circle of highly abnormal people, located far from reality, that apparently has taken it upon themselves to speak for the rest of us. Any website worth my attention has batted around this ridiculous Colbertian meme: "Merriweather Post Pavilion. Great album, or greatest album?" It is a discussion for lunatics who need to leave their homes before presenting their final answers. Who died and made Animal Collective king?

To make clear, my objections are not based on taste. I roll my eyes when someone raves about a piece of shit band like Grizzly Bear or No Age, but poor taste in music is not the issue. Loathing aside, I will grant that there is an audience for this kind of music. This is very much the most ridiculous critical response to music I have ever witnessed.

The problem, to me, is one of defining the basic terms of the discussion. Love or hate, music has certain qualities that cannot be argued. Happy, dreary, energetic, angular, poppy... there are grey areas for sure, but for the most part these are qualities that are is-or-isn't propositions.

Animal Collective's supporters, to a person, are using alternate definitions of terms that no rational listener could possibly use. They are describing something completely different than what you will hear. And as the last 20-30 years of politics have proven, if you refuse to define your terms the way everyone else does, you cannot have a dialogue.

Let's break down exactly where the problems lie:

"Something accessible and complete" - Pitchfork album review

Um, no. It is exactly as inaccessible as anything they've ever done. I have a very tolerant and patient ear now, and I cannot fucking bear to sit around and wait six minutes for Animal Collective to get to the point of their song (if they ever do). I will grant them credit for a veritable cornucopia of bits and pieces of ideas. But they are satisfied just with that, with taking one idea and repeating it ad nauseum for 7-8 minutes. Complete, yes. A complete fucking waste of time.

"Danceable and insanely catchy" - Pitchfork track review of "My Girls"

Well, maybe not. If I learned anything from my time with MPP, it's that "My Girls" is actually a pretty good song. It has glaring weaknesses, but I do see why it would have some appeal. It's the closest they come to a real song, though it still lacks anything besides its main musical idea. It's harmless.

That said... the whole song is Panda Bear wailing away over a chord progression (another rarity for them) that doesn't go anywhere. And this is what passes for "insanely catchy" these days? Really? Really??? "My Girls" should be treated as what it is: a step forward, but still very Animal Collective. But because "My Girls" sounds like fucking "Hey Jude" compared to everything else AC has done, they are giving it that much credit. A guy uses echo effects on his voice, ONE technique Brian Wilson used with the Beach Boys, and suddenly they ARE the Beach Boys.

To me, it's like the Chris Rock routine where he talks about people being proud of themselves for things they're supposed to do. "I take care of MY kids," "I ain't never been to jail," and so forth, with Rock's reaction being "of COURSE you supposed to take care of your kids!" This apparently is how everyone thinks Animal Collective just reinvented music because they employed a chord change. If you expect me to give them a pat on the fucking back for that, you are barking up the wrong asshole. Their next accessible and complete musical idea will be their first.

"Gorgeous," "Animal Collective's music is for everyone's world" - PopMatters, author of which is named for what I think AC's music is most accurately described as

"Gorgeous" isn't a universal word, so my objections to that are beyond the topic. It's a word that gets most critics into a hole in my book. They will pick up some faux-choral piece of shit like Grizzly Bear or Joanna Newsom and praise it for its beauty. Earth to critic: it is a fucking lo-fi indie rock record that cost $4000 to record, so no, it's not fucking beautiful. It exposes the author as someone who has never heard a symphony, or isn't caught up on his Miles Davis. In this context, it just makes you look stupid.

As to the suggestions of universality, I laugh in your idiotic fucking face. No, Animal Collective is not music for the world of your average black kid in Roxbury, now is it? Or an 85-year-old Southern socialite? Or a Tokyo schoolgirl? If the author thought for just one fucking second before typing that sentence, he would have removed it. Hackery at its finest.

Seriously. What is with the superlatives? I thought the job of the critic was to put something in perspective, not to hide the perspective up one's ass while typing away.

"Orgasmic rush of danceable rock" - Paste, in a truly embarrassing non-review

No, no, no. This guy compared Animal Collective to Girl Talk. That is so fucking obviously inappropriate that this dipshit should be barred from music criticism for the rest of his life. He moves on to suggest that MPP is a rave record by ending his review with "hand me that glow stick." Jesus Tapdancing Fucking Christ. He hit so many wrong buttons that I'm surprised he didn't use the P word.

Look, I have done my due diligence. I have studied MPP relentlessly, thinking that America cannot possibly be as stupid as I'd assumed. I was wrong. Hoping against hope that I had somehow missed some kind of revelatory advance in their music, I found that I had not. MPP is exactly the same droning, meandering, path to nowhere that their other work provides. "My Girls" is probably their best work, but it doesn't give anyone the ability to use the words that were used. None of the above quotes have any foundation in truth whatsoever.

The music being described by those quotes is The Hold Steady. LCD Soundsystem. Cut Copy. Hot Chip, maybe. Those are poppy, accessible acts. They share absolutely nothing with Animal Collective.

Here's our experiment. Below is a high-def embed of the aforementioned "danceable" song, "My Girls." So get on up and shake that thang!

Come on, let's see you dance to it. Go right ahead. It's danceable, right? If it doesn't look like the Elaine Benes dance, I'll be shocked. I want to see a wedding reception go bananas to this song. Because it's danceable, so naturally a group of regular people will dance to it, right?

See, that's what kills me. Use a better word, and I have no objection whatsoever. But if we can't agree on basic vocabulary, then we can't have a discussion. They've used a word that does not apply, but that they WISHED would apply... so it was used it anyway.

There is a baseline, control sense of these words that you have to consider before using them to describe this weirdo, hipster shit. Ignore the general sense, and you either look like a fucking idiot, or you look like you're lying. If the average person were to hear from a litany of national food critics that the bowl of corn-riddled turds he's eating is in fact a hazelnut creme brulee with a raspberry amaretto reduction, apparently he'll eventually believe it. But not me. I'm not eating one kernel of Merriweather Post Pavilion. It's shit. It's a big bowl of shit.

Here's the deal. The method for connecting to Animal Collective's super-cerebral electronica is similar to that of the more inaccessible "free jazz" artists that emerged in the early 1960s. Ornette Coleman is considered an important artist; in my opinion, his entire career is a pile of nihilistic, anti-musical shit. Cecil Taylor, whose output is far more worthy of praise, was noted in the famous Jazz miniseries to have encouraged his fans to "study" for his appearances; I agree 100% with Wynton Marsalis's contention that music should not require homework. In each sense, Animal Collective's blueprint for appreciation is identical to Taylor's and Coleman's. Understanding them requires a non-musical approach, an emphasis on craft over the end product, with repeat listens a concrete requirement. You put in your homework and you get something out of it. No homework, no benefit.

I personally don't care for that, but that's what it is. It's not pop, accessible, danceable, or anything even remotely fucking close to that. It's homework. It's OBVIOUSLY homework.

So obvious, in fact, that I don't think the above quotes are simply wrong or misguided. They do not simply exhibit poor taste. The language used to describe MPP is so woefully inaccurate that I can't see it as anything other than reflexive opinions that could be used to describe any indie band making a leap.

But there's no leap. They WANT the band to have made the leap, so they make it for them. The cart has been placed before the horse.

In other words, the reaction is intentionally dishonest and misleading. The music has been set aside, leaving the context and growth to be considered apart from their actual achievements. A nation of buffoonish critics wants to elevate a pet band of theirs to prominence without merit, to flex its muscles just to show that it can do so regardless of whether there is justification. It's widespread, willful ignorance. And it makes all of us look stupid.

After all this venting, the question remains: what makes this such a special case? Why single them out? What harm are they doing?

It's very simple. Animal Collective is the Evangelical Christianity of indie rock. Harmless in theory, abusive and dangerous in practice.

* Their fans are more prone to proselytizing than any other band I'm aware of. They just cannot shut their fucking yaps about how awesome Animal Collective is, how they're so poppy and how everyone else needs to love them. Just like the average born-again. They can't tolerate anyone who thinks otherwise, can't understand why anyone would. The rest of us, those of us in the silent majority who do, can only roll our eyes at how hopeless, how detached from reality, one must be to feel that way.

* Just as evangelical wingnuts are allowed to control political discourse in America, Animal Collective wingnuts are allowed to dictate the future of music. The fundamental (so to speak) flaws in their belief is never addressed, because it's a matter of not looking like you don't get it. Just like political figures would never take a bat to the evangelicals like they deserve.

* It's not the band's fault, just like the evangelicals aren't God's fault. AC, much to my chagrin, are just doing their thing. I don't like it, but in a vacuum, they are free to do it. The off-the-mark reception and analysis of their music is the problem. Remember, God's a cool guy. His followers are the retards, not him.

* The holy-rolling clowns who praise Jesus and act on his behalf... the guys telling me to eschew condoms, to hate Muslims, to let the FCC parent my children... do not understand the fucking Bible one bit. But they follow Jesus anyway, to make sure everyone else knows they love Jesus more than you. Likewise, those who praise Animal Collective don't understand the music's flaws one bit, but they want so desperately to get Animal Collective that this is what their praise sounds like.

That last item is the killer. It's a group of people trying to will their nutbag idea of reality into the mainstream, without merit, just because a lot of people on the internet say so. If internet discussion has taught us anything, it's that the silent majority cannot be won over. Just because two hundred dopes on the internet say something, it doesn't mean that anyone else gives half a shit about it.

In my heart of hearts, the release of Merriweather Post Pavilion is an apocalyptic event in the world of music. It has exposed all of the very worst things about the internet revolution. It gives wingnuts a voice, much like the Bush administration did. But wingnuts they are. And nobody has stood up to call a spade a spade.

So here I am. Just like those who feel the need to walk up and down the sidewalk wearing only a pair of socks and a signboard, I'm here to warn you. The end is nigh.

UPDATE: I should reference this, just for clarity's sake. Having re-read Carles's post for the first time in a few weeks, the evangelism idea very clearly comes from his original observation. I'm not that clever.

It Was Funny When Everyone Freaked Out About Palin, And It's Funny Now

2009-01-20T11:54:00.004-08:00

God bless America.

How Did These Things Escape My Grasp Until Now?

2009-01-01T22:13:00.000-08:00

Yeah Yeah Yeahs - "Gold Lion"

I thought they were a one-hit wonder with "Maps," but that right there is friggin awesome.

Demetri Martin - These Are Jokes

"If I ever saw an amputee being hanged, I would just yell out letters." ROOOOOOFL

The Dismemberment Plan - Change and Emergency & I

The other shoe finally dropped. I get D-Plan now. They're all over the place and messy, which usually pisses me off... which is what bothered me before... but in this case the mess is a good thing! In the right hands, it works, and these are the right hands. What was I thinking?

Best Albums Of 2008

2008-12-22T16:41:00.003-08:00

Picking a best album from this crop was an unenviable task. I'm still not entirely happy with my selection, nobody else has much of an argument to make against it. Meanwhile, I ended up with too many contenders for worst album. That's what happens in a consensus down-year, I guess.

What better way to salute 2008 than to start at the ass end? In a bizarre fit of Christmas generosity, I have decided to rename the Clap Your Hands Say Yeah Award, only because it's really just the singer who drives me bonkers. So they are hereby rescued from the unbearable hell of some guy on the internet talking shit about them. For now.

So from now on my shit list has a new name:

The Grizzly Deerhoof Collective

Has a ring? No. Forced? Yes. Accurate? Also. Three irredeemably awful bands, coming together to form a Voltron-like musical Golgothan that would probably destroy humanity, just like that meteor destroyed the dinosaurs. And the less said about its parts, the better. Allow these piece of shit songs, if you dare, to speak for themselves:

God help you if you like any of that trash.

In order to stop myself from comparing the above bands to recent poops I've taken, here are this year's booby-prize winners:

No Age - Nouns

No talent, either. This is exactly the kind of non-music Pitchfork LOVES to insist is artistic progress, and not just two bozos making an "atmospheric" wall of noise and hoping some jackass works hard enough to derive some musical qualities from it. (To clarify, Pitchfork is the jackass in that situation, and No Age are the bozos.)

When I consider the untold numbers of talented folks who bust their asses to educate themselves about music history, work on their craft, and conceive something creative and unique to share... and then consider "experimental" garbage like No Age being touted by influential people... depressing.

Fuck Buttons - Street Horrrsing

This album sounds like shit tastes. What I said for No Age goes double for Fuck Buttons, which is clearly short for "Just Fucking Around With The Buttons On My Macbook." I saw these two dopes in person, and thought they were garbage. I checked out their album, thinking maybe they had a bad audio set up. They did not. It was even worse.

They set out upon the difficult tightrope-walk that is blips-and-bloops electronica, but they fall onto a group of tourists below. It's neither the composed brilliance of Burial nor the rollicking fun of likewise filthily-named Holy Fuck. Fuck Buttons is just a bunch of nothing. I hope they're enjoying acclaim while they have it, because their cunning attempt to trick us isn't going to go over twice.

The Walkmen - You & Me

Unlike the above, this just plain sucks. My irritation with The Walkmen is that they are emblematic of all the things I hate about "indie" rock: purposeful awfulness. The singer puts on this awful fake Dylan drawl, the songs are decidedly uncatchy, and the end result of each song is filtered needlessly through a tin can in order to make it impossible to hear, apparently. It's not visionary, it's not hard, it's not rough. It just sucks. There's only one good reason why you would purposely make your music impossible to hear: if it's utter shit.

The Murderer's Row of Disappointments

The Killers - Day & Age

Day & Age marks the end of The Killers as relevant artists. They are no longer ripping off quality musicians like Interpol and Bruce Springsteen... now they're ripping off Maroon 5, themselves a rip-off. We are clearly not getting another Hot Fuss, not unless there's an American Idiot-type return from the depths in their future. But I highly doubt that. The most damning thing I can say is that every time I try to listen to Day & Age from start to finish, I wonder why I shouldn't just put Hot Fuss on instead.

of Montreal - Skeletal Lamping

Skeletal Lamping is the skillet-to-the-face imagery of Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?, without any of its hooks, its focus, or its relentlessness. It has some great moments on it, notably "Id Engager," but the superlative, endearing pop ingredients from Fauna are gone. Kevin Barnes's urgency on Hissing Fauna, seen perfectly in the sublime "Heimdalsgate Like A Promethean Curse," is what drove that album to its heights, but it's unseen on Skeletal Lamping. Here, he's just wandering aimlessly up and down each track, no purpose or direction. There are flashes of brilliance here and there (the opening of "Nonpareil of Favor," or his alter ego Georgie Fruit's admonitions in "Wicked Wisdom") but "Id Engager" is the only song that really works in its entirety... and even then, not as much as any track on Hissing Fauna.

My Morning Jacket - Evil Urges

Not up to snuff by MMJ standards... none of the sinister undercurrent of their other, better work. It plays like an Allman Brothers ripoff more than anything. An example of a band escaping the indie ghetto and drawing new fans by going completely blah. I bet it's fine live, but it sure ain't that great in my apartment. Evil Urges is okay, but definitely not unnecessary. I'm guessing they will right the ship next time around.

Tokyo Police Club - Elephant Shell

After being teased by a pair of too-short EPs in two years, I expected their proper album to be longer than 27 minutes. Getting basically just another EP, one that is only sometimes brilliant at that, is not acceptable. Very disappointing, though not so much that I dislike it.

It isn't all bad. "Tesselate" and "In A Cave" and "Your English Is Good" stand up to their best. But it's sad to hear them finally record some filler tracks. Given the choice between getting Elephant Shell when we did and waiting for a proper LP, I would have waited. In fact, irony of ironies, I would have preferred to get Elephant Shell pared down to a six-song EP worthy of their talents.

Tapes n' Tapes - Walk It Off

After the superb "Hang Them All" started to make the rounds, my hopes got up. Not one other song approaches it. There are so many down-tempo, tiresome, blah songs that you wonder whether they indulged their "moody" side a bit too much. The beauty of The Loon, as with so many other lo-fi albums, was that they simply rocked out as best they could. "Hang Them All" was a step forward, but nearly everything else was a step back. (I will grant that album closer "The Dirty Dirty" ends things on a rollicking note that should have been more prevalent in the tracks preceding it.) Still, one of the bigger disappointments personally.

The Roots - Rising Down

They've drifted away from what they're good at in order to recover their street cred. Game Theory and Rising Down both attempt to make the band darker than they actually are. The great tracks on here ("Criminal" and "75 Bars" come to mind) are the tracks with no axes to grind, musically speaking. I just wish they'd go back to making the music they want to, instead of trying to be the cool kids on the corner.

Commuted Sentences

Sigur Rós - Með Suð Í Eyrum Við Spilum Endalaust

It broke my heart to list this under disappointments, and it really did belong there, but I just couldn't. Still, this usually bombastic group deserves a slap on the wrists for turning in their smallest and least essential album since their debut, Von. Með Suð Í Eyrum Við Spilum Endalaust has its bright points up front, but the album drifts along into total boredom by the end. How can the band responsible for this turn in such a tepid record?

They've purposely sapped themselves of their power, their biggest asset by far, to make something more intimate, but I don't want that. The only song that kinda-sorta approaches the style of their previous successes, "Festival," in fact proves my point better than anything else: its structure mirrors "Untitled 8"/"Popplagið" and other Sigur Rós gems, but with no bite to the rock-out part at the end, it just doesn't work.

Their acoustic abilities were proven on Hvarf/Heim and the film Heima; dedicating yet another piece to the softer side was not necessary. The most powerful band on the planet should go back to being powerful.

Bloc Party - Intimacy

For a long time, I had them first in line for a beating. Intimacy should have been called Laziness, or Hurry, or something else that mirrors the amount of effort they put into it. But it's still Bloc Party, so ultimately it's still good.

However, subscribing to the slapdash recording methods that The White Stripes used so successfully for Get Behind Me Satan does not suit them nearly as well. They're probably as good as anyone has ever been when it comes to B-sides... so it's pretty disappointing to hear an album of C-sides. Even the best of Intimacy, "Halo" and "One Month Off" and "Talons," reminded me more of "Cavaliers and Roundheads," "The Once And Future King" or "Hero" than any track from Silent Alarm or A Weekend In The City.

All in all, the sloppiness plays as an apologetic reaction to the increase in composure evident on A Weekend In The City. Personally, I didn't need them to prove they could still be wild. It's great that they're so prolific, and want to get stuff out to fans ASAP. But a less hurried band would have kept "Flux" in the can until Intimacy's release, would not have put the digital version out without "Talons," would maybe have cropped a track or two out of the filler, and would have seen Intimacy welcomed a lot more warmly from the get-go. They're better than this.

Good Enough To Name-Drop, Not Good Enough To Discuss

Destroyer - Trouble In Dreams

The Magnetic Fields - Distortion

Okkervil River - The Stand Ins

Portishead - Third

Hercules And Love Affair - Hercules And Love Affair

M83 - Saturdays = Youth

Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago

The Best Of What I Encountered From Other People's Best-Of Lists

Raphael Saadiq - The Way I See It

This year's retro-soul entry, following in the tradition of Nicole Willis And The Investigators and Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings. But this is the best of the bunch. Mr. Saadiq is a seriously talented dude, feeling less like a throwback and more like a man in the wrong century.

Los Campesinos! - Hold On Now, Youngster... / We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed

Very fun. Potentially annoying, but pretty fun on a first impression. Unfortunately their having released two separate albums this year means that I haven't really gotten through it all yet. But I can say that We Are Beautiful is a large step forward, in quality if not anything stylistic. As amazing as the swiftness of their follow-up's release, the extent of growth is just as amazing.

Good Stuff

Gnarls Barkley - The Odd Couple

It's missing the instant hits, but it's also far more consistent. Even more Motown than St. Elsewhere.

Ben Folds - Way To Normal

"Bitch Went Nuts"

A return to impish form after dabbling in soft-rock territory with Songs For Silverman. Although Silverman was far better than generally thought, it's nice to hear the clearest lyricist in pop music up to his old tricks, writing songs like "Bitch Went Nuts" and a song about falling off a stage. It's not essential from front to back, but it's certainly no disappointment.

Girl Talk - Feed The Animals

You want an indication of how weak a year it's been? Until very, very late in the year, a mashup album, albeit an awesome one, was in my top 10. I purposely left Night Ripper out of contention in 2006, and I very nearly had to break that rule this time around. Sheesh.

But as for the album, same deal as Night Ripper, second verse same as the first. Instant dance party. But more importantly, it made me remember how awesome "Gimme Some Lovin" is.

Lil Wayne - Tha Carter III

[nsfw lyrics]

Best mainstream rap album in ages, certainly since Speakerboxxx/The Love Below. But what's so remarkable is that he didn't go pop, as OutKast kinda did... he dragged pop to him. His talent is so superlative that people are drawn to him without him having to take one step away from what he's doing. For Wayne to be as unique and weird as he is without his beats following suit... for him be as critically acclaimed as he is without sacrificing any street cred... that is just a monstrous achievement, one that mostly explains the diversity and size of his fan base.

R.E.M. - Accelerate

And now here's the best mainstream rock album in ages. They've regained the fastball they had during the Monster years. Basically, Jacknife Lee should stick to dead bands and leave the ones I like alone.

Blitzen Trapper - Furr

Now this gets a huge thumbs up. Embarrassingly, it took a surreal fan-made video setting "Saturday Nite" to Alf footage to get my attention. But it worked. And I'm glad it did, because the entire album is awesome. Reminiscent of The Band or Lynyrd Skynyrd, and more immediately the FAIL-ridden-but-once-great My Morning Jacket. Worthy of each comparison. And far better in the retro category than Dr. Dog, which bores me for some reason.

A quick but illustrative sidebar: a month ago, during a shopping spree at Newbury Comics, I encountered the most drug-damaged acid victim I've ever seen. Holding a gigantic Foo Fighters vinyl box set, he was quizzing the man behind the counter about its contents. Imagine the following exchange happening at the most excruciatingly slow pace imaginable:

Acid Victim: What kind of music is this?
Store Cashier: It's rock.
AV: Yeah, but what kind?
SC: I don't know, just regular rock.
AV: So it's like the Dead?
SC: No.
AV: What instruments do they play?
SC: Um... I dunno, drums, a bass, a couple of guitars.
AV: What, no keyboards?
SC: No, not really.
[AV looks at the box set]
AV: Do they jam?
SC: No.

At that point he looked quizzically at the box set again, confused at how this band could play rock music but be nothing like the Grateful Dead or Phish. I have no idea what possessed this man to pick up the set, other than the word "Foo" sounding like something a pothead Communist from Burlington would name his band. I also cannot imagine why the epitome of late-90s rock would be so impossible to quantify. I have thought about that story several times since it happened, and I don't know what the cashier should have done differently.

My point? That guy should have picked himself up some Blitzen Trapper.

Kanye West - 808s And Heartbreak

I thought this would be #10, but it's not, thanks to a late-breaking curveball.

The general tone of criticism has been that Kanye departed a field in which he was the undisputed master, pop hip-hop, and entered a field in which he is mediocre, neo-soul. However, as I've documented frequently in the past, he's not much of a rapper, but he is an unparalleled musical conceptualist. 808s is no exception, proving both that West is good enough to do anything he wants and weird enough to drag the mainstream towards him. From the bare electro of "Say You Will," through clear highlights "Love Lockdown" and "Robocop," and on to concluding track "Coldest Winter," 808s is a complete success.

The List

10. Frightened Rabbit - The Midnight Organ Show

This album inspired the "best albums from other people's lists" category, then graduated from it.

My first reaction, when digging into the deeper tracks in here, was that they were a Scottish version of Crowded House or Tears For Fears, or even U2 in their sense of drama and the wholesale thievery on "Head Rolls Off" of every rhythm guitar trick The Edge invented.

But after listening to Scott Hutchison's Mangum-style vocal work, particularly on "The Twist," it struck me that the heart of their appeal is the same as that of Neutral Milk Hotel... there's a deep resonance that absolutely hammers you if you let it. Sounding genuinely like a cross between U2 and NMH is one hell of a compliment, but it sure feels true to me.

I have a feeling I'll be listening to this a hell of a lot next year.

9. Hot Chip - Made In The Dark

A big jump forward after 2006's The Warning. They're missing a "Boy From School" to tie it all together, but track for track this one is a lot better. They're really pushing the formula with a lot of these goofy songs ("Bendable Poseable") where the song is weird, but there's a purpose.

8. Death Cab For Cutie - Narrow Stairs

A more than respectable effort from a band that is clearly in search of greener pastures. Not a perfect album from beginning to end, but given the sappier, smoother direction that Plans pointed towards, for better or worse, Narrow Stairs is a welcome reintroduction of some edge and jangle. "Cath..." and "Long Division" are hard to argue with; "No Sunlight" isn't so hard to argue with, as was seen earlier, but it is nonetheless the latest in a series of Death Cab songs that juxtapose cheery and bouncy music with depressing, defeatist lyrics ("The Sound of Settling," "I Was A Kaleidoscope") with great results.

7. Wolf Parade - At Mount Zoomer

Most underrated album of the year. A letdown only because it couldn't possibly follow up one of the greatest albums of recent memory, Apologies To The Queen Mary. But by a) allowing Dan Boeckner to take the reins from Spencer Krug for most of the album, and b) forging a more unified album from start to finish, Wolf Parade make the best of it. Boeckner's emergence is particularly encouraging; while the Krug brilliance everyone hoped for wasn't quite there, Zoomer high point "California Dreamer" excepted, Boeckner rose to Krug's level and established that Wolf Parade has more than one superlative creative force behind it.

6. Snow Patrol - A Hundred Million Suns

I am truly, legitimately shocked to have placed this so high, and above such good work from bands who never stumbled the way Snow Patrol has. After the abuse many of us endured at the hands of "Chasing Cars" and its overexposure, I marked them as either washed up or high on their own stardom. But they've earned it.

So how the hell did this happen? It may not be much of a departure from Eyes Open (which, by the way, looks a lot less crimes-against-humanity bad now that it doesn't signified the demise of the band) but it is mostly bereft of the goofy "put Sufjan Stevens on" lyrical indulgences that made that album so impossible to like. Gary Lightbody's return from the foreground to the level of his bandmates, happy to contribute rather than distract, serves Snow Patrol well.

This return to excellence only bangs home another bizarre truism about Lightbody: he is maddeningly consistent in his inconsistency, alternating brilliance and turditude. Songs For Polar Bears is great. When It's All Over We Still Have To Clear Up is terrible. Final Straw is coming with me to my desert island, as convincing an album as there is. Eyes Open, though better than I originally thought, is openly lazy to the point where you wonder if Lightbody even cares. A Hundred Million Suns proves that he does. How does this keep happening? He's supposed to have a phenomenal creative period in the middle, flanked by mediocrity. It's a Snickers bar with alternating layers of nougat and caramel, and no chocolate shell. Is this alternating yes-yes-yes/oh-God-no situation more encouraging or more frustrating? Even his Reindeer Section output alternates between genius and boredom (Son of Evil Reindeer, which features one great song).

I guess this means the next one will blow, cause this one is really, really good.

5. Cut Copy - In Ghost Colours

One of the most fun albums of the year. Bright Like Neon Love was good; this is excellent. It's hard to describe Cut Copy without invoking the obvious New Order comparisons, but they certainly stand up to the comparison.

4. Elbow - The Seldom Seen Kid

This album won Great Britain's prestigious Mercury Prize, and justifiably so. The filler isn't particularly compelling, but the best work on here is deeply moving. As I said in my review, "One Day Like This" is an amazing song that deserves more (or some) stateside attention.

3. TV On The Radio - Dear Science

I was supposed to pick Dear Science. It should have been easy. It's indeed brilliant stuff, their best and most fun work to date. And it certainly makes the best rational argument for the #1 spot, deep and subversive and masterful even through its low points.

But I want to have some irrational love for it as a whole... I need to have some obsession with this album, the inability to take it out of my CD player, the ability to sing along with every song. And that's not really true.

It just feels unreal to me. Return To Cookie Mountain, for all its totally original post-apocalyptic noise, nevertheless still felt very human and organic... my reaction is to wonder how humans could come up with those sounds. Dear Science's detached smoothness leaves no such wonder about the music's synthesis; it's all constructed and processed and digested, stripping away its urgency in the process. Normally I'd be fine with that; here, though, I think they lose sight of what's important.

There's no one defining song on Dear Science, no "Wolf Like Me," to tie the album together. Much as I love "Crying," it's so clean and meant for dancing that it reminds you of bands who do the dance-rock thing a whole lot better. Much as I adore the Africa-infused "Red Dress," it feels more like an Antibalas song (they provide the horns) that TVOTR guests on than the other way around. "Golden Age" is weak. "Dancing Choose" is fun but airy. Where is the song that we all would think of when thinking of Dear Science? I don't hear it.

Dear Science is far and away their most cohesive and least difficult work. It is evidence of a band that has Gotten It. The slick feel across each track takes away from the band's rough strengths, making it sound at times like what New Age really should have sounded like. I certainly don't think it's undeserving. But the bottom line is that Dear Science just didn't win my vote.

2. The Hold Steady - Stay Positive

I'm not surprised that Stay Positive wasn't the upper-echelon breakthrough it should have been, given that it's a redux of Boys And Girls In America that narrowly misses its mark. But Boys and Girls shouldn't prevent us from holding the deeply skilled work here in high regard. If Stay Positive had come along without Boys and Girls preceding it, it would blow people's minds.

They're not plowing any new musical soil, but they do what they do better than anyone else. The band rocks harder than anyone else. Craig Finn's always-tragic words hit harder than anyone else. You really don't need much more than that.

So many upper-underground bands of their caliber failed. It's a shame that The Hold Steady haven't been applauded more often for succeeding so thoroughly.

1. Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend

I seem to have dealt with internet buzz bands really well this year. I'm indifferent towards Fleet Foxes, and I love Vampire Weekend to death. This would never have happened five years ago.

Vampire Weekend was probably the most uncool choice possible as my favorite album, but there it is. They didn't rock as hard as The Hold Steady, show the genius of TV On The Radio, hit with the same emotional punches and drama as Elbow. But at the end of the day (year?) none of that matters. Because I just flat-out like their album better.

It's not like I don't get the backlash. Their unabashed bourgeois preppiness and their delicate Ivy League aesthetic open them up for all sorts of criticism. And I hate privileged people as much as anyone I've ever encountered. I should despise them.

But I don't, because they made a fucking fantastic album. High quality, tons of creativity and originality, pop sensibility to spare. They wore those sweaters and loafers, and made a classic album in spite of it. So I can't say shit, other than nice job.

And with that, I'm done. It may only be just over 4000 words, but to me it felt like a milli.

Alvin, You Were A Little Flat... Watch It

2008-12-22T08:58:00.000-08:00

Having been walloped over the weekend by a white Christmas, having put the lights on the tree and the presents beneath it, and having guaranteed myself another Christmas Eve filled with frantic store-to-store driving, I have been overtaken by Christmas spirit. And I saved a mouthful of spirit for you! Enjoy.

Songs List Sidebar

2008-12-19T16:58:00.000-08:00

Thanks to some seriously nasty snow, I'm stuck in the apartment listening to music and watching the Celtics tonight. And I'm glad I did, because the most awesomest thing ever just happened.

Speaking of my just-posted best-songs list, Kanye's "Love Lockdown" just came on in iTunes. After a few measures of the bass beat at the beginning of the song, right as Kanye was about to start singing, a snow plow went into reverse just outside my building. And its BOOOP... BOOOP... BOOOP... started up just after Kanye did, fitting perfectly into the fourth note of the measure.

It really was perfect. The tempo lined up perfectly, the tone was in key, the length of the tone even complemented the deep bass half-note it was playing on top of. It added without subtracting, like a thin layer of mayo on a BLT. I was disappointed when the truck stopped backing up. I may never think of "Love Lockdown" the same way.

This is what happens when snow takes a dump your weekend...

Best Songs Of 2008

2008-12-19T16:33:00.001-08:00

I thought I'd start easy, since the best albums list is careening out of control like Howard Hughes, and ballooning in size like Mike Tyson.

So, dun-det-da-dunnnnn, here's the best songs from this year... ever.

I've posted an Imeem playlist at the bottom that, as of this writing, holds each of the songs on the list. For now they are mostly 30-second previews; register on Imeem and you should be able to hear the entirety of each song.

Honorables

Frightened Rabbit - "Head Rolls Off"
Blitzen Trapper - "Furr"
Raphael Saadiq - "100 Yard Dash"
Tokyo Police Club - "In A Cave"
M83 - "Kim & Jessie"
Tapes 'n Tapes - "Hang Them All"
Cut Copy - "Hearts On Fire"
Kanye West - "Love Lockdown"
Girl Talk - "Play Your Part (Pt. 1)"
Okkervil River - "Lost Coastlines"
The Roots - "Criminal"
Snow Patrol - "If There's A Rocket Tie Me To It"
Hot Chip - "Ready For The Floor"

The List

10. The Magnetic Fields - "California Girls"

Caustic and beautiful, like pretty much anything else Stephin Merritt has ever recorded.

9. Gnarls Barkley - "Surprise"

A haunting Mamas & Papas tribute that stands as one of Cee-Lo's most introspective pieces.

8. Wolf Parade - "Language City"

The most fun song on At Mount Zoomer.

7. TV On The Radio - "DLZ"

One of the few from Dear Science that recalls the band's previous, moodier work. Not that the awesome party-fusion stuff they're doing now is a problem, but it's not nearly as totally awesome.

6. The Dirtbombs - "Ever Lovin' Man"

Holy shit, does this rock. A prime example of how ridiculous it is that certain bands aren't bigger.

5. Death Cab For Cutie - "Cath..."

Not frequently does a band in its second decade of existence release a song that so perfectly summarizes that band's body of work. "Cath..." does it.

4. The Hold Steady - "Stay Positive"

Great song from a great band. Manages to be awesome despite a corny, awww-inducing shout-out to their fans and supporters. But easily the catchiest track on Stay Positive.

3. Vampire Weekend - "Oxford Comma"

I'm not at all surprised by the wide array of songs from VW's debut that folks have chosen to single out for lists like this. "Oxford Comma" is the song that really sold me on the band; simple and pretty, rising above the preciousness that elsewhere makes them so easy to dismiss to create a truly great song.

2. Hercules And Love Affair - "Blind"

I wasn't a huge fan of this album in its entirety, but probably only because "Blind" is so completely and totally incredible. Turns any boring-ass room into a dance floor. Between this and Cut Copy, and the recent successes of LCD and The Rapture, it would seem that everything that the DFA touches turns to gold. (Or silver.)

1. Elbow - "One Day Like This"

The clear winner. In my initial mini-review of The Seldom Seen Kid, I said, "this song makes me want to get my fucking life together." So expressive, so profoundly joyful, so effective at banging its uplifting message home and moving the listener. Bravo.

There you have it. Best albums coming soon. Until then, abbondanza:

Apatow FTW: I Love You, Man

2008-12-17T12:41:00.000-08:00

It's been months since any Apatow-related content has come out! I guess that explains why the economy went in the shitter. But it will all bounce back once I Love You, Man comes out:

This looks both totally stupid and totally pointless and totally awesome. It seems like Jason Segel, unleashed and insane, is finally about to match the apex of his acting career, which was accomplished with naught but his silvery voice:

ALF As Northwest Psych/Folk Pop

2008-12-05T12:26:00.003-08:00

I wasn't sure who would appreciate this... but here's a video of a Blitzen Trapper song set to ALF footage.

(h/t)

Green Man: A Life In Pictures

2008-11-26T15:32:00.003-08:00

Writing posts is hard, so instead take these fine clips of this fine persona from a fine show.

In Praise Of The Idiot Box

2008-11-18T12:45:00.000-08:00

It's garbage day! Two mammoth posts. I've been catching up on some TV lately:

It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia

This surprised me, as I was predisposed to hate this show. I once saw a commercial for the episode "Charlie Gets Cancer" and found the ad supremely unfunny. (Perhaps it was during the baseball playoffs on FX, when I was presumably pissed off about the Yankees or some such nonsense.) I rarely jump into shows about assholes, and this is definitely a show about assholes. The show should be called It's Always Assholes In Philadelphia. (Or maybe just Philadelphia would suffice?)

But my God, is this a really, really good show or what? Not great, but 2x really good. As social satire, it's right up there with Curb and Seinfeld, but with a serious gonzo/stupid streak. Seinfeld meets The Three Stooges. A really simple premise that has been dipped in some seriously off-the-wall shit. It's as if they made a list of the very worst things in the world, and cross off two or three with each episode.

Oh, yes. I'm not entirely sure why these clowns are so endearing, not just to us but to each other, but they are. (Probably a result of their inner Stooge-ness.) I got the good lord goin down on meeeeeee...

Battlestar Galactica

As someone who is generally skeptical of television sci-fi, this is really fantastic. I haven't gotten far enough into it to encounter what I understand is some seriously stupid shit, what I've seen through half of Season One is really excellent.

They pull few punches, and constantly wreak havoc upon their characters, burying them in disaster and giving them a mere toothpick with which to dig themselves out. Dread lies around every corner, ready ruin the entire human race if someone makes just one simple error. The first proper episode of the series establishes this so memorably that they can skate on things further down the road without losing credit. They make you imagine what it would be like to live in fear of the human race dying in the next few minutes.

This show about androids and space flight feels so real because it works on a personal, human level to a greater extent than any other sci-fi show I've seen. The drama doesn't come from imagining some weird alien universe, it comes from allegory and transplanted human feelings. On the show, it's Cylons attacking every 33 minutes; in real life, it's "terrorists" and 9/11.

Either way, highly recommended.

Mad Men

I can't say this is as great a show as it's been built up to be. But it's awfully great. It oozes cool and style and charisma in every frame, serving, as The Sopranos did, as a proxy through which the viewer behaves irresponsibly. You cannot agree with the show's subjects, who have probably done more damage to America than the Mafia, on any count, but Jon Hamm and his off-the-charts likability makes you like and even root for this amoral person nonetheless. He's just barely decent enough to grab you and keep hold as he navigates the slimy waters of his universe.

Heroes

Yes, it's flawed. It's camp, it's derivative, it has awful dialogue, its characters are stupid and frequently act in service of the plot instead of themselves, and it hand-holds you through every step of its labyrinthine plot, unwilling to let even the most fundamental truth go unspoken. But I like it all the same. Because it's fun.

But I'm beginning to lose my patience.

Ever since the first season, they've been flailing around, trying to make this show work. The second season was in many senses a do-over of the first. More new storylines, more unrevealed mysteries, just more, not unlike how The Wire handled its sophomore season... except Heroes was awful.

This season, they've tried to delve more deeply into the same characters, but in reality have done more to invalidate past truths than build upon them. It's been a litany of "remember that? Well that wasn't REALLY how it went" revelations. Why they would want to tell us that what we LIKED was fake, and what we do NOT like is the real deal, I don't know. It's a delicate dance that even when done supremely well can be loathed or rejected (ahem, Matrix Reloaded). This show's writing staff has failed to pull it off.

And while it's nice that they've heard our calls for fewer new characters, they have answered those calls in the most perfunctory manner possible: by simply teaming up odd pairs of heroes and having them do something benign. The effect is the same as, say, the effect satirized so well in the brilliant film Last Action Hero: the movies will always pair up cops in the craziest ways, like the lady cop with the cartoon cat, or (as with the stars) Arnold Schwarzenegger with an eleven-year-old kid. (Gosh, I wish I had video of this.) On the good side, you have something like Lethal Weapon. On the bad side, you have some of the more ridiculous Tom & Jerry cartoons out there, those in which Tom and Jerry have to team up to defeat some third entity, like the dog... it's thrilling because Tom and Jerry are enemies who have teamed up, but after a while, so what? And doesn't it totally undermine the premise (cats and mice) to team them up? Heroes, if you couldn't guess, leans heavily towards Tom & Jerry. Oddness for its own sake sucks after long enough.

So why do I keep watching? I honestly have no idea why this show has the distinction of being the only one I try to watch live. And yet it is. But if this crap keeps up, it won't be for long.

But let's end this on a high note:

30 Rock

Is awesome. I was stunned to discover that 30 Rock isn't a gigantic hit. This show is hilarious, madcap, and entirely accessible. There's no weird Arrested Development-esque barrier to watching... devoid of inside jokes and winks, you can jump in pretty much anywhere without missing a beat. And it killed Studio 60, and justifiably so. Why is this show stuck in the low-rated-Emmy-winners ghetto? It's no longer the mix of trail-blazing and quality that kills ratings... now it's strictly quality! Totally, totally bizarre.

Live: TV On The Radio & The Dirtbombs

2008-11-18T11:48:00.002-08:00

Why do things right away when you could just wait a month or two?

TV On The Radio / The Dirtbombs
Wilbur Theater, October 13, 2008

Telling you that TVOTR is incredible in person is old news, so let's start with some exciting new business:

THE DIRTBOMBS

Absolutely outstanding. I listened to Ultraglide in Black, their 2001 soul cover album, damn near on repeat for the week leading up to this show... their new album, We Have You Surrounded, is good, but Ultraglide is the best thing I've heard all year. With the really great stuff, you know as soon as you hear a little bit of it, and Ultraglide is no exception.

Both Sly Stone cover "Underdog" or Phil Lynott cover, "Ode To A Black Man" deserve to be heard in all their proper glory. And you deserve to listen to them. Just barely below those two is "Chains of Love," embedded for your convenience, which also owns.

Unfortunately I had to wait for someone before the show, so I didn't make it inside in time to catch them playing either song. (At the pace those guys move along at, I probably missed about 5-6 songs in those 15 minutes.) But I did catch "Ever Lovin' Man" (embedded below) and "Chains of Love," so it worked out. My ears took a lot of punishment from being so close to the front, but entirely worth the trouble.

They have earned my business for each of their Boston shows for the immediate future. And if they come to you, you really need to check them out yourself.

TV ON THE RADIO

(credit)

Having seen them before (this is now my third time) and having gotten three completely different shows from them, each time elevating the source material, I'm pretty convinced. Easily one of the two or three best live acts I've ever seen. And any visit they make is going to get high marks from me.

I'm always impressed by how they go about repurposing their older songs, perfecting them over time for live performance. Case in point is "The Wrong Way," which has been making a slow journey from the medium-pace distort-o-matic recorded version to a show highlight that I dare say has overtaken "Wolf Like Me" in the rock-out department. (This will be the second year in a row that a TVOTR song will be my live-and-in-person highlight of the year.)

The version captured above was taken in Philly the night before the Boston show, and is notably missing the full horn section that makes the rendition I heard the full-blown Vegas-style explosion that it is. Tunde Adebimpe fed off the horns, hopping around even more than usual and knocking it out of the zip code, let alone the park. The closest comparison I could come up with, to what I saw and felt and was reminded of, was the James Brown church sequence in The Blues Brothers. It built and built and built. I kinda loved it.

Link:

The thing is, I was hoping for similarly joyous treatments of the new material. And I didn't get them. The new stuff played fine. The Benedictine Horns sounded a little off on "Golden Age" and "Crying" (though "Dancing Choose" went far better for them), and the result was less than perfect, given how awesome "Golden Age" in particular is.

The bottom line is that of the opening five-song murderer's row, the unquestionable highlights of that stretch were still oldies "The Wrong Way" and "Wolf Like Me." The new songs couldn't hold a candle to the old ones. I'm sure they will work that out; their second tour supporting Cookie Mountain was far better than the first.

Also on the less-than-glowing side, their set list surprised me a little. While I appreciate their range of abilities as a band, and I'm impressed that they thought to play two selections from Young Liars, I was put off by the long, filler-filled lull during the third quarter of the show. I didn't show up to hear "Stork and Owl," "Blues From Down Here," and similarly middling songs. Oddly, "Stork And Owl" is probably the ONLY song on Dear Science worth skipping, and they managed to include it at the expense of "Red Dress," understandably, and "DLZ" and "Lover's Day," less understandably. Leaving a full four new songs out in order to bring along "A Method?" Seriously? At least play "Tonight" or "Province," two other heinous omissions, if you're gonna preserve Cookie Mountain's lesser works. "Tonight" had never made much of an impression on me, until they opened their 4/19/07 show with it. It's surprisingly moving in person. "A Method" just sucks. What the hell.

But that doesn't change my opinion of their quality one bit. Despite the time I've spent nitpicking here, they are minor complaints on the whole. The great largely outweighs the not. The lulls and less-interesting song selections were flanked by some seriously excellent work. They are a truly tremendous live band.

As I've parroted before, the essence of this band has not been captured in the studio. One day, they will release a live album that presents their live sound definitively to the masses, as Okonokos did for My Morning Jacket, and people will flip the fuck out. (And "The Wrong Way" will be that album's best track by far.) I would like more people to have the experience I've had with these guys.

Other thoughts from the show:

* I liked the Wilbur Theater's concert setup. It's a skinny, tall theater, so floor access is that much better if you get it. And it's historic, so it's got some character, though not really that of a rock show. But best of all, unlike some theater-based rock shows, where you have to deal with immovable seating and strict ticketing restrictions, the Wilbur gets that shit out of the way! And with (I presume) fire codes involved, it's less of a sea of humanity down there at the bottom. The only minus is the lack of bar. But that can also be a plus, depending on the crowd. (Kyp actually thanked us for having so much fun despite the lack of bar.) On the whole, I give the Wilbur an A-.

* I was close enough to the stage to read Tunde's set list (in reverse) prior to the start of the show. While the blogger in me furiously noted the list in his phone, the fan in me knew what was coming ahead of time, and had a bit of the joy of surprise taken away. This is a good example of the reviewer/blogger mindset taking the soul out of the experience.

* Check this nugget from the AV Club interview with Tunde:

AVC: Cookie Mountain felt like an artistic hurricane. By contrast, Dear Science feels, not reserved, but...

TA: More regular?

AVC: Exactly.

TA: [Laughs.] The recording of Cookie Mountain is something that none of us really wanted to experience over again, let alone accidentally repeat. Doing so probably would have resulted in the band breaking up, or one of us causing another grievous bodily harm.

AVC: Why is that?

TA: It was just a really dark place. I'm glad that record exists, but it was kind of like the Ren & Stimpy episode where they get space madness, and they're orbiting the planet, ready to kill each other for a bar of soap. Coming home after touring, we had to be like, "Guys, remember how we actually liked each other? Let's do that again, and make something that comes out of that." Which is what Dear Science is.

Ren and Stimpy!!! The guy who sang "all your dreams are over now / all your wings have fallen down," draws analogies to Ren and Stimpy. This is like learning that Cormac McCarthy drawing inspiration from The Three Stooges.

Anyway, great show as always. I don't know that I really described the character of the show,

SET LIST
Halfway Home
The Wrong Way
Dancing Choose
Golden Age
Wolf Like Me
Young Liars
Love Dog
Stork and Owl
Dreams
Blues From Down Here
Shout Me Out
Satellite

[encore break]

Crying
A Method
Staring At The Sun

Whoever Did This Is King Of The Internet

2008-09-23T11:58:00.001-07:00

TV On The Radio - Dear Science,

2008-09-23T11:20:00.000-07:00

TV On The Radio
Dear Science,

The comma-laden Dear Science, is a surprisingly positive and immediate effort from a band known primarily for a distinctively brooding sound that is typically described as post-apocalyptic. While each song on Return To Cookie Mountain, their 2006 breakthrough, is shrouded in a unique fuzz that inspires visions of broken machinery and rust, the entirety of their follow-up is shiny, clean, and, most shockingly, a lot of fun. If their debut Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes was the apocalypse, and Cookie Mountain was the first sprout from beneath the rubble, then Dear Science, is the party.

That new brightness is a double-edged sword. The primary source of fun with Cookie Mountain, and to a lesser extent Desperate Youth, is in the discovery of musicality in the untraditional elements used to build not just atmosphere ("Playhouses," "Tonight," "Don't Love You") but front-and-center hooks ("I Was A Lover"). That aforementioned distortion-heavy signature sound of theirs is gone, replaced by drum machines, funky guitar lines, clean reverberations, and (gasp) hand-clapping. It's not really a better-vs-worse thing... one part of me had been looking forward to hearing what kind of crazy shit they'd come up with next, and the other part is just digging the new hotness.

If there is a clear disadvantage, it's in the smaller emotional punch Dear Science, packs. Their biggest songs, "Wolf Like Me" off Cookie Mountain and "Staring At The Sun" off Desperate Youth, are so strong because they're so immediate, urgent, and terrifying on the surface. The best work on Dear Science, doesn't carry the same rage or spite... by contrast, it's sleek and composed. More intimate, maybe, but not as effective in stirring up a deep response.

But at the same time, that best work is really excellent. Their mastery of rhythm is on full display, particularly on the faux-rap intro to "Dancing Choose" and the faux-African horns of "Red Dress" (contributed by, er, non-faux Afrobeat band Antibalas). "Crying" is slowly becoming a favorite, its choruses becoming increasingly thick with horns and synths on top of the main guitar riff. "DLZ" has a heavy, almost Zeppelin-ish stomp. "Lover's Day" is a strong, call-to-arms closer that leaves you with the kind of explosion that every album should end with.

Even their filler is better than ever, far superior to that of Cookie Mountain and Desperate Youth. "Love Dog" and "Family Tree" aren't as deep or unique as "Dirtywhirl" or "Let The Devil In," for example, but they work a whole lot better, both as complements to the stronger tracks and on their own.

When I last wrote about Cookie Mountain, I suggested that TVOTR was capable of more. While Dear Science, is not quite what I had in mind, and while it won't Represent Something Important the way that Return To Cookie Mountain did, it's easily one of the top releases of the year. It stands as evidence that TVOTR are realizing how good they are, gaining confidence in their abilities, and relying less on sonic trickery to make compelling music.

Yearly Album List

2008-09-11T11:38:00.001-07:00

And now... the last of today's cleaning of the Drafts folder...

A while back, a blog-dork exercise made the rounds, in which the author makes a list of great albums from each year of your life. You're free to decide your own criteria and overarching theme and whatnot... just do it however.

I tried, and failed, to use a consistent metric for each selection. It's just not possible for a civilian. I haven't listened to enough music from that pre-2000 period to use quality as the only criterion. And my listening behavior as a child doesn't lend itself to a list of albums that loomed large in my consciousness... Brothers In Arms and Graceland are the first instances of that. Where I could tip my cap to what I was listening to, as with 1988, I did. But until 1989, when I finally acquired the buying power to collect CDs, this wasn't happening. So these albums are, for the most part, picked retrospectively. I wasn't listening to Sheik Yerbouti in 1979, Appetite For Destruction in 1987, or Neutral Milk Hotel in 1998.

But that's fine. This is a fair index of my musical tastes over the years where possible, and a decent reflection of my tastes going backwards. Discussion to follow...

1979 - Fleetwood Mac - Tusk / Frank Zappa - Sheik Yerbouti (tie)
1980 - Talking Heads - Remain In Light
1981 - The Police - Ghost In The Machine
1982 - Dire Straits - Love Over Gold
1983 - Billy Joel - An Innocent Man
1984 - Weird Al Yankovic - In 3-D
1985 - Dire Straits - Brothers In Arms
1986 - Paul Simon - Graceland
1987 - Guns N' Roses - Appetite For Destruction
1988 - DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince - He's the DJ, I'm The Rapper
1989 - Faith No More - The Real Thing
1990 - They Might Be Giants - Flood
1991 - Red Hot Chili Peppers - Blood Sugar Sex Magik
1992 - Rage Against The Machine - Rage Against The Machine
1993 - Pearl Jam - Vs.
1994 - Green Day - Dookie
1995 - Rancid - And Out Come The Wolves
1996 - Weezer - Pinkerton
1997 - The Mighty Mighty Bosstones - Let's Face It
1998 - Neutral Milk Hotel - In The Aeroplane Over The Sea
1999 - Blink-182 - Enema Of The State
2000 - The New Pornographers - Mass Romantic
2001 - Ben Folds - Rockin' The Suburbs
2002 - Spoon - Kill The Moonlight
2003 - OutKast - Speakerboxxx/The Love Below
2004 - The Killers - Hot Fuss
2005 - Sufjan Stevens - Come On, Feel The Illinoise!
2006 - The Decemberists - The Crane Wife
2007 - LCD Soundsystem - Sound of Silver
2008 - The Hold Steady - Stay Positive [pending]

What's fascinating to me isn't so much the classic albums I couldn't include (1979's London Calling, for example) but the number of albums by those names that caused drastic alterations in my musical tastes and habits. Lots of big names are missing. Where's Nirvana? Where's Radiohead? Where's Snow Patrol? Those bands each changed the way I listen to music, and they're not represented even once. And I wanted to include Stone Temple Pilots, just as a big fat fuck-you to whoever says they were talentless and unoriginal. But this is how it has to go.

Nevermind wasn't the only tought cut from 1991. That year was a near-impossible decision. Blood Sugar Sex Magik gets the nod over Nevermind and Ten because it showed me that sexuality could be put forward openly and aggressively without it being childish ("Sir Psycho Sexy" notwithstanding). Since I was just starting to mature, it really affected me... and corrupted my sweet, church-going, innocent mind! Thank God for that.

1979 was another toughie. It's the only tie, but I couldn't lose either Tusk or Sheik Yerbouti. And that meant leaving out London Calling, The Wall, The Specials, Fear Of Music... just far too many crimes against musical list-making.

On the other hand, my unavoidable 1985 selection disappoints me greatly. Brothers In Arms is possibly my least favorite Dire Straits album, despite the enormous footprint it left on my childhood. The work they did prior to that album was so far superior that Brothers In Arms really doesn't belong here, especially when I already selected Love Over Gold as my pick for 1982. However, 1985 is littered with a mix of good albums by great bands whose better work appears elsewhere on the list (this, Little Creatures, Dare To Be Stupid, Life's Rich Pageant) and critical classics I haven't really listened to enough to put on a list like this (The Replacements' Tim, The Smiths' Meat is Murder, Kate Bush's Hounds of Love). I would have been much happier if I could, in good faith, put Tim in this slot. It's a fantastic album that I like a lot. But it has played zero role whatsoever in my life.

1981 is the only de facto choice. I expected more. But that's not so bad, because The Police ought to be on here in some form. But it was one of a whopping five non-Zappa albums from 1981 in my iTunes. So it was an easy make-up call to give them. (Other four: The Tom Tom Club, Van Halen's Fair Warning, Guitar Music by Leo Kottke, and The Replacements' Sorry, Ma, Forgot To Take Out The Trash!)

And speaking of make-up calls, I got to give one to The Killers. I tore apart Hot Fuss in my review of Sam's Town, and have often referred to The Killers as part of a progressive abstraction away from similar and better bands (i.e. "The Killers ripped off Interpol, Interpol ripped off New Order, New Order owes everything they had to Ian Curtis, Joy Division is overrated," etc), which I may have elucidated on the blog a long while back. However, after dozens of listens, I have completely changed my mind. Hot Fuss is one of the great albums of the decade. When I can't decide what to listen to on my mp3 player as I go out for the evening, I invariably select Hot Fuss. I can think of no bigger compliment, especially given that it's been out for four years.

2002 is kind of a weird year, too. Kill The Moonlight is a fantastic album, and the Spoon album most representative of why they're so awesome. But that gets the pick because of its lasting effect as much as anything else. There were so many albums from 2002 that I loved at the time, but don't affect me as much anymore... The Postal Service's Give Up, Talib Kweli's Quality, Blackalicious' Blazing Arrow, Jurassic 5's Power In Numbers... the list goes on. And the others that I do still feel strongly about, like the late-era Bosstones release A Jacknife To A Swan, don't hold up to the true classics from that year, like The Flaming Lips' Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots or Bright Eyes' Lifted...

You know what? Screw it. I'm talking too much about stuff I left off. I should just list the most egregious omissions.

1979 - Pink Floyd - The Wall
1980 - The Clash - London Calling
1987 - R.E.M. - Document
1991 - Nirvana - Nevermind
1991 - Pearl Jam - Ten
1992 - Sublime - 40 Oz. To Freedom
1992 - Stone Temple Pilots - Core
1994 - Weezer - Weezer
1996 - Less Than Jake - Losing Streak
1996 - Dave Matthews Band - Crash
1997 - Foo Fighters - The Colour And The Shape
1997 - Radiohead - OK Computer
1999 - The Roots - Things Fall Apart
2002 - The Flaming Lips - Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots
2003 - Snow Patrol - Final Straw
2003 - Guster - Keep It Together
2003 - The New Pornographers - Electric Version
2004 - Green Day - American Idiot
2004 - Franz Ferdinand - Franz Ferdinand
2006 - The Hold Steady - Boys And Girls In America
2007 - The National - Boxer

I could have made a whole other list of rejects! Better stop right there, before I do make another list....

Ballwashing The National Again

2008-09-11T10:42:00.000-07:00

Ignore the fan-video visual. Just listen to this simple, perfect song. Lucky you.

Annotated Girl Talk

2008-09-11T09:57:00.000-07:00

Looks like I'm flushing a bunch of old posts today...

Girl Talk's new collection of mashups to end all collections of mashups, Feed The Animals, is out now. And somehow, it's even better than Night Ripper. Not all the mashups work, but there are so many flourishes of DJ genius that it's worth it.

His work is so dense and encyclopedic that you need an atlas to figure out his samples. Most of the times I've listened to Feed The Animals, I've followed along in Wikipedia. Enjoyable as it is, I always have trouble seeing it for its music, and not for its documentary value. I think I like acknowledging which songs he mashed together more than listening to the end result. (Not that I won't dance to it. Because I absolutely will. Just saying.)

Anyhoo, following in the footsteps of such music-nerd compendiums as the Dan Bejar/Destroyer wiki, a good fellow at waxy.org compiled this statistical analysis of how GT uses those samples. Breakdowns of median sample date, length, changeovers, etc. It's interesting stuff.

[hat tip]

New TVOTR Songs

2008-09-11T09:52:00.001-07:00

Two new TV On The Radio songs have been making the rounds of late, and they're both awfully promising. They're both a little simpler and smaller than their usual fare, but good nonetheless. I'm so ready for the new album. It's been a weak year, full of disappointments, disasters, boredom, and downturns. I can't write a best-of post of nothing but de facto choices; if Gnarls Barkley makes my 2008 list, I quit. I really need Dear Science, to be good.

"Golden Age" and "Dancing Choose" can be heard here, as of today. They're also touring this fall; go see them.

Nobody Expects the Palin Inquisition

2008-09-09T12:26:00.004-07:00

I've been thinking about this since Sarah Palin was announced. Thank goodness someone else videotaped my thoughts...

You Mean Doctor Galazkiewicz?

2008-08-28T19:01:00.006-07:00

I've always been a little puzzled by Eddie Jemison's presence in the Ocean's 11 movies. Apart from Shaobo Qin, whose role calls for anonymity, Jemison is the only unknown in a movie whose sole premise is to have celebrities in even its smallest roles. In that way, he stands out.

And yet despite not being a known quantity, he has always felt strangely familiar to me. For a long time, I thought it was because he appeared to be at ease, to belong, amidst the Pitts and Clooneys to an unexpected degree.

But tonight, thanks to this guy, I realized why. Behold:

HE'S FUCKING DR. GALAZKIEWICZ!!! I always wondered what happened to that guy! He had stardom written all over him. And sure enough! But man, that was awesome to discover.

A Video's Worth The Time It Takes To Write A Post

2008-08-26T09:51:00.004-07:00

Seems like every summer I lose all ability to finish the posts I start. But they're not perfect yet. I'll make up for this radio silence eventually.

Until then, enjoy this. At least SOMEONE has a way with words around here.

Why YouTube Should Have A Repeat Button

2008-07-14T15:07:00.003-07:00

If they did, I would put this on repeat, and leave it on repeat. Wouldn't that be awesome?

Boo-Yahhhhhh

2008-07-02T12:23:00.004-07:00

This canned but funny Hellboy II promo was brought to my attention here...

Hellboy kicked ass. Hellboy II will kick the ass of whoever normally kicks asses, but will then defend its ass against the dude trying to kick his ass.

Sad Songs For Dirty Lovers Not So Sad Nowadays

2008-06-27T14:27:00.004-07:00

(credit)

Idolator just linked to a great piece chronicling the rise of indie slow-burners The National, currently touring with R.E.M. and Modest Mouse.

I had their Boxer in the lower half of my 2007 top ten, but it turns out even six months' consideration wasn't enough to properly rate that masterpiece of an album. If I had it to do over again, it'd be #2. Easily. It's been almost a year now, and I'm STILL discovering things. New shit just keeps coming to light. How can something make so little of an impression, and then make such an unmistakable one? It's beyond my comprehension... and I'm a pretty smart motherfucker.

That is, in a nutshell, what the linked story is all about. These guys REALLY know what they're doing, and they were absolutely nowhere for five years. So how does this happen?

Fascinating reading for anyone who's into them... or, really, anyone who's marginally curious about how a great band, toiling in anonymity in spite of their best efforts, can plow forward anyway. (And, of course, hit the jackpot in the end.)

One side note: I get that the author has a personal relationship with The National, and that their tourmates, R.E.M., are the blueprint for slow-burning success... but what of their other tourmates, Modest Mouse? Their career trajectory makes the author's point even better than The National does! I wasn't on the front lines for them, but it's not as if The Lonesome Crowded West or The Moon & Antarctica were instant oatmeal. And there was a long, inactive period between those albums and the "Float On" phenomenon. Given that a correlation was drawn to R.E.M., and that the tour as a whole intentionally features slow-burning acts, it certainly feels more like a singling out of Modest Mouse for some reason than clarifying the argument. Just an observation.

Jump In The Line

2008-06-26T08:17:00.004-07:00

Been a long time since I've listened to Harry Belafonte.

I was sitting at home the other night, minding my own business, when I found myself humming to nobody in particular... jump in the line, rock your body in time, OK, I believe you...

That led me down two separate lines of nostalgic superlatives: remembering that Beetlejuice is one of my favorite movies (and characters) ever, and remembering that Belafonte was the best Muppet Show guest ever. I dare you to watch this video without feeling warm.

Thank goodness for the Interwebs... without YouTube, I'd have had to go out and buy something to feel that good.

I Got Chokes And Chokes And Chokes...

2008-06-12T10:02:00.009-07:00

Choke, a film adaptation of one of Chuck Palahniuk's better novels, is coming down the pike in a few months. This pleases me tremendously. Fight Club was a coup for him, but Palahniuk's scolding, snide voice is too important to be adapted just once every ten years.

Choke probably wouldn't have been my first choice for a Palahniuk adaptation, since the story backbone isn't quite as strong as Fight Club or the equally satirical Survivor. His post-Fight Club stuff has this nasty habit of indulging and exploring a good idea without bringing it to rest on the right note (see Lullaby).

Then again, even top-notch Palahniuk is wandering and unfocused (with the exception of the notorious Guts) so Choke is as good a choice as any. Besides, it's a riotously funny book. And sexy, as you can tell from the YouTube freeze-frame down there. If Clark Gregg has clarified those pesky narrative strands, this should be a winner.

(The un-embeddable QuickTime version is way less dark, much easier to see.)

As for the trailer... I deduct 10 points for using Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (a.k.a. "Jeff repellent") on the soundtrack, but everything else is aces. The wicked sense of humor looks intact, and the roguish Sam Rockwell is the ideal lead for pretty much any Palahniuk story. I can definitely see him referring to his penis as his "dog." Which is key.

Iron Man

2008-06-12T08:29:00.002-07:00

A neat little movie. The core idea and how it plays out is pretty excellent. Where most comic book franchises are somehow rooted in youth and the transition to adulthood, Iron Man is unabashedly adult and middle-aged by comparison. It's not Amadeus or The English Patient or anything, but simply adding a little maturity to the equation does wonders.

Iron Man is in many ways a scolding response to the shallowness of Transformers. The erroneous cynicism of the Michael Bay movie ("admit it, asshole, you just want to see robots beating the shit out of each other") is reversed ("you are going to love Tony Stark... also, he beats the shit out of some robots"), resulting in a movie with quite a bit more heart. So to speak.

Beyond the obvious character/conceptual advantages, the nucleus of Iron Man's plausibility is the time the filmmakers take to show us how the suit works. You get a detailed, tactile introduction to how it's built, how it evolves over time, the specific capabilities. During the fight scenes, you know exactly what's going on, and you believe that the suit can perform as it does. The action isn't ground-breaking or kinetic on its own or anything, but at least you know who's punching who. It's still CGI, but the effort made to ground the suit in reality pays off when asses starts getting beaten.

On the other hand, I couldn't tell you a damn thing about who did what to whom in a single fight in Transformers. Couldn't tell you how they inhabit the cars they choose to impersonate, what moves they were executing on each other while the camera was flying through their legs, etc. The fight sequences may have a greater sense of grandeur (the Iron Man finale seems to have little effect on anyone but the three principals) but what does it matter if you don't know what you just saw? (THEY JUST KICK ASS, OKAY? YOU LOVE ROBOTS BEATING THE SHIT OUT OF EACH OTHER, SO SHUT UP!!!) Jon Favreau may not know kinetics, or demand things to be awesome*, but at least he and his team can put together a coherent action sequence.

Then there's Tony Stark himself. The pitfall for this character would be the Superman Problem, where invincibility breeds boredom. But he's so rooted in plausibility and rakish charm that minor details like funding sources and sentient robots go down smooth, like the medicine buried in a spoonful of sugar. Not much more needs to be said about Robert Downey, Jr.'s superstar turn, except to comment that it not only continues a recent tradition of "serious" Hollywood personalities slumming it with genre movies, but also provides us with a competitor to Johnny Depp for Beloved Weirdo Of The Moment. I have a feeling RDJ is going to cement that status once Tropic Thunder drops.

Anyway, enjoyed myself a lot. Not perfect, not a rules-changing phenomenon or anything, but definitely a good movie, and one that should be fun to see playing ten times a day on TNT in a couple years. All in all, I give Iron Man four iterations of the suit out of five.

* - I actually really enjoyed this commercial. You get a clear idea of which items on his patio are exploding, and when. Not that hard!

Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of Incongruous Nonsense

2008-06-09T20:03:00.002-07:00

Whoops! I got my franchise turds mixed up for a second. But The Phantom Menace is pretty much where we have to start the discussion.

Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls is a truly remarkable cinematic achievement: an Indy sequel worse than Temple of Doom.

It's not worse because of the ludicrous central conceit of the story, as I first thought. I will not detail the ways in which the crystal skull notion is silly, because a) it's actually not that bad an idea, in and of itself, and b) this is the franchise that gave us God, popping out of the Ark of the Covenant like a jack-in-the-box, in order to melt Nazi faces... can we really split hairs here? As such, I'm not going to fixate on the silliness... in and of itself, anyway.

The problem is more the usage of that silliness. Yes, God himself rained down his fury at the ends of both Raiders and Last Crusade. But in each case, the melting of the face was the climax of a story that was otherwise 100% grounded in reality-based adventure. The leaps of logic were in the stuntwork, which was so kinetic and exciting that we ate it up.

But in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, as in Temple of Doom before it, the implausibilities lie in the journey, not the destination. Their stories are propelled forward based solely on preposterous details. The suspension of disbelief is central, rather than collateral.

In Temple of Doom, for example, we are asked to believe and accept, amongst other things:

* that the human body can live without a heart
* that Indiana Jones is subject to mind control
* and voodoo dolls, too
* that Indiana Jones would drag a loud-mouthed blonde bitch along with him on a life-threatening adventure

Kate Capshaw hatred aside, there's only so much horseshit we can be asked to accept in one bite. It's as if the artisan-style heart removal's WTF-ness is meant to distract us, so that the filmmakers can shove in a bunch of ridiculous details while we're still reeling. If it were the only campy moment, perhaps it wouldn't have been such a crime. But by that point in the movie, we in the audience have seen about 50-60 minutes of pure camp. We're not exactly eager to accept more idiocy. The heart-ripping scene and its hypnosis-dependent aftermath thus stand more as opportunities to roll one's eyes and jump out of the mine cart.

[SPOILER WARNING; SKIP AHEAD]

Likewise, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull's progression is dependent upon accepting the skull's magical function, and its effect on both Indy and Harold Oxley. Which I don't, because the rules are not established with even the most remote believability. When rules get invented in order to move things along (Indy resists Irina's psychic powers, but not the skull's, and oh by the way he doesn't go crazy-go-nuts like Oxley) the natives get restless.

Further, each such deus ex machina intervention means that we sidestep proactive behavior from the protagonists. For example, how do Indy and friends escape the Soviets' clutches? Why, vine-swinging CGI monkeys and flesh-eating killer ants, of course! And did I mention that the crystal skull's presence creates a FUCKING FORCE FIELD around Indy and Oxley? Compare this to Indy slamming a bad guy's face into an airplane propeller. One is Indy's doing, another is Indy floating along like the rest of us.

And why do the Soviets need Indy? Because the skull turned Oxley into a babbling moron. Oh, I see. So Indy has to look into it himself, in order to communicate with Oxley... but not too much. Because it's too much skull-staring that makes you babble. Isn't this all so convenient. Never mind that the primary tool the Russians are using to discover the skull is... ANOTHER SKULL! COME ON!!!

[OK, NO MORE BIGGIES]

Now, this isn't the first time Indy has been involved in something silly. But much as I loathe Temple of Doom, even that film eventually finds its legs and keeps us on board. Stupid? Absolutely, but Indiana Jones comes out of the experience relatively unscathed as a character. And as I began, all of these movies are outlandish and ridiculous in some core way.

What makes KotCS so different is that Indy's not himself. He's just along for the ride.

The appeal of the series isn't simply in paying homage to 30's serials and (now) 50's B-movies, but in the elevation of that material through one of the most charismatic heroes in film history. The sag of KotCS comes directly from the sag in Indy's step.

I can't say it any better than this guy, whose exhaustive and uniformly spot-on list I discovered well after I started working on this. (Sigh.) But I'll sum it up:

* Indiana Jones doesn't care about the Crystal Skulls, so neither do we.
* Every twist is foreseeable and telegraphed, which undercuts every opportunity for tension.
* Those two absences keep our attention focused on the ridiculousness, which we reject because there's no reason not to.

Simple as that. Not even Sean Connery could save a movie with such a disastrous skeletal structure.

One interesting point I've seen made to contradict the utter ridiculousness of KotCS is that Indy isn't really after the Crystal Skull... his object of desire is Marion Ravenwood. The idea being that Indy has matured, has come face to face with death and mortality, and realizes that Marion, and a family, are how he digs himself out of his old rut and reclaims his Indy groove.

Not a bad notion... but if it's in there, it's the only well-kept secret in the whole goddamn movie. but I don't feel that was established. Nothing Indy does is firmly rooted in a desire to protect Marion. He doesn't even know who the hell he's protecting until he gets to Peru! And everything else is so half-assed that they could not possibly have effectively established that as Indy's true quest.

Anyway, all ranting aside, it may be a well-made good time, but so is any old amusement park ride. There's a high standard to meet in this series, and this one falls well short of the mark.

Two horribly animated jungle creatures out of five.

(Maybe I should be grateful that the prairie dogs didn't talk. Naaaaaaaah.)

New Sigur Rós Album Stream

2008-06-09T09:24:00.005-07:00

The upcoming Sigur Rós album, Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust (with a buzz in our ears we play endlessly), has been made available for streaming via this little thingy:

[h/t Stereogum]

It's futile to judge music when given such a poor audio stream; that goes double for Sigur Rós. But it certainly seems like a significant departure from the epic noise rock that they do best. This has its dramatic moments, but the band appears to be emphasizing the acoustic and earthy this time around... no doubt a partial byproduct of their recent Icelandic barnstorming tour. I eagerly await the version you can actually hear.

Death Cab For Cutie - Narrow Stairs

2008-05-19T19:04:00.003-07:00

Death Cab For Cutie - Narrow Stairs

My reaction to 2005's Plans hasn't softened much over time. My opinion of the band never changed, especially after seeing them, but my disappointment in Plans remains clear. It's a toothless move towards the adult-alternative Starbucks/Grey's Anatomy crowd -- a crowd that would have come to the band on their own anyway -- by a band that knows better. Despite having come to enjoy the album quite a lot, Plans still stands out as the weak link in an otherwise outstanding alt-rock catalog.

Luckily, everyone's allowed a mulligan. They got it right this time. Apparently recognizing the sore-thumb softness of Plans, Death Cab have reacted by making an album much more in their idiom, placing a premium on spaciousness and the sensation of instruments being strained to their breaking points. The end result is far closer to what one expects from a Death Cab album. We may not get much in the way of uniqueness or originalilty within the band's catalog, nor anything that places Narrow Stairs firmly amongst its classic predecessors, but fans of the band will be hard-pressed to hold this record in disdain. The "major label" finger-pointing levied at Plans holds no water here.

Much as Modest Mouse's last release, We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank, tipped its cap to several points in the band's catalog, likewise does Narrow Stairs remind us of We Have The Facts ("Cath..." and "Talking Bird"), Transatlanticism ("Bixby Canyon Bridge"), The Photo Album ("Long Division"), and even Plans ("I Will Possess Your Heart") throughout. With all those shout-outs to past success, the album as a whole isn't all that cohesive. And there are plenty of pleasant-but-forgettable tunes like "Grapevine Fires." But it's a nice reflection of the band and its capabilities.

What's remarkable to me is that they've done this without being blatant about it, without the sense of desperation that one can read into something like R.E.M.'s Accelerate, where they're practically screaming to us, "hey, remember when we used to sound like this? Come back!!!" Narrow Stairs plays more like "this is what we sound like." It's no standalone masterpiece, but it stands as proof that Death Cab haven't lost their fastball.

A Few Album Reviews

2008-04-23T16:18:00.000-07:00

Elbow - The Seldom Seen Kid

Quite good. Wouldn't call it great, but a strong, full-bodied British pop album. Pretty much what you expect from Elbow: half the songs are stirring, ponderous anthems, and the other half are decent, super-ponderous filler. But the good stuff is worth it.

And when I say "good stuff," I mostly mean the following two songs:

"One Day Like This"

This song makes me want to get my fucking life together.

"Grounds For Divorce"

No relation to the desert-island-worthy Wolf Parade tune, but good enough to merit sharing the title. Kinda like the US and UK versions of The Office.

Elbow, like any other huge British pop band this side of the Arctic Monkeys, have been branded, unfairly, as Coldplay imitators. They're in the same league, for sure, but in different conferences. Their rhythm is a lot more rollicking and pulsing than anything in Chris Martin's catalog. ("Grounds for Divorce" is a great example, but the title track from Leaders of the Free World is a better one.) And between the hard-luck lyrics and Guy Garvey's bottle-of-scotch/pack-of-cigarettes voice, they've got as sharp an edge as they'd ever need to maintain credibility amongst the males of the species.

Anyway, good band, good album. And their website is fookin awesome. Seriously, I'm impressed that they landed such a visually cool site.

Tokyo Police Club - Elephant Shell

First, my reaction. Then my dismissal of the reaction.

This album definitely isn't their best work. The only memorable tracks on the album that weren't previously released (album highlight "Your English Is Good" was released as a single last year) are "In A Cave" and "Tessellate." Lots of wing-spreading filler.

And I hate to bitch about something like this, but given how anxious I was for a full-length album from them, a 28-minute album of 11 brief-as-usual songs doesn't really cut it. The phenomenal A Lesson In Crime and Smith EPs were about that long.

I don't care though. You can see it's not a failed attempt to recapture what they had on the two EPs. They intended to slow things down and work on song structure a little. And that's fine. It's easy to forget nowadays that bands are allowed to grow. Not everyone can pull off a masterpiece the first time out (I'm again tempted to bring up Wolf Parade). So good on them for chilling out and trying to grow a little.

And to be fair, "Tessellate" in particular is a fantastic cross between the band's post-punk sound and standard pop structure.

All in all, I'll take it, and I'm still pumped to see them tomorrow night.

Gnarls Barkley - The Odd Couple

The Odd Couple may not reach the heights of popularity that its predecessor did. But it may be a little bit better, and a lot longer-lasting than the hyper, sugar-coated St. Elsewhere. The production draws a little less attention to itself this time around, purposefully reappropriating that 60's Motown sound instead of just having Cee-Lo Green sing over Danger Mouse's gonzo, kitchen-sink rap beats. The new stuff come out cooler and goes down smoother. It's essentially a whole album's worth of St. Elsewhere's excellent "Smiley Faces." In short, they grew up and got a job.

The album's background-appropriate consistency means I don't have to dock them any points for a lack of "Crazy"-level single. That's not the idea. Besides, there's plenty of good stuff. I particularly love "Surprise," which is buoyed by a haunting, Mamas-and-Papas-esque backup vocal. But since they released the closer-to-gonzo "Run" as their single, here it is:

"Run" is fun, and kinda fabulous, but I'm not feeling it. I'll take "Going On," "Blind Mary," and "Surprise" first. But that's just me.

So, in the end, liked it. Cee-Lo's worth the price of admission on his own.

R.E.M. - Accelerate

The enthusiasm with which their return has been received makes me wonder whether the work of other bands in a similar position in years past (Aerosmith, The Rolling Stones, etc.) got the same warm critical reception as Accelerate has had. As we've seen with the reunion-driven concert industry lately, could the dearth of worthy biggest-bands-in-the-world and the struggles of the record industry in general have turned a new album from R.E.M. into a bigger event than it would have been otherwise?

Or, like the Star Wars prequels, do we all just like them so damn much that a solid album from them is a cause for some, any, form of celebration?

Accelerate is being hailed as a return to form. This is basically true, although it's a return to their Monster form more than anything. But even then, this is like a version of Monster with the same shut-up-and-rock ethic as their pre-Warner Brothers days. It's Document, played in the Monster key.

I'm teetering perilously close to not making sense. Time for an embed.

On the flip side, while it's a lot better than anything they've done since the woefully mistreated and underappreciated New Adventures In Hi-Fi, it's not an album that changes your impression of them in any way. I wouldn't go so far as to call it autopilot, but this is clearly a case of them reclaiming their well-deserved stardom first, and making a musical statement second. (Again, like the Star Wars prequels, except without all the wrong people who say Episode III sucks.)

Anyway, nothing classic or great, just basically an acceptably solid and worthy addition, presuming you love the band. Basically, if you liked the pop-era R.E.M., you'll really like this. If you're a jackoff with a vintage Murmur t-shirt who hates everything they did after the I.R.S. years... probably not so much.

Side rant... the Reveal/Up/Around The Sun period is generally reviled. But it should be noted that they took time off from their slide into irrelevance to record a new version of "Bad Day," seen below, for their greatest hits compilation. It is absolutely phenomenal, and one of my favorite songs of theirs of all-time. And it came during the band's perceived low point. Just saying.

Bacon And The Human Response

2008-04-22T13:12:00.003-07:00

The A.V. Club's ongoing series of disgusting food reviews (note: the food's disgusting, not the reviews) appears to have tripped upon a winner: the bacon-and-maple lollipop. Color me intrigued.

Pops untasted, I suspect the A.V. Club's general consensus, that sweet + savory = "jarring" and off-putting, is true. And the pops actually kinda look like pre-congealment bacon fat, even if they're mostly maple.

However, I'm leaning towards these things working out. It's not something I'd pick up at the store once a week (if only I could) but also not something I'd turn down if offered one.

If anything, this proves how fan-damn-tastic bacon is. The one bit that everyone seemed to agree on, even those who disliked the lollipops, was that people enjoyed chewing into the embedded bacon bits. Proof that unless you're a member of the Tribe, or some kind of filthy hippie freak, you are addicted to bacon.

Which is, I think, why this commercial always hit home:

If Beggin' Strips were for humans, you could make the same exact commercial, complete with crawling on the ground. Bacon turns people into Gollum.

Speaking of the dog food commercials of my Price-Is-Right-loving youth:

Pre-Oscar Grouching

2008-02-24T10:07:00.004-08:00

It's all well and good that I have my best-of list up for all to see, but let's talk about something totally unrelated to the best movies of the year: Oscar night!

Tonight is a rarity: films that actually deserve the award! Juno aside, and Atonement unseen, you've got a spate of movies that are right where they ought to be. There may be blood, but there won't be Gladiator or Crash. Thank God for that.

I don't see much in the way of surprises. The acting categories are pretty easy to predict, and it's shaping up to be a No Country For Old Men coronation. You've got a more deserving (There Will Be Blood), and a potential spoiler that could ruin everything like Crash did (Juno), but it sure looks like the Coen Brothers will finally be recognized by the powers that be.

I do, however, have some notes for the Academy:

The Diving Bell And The Butterfly's representation in four measly categories is atrocious. Should've been a BP nominee, and should've thrown a bone to Mathieu Amalric in the Best Actor category. Its absence from Best Foreign Language Film is just stupid, and we have the Academy's rules for foreign language film eligibility to thank. France chose Persepolis as their foreign language entry, and justifiably so when one considers that Julian Schnabel isn't actually French, even though his film was. You can't really blame them. But the end result is that none of the five nominated films, or even Persepolis for that matter, will deserve the award more than Diving Bell. I don't mind forcing diversity on the list of nominees, but I do mind when the rules are set up in such a way that the rightful winner is nowhere to be seen.

There's an equally horrendous omission in the music category: Jonny Greenwood's score for There Will Be Blood. Like Diving Bell, he was never an actual candidate, ineligible for having used large portions of a previously-written score. But that's a case where the disqualification exposes a problem with the rules, not the entrant. No film this year made better use of its score than Blood. (Except, perhaps, the Nick Cave- and Warren Ellis-scored The Assassination Of Jesse James By All The People Who Were Forced To Type Such A Long Goddamn Title... which was also not nominated. Boo this academy!) Disqualified or not, the bottom line (as above) is that the category's best performance isn't represented. And that's a shame.

Which brings me to my ballot for the categories in which I have an opinion. I've listed the rightful winners in red, and the likely winners in blue where necessary. I've also added the unnominated rightful winner for the two categories discussed above.

ACHIEVEMENT IN MUSIC WRITTEN FOR MOTION PICTURES (ORIGINAL SCORE)
Atonement: Dario Marianelli
The Kite Runner: Alberto Iglesias
Michael Clayton: James Newton Howard
Ratatouille: Michael Giacchino
3:10 to Yuma: Marco Beltrami
There Will Be Blood: Jonny Greenwood
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: Nick Cave, Warren Ellis

Giacchino deserved it for The Incredibles, and this would be a well-earned make-up call. Beltrami is deserving as well. But their work doesn't approach what Greenwood and Cave & Ellis accomplished, disqualification be damned.

ACHIEVEMENT IN MUSIC WRITTEN FOR MOTION PICTURES (ORIGINAL SONG)
“Falling Slowly” from Once: Glen Hansard, Marketa Irglova
“Happy Working Song” from Enchanted: Alan Menken, Stephen Schwartz
“Raise It Up” from August Rush: Jamal Joseph, Charles Mack, Tevin Thomas
“So Close” from Enchanted: Menken, Schwartz
“That's How You Know” from Enchanted: Menken, Schwartz

Yes, the Oscars are ridiculous, politically-motivated popularity contests, and not barometers of quality. But I don't see how anything else can win. The goofy Disney songs will cancel out, and I've never even HEARD of August Rush. But “Falling Slowly” weaves its way into the storytelling in exactly the same manner as “It's Hard Out Here” did in Hustle & Flow. If “Falling Slowly” loses, I give up.

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE
Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth: The Golden Age
Julie Christie in Away from Her
Marion Cotillard in La Vie en Rose
Laura Linney in The Savages
Ellen Page in Juno

Having only seen Juno, I'm unqualified to express an opinion in red. But The Savages unseen, I'd give it to Linney. She's a poor-but-not-that-poor man's Meryl Streep who has worked at a high level for too long to have gone unrecognized. So if I'm picking blindly, why the hell not? Besides, Christie's gonna run away with this one, so what does it matter?

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
Cate Blanchett in I'm Not There
Ruby Dee in American Gangster
Saoirse Ronan in Atonement
Amy Ryan in Gone Baby Gone
Tilda Swinton in Michael Clayton

Swinton is definitely deserving, and Blanchett also is from what I hear, but I go with Ryan, who elevated Gone Baby Gone from a Law & Order-level potboiler to a devastating portrait of right not being synonymous with righteous.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to note that Dee was nominated for two minutes of screen time and a slap to Denzel Washington's face. This is precisely why we need more juicy roles for women.

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE
George Clooney in Michael Clayton
Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood
Johnny Depp in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Tommy Lee Jones in In the Valley of Elah
Viggo Mortensen in Eastern Promises

No question, no doubt, no discussion. He drinks their milkshakes. Sup sup sup sup sup.

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
Casey Affleck in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men
Philip Seymour Hoffman in Charlie Wilson's War
Hal Holbrook in Into the Wild
Tom Wilkinson in Michael Clayton

Ditto. Affleck gave a hell of a performance, and Wilkinson would be a fair selection as well, but nobody can outdo Anton Chigurh. Just not possible.

ACHIEVEMENT IN CINEMATOGRAPHY
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: Roger Deakins
Atonement: Seamus McGarvey
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: Janusz Kaminski
No Country for Old Men: Roger Deakins
There Will Be Blood: Robert Elswit

I can't speak for Atonement, but I have a hard time believing a single film on this list deserves to lose. Jesse James is the best-looking movie of the five (by a hair) but given that Diving Bell is the film that hinged on its cinematography more than any other, you have to give it to Kaminski.

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM OF THE YEAR
Beaufort (Israel)
The Counterfeiters (Austria)
Katyn (Poland)
Mongol (Kazakhstan)
12 (Russia)
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (France)

An absolute joke. There's no point in saying anything; Diving Bell makes it so easy to read the other books by their covers. This ensures that the deserving winner will lose this category two years in a row. (I liked The Lives Of Others a hell of a lot, but it's not Pan's Labyrinth. Not even close.)

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Atonement: Christopher Hampton
Away from Her: Sarah Polley
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: Ronald Harwood
No Country for Old Men: Joel Coen & Ethan Coen
There Will Be Blood: Paul Thomas Anderson

The screenplay categories can often be consolation gifts given to the wide nominees that don't end up winning anything... unless the Best Picture is nominated. So I'm guessing No Country. But as is true almost everywhere else, Diving Bell deserves it.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Juno: Diablo Cody
Lars and the Real Girl: Nancy Oliver
Michael Clayton: Tony Gilroy
Ratatouille: Brad Bird, Jan Pinkava, Jim Capobianco
The Savages: Tamara Jenkins

Lars, Ratatouille and Michael Clayton are all written masterfully, and I've been a fan of Jenkins since the criminally unseen Slums of Beverly Hills. A win for any of them would be good news. A win for Cody would be an insult to what good screenwriting is about. I just hope and pray that the stripper-turned-screenwriter doesn't use her backstory and her charisma to dupe the Academy into an Oscar. (Although a win would give that pompous prick Robert McKee a heart attack. So I suppose it's not a total loss.)

ACHIEVEMENT IN DIRECTING
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: Julian Schnabel
Juno: Jason Reitman
Michael Clayton: Tony Gilroy
No Country for Old Men: Joel Coen and Ethan Coen
There Will Be Blood: Paul Thomas Anderson

This is where my sympathies for the front-runners start to cloud things up. I'm toeing the line of giving Diving Bell all the awards that I can out of protest. But neither the Coens nor Anderson would deserve to win for Picture and then lose for director.

BEST MOTION PICTURE OF THE YEAR
Atonement
Juno
Michael Clayton
No Country for Old Men
There Will Be Blood

I'm a Blood man. I'd be pleased if it won. But not that pleased. This is the Coens' best chance yet, and Anderson will have plenty of other chances to win an Oscar before he croaks.

So now that I'm on the record, I'm off to do something important. (Read: anything besides worrying about the damn Oscars, preferably located outdoors.)

My New Favorite Web Site

2008-02-20T12:05:00.002-08:00

Instant Rim Shot.

Long have I desired a little portable audio box that would allow me to pepper real-life conversations with morning-show sound effects... rim shots, boioioioings, Curly-esque wwww-whuwhuwhuwhuwhus, that kind of thing. This isn't a bad consolation prize. It makes me wish I worked in an office, so I could drop this on an unsuspecting coworker.

(hat tip)

Best Movies Of 2007

2008-02-18T20:13:00.001-08:00

Just in at the pre-Oscar buzzer! I also have a shorter Oscar cheat sheet in the works for the end of the week, but I think it's high time I speak up on this.

So yeah, the year's been over for a couple months. The wrinkle of aiming quality films at January/February runs (though released in single theaters on December 31st, only in NY and LA, to qualify for Oscar) means that it isn't even possible for me to make a list until it's "too late." I guess internet piracy hasn't yet done for film criticism what it's done for music criticism. (Although to be fair, music criticism has been Amateur Night for a long, long time.)

Anyway, what also happened is the absolute bumper crop of excellent movies. The list of capital-F Films from 2007 would look far more impressive than last year's list. There will be no repeat of last year's Martin Scorcese Oscar make-up call, awarded to the pulpy, capital-M Movie The Departed. I've spent the last month pounding the local theaters, and I still think I missed an awful lot. The upper echelon was just too good.

As were all the other echelons, for that matter. From Gone Baby Gone to Superbad to Michael Clayton to Shoot 'Em Up, a lot of movies that could have been dismissed for one reason or another turned out to be not just successful but triumphantly so. Even crap like 300, Transformers (begrudgingly), and Live Free Or Die Hard were better than they had to be. Summer blockbusters (namely each of the "threequels" besides Bourne) were the only bunch that got its ass kicked in the quality department.

Apart from quality, the other common thread I've noticed is controversial endings. Walk through the top ten (the top twenty, really) and you'll find a lot of movies with difficult, puzzling, anticlimactic, and above all else hotly-contested endings. On the flip side, walk through the sections of so-so movies and you'll find a lot of so-so endings. You're more likely to stick by a memorable head-scratcher (the #1 entry on the list being Exhibit A) than a tepid ending you've seen before, no matter how well it was executed. It's damn near impossible to come up with a great, unique ending; it's yet another testament to the filmmakers in question that so many of them did so.

Since I can't convey the kick-ass-ness of my list without discussing a few surprises, consider yourself mild-spoiler-warned. I will also mark any paragraph with HIDEOUSLY-COLORED TEXT if anything truly revelatory is coming along, and show you some MORE SOOTHING when I'm done.

MOVIES I MISSED, VAGUELY IN THE ORDER OF LIKELIHOOD OF AFFECTING THIS LIST

Persepolis
Atonement
Rescue Dawn
American Gangster
Charlie Wilson's War
The Darjeeling Limited
Before The Devil Knows You're Dead
Southland Tales (I didn't say how the list would be affected)

MOVIES GOOD ENOUGH TO MERIT A SHOUT-OUT

Breach
The Bourne Ultimatum
Hairspray
Harry Potter And The Whatever It Was This Time
Heima
Hot Rod
The Lookout
Ocean's Thirteen
The Simpsons Movie

WORST MOVIE OF THE YEAR

Balls of Fury

No matter how stupid a movie is, it must take its own structure seriously, and handle itself consistently in that regard from start to finish. Not negotiable. Dodgeball had a coherent story to tell. Nihilistic spoofs like Airplane and Blazing Saddles respect their own structures.

Not so with Balls of Fury, which has an obvious surface-level contempt for its own storytelling... a contempt that I share. This stupid, insipid mess wastes only two or three decent laughs on an absolutely embarrassing finished product. A funny movie can forgive errors in craftsmanship, which in this case number in the thousands after the twenty-five minute mark. But with so many jokes falling flat, there's no saving this turkey.

Why am I so livid about a movie that clearly isn't worth the time I've spent on it? BECAUSE IT COULD HAVE WORKED! They achieved a very difficult thing: they proved that you can assemble a decent movie premise about ping-pong. I watched the trailer and laughed my ass off! But they screwed it all up, worse than anyone could have imagined.

Hey, at least George Lopez got a paycheck.

MEDIOCRE FILMS THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN BETTER

Knocked Up

For reasons mentioned ad nauseum elsewhere. At least my opinion appears to be how the film will be remembered: funny, with reservations. There was talk of a screenplay Oscar nomination... thank GOD they didn't do that. Oscar has been tainted enough in recent years. It's a hilarious movie, but let's stop sucking each others' dicks for a minute and ask ourselves WHAT THE FUCK THOSE TWO PEOPLE ARE DOING IN THE SAME PICTURE!!!!!

Day Watch

The follow-up to 2005's sublime Night Watch is decent, but a major disappointment. The first was indulgent and kinetic; this is just indulgent. It throws all sorts of gimmicks at us that violate the guidelines and spirit of its predecessor in its attempt to outdo said predecessor. Except it doesn't outdo Night Watch's genius as much as undo it.

3:10 To Yuma

I'm not as vitriolic in my hatred of the ending as some. Westerns are, first and foremost, morality plays. The ridiculous-ass climax of this otherwise excellent movie fits in nicely with that. Within the context of the genre, I'm OK with the climax.

My objection is to everything that transpires leading up to said climax. The adapters wrote themselves into a corner, and their escape from the hole just doesn't ring true. You can't have a conclusion like that without telegraphing it, in no uncertain terms. There's a little half-assed foreshadowing, but not enough to keep me from going "whaaaaaaaaAAAT?"

The filmmakers also switched back and forth from "Ben Wade is evil and principled" to "Ben Wade is entirely evil and selfish" pretty randomly, basically making him one or the other when it suited their expositional needs. You really don't know what the hell is motivating Wade to not just run off at every point. Maybe that's the fault of Russell Crowe, maybe it's James Mangold. I don't know. But I know it's an inconsistent portrait, one way or another, even if it's gripping as hell.

It's a real shame that the third act was so casual, because the conception was otherwise excellent. The acting, photography and set design were all top-notch. Yuma's world is harder, gritter, more dark and hateful than we're used to seeing in westerns, even in the post-Unforgiven universe. And the extent to which the climax comes out of nowhere is really frustrating.

(Note: here's where the year's depth of quality really becomes evident. The next ten movies are an absolute murderer's row of must-see movies... but CLEARLY are not up to snuff. Which is amazing, because I'd have no problems voting for any of them on any previous year's list. Shit, my #10 last year was The Devil Wears Prada... good movie, but I'll take any of these over that.)

BEST FAILURE

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

This is an awfully well-made movie, as good as they come in a lot of respects. But also a deeply flawed one. If the title alone makes you impatient, just you wait.

Good news first. The acting is superb. The music by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis is as good as it gets, up there with Jonny Greenwood's work on There Will Be Blood as the best of the year. The Oscar-nominated photography by frequent Coen Brothers collaborator Roger Deakins is outstanding, and by far the best thing about this film. The pacing and the minor-key mood suit the story nicely.

It reminds me (and rightly so, apparently) of Terence Malick's The New World in that it demystifies what we expect to see from a story in its period. When I think of colonial times, I don't first imagine the unbelievably lush wilderness of The New World... I think of Plimoth Plantation, red-coats, Benjamin Franklin, Thanksgiving, that sort of thing. And yet the lush Virginia swamps are probably more true to life. Likewise, watching Assassination, you get the feeling that they've created a more faithful vision of the 1880s than most Westerns would have. Andrew Dominik was explicitly going for Malick while making this film, and it would seem that he achieved it.

Except for one thing: the lack of purpose behind its languorous, Malickian pace. There's no reason for dragging things out to this length besides to assert that you can. It's epic for the sake of being epic. It's a well-meaning attempt at the kind of fanciful poetry that Malick can draw from so little. But it falls short.

More importantly, the tale hinges on things that the audience can't really accept. One of the guiding principles of the story is that Jesse James, legend, is absolutely as godlike and special as he's made out to be... and Bob Ford is absolutely not. Ford, in fact, is shown to fail at each of his attempts at ingratiation. And yet there he is, tagging along all the way through to the end. Given that Jesse James is severely untrusting and paranoid, that he has no qualms about disposing of those he sees as traitorous, and that there's nothing (whatsoever) likable about Bob Ford, what exactly does Jesse James see in him? We never find out.

I guess Dominik expects us to just take it as fact. Sure, the story as it unfolds is kinda-sorta-basically true is irrelevant. And life isn't always logical, and this is kinda-sorta what really happened. Sure. But that doesn't matter when it isn't demonstrated. True or not, it must be shown. The film's title alone is not reason enough to accept its contents.

The bottom line: the two most critically important moments in a story are the provocation, which sets the story's action in motion, and the climax, which halts it. Here, the provocation (Jesse's acceptance of Bob) and the climax (the film's title) are the two most unconvincing moments in the entire movie. That, my friends, is a problem.

Malick can certainly be proud that Dominik is following his lead. But I'd like to see what Dominik does when his aesthetic doesn't dilute his message.

Runners Up

Grindhouse

Fun for the whole family.* I eagerly await the arrivals of Machete, Don't, and of course Thanksgiving, the film that could either redeem Eli Roth as a human being or seal his fate. Especially if he fleshes out (so to speak) the trampoline scene.

* if your whole family is 18-to-35-year-old males

The Host

Allegorical and ultimately poignant monster movie from Korea. The take-home message of constant vigilance is hard to miss.

Hot Fuzz

As someone whose entire life was affected, for the better, by spoofs like Blazing Saddles, Airplane!, Hot Shots!, and The Naked Gun, it's infuriating that uncreative, lazy, stupid, and above all else unfunny hogshit like Epic Movie is allowed to exist. It is the worst kind of hackery.

Movie spoofs, like any satirical art, are meant to work not just as parodies but also as the thing that they parodize. And comedy is one of the many things that should not be attempted if you have no intention of making it work.

So it's nice to know that the Pegg/Frost/Winter team behind Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz are out there, fighting the good fight and actually knowing what they're doing. Fuzz does what it's supposed to do: it sends up action movies (with major insight), it works as an action movie, and it's flat-out hilarious.

Eastern Promises

Intelligent, lingering thriller about the Russian mafia. I personally find David Cronenberg's unnaturally slow delivery of dialogue to be a distraction. However, the slow, get-on-with-it pacing of this story builds all kinds of suspense. That, and Viggo Mortensen kicks all kinds of fucking ass.

Juno

There are so many things I like, and so many more that I really despise.

Much has been said about the script and the dialogue, but Diablo Cody's cleverness doesn't always suit the material. (I sound like all my old English teachers.) The great stuff is great, but even in a fantasy universe like this, lines like "silencio, old man" that might have seemed clever in print just slam into the ground and die. The first ten minutes is chock full of lines just like that... spoken in an attempt to impress a style upon us, but it doesn't quite fit. All it really does is take us off the rails. Given that the first scene of the movie is so amazingly tender and sweet, why are we then subjected to that barrage of "honest to blog" crapola? It undermines so many great things.

That said, Juno finds its legs once the story gets rolling, and once we have something other than Witty Banter to hold onto. At that point, it takes off into space. We start seeing things other than bravado from Juno. Her vocabulary becomes a defense mechanism more than a lovable trait. As many things as are wrong with it, they managed to capture something really magical and adorable that forgives it.

(Not the music though. Juno herself may be a little too cute and clever, but we eventually warm to her once we see that she's way more full of shit than she sounds. Not so much with the written-on-a-bar-napkin music. Its preciousness reflects and multiplies the preciousness of the movie... and that's a bad thing.)

I also wanted to mention Jennifer Garner here, since by the end she's the one holding the movie together. As the grown-up killjoy, she has the toughest job in the movie, and she manages to be both hardened (for a reason) and ultimately sympathetic. Anyone who can make a Vitamin Water-drinking yuppie bitch likable has done a hell of a job. Outstanding.

The Lives Of Others

Far from the depressing, in-your-face moralism that you'd suspect, this is a taut character study of a cog in the East German bureaucratic machine who begins to let the subjects of his surveillance campaign get the better of him. Last year's foreign language Oscar winner, and deservedly so.

Once

This very, very good movie irritated me in a lot of ways once (ha) it was over, primarily because the story structure is so haphazard. Not the film itself; obviously it is a guerrilla film, and will therefore have rough edges. In keeping with my theme, I am bothered tremendously by the ending.

An ending has to reinforce everything that preceded it, either by confirming what we suspected or inverting those suspicions and revealing the true nature of the story. Once's climax does neither. It plays against the grain with our suspicions and our understanding of the characters, and sends a message neither consistent with the themes of the film nor consistent with our knowledge of the characters and their respective love lives. The last note is cute, but no matter how cute it is, you still have to set it up. It felt too much like a left turn, and not enough like the "awwwww" that a movie like this needs in order to be a home run.

I certainly don't begrudge anyone who feels differently. Flawed or not, it's a terribly romantic and stirring movie. You'd have to be a real curmudgeon to be unmoved by the heartfelt and believable performances of both Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová. And for an el-cheapo hand-held guerilla film, it's fantastic. But in the final analysis, it just doesn't feel right. It feels half-baked and thrown together instead of conceived. It's the little movie that almost did.

BIGGEST SURPRISE

Stardust

What a great, great movie. Funny, lovable, creative, and exciting, but never perilous or black. While every other fantasy movie is taking pages from The Lord of the Rings, this one rips off fantasy movies from the 80's: Labyrinth, The Neverending Story, Ladyhawke, that sort of thing.

MOST ADMIRABLE GENRE FILM

The Kingdom

I love when a genre movie aims higher than it needs to, and succeeds. The set pieces, as fresh and original as you can get, are exactly as terrifying as you would expect them to be in real life. But it isn't just a typical political actioner. It actually has something more insightful and resonant to say than "America: FUCK YEAHHHHH!"

On the surface, it's a "catch the Arabs, blow stuff up, try not to be too racist" thriller. There have been plenty of those, each demonstrating that peppering a basic "we're the good guys" military operation with some "yeah, but..." thoughts doesn't really work unless the action itself fits into all the philosophizing.

But just when you think The Kingdom is going to fit that description to a tee, right at the very end, the closing line drops, flipping the film's entire morality structure inside out. The exhilaration of success comes with a sobering take-home message. It may lack the reassuring humanism of Three Kings, but it hits a lot harder.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

BEST GUILTY PLEASURE

Shoot 'Em Up

Oh boy. Bugs Bunny as hard-boiled action hero... and as you can see, he's even got the carrot. Admittedly, you have to be in the right mood for a movie like this. It's too surreal and over-the-top to be believable; the silliness takes away any shot at an emotional punch; its underlying plot is rendered pointless at every possible moment. But I don't care whether it's a Complete Moving Picture Experience. Every time you think they won't top what you just saw, they do. It's exactly what overtly over-the-top movies have to be: ingenious.

THE LIST

10. Zodiac

Don't expect a cop movie. When you realize how David Fincher decided to attack this story, the police procedural about an unsolved crime, it will all make perfect sense. Much like No Country For Old Men, this is a film about futile obsession, about knowing when to fold, first, second and third. There's this Zodiac killer guy or something too, but he's beside the point.

9. Lars and the Real Girl

What a pleasant surprise. You think "lonely guy with no social skills buys a sex doll," and you'd think it'd be a dumb gross-out comedy, or at the very least unseemly. But it plays out as a big, wholesome joke on those of us with our minds in the gutter. How unexpected it was when the lights come up and you realize how utterly wholesome and sexless it was.

To say nothing of optimistic; it's one of the more sweetly positive movies you'll ever see. Much has been made of the recent trend towards antagonist-free comedies (Judd Apatow productions like The 40-Year Old Virgin), and Lars does them all one better by showing a world absent of conflict. Everyone cares SO much about Lars, and wants SO badly for him to grow up and be happy, that they cast themselves, and their entire worlds, into an absolutely ridiculous proposition... for Lars' benefit, and for no other reason.

I'm not all that excited about Ryan Gosling's endearing but unnatural portrayal. I was more impressed by Paul Schneider as Lars' brother, a refreshing inversion of the typical resistant, wet-blanket character. Even when he fights Lars' "relationship," he does so with only the best of intentions. Despite being the lone voice of reason, he gives in to insanity rather than act the killjoy. And as goofy shit just explodes all around him, he slowly suspends his disbelief. As do we. Well done.

8. Superbad

A perfect, joyous, sophisticated film about cartoon dicks. [NSFW]

7. Ratatouille

A perfect, joyous, sophisticated film about cartoon rats.

I really can't recommend this enough. It's not for kids in any way. Strictly for adults... and sophisticated adults at that.

(Again, for those keeping score, this is the point at which every movie from here on down is better than The Departed, a.k.a. The De Facto.)

6. Sweeney Todd

The first GREAT movie musical I've seen since the revival of the genre. Others have been uneven at best (Dreamgirls, Chicago), atrocious at worst (Rent, The Producers), and a little too Broadway for my liking in the middle (Hairspray... good movie, but ceeee-hrist). You have gonzo stuff like Moulin Rouge! and cartoons and stuff, or a satire like South Park, but the actual serious Broadway adaptations haven't really work across the board.

And Sweeney does. Everything seems just right. You never feel like you're watching a Mu-si-cal Num-be-e-e-e-e-er!!! The songs always plays as the story, not the song alone. Not that the music and conception aren't fantastic; they just serve their purpose first and wow us second.

But still, in typical Tim Burton fashion, it kinda fizzles (gurgles?) at the end. The revelations of the finale don't shake you or move you as they should... possibly because the devastation is drowned in explosive geysers of blood. And even though Johnny Depp is the only actor alive who could have pulled off that role, he nevertheless missed an opportunity to knock the conclusion out of the park, Daniel Day-Lewis-style. ("I... eat... your... MEATPIES!")

Still, that's nit-picking. Totally awesome.

5. Michael Clayton

A master's class in genre writing. Tony Gilroy breathes life into a tired, washed-up legal drama plot (corporation poisons the poor, oh noes!) by ignoring the victims and concentrating solely on the moral quandaries encountered by the lawyers in each level of the case: the head of the firm; the lead defense attorney; the defendants' private legal counsel; and the "janitor," Clayton. The acting, of course, is excellent. George Clooney is the rock, but Tom Wilkinson and Tilda Swinton are perfect and thorough in their portrayals.

*** SPOILER ***

But again, it's all about the ending. What's nice about it is that it doesn't trumpet Clayton's decisive action as a win or a loss. There are tastes of common redemption themes (revenge, morality, loyalty to one's mentor, denying a sell-out opportunity, etc.) that come into play, but none of them dominate. Clayton had simply had enough. "Fuck you" that the conclusive act was, it was less a "fuck you" than a truly grand "I quit." A resignation, as opposed to a victory. Legal dramas aren't supposed to end ambiguously... but the taxi ride, devoid of reaction, says it all. No judgment, no celebration, no concern... it's just something that I did today.

*** END SPOILER ***

4. Gone Baby Gone

Mystic River, eat Ben Affleck's shit. He and Casey deserve TONS of credit not just for executing Dennis Lehane's source material so well, but also for bringing so much extra to it. A gritty potboiler mystery with, ahem, one of the great endings you'll ever see... an absolute head-scratcher that not only inverts everything you thought you knew about the story's key participants, but leaves you legitimately speechless as to what you would have done. And gosh, did they nail the neighborhoods. Bravo.

3. No Country For Old Men

A bleak, dark, and violent fable about the nature of evil. But unlike most morality plays, it's not about choosing sides. The unavoidable nature of death (Chigurh as reaper), the unstoppable nature of evil (Chigurh as epitome), and the complicity with which the average person enables evil to thrive (Chigurh as, um, houseplant) are all covered, but No Country is primarily about where we draw the line in fighting against the things we can't control. The train isn't stopping... so where do we get off?

*** SPOILER ***

There's been controversy over the ending (or, for that matter, what the ending actually was) but the anti-climactic, minor-key decompression was just about perfect, mirroring Tommy Lee Jones' throwing in of the towel. Evil, death, crime, greed, etc. are inexorable. They never stop. But your participation, your decision to be involved, does. The conclusion is merely where you choose to exit. Tommy Lee Jones has very little screen time, but effectively acts as our conduit; he says, this is my stop, time to head home, and that's where the telling of the story ends... or, at least, where our part ends.

*** END SPOILER ***

Anyway, it's a great film. Probably the Coens' best ever, if not their most ingenious. Flannery O'Connor would be proud.

2. The Diving Bell And The Butterfly

Wow. It's impossible to do justice to how good this is. The main casualty of this year's bumper crop of Oscar-worthy films. I'm glad that Julian Schnabel nabbed a Best Director nod, but the film itself deserves to be acknowledged for the masterpiece it is.

I had to spend a lot of time reflecting on the climax, which at first didn't work for me. But I maintain my objections. It fails in the slightest, simplest way, but for me it's important.

On the one hand, my reaction of "wait, that was IT?!?" is a testament to how engrossing the previous two hours had been. And once I got the narrative pattern down, I saw that the story made a great deal of sense. It's the tale of a man who learns to confront and accept his fate rather than fixating on what he's lost. And the suddenness of it all mirrors life itself, and whatnot.

On the other... it's not really a climax if you don't realize it until later, is it?

*** SPOILER ***

Watching Jean-Do suffer his stroke, knowing full well that he'd been unable (or unwilling) to remember the event for the length of the flim, was no doubt a significant moment. And in retrospect, yes, it makes sense that recollection would be the moment in which he fully comes to terms with what his life is. But then it's BOOM, dead, credits. What the fuck? This isn't a Hitchcock movie. Where'd that come from?!?

That problem stems from my impression that the pneuomnia wasn't obviously going to kill him. Bauby himself sets his pneumonia against his singing/grunting progress... as if to say, "as soon as you take a step forward, you take a step backward." It was NOT made out to be "just when I turned the corner, I get a fatal disease. Oh well. Release the doves!" If you DO assume it's fatal, the rest of it makes sense. But I had to retrace my steps all afternoon to connect the dots and figure out why the hell it all made sense.

Perhaps I'm being too hard. Maybe the jolting ending says something about life, and that was Schnabel's point. I suppose that part of the message of Diving Bell is that life can indeed be whisked away suddenly, just like that. I suppose it's nice that our notification of Jean-Do's death was the lack of movement in his eye... as if to say "yes, there was indeed an indication life despite it coming just from that one eye." I suppose that for a film that purports to tell the story of a life, such an underwhelming and undramatic death is fair game.

But it's not the note I wanted to hold onto as I walked home. I wasn't ready to go, and the film didn't prepare me for my departure. Maybe that says something about life! (You can't play that game forever. Which says something about life!) The bottom line is that "what a perfect ending... gosh, I'm just so floored by meaning and philosophy right now" is not how I left the theater. I left grumbling like I'd been kicked out.

Of course, it could also just be that I missed something by watching the film using only my left eye.

*** END SPOILER ***

I guess I'm still not totally decided, am I?

At least there's one thing I can say with certainty: if Janusz Kaminski isn't given the Oscar for cinematography, it will go down as one of the biggest jokes in the Oscars' already laughable history. No DP has EVER deserved an Oscar as much as Kaminski does here. The creativity behind this film's conception is astonishing. Only a master could use the kind of attention-drawing camera flourishes on which the first-person storytelling is built without coming off as a style-before-substance hack. The style never draws our attention without having a very good reason. And even then, what starts out as look-at-me camerawork soon folds into Bauby's vision of the world. Great stuff.

(Another fun thing: the washed-out, shaky-cam stuff at the beginning is eerily reminiscent of Kaminski's work during the Omaha Beach scene in Saving Private Ryan. There is a sense of order to the shaking that both scenes seem to have, though obviously to different effects.)

1. There Will Be Blood

This was a tough decision, made tougher by finally seeing Diving Bell.

Blood is hardly perfect. Sitting in the theater, watching its second half unfold, I was torn. No movie this year is more memorable, and no actor is more mesmerizing than Daniel-Day Lewis, despite his liberal theft of John Huston. (Watch Chinatown and tell me that's not the older Plainview.) And no film, with the exception of Diving Bell, is as fertile with insight and hidden ideas.

The divergence of opinion seems to hinge on whether you've stuck with Anderson after Plainview's rails come off. The story's focus shifts from being a grand American epic to a value-based character study, which seems to throw people off... but it's a reflection of Plainview's focus, which also shifts. As the Standard Oil executives point out to him, he's set for life... now what? But as Plainview unsettles us with his reaction, so is he unsettled by the question itself; our confusion and sense of loss mirrors his. He then spends the remainder of the film flailing around

The shift's mild clumsiness doesn't work as universally as it would need to for Blood to vault into the pantheon of great American films. A timeless film in general will not require you to sit there and think about it in order for you to get why it, in fact, makes sense. In this case, the story Blood resembles most is Citizen Kane, which tells its tale very clearly. With that story in mind, even though Blood has so many things in its favor, we're left wondering what P.T. Anderson is on about.

And yet that's just it. Look how high Anderson has raised the bar! We're talking about the difference between "great but difficult" and "all-time classic." Blood may not be as great as Kane, but its failures sure aren't due to missteps. There are even a few ways in which Blood and Plainview (blasphemy!) compare favorably to their counterparts in Kane. (Plainview's rise, for example, is more hard-earned, relatable, and quintessentially American than Kane's, which was basically inherited.) Blood is nowhere near the filmmakers' bible that Kane is, but the fact that it can stand up to the comparison at all is heavy praise.

And then there's the drainage, the milkshakes, and what's now the second-most famous slurp (behind this) in Oscar history. Anderson gets bonus credit for making his terribly serious work so damned iconic and hilarious at the same time.

In summation, Anderson has taken on the gods of cinema, and lives to tell the tale. That's enough for me.

Apatow FTW Part II: Pineapple Express Trailer

2008-02-15T22:10:00.003-08:00

The red-band trailer here is NSFW, unless you work in a profane, weed-filled office.

HOLY HELL YES. Are we all going to enjoy the shit out of that or what? They had me at "thatisgoodweeeeeed!"

(Also, programming note... since Mr. Apatow is producing like 12-14 movies for the upcoming summer alone, I expect there will be plenty more Apatow FTW posts to come.)

Recent Musical Adventures

2008-02-15T20:30:00.006-08:00

Everyone Else Said Something, Now It's My Turn

...and we're not taking it out of the tree until you come up with a better point of comparison than Graceland

Vampire Weekend has kinda exploded, in the way that I love to rail against. Which I will do here: the next lazy motherfucker who drops Paul Simon's fucking name, as if HE had invented Afro-pop, gets diamonds cut into the soles of his shoes. (Or hers.) That shit is weak. The guitar sounds are very much like those found on Graceland. But that's a matter of timbre, and mixing, not songwriting. The music is nothing like it. Please stop.

But that's where the anger ends. Because their album's awfully good.

I'm puzzled (well, not really) by the need to wrap them up into one package, because the album all but begs us not to. The Afro-Pop correlation does indeed stand up on their strongest tracks, notably "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa," "Walcott" and "The Kids Don't Stand A Chance." But there are just as many songs where they seem as obsessed with faux-harpsichords and string sections ("M79") or paint-by-numbers indie rock (the tired-before-it-broke "A-Punk") as they do with African rhythms.

In fact, on an album so rife with unique musical influences, the track you are most likely to find on Hype Machine et al is... "A-Punk." Setting aside the disservice that song's popularity does their work, that's proof positive that they need to be described in less digestible terms.

And not for nothing, but if you want to draw an analogy to an album we've already heard of, please use Naked by Talking Heads. Again, very little in common on the songwriting front, but at least there's a conceptual similarity between the two bands. Naked actually fuses sounds; Graceland, good as it is, was a commandeering and repurposing more than a melting pot.

(Just to be clear, that was a recommendation. I've been enjoying them, and so should you... with tempered expectations.)

Is This The Five O'Clock Free Track Giveaway?

Druuuuuugs... and a-ca-hol... have ruined my life!!!

A new song from Tapes 'n Tapes started bouncing around the tubes today. It's a good song, but what really has me amped is how great it sounds. It's the same basic formula as found on The Loon: frenetic rhythm guitar, hyperactive bass line, random brass or woodwind, pounding drums. But "Hang Them All" sounds crisper, cleaner... more professional.

Based on this one song, it would seem they've taken a huge step upward in quality, without changing anything else about themselves. That's a good thing. It's no guarantee that the rest of Walk It Off will be this good, but it's encouraging to say the least.

OK, Fine, Even The Sky Looks Like Wine

...the fucking MANIAC!

Dan Bejar's new Destroyer album, Trouble in Dreams is pretty good too. I haven't got as much to say about it, except to mention that it's worthwhile. First impressions are that it's a little less lilting and energetic than Destroyer's Rubies, placing it more along the lines of Your Blues (but without the synthesizers). Centerpiece "Shooting Rockets" is particularly compelling... for all his weird idiosyncracies, Bejar does an excellent job of keeping your attention on long tracks like this.

What Is The Sound Of Five Casiotones Clapping?

Hot Chip will break your legs

I'm gonna have to chew on Hot Chip's new one a little more. There are some really worthwhile songs on Made In The Dark ("Shake A Fist" and "Ready For The Floor" stand out right away) but on the whole, it's kind of a lot to process. The Warning took a while to drill its way into my head too, though, so I don't expect this to be any different.

The Ballad of Ricky Bauby

2008-02-13T20:33:00.002-08:00

In the days since seeing The Diving Bell And The Butterfly (which EVERYONE should see) I've thought about little else. The tale is harrowing, but the execution brims with so much life and humor that it avoids all the usual pitfalls of bio-tragedies. Every true-to-life tale of woe claims to be life-affirming; here's one that actually is.

The reason it feels so genuine is the droll, very black sense of humor at the core of Jean-Do Bauby. It's absolutely true that people in these situations don't necessarily stop being themselves, or suddenly epitomize the tragedies that have befallen them. That's a dramatic trope more than a celebration of an actual life. So the guy had a stroke and was paralyzed... suddenly nothing's funny anymore?

Look at the telephone installers' joke. The therapist on duty chides them for having a laugh at Bauby's expense, but Bauby is in fact laughing (on the inside of course) at the cheap shot he's absorbed. Because it's funny!

It is to the great credit of Ronald Harwood, Julian Schnabel, Bauby himself, and their collective observational abilities that their movie courses with the most ironic and biting of humors, when it could have so easily devolved into a maudlin exercise in self-seriousness. I have a great deal of respect for their handling of the source material.

Anyway, Diving Bell can't be more highly recomended. I'll have more honors to bestow on it later, but until then I implore you to go see it... if for no other reason than because you'll then know what the hell I'm about to talk about.

You see, since seeing the film, I've been working on an impression of Jean-Do. This is largely out of appreciation, mind you; recall that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. But it's also to amuse myself, much as I had the habit of growling the word DRAIIIIINAGE to myself to pass the time as recently as... ten seconds ago. [Ed. note: SUP SUP SUP SUP SUP SUP SUP... I DRRRRRRINK IT UP!]

Anyway, I haven't done impressions in God knows how long, so I'm really excited about getting this one down. Even while writing this, I've managed to achieve a workable drool. I've nearly got the grunt under control too, but I'm not too worried about that.

The problem is that my eye and face just doesn't look right. I can't sculpt my face into the right pose. It's really hard! If you think you've read one review too many that lauds Mathieu Amalric's ocular acting skills, think again, because that eye of his deserves all the attention it's gotten. Amalric channels the concerned/horrified stare of the drama marmot perfectly. Check out this still:

Look how placid and folded-up the face is... but the eye alone bulges with fear, almost bursting out of its socket? That's hard! I have the strength of reaction down, but it makes its way out onto the rest of the face, so I end up looking like this guy:

Bitter Locked-In Syndrome Face!

I'm a little better when I use the right side of my face, since I'm able to raise my right eyebrow independent of all my other facial muscles... but Bauby's left eye was the good one. And to raise my left eyebrow, I have to squint my right eye into closed position, which of course is ridiculous since Jean-Do was paralyzed, and thus unable to squint like that. I really have to do something about that.

But persist I shall. You'll know when I get really good at it, because I'll have been struck down by lightning and sent straight to hell. That amateurish Photoshop up top is the ticket; doing a good Jean-Do will be my boarding pass.

They've Fixed A Huge Mistake

2008-02-11T22:25:00.000-08:00

Hello, God? It's me, Jeff.

I don't ask for much. I expect a lot, sure, but I'll be damned if I'm going to ask for all that. I shouldn't have to! You can read minds, so you already know what I want. Yeah, like that. And that. See? Easy. Point is, I reserve questions for the things that are really important.

So with that in mind, here goes.

O God in Heaven... playing Scrabulous with Jesus and his pals in all their glory... please take a little time out of your busy schedule, pick up a phone, and MAKE THIS HAPPEN GODDAMMIT!!!

If you don't intervene, and this opportunity slips through your fingers... then God, you've made a huge mistake.

Amen.

Apatow FTW: Forgetting Sarah Marshall Trailer

2008-02-05T13:57:00.000-08:00

I'm not cheered up just yet, but this helps:

The proverbial universe of Hollywood hasn't removed its proverbial lips from Judd Apatow's non-proverbial dong just yet. And rightly not, because Apatow and his cabal of miscreants continue to churn out funny shit, as is proved by this faaaaantastic (and NSFW) red-band trailer for Forgetting Sarah Marshall. I'm sold!

(thanks)

Drainage

2008-01-22T09:43:00.001-08:00

I have a fever, and the only prescription is...

DRAIIIIIIIIIIIINAGGGGGGGGGGE!

I cannot stop watching the last scene of There Will Be Blood. Once a day I'll be sitting here, minding my own business, when suddenly I'll think: "drainage." Then "drainage" becomes "DRAINAGE," "DRAINAGE" becomes "DRAIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINAGGGGGGGGE," and I'm cracking up. What an insane ending. It just grows and grows and grows. It's set up shop in my brain like a tumor.

(Do not watch unless you wish to be moderately spoiled.)

IIIIIIIII AM THE THIRD REVELATION! IIIIIIIIII AM THE THIRD REVELATION! I TOLD YOU I WOULD EAT YOU!!!!!!!!!

There Will Be Milkshakes

2008-01-18T11:33:00.000-08:00

[here there be mild spoilers me hearties, yarrr]

After a couple days of deliberation, I've made up my mind: There Will Be Blood is an awesome, awesome movie. Complicated and muddled, but awesome. I will need to see it again, I think, to make sure, but for now you can count me on the pro-milkshake side of things.

There cannot be any discussion about the beginning of the story. It's just phenomenal. From the brilliantly dialogue-free opening through the midpoint, we are talking about a perfect, colorful, and unarguably ingenious look into the early workings of oil industry, with the amoral Daniel Plainview as our guide and storytelling proxy.

Where opinion hinges is the story's subsequent change in focus. Once the oil is flowing with no end in sight, the film stares unendingly at Plainview himself. We move away from Plainview's tete-a-tete with minister Eli Sunday, and his increasingly odd relationship with his adopted son, towards a non-sequitur sidebar involving his half-brother. Guns and violence enter the equation. An embarrassing run-in with Sunday is played as comedy. Plainview, like the film, flails back and forth, around and around, until the inevitable devastating finale... all the while touching upon the business of oil only tangentially.

Then again, once the problem of getting at Little Boston's oil is laid to rest, the story's conundrum becomes that of Plainview: now what? And appropriately, each mirrors the other as they descend into madness and loss. Logic and reason disappear, but Plainview remains a force to be reckoned with.

And therein lies the problem. For some, that curveball represented a loss of focus, and a lack of purpose, on the part of P.T. Anderson. His conclusion leaves the oil industry behind, leaving nothing said about the after-effects of the industry on Little Boston, which seems to have been interpreted as laying up, copping out. We were promised an oil movie, and it became a tale about what we're supposed to do after reaching our goals.

What's wrong with that?

So the movie's not really about oil. Blood has more to say about wealth and success than it has to say about oil. The oil's a nice metaphor for human spirit and soul being sold off and sucked up, but Anderson clearly isn't as concerned with the further workings of the oil industry's upper echelon as he is with the question of what a bull like Plainview is supposed to do once he's reached the top. Concentrate on family? Rediscover old friendships? Let bygones be bygones? Enjoy the little things?

His run-in with Standard Oil lays out the problem very nicely: not only does Plainview see retirement, cashing in his chips, as acquiescence, but the argument over family's role in Plainview's life asks the question of of what else Plainview wants. Except he's just an oil man. He wants oil. And he's got it. And that's that. What happens then?

There's also the question of class and class mobility. It takes a force of nature to pull oneself from nothing up to the upper class. It requires ruthless struggle for survival, and blinding focus on vocation and purpose. All of that is certainly the case with Daniel Plainview, who begins as a solo, broken-legged dirt dog and becomes a millionaire. When that person reaches the top, does that attitude change? Why would it? Why should it? Why would someone so fixated upon competition ever just stop and rest?

I know this: those questions are a lot more interesting than seeing the oil industry develop for another hour.

I'll have to see it again to know just how good There Will Be Blood really is. But I do know that Anderson has answered, demonstrably, all the questions raised by his uneven work in Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love. It's a rich, mature work of genius. And a hell of a movie.

Press Button, Receive Bacon

2008-01-13T13:40:00.000-08:00

A compilation of really funny graffiti. (hat tip) The air-dryers are the best.

Easiest Post Ever

2008-01-11T13:56:00.000-08:00

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then this video is worth Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. Also, this is hilarious.

(hat tip)

The Black President

2008-01-08T14:48:00.000-08:00

Now that people are FINALLY coming around on Barack Obama, it's time to nip a future journalistic trope in the bud: he would not be the first black president.

That honor goes to the late Fela Kuti, co-inventor of Afrobeat and all-around kicker of Nigerian military government ass. He's the Black President.

The second Obama releases anything as scorching hot as Zombie or Expensive Shit, then we can talk about maybe sharing the title. Until then, Fela's the president, and Tony Allen is vice. (Vice Black President, or Black Vice President? Hmm.)

Best Albums Addendum

2008-01-03T08:37:00.000-08:00

A few leftover thoughts and reflections, following up on my best-of list.

* Best songs of the year:

Bloc Party - "I Still Remember"
Song of the year. I watched the video again as research, and got goosebumps. Almost a full year after the fact. Stunning. There is no excuse, whatsoever, for this song to have made no inroads on the American charts. It's not even hip!

LCD Soundsystem - "All My Friends"
Simple, bouncy, pithy, heartbreaking. James Murphy is living proof of David Byrne's theory that a deeply imperfect vocalist will connect with his audience better than a good one will. "All My Friends" and "Someone Great" are classic examples.

Jens Lekman - "Your Arms Around Me"
Another tune so perfect and classic that it couldn't possibly have come from the modern day. This song floors me.

Battles - "Tonto"
Absolutely epic. Any prog fan should shit a brick over the midsection of this one.

Spoon - "You Got Yr Cherry Bomb"
Incredible in any era. Totally timeless. White Texan geeks should not get the Motown sound so right.

The Twilight Sad - "Cold Days From The Birdhouse"
I'm a sucker for thick Scottish accents. They turn a great turn of phrase into something epic and authoritative. Not that the build up from slide-twang to heavy electric fuzz wouldn't have rocked the shit on its own. Boot raead thes fookin paeragraph agaen en a Scoattish accant, aen taell me ye disnae prefaer it thet wae. (Ye coont, ye.)

Honorable mention:
Band of Horses - "Is There A Ghost"
of Montreal - "The Past Is A Grotesque Animal"
Holy Fuck - "Lovely Allen"
Klaxons - "Golden Skans"
!!! - "Heart of Hearts"
Feist - "1 2 3 4"
Noisettes - "Sister Rosetta (Capture The Spirit)"

* I should have made it clearer how much I like The Field and Burial's respective work. Sticking it in the "overrated" ghetto doesn't really convey how good I think they are, or how much enjoyment I've gotten. Untrue in particular makes me wish I was drunk at 3AM with an hour's walk home ahead of me.

* The more I listen to Boxer by The National, the more I like it. I've had it in steady rotation for almost six months now, and it's still revealing new shit to me. Much as it's missing that one standout song to tie the record together, it keeps getting better and better nonetheless.

* Since posting the video for Simian Mobile Disco's "Hustler," I discovered that a new video was made for the track's inclusion on Attack Decay Sustain Release. It's messed up, clearly owing a debt of gratitude to Aphex Twin. (I'm not even a Richard D. James kinda guy, and I knew it was all about Aphex Twin freaking us all the fuck out. Though to be fair, if you encounter some seriously WTF messed-up shit in any context, chalking it up to James and Chris Cunningham is a safe bet. Come to daddy!!!)

Anyway, here's the new version... just as sleazy, but this time way funnier, and with a brand-new ending: punishment for being shallow! LOLOLOLOL!

* A few more albums that I should have mentioned:

Andrew Bird - Armchair Apocrypha
If you can write a hook around the phrase "thank God it's fatal," you're a champ.

Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings - 100 Days, 100 Nights
Nicole Willis and the Soul Investigators - Keep Reachin' Up
Poster children for retro soul, along with The Budos Band. Jones and Willis aren't bringing anything "new," but when it's this good, who cares? It's not as if the Stax/Motown sound is so revolting to our ears that we can't take a little bit more, right?

Manu Chao - La Radiolina
Mad genius. He gets docked points for reusing material from his work with Amadou & Mariam a couple years back. But as above, it's Manu Chao. It's not tired and repetitive... it's leftovers.

* Look, I'm a reasonable guy. Pitchfork thinks a lot of itself as a symbol/torchbearer, and acts accordingly, but when it comes to rating albums, they're usually a reliable source. I may not agree that last year's choice, The Knife's Silent Shout, was the best record of 2006, but it's defensible. I may not be a huge fan of love/hate acts like Clap Your Hands Say Yeah or Joanna Newsom, but I do acknowledge that they have something to offer and understand if people are deeply moved by their work. I may disagree when they champion a crappy band like Grizzly Bear, but if they want to stick their neck out and be totally wrong every now and then, that's their prerogative. I know where that comes from.

But don't hold up a piece of shit as the best album of the year. You're insulting everyone who actually made music over the last twelve months.

I can neither defend nor respect their selection. I truly believe that fans of Panda Bear have been punk'd; that enjoyment of this album represents an intellectual failure on the part of the listener; that the folks who call it a work of beauty, or a deeply moving blah blah blah or whatever, are fooling themselves; and that certain people want to call a piece of pretentious, non-musical shit like Person Pitch a work of genius, simply in order to look superior, to look like they see something you don't.

It is a sucker's bet. Someone smart enough to know better gets fooled by all the precision and hard work required to bring it to "life"... and in doing so looks past how boring, meandering and pointless it is.

Hey, I can look at a blank white wall and call it a work of artistic genius too. Doesn't mean there's something there.

It takes precision and hard work to scribble onto a wall with your own feces. That alone doesn't make the end result worthy of my time, let alone artistic.

Bottom line: if Person Pitch is where music is headed, I'm throwing myself into Verdi and Maria Callas and calling it a life.

Way Down In The Hole

2007-12-27T16:31:00.000-08:00

The Wire Season 5 arrives in just ten days. And then the clock starts ticking on the greatest, best, most important television show ever made.

In the meantime, here's a few ways to get excited.

* Watch the prequels. Cute.

* Yet another extensive David Simon interview, this one from a year ago. But it's got some great details in there. I'm constantly amazed that Simon gives such detailed interviews. Details are the trick. Someone can read 50 interviews with Brad Pitt hoping for that one detail to drop, but Simon consistently delivers the goods. The message is always the same in each 80-page conversation you read, but there's always something new.

* Kottke pointed out Heaven and Here, a fantastically erudite blog on the show and its meanings.

The first episode premieres Sunday... which means I should have it in my On Demand folder on Monday. I cannot wait.

Heima Gonna Beat Yo Ass

2007-12-19T19:36:00.000-08:00

Just saw the Sigur Rós concert documentary Heima, screened in full HD in a crowded theater. I'm glad I did, because now I can't imagine having seen it just on my little 32" TV. It was really something. I can't promise that non-fans will be entertained... but I can promise you'll see some jaw-dropping shit.

I want to declare that the bar has been raised, but it doesn't seem fair. It's not a traditional concert film / band documentary, in that there's very little storytelling about the band, or even the band with respect to their homeland. You don't get the usual "mugging for the camera" goofiness or "hey look we filmed an argument" drama. Instead, you really just get Iceland, the whole Iceland, and nothing but Iceland... with a special appearance by Sigur Rós. It was reminiscent of a nature documentary like Planet Earth or something more than a concert film.

But to be clear, that's a good thing. The photography alone makes Heima worth seeing on a big screen. I can't remember ever seeing real life shot and reproduced on screen so faithfully. There is no stylistic anything, no unnatural lighting, no manipulation. It looks exactly like it would look if you were standing there.

The concert footage is so calm and focused that you don't need any extra face time to get a feel for what the band is like. Without the classic MTV-style jump cuts and flashes, you can just sink in and watch them operate.

Oddly, the music wasn't even all that big a deal to me. I mean, it was awesome. "Glósóli" and "Hoppipolla" and "Popplagið" are always going to be showstoppers. And the quieter songs like "Heysatan" and "Staralfur" were arresting in their own way. But I was so mesmerized by the Icelandic countryside that anytime we were back with the band, I wanted to get back to nature.

So, I loved it. If this comes out on a high-def DVD format, it'll be on the short list for early purchases.

Reason #86 Why I Want To Be A Kangaroo

2007-12-14T10:57:00.000-08:00

Hat tips. NSFW if you work at a zoo... borderline otherwise.

Best Albums Of 2007

2007-12-09T09:54:00.000-08:00

In a world... where art is enumerated...

In a place... that only exists in your computer...

In a time... when bloggers lay claim to that which is not theirs...

One man... will pretend he knows something.

... the Dunkin Donuts guy.

Well... I was hoping to discuss Time To Make The Donuts, my biopic about Fred the Baker. However, those prick Weinstein brothers refuse to release it without first cutting it to shreds in an attempt to make it more "commercial." So I can't. Let's talk about music instead.

I couldn't just make a quick list and leave it at that. Having blogged so inconsistently means that I haven't really gone on the record concerning most of the music I liked. So I've got a big one brewing. And this isn't even the end... I've got a Best Songs post on deck after this.

First things last:

* I've included videos where possible, and mp3s only in one particularly critical case.

* Seems I didn't hear much hip-hop this year. My iTunes playlist for 2007 only shows four artists: Kanye West, Talib Kweli, Common, and Blue Scholars. (All recommended.) Haven't heard the new Jay-Z, Ghostface Killah or Wu-Tang either. I'm basically calling a mulligan on hip-hop this year. Just go here for some expertise, cause I got none.

* The Pitchfork mind-meld procedure is surprisingly gentle. But they do go in through the rectum.

OK... let's chug some Haterade and Red Balls so we can get things going.

The Very Worst
(or "How To Tell What The Good Parts Of The List Won't Sound Like")

Animal Collective - Strawberry Jam
I suppose this pegs me as someone who just doesn't get them. Maybe I'll eventually come around, or have some big epiphany. But until then, I will wear my ignorance like a goddamn badge, because all I hear is the sound of two computers blowing each other.

Deerhoof - Friend Opportunity
Absolute garbage. Congratulations, Deerhoof, you recorded the sound of three amateurs taking dumps on their instruments. The result is the musical equivalent of 2 Girls, 1 Cup. Enjoy your status as the torchbearers for the musical genius of Yoko Ono. Your music makes me feel bad for having given you a chance. Thank you. Thank you right to hell. You win the coveted Clap Your Hands Say Yeah award: worst album of the year.

Grizzly Bear - Friend EP
First guy to kick these fuckers in the nuts gets a cookie. I don't want these dopes having kids. I can't imagine, like, six pre-teen Grizzly Bear cover bands running around and ruining everyone else's lives.

[mercifully no video]

Menomena - Friend And Foe
Man... if you put the word "Friend" in your album, you apparently suck balls. With friends like these, shoot yourself.

Panda Bear - Person Pitch
I don't understand this at all. This guy's a sound editor, not a musician. He's just messing around. That's fine, but I could give a shit. Making matters worse, this is his solo project spent while away from his band: Animal Collective. Way to go, Noah, you made two of the most unlistenable turds of the year.

The Album I May Eventually Regret Not Liking

Sunset Rubdown - Random Spirit Lover
Here's the thing. I love Wolf Parade, and I love what Spencer Krug brings to the table. And yet I loathe Sunset Rubdown, and not just because it keeps Krug away from Wolf Parade. I should like it. But I find it boring and uninteresting. Maybe this will change. But last year's entry in this space (Joanna Newsom's Ys) hasn't gotten any better. So maybe not.

Brilliant Folks What Dropped The Ball With Their Followups

Bright Eyes - Cassadaga
It's not bad. I kinda like "Soul Singer In A Session Band" for some reason. But it's hard to believe this is the same guy who could have used some restraint on Lifted. The video has more to say than Conor Oberst does on the entire album. Let's all hope he gets it back together before he kills himself.

Editors - An End Has A Start
There's a few likable songs on here, but the record as a whole is a far cry from The Back Room. All the energy and verve of "Munich" and "Fingers In The Factories" got scaled back. I liked them better when they were repurposing Interpol's sound instead of Snow Patrol's.

Smokers Outside The Hospital Doors [embedding disabled... fuckers]

Interpol - Our Love To Admire
Speak of the devil. Antics and Turn On The Bright Lights have grown on me, but Our Love isn't doing anything that those albums don't do a lot better. Nobody's gonna go ripping off this one.

Jimmy Eat World - Chase This Light
Most disappointing album of the year. Looks like they're out of songs. The underrated Stay On My Side Tonight EP suggested that they still had their Clarity-era fastball, but this is mostly just the same old crap from a band that should know better. "Big Casino" is the catchiest tune they've got, and it's really better served as like the 4th or 5th track on an album of better, stronger songs.

Big Casino

Likable, And Really Good... But Getting Way Too Much Love

Burial - Untrue
+
The Field - Here We Go Sublime
I'm no expert here. Both are worthy of inclusion in my own personal techno pantheon, which is quite small. But I can't honestly rank them. They're both albums I wouldn't hesitate to play or recommend, but best of the year? Not for me.

[no video]

Justice - †
The trendy dance/techno pick, universally hailed and revered despite its mediocre, momentum-killing center of "Valentine" and "The Party." I'm not feeling the universal love for "D.A.N.C.E.," either. Great song, great video, really derivative. Maybe I just feel spoiled by "We Are Your Friends," which is better by a wide margin than any track on †. Who knows. But I can safely say that this is not a great album, and definitely not as great as it's considered by the criterati.

Kanye West - Graduation
I'll repeat my complaint about Late Registration: he's as earnest as anyone's ever been in the same position, but I still can't get past what a rapper with some actual tricks up his sleeve would have done with the same beats. Also, four words: "Drunk And Hot Girls." Oh Mos Def, why hast thou forsaken us?

Three Albums Worth A Shout-Out

Blue Scholars - Bayani
The Budos Band - The Budos Band II
Holy Fuck - LP

Partial Credit: Stuff I Might Have Ranked If I'd Heard Them Sooner

Bonde do Rolê - With Lasers
The Real Tuesday Weld - The London Book Of The Dead
Okkervil River - The Stage Names
Pela - Anytown Graffiti
Patrick Wolf - The Magic Position

Stop Me Before I Release Another EP

Tokyo Police Club - Smith, Your English Is Good
I'm amazed that they've basically written, like, two or three songs so far... played those same three songs about a dozen ways across their various EPs and singles... and every single song still feels unique and fresh. They've certainly got no shortage of ideas. I hope to Jesus their full-length is as good as their EPs have been.

[No time for videos! Get your Canadian asses in the studio!]

Noteworthy Runners-Up

Art Brut - It's A Bit Complicated
Likable. I'd have put it in the "disappointments" list up top, but they had such an impossible task... and Complicated is actually a fair follow-up anyway. I prefer Eddie Argos when he's turning a song genre inside out ("Good Weekend," "Rusted Guns of Milan") or being flat-out ridiculous ("18,000 Lira"... sounds like a lot of money) than when he's yapping about girls and lying around in bed... who wouldn't prefer the old Eddie Argos? But if this is what Art Brut has to be from now on, it's a happy little medium.

Band of Horses - Cease To Begin
Everything All The Time is kinda dry and boring, "The Funeral" excepted. The meatier, thicker sound on Cease To Begin does them a lot of favors. "Is There A Ghost" and "Cigarettes, Wedding Bands" are big improvements sound-wise on everything on Everything.

Feist - The Reminder
It falls where Neko Case fell for me last year. Highly recommended, frequently enjoyed, but not something I connected with. Not much going on beneath the veneer of the music, either... it's really just underproduced crooning. But still good.

Jose Gonzalez - In Our Nature
Yes, folks, it's yet another finger-style folk-rocking Latin Swede! When will someone come up with an original angle??? So yeah, he's incredible. Every Nick Drake comparison is a well-earned compliment, but Gonzalez has a cool, pulsing, slightly sinister calm that is decidedly unlike Drake's joyous, colorful devastation.

Klaxons - Myths of the Near Future
I wanted to love this more than I do, because there are some seriously awesome songs on here ("Atlantis to Interzone," "Golden Skans," "Gravity's Rainbow"). But the rest is lazy, unmemorable, disposable, and sometimes embarrassing. ("18:30 on the Julius Caesar / Lady Diana and Mother Teresa"? Huh? Mercury Prize my dong.) "Hook + Nonsense" works as a formula, but when the hook doesn't work, they're shit out of luck.

Talib Kweli - Eardrum
A case where stepping backwards puts you in the right direction. The beats on The Beautiful Struggle didn't have much bite; Eardrum's got bite to burn. Feels like a slicker version of Reflection Eternal, which is a good thing.

Jens Lekman - Night Falls Over Kortedala
Ingenious stuff. He does it all... humor, insight, sweetness, self-reference, pith, you name it. He's really nailed this lilting-English, postmodern Burt Bachrach act he's got. But if I don't listen to Bachrach, why would I listen to Lekman? I tip my cap, but this sort of thing ain't my bag, baby.

(Nothing suitable on YouToogleGube, but go here and download "Your Arms Around Me." Then come back and thank me. I like being thanked.)

Noisettes - What's The Time, Mr. Wolf?
That quality that allows you to simply say someone "rocks"? They have it. Decidedly different and unique. Enjoyed the shit out of them in person, and the album's just as strong. "Sister Rosetta" is one of my favorites of the year.

[Sister Rosetta (Capture The Spirit)... ironically, this video doesn't capture their spirit at all]

Simian Mobile Disco - Attack Decay Sustain Release
Awesome, straightforward electronica. More front-to-back consistent than most techno debuts. And any excuse to show the "Hustler" boner-fest in polite company is good enough for me!

The Twilight Sad - Fourteen Winters And Fifteen Autumns
Their spacey, meandering, and ultimately explosive sound is good and all, but it's all held together by their singer's northern English accent. Seriously. The accent really bangs home the iconic lyrics, especially in the opening track.

[no video]

#15-11: Kings Of The Losers

Arcade Fire - Neon Bible
A worthy successor to Funeral, proving beyond any shadow of a doubt that they're here to stay. Clearly they were working on the organ sounds, with much patience. No "buts" are coming, either... I just don't feel like putting it on my best-of list. I don't think I can displace any album on the forthcoming list with Neon Bible. (Bonus: watch them play the title track in an elevator... living it up while they're going down!)

Battles - Mirrored
The last album to fall from the list, after several flip-flops. Best sounding album of the year... the clearest, cleanest rock recording I've heard in a long time. And the drumming is absolutely nuts. But I ultimately docked this one a few points for losing me toward the end of the record. 1-5... best album of the year. After that, it's just studio wizardry. But all the praise they've received elsewhere is totally warranted and earned. Behold the genius that is "Tonto."

The Go! Team - Proof of Youth
Doesn't have the freshness of Thunder, Lightning, Strike, but it has its fair share of winners. Anything with the wrath of either Marcie or Mikey involved can't be all bad. Note how perfectly their "Doing It Right" video translates the band's grainy, lo-fi, Schoolhouse Rock sound into visuals:

Stars - In The Bedroom After The War
Just a solid, reliable, straight-ahead pop album. Thoroughly enjoyable, and unremarkable in a good way. It's comforting to know that someone's out there playing plain old well-made pop.

Ted Leo + Pharmacists - Living With The Living
I really wanted to show Ted more love. It stands up to his best work, growing on me the more I listen to it. "Sons of Cain" kicks all kinds of ass. But the few missteps he makes (e.g. "The Unwanted Things" and its phony-baloney reggae) really stand out... and not in an endearing way, like "Bottle of Buckie" or "Bomb. Repeat. Bomb." In a skip-me-every-time way. When you're a punk-pop trio, your margin for error is pretty thin when it comes to genre experiments, and those here didn't work.

#10-1: The Top Ten

We start out with a huge upset:

10. Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?
I usually hate shrill music like this. Until about a month ago, I was going to award them the Clap Your Hands Say Yeah award for overrated, intolerable trash. Then two things happened: 1) I remembered that Clap Your Hands Say Yeah actually put out an album themselves, and 2) I revisited Hissing Fauna and lost my shit. They went from the Worst List to the Top 10. Bravo, ~~gentlemen~~ Kevin Barnes.

This Brothers Chaps-directed video for "Heimdalsgate," one of the most randomly bizarre videos I've ever seen, had a lot to do with the turnaround.

9. Radiohead - In Rainbows
This album needs a slap. The universal acclaim MUST be given a rest. It's good... it's not that good. It's not even amongst their best work! How can it be on the top of so many lists?

Something tells me the backstory with their self-release, and the ensuing media feeding frenzy, played a huge role in the album's toasty reception. After all, what really sells music to nerds is the backstory. All their parents and friends like totally died n' stuff, and that's why they called it "Funeral!" I'm gonna go blog about these guys! And so forth.

Bottom line for me... a great album from a great band, one that lived up to my expectations. And that's about it.

8. Bloc Party - A Weekend In The City
This one bounces around all over the place... it's gone from my top 3, to out of the top 10 entirely, to back in. It's been sliding around like soap in a prison shower. I slotted it above In Rainbows at the last second. But what am I supposed to do? It's both a bitter disappointment and an explosive success at the same time.

I'm still torn. It's one of the performances of the year. It follows through on its quasi-concept-album ambitions, and constitutes a leap forward for the band both musically and lyrically. But this isn't the "top 10 performances" list. The filler between classics like "Hunting For Witches" and "I Still Remember" isn't really memorable. Likable enough, but those weaker songs are mostly unworthy of the band. It's hard not to wish they'd done more. How high can you rank an album like that? And then I listen to "I Still Remember" again, and I (ha) remember what I love so much about it. My brain will explode if I consider moving it up or down the list again, so I'm leaving it right here.

7. The National - Boxer
It took many, many listens for me to upgrade it from "good ambient rock for those at-work moments" to "I might actually choose to give this some undivided attention." Nothing on Boxer comes close to the highlights of 2005's Alligator ("Abel," "Mr. November") but it's still an deep, accomplished album. There's more going on than meets the ear on the first listen... maybe not as much as the band's most ardent fans and defenders think, but more than you'd get on a single quick listen. It is the very model of a "grower."

6. !!! - Myth Takes
I was a bit too hard on Nic Offer in my initial review, for which I've since apologized. I didn't give him adequate credit for having scaled back the not-as-clever-as-he-thinks lyrics. There are groan-inducing moments (most of "Must Be The Moon," and the previously-deconstructed "Sweet Life") but Myth Takes still contains his best work. And that's before getting to the music, which is a gigantic step forward, a refinement and expansion of the sound they created on !!! and Louden Up Now. Great stuff.

5. The New Pornographers - Challengers
With every listen, the spreading of wings doesn't feel nearly as drastic as it did the first few times around. Apart from the more-obvious-than-ever comparisons to Fleetwood Mac, the band comes through with its deepest and thickest work yet. Each song on Challengers could have been re-arranged to work in the band's typical sugary mode, but none of them would have been quite right. In fact, the more familiar songs of theirs feel out of place. (Not that they're unwelcome.) Regardless, the changes are a success.

(another non-representative video, but at least this one has a bunch of Neko)

4. Apples in Stereo - New Magnetic Wonder
My #1 on the Irrational Love charts. All of the proper songs are catchy as all hell; it's a hit-or-miss proposition without any misses. And the production is just over-the-top insane; it plays like Robert Schneider's resume for working with other bands. If I have a beef, it's that the interstitial amuse bouche interludes are kinda distracting. My track-skipping finger gets itchy when they come up. However, as was the case with Sufjan Stevens' Come On Feel The Illinoise!, the little nuggets become less of a distraction with each listen. And they give the album some structure.

(the "Can You Feel It" video doesn't do them any favors)

3. Modest Mouse - We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank
The blew-me-away rock-out album of the year. It's a shame that people thought it was a step back, because it's a phenomenally accomplished rock album. They took the sound they perfected on Good News and used that power to rock our collective balls off. If I had a band, I'd want to knock people's cremaster muscles backwards too, turning men into women and women into men with the immovable force of my rock. That's not quite what Modest Mouse did to me, but it's pretty obvious that gender reversal is what they were after. (Huh? Nautical theme? I don't see that at all. Nope, it's clearly about sex changes.)

2. Spoon - Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
I'm amazed that they can keep churning out music this good, while making it seem so simple and effortless. It's not like their songs are complicated. But somehow they just have a feel for what's classic and timeless without being unoriginal. "The Underdog" may be reminiscent of Billy Joel, and "You Got Yr Cherry Bomb" may but it's still their own. Who out there is trying to be classic? They're a truly gifted band.

(To find out what the big deal is with the robot, watch him shake his grant-money-maker to Gimme Fiction's "I Turn My Camera On")

1. LCD Soundsystem - Sound of Silver
Perfect. Brilliant dance-pop from start to finish, with nary a stinker on the entire record. The only song you can nitpick is album closer "New York I Love You," but I choose not to. Everything else... just perfect. Not much else to say.

Phew... I've just about had it. If I missed anything, let me know down below. And look for my list of best songs in the near future.

(P.S. If you read all of the 3,325 words that preceded this, you get another cookie. And don't forget how you can get that first one. Get out there and kick Grizzly Bear in the balls, soldier!!!)

Damn You, Walt Whitman!

2007-12-05T11:54:00.001-08:00

This link has nothing to do with the poem, but any excuse to make the following statement is a good one:

"LEAVES OF GRASS," MY ASS!!!!!

(haha)

Katherine Heigl Also Thinks "Knocked Up" Sucks

2007-12-03T21:09:00.000-08:00

When I first saw Knocked Up and got really bullshit about it, I thought I'd be in the minority about it. Turns out that doesn't seem to be the case; most conversations I have about the movie naturally turn towards the story being implausible and stupid. At first, I suspected my objections were a result of my mood as much as anything; I'm relieved to know I'm not alone in wondering what the hell was going on here.

Now comes even more objections... except these objections come from someone who was actually in the movie.

"[Knocked Up was] a little sexist. It paints the women as shrews, as humorless and uptight, and it paints the men as lovable, goofy, fun-loving guys. It exaggerated the characters, and I had a hard time with it, on some days. I'm playing such a bitch; why is she being such a killjoy? Why is this how you're portraying women? Ninety-eight percent of the time it was an amazing experience, but it was hard for me to love the movie.

I do join the A.V. Club blogger in wondering exactly how little responsibility Katherine Heigl thinks she had for the "killjoy" portrayal. And I'm definitely on board with Knocked Up, warts and all, being brave enough to not shy away from showing women acting like uncontrollable, wrongheaded nutbags. God knows, it actually does happen every once in a while, so Judd Apatow gets props for that.

But the proof is in the pudding. I walked away from that movie rolling my eyes at the thought of Seth Rogen ever putting up with that woman's shit. The end result is a nutbag woman doing nutbag woman things... and a director communicating empathy for it. Puhleeze.

Strictly from a storytelling perspective, he's been given no good reason to stick with her. And it's not from her character being one-dimensional; it was actually a very deep portrait of a stressed-out woman making mistakes. That she is as much as fault as anyone allows Rogen's character to approach the final conflict without having to correct a cliched "stupid man mistake" like most romantic leads have to do. That in turn allows us in the audience to concentrate on what Rogen will do, instead of wondering how he will correct an obvious mistake. It frees the character to choose a path without being hindered by group notions of "right" and "wrong"... it's strictly a personal decision. That's actually a nice touch.

If only it didn't lead to such a damn fool ending. After two hours of plausibility, it sucks to see five minutes of utterly laughable bullshit undermine everything that preceded it. Goddammit. And now I'm pissed off all over again. Why did a smart movie have to be so stupid? Grrrr.

Anyway, I fully intend to see Knocked Up again in colder blood. The depth of my disappointment suggests that further viewings are necessary. After all, it was indeed a laugh-out-loud hilarious movie, and I want so badly to love it. So I'll give it another chance. I'm not likely to budge on the bottom line, but we'll see.

WIN AT YELLING!

2007-12-03T08:45:00.000-08:00

My love for the criminally unheralded film Idiocracy has been documented frequently around here. Me and, like, 12 other people like it a lot.

Naturally, then, those 12 people and I are the target audience for... get ready... Brawndo: The Thirst Mutilator! Unless kottke and the Googletubes are lying to me again, someone is actually making Brawndo. It's got electrolytes!!!

This commercial actually does more to suggest it's a hoax than to promote the "product":

Fox took such a bath on Idiocracy that it'd be natural for them to license and monetize anything they could from the experience. I'm in favor of them making back as much money as they can, if only so that they might feel less discouraged from taking a similar risk in the future.

Or maybe they gave up the rights to Brawndo to one of the brand name conglomerates (Carl's Jr., Starbucks, Costco, American XXXpress) that Mike Judge hornswaggled, as a sign of corporate good-faith.

Or maybe it's a big fat fake. That seems more likely. But for now... pretty awesome.

Oi, I've Got The Death Sentence On Twelve Systems, Guvnah!

2007-12-01T11:16:00.000-08:00

Star Wars is on HBO right now. They just showed the Mos Eisley cantina sequence. To spice things up this time, I muted the sound and instead sang the "Derka Derka" theme from Team America: World Police over the intro. It was AWESUMMMMMMM

After I'd had my fun, up came a sequence that has always bothered me: the assault of Luke by the fiendish, dastardly Dr. Cornelius Evazan.

What bothers me is the looped dialogue. The lines come nowhere near Dr. Evazan's lip movements. Even with the prosthetics obscuring the actor's lips, they can't even get close. The noticeable lack of sync led me to believe that the line was changed, not that the looping was poor.

So today I decided to ask the Googlewebs what the original line was. The answer lies in the video below, a montage of production footage from the shoot. There are many, many tasty nuggets to be savored (please do) but once you get to the 5:38 mark, you'll hear the original Dr. Evazan dialogue. Turns out the lines didn't get changed... but the actor's accent did.

Cockney! Sweet.

But having heard the original, I'm inspired to speak words that have never been spoken on the Internet until now: I agree with a George Lucas decision. (It's true. That sentence is a Googlenope. Or, at least, it was.)

Anyway, the accents are more earthy, and match the actors' motion much better, but they're also kinda distracting. The accents identify Dr. Evazan and the bartender as Brits (or Shakespeareans) much more than the dubbed accents do. Drawing attention to the dubbing is bad, but it probably would have been worse to draw a comparison between Mos Eisley denizens and lovable Dickensian rogues.

So yeah... nicely done, George Lucas. (Well, 1977 George Lucas. I qualified my praise! Take THAT!)

Canadian PSAs Are As Strong As Their Currency

2007-11-28T11:59:00.000-08:00

Canadian PSAs getting some huge props today.

First, via Deadspin, comes this horrible, HORRIBLE kitchen safety PSA:

I don't think she's making head chef next year! Did I say horrible? How about horrifying? I'll never cook again.

But to lighten things up, let's mix in a bit of sex with our violence...

Welp... there goes my sex drive.

Today's Dose of Musical Blasphemy

2007-11-02T10:56:00.000-07:00

I'm unblocked! I can finally stop swallowing down the bilious, hateful things I've been thinking all these weeks! So let's make ourselves a sacred cow hamburger.

Now that I'm working from my brand-new, Ikea-sweatshoppified, dorm-reminiscent PC hutch on a daily basis, my musical selections are no longer limited to whatever I bothered to load up in the office. My entire CD library is at my disposal. This has a few notable benefits:

Reminiscence
Fun turn-back-the-clock theme days. For example, my first order of business was to dig into the high school and college era, back when I was taking cues primarily from the radio. I listened appreciatively to some albums that would probably make my head spin today. I swam out past the breakers and watched the world die. I slowly walked down the hall, faster than a cannonball. And it was awesome.

Theme Days
Pearl Jam day! Everything from Ten through Binaural! R.E.M. day! Document through New Adventures In Hi-Fi! Ben Harper day! And so forth.

Correcting Past Mistakes
If something slips through the cracks, I can give it some more attention. For example, on Pearl Jam Day, I paid very close attention to No Code, the album on which the band clearly and unmistakably turned off the no-seat-belts sign from there on out. It's still mediocre (with a few exceptions like "Hail, Hail") and clearly a birth-defective cousin to both Yield and Binaural, but it's not as unmemorable as I once felt. Standing it up against Ten, Vs. and Vitalogy is clearly unfair.

I'll get into specifics on some of those other discoveries in a later (and longer, if you can believe it) post. But for now, let's get blasphemous.

With Radiohead's In Rainbows making the rounds, I thought it'd be fun to cue up Kid A, an album I never really cared for. I tipped my cap to the band after a few listens (you can't argue their brilliance) but apart from "Natural Anthem" and the opening track, it never made much of an impression on me. But I figured that my modern-day self, a much more open-minded listener with more complex tastes than my 21-year-old self, might have a different reaction.

So I popped it on. And I did indeed have a different reaction:

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

I was shocked to have so different a reaction than what I expected. My bias in favor of "Natural Anthem" and against pretty much all the other tracks actually got worse. I'd say six or seven years is enough lead time to determine whether an album is really all that good or not. Unlike the famous Onion headline, I'm not getting into it, and I won't. It's unfocused and meandering. It has its high points, but the lesser tracks are boring to me.

I guess I just have a bias against experimentation for the sake of it... or, at least, subjecting us to it. The fact that they're brilliant doesn't mean their output is just as brilliant, nor should it. Who cares if it's a landmark if it's not all that good? Bitches Brew was a landmark for Miles Davis... and for the destruction of jazz. Enjoy Your Rabbit is a landmark for Sufjan Stevens, but it's nowhere near as good as the albums that have followed it. Likewise with Kid A, and to a lesser extent Amnesiac.

However, I'm grateful that those two albums influenced Hail To The Thief, the best of their post-OK Computer output. It's an ideal blend of their border-pushing electronica fetishes and the this-is-your-brain-on-drugs-[pause]-THWACK adrenaline rush that's their true strong suit. The best five or six songs on Hail are better than everything on Kid A. The fact that one couldn't have happened without the other only goes so far.

Maybe I'm just pulling a Flowers For Algernon and reverting to my old ways. Perhaps I got a taste of Everclear and the Foo Fighters and, like a heroin addict who's been clean for a few years, I got sucked back in. (Losing myself to a white-trash hell... lost inside my heroin girl!!!) But I just gave Kid A a second spin, and had the same reaction: so what??? So I guess that's really what I think.

My Majorly Massive Non-Dismissive Missive On Moving

2007-11-01T21:55:00.000-07:00

I get the sense that most people haven't really heard from me since I moved. Let's rectify that.

After exactly seven years in the DC area, I shipped off to Boston... TO FIND! MY! WOODEN! LEG! And I'll be looking for it from my apartment in the aptly named Mid-Cambridge neighborhood, equidistant from Inman, Harvard and Central Squares. I'm closest to "stuff" in Central, though the neighborhood demographic and appearance are more like Harvard. So if that leg I lost whilst climbing about in the topsails turns up in any of the fancy, high-priced Euro-style pawn shops in my neck of the woods... or perhaps in one of the twelve local Crate & Barrel shops, refashioned into a set of matching coffee stirrers... I'm all over it.

Unexpected and unfortunate unidexterity aside, I'm really thrilled to be back. My situation worked out just about exactly how I'd want it to work out. I'm in a great spot... a quick hop from anything I'd need, and a quick T ride from everything else. My apartment is nice, furnished with all the luxury items a cultured manchild-about-town could ever need. I was quite lucky to find an apartment on such short notice that covered the heating bill and also had an electric peg-leg sharpener in the bathroom.

(Here's where I stop pretending to have one leg. I am not a unidexter.)

So, some thoughts on being back...

Being back. (Great segue!) I'm adjusting, albeit slowly. It's becoming less and less of a big, romantic deal to be here... every bill that arrives at my new address reminds me of that.

But just because it's less so doesn't mean it's not so. I haven't stopped marveling at the brick sidewalk under my feet every day, nor at the weirdly-shaped streets that probably weren't so weirdly-shaped 400 years ago. And I still appreciate being able to run along the Charles, looping around at the fields where I had soccer practice in high school.

It isn't as universally awe-inspiring as casually playing ultimate under the Washington Monument... but in a way, it kinda is.

Cantabridgianity. This may not seem like a major adjustment, but it's huge. Walking around Cambridge with a sense of ownership is just totally bizarre to me. Growing up, I reserved the status symbol of Cambridge residency for Brahmins, Ivy Leaguers, professors, politicos, snobs, pain-in-the-ass Euros, and the self-consciously well-to-do. Not me, the son of public school teachers, the middle-class bankruptcy survivor. Moving to Cambridge seemed as likely as moving to Mongolia. Strictly a fictional proposal.

Of course, it's a silly way to look at it. It's not that big a deal. But it sure seems like a big deal. The fact that I'm sitting in my Cambridge apartment right now kinda blows my mind, in a good way.

My pre-Comcast routine. Prior to getting internet installed at home (and, by the way... FUCK YOU, COMCAST) I had a nice daily grind mooching wifi from cafes. It was a nice routine... plunk myself down at Darwin's, buy tons of food that I normally wouldn't because I'm mooching their wifi all day, exchange pleasantries with the mostly female employees and ~~underage~~ 100% legal customers of the non-denominational cafe... all that's a big step up from the office environment I left behind. (The one I'm simulating seamlessly from 400 miles away.) It's not a sustainable lifestyle, but one I enjoyed while I could.

My apartment. I've grown to like my apartment. I didn't like it much when it was empty, but I liked where it was situated. But now that I've furnished it (well, almost) I'm beginning to like it a lot.

The building isn't as ideal as its neighborhood, but the roughness around the edges can be chalked up to it being a self-built, self-managed mid-rise, as opposed to a professionally developed... development. That's something I can get behind. I'll forgive a broken AC outlet or two in exchange for the knowledge that I'm not helping the filthy rich get filthier or richer.

That's not to say it's a hole. The bathroom, for instance, is nice enough that I felt obliged to buy, for the first time in my life, a shower curtain. And not just any shower curtain... one that matched the tiling. It's not stunning, but it's a start. Maybe by the time my kids graduate college I'll give a shit what the rest of my living space looks like.

Then there's the balcony, which doesn't do me much good now that it's getting down into the 40s at night. I've been looking longingly at the planters at Home Depot, thinking about how to spruce things up a bit out there... put in an herb garden, plastic furniture, etc... only to realize that the basil plant of my dreams is about to be draped in a snow drift. But come spring... it'll be nothing but fresh basil and rosemary up in this bitch!!!

Boston is expensive. Want some advice? Don't be a neurotic, short-fused headcase who can't share space with other people. Learn to deal with minor personality quirks. It will save you thousands if you ever move to Boston, especially if you like things like "clean dishes" and "heat." Ohhh, dishwasher. How I need you.

(Call me a spoiled, insufferable, prissy little pussy who has grown up to become everything he hated as a child if you must... but this is a simple matter of public health. I've seen the foul beasts that emerge from the dish-stacked sink when I'm left to my own devices. I flatly refuse to subject my neighbors to filth and disease just because I want to prove a point. Should someone's poor old grandmother die because someone on the internet thinks I'm a wuss? Why not go kick a homeless guy in the nuts while you're at it? In summation, I need a dishwasher because I love homeless children more than you do, you inconsiderate prick.)

Cambridge is nicer than Silver Spring... I'll defend Silver Spring until I'm blue in the face. Over seven years, I watched it grow from a shallow turd of urban blight into a mere shitstain on the side of the Toilet of Columbia. What a difference a few years can make! All kidding aside, Silver Spring became a community worth taking the Metro (and leaving the District) to check out. But it's not Cambridge. You can't beat someplace that has so much character. Cambridge will always be Cambridge; Silver Spring hopes someday to be Bethesda. Chalk one up for those of us on the wrong side of the river.

...but it definitely fails the class diversity test. The most underrated thing about Silver Spring is how diverse a place it is. Even after the recent Bethesdification of the downtown area, it's still a minority-driven and largely middle-class city. How long that will last, I don't know. But that's one striking difference with Cambridge: it's not narrow, but it's more narrow. Having become accustomed to being a minority, it's odd to be back in the majority, in terms of both race and class. Not better or worse, just foreign. Just an observation, based on a few weeks' walking around.

Thank Jesus it doesn't fail the pizza test. DC is the worst pizza city ever. Much as I adored a late-night jumbo slice after a night in Adams Morgan, the faithfully excellent 2 Amys, or Armand's delivery, Washington is a gimmick pizza city. Go there and try to find a regular slice of pizza, from a typical greasy pizza shop. Not possible. The market for plain old pizza just plain old sucks. You can find a 1300-calorie behemoth, a Chicago-style cake slice, or a Denominazione Originata e Controllata-approved Neapolitan pie. But you cannot find a good old slice of pizza. Thank God I'm back in a city that appreciates a slice of friggin pizza.

Well... I suppose it warrants mentioning that the best slice of pizza in walking distance comes in squares. It counts as a gimmick, but it really, really isn't fair at all to Pinocchio's. They do serve cheese in regular slices, so they count. And my point stands if you use Il Panino, which owns every pizzeria in DC without even being a pizza shop in the strictest sense. And Pinocchio's owns Il Panino, though not by much. So there.

Bars. For now, let's just say I prefer them. Two words: People's Republik. Game, set, match for Cambridge. And how many DC bars have scorpion bowls, hmmm????????

In fairness, I have not yet been out on a typical Friday night yet. So I will refrain from judging with any finality until I've done that. I also haven't come up against any insane last call times either, so once that happens I may change my mind. But until then, I'm pro-Mass.

In conclusion... come visit. I even have guest parking decals to share!

We now return you to your regular, fluffy, frothy blog of music reviews and stuff.

Krampus, The Christmas Monster

2007-10-16T08:55:00.000-07:00

So, I've been a bad blogger of late. No posts in four weeks, and only five since the beginning of August. I've slipped into the same trap that all casual bloggers fall into: the No Obligation To A Regular, Paying Readership Trap.

Not that nothing's been happening. I've been telling everyone about this enormous blog post I have brewing, concerning my recent relocation to Boston. How it's an escape from the music reviews, Dick In A Box jokes, and other stupid links that usually litter the landscape around these parts. But the post has become clogged up. The works have been gummed. It currently discusses things that happened "yesterday," in reference to October 5th. It's kind of a shame... I was hoping I could use a more substantial, personal post to signal my return from blogging obscurity.

But no. Here's a stupid link.

The speaker below is Spencer Krug of Wolf Parade, Sunset Rubdown (the subject of the link), and more side projects than you have fingers to count them with. In reference to Sunset Rubdown's latest album art:

Pitchfork: What is on the back cover [of Random Spirit Lover]?

SK: Oh, that's the monster.

Pitchfork: Obviously.

SK: That's Krampus. In Austria, at Christmas they have Santa Claus, but he's also followed by Krampus, who kind of beats children on the head if they're bad, and I think if I remember correctly, if they've been really bad, puts them in a basket and takes them away.

And I read an article [about the tradition], and if you look at pictures in Austria around Christmas, way more people are running around in costume dressed as this thing. And, like, partying, hanging around fires. And the costumes get really elaborate. So you can imagine being five years old, and being taught that this thing is going to come get you, and having the people chasing after you--

Pitchfork: That really changes the meaning of Christmas.

Krampus. For those scoring at home, the question was "but... what about the children???" and Austria's answer was "have a horned freak hit them on their heads." I'm just stunned that the people who brought you Hansel and Gretel and the Pied Pedophile also came up with a Christmas monster who puts misbehaving children in fucking baskets.

Don't let my sarcasm deceive you. I've got a fever, and the only prescription is more Krampus. The Venture Bros. is a start, but let's actually get him signed to a multi-year personal services contract. Once he signs, the other companions of Saint Nicholas will follow, and hell will rain down on all the children of America. Please, God, send your humble servant Krampus to our shores, as was prophesied in the book of Mark: "and God did so love the world, that He gave his only Krampus. / And lo did Krampus beateth the shit / out of those begotten by the meek."

I Cannot Agree More With This Sentiment

2007-09-20T12:26:00.000-07:00

Die Yuppie Kickball. Indeed. This site wins the internet for all sorts of reasons:

Their visual mission statement.
Analysis
Pranks
They link to this guy. Fuck the heck?!? What's stupider... hating Wonderland, thinking to evaluate it based on its "kickball bar" attibutes, or trumpeting how big a moron you are all over the internet?

[h/t DCist]

Creative Arts Emmy In A Box

2007-09-11T07:58:00.000-07:00

How was my day made? By learning that "Dick In A Box" won an Emmy for best original song. Huzzah! For just one night, sanity and boxed genitals reigned supreme.

Does it make up for the hideous Oscar-night loss by "Uncle Fucker" seven years ago? Absolutely not. That's a pain that not even time can heal. But far be it from me to begrudge the success of two guys who gift-wrapped their penises for Kwanzaa.

Additional props to Andy Samberg for his acceptance speech:

"I think it's safe to say that when we first set out to make this song, we were all thinking 'Emmy!'" Samberg said in accepting the award Saturday for best original music and lyrics.

"The other thing we were thinking was, 'Hey! Here's this young up and comer, Justin Timberlake, who is clearly very talented and could clearly use a break,'" Samberg said. "So, Justin, if you're out there, congrats to you, kid."

Finally, check out the end of this CNN story (feel free to skip everything about the obnoxious attention whore) for a fantastic summary of the "Dick In A Box" video:

Andy Samberg of "SNL" said Saturday that he had yet to be asked by the TV academy to perform the tune with Timberlake on the Fox broadcast, but he was willing. Timberlake, on a concert tour, is scheduled to be in Los Angeles next weekend.

The subject of their "(Blank) in a Box" video: wrapping a certain part of the male anatomy and presenting it to a loved one as a holiday present.

Give that man a Pulitzer. I could never have boiled "Dick In A Box" down to its essence so perfectly. I would have loved to be the guy who took a crack at it, though.

Today's Nugget Of Truth

2007-09-06T15:37:00.001-07:00

Not that a catfight between Nas and Bill O'Reilly over the former's upcoming performance at Virginia Tech is newsworthy or important, but I really enjoyed how downright sane Nas sounds here. [h/t Idolator]

The best part is the truest part: "You can't talk to a person like that." PWN3D!!! You can't damn someone's point of view any more effectively and finally than Nas did. Nicely done. If only he'd taken on Jay-Z with such force, maybe he wouldn't have disappeared for all those years.