Philip Seymour Hoffman died of a heroin overdose on Super Bowl Sunday, 2014. He was a great actor and about as close to the archetypal tortured artist that Hollywood has nowadays. He was open in his past with drugs and his recent, final relapse. Perhaps that relapse is why America got to see Paul Thomas Anderson fumble through an interview with Jon Stewart to promote The Master instead of the star of the movie.
Twister was my introduction to him, but the first one I remember him being in was Happiness. It should be noted that I did not finish that Todd Solondz movie (I gave up during the scene where one of the characters masturbates to teen boy magazines in the back seat of his car) but I still remember Hoffman's tortuously painful scenes making obscene phone calls to a woman he's obsessed with. I still haven't finished that movie, though the synopsis says his character gets at least a little bit of a redemption.
The funniest film I saw him in was State & Main, a satire where he plays a screenwriter realizing his vision is going to be chewed up and spit out by the Hollywood machine. He gets help from Rebecca Pidgeon's local bookstore owner, who is presented as an almost literal Greek muse. The film is very inside-baseball but not so much as to alienate viewers; the characters are barely hanging on to the belief that they're making art, but the film itself knows it's all bullshit.
Most recently I saw him in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, though his performance seemed like a sleepy, check-cashing exercise than an attempt to elevate the material. It was interesting to see him in a movie that relied almost completely on franchise appeal, but he didn't have much to work with, and what he did have was merely a set-up for the politically-minded finale.
Synecdoche, New York may live on as his masterpiece, though I was lukewarm on it after the first viewing. Its so self-consciously a tour-de-force, written and directed by a guy whose entire oeuvre is about looking inward, usually literally (the hole in the wall in Being John Malkovich, the tricky memory in Eternal Sunshine). Hoffman was so actor-y, so up front with displaying the techniques he employed to move an audience, yet they rarely verged into parody. Paul Thomas Anderson may have called these idiosyncrasies "business", but they were an integral part of his toolkit as an actor.
Seeing him act was a lot like watching the original version of The Blob. Steve McQueen's Method chops put him on such a different level than the rest of the old school actors that it's like he's in a completely different movie. Maybe that's what's so disappointing about his role in Catching Fire. Surrounded by one Oscar winner and another respected veteran*, he decided to merely bend down to the level of the material. He was under no obligation to do so, but seeing him work his magic in a tentpole blockbuster would have been an amazing thing to experience.
*Typing that out, I just realized Jennifer Lawrence has one Oscar and Donald Sutherland has never even been nominated.
Thursday, February 6, 2014
Monday, January 20, 2014
The Beatles Anthology
The Beatles Anthology is a weird beast: as a documentary, it takes a narrow view of the Beatles, seen strictly through the member's eyes (and what they chose to remember), tiptoeing around their massive egos and the less than complimentary aspects of their personal lives. The accompanying CDs are even stranger, more of a vault clearing exercise than a true anthologized collection of their best tracks. To its credit, the CDs include thorough liner notes that take fans through the band's songwriting process in almost excruciating detail. Evidently there was also a book, though it came out five years after the documentary and I wasn't even aware of it until recently.
I recently re-watched the documentary for the first time since it originally aired on PBS, among the excitement of a "new" Beatles track, "Free as a Bird", the video for which got a prime time network television airing. I had forgotten how on-the-nose the video was with populating the screen with references to their songs. The track itself was a John Lennon demo that the rest of the band, along with ELO's Jeff Lynne, overdubbed to completion. Given Jeff Lynne's instantly identifiable production techniques, and the surviving members entrenched solo tendencies, it comes off as a hodgepodge of styles, though given its origins that's not a big revelation.
What struck me the most about the documentary is how chronologically unbalanced it is, spending most of the 10 hours focusing on the Beatles beginnings and pre-Sgt Pepper period. It's a long slog to the era-defining concert at Shea Stadium, which is treated like a cliffhanger, despite the band still having another American tour ahead of them (though it was hampered by controversy and low ticket sales). After the band decides to stop touring, their last 4 records are covered in the final two 70-minute episodes. Perhaps it was the lack of in-studio footage, but the band's studio years are as worthy of dissection as their live years, when they played the same 30 minute set for several years. Sgt Pepper's gets screen time, mostly to show how the band changed their recording approach, though besides Let It Be it was the worst recording experience they had. Oddly enough, while some of the songs on the White Album are discussed, the actual iconic cover is never once shown on screen. Let It Be takes up most of the last episode, though it's also the one that’s well-documented despite basically being the record of their breakup. It was a bit funny that Phil Spector got zero mention, perhaps as retaliation for his bizarre behavior and the general consensus that he ruined the record with his signature overdubs. Remember this documentary came out almost 20 years ago, when Spector was a crazy has-been, not a convicted murderer.
The second surprising thing is how often entire songs are played, when most modern music documentaries will play about 30 seconds then cut to a talking head. Curious to see uncut footage of the band on Swedish TV, being awkward with the host? It's all there. Ever wanted to know what it was like to try and hear the band over the screams of 50,000 fans? The barely-audible video is there in its entirety. Oddly enough, there are at least 2 instances of the members discussing the difficulty in playing live in the era before stage monitors, then showing footage of a sloppy performance where they barely kept it together. That goes along with the entire project's odd insistence on showing the band struggling musically, either with flubbed takes on the CDs or their increasingly poor live performances at the end of their touring career.
There's an odd bit during a press conference (again, a large portion of it is shown for some reason) where the interviewer mentions John's wife at the time. He's clearly unprepared for it, and manages to ad-lib a bit about not knowing who she is to get a laugh, but it's telling that they decided to keep that bit in. The rest of the band's significant others, besides Yoko Ono, barely get a mention. There's no talk about their early girlfriends, John Lennon's secret marriage to Cynthia Lennon, or the tension between George Harrison and Eric Clapton over Patti Boyd, who would eventually leave the Beatle and inspire "Layla". But why should they include any of that? It's none of our business, though they've lived the majority of their lives in the public eye and prying into their personal lives in a bit of a national pastime. It seems like maybe there was an early edit that did include more personal information, thought the living member's used their power to excise those parts from the film.
John Lennon's absence, though he was presumably represented by Yoko Ono behind the scenes, meant that he was shown in the least flattering light. One of the oddest, most incongruous parts of the whole thing was a sequence where the band remembered John's habit of mimicking the stereotypical movements of a retarded person for a laugh. It's absolutely horrible to watch, and not only do they mention it for some reason, there is even high quality footage of him acting out on stage in front of an audience. Why was this included at all, if only for the surviving members to get back at a member they clearly were irritated with much of the time?
There's quite a few "what were they thinking" moments in the documentary, but the most pointless, and the one that me & my wife are still laughing about, is a montage of the group visiting some islands they were looking at buying, set to the tune of "Baby You're a Rich Man". It goes like this: The band says they thought about buying an island together for privacy from the outside world. There are home movies of them on boats. And that's it. Remember, the White Album is barely mentioned, but the band's holiday gets three minutes of screen time. It's one of several misguided attempts to turn it into an odds 'n sods collection for obsessive fans.
Brian Epstein's death is treated to a fitting montage, though his homosexuality (and its effect on his lifestyle and eventual death) isn't mentioned once. Maybe it was the tenor of the times in the mid-90s, but it would have been eye opening to hear that both his job as a the manager of the biggest band in the world, and the fact that his lifestyle was against the law at the time, would lead him to use drugs to cope with the constant stress and fear of arrest. It would have been difficult to balance that revelation without seeming like he was a tortured gay man who killed himself (I agree with the popular theory that it was an accidental overdose), but to completely ignore it turns Epstein into a one-dimensional figure.
The entire project ends up being exactly what it seems, an exercise by three guys with monumental egos to create a new product to feed the Beatles machine. Isn't it odd that the first volume of Live at the BBC came out about the same time, but the sequel was only released recently to extend it's copyright? Though it’s much more interesting and culturally relevant than Beatles toys or other collectibles, in the end the Anthology is yet another Beatles product for the masses.
I recently re-watched the documentary for the first time since it originally aired on PBS, among the excitement of a "new" Beatles track, "Free as a Bird", the video for which got a prime time network television airing. I had forgotten how on-the-nose the video was with populating the screen with references to their songs. The track itself was a John Lennon demo that the rest of the band, along with ELO's Jeff Lynne, overdubbed to completion. Given Jeff Lynne's instantly identifiable production techniques, and the surviving members entrenched solo tendencies, it comes off as a hodgepodge of styles, though given its origins that's not a big revelation.
What struck me the most about the documentary is how chronologically unbalanced it is, spending most of the 10 hours focusing on the Beatles beginnings and pre-Sgt Pepper period. It's a long slog to the era-defining concert at Shea Stadium, which is treated like a cliffhanger, despite the band still having another American tour ahead of them (though it was hampered by controversy and low ticket sales). After the band decides to stop touring, their last 4 records are covered in the final two 70-minute episodes. Perhaps it was the lack of in-studio footage, but the band's studio years are as worthy of dissection as their live years, when they played the same 30 minute set for several years. Sgt Pepper's gets screen time, mostly to show how the band changed their recording approach, though besides Let It Be it was the worst recording experience they had. Oddly enough, while some of the songs on the White Album are discussed, the actual iconic cover is never once shown on screen. Let It Be takes up most of the last episode, though it's also the one that’s well-documented despite basically being the record of their breakup. It was a bit funny that Phil Spector got zero mention, perhaps as retaliation for his bizarre behavior and the general consensus that he ruined the record with his signature overdubs. Remember this documentary came out almost 20 years ago, when Spector was a crazy has-been, not a convicted murderer.
The second surprising thing is how often entire songs are played, when most modern music documentaries will play about 30 seconds then cut to a talking head. Curious to see uncut footage of the band on Swedish TV, being awkward with the host? It's all there. Ever wanted to know what it was like to try and hear the band over the screams of 50,000 fans? The barely-audible video is there in its entirety. Oddly enough, there are at least 2 instances of the members discussing the difficulty in playing live in the era before stage monitors, then showing footage of a sloppy performance where they barely kept it together. That goes along with the entire project's odd insistence on showing the band struggling musically, either with flubbed takes on the CDs or their increasingly poor live performances at the end of their touring career.
There's an odd bit during a press conference (again, a large portion of it is shown for some reason) where the interviewer mentions John's wife at the time. He's clearly unprepared for it, and manages to ad-lib a bit about not knowing who she is to get a laugh, but it's telling that they decided to keep that bit in. The rest of the band's significant others, besides Yoko Ono, barely get a mention. There's no talk about their early girlfriends, John Lennon's secret marriage to Cynthia Lennon, or the tension between George Harrison and Eric Clapton over Patti Boyd, who would eventually leave the Beatle and inspire "Layla". But why should they include any of that? It's none of our business, though they've lived the majority of their lives in the public eye and prying into their personal lives in a bit of a national pastime. It seems like maybe there was an early edit that did include more personal information, thought the living member's used their power to excise those parts from the film.
John Lennon's absence, though he was presumably represented by Yoko Ono behind the scenes, meant that he was shown in the least flattering light. One of the oddest, most incongruous parts of the whole thing was a sequence where the band remembered John's habit of mimicking the stereotypical movements of a retarded person for a laugh. It's absolutely horrible to watch, and not only do they mention it for some reason, there is even high quality footage of him acting out on stage in front of an audience. Why was this included at all, if only for the surviving members to get back at a member they clearly were irritated with much of the time?
There's quite a few "what were they thinking" moments in the documentary, but the most pointless, and the one that me & my wife are still laughing about, is a montage of the group visiting some islands they were looking at buying, set to the tune of "Baby You're a Rich Man". It goes like this: The band says they thought about buying an island together for privacy from the outside world. There are home movies of them on boats. And that's it. Remember, the White Album is barely mentioned, but the band's holiday gets three minutes of screen time. It's one of several misguided attempts to turn it into an odds 'n sods collection for obsessive fans.
Brian Epstein's death is treated to a fitting montage, though his homosexuality (and its effect on his lifestyle and eventual death) isn't mentioned once. Maybe it was the tenor of the times in the mid-90s, but it would have been eye opening to hear that both his job as a the manager of the biggest band in the world, and the fact that his lifestyle was against the law at the time, would lead him to use drugs to cope with the constant stress and fear of arrest. It would have been difficult to balance that revelation without seeming like he was a tortured gay man who killed himself (I agree with the popular theory that it was an accidental overdose), but to completely ignore it turns Epstein into a one-dimensional figure.
The entire project ends up being exactly what it seems, an exercise by three guys with monumental egos to create a new product to feed the Beatles machine. Isn't it odd that the first volume of Live at the BBC came out about the same time, but the sequel was only released recently to extend it's copyright? Though it’s much more interesting and culturally relevant than Beatles toys or other collectibles, in the end the Anthology is yet another Beatles product for the masses.
Friday, December 20, 2013
2013 Albums of the Year
Here's the whole list I submitted to the Fiddleback, which used a voting system to determine its Albums of the Year. You can read that here.
First off, just getting this list down to 20 was a challenge. So many notable records didn't make the cut for whatever reason: While Shaking the Habitual sparked many conversations about gender equality, its cold nature meant it rarely got more than a couple spins in the months after its release; Ghost BC’s Infestissumam was the best bubblegum metal record of the year, though its hooks started to dull after a while. Mysterious collective Sandwell District delivered the best mixtape of 2013 with their dark, intense contribution to the Fabric series, but I decided against including compilations. Saves the Day’s self-titled album isn't exactly a return to form, but it’s catchy as hell and marks a decided improvement after 4 mostly unlistenable records. Superchunk continue their return as an active band with I Hate Music, and Noisem & Carcass released the best thrash records of the year, despite the latter being old enough to father the former. Much of the list came down to my listening habits: I can’t really play punk or hardcore at work, so I focus mostly on ambient instrumental music (exceptions must be made though)
In no particular order:
Dawn of Midi – Dysnomia
This is the sound in my head when I envision “contemporary jazz”: combining disparate genres (in this case, minimal techno) with the knowledge and skill of jazz performers. Miles Davis tried it with funk and was ridiculed, and fusion has so many bad connotations that it’s best to put that label to rest. Here we have repetitive melodies played on real acoustic instruments, where real people interact in developing simple ideas into interwoven paths in a way that can’t be duplicated digitally.
CHVRCHES – The Bones of What You Believe
It’s been decades since stadium synth pop had its day in the sun, but the crisscrossing synths of Iain Cook & Martin Doherty with Lauren Mayberry’s Scottish lilt foreshadow a return to the days when Human League were chart toppers. Every nook and cranny of this record is filled with shiny melodies and sparkling rhythms, layered in a way that rewards repeated listens. While “The Mother We Share” garnered the big blog boosts, but stay for “Gun”, “Lies”, “Science/Visions”... the whole thing really.
Autre Ne Veut – Anxiety
2013 was a great year for people who started listening to music at the time Boys II Men released their record-breaking II. Arthur Ashin’s voice is a joy to behold, all studied nuance and hints of gospel. I’m convinced this record would be just as good a capella; not as a diss to the backing tracks, but his voice carries so much weight that it only requires the most minimal of supports.
Joel RL Phelps & The Downer Trio – Gala
Phelps’ last record came out nine years ago and spent a good chunk of its running time focusing on the futility of the war in the Middle East, a war that is still going on as the band reconvened for the follow-up. Gala doesn’t share its predecessors’ anti-war venom, though they are still meditating on mistakes, regret and death. Their sound hasn’t changed much since Customs; the record is split between jagged, bass-driven post-punk, hazy mid-tempo rockers, and small acoustic pieces. A record from them is rare, and their ability to enclose an ever-developing melody in perfect harmony remains undiminished.
Laurel Halo – Chance of Rain
While her debut full length explored the limits of the unprocessed human voice, Halo’s follow up focuses on hardware synthesizers that slip in and out of time, suggesting a future world where the organic and technological are becoming harder to distinguish. The title is a good way of describing the gray, foreboding music here, which takes its cues from techno but tears it apart to show the squishing beast underneath.
Tim Hecker – Virgins
In his first foray with an ensemble, the gritty homemade ambient music of Tim Hecker recalls the hypnotic phases of Steve Reich and Mike Oldfield; there’s always been a violence to his work, but aggressive performances & the creeping horror of the cover art tie the record to a claustrophobic world where the real and unreal are interchangeable. While his symphonies of feedback & static were never sunny, this development of the stunned silences on 2011’s perfect Ravedeath, 1972 is a welcome continuation of his sound.
The Field – Cupid’s Head
This has been a great year for nominally experimental electronic acts to change up their sound a little; Tim Hecker added actual muscle & sweat into his ambient explorations, and Axel Willner tweaked his warm, melodic take on pulsing Berlin techno. Looping State of Mind was a retread, but only in the best sense, buffing & shining his trademark sound after the detour of Yesterday and Today. There’s more going on in the mix and it requires a bit more attention, but the addition of a little anxiety in his usually lush palette is a welcome change.
Deafheaven – Sunbather
It took way too long for a band to combine the tremolo-picked intensity of black metal with the melodies of the Cure and blurred aesthetic of shoegaze, but this San Francisco duo perfected it on their second full-length. The screaming vocals remain, but they act as a good textural counterpoint to the rest of the band, which has filed the sharp edges down just enough to be memorable but still brutal.
My Bloody Valentine – mbv
Stop focusing on the fact that 22 years have passed since Loveless. Forget that the band dropped the record Radiohead-style, with no lead-up, on an unsuspecting world. Instead, focus on how it will probably take another 22 years for listeners to unravel everything hidden in m b v, a record thick with synths that sound like guitars, guitars that sound like synths, and songs that fold back on themselves before turning themselves inside out.
Rashad Becker – Traditional Music of Notional Species Vol. 1
Don’t let the studious title fool you; legendary mastering engineer Rashad Becker’s debut full length is a wild beast of otherworldly sounds, much more Notional than Traditional. Rhythm and timbre are at play as unidentifiable tones succumb to enveloping static, like nameless beasts crawling across an alien landscape.
Dan Friel – Total Folklore
There’s this unmade music in my head, where all the elements are as beautifully balanced as a classic painting: dissonance and harmony, catchy melodies and jackhammer rhythms. This former Parts and Labor members combines major key harmonies and overloaded electronics with a DIY style that shows the perfect balance between disparate textures while remaining instantly catchy.
Thundercat – Apocalypse
The bass virtuoso’s excellent second record reminds me of what Squarepusher attempted to do on the Shobaleader One record, namely combine hyperactive bass with soul-inflected melodies and the futuristic funk of 80’s pop. Thundercat succeeds because he never lets the programming get in the way of the song, and his melodious voice stretches & compresses around the springy tunes.
Pusha T – My Name is My Name
Everyone loves a villain, and this Clipse member’s first solo non-mixtape is seething with the menace of dealing drugs, eradicating enemies, and dealing with the fallout of crime. Pusha has never been one to hide his age, and it would be a cop out to say his obsession with early 90s rap signifiers didn't strike a chord with rap fans in their 30s. Above all, his rhymes fall into place among bare-bones beats that show what Kanye is capable of when he’s not being self-conscious.
Tiger Village – I-III
This solo effort out of Cleveland released three tapes in 2013, each one brimming with 8-bit melodies, dark noise, and ambient textures. The magic is in how the elements flow seamlessly into one another without the whiplash expected in such tonal shifts. The programmed beats and melodies are surprisingly elastic and organic, showing a mastery of finding the warmth in hardware and software.
Boards of Canada – Tomorrow’s Harvest
After years in the wilderness, Boards of Canada return with a tapestry of hidden vocals, ghostly melodies and creeping beats so layered and complicated that it has its own wiki. The title alludes to a post-apocalyptic landscape and the music reflects a blasted, sun-bleached world where rusted technology and humanity have their final battle.
Autechre – Exai
More than 20 years in the game and still exploring the limits of technology, this double disc effort combines the lessons the duo learned in their noisy early ‘00s records with the slippery melodies of their ‘90s work. It’s a lot to take in, but Autechre see it more as a gift and so should you; if you like what they do, here’s a ton of it to sift through.
Bill Callahan – Dream River
Dream River finds Bill Callahan in a place where, dare I say, he’s almost comfortable. He’s released records just different enough over the last 20 years to make each one an event for his fervent followers of his skewed look at modern American life. It unfolds as a piece, echoing the creator’s love of listening to records all the way through, and it’s most rewarding to experience as a whole.
Cex – Prosperity
He may not get the blog attention that acts as the modern measurement of popularity, but Rjyan Kidwell has been prolific as ever in recent years. This digital-only release is a collection of tracks as opposed to his usual conceptual framework, but his recent collage-style technique has created tracks that ebb and flow like proper songs built up from a techno foundation, while remaining memorable the whole way through.
Co La – Moody Coup
Tightly-spun guitar duo Ecstatic Sunshine split into Dustin Wong and Matthew Papich, whose full length as Co La splatters barely recognizable samples across tracks that refuse standard organization while retaining the overdriven attack of his former band. Papich has a steady hand that keeps the tracks stuffed yet uncluttered, starting out small before sprawling out in dayglo colors. There’s an air of menace that, like the cover, is affecting while remaining inscrutable.
Pan•American– Cloud Room Glass Room
Former Labradford guitarist Mark Nelson’s Pan•American project hasn't strayed too far from minimal, staticy dub in the last 15 years, but the addition of percussionist Steven Hess has added another dimension to a project that treats each sound equally. Hess practically paints over the middle section of noisy “Laurel South” with tinny drum n bass rhythms, and “Virginia Waveform” acts like a call-and-response between Hess’s drums and Nelson’s static drone.
Monday, December 9, 2013
Twin Peaks (Series)
We recently finished watching the original run of Twin Peaks and were trying to watch Fire Walk With Me when the DVD started skipping & we had to send it back to Netflix. The movie is a strange beast, at least what we were able to see, and in some ways seemed inferior & superior to the original series.
The story of Twin Peaks' brief life on TV has been well documented: After a brief but popular first season, David Lynch left to direct Wild at Heart, leaving Mark Frost and his writers with the task of trying to balance the serialized aspect of Laura Palmer's murder with the various story lines that orbited the central mystery. The second, 22 episode season quickly solved her murder, floundered for a while with a couple unrelated story lines, then picked up steam again in time for the horrific finale.
My first suspicion that the second season was going off the rails was when the two main music cues, "Falling" and the jazzy mystery theme, were placed seemingly haphazardly, instead of with the pointed precision in the first season. Sometimes the cues were a little on the nose in the first season, but after Lynch left, they seemed like they were just used as stock music to fill in gaps in the soundtrack, instead of the highly thematic songs they acted as previously.
At it's heart Twin Peaks was a daily soap, and would probably benefited from a 5 episode week, where each plot strand had time to unfurl and progress. Instead, it crammed 6 months of subplots and digressions into a weekly show, with no room to breath. Honestly, by the end I had completely forgotten about Jean Renault, Cooper's trouble with the FBI, and the food critic.
Digression about a digression: James Hurley's whole romance/mechanic subplot feels like an entirely separate show grafted on when the running time fell short. While I enjoy the non-sequitur aspect of the show, this just kind of came & went without making much of an impact. Maybe it was supposed to be slight: the basics of the story were fully fleshed out six years later in Lost Highway.
While the second season started off by throwing in more story than it could handle, it started to really get out of control after episode 9, when the central mystery is solved and the other stories come into the foreground. The problem is, they're a mess: episodes 10-13 kind of blend together into a mash that serves as a good indication of the moral depravity of the town, but provides little momentum. Once Windom Earle enters the picture in episode 14, it's like a new season of the show has begun.
While the Earle stuff manages to be much more entertaining than the first part of the season, it also seems to go out of its way to consciously bring the cast together, as a poorly disguised Earle gets facetime with most of the top billed actors. It smacks as more of an attempt to fix the messy plotting of season 2 than a chance to introduce another mystery to the show. I would have liked to see Earle's obsession with finding the Black Lodge introduced sooner, as Cooper & the audience think he's simply out for revenge until the very end. Kenneth Welsh is a magnetic presence on screen and single-handedly saves the show from further descent.
While it's foolish to try and pry answers from anything David Lynch does, it did strike me how his character, FBI Regional Bureau Chief Gordon Cole, seemed to fashion a team of paranormal inclined agents around him. Most of his team either had firsthand experience with the creatures from the Black Lodge, or were receptive to it. Did Cole seek these men out, or did they seek him out? Did he feel any guilt for two of his agents being trapped in the Black Lodge? Were there more? And why would FBI agents stationed in Philadelphia regularly travel to the Pacific Northwest?
We should be getting a new disc of Fire Walk With Me in the mail tomorrow, so while I await more amazing imagery (the macro lens! the fingernail! the painting!), we don't expect any answers.
The story of Twin Peaks' brief life on TV has been well documented: After a brief but popular first season, David Lynch left to direct Wild at Heart, leaving Mark Frost and his writers with the task of trying to balance the serialized aspect of Laura Palmer's murder with the various story lines that orbited the central mystery. The second, 22 episode season quickly solved her murder, floundered for a while with a couple unrelated story lines, then picked up steam again in time for the horrific finale.
My first suspicion that the second season was going off the rails was when the two main music cues, "Falling" and the jazzy mystery theme, were placed seemingly haphazardly, instead of with the pointed precision in the first season. Sometimes the cues were a little on the nose in the first season, but after Lynch left, they seemed like they were just used as stock music to fill in gaps in the soundtrack, instead of the highly thematic songs they acted as previously.
At it's heart Twin Peaks was a daily soap, and would probably benefited from a 5 episode week, where each plot strand had time to unfurl and progress. Instead, it crammed 6 months of subplots and digressions into a weekly show, with no room to breath. Honestly, by the end I had completely forgotten about Jean Renault, Cooper's trouble with the FBI, and the food critic.
Digression about a digression: James Hurley's whole romance/mechanic subplot feels like an entirely separate show grafted on when the running time fell short. While I enjoy the non-sequitur aspect of the show, this just kind of came & went without making much of an impact. Maybe it was supposed to be slight: the basics of the story were fully fleshed out six years later in Lost Highway.
While the second season started off by throwing in more story than it could handle, it started to really get out of control after episode 9, when the central mystery is solved and the other stories come into the foreground. The problem is, they're a mess: episodes 10-13 kind of blend together into a mash that serves as a good indication of the moral depravity of the town, but provides little momentum. Once Windom Earle enters the picture in episode 14, it's like a new season of the show has begun.
While the Earle stuff manages to be much more entertaining than the first part of the season, it also seems to go out of its way to consciously bring the cast together, as a poorly disguised Earle gets facetime with most of the top billed actors. It smacks as more of an attempt to fix the messy plotting of season 2 than a chance to introduce another mystery to the show. I would have liked to see Earle's obsession with finding the Black Lodge introduced sooner, as Cooper & the audience think he's simply out for revenge until the very end. Kenneth Welsh is a magnetic presence on screen and single-handedly saves the show from further descent.
While it's foolish to try and pry answers from anything David Lynch does, it did strike me how his character, FBI Regional Bureau Chief Gordon Cole, seemed to fashion a team of paranormal inclined agents around him. Most of his team either had firsthand experience with the creatures from the Black Lodge, or were receptive to it. Did Cole seek these men out, or did they seek him out? Did he feel any guilt for two of his agents being trapped in the Black Lodge? Were there more? And why would FBI agents stationed in Philadelphia regularly travel to the Pacific Northwest?
We should be getting a new disc of Fire Walk With Me in the mail tomorrow, so while I await more amazing imagery (the macro lens! the fingernail! the painting!), we don't expect any answers.
Tuesday, October 22, 2013
Explosions in the Sky review
I wrote this review for a now-defunct music website. Besides fixing a couple grammar issues, this is how it looked way back when.
artist: Explosions in the Sky
album title: All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone
label: Temporary Residence Ltd.
release year: 2007
rating: 6.5
Explosions in the Sky have made no-frills post-rock their forte; no orchestration a la Godspeed You! Black Emperor, no jazz pretense like the Chicago scene, and little of the straight ahead rock meets electronic noodling of Mogwai. Instead, they use the same combination of echo-laden guitars, chiming bass and martial drums as their elements to forge soundscapes that alternate between introspective passages and soaring choruses.
So what does their new 6-song album sound like? Much like the others, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. You’re hard pressed to find a band with a distinctive sound, and even rarer to find one with the discipline to develop and refine it.
Even without the title “The Birth and Death of the Day”, the opening track’s brittle guitar and subsequent explosion of chords evokes a violent birth, development and gradual death. The track ends as dulcet tones fade away until a thin, underlying tone is revealed that carries on into the second song, "Welcome, Ghosts." What we get is more of the same, but somehow different; anyone who has listened to their oeuvre can attest to the fact that each album is basically one long song divided into movements that echo each other in theme and approach.
"Welcome, Ghosts" ebbs and flows between shimmering chords and mountains of distortion, fading into the 13 minute centerpiece, "It's Natural to be Afraid." In the album’s major mood shift, it uses a repetitive piano riff, whirling distortion, sawing strings and backwards guitar to sound vaguely menacing before fading away. It's closely followed by some gauzy electronic distortion, which itself fades away before a standard Explosions riff enters. It would have been interesting to hear the proceeding 5 minutes of kaleidoscopic noise be developed, even at the risk of breaking the atmosphere of the album.
The tracks ebb and flow in a similar manner, though the repetitiveness is broken up here and there: a flurry of piano notes that recalls vintage Genesis suddenly appears among the otherwise droning "What Do You Go Home To". "Catastrophe & the Cure" opens with possibly the albums most animated moment: a quickly strummed chord makes its presence known before a volley of slightly overdriven snare hits introduces the rest of the band. Surprisingly, the energy doesn't flag for a while, taking the same basic elements that make up the quiet parts and beating the hell out of them.
A plinking piano melody introduces the relatively brief closer, "So Long, Lonesome." The whole band rallies around that single piano riff, giving it a bed of ascending chords that evaporate just when things get too claustrophobic. Drums charge forward, guitars get more distorted, the piano becomes more insistent, and then… nothing. But they aren't after the big, heroic payoff that one might expect. Their meandering sound lets the listener get lost on the way, unencumbered by the expectation of a destination.
artist: Explosions in the Sky
album title: All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone
label: Temporary Residence Ltd.
release year: 2007
rating: 6.5
Explosions in the Sky have made no-frills post-rock their forte; no orchestration a la Godspeed You! Black Emperor, no jazz pretense like the Chicago scene, and little of the straight ahead rock meets electronic noodling of Mogwai. Instead, they use the same combination of echo-laden guitars, chiming bass and martial drums as their elements to forge soundscapes that alternate between introspective passages and soaring choruses.
So what does their new 6-song album sound like? Much like the others, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. You’re hard pressed to find a band with a distinctive sound, and even rarer to find one with the discipline to develop and refine it.
Even without the title “The Birth and Death of the Day”, the opening track’s brittle guitar and subsequent explosion of chords evokes a violent birth, development and gradual death. The track ends as dulcet tones fade away until a thin, underlying tone is revealed that carries on into the second song, "Welcome, Ghosts." What we get is more of the same, but somehow different; anyone who has listened to their oeuvre can attest to the fact that each album is basically one long song divided into movements that echo each other in theme and approach.
"Welcome, Ghosts" ebbs and flows between shimmering chords and mountains of distortion, fading into the 13 minute centerpiece, "It's Natural to be Afraid." In the album’s major mood shift, it uses a repetitive piano riff, whirling distortion, sawing strings and backwards guitar to sound vaguely menacing before fading away. It's closely followed by some gauzy electronic distortion, which itself fades away before a standard Explosions riff enters. It would have been interesting to hear the proceeding 5 minutes of kaleidoscopic noise be developed, even at the risk of breaking the atmosphere of the album.
The tracks ebb and flow in a similar manner, though the repetitiveness is broken up here and there: a flurry of piano notes that recalls vintage Genesis suddenly appears among the otherwise droning "What Do You Go Home To". "Catastrophe & the Cure" opens with possibly the albums most animated moment: a quickly strummed chord makes its presence known before a volley of slightly overdriven snare hits introduces the rest of the band. Surprisingly, the energy doesn't flag for a while, taking the same basic elements that make up the quiet parts and beating the hell out of them.
A plinking piano melody introduces the relatively brief closer, "So Long, Lonesome." The whole band rallies around that single piano riff, giving it a bed of ascending chords that evaporate just when things get too claustrophobic. Drums charge forward, guitars get more distorted, the piano becomes more insistent, and then… nothing. But they aren't after the big, heroic payoff that one might expect. Their meandering sound lets the listener get lost on the way, unencumbered by the expectation of a destination.
Friday, October 18, 2013
Ted Leo & the Mighty Mighty Bosstones
I take full responsibility for any facts my brain has mixed up in the last decade.
"I wonder if the Mighty Mighty Bosstones are playing St. Andrews Hall?"
"Ha yeah right, I thought they broke up."
The Bosstones hadn't had a hit since 1997's "The Impression That I Get", in the brief period of time between grunge and the boy band explosion when ska punk barely squeaked into national attention. They've also been around almost as long as I've been alive, so it's understandable that their longevity would result in a solid tour schedule; but in 2004, ska punk was thought to be dead and gone.
So Ted Leo starts playing, and about 20 minutes in, all of the Mighty Mighty Bosstones exit the dressing room next to the Shelter's stage and walk through the packed crowd while carrying their instruments. The dressing room placement seems a little awkward, especially for the guy carrying the trombone. The whole display seems a little cocky, despite the necessity to get to their show, since a line of a dozen men in tailored suits walking away from the stage looks disrespectful no matter the context.
The Bosstones disappear within a minute and all attention returns to Ted Leo, who is slaying in the full-band + keyboard Hearts of Oak version of the Pharmacists. There are no punches pulled, all the hits are there, and everyone is enjoying themselves.
Then, even before the 10-minute rendition of "Stove By A Whale" (where they're joined on 2nd guitar by I believe James Canty), the Bosstones return from serenading skanking teenagers upstairs, and soaked in sweat under their suits, march through the crowd yet again, lugging their horns past an appreciative crowd that is eager to hear "Timorous Me". The Bosstones, who probably commanded a much larger check for playing the big room, played for half the time as the indie band in the basement.
The Pharmacists finish up and man their own merch table while, presumably, the Bosstones sit in their dressing room and wait to get paid. The two instances of the show being interrupted are forgotten, or remembered as a bizarre interlude to an otherwise great show.
Friday, August 16, 2013
Blink 182 - "Dumpweed"
The iPod connector to my car stereo broke, but since my car CD player can play MP3 CDs, I've been making 5-6 hour mixes to make the commute bearable. After realizing most of the ambient instrumental music I listen to at work wasn't going to cut it, I dug out a bunch of pop punk CDs that I haven't listened to since high school. One of them was Blink-182's Enema of the State, which I remember really liking 14 years ago. Does it hold up? No. Oh dear God no.
Before I get to the terrible, possibly destructive lyrics, I have a couple words on compression. In the audio world, a compressor takes a signal and boosts low frequencies while pushing down high frequencies, which is useful in making certain instruments stand out in a mix, especially if they share the same basic frequency range. By the late '90s modern music was in the midst of the Loudness War, where high profile releases were subjected to punishing compression that squeezed each instrument into it's own part of the spectrum so you could hear the snare just as loudly as the lead guitar. This destroyed any nuance and subtlety in a track with the goal of making it stand out when listening to it on the radio; nevermind the fact that radio stations have their own compressors to make sure the songs they play fall within their broadcast guidelines. The most famous instance of this is Metallica's widely panned St Anger album, which angered enough audiophiles to briefly become a news story (and the only interesting thing about the record).
Enema of the State was compressed so much as to become an oppressive, punishing listen. At first listen, the technique does its job, making the instruments push the speakers in a way that gets the listener's attention. After a couple plays, it becomes the aural equivalent of looking at a posterized photograph, where all the gradient and shading is gone, replaced by solid blocks of color.
Who was asleep at the switch when a line like "I need a girl that I can train" was recorded? The arc of the song goes something like this: Guy can't decide whether to break up with his girlfriend because she's crazy, and laments that he could sow his wild oats if only he could find a girl that obeyed him. It's not the subtlest song ever, and it reminds me a lot of the dickhead skaters at my high school, who considered themselves apart from the fray of meathead jocks yet indulged in the same moronic, misogynist behavior. It's not so much that they were terrible people-high school is a training ground for kids to mimic the terrible choices of their parents; it's that they honestly thought they were rebelling against a status quo, not fitting into a demographic that MCA Records exploited all the way to the bank.
This was back when TRL set the agenda for mainstream popular music. They had boy bands for the teen girls, rap for the kids who could drive, and R&B to soundtrack awkward makeout sessions. That left the most-white, mostly middle class droogs that didn't like rap but still tended to invite their girlfriends over to watch them play video games. Blink-182 became The Rock Band, just like Foo Fighters and later Queens of the Stone Age. Mainstream media only picks one white rock band to get behind at once, and their success is due to whatever shady backroom dealings happened between publicists, A&R, MTV and radio.
That kind of chicanery sounds like the only explanation for an album that sounds like it was focus grouped to death; or, fantastically, made in the future where its reception could be measured, then adjusted to achieve maximum exposure. With the money put behind the promotion of the album, nothing was left to chance: so why were the lyrics, ostensibly aimed at idiot kids, set somewhere between Vapid (which is understandable) and Awful? I'm not saying some 90s pop punk band owed it to anyone to be politically progressive, but opening a record with a song about the exact wrong way to handle a relationship, without once reflecting "hhmm maybe that was a bad way to deal with it", sounds like a damaging thing to do.
Before I get to the terrible, possibly destructive lyrics, I have a couple words on compression. In the audio world, a compressor takes a signal and boosts low frequencies while pushing down high frequencies, which is useful in making certain instruments stand out in a mix, especially if they share the same basic frequency range. By the late '90s modern music was in the midst of the Loudness War, where high profile releases were subjected to punishing compression that squeezed each instrument into it's own part of the spectrum so you could hear the snare just as loudly as the lead guitar. This destroyed any nuance and subtlety in a track with the goal of making it stand out when listening to it on the radio; nevermind the fact that radio stations have their own compressors to make sure the songs they play fall within their broadcast guidelines. The most famous instance of this is Metallica's widely panned St Anger album, which angered enough audiophiles to briefly become a news story (and the only interesting thing about the record).
Enema of the State was compressed so much as to become an oppressive, punishing listen. At first listen, the technique does its job, making the instruments push the speakers in a way that gets the listener's attention. After a couple plays, it becomes the aural equivalent of looking at a posterized photograph, where all the gradient and shading is gone, replaced by solid blocks of color.
Who was asleep at the switch when a line like "I need a girl that I can train" was recorded? The arc of the song goes something like this: Guy can't decide whether to break up with his girlfriend because she's crazy, and laments that he could sow his wild oats if only he could find a girl that obeyed him. It's not the subtlest song ever, and it reminds me a lot of the dickhead skaters at my high school, who considered themselves apart from the fray of meathead jocks yet indulged in the same moronic, misogynist behavior. It's not so much that they were terrible people-high school is a training ground for kids to mimic the terrible choices of their parents; it's that they honestly thought they were rebelling against a status quo, not fitting into a demographic that MCA Records exploited all the way to the bank.
This was back when TRL set the agenda for mainstream popular music. They had boy bands for the teen girls, rap for the kids who could drive, and R&B to soundtrack awkward makeout sessions. That left the most-white, mostly middle class droogs that didn't like rap but still tended to invite their girlfriends over to watch them play video games. Blink-182 became The Rock Band, just like Foo Fighters and later Queens of the Stone Age. Mainstream media only picks one white rock band to get behind at once, and their success is due to whatever shady backroom dealings happened between publicists, A&R, MTV and radio.
That kind of chicanery sounds like the only explanation for an album that sounds like it was focus grouped to death; or, fantastically, made in the future where its reception could be measured, then adjusted to achieve maximum exposure. With the money put behind the promotion of the album, nothing was left to chance: so why were the lyrics, ostensibly aimed at idiot kids, set somewhere between Vapid (which is understandable) and Awful? I'm not saying some 90s pop punk band owed it to anyone to be politically progressive, but opening a record with a song about the exact wrong way to handle a relationship, without once reflecting "hhmm maybe that was a bad way to deal with it", sounds like a damaging thing to do.
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