Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me

We finally got a working disc from Netflix and picked up where we left off: Leo slapping Shelly for not cleaning their half-constructed house correctly. Fire Walk With Me makes no sense if you haven't seen the series. It doesn't even make much sense if you have.

• The opening subtitle identifying Theresa Bank's body was unnecessary, since the events surrounding her death & disposal were taken care of in exposition. Was Lynch afraid that viewers would get confused on the timeline? I can see people maybe getting confused at that point in the movie, but later scenes clear up who died first. 
• There are other subtitles in the movie, though besides the usual Black Lodge titles, the one identifying Ronette Pulaski is needed only because she's only in about 3 episodes of the show, and even in that case Laura could have just said "Hi Ronette".
• The entire timeline is screwed up, but in a way I find interesting. When David Bowie appears, was that before or after the events of the TV show? Was it the evil Cooper who could simultaneously appear on the security camera while looking at the monitor? No matter what, I loved that whole bit, which was low-tech while being totally creepy. 
• The old lady & her son weren't explicitly evil in their single scene in the TV show (which also introduced the concept of the creamed corn), and really they're more like benign guides than BOB-level evil. They're seen in the convenience store sequence laughing with The Man From Another Place, BOB, and an assortment of other creatures. The room above the convenience store seems separate from the Black Lodge, maybe more of a benign meeting place for these supernatural beings than an expressly evil place. 
• The opening sequence, with Chris Isaak and Kiefer Sutherland as FBI agents, is entirely forgettable and only serves to show a) what Lynch had to work with when Kyle MacLachlan refused to offer more than a cameo and b) introduce the jade ring. The scene with Lil the Dancer is interesting in its weirdness, though its odd that Cole would feel the need for covert briefing (couldn't they have just done it in a car or some other private place?)
• My biggest complaint was that Cooper's fate is left unknown. But I think that points to a fundamental flaw in the movie's structure: while it focuses almost exclusively on Laura Palmer, it leaves enough clues about the nature of the Black Lodge to lead viewers to expect some sort of explanation, especially with the late-game addition of the origin of MIKE's problem with BOB.
• Back to the subtitles: When BOB and Leland are in the Black Lodge after killing Laura, BOB is confronted by MIKE & the Man from Another Place and told to return their garmonbozia (pain and sorrow). That refers to the creamed corn that the old woman talked about in the show. 

NOW! That's What I Call Blog Rock

From about 2002-2008, broadband access, easy Wordpress templates, and third party file hosts contributed to the explosion of blogs posting MP3s of varying legality. P2P file sharing was gaining national attention, but there was a need for people to curate songs outside of the wild west of P2P. Many of the one-person operations disappeared around the time Mediafire deleted a ton of its content after copyright holders complained, but a few consolidated and became the publicity powerhouses like Brooklyn Vegan and Stereogum, becoming legitimate while losing their personalities in the process. Long-gone blogs like Domino Rally would post obscure noise one day and Steely Dan the next, opening doors for listeners to gain a foothold in music they used to only read about. Below is a list of songs I downloaded around that time; some of the songs are good, others I can't believe I ever liked.

Annuals - Bleary Eyed
Winter 2006 I was at my in-laws house without a laptop or iPod, and this song kept getting stuck in my head through pure imagination. They were on Conan's old Late Night show and the singer played a huge electric keyboard while sharing the mic with one of the other members. For some reason I can only find acoustic versions of this song online, the superior full band version is nowhere to be found. Their live videos are a good example of the problem with a lot of these bands that got too big too quick: they weren't very good performers.

Archie Bronson Outfit - Dead Funny
This band had a similar vibe to the DFA crew, using dance music arrangements, raw guitar sounds and an obsession with 80's post punk. If I remember right, they were part of Domino's sudden singing frenzy.

Tokyo Police Club - Tesselate
This one sounds like the one track the band let themselves just do whatever they wanted: The percussion finally sounds like it's listening to the rest of the song; the stop/start dynamics compliment the manic energry, and every bar is an excuse to squeeze in another hook.

Beirut - Postcards from Italy
I can see why people like Beirut. Their songs are catchy, nonthreatening and they predated the resurgence of old timey things that Mumford & Sons took to the bank. There was just this odd feeling that the media coverage they got was not indicative of their actual popularity: any buzz band can sell out the Music Hall of Williamsburg, but that doesn't mean they're selling thousands of records.

The Bird & The Bee - I Hate Camera
Lowell George's daughter & a guy who used to be in Geddy Tah made the kind of jazz- and electronic-inflected pop that would have come out on Grand Royal if they were around in the 90s. This is a good, spare song but the act is so entrenched in LA that I guarantee either of them has complained about The Grove in the last 24 hours.

Bishop Allen - Rain
Bishop Allen is the perfect band to encapsulate the rush to monetize the buzz created by blog attention. In 2006 they recorded an EP for every month of the year, the kind of novelty trick that was easy for blogs to latch onto and have at least one piece of news to post in a month. Their songs started appearing in TV commercials and network dramas, though the eventual full-length Bishop Allen and the Broken String didn't capitalize on their attention, consisting mostly of polished re-recordings of the charmingly raw songs on the EPs. They've since disappeared, but don't work: band member Christian Rudder was one of the founders of OKcupid, which was bought by Match.com in 2011 for $50 million.

Blitzen Trapper - Wild Mountain Nation
Weirdo country that oscillated between AOR rock and Pavement-isms, it's a shame the title track to their 2007 record didn't become a rock radio staple. It's not really a good indicator of their sound, though to think of it most one hit wonders get big on a fluke song.

Have Gun Will Travel - Sons and Daughters of the Gilded Age
This is a relatively recent discovery of mine, and probably the kind of band that would have been snatched up post-Lumineers if record companies were still on spending sprees. I like this song but there's something a desperate about the lyric's obsession with the ills of modern culture and the cornpone backing track. Wordy verses that only add up to a vague picture of modern consumerism has been around at least since Bright Eyes.

Loney Dear - I Am John
I'm noticing a pattern, clearly not a new one: when a genre gets some indie groundswell, in this case wimpy acoustic singer-songwriters with a deep collection of Belle & Sebastian EPs, major record labels start looking for an act that's willing to play ball. Loney, Dear is still churning out records on Polyvinyl after a brief moment on Sub Pop, while the bowler-hatted/suspender dorks are getting their songs on Grey's Anatomy before disappearing into obscurity.

Muscles - Chocolate Raspberry Lemon and Lime
Blog house! Remember that? I'm not even sure what it means; I guess big melodies, a closer adherence to the three minute pop structure than dance music repetition, and Garage Band plugins. Muscles was huge in his native Australia but sank without a trace in the US, despite shiny production, catchy songs and an idiosyncratic voice.

Be Your Own Pet - Becky
How could a band be on the verge of getting huge then suddenly disappear? Blog attention does not equal a payday for these bands. It does lead to a booking agent and quickie record deal that requires constant travel and pressure to live up to their buzz, which breaks even the strongest band.

International Pony - Gothic Girl
It's great that 20jazzfunkgreats is still around, but does anyone read the write-ups that come with the MP3s they post? I respect the post-apocalyptic weirdness but they're so hard to follow. Maybe that's the point. This is a song that reminds me of the goth girls I knew in college.

Brenden Benson - Iron Woman
This should be in the Great American Songbook. Rod Stewart should be mutilating it on one of his innumerable covers CDs.  Instead we get one record released in 2005 and a website that doesn't work.

Street Smart Cyclist - Hoods Up
Clean guitars playing complicated melody lines is catnip to midwest kids who still miss Braid, and the posi core lyrics connected with 30 somethings not ready to give up on punk. I can't find anything about this band online.

The Sound of Arrows - Danger
This is a Scandanavian duo mostly known for remixing corny pop songs. The EP this is on was released free and probably appealed to blog editors looking to post something they wouldn't get a cease and desist letter about.

Pacific - Sunset Blvd
The only thing I can say about this song is that the band name and song title are very clear indicators of what the song is about.

Thrust Lab - Dance Sweet Dracula
Another 25JFG track that turns out to be the work of two MICA students over in Baltimore. This track isn't on YouTube but you can download all their stuff on their website.

Yelle - Ce Jeu
I don't speak French so this song could be France's take on teen pop, but my inability to understand the words forces focus on the melody, which kind of floats just out of reach of the tonic. This gives the song a weird forward momentum that US radio pop usually doesn't attempt.

Pop Levi - Never Never Love
This guy makes really good synth pop so I'm not sure why he based his image on being a garage rocker. Embrace the keyboards dude. The Pink Enemy remix cuts out all the ratty guitars and turns it into a sleek torpedo of a track.

The XYZ Affair - All My Friends
In middle school, when students were talking too much, I had a teacher who called it diarrhea of the mouth. This song has diarrhea of the mouth but a sophisticated melody and constantly developing arrangement make it OK, even with the Confederacy of Dunces reference. Stocking the video with mid-90s Nickelodeon stars was all blogs needed to hear.

Winterkids - Tape It
Winterkids are the reason bands think it's ok to play a dozen unpaid shows at SXSW. They got some attention and a record deal out of it, but things fell apart as they do. I respect keeping their accents & having lyrics so UK-centric that I barely understand most of the references.

A Weather - Spiders Snakes (mix)
This un-Googleable band has 1 song I've heard and it's a good example of chamber pop that doesn't try anything outside it's wheelhouse. If it wasn't played over the credits of an episode of a teen drama then I'd be surprised.

The Veils - Advice for Young Mothers
Finally a band that attempted at least a little bit of nasty swagger! It's Nick Cave-lite but stood out among the Animal Collective clones.

Unlovables - Leave Me Alone
Sometimes pop-punk would bubble to the surface if I was reading the right blogs. This is not a punk band trying to do dream pop or whatever.

Two Gallants - Nothing To You
It came down to The Black Keys and Two Gallants in the major label white boy blues duo; Two Gallants were such strict adherents that they dropped an n-bomb when covering a traditional slave song.

Sybris - Hurt Hawk
A gossamer folk song. Either you'll like it or think it's insufferably boring.

Math and Physics Club - Weekends Away
Pretty sure I got this song via Skatterbrain, which has a lock on 80s twee indie pop (and its contemporary adherents). Not something I can get into all the time, but every once in a while I need that pastoral wash.

Ridley Bent - Nine Inch Nails
I spent 3rd-7th grade in Texas, which is the prime time for a child to be inoculated against the cornier aspects of modern country. Ridley Bent doesn't embrace country as an ironic pose, which I appreciate. This is a simple ballad about ex-lovers mixing up their record collections.

Ruby Isle - Final Cut
A project that could have only existed in the mp3 blog era (they also did a song with Tay Zonday), two guys from Kindercore records (and ex-I Am the World Trade Center) make electronic dance covers of whatever hit the top spot on aggregator elbo.ws (RIP). This Pink Floyd cover was done for blog project Buffet Libre Rewind and is much more listenable than the groaning, miserable original.

The Russian Futurists - Tripping Horses
Russian Futurists have another song called "Paul Simon" that follows the same structure, namely repeating the same melody over and over. The cut & paste editing style comes from dance music, but the lack of structural development means the track lives and dies depending on how catchy that one melody is. Kind of odd I can't find a video or MP3 online but there are plenty of lyrics websites that list it.

S - Falling
Ben Bridwell wasn't the only former member of Carissa's Wierd to keep making music; Jean Ghetto has released a handful of minimal, experimental records as S. A spooky verse explodes into a soaring chorus of "you know that's the only way to hurt me... all I can do is hurt you"; intense stuff.

Sambassadeur - Between the Lines
Another Skatterbrain find, the awkward pause before the chorus is charming. Since broken up, their discography was naturally on Labrador records.

The Second Band - Wild is the Wind
Like Sambassadeur, The Second Band were a Swedish indie pop band that gained a bunch of short-lived blog attention in the early 00s before disappearing. How come compact, catchy as hell guitar-based pop comes so easy to the Swedish?

Philip Seymour Hoffman

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

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.