Bat for Lashes - Two Suns & Fever Ray

Looking through the compilation section at the record store the other day, I was struck by a realization and a memory simultaneously. The memory came first: I was in ninth grade, riding the band bus to a parade. The era of the ipod and segregated listening had not yet dawned and so the upper classmen brought a boombox, sat in the back and filled the bus with a dictatorship of sound. This time, it was Rage Against the Machine. While I appreciate the band and their content, they've always been a bit too repetitive for my taste. My friend sitting next to me was a fan of Billy Joel and jazz played on trumpet. He turned and said, "You know, when we get old, classic rock radio is going to really suck."
As I picked up decade-spanning compilations, it was easy to see how we've defined our past half century through its popular music. You will likely never see a '70's compilation without Carole King on it. You will never see an '80's compilation without Duran Duran on it. While Rage Against the Machine won't make it onto too many '90's comps, it'd be better for most of them if they had. While Rage may be too hard for some listeners to deal with, the validity of their music eclipses the buzzbin output of most of their well-remembered contemporaries.
Even if the CD industry weren't bleeding to death, it's hard to imagine a '00's compilation. It's a frightening prospect to consider what passed for popular music over the past decade, and unlike the past few decades, that strong connection between society and its literal rhythm is weak, if not broken. Whereas Peter Gabriel, Tears for Fears, and others were what the 1980's sounded like, what does it sound like today?

These two albums ARE the contemporary sound. They are both dark but tender, cold but welcoming, progressive yet comfortable. They take familiar elements and build on them, creating vast, moody soundscapes that warp their imagery and structure something completely alternatative. Postemodernism is a gooey term that I don't use often, but it applies to these two works.
Two Suns is Bat for Lashes' second album. On her previous work, Natasha Khan's project sounded like an adapted Black Box Recorder; now her vocals have matured to a transendency exhibited by Kate Bush in her best days. The album opens with some absorbing numbers. 'Glass,' and 'Sleep Alone' are a great one-two opener; deep, dark, and shimmering. The synthesized sounds that create the glittery dance of the music provide the aura that Two Suns is dependent on. After the pop-bliss of 'Daniel,' the album slows down into a series of misty numbers that suggest smoke and mirrors. By this point though, the album has suspended your disbelief and the listening experience is pure magic.

The aesthetic experience of the album is mirrored in, what strikes me as a related work, Fever Ray. Check out the cover art and you'll see the similarities begin immediately with the lone figures acheiving a sort of tactile balance. This is the first album under the name, but Karin Dreijer Andersson, honed her music talents on 2006's exquitise album Silent Shout, by The Knife. The synths here delve deeper and explore darker, more subconscious territory than Bat For Lashes. In a way, Two Suns is a listening exercise for Fever Ray. The synth-drenched soundscapes supplement to form a unique cinematic environment. 'If I Had a Heart' plays like a march for Yeats' rough beast, and is about as radio-unfriendly a "single" as I've ever heard. 'When I Grow Up,' is a wonder in contrast. The imagery is lush and verdant, while the sound is glossy and cascading, the effect reminiscent of Blonde Redhead's trembling, yet strong vocal delivery. 'Dry and Dusty' adds further mass to the album and makes it completely inescapable from there on in. Listening to it is like listening to the music from John Carpenter's '80's flicks with their pulsing, suspenseful sound that is weighted with sinister promises.
Fever Ray is unquestionably a lonely, introverted album. Yet while most artists find either weepy, mopey guitar tunes or angry, shouty guitar tunes the best way to express those feelings, Fever Ray do neither. They create their own lonely sound and it is stupefyingly beautiful. Its bold confrontation of inner feelings in crisis and at odds with one another may be the best audio representation of our current cultural climate I've heard since Neon Bible.
While it certainly would never have gotten played on the band bus' boombox, the best, most defining music NEVER did. As our culture encourages isolation and the boombox's massive speakers die off like dinosaurs to give way to the highly individualized earbuds, Bat for Lashes and Fever Ray prompt musical evolution with a nostalgic look over their shoulder. They pay homage to the sound that brought us here, provide impressions of where "here" is, and look ahead with dark determination.

David Sedaris - When You Are Engulfed in Flames

In an era of visual media saturation, eliciting a laugh-out-loud response is becoming increasingly harder for the print medium. Humorists have to work twice as hard for diminishing results.
While I often find the actual authenticity of David Sedaris' memoir writings questionable, it doesn't particularly matter whether they are true or not because they COULD happen and that is enough. His pieces, while undoubtably exagerated accounts, provide effective, identifiable associations for the reader.
When You Are Engulfed in Flames shows Sedaris' sharpest, wittiest, and most focused writings to date. The book has a coherency which his earlier books lacked. While this is a collection, there is something about the sequencing of the pieces and the overall flow that ties it together remarkably well.
He hits on familiar areas throughout the book; his familiy, his partner Hugh, childhood memories, and smoking. The final chapter, a longer bit entitled 'The Smoking Section,' is his best writing to date. Laid out with dynamics that are little short of verbally symphonic, he chronicles his struggle to quit smoking, laying out the particular pleasures, the crutch of the patch, and the curious void of self-fulfillment felt afterwards. His fight against nicotine addiction is set against the backdrop of his living experiences in Japan. Overlaying the experiences uniquely connects both subjects and gives each of them greater resonance. As he moves through an alien environment, trying to learn the language well enough to tell the difference between bottles of shampoo and baby lotion, he feels alien to himself without a cigarette between his lips. With humorous and practical examples, he dredges the notions of suffering and the desire for familiarity as he purposefully denies vices disguised as comforts.
Rather than go straight for a laugh, Sedaris nimbly dances with his accounts, using referential humor and honest human connection to paint scenes that pan the entire emotional landscape, often within a single ten page poigniant story.
Bonus points for the predictably awesome Chip Kidd cover.

The Soundtrack of Our Lives - Communion

What a pity no one believes that the power of a rock n roll record can change the world anymore. It wasn't too long ago that The Beatles, The Clash, hell, even Nirvana did more than impact the music scene, they broke the genre's self-created boundaries and became cultural mammoths showing what happens when the power of the music is unleashed.
That's not to say that The Soundtrack of our Lives' new album, Communion, is on the same level as London Calling. It is, however, a perfect example of how the new means of marketing and listening to music; digitally, on a track by track basis, rather than for the album's flow and overall message, will not allow an album created as a coherent whole to make such an impact.
Appropriately, this is the sort of ideology that TSOOL lambast against in Communion. Whereas one of the things that bugs me about that last Swedish rock export, Peter, Bjorn, and John, is that it seems almost purposefully in denial of contemporary reality, thumbing its nose at things that can't be laughed at anymore, TSOOL boldly take on these issues from Communion's start to its finish.
Oh, yeah and that end...well, give yourself some time. Communion is a double album that plays for over an hour and a half. Improbably though, there are no clunkers. Not every song reaches the anthemic heights of its brightest spots, but for as long as it is, it maintains its pace like a triumphal march.
Opening, Communion builds slowly up to the throbbing bassline of 'Babel On,' a track that acurately foreshadows the long journey ahead. The pun is apparent if you know the Biblical story. Whereas communication differences may have allowed cultural diversity to thrive, the fact that an omniscient god would prevent a single global tongue is sadistic and purposefully antagonistic. In our shrinking world where communcation breakdowns lead to cultural ideological differences, which lead to more and more global conflicts, a united language would prove undoubtably beneficial. Addressing the issue, lead singer Ebbot Lundberg yawningly sings, "The language that we speak was spread out to complete and communicate as one so turn the towers of Babel on."
A bit more than halfway thru the first disc, the band throws a curveball with a cover of Nick Drake's Fly. While it may not seem a likely fit, TSOOL put a beat behind the weepy folk tune and bring it up to speed with the rest of the album. The song's melancholy is preserved, but only for those listeners who know to look for it as it is covered with cheerful twelve-string guitar and tom tom percussion. The result is a cover that does what its supposed to. It stays respectful to the original but provides a new perspective and toys with fresh insturmentation.
While the first half of Communion keeps its focus on upbeat British invasion style rockers, the second half waxes more acoustic. Focused and precise, the second half showcases some truly beautiful numbers. The last two tracks, Lifeline and The Passover provide a solid capstone, leaving the listener humbled and hopeful. Lifeline is an introspective track that attempts to help the listener locate and establish whatever connection they can in our society of alienation. The Passover is the sound of gray clouds parting to let in golden light.
TSOOL have always been about big sounds, sounds that have always seemed a little derivitive of their British peers. With Communion, their ambition elevates them over all the bands they draw comparisons to; its a career album that shows a band meeting and exceeding their potential.
Communion is an album out of time. The degree of concentrated listening necessary to appreciate its complexity is one that few will ever get. Sad, because TSOOL's substantial messages are sugar coated with some very sweet tunes. Released forty years ago, this album goes side by side with Physical Graffiti, but today will garner a cult following who find themselves personally reflected in its songs. Maybe its better this way.

Peter Bjorn & John - Living Thing

Every artist inevitably lives in the shadows of their former work. It would be nice to think of every artist making a steady evolution; getting better, more complex, and skilled with each new piece of work, but this so rarely happens. That's why we have the phrase "sophomore slump" and that's what Living Thing exemplifies.
Peter Bjorn & John's first album is full of so many majestic high points that it seemed improbable that they'd be able to repeat its brilliance. However, Living Thing's highest points barely approach the lows of Writer's Block.
The ubiquitous whistle that burned itself into the public consciousness from 'Young Folks' is the rare piece of music that makes you feel as though you've heard it before the first time it seeps into your ears. It is the rare track that feels both familiar and new. Even after hearing it at the grocery store, while pumping gas, and backing up network television shows, it is a song that brings undimished pleasure with every spin.
To expect another 'Young Folks' would be foolish, but this...
Comparing the albums, it is easy to see that Writer's Block is the true living thing, while the new LP better suits its predecessor's title.
No one else seems to have noticed that the hook from the first single, 'Nothing to Worry About,' is a repetition of 'Amsterdam' from the last album. It sounded better the first time around and the kids' chorus that 'Nothing...' relies on for its drive is ineffective and confounding. After a disapointing first half, the listener hopes for a pickup, instead we get 'Lay it Down,' an uncharacteristically abrasive track that completely disagrees with the album's flow and rudely halts any forward momentum.
Credit the Swedish trio with at least making an effort to vary their sound. They back off from the sharply honed pop edges that carried Writer's Block and attempt some darker, more syrupy textures. Songs like 'The Feeling' approach breakout moments numerous time but are never allowed the space to grow, which ultimately proves to be the case for the entire album. By the end of Living Thing, it has faded into background noise and that is not what PB&J are about.

Sunshine

Many contemporary directors cite Stanley Kubrick as a central inspiration for their work. Danny Boyle is among them. Whereas many directors fall into the trap of simply aping (anyone get the pun?...no?...sigh) Kubrick, Boyle proves that he truly gets the vision by simulating not Kubrick's technique, but his ambition. Boyle takes creative risks with every one of his films, tearing down stereotypes and genre expectations to defy audience expectations creating something brilliant and progressive. Also, like Kubrick, he doesn't settle on any one genre. His films can be found in every section of the video shop and I have yet to be disappointed by any of them.
With how far technology has come over the last thirty years, it's startling that the central plot elements of space films have remained essentially constant. The crew, the ship, the mission, the threat. Sunshine contains all of these and, while the homages to its genre predecessors (especially 2001) are visible, they are not blindingly obvious.
The movie starts in space. Unlike the messy end-of-the-world space films that crapped across screens in the late '90's and tried to develop characters on earth before sending them on their missions, we begin aboard a vividly imagined Icarus II. Its mission: to deliver a device to the sun, which is dying. The nuclear device will reignite the failing star, thus saving the human race. My first impression of the plot was that it is a bit farfetched, but once the movie pulls you in, you begin to be floored by the originality of the plot and the careful details that make it tick.
Tension is built quickly and after twenty minutes, Sunshine hits its stride and doesn't back off. The action continuously gains momentum and it becomes nearly impossible to look away. Cillian Murphy plays Kappa, the ship's physicist and he serves as the film's biggest name. He plays his role well, yet Sunshine is very much of an ensemble film. Whereas you know Bruce Willis is going to make it to the end of his space flick, a cast of relative unknowns means that they can die in any order at any time.
And what deaths...heroic, jaw-dropping, majestic deaths that beat having an alien pop out of the belly. The imagery is consistently gorgeous from start to finish. Boyle has a sharp eye for color and the extreme contrast between the muted blues and greens inside the ship with the reds, oranges, and yellows of the beautiful yet deadly sunlight are sublte and rich.
Like many of Boyle's films, this one takes a sharp turn for the surreal a bit past the halfway point.
SPOILER: After docking with the first ship, Icarus I, whose mission mysteriously failed, the film becomes a psychological battering ram. Capt. Pinbacker of the first mission surreptitiously boards the Icarus II while the crew explores the dusty remains of its forerunner (foreflyer?) and sets about sabatoging the mission as he did with his own. Driven mad by the mental torments of deep space, Pinbacker develops a god-complex and is determined to prevent the mission from succeeding, seeing himself as an agent of fate. Dawning on the audience is the thought of what he must have endured sharing a powered down spaceship with only the incinerated, crumbling remains of his crewmates as company.
After the inevitable self-sacrifice and success, we are shown for the first time life back on earth. It is a breathtaking view of a snow covered tundra with the Sydney opera house on the horizon and as the gray sky begins to brighten with the returning sunshine, the film ends with an effective return to normality.
It shows us that it is only through the efforts and sacrifice of those we take for granted that our planet endures at all.
Also worth mentioning is the beautiful score by Underworld which perfectly accentuates the film's mood as it transitions between light and dark.

the Verve - Forth

Linguistic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously intoned that anything worth saying can be said clearly. The Verve did just that with 1997’s Urban Hymns, a bombastic yet heartfelt album that anyone with a pulse can identify with. ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ endeared itself to millions and secured a spot in a generation’s soundtrack, lifting the band to the notoriety they had worked so hard to achieve.
More than simply writing songs and playing music, The Verve preached it. “Music is Power,” frontman Richard Ashcroft would later declare on one of his piddling solo albums. For a couple of years, the band backed up the sentiment and became a justified musical juggernaut.
Eleven years later, comes the band’s fourth LP, Forth. If you can’t tell by the pitiful attempt at irony that passes for the album’s title, subtlety is absent here. Whereas the band’s catalogue material still gives the listener elements to discover anew a decade later, Forth feels frustratingly stale and irrelevant.
‘Sit and Wonder’ opens the album with reverb and a distorted drone that hearkens their Storm in Heaven days and would have fit nicely into the band’s formative years, but seems pedantic as the start to a comeback. ‘Love is Noise’ follows it and serves as the album’s driving single and brightest spot. It is a euphoric, catchy number and Ashcroft’s lyrics revolve around themes that Verve fans will latch onto with familiar joy; happiness despite anomie and strident individualism. It’s hook relies on an uncharacteristically computer generated loop though, instead of Nick McCabe’s distinctive guitar work. Ultimately, it feels contrived in its aim for airplay, although it is nice to see a burst of energy on an album that is otherwise lacking. ‘Rather Be’, the third track, is the last stop worth noting before the album runs away into insignificance. It is a rhythm-driven ballad that finds Ashcroft coming off as a sincere musical prophet.
Had this been a first album, a collection of unreleased material, or even recorded under another name, it would earn itself a stronger place. However, The Verve have shown what they are capable of and fall far short of it with Forth. Optimistic fans can only hope that it is but a warm-up for a true return to form that The Verve hint at, but never quite clarify.

The Tripper

An axe murderer in a Ronald Reagan costume running around the California woods killing hippies. Obviously, not a serious flick. Although you'll find it filed under horror, this one's a comedy thru and thru.
Let me start with the fact that while the tabloids and celeb gossip rags harp on the couples that fight like rabid wolverines, David Arquette, who makes his directorial debut with The Tripper, and the lovely Courtney Cox have been happily married for a decade. The Tripper is evidence of why anyone would find a goofball like Arquette appealing when they could marry or bed any number of successive supermodels.
The film is clever, laugh-out-loud funny, and while it's not one I feel the need to add to my collection, the time spent watching it isn't wasted.
Arquette pulls strings to assemble the type of cast that ensure this film's cult status: Thomas Jane (The Punisher), Jason Mewes (Jay, a la Jay & Silent Bob), Lucas Haas (The Wittness), and Paul Ruebens (Pee Wee himself) come together and give their best, all to Arquette's credit.
The central plot is menial; a vanfull of hippies go to a free love festival in the CA redwood forest and are picked off by the axe of an ex-prez impersonator. Arquette and co-writer Joe Harris throw in enough red herrings to make the plot passable, but it's the tongue in cheek politicizing that gives the film substance. At one point, an angry conservative finds himself at Ronnie's mercy and just before getting the axe, utters, "...But I'm a Republican." It was delivered so effectively that I had to rewind to catch the actual killing because I was laughing so hard. Set in Bush-administration America, the movie takes its shots at GW aplenty and uses its over the top aproach to mirror the GOP's ridiculous vision.
Blood and gore abound but not to the extnent I was expecting. Instead, Arquette puts faith in his script, his cast, and his vision and it pays off for him.
When Ronald Reagan bursts into a firelit hippie drum circle and wreaks havoc with wild swings of his axe, I felt an authentic moment of conservative Republican glory. "Go Ronnie, kill them damn, dirty hippies!" I yelled. It almost inspired me to go eat a slab of raw meat and crack a can of PBR, but the subsequent bloodletting brought me back to my senses.