Song of the moment: Rilo Kiley - "Portions For Foxes"

Shiny indie poptastic wonderfulness, and how's this for an opening lyrical flurry:

Blood in my mouth cause I've been biting my tongue all week/ I keep on talking trash but I never say anything/ And the talking leads to touching/ and the touching leads to sex/ and then there is no mystery left/ and it's bad news ...

The other songs that I've heard off this new album aren't really all that, but I must admit that I'm tempted to buy it anyway.

The other couple of songs currently on particularly high rotation are both Scandinavian pop things: the Cardigans' "I Need Some Fine Wine And You, You Need To Be Nicer" and Robyn's "Be Mine!".

Hurray, pop music!

Nellie McKay - Pretty Little Head [advance version]

This is just too cool...McKay's metier is basically a sort of fusion between vocal jazz and pop, but to describe her music in those terms doesn't do it justice; in particular, it doesn't give a sense of how many other influences work their way into the mix, nor of how stylistically diverse yet coherent the resultant melange is, nor how quirky, nor how independent-minded and unique - nor, for that matter, how delightful. McKay sings in a wry, expressive alto and has a full cupboard of different vocal styles - lower register conversational slides, honey-throated crooning, Birkin/Hardy-styled twee-isms, girlish shrieks, breathy sighs, sudden shouted expostulations - and an array of tricks to decorate her singing, involving fey layering, pretty harmonies, odd echoes and unanticipated emphases, to name just a few. Primary instrument is piano, but it never dominates, and there's a bit of a kitchen sink ethos at work, meaning that organ, electric keyboards, bass, various types of programmed tones and squiggles, and all kinds of percussion also bob up. I'm not good at deciphering lyrics, but what I've picked up (rhyming 'you' with 'status q', or 'Baudelaire' with 'millionaire', and generally giving off an air of fashionable disenchantment) suggests that a lyric sheet would be worth seeing.

Sometimes she plays it relatively straight and smooth (as on "Long and Lazy River"), and she doesn't mind singing a bit of the blues (particularly on "I Am Nothing", which gets a torch vibe happening), but the highlights come when she is most determinedly treading her own path. To pick out a handful of these:
- "Cupcake". A real charmer to open with, a swooping, irresistibly catchy thing in which all of McKay's glorious eccentricity is on full display.
- "There You Are In Me". Scurrying verse, commandingly chanted chorus; hella cool.
- "The Big One". Breaking out the hip hop/electric guitar drama. How this works with the pre-existing vocal jazz/pop thing is anyone's guess.
- "Bee Charmer". Cyndi Lauper duets on this one, and it's a real good 'un - one of those gloriously light pop songs whose chorus always takes you a bit by surprise and hits you hard in the back of the head.
- "Real Life". At full-pelt.
- "We Had It Right". On which k.d. lang pops up - a jaunty, rather lovely ditty in which light jazz meets twee electro-pop.

Apparently the deal is that McKay has had a falling-out with her record company over the release of Pretty Little Head - the company wanted to release this truncated (and hence presumably more commercial) version of the record while McKay was holding out for her original, longer cut - so I don't know when, if ever, it'll hit the stores here. More information and the advance version here.

Two good intentions for the rest of the summer

1. More writing, less reading (time not being unlimited).
2. More live music, less general going out (money likewise).

Lost Highway: The Story of Country Music

Although I'm not much of a documentary watcher, I did intend to see this series when it was on a while back, for it'd been well reviewed and promised to be interesting; however, I ended up missing every single episode due to some combination of always being out, forgetting to set the vcr, and just plain forgetting (the usual things which ensure that I rarely watch tv). Happily, though, Kevin recorded three out of the four instalments and I was able to get them off him.

The series begins by examining the usual roll call of early mountain music types - Bill Monroe, the Carter Family, Ralph Stanley, and so on - with the usual archival photos and other material, tracing their voyages from front porches to recording studios and providing some interesting insights into the way in which the style became popular and began to sell. The second episode concerns the Nashville scene and the commercialisation of country - this is the one that I didn't get to see (and, fortuitously, the one that I would've been least interested in seeing anyway). Episode three turns to what came after Nashville - Johnny Cash and the outlaw movement, Gram and Emmylou, the 'new traditionalists' (haven't heard much of the stuff from this stream, but I don't think it'd be much my bag), and then two contrasting contemporary developments in the 'alt-country' thing and the massive pop crossovers of Garth Brooks and Shania Twain. And the final episode considers the history of women in country, providing the highlight of the series as far as I'm concerned by devoting a generous amount of time to Gillian Welch in the closing minutes, including interview and concert footage.

'Generous', though, is a relative concept in the context of, I suppose, any documentary series such as this one; each episode's about 50 minutes in length, meaning that the whole stretches out to only 3 and a bit hours, which is not enough to give more than the most cursory overview of a whole set of musical genres from go to (present day) whoa. The makers do a good job within those constraints, and the mix of interviews with older and more contemporary musicians, industry types, and historians/archivists, along with voiceover, historical material and a couple of unobtrusive re-enactments, works well. I didn't learn much from it, but still enjoyed watching to see how things were presented and arranged (and also for the implicit reinforcements of canon that it enacts), and suspect that it'd make a good primer for a complete country music neophyte.

Zadie Smith - On Beauty

I reckon that this one takes 40 or so pages to properly hit its stride, which it does more or less from the point when the narrative settles down in Wellington, the New England university town where the Belseys - and, soon, the Kippses - make their home. In its setting, then, not to mention its frequently arch tone and the unsparing but rather sympathetic view it takes of its characters, On Beauty naturally brings Alison Lurie to mind for me, but the tone is more contemporary and more overtly concerned with Big Ideas and fashionable -isms (well, the title's a bit of a giveaway, huh?), and Smith - as we would expect from her - also pays much more attention to questions of identity, belonging, race, and family...one of the great strengths of the novel is the way in which it synthesises Smith's more abstract, philosophical concerns with these more down to earth, immediately relevant threads while wrapping the whole up in a Story, with Characters who exasperate us but force us to care about them, or at least respond to them as something more than purely symbolic figures (in a way which never happened in The Autograph Man).

If I were to attempt to leave all the comparisons (to Lurie, to Smith's previous novels, to everything else I've ever read, etc) aside for just one moment, I would simply say that I enjoyed On Beauty - it's easy to read yet also quite substantial, and the prose is deft without being intrusive (barring the occasional over-written descriptive passage which threw me out of the pure sensuous experience of reading and made me become aware that I was holding something constructed in my hands). But I'm also nagged by the elusive feeling that it's not quite all that, and I can't quite put my finger on the reason for the feeling.

Part of it, I think, is that, while I like her heaps, I also tend to be particularly critical of our Zadie. There are probably a few reasons for this: first, there's a sense in which I feel as if I've grown up with her, and as if I've watched her grow up as a writer (a continuing process on both ends, natch); second, and relatedly, she's a contemporary writer, writing about contemporary times; and third, and relatedly again, the milieus [pl?] about which she writes aren't all that far removed from my own (all things being relative)...so that might go some way to explaining why I liked On Beauty so much and yet don't feel completely sold on it.

I do think that Smith has a knack for characterisation - the Belseys and the Kippses all come to life, as do most of the minor characters, often with not a lot of 'page time'...they all seem to live and breathe, and I had the sense that I could begin to guess where they were coming from based on the few small interactions that I had with them - much like meeting people in real life! They're all impressively multi-faceted while always seeming to retain a basic integrity which makes them believable, and it was easy to visualise them, all of which is a testament to the author's skill. (I was, however, left a bit cold by the depictions of Carl and Monty - the former because he seemed a bit of a stock type, and not particularly interesting, and the latter because we always seem to be seeing him through others' eyes and we're given no real explanation for the affair with Chantelle (unless we're supposed to infer that, hey, he and Howard aren't so very different after all).

It's also interesting that, at least after a first read, Smith doesn't seem to have taken any particular stance on a lot of the issues which she raises in the novel. Howard Belsey and Monty Kipps are pretty clearly positioned on opposite sides of the ongoing 'culture wars', and we're given plenty of opportunities to see each of them in action and to observe the effects of their politics on their lives as well as their individual blind spots, but neither seems really to be endorsed. (Incidentally, I was initially a bit ambivalent about the writerly tactic of producing a book on beauty and then having one of the central protagonists be an academic/intellectual champion of anti-representational art (ie, he doesn't like the tomato), as opposed to, say, the more traditionally aesthetic responses of Kiki, but I'm willing to give her that one.) Similarly, there isn't - thank goodness - a clear line on just what 'beauty' is, which in fact (I think, though am not entirely sure) makes On Beauty a better novel.

I do want to go back and re-read White Teeth again some time - I'm with everyone I've spoken to about On Beauty in considering it a definite improvement from The Autograph Man, but I'd also like to go back and compare it to the one with which it all started...I suspect that this latest will turn out to be more mature, and quite possibly the better novel, but less joyfully full of the love of life and words...

Tift Merritt - Bramble Rose

Like Caitlin Cary, a North Carolina alt-country chanteuse type, but shares more musically with Sweet Old World era Lucinda, albeit with a sweeter voice and more of a tendency towards balladeering than that latter. Opening track "Trouble Over Me" (the one that I knew before listening to the album) encapsulates the feel of Bramble Rose - strength and fragility, wrapped up in a melody which is rooted in trad country songwriting styles but subtly inventive about it. Indeed, all in all, it's a very well-balanced record, hitting all the right notes without seeming to be merely going through the motions, and it's impressing me so far; summer is the right time of year to be listening to this kind of music, and I think that my appreciation of it will only grow over time.

Tori Amos - The Beekeeper

There was a time when I really loved Tori - memory is unreliable when it comes to things as diffuse as music, but it was something like from 1999 through to early 2003-ish (ie, from year 12 or so up to about the beginning of fourth year uni) - but that time's now pretty much in the past. While I still reckon to venus and back to be her finest hour (much as I like all four of the albums which came before it), for mine, Strange Little Girls was a serious misfire, Scarlet's Walk a muddled, indistinct offering partially redeemed by a handful of strong songs (my initial impressions of it were more positive, but then, as the exhaustive treatment of both Scarlet's Walk and back catalogue in my epinions piece of the time suggests, I was still very much into Tori when it came out, back in October '02), and the new cuts on Tales of a Librarian pleasantly lush but not at all touched by greatness; and in any case, to a considerable extent I've grown out of the old, classic lps as well.

Even so, I had to listen to The Beekeeper, just in case (and particularly given that Tori has a history of making musical turns out of left field, to mix my metaphors) - but alas, while it's worthy enough, it's also basically Scarlet's Walk redux, and probably the first time in her recording history that she's really stood still from one lp to the next (even if SLG, at least, was a rather dramatic backwards step). I haven't listened to it that carefully, and I'm sure that a few of the pretty songs will get prettier, and there'll be at least one or two other growers in amidst the 19 songs/79 minutes, but just now it doesn't seem worth the investment of time to find them. (Then again, I've been asking myself what more I could've wanted from a new Tori album...perhaps the truth is just that I'm over her almost no matter what she might release from now on...)

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

After finishing watching this, "Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime" fading out over the closing credits, all I wanted to do was lie on the floor, on my back, and feel a bit. So I did, for a while.

* * *

The other night, Swee Leng and I were talking about what we thought/wished Bob said to Charlotte at the end of Lost in Translation. She went for something like "it'll be difficult, but I think that we should try to make this work", while my version was more along the lines of "it's been amazing; have a great life"; of course, each of us thought that our own version was the more romantic. Anyway, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind sort of charts a course between those two possibilities; more or less romantic, I don't know - but that I'm even considering the question ought to tell you something.

* * *

Memories are unreliable, and so is perception. The world is (only) that which is present(ed) to us as a stream of intentional objects as synthesised by the mind - or, at any rate, our only access to the world is through our minds, or consciousness. The past is only available to us through memories. Memories are only available to us in the moment. What does this say about the status of the world and our perceptions of it? More phenomenology.

This was kinda like a cinematic version of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World - a version which engages the question of where love and other people fit in.

* * *

So, Eternal Sunshine is excellent. The Kaufman/Gondry partnership makes sense, both on paper and in fact - the ruminations on consciousness and mind are complemented and agmented by the visual inventiveness and surreal aspects of the film. The bright colours and dark edges (never mind the sudden shifts and disappearances) 'feel' like the inside of a mind adrift in its own memories and dreams. Jim Carrey makes you forget that he's Jim Carrey and instead sympathise with him; Kate Winslet also plays somewhat against type (but in the opposite direction) and similarly convinces; Mark Ruffalo and Kirsten Dunst are kooky and funny and spot-on when they need to be serious; Elijah Wood and Tom Wilkinson are suitably woolly-edged while remaining recognisably real when they need to be.

* * *

Listening to the soundtrack as I write this, before I go to bed (2am). I wonder what dreams will follow.

Million Dollar Baby

Powerful and mostly understated film-making ('mostly' because it's a bit weighed down by some of the voiceover material at the start, and occasionally by the hints as to Frankie's past, though both are, I guess, necessary for the integrity of the film as a whole) - this is very, very good. For a film in which boxing plays such an important role, Million Dollar Baby is surprisingly quiet and still - there's very little in the way of external flamboyance or pyrotechnics, either physical or emotional. Instead, events just sort of unfold, one after another, and the story (straightforward, measured, inexorable) and the main characters (battered, on the margins of society, decent) are left to carry the load, and come up trumps.

It's quite meticulously constructed, and the acting in particular is excellent. Ole Clint, of course, has shown himself a master of these kinds of character studies in the past, and does it again here, while Hilary Swank is, as ever, excellent; Morgan Freeman also does the job in unobtrusive style. If only I hadn't already known the twist that the film would take, and its outcome, the emotional punch that it packs probably would've been even intense; even as it is, I felt myself carried along by the story, and was prompted to think afterwards about what I would've done in Frankie's position (it's relatively unusual for a film or book to trigger those sorts of reflections on my part).

(I don't think that Million Dollar Baby really takes a stance on that vexed question of euthanasia - once it gets to that point, it strikes me more as a rather sensitive presentation of the issue without any particular polemical intent - but that opinion may, to some extent, be attributable to my being guardedly in favour of legalising 'assisted death'...possibly opponents of the practice would be more inclined to see the film as quite clearly pro-euthanasia (and, if I remember correctly, many of them did at the time that this film first hit the multiplexes).)

Arrested Development (season 1)

David's been talking this show up for ages, and recently decided to lend me the dvd set for season 1, in the hope that I would watch the first couple and then get hooked. One might well think that this was an unlikely hope given my own apathy towards basically all television, but to think that would be to reckon without: (a) the strange torpor-inducing power of summer (especially when full-time work awaits at its end); (b) the far better experience provided by being able to watch numerous episodes on end, without the curse of ad breaks, and without needing to remember to be home at, or to set the vcr for, the relevant times (I've always found life too short and too full, even over the summer holidays, to be organised around tv); and (c) the quality of Arrested Development itself. So, with all of those things aligned, I got quite into the show and ended up going through that first season pretty quickly.

The main thing about it, of course, is that it's funny, but it's also very fast-moving, and I like the way that there are some continuing narratives which run through all the episodes (most obviously to do with George Sr's incarceration and upcoming trial, and Michael's efforts to take over the running of the business) - there's a sense of plot (and, to some extent, character) development which is satisfying and makes me want to find out what happens in the next episode, and then the next, and so on. The wit seems a bit sharper than that to be found in most sitcoms (not that I'd really know), and the writers are willing to tread out on thin ice on occasion, plus the slapstick is funny in context - and, thank goodness, there's no laugh track. I don't really have favourite characters, but they're all well-realised despite their (dominating) comical aspects, and in the end the show is too warm-hearted not to be basically merciful in its presentation of them, for all of their (very pronounced) flaws and foibles.

Also, the show has taught me something that it had never even crossed my mind that I might learn - that Portia de Rossi is very attractive. Also-also, the number of Buster lookalikes - albeit generally marginally better dressed - roaming the cbd is quite remarkable (but perhaps that oughtn't to've been a surprise).

(I'd thought that, when I came to write this up, I might also do a 'Howard and television' summation, but really, who can be bothered?)

André Gide - The Counterfeiters (and a list of my favourite novels read in 2005)

We never come to any art free of preconceptions or expectations, and in the case of The Counterfeiters, this meant that I was strongly predisposed towards the novel before I started it. See, it was a gift from Sarah, given with the sentiment that she was certain that it would fit my sensitivities (it's one of her favourites, too); having finished it a few weeks on, I'm unsure whether to be miffed or pleased that she was so right.

Up till now - as is right - my tastes, my feelings, my personal experiences have all gone to feed my writings; in my best contrived phrases I still felt the beating of my heart. But henceforth the link is broken between what I think and what I feel. And I wonder whether this impediment which prevents my heart from speaking is not the real cause that is driving my work into abstraction and artificiality.

Essentially, the novel is an account of the doings and entanglements of a number of middle-to-upper class types, many of them schoolboys, in between-the-wars Paris (it was published in 1925, the same year as Mrs Dalloway across the channel, and a year before The Great Gatsby emerged on the other side of the Atlantic). Their relations to each other are complex in more than one sense (I had to stop and draw myself a character map about a third of the way through in order to keep track of who everyone was and how they were connected to everyone else, and in so doing realised how little it did justice to the intricacies and subtleties of those relations), and most are of a pronouncedly literary bent, being writers, editors, and so on. Even those who aren't directly implicated with literature and the arts are very much 'literary' characters, being prone to introspection, abstraction of thought, fluidity of expression and extended disquisitions...in other words, just the sorts who I like, in literature and in life.

The street where Bernard Profitendieu had lived until then was quite close to the Luxembourg Gardens. There, in the path that overlooks the Medici fountains, some of his schoolfellows were in the habit of meeting, every Wednesday afternoon, between four and six. The talk was of art, philosophy, sport, politics and literature. [...] Every one of them, as soon as he was in company with the others, lost his naturalness and began to act a part.

While centre stage is initially occupied by Bernard and Olivier, Olivier's uncle Edouard soon assumes a pivotal position in the novel's overall scheme. Edouard is a writer, and we have access to his thoughts through extracts from his notebooks; moreover, it turns out that he's writing a novel called 'The Counterfeiters' and is given to lengthy excursions on the subject not only of that novel, but of art in general...très metafictional.

'My poor dear friend, you will make your readers die of boredom,' said Laura; as she could no longer hide her smile, she had made up her mind to laugh outright.

'Not at all. In order to arrive at this effect - do you follow me? - I invent the character of a novelist, whom I make my central figure; and the subject of the book, if you must have one, is just that very struggle between what reality offers him and what he himself desires to make of it.'

'Yes, yes; I'm beginning to see,' said Sophroniska politely, though Laura's laugh was very near conquering her. 'But you know it's always dangerous to represent intellectuals in novels. The public is bored by them; one only manages to make them say absurdities and they give an air of abstraction to everything they touch.'

'And then I see exactly what will happen,' cried Laura; 'in this novel of yours you won't be able to help painting yourself.'

The counterfeiters of the title of Gide's novel are, on one level, the makers and schoolboy passers of counterfeit coins whose activities, both with the false coinage and with the institution of a rather seedy quasi-brothel frequented exclusively by these privileged children of pillars of society (both Bernard's and Olivier's fathers are eminent jurists; the contrast between that profession and the activities of some of their children and childrens' schoolfellows is surely intentional), form one thread of the story. But one is also led to wonder whether all the characters of the novel are engaged in a more figurative passing of false coin - of being counterfeiters - through everyday hypocrisy, failures of understanding or imagination, excessive artifice, excessive self-denial, and in countless other ways. And, as is made explicit in the comments of the cynical Strouvilhou near the end, also at stake is the question of the status of art (including, presumably, The Counterfeiters itself), which is where the metafictionality becomes doubly important:

' [...] We live upon nothing but feelings which have been taken for granted once for all and which the reader imagines he experiences, because he believes everything he sees in print; the author builds on this as he does on the conventions which he believes to be the foundations of his art. These feelings ring as false as counters, but they pass current. And as everyone knows that "bad money drives out good", a man who should offer the public real coins would seem to be defrauding us. [...]'

So all of this of course took my fancy, especially when presented in prose so sharp and unsparing (and sometimes very witty), and with its characters continually falling into a series of unfortunate relationships with one another, of variously assumed, obscure and hinted-at characters (there's more than a whiff of pederasty to many of the interactions), and also carrying on this whirl of erudite, elegant, and often rather cutting conversations, sometimes scoring points off one another, sometimes floundering in a sea of mutual misunderstandings and things left unspoken (most notably between Olivier and Edouard)...it actually put me rather in mind of The Secret History, even though they're quite different novels in many ways.

I've just noticed that, in pecking out these impressions, I have, as is my wont, emphasised the 'literary' aspects of the novel over its more 'human' or 'natural' elements (say, to do with character and plot!), but I think that this is a kind of reading which is positively invited by The Counterfeiters - I mean, it even has a chapter entitled 'The Author Reviews His Characters'...it's also difficult to pin down because it refuses to focus on any one of its individual characters in any conventional way, often disposing of them or raising them to sudden prominence rather peremptorily. Anyhow, there was more that I wanted to say about The Counterfeiters but, as with every book that I really like, it'd be futile to attempt an exhaustive recapitulation/excavation of my responses to it - and so instead I'll leave off here.

* * *

Edit [16/2/06]: Thoughts on the ending here.

* * *

Top 14 favourite novels first read in 2005, in order (14 because that's how many have really stuck with me):

1. Hard-Boiled Wonderland And The End Of The World - Haruki Murakami
2. To The Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
3. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami
4. The Counterfeiters - André Gide [I'm including this one because: (a) I was a fair way into it by the time the new year rolled over; and (b) it feels so much like an '05 book in terms of my personal history]
5. The Master And Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
6. Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
7. A Wild Sheep Chase - Haruki Murakami
8. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
9. The New York Trilogy - Paul Auster
10. South Of The Border, West Of The Sun - Haruki Murakami
11. Fear And Trembling - Amélie Nothomb
12. Lord Malquist & Mr Moon - Tom Stoppard
13. Beloved - Toni Morrison
14. Love & Friendship - Alison Lurie

Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events

Read the first couple of books in this series a couple of years back, but didn't - rather against expectations - hugely get into them; it was one of those instances where I liked the idea very much more than the execution. Anyhow, response to film is similar - it's neat, and inventive, and engages quite a few of my minor fetishes, and I was digging the set design, costumes, and general ramshackle Gorey/Burton/self-reflexivity thing, but for some reason it never really quite grabbed hold...maybe I was just taking it too much for granted and wasn't suitably appreciative of the subversiveness and joy of the basic idea.

Kelis - Kaleidoscope

The one with "Caught Out There" on it. Don't have a lot to say about the album, except that I continue to find 95% of all hip-hop exquisitely uninteresting to listen to, and Kaleidoscope doesn't fall into the other 5%...well, we all have our blind spots.

The Strokes - First Impressions of Earth

I reckon that most sensible people were past the hype -- backlash -- backlash-against-the-backlash thing that the Strokes copped in relation to Is This It by the time Room On Fire came out, and have had time since to work out that (a) Is This It doesn't sound that much like Television, (b) Room On Fire doesn't sound that much like the Cars (well okay, except on one or two songs), and (c) while the Strokes aren't likely to save rock and roll, both of their lps to date have been pretty darn solid, catchy pop-rock record-things, and they're a pretty darn good band.

As to this newest one, well, the first thing one notices is that it's a bit of a change in sound - more 'stadium-rock' in sound, and fuller and harder-rocking (though it also has more slow songs), maybe a little more expansive and definitely more diverse and covering more ground than the earlier two albums. The second thing to notice is that despite these changes, it still sounds every inch a Strokes album. And the third thing, which comes quite a bit later, is that, contrary to first impressions (no pun intended), it's not that much of a drop-off from Is This It and Room On Fire.

There are plenty of things wrong with First Impressions of Earth - it's too long, some of the experiments don't work (the world didn't need the Strokes to go all Magnetic Fields, as on "Ask Me Anything"), a few of the songs drag. But on the other side of the ledger, when it hits ("You Only Live Once", "Juicebox", "Heart In A Cage", "Killing Lies"), it hits hard, and you have to give the band credit for stretching themselves (even if, on this third outing, the alternative would have been assured mediocrity). Cons, pros...the album may not be as tight as I'd like, but the band is as tight as ever; some of the songs which eventually fall into heaps or become boring at least start really well or have really good bits ("On The Other Side", "Vision Of Division", the Muse-esque "Electricityscape"). On the whole, it doesn't quite work for me, but it's neither a complete nor an ignoble failure.

Rilo Kiley - The Execution of All Things

It's taken me long enough to get round to this one; I heard a few songs from it at the time that it was released (2002), most notably "A Better Son/Daughter", a brilliantly tuneful and messed-up anti-anthem, resolutely downcast but somehow overwhelmingly affirmatory, and since then have contrived to hear a majority of its songs in one way or another (downloads, last.fm, radio...) and liked every one. Anyway, a few days ago I realised that I really needed to listen to and own the album, and it lives up to all expectations - it's pretty much as good as this kind of melodic, guitar-driven indie-rock gets (all the better that it has something of a countrified edge).

"A Better Son/Daughter" is still as good as it ever was, but I like "The Execution of All Things" even more - it has the same soaring melodicism, the same slashing guitars, the same attitude, the same utter conviction...and it's even more catchy. At their best, Rilo Kiley have the knack of writing songs and, I suppose, Jenny Lewis has the knack of singing those songs, in such a way that nearly every line (lyrical or instrumental) works as a hook, dragging the listener along in the song's wake, and "The Execution of All Things" is probably the best example of that.

The two other highlights come right at the end: first, "With Arms Outstretched", a uniquely gentle, wide-eyed, aw-shucks top-of-a-mountain moment (complete with strummed acoustic guitar, glockenspiel, handclaps and 'boy choir' including Conor Oberst); then, the band gets its rock gear back on with barnstorming finale "Spectacular Views", one of the few songs on the album to have a genuine chorus, and a helluva good one at that. (That said, the opening pair of "The Good That Won't Come Out" and "Paint's Peeling" is pretty fantastic, too.)

As I sort of suggested earlier, the two best things about The Execution of All Things are the edgy, memorable songwriting and Lewis's delivery (guitarist Blake Sennett also sings on a couple of songs). But the lyrics are also a feature - they have a disaffectedness and a feel of human messiness which is exactly right, and while little fragments often leap out, they work best as wholes, each song forming a self-contained, unified narrative ("A Better Son/Daughter" is the best of these). All in all, I'd go as far as to call this album a minor masterpiece - it's the complete package.

Emiliana Torrini - Fisherman's Woman

This one was a gift from David (Christmas-related), and listening to the album, it occurred to me that he was on pretty safe ground in choosing it for me, given my definite fondness for fey, somewhat precious, eccentric female singer-songwriters such as Torrini. A'course, that doesn't diminish the pleasure I've taken in allowing Fisherman's Woman to weave its delicate way into my life in the slightest - it's a very lovely, hushed, unobtrusively pretty record which drifts gently along on its own path, and damnit, this is the sort of thing that I like.

Opener "Nothing Brings Me Down" is the prettiest song on the record, and probably my favourite. But really all of the songs are at least nice, and most are considerably more than that in their cascading, poetic flowerings; for all of its simplicity of construction, the whole album really rewards careful, headphones-while-doing-nothing-else-in-a-dark-room listening. It kind of puts me in mind of The Last Beautiful Day in its gently shimmery music-box vibe, though sparer in its instrumentation and just generally more stripped back; creates a similar sort of mood to outfits like Azure Ray and Hem (quiet, thoughtful, and edged with melancholy without being overwhelmingly downbeat), but musically has more in common with, say, a more acoustic guitar-oriented Björk or Múm at their most restrained. It's actually really difficult to describe or pin down the actual sound of Fisherman's Woman, which is, I guess, a sign of originality - and, most importantly, it all works.

Paul Kelly & The Stormwater Boys - Foggy Highway

Normally, when I really get into bluegrass, it's when done with a female vocalist - I don't know why...guess that's just the way I'm wired. This record's an exception, though - a while back, I heard it playing in Sister Ray's and was interested enough to suss it out at that point, but it's only now that a copy of the album has fallen into my hands, whereupon lo, it's as good as I remembered.

The ensemble is led by Kelly on vocals, and elsewise made up of what is, I guess, the standard modern bluegrass instrumentation - most prominently, banjo and fiddle (the former usually accompanying the vox, pushing the music forward from beneath, the latter either commenting in the upper register or emerging as a separate melodic voice in its own right), shaded by mandolin, guitars (just acoustic, as far as I can hear) and double bass. Mostly comprised of Kelly originals (one cowrite with Archie Roach, another with one A. McGregor, plus a Louvin Brothers' song, "You're Learning", on which Kelly's joined by Kasey Chambers, returning the dueting favour after "I Still Pray"), it's a really quite wonderful contemporary gloss on that high lonesome sound. The songwriting is consistently good, the band knows exactly what it's doing and is technically very sound, Kelly's vocals provide a charismatic focal point (and the harmonies, when they come, are spot-on), and the overall sound hits precisely the right spot. Swinging easily from the declamatory, scene-setting opener "Stumbling Block" through numbers both yearning and rollicking (current favourites are "Rally Round The Drum", "Passed Over" and "Foggy Highway" itself), to penultimate quasi-waltz "Cities Of Texas" and slowed-down gospel/worksong-ish closer "Meet Me In The Middle Of The Air".

Miller's Crossing

A while ago, I was talking iconic films with Rosie from Reading The Subject, and the first one she mentioned was Miller's Crossing; it's an early Coen brothers film. Taken together, those two things were enough to get me to watch it, and I'm glad I did. Set in a prohibition era American town controlled by gangsters, it focuses on Gabriel Byrne as Tommy, sad-eyed son-of-a-bitch-as-a-matter-of-pride right hand man to the Irish (of course) boss, whose territory is increasingly being threatened by the eye-talians; cue intrigues, set-ups, gunnings-down, menacing associates, bought police chiefs and public officials, tough-as-nails molls, fixed fights, and all the other cliches of the genre (with some noirish elements creeping in, too).

There are some distinctively Coen touches - the ways in which the grotesque elements of the characters are often highlighted by the angles from which they're filmed, the deadpan violence, and (most notably) the unsentimental yet oddly affecting tone. Another, I suppose, is the way in which we're kept at a bit of a distance from the characters and the story - initially, there's a confusing swirl of names, events and characters (though the basic story is very simple), and the characters all talk in such literate, wise-cracking sentences that one doesn't take them entirely seriously as real people...rather, they're very much 'screen' characters, inhabiting the idea of the gangster film rather than the gangster film itself. Even so, Miller's Crossing has a humanity to it, thanks in part to clever writing and in part to Byrne's sensitive performance, so that we see Tommy as a moral being (albeit with his own highly individual moral code, and with his choices often severely limited by his circumstances) and take him seriously as such through the twists and peregrinations of the plot and his machinations, and despite our limited insight into his underlying motives. (A reading of Tommy and the film which is supported by the film's title and its resultant emphasis on the decision forced upon Tommy when he takes Bernie out to Miller's Crossing to whack him, and the way that falls out at the end of the film, as well as the recurrent imagery of the woods and Tommy's hat.)

Natalie Merchant - Motherland

Weirdly, it was almost out of a sense of duty that I borrowed this album from the library - a duty owed to myself, since I thought that I might well like it, even though I didn't really expect to. For me, it all started with Merchant's solo debut Tigerlily, a sweetly precious gem of an album, and one which I always associate with gentle summer sadness; after that, I began to get into the Maniacs' back catalogue, and before now I hadn't explored any further with her solo stuff. Motherland is very recognisably Natalie (though I'd never noticed the pronounced vocal similarities between her and Beth Orton before), but has a fuller and perhaps less 'young' sound, covering more stylistic ground than that earlier work. Unsurprisingly, then, I like the dreamier, more folky ballad types the most - "Motherland", "Golden Boy", "Henry Darger" - but it turns out that the whole record is very solid, lightly bathed in the soft golden glow that made Tigerlily so special all those years ago.

Jewel - Pieces of You

Another of those sensitive, somewhat folksy girl singers for whom I have something of a soft spot ("Hands" is the first mp3 that I can remember downloading - how's that for a bit of trivia?); I remember hearing Jewel's first singles - "Who Will Save Your Soul", "You Were Meant For Me", "Foolish Games" - on the radio, back in the day, and they've more or less remained a part of my life since then, in that all-encompassing, vaguely wistful way probably unique to pretty, melancholy pop songs which have had saturation airplay at some point in their existences. Years on, I finally come to listen to the album, Pieces of You, and am surprised by how unpolished and genuinely naïve it is (at least one of the singles - "Foolish Games" - was definitely re-recorded for its single version) given that it was a massive seller in its time. In all honesty, it's not that good - there are too many mediocre, dragging songs and not enough which sparkle with the unaffected grace of the singles - but kind of charming for all that.