Kent - Isola

An indie-edged guitar-rock album, but one with particularly nice sonics. What does that even mean? I like it, anyway, though on first blush it doesn't seem made of the kind of stuff that really sings. Has a lighter touch than Hagnesta Hill, incidentally, even though that other came later.

"The opposite is fiction": The Essex Green - Cannibal Sea

Sprightly, elegant, 60s-infused pop that sets its camp up somewhere between the classic revivalist tent and some strong folk- and power-pop streams, though my favourite is the distinctly Stereolab-y "Cardinal Points", complete with minute-and-a-bit-long guitar wig-out ending ("This Isn't Farm Life" and "Snakes in the Grass" are also particularly rad). It's a good record - not a weak song to be seen, plenty of likeable melodies (it reminds me a bit of the Fiery Furnaces at points, too).

The Pitchfork 500: Our Guide to the Greatest Songs from Punk to the Present edited by Scott Plagenhoef and Ryan Schreiber

I enjoyed reading this, of course - I long ago made my peace with the 'fork and any list of this kind, along with brief accompanying wraps on each of the inclusions, put together by the site was always going to be at least readable. Moreover, breaking the book up into three or four year periods (each introduced by a brief overview of the time) and making some attempt to arrange the songs within each of those periods into an approximate narrative of the musical milieu of the time works well - while also reinforcing the sense, generated in the first instance by the selections themselves, that the 500 here really do reflect a kind of contemporary 'indie' canon consensus (which at the same time forces the realisation of just how influential pitchfork has been, because really their purview extends considerably beyond even the broadest notion of 'indie' or 'alternative') - and the interspersed mini-lists are a nice touch.

That said, something about the format seemed to result in the write-ups being less inspiring than I might have expected; of the songs that I know (extended pause now while I count them: 182...and I've just realised that I like, and in most cases really, really like nearly every one of those), only a very small handful made me want to really go out and listen to them again, loud, and only one of that small handful remains in my mind right now (the one on "Cross Bones Style", for one particularly piquant turn of phrase); moreover, there wasn't a single one on a song that I didn't already know that made me think that I had to hear it.

There doesn't seem much point going into individual selections, though I must say I was pleased that "Lazy Line Painter Jane" cracked the list - and, as I mentioned before, the canonical nature of the list is striking in patches (though there are probably easily a hundred more which would've taken their places just as easily as 'obvious' choices had they in fact been included).

Songs that the list has got me to listen to in the last few minutes (though not particularly, as noted above, due to the way they're described in the book): "Headache" by Frank Black (I still like "Bad Harmony" more), "Heartbeats" by the Knife, "The City" by the Dismemberment Plan, "Ever Fallen in Love" (Buzzcocks of course).

Drop Dead Gorgeous

Reasonably entertaining satirical comedy following the leadup to a teenage beauty pageant in smalltown Minnesota which could've been so much better than it in fact is, especially given those strutting their stuff - Kirsten Dunst and Denise Richards as the leading contenders, Ellen Barkin and Kirstie Alley as their respective mothers, and the likes of Amy Adams and Brittany Murphy as other contestants...not all great actors by any stretch, but all seemingly well to brilliantly suited to playing the sorts of roles they have here. But it just doesn't coalesce properly, feeling lead-footed and prone to pulling its punches despite the seriously over the top moves it makes.

Kelly Clarkson - All I Ever Wanted

Pretty much what you want a Kelly Clarkson album to be - vividly 'now' pop anthems and ballads with just a couple of rockers thrown in...the songs are good and it might be the most consistent of her four records (elsewhere, see here, here and here), and has high points which come close to matching those of Breakaway. Not breaking any new ground, either for KC or generally, but of course that isn't the point.

Let the Right One In

Completely lives up to the hype - Let the Right One In is nothing short of superb. It feels odd to throw a superlative at the film, though, for in its quiet way, it feels a bit beyond words - to watch it is to be wrapped up in a distinctly filmic experience, in which horror, drama and a sweet, painful coming-of-age romance coexist in complete harmony. It's a genuine horror movie - the vampire elements are far from merely symbolic, aesthetic or mechanical - but it functions equally well on those other levels, and as a pure mood piece, too. A couple of born-of-budget-shortcomings moments of sfx hokiness aside, its craftsmanship is beyond reproach, including the spectral, compelling performances put in by the two child leads, and to the extent that it builds to a climax, it's oddly muted and the more effective for it. A real pearl.

(w/ M)

Pete Fidler, Sal Kimber & Fireside Bellows @ East Brunswick Club, Sunday 22 March

Pete Fidler, a dobro player teamed with a guitarist and a double bass, music very dobro-y. Pleasant but not overly memorable, and I thought the band wasn't as tight as a unit as it might've been. Then Sal Kimber, a skinny bundle of energy who reminded me a bit of Jen Cloher and a bit of Justine, and had some very good songs and a great way of selling them, alternating between banjo and guitar and backed by a full band (guitar, bass, drums, keys). Her thing was a kind of blues-folk-rock-pop thing, and a lot of fun. And finally Fireside Bellows, ordinarily a two piece but joined on stage by a couple of others to flesh out their sound, which is a somewhat but not overly contemporised take on the cosmic/high and lonesome thing, the m & f harmonies and way of writing songs evoking Gram and Emmylou - they were very winning and I liked 'em a lot.

(w/ Wei)

Watchmen

Actually very faithful, and very good - just rock solid across the board, and brings the book to life in suitable style. The moral lines and complexities of Moore's text aren't sacrificed, and the different ethoses represented by Rorschach, the Comedian, Ozymandias, Dr Manhattan, etc come through clearly, while the action scenes are exciting and emphatic; the mood is about right too, if not quite as despairingly heavy and grimy as on the page. And the actors do enough to convince; Patrick Wilson as Dreiburg and Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach are particularly good. The soundtrack is interesting, too, leaning heavily on music from the 60s (and 70s?) despite the alternate-80s period setting.

(w/ M)

Hope Sandoval & The Warm Inventions - Bavarian Fruit Bread

Even more dreamy and hushed than her Mazzy Star stuff. It's a bit on the insubstantial side, but the gauze is a matter of taste and certainly has its place, and besides, I could happily listen to Sandoval sing just about anything.

Department of Eagles - In Ear Park

A set of quirky, ornate, piano-y, somewhat experimental, full band singer-songwriter pop. A bit like Destroyer, a bit like the Decemberists, a bit like the Dears. "No One Does It Like You" continues to be rad.

Spoon - "Love Ways" ep

More Spoon! From a few years back, I think - kinda boppy. Yes...

Ali Smith - The First Person and other stories

I still find Ali Smith more frustrating than enjoyable to read (last time, it was The Accidental), but having worked my way through this collection of short stories, I'm increasingly inclined to think that she's worth the effort. Her writing is demanding - formally experimental and dense - and requires wrestling with, but the rewards can be considerable, even if I still feel I've only scraped the surface.

Neko Case - Middle Cyclone

The third impeccable album in a row from Neko Case (fourth if one includes the live Tigers), and her most abstract and impressionistic yet. She's never particularly been one for conventional song structures, particularly since the watershed of Blacklisted, but Middle Cyclone is a step further than anything Case has recorded before, and it's increasingly exciting to see the direction that she's going in - the result is something edging ever closer to 'pure' music, and already it sounds very far from anything else that's happening out there...there are traces of all the ground she's staked out before, the haunted, shadowy country-noir terrain which picked up such intriguing resonances in Fox Confessor in particular, but now writ anew.

It seems besides the point to discuss individual tracks, for this is a record about texture, sound and melody rather than discrete parts...the shorter mood pieces work as well as the fuller songs; the whole is more than the sum of its parts. It makes the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.

* * *

Previously (in order of release/happening rather than order of listening by me): The Virginian, Furnace Room Lullaby, Canadian Amp, Blacklisted, The Tigers Have Spoken, Fox Confessor Brings The Flood, and live.

"IMP October 2008"

Got a bit of a backlog of IMPs to listen to. This one's a moodily atmospheric set, Boards of Canada and Dust Brothers and Four Tet etc (subliminal/abstract electronic type stuff); I had it on last night while doing something else, so wasn't paying fullest attention, but I think the only track with lyrics was the Billie Holliday number pretty much dead in the middle.

(from John in Boulder, CO)

The National - Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers

An older one, but doesn't lose much by comparison to Alligator and Boxer - more velvety, rough-edged modern chamber-rock, replete with subtle hooks and huge crescendos.

David Bowie - Hunky Dory

Strange that I've never listened to this before, but still. For mine, Hunky Dory isn't a patch on Low or even Ziggy, but it's still a rather darling pop singer-songwriter Bowie record, and in "Changes", "Oh! You Pretty Things" and "Life on Mars" it has three of his most recognisable and, probably, greatest songs up its sleeve, so...

More on The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Ruth's book club recently did The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, in part because she told them that it was the only one that everyone in my book club (the NV one) had liked, and after that meeting said that everyone in that club had been curious about why we liked it so much, and requested an email distillation. It's taken me a while to get round to it, but I eventually expanded my previous thoughts, as follows:

* * *

[...] the short version would go something like this: I like "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter" because it's haunted, poetic and human, and because it makes me feel all sad and stirred-up inside...

To begin with, an idea: in literature as in all art, only the particular and specific can be truly universal. To create something which somehow expresses or otherwise touches upon the universal (which is not to say that this is or should be the goal of all literature, natch), it's necessary to focus on a specific setting and milieu rather than dealing in windy abstractions and generalities; the most well-known of Shakespeare's plays, for example - "Romeo and Juliet", say, or "Hamlet" or "Lear" or "The Tempest" - derive their universality and archetypal flavour precisely from the playwright's close, nuanced scrutiny and 'pushing' of the particular characters and events which inhabit and constitute those works.

Whether or not you agree with all of that (I happen to, by the way), I think it's just such a dialectic (not quite the word I'm after but you know what I mean) that's at work in "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter" - McCullers' is an intense scrutiny of a small group of characters in a particular place and time (namely 1930s small-town southern America), and in particular of the loneliness, incipient anomie and sense of yearning for something they're unable to clearly identify that afflicts all of them, but it also comes to serve as microcosm, illustration and exemplar of what might be called, were it not so pretentious, the 'human condition' as perceived and experienced by McCullers herself.

Of course, the trick is in how McCullers achieves this. The inside front page of my secondhand Penguin edition quotes Graham Greene as saying that "Miss McCullers and perhaps Mr Faulkner are the only writers since the death of D. H. Lawrence with an original poetic sensibility" and I reckon that phrase - 'an original poetic sensibility' - gets it just right...there's just something about it. The novel has a clarity of vision that's at once troubling and affecting -

The poignancy of its characters' plight (a plight which is referable to the sort of existential malaise which lies over all of them rather than to any particular events or happenings in their lives) is highlighted by the tenuous, unarticulated ways in which they relate to Singer. In many ways, the deaf-mute stands at the centre of the book, but it's the characters over whom he exerts his strange fascination - Biff Brannon, Jake Blount, Dr Copeland, and most of all Mick Kelly - who most touch and linger, which may be precisely the point. After all, Singer himself is a strangely absent central figure, not only in the literal sense of his muteness, but also in that his motives are almost completely opaque to the characters, including, perhaps, himself (Biff seems to get closest, but even he doesn't understand the half of it); it's telling that Greene, in that line above, speaks of McCullers in the same breath as William Faulkner, for both are inextricably tied up with the idea of the southern gothic, which itself is characterised by the use of (among other devices) grotesque elements to highlight and throw into relief the setting and milieu being explored. Singer is not who everyone thinks he is; he is a blank canvas on which they can project their longings for human connection and understanding.

It seems clear that, for McCullers, if we can't live alone, then we also haven't yet fathomed how to live with each other. One thing that the novel is about is the gaps between people, and how impossibly difficult those gaps may be to bridge - the loneliness that is experienced by everyone in "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter" is a deeply social loneliness...people are all around us, if we could only connect.

...which leads naturally to the political elements of the novel, such as they are. For mine, these aspects of the book are its weakest - McCullers is better on the personal, human dimensions of her canvas, whether in isolation (Mick's inchoate development, Biff's half-articulated feelings for the girl) or shading into the political (Dr Copeland's difficult relationship with his people and his family, Jake's alcoholism and fiery idealism), than with the overtly political stuff (which is not so surprising given that she was only 23 when the book was published and presumably younger while writing it). Still, they have their place - set pieces like the conversations between Blount and Copeland, playing out the classic lefty strategy of (as I once saw it memorably put in a different context) drawing their wagons into a circle and firing inwards, add to the sense of sorrow that is imbued in every line of the book...and of course she can't be faulted for giving fascism a good kicking, nor for wrapping the progressive political movements of the time (and their failures) up with the wider malaise which then afflicted (and continues to afflict) society at large, and those aspects of the novel left me not merely sad, but actually angry, too, in a way that few others have (Toni Morrison's "Beloved" leaps to mind as one other with such an impact).

But for all of that, for all of the sense of sadness and shadowy, heavy melancholy, of failures of connection and understanding, of loss and absence in it, there's something miraculous about "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter" - it remains humane and somehow pure of vision...it has a kind of crystalline quality. Whatever it is that makes literature great, this novel has it.

Phew! I could go on, but I'm kind of running out of steam and this is already pretty long, and messy too. [...]

Kim Richey - Rise

Anyone who can sound, vocally, like Sarah McLachlan on one song (say "Without You") and Lucinda Williams on another (say "Cowards in a Brave New World") deserves points for versatility at least; I suspect Richey's natural singing voice is closer to the sweetly scratchy purr that's at its most heightened on melancholy album opener "Girl in a Car". In fact, while Richey does reveal herself to be pretty musically versatile across the 13 country/adult-alternative tracks making up Rise, there's a lot more than that to like here - the songs are strong, and arranged and delivered in a way that's fresh and appealing while also possessing depth.

"Degas: Master of French Art" @ NGA, Canberra

Though this exhibition was one of the main reasons for our excursion to Canberra over the last few days (indeed, it was the original stimulus), Degas isn't particularly a touchstone for me, and nor do I know particularly much about him; still, I was interested and a bit excited to see what he was all about.

The exhibition provides a wide cross-section of his work, including a large proportion of prints (etching, lithography, etc) and sketches, including chalk and pastel type work, as well as a fair number of sculptures and even some photography, but relatively few (though still a significant number) of the oil paintings with which I primarily associate him. The ones of dancers tended to most catch my eye and appeal - the subject/motif seems best suited to his ideas about colour, shade and composition, whether in clearer, relatively formally posed and arranged pieces like 'The dance class' (1873-6), or in more ethereal works like the forest scene of 'Dancers, pink and green' (c 1890) in which the dancers resemble fairies, or those somewhere in between such as 'The ballet of "Robert le diable" ' (1871), in which ghostly dancers blur into each other on stage in the background, while the foreground of audience members watching the stage (including one man looking off to the side with a pair of binoculars) is rendered in more distinct outlines. That said, the racecourse ones have an interesting combination of the earthy and crude on the one hand, and the suggestive and abstract on the other, and have their own appeal.

Having looked at this exhibition, I can understand why parallels are drawn between Degas' work and the main stream of the French impressionists, but my sense was that something different is going on in his work, even beyond his rejection of the 'en plein air' technique and the typical impressionist variegated light-and-colour method, something tending more towards abstraction (in the senses of both non-representationality and speaking to something beyond themselves). I haven't been inspired, but I do feel like his art may have more to say to me than I'd previously imagined.

"You may ask yourself: How did I get here?": Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

I haven't quite made up my mind about this one - an appropriate turn of phrase given its subject matter, namely the nature of consciousness and identity. I expected to get a lot out of it, was put offside by its first few chapters, gradually began to trust it a bit more as it progressed, and ended up feeling something more akin to a distanced admiration than any real liking for it by its end. It's a very clever book, and its themes of course interest me, but it lacks a certain lightness of touch or something, I'm not sure. It's a bit too cerebral (hah), perhaps, and not human enough, something which I suspect is one part a Powers thing and one part down to what The Echo Maker is about.