100 favourite albums: # 7: Moon Pix - Cat Power

Moon Pix is a magical record - it's almost unadorned and often positively stark, but also one of the most idiosyncratically beautiful albums I've ever listened to. A lot of the time, it's little more than her and a guitar, but so rich and expressive is Marshall's voice and so involving her songs that one doesn't even notice; every extra texture that's added (the uneasy flute on "He Turns Down", say, or the muted thunder sounds on "Say") serves a precise tonal purpose.

The mood is sombre, even barren - on her version of the traditional song "Moonshiner", it's outright desolate - but, though the flow of the record is never broken or even interrupted, it's by no means monochromatic. Indeed, "Moonshiner" itself signals the beginning of a spectacular second-half run: "Moonshiner" itself is indelibly sad; it's followed by "You May Know Him", a warmly strummed tune, and one of the best on the album; and then the skyscrapingly clear-eyed and tender "Colors and the Kids", in which a simple piano figure repeats over and over with slight variations as Marshall sings one of her purest and most heart-tugging melodies...and after that, the pulsating, humming "Cross Bones Style" ("oh come, child, come rescue me/'cause you have seen some unbelievable things"). (And that's not even mentioning the symphonic "American Flag", which opens the album and is its single finest moment.)

Moon Pix is one of those albums that feels like it's out of time - its folk influences are clear, but they've been melded with something faintly unearthly to produce a record that defies description. To me, it feels like a gift.

100 favourite albums: # 8: Summerteeth - Wilco

... each summer seems to have one particular album which, in retrospect, seems to’ve been everywhere in the air over that time. ... in 03/04 it was Wilco’s Summerteeth. - 6/10/05

It seems apt that I first came across Wilco on the radio - it was "Can't Stand It", way back when - for their music feels particularly suitable to being heard drifting on the airwaves, perhaps from a car stereo or through an open kitchen window some sunny afternoon; of all their albums, Summerteeth is the one that most has that feel, and it may not be a coincidence that it's also my favourite of theirs.

Summerteeth is one of those albums that I think of very much as a whole made comprised of a few different mood suites, all flowing naturally into each other. After the pealing, joyous-sounding (the words Tweedy sings are rather less upbeat) beginning of "Can't Stand It" comes the record's best song, the dreamily elliptical "She's A Jar" (another with poetically ambiguous but distinctly uncheerful lyrics); it's followed by the first of the album's several climbing rock-and-rollers, "A Shot In The Arm" (probably the one that I'm most likely to get stuck in my head), which kicks off the 'fast' part of the album which also includes "I'm Always In Love" and "Nothing'severgonnastandinmyway(again)". (Admittedly, the 'fast' section is broken up by the sweetly plaintive "We're Just Friends", another particular favourite of mine.)

Then comes the 'quiet' part, beginning with "Pieholden Suite", followed by the faux-jaunty but actually rather sad "How To Fight Loneliness" and culminating in the epic, magnificent "Via Chicago". And then the final section of the album, which is a bit more uneven in tone and mood but nonetheless seems to lead entirely naturally to the penultimate 'proper' track, "Summer Teeth", which, I reckon (without being able to justify it) takes its skittering, sunnily declining tone from its first words ("Like a cloud/His fingers explode/On the typewriter ribbon/The shadow grows"), and then quietly unwinding closer "In A Future Age". (After a brief pause, we get the most straightforwardly friendly and golden song on the album, "Candy Floss", and a slightly different mix of "A Shot In The Arm".)

Taken as a whole, Summerteeth has, at once, a haziness and a clarity to it, a palette which seems comprised of both nostalgic sepia tones and thoroughly contemporary hues of grey alienation mixed with daubs of in-the-moment colour. The music is elegantly orchestrated modern rock with numerous streams of other popular music influences running through it; lap steel, piano, organ and other instruments appear throughout, always incorporated subtly but in a way that is integral to the song. It makes me feel both happy and sad in a mixed-up way that I can't clearly identify as either piercing or diffuse, but is undeniably strong; it makes me feel.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

I can't quite make my mind up, but this may be the best yet. It's certainly grittier than any of the previous entries, with Harry and his friends on ever more unstable foundations (here, the threat is as much from an entity that is nominally within - the ministry of magic - as from outside, and the external menace is increasingly insidious and inextricably linked with Harry's own life and even his mind), and while it doesn't have the same style as Azkaban or the concentrated, concise structure of Goblet (indeed, it's a bit jumpy and one feels that some cuts to the source material have made certain plot developments a bit obvious - the role of Grawp and the centaurs, for example), that grit and enveloping sense of shadowy movements counts for a lot. In other matters, in Luna, an intriguing (if slightly affected) new character is introduced, Helena Bonham Carter also makes her debut (though she doesn't do much apart from snarl) and Gary Oldman is marvellous again.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Darker again than its predecessors, and tighter, while also expanding on the ongoing story underlying the series. Over the course of this one and Azkaban, the films have assumed an increasingly epic feel - something I hadn't expected given that the main protagonists are children (more particularly, children who, apart from being able to do magic, aren't particularly preternaturally self-possessed or able to avoid the pitfalls of growing up), with events taking place within a relatively confined compass.

(Indeed, that notion of the end of childhood runs strongly through this one, with really the whole film serving as an extended metaphor for that particular passage - it's well done.)

Santogold - Santogold

Is 'post-M.I.A.' a genre? If so, this album would fall within it. That said, the most obviously M.I.A.-esque are also generally my least favourite; the best songs are the ones where Santi White, the woman behind the moniker, really does something different, and usually the more melodic ones (I'm thinking particularly of "L.E.S. Artistes", "Lights Out" and "I'm A Lady"). All told, not an album that's dazzled me, but nonetheless a good one.

"Happy new year 2009": IMP January 2009

This is a pretty neat mix. Plenty of jangle of various kinds and just general good-taste (in a good way) pop music - Kinks, Breeders, Camera Obscura, New Pornographers, Jesus & Mary Chain ("Almost Gold"), Mum, Emily Haines & the Soft Skeleton. Doesn't have any individual songs that really knocked me out, but still nice.

(from Abby in Seattle, WA)

100 favourite albums: # 9: In The Aeroplane Over The Sea - Neutral Milk Hotel

... there's something going on in the spaces between the notes which binds it together and renders it amazing. Now that I've entered into its world, it keeps me with a lump in my throat more or less the whole way through, and I feel as if its rhythms ... have written themselves inside me, or something, so that there's a kind of inevitability in its rises and falls, as well as a feeling of wholeness. Melodies recur, overtly and subliminally, and the horns serve as punctuation and signposts along the way, taking on a different complexion each time they reappear; Jeff Mangum's voice reaches and frays and expresses and one always feels as [though] things are going to fly apart at any moment, but they never quite do. - 9/4/06

"it's just so great, and it makes me happy and sad all at once and I find myself singing and humming bits of it at inappropriate moments and I can't explain it but it stirs me" - 6/5/06

(The song that started it all.)

Everything I've already said about this album still holds true, only more so. It's still inscrutably weird, still overflowing with life and humanity, still astonishing. I don't even know where to begin.

100 favourite albums: # 10: If You're Feeling Sinister - Belle and Sebastian

I don't know. A part of me feels that Sinister is so fragile that it would fall apart if you so much as breathed on it, but another part thinks that it's actually considerably more sturdy than its delicate, precious exterior suggests. The reasons for the first of those impressions are obvious enough (this is Belle and Sebastian we're talking about, after all, and well before they developed the muscular gloss of their latter-day records); as to the other, I think it has a lot to do with just how well wrought every single song on it is...the quiet sad ones (most directly, "Fox in the Snow") are just as carefully and precisely put together as the more obviously robust numbers like "Me and the Major" and the mid-tempo pieces which make up the principal cloth of which the album is cut, of which "Like Dylan in the Movies" is the paradigmatic example, not just on Sinister but amidst their discography as a whole.

"Get Me Away From Here, I'm Dying" is the big one off Sinister, I suppose, and deservedly so - it's one of those songs where everything comes together perfectly for its three and a half minutes, jaunty bagatelle, lament and bedsit anthem all at once. But "Seeing Other People" is the one that has the most personal meaning for me, and it, along with "The Stars of Track and Field" and "Judy and the Dream of Horses" are my favourites; thinking about that now, I realise (though surely not for the first time) that Belle and Sebastian are one of the few artists where lyrics and music are equally important to my affection for them.

Of course, my feelings about Belle and Sebastian go well beyond mere affection; here's probably as good a place as any to collect various previous more or less tongue-tied attempts to express why they have such a place in my heart, viz:

* * *

You really need to be in a very specific space to fully appreciate these wry, precious, oh-so-twee, librarian-chic clad indie-kids, but those of us who understand will always feel something akin to love for Belle & Sebastian — for their eloquent sneers at bourgeois society, for their quiet, wistful recognition that modern life was not made for such as them or I, and for their whimsical, faintly melancholy sense that for all of that, it’s the little moments and the gentle absurdities that make it all worthwhile. - 1/04

... it may not be entirely accurate to think of the two Stuarts, Isobel, Stevie and co as forever meandering, bookish, gentle, distracted, lightly tripping, out of step with the rest of the world, in a strange timeless realm of their own - but even still, that's the picture of the band that I'd like to retain. - 26/4/06

... their music represents something for me - some hazy ideal of elegant disaffectedness, at once brightly lit and sepia-toned, thoroughly contemporary and yet not at all made for these times, breezy and subtle and shot through with something wistful...music for the heart and for the inner life. - 22/2/07 (of both Belle and Sebastian and Saint Etienne)

* * *

Simply put, Sinister is their most complete and best album. What else is there to say?

Synecdoche, New York (again)

Emails:

From:

Howard, did you see the film again? What did you think?

To:

Yup, and was left with much the same impressions as on first viewing, most particularly that it deliberately enacts many of its ideas about non-linearity, irreducibility, liminality, etc in Art and Life rather than merely depicting them, and as such avoids any kind of formal closure or single or coherent reading. One of the underlying ideas, clear on the face of the film (if I can put it in those terms), is that art and life tend to blur into each other, and from there it's a short step to the notion of art as a metaphor for life, and then another (longer, but still not too long) step to the idea that life is, in some meaningful sense, at the same time a metaphor for art. And perhaps it's in theatre that we get, if not the purest (although perhaps) then certainly at least the most obvious example of those phenomena...simulacrum, synecdoche.

I enjoyed all the stuff about fragile/fluid identities and (relatedly) senses of time, too. (Did you notice that, when he first rings the bell to go about to what appears to be Adele's apartment, a handwritten label bearing the word 'Capgras' is attached to name tag beside the button? Capgras syndrome is - as I know from coming across it in more than one novel recently - a condition where a person becomes convinced that someone close to them has been replaced by an impostor who looks exactly like the supposed replacee.)

(last time - I'm still not sure whether I liked this film or not, even after a second viewing, but it certainly has something. This second time was with David and Ruth, neither of whom liked it much at all.)

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets & Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

These are very enjoyable! Chamber of Secrets improves on Philosopher's Stone, moving faster, introducing some fun new characters, and managing two spectacular sequences (the spiders and the basilisk) which top anything in the first film, and is itself improved upon by Prisoner of Azkaban, which is notably darker than the previous two (in part, perhaps, thanks to Alfonso Cuaron's coming on board as director for it). Shirley Henderson arrives in number 2 as Moaning Myrtle (don't know if she'll be back), and Gary Oldman as Sirius Black (who will definitely be back) in number 3...enjoyed Margoyles, Branagh and Thewlis, too, and Emma Thompson as well (though I didn't recognise her till I saw her name in the credits); Alan Rickman continues to be a treat. It's also fun to watch the three child leads growing up; thus far in the series, at least, it works well, although Emma Watson as Hermione increasingly threatens to act the other two off the screen.

"Optimism" (@ Malthouse)

Perhaps I'm being unfair to this play, but I thought it was all a bit incoherent. The satirical perspective it takes on the naive optimism embodied by Candide and Pangloss comes through clearly enough, but not much else. Its postmodern tricks are all too familiar - at least inasmuch as it's a Malthouse production - and don't take it any place new; the performers seemed to believe in the play, and there are some heavy hitters amongst them (Barry Otto, Caroline Craig, Alison Whyte, and then of course there's Frank Woodley of 'Lano & -' fame), and there's enough in there that I could go on, but the simple fact is that I didn't take to this one.

(w/ Sunny + a bunch of his friends, and M)

100 favourite albums: # 11: Blacklisted - Neko Case

... haunted, evocative, nocturnal country-noir by way of classic torch chanteuses as well as traditional folk, with echoes of rootsy revivalists ... and modern alt-country, and all tied up by the glory that is Case's voice ...- 30/1/06

It's true, Blacklisted is, as Case sings on the windswept "Things That Scare Me", haunted by American dreams. Banjo and steel string guitar drift through the record; listening to it, one is left with a sense of vast spaces and solitary drifters, plains and tumbleweed. Case's is a distinctly naturalistic universe, in which humans play out their bloody, urgent dramas against the backdrop of an essentially unyielding landscape; Blacklisted, moreover, is a thoroughly nocturnal record, lit by the flicker of campfires or else by the moon.

Many of the songs on Blacklisted are really just fragments, impressionistic slivers, but it's the way they come together that counts; that said, individual song highlights are studded throughout, from more countryfied numbers like "Deep Red Bells" (a resounding, resonant murder ballad which also happens to be one of the few songs on the album where Case really gives full play to her rich, expressive voice, and to great effect) and "Tightly" to the swelling, soulful, torch-touched trio of "Look For Me (I'll Be Around)", "I Wish I Was The Moon" and "Runnin' Out Of Fools". In any event, there's something poetically elliptical about even the most straightforward of her songs, and the music on Blacklisted seems all of a piece.

It's funny how these things go. I reckon that if Case hasn't already attained greatness, then she's right on the verge of it, and while Blacklisted was the first unequivocal shot across the bows of that particular horizon (to mix my metaphors somewhat), each of her subsequent studio lps, Fox Confessor Brings The Flood and Middle Cyclone has probably been richer and more fully-realised than this one, deeper and broader without losing anything of the concentrated power of her vision - and yet it's Blacklisted that remains my favourite, and there's something more to that than simply the loyalty that we tend to feel for those records that introduce us to artists who later become favourites...something about the way that it powerfully invokes an idea and a sense of place, imagined, to be sure, but all the more vividly for it.

100 favourite albums: # 12: Low - David Bowie

Even today, more than thirty years on from its initial release, Low still carries with it the shock of the new. An 11 song set of avant-pop, it breaks down into two sides - the first made up of seven crisp pieces of kinetic pop-ism, the second comprised by four crystallinely abstract musical soundscapes - which complement and comment upon each other, each sounding as vivid and as modern as the other. The 'pop' side is immediate but indelible - every song's a keeper, and as catchy as you could want (I really can't pick any favourites - each is as good as every other) - while each of the four pieces on the 'abstract' side is a shimmering edifice, complete in itself, and especially the magnificent "Warszawa", which sounds like glass vibrating in the shape of a tower. Who knew that Art could sound so good?

...always crashing in the same car...

"John Brack" @ NGV

Like, I suppose, a lot of people, I didn't know much about Brack beyond "Collins St, 5pm" and "The bar", but it turns out there's a lot more to him. The exhibition breaks more or less discretely into two parts, the first covering the earlier half of his career, in the 1950s and 60s, and the second occupied with the period from the 70s onwards, after his 'turn' towards a generally more abstract mode (utensils, playing cards, and writing implements often in massed ranks, like the pencil sieges and battles in pieces like 'The Pros and Cons' and 'Yes, No' from the 80s).

Certain characteristics run throughout, including Brack's sly sense of humour and his penchant for unusual and distorted perspectives and fondness for large spaces in his paintings. Some of the earlier pieces, flatly expressive suburban dreamscapes, reminded me a touch of de Chirico ("The short street", 1953, say), and in places he edges towards a surrealist sensibility (eg, "The fish shop", 1955). I wasn't that interested by the nudes, nor the gymnasts, though the pink-hued ballroom dancers appealed. I did like the school ones, like "The playground", 1959; my favourite in the exhibition was probably 'Still life with self-portrait', a blue-tinted shop window, scissors on display, inside and outside blurring into each other with a face faintly visible in reflection and the whole thoroughly denaturalised.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

Never having read any of the books, nor seen any of the films, and suspecting that I only have it in me to do one or the other, I've taken advice in the past as to which would be the better option. The advice has been conflicting, but on balance the films seemed a better bet, so if they're any good after all, I'm planning on working through however many are out on dvd in time for the next big screen release, whenever that is.

This one, the first, is a fairly auspicious start. It's clearly a fantasy movie (that goes without saying) but the path it chooses differs from many of its type, keeping things pretty light in such a way that the darker moments never get all that dark. It's painted in bright colours; it's probably fair to say that it is a film made primarily for kids, or if not, at least with a very firm eye to being kid-friendly. But it's neither too hokey, nor too twee, nor really tongue in cheek (though it's certainly knowing about its own sheer Englishness), and it's well served by both the child actors and the host of established adults in roles large and small, likeable, villainous, or ambiguous as required. (I commented a while ago to Tamara that a lot of actors who I particularly like had ended up in the franchise; she responded, not entirely accurately but not entirely inaptly either, that that was because I like English actors.) Happily, apart from the inevitable static interference, I've managed to avoid learning almost anything about the series over the years since it first exploded, so anything that the next few have up their sleeve ought to be fresh to me, just as was, by and large, the case with this one.

José Saramago - Death At Intervals

Death At Intervals is a real little charmer of a book, and in its light, gracefully ironic way, it's rather brilliant. 'The following day, no one died', it begins, and the rest of its first half or so is given over to telling the story (I use the phrase deliberately) of the ramifications of that phenomenon in the unknown country with which the novel is (in)nominally concerned (the travails of the state, the church, the funeral industry, life insurance companies, etc; the development of a semi officially-sanctioned people smuggling operation to move the suspendedly-alive across the country's border, where they can expire; and so on); then, death herself takes centre stage, announcing her presence with a letter to the Director-General of Television which is then read on live television by the Director-General himself after a very amusing consultation between him and the Prime Minister (who is one of my favourite characters, insofar as any of the figures in this book apart from death herself and perhaps the cellist with whom she later becomes preoccupied can be described as characters, that is). Actually, that passage gives a good sense of the flavour of the whole of this book (it also caused me to go a few stops past my own while reading it on the tram the other night), so here it is:

... The moment that the newsreader finished reading the government communiqué, camera two brought the director-general up on screen. He was clearly nervous, his mouth dry. He briefly cleared his throat and began to read, dear sir, I wish to inform you and all those concerned that as from midnight tonight people will start to die again, as had always happened, with little protest, from the beginning of time until the thirty-first day of december last year, I should explain that the reason that led me to interrupt my activities, to stop killing and put away the emblematic scythe that imaginative painters and engravers of yore always placed in my hand, was to give those human beings who so loathe me just a taste of what it would mean to live for ever, eternally, although, between you and me, sir, I must confess that I have no idea whether those two expressions, for ever and eternally, are as synonymous as is generally believed, anyway, after this period of a few months of what we might call an endurance test or merely extra time and bearing in mind the deplorable results of the experiment, both from the moral, that is, philosophical point of view, and from the pragmatic, that is, social point of view, I felt that it would be best for families and for society as a whole, both vertically and horizontaly, if I acknowledged my mistake publicly and announced an immediate return to normality, which will mean that all those people who should be dead, but who, with health or without it, nevertheless remain in the world, will have the candle of their life snuffed out as the last stroke of midnight fades on the air, and please note that the reference to the last stroke is merely symbolic, just in case someone gets the stupid idea of stopping the clocks in all the belltowers or of removing the clappers from the bells themselves, imagining that this will stop time and contradict my irrevocable decision, that of restoring the supreme fear to the hearts of men          most of the people in the studio had by now disappeared, and those who remained were whispering to each other, the buzz of their murmurings failing to provoke the producer, who was himself standing slack-jawed with amazement, into silencing them with the furious gesture he normally deployed, albeit in far less dramatic circumstances          therefore, resign yourselves and die without protest because it will get you nowhere, however, there is one point on which I feel it my duty to admit that I was wrong, and that has to do with the cruel and unjust way in which I used to proceed, taking people's lives by stealth, with no prior warning, without so much as a by-your-leave, and I recognise that this was downright brutal, often I didn't even allow them time to draw up a will, although it's true that in most cases I did send them an illness to pave the way, but the strange thing about illnesses is that human beings always hope to shake them off, and so only when it's too late do they realise that it will be their final illness, anyway, from now on everyone will receive due warning and be given a week to put what remains of their life in order, to make a will and say goodbye to their family, asking forgiveness for any wrongs done and making peace with the cousin they haven't spoken to for twenty years, and that said, director-general, all I would ask is that you make sure that, today without fail, every home in the land receives this message, which I sign by the name I am usually known by, death. When he saw that his image had gone from the screen, the director-general got up from his chair, folded the letter and put it in one of his inside jacket pockets. He saw the producer coming towards him, looking pale and distraught, So that's what it was, he said in a barely audible murmur, so that's what it was. The director-general nodded silently and headed for the exit. ...

Needless to say, things don't go quite as death (who insists on being referred to in the lowercase) anticipates...

100 favourite albums: # 13: Isn't Anything - My Bloody Valentine

When you wake (you’re still in a dream) – several girls galore – you never should – i can see it (but i can’t feel it) – the very titles of the songs which make up this head-spinningly hallucinatory album are ungraspable; hearing one of those evocative phrases murmured underneath the waves of sound which form the texture of Isn’t Anything is like wading through a dream and then happening, unexpectedly, upon an old, unreachable friend. “Soft As Snow” is the first song on this album, and at first glance, it seems an entirely incongruous title to open a record built on loud, often abrasive layers of guitar noise. But a closer inspection reveals just how apt a description it is for the album as a whole, for delicate, drifting melodies and half-melodies are dreamily interwoven into the noise-fabric of Isn’t Anything, and for all the heaviness of the album, the listener finally feels as if they are being immersed in a sea of something quite extraordinary, balanced between those two sets of poles: lightness and weight, darkness and light. - 27/2/03

Strip away the layers, and what Isn't Anything is, if I can put it this way, is an indie-rock album - but what an indie-rock album!

"Several Girls Galore" has pretty much always been my favourite, its ethereal vocal line threading through resoundingly bass-y drum beats and classic MBV shearing guitars; a true mini-epic, it's one of those songs that is absolutely perfect on its own terms. It's basically a pop song, but sounds like a thunderstorm...what a racket, but what genius. Elsewhere, they're equally good with foggily downbeat lullabys ("Lose My Breath", "No More Sorry"), full on noise-fests ("All I Need"), racing, punky numbers ("Sue Is Fine", "You Never Should") and almost jangly indie anthems ("Cupid Come") (need I say that most of the songs on Isn't Anything meet more than one of those descriptions?).

By turns or simultaneously pretty and cacophonous, delicate textures and melodies colliding with blaring noise and buzz-saw guitars, Isn't Anything is strikingly direct, even when the most obvious elements of its songs seem deliberately fashioned to obscure the usual trappings of rock music. As hard as it hits, its touch is delicate; it's got one hell of a kiss.

Insignificant Things

I do wonder sometimes if I might be becoming a bit set in my ways...Steph emailed NV and I about hitting the Spanish film festival (this apparently being the official one, as opposed to the 'La Mirada' one that we did a few weeks ago); upon me nominating Insignificant Things and a few others as possibilities, she remarked that she'd thought I would pick it out of the program (description here).

Anyway, we saw it last night (M, too) and it was what I'd thought it would be - a quiet but unabashedly affect-laden invocation of sadness in modern society, and done well. It's not one that I think will stay with me (it's ultimately a bit indistinct and overly familiar), but I did like it a fair bit, and it has a humanity which keeps it grounded amidst all the wispy cinema-poetics.

Star Trek

Pretty entertaining, but doesn't have quite the punch or the pizazz that I'd thought it might. Still, no regrets about seeing it; as space opera goes, one could do far worse.

100 favourite albums: # 14: The Bends - Radiohead

... a truly timeless album ... but it’s also a record thoroughly of its own milieu. ...

What Radiohead did with The Bends was create, in twelve carefully-crafted, brilliantly left-of-centre songs, a document which perfectly captures the (post)modern individual’s alienation in contemporary society. Musically a mix of indie-rock anthems, acoustic ballads, atmospherically melodic meanderings, and a couple of interesting, almost Pixies-esque rockers, the album is given an underlying coherency by Thom Yorke’s haunting vocal delivery – which switches effortlessly from the angelic to something reminiscent of Munch’s painting "The Scream" – and the distinctive musical and lyrical sensibilities of the band.

...

... it’s impossible not to reflect on the appropriateness of this album’s synthesis of the timeless and the timely - for The Bends is a classic, and destined to endure. - 8/6/02

Really, The Bends is so much a part of my history, musical and otherwise, that what I wrote back then, in June 2002, still goes just as well to describing how I respond to it and what it means to me; songs like "Fake Plastic Trees", "Black Star" and "Street Spirit (Fade Out)" have been deeply embedded in the soundtrack to everything I've done for seemingly as far as I can remember (although really only since say '97 or '98 or thereabouts - plenty long enough in any event) and have lost little of their power to pull at me even today. To a large extent, The Bends is nowadays an album from the past for me - but that's very far from meaning that I've left it behind.

"Andreas Gursky" @ NGV International

[Draft from 16/2/09: this was sitting on blogger in draft format. I just over-eagerly deleted it before noticing that it had, in fact, never been published properly...so herewith, belatedly.]

Photography very rarely captivates me in the way that paintings often do - I remember being quite struck by Bill Henson's work when I saw a career retrospective of his a few years back, and I do like Gregory Crewdson (and there were also a couple of others in the NGV Guggenheim exhibition which took my fancy), but those are very much the exception rather than the rule. Which is odd, I guess, since the medium ought to appeal to me (I'm ruefully remembering a short story entitled "The Photographer" that I wrote several years ago - tres melodramatic, as was and in some ways remains my wont), but there's no accounting for (one's own) taste. Still, Gursky's work appealed to me a bit, without resonating particularly deeply - they're large in scale in more than one sense, and finely detailed...several are stitched together from multiple shots to create a vague sense that things are just slightly askew (I spent some time wondering what sorts of lenses he'd used to generate that distortive effect, before overhearing a tour leader explaining what had really happened). His subjects are diverse, from large natural landscapes to F1 pitstops and supermarket aisles. [17/5/09 - this no doubt penetrating analysis to remind ever uncompleted now, alas...]

(w/ Kim)

100 favourite albums: # 15: Closer - Joy Division

... moving in every sense of the word – shot through with synths which are both ominous and danceable, and trembling as if it might fall apart at any moment, the record houses many of the four-piece’s most compelling numbers, and the whole is touched by a mysterious sense of grace. Human, all too human, the album is a fitting testament indeed to what might have been, and to what, to our lasting enrichment and sorrow, has ineluctably passed. - 27/2/03

It's inevitable, I suppose, that bands and, particularly, albums that we take to heart will come to stand for something larger than themselves, and indeed, sometimes to assume almost mythic proportions; for me, Joy Division is perhaps the quintessential such band, and of their two proper albums, it's certainly Closer which most has that aura to it.

I got into Joy Division at probably the ideal time - late high school, edging into the beginning of university - and it seems that every year my relationship with the band deepens, even though there may very well have been stretches of 12 months or more during which I haven't sat down to listen to either Unknown Pleasures, Closer or any of the compilations (Permanent was my first) in their entirety. Much like Radiohead, and perhaps the Cure, too, they're always there in the background.

After all this time, Closer is still mesmerising; from the opening pair of the ominous guitar churn of "Atrocity Exhibition" and the skitteringly desolate (and weirdly catchy) "Isolation", it's unremittingly heavy and dark, but something about it feels like a memory of flying. Each of its only nine songs has its place on the record, which is by turns propulsive, jagged, pulsating, declining, and each one, those I've already mentioned, and "Passover", "Colony", "Means to an End", "Heart and Soul", "Twenty Four Hours", "The Eternal" and "Decades" carries a particular charge with it which is tied in with my sense of the whole of Closer but also separable. There are very few records as close to my heart as this one.

The Very Best of Supertramp

A little bit pop, a little bit rock, a little bit prog, Supertramp are rather too mellowed for my taste, but when they get it together, they do give good melody - this is pleasant and not entirely uninteresting wallpaper music but not a whole lot more.

Cirque du Soleil: Dralion

Been a long time since I went to any kind of circus! The spectacle is undeniable - I enjoyed it.

(w/ family + M and Amy)

Camera Obscura - My Maudlin Career

Mmm, Camera Obscura are really becoming rather good. I've listened to Let's Get Out Of This Country a lot (I've particularly taken to heart the glistening title track, and, as is so often the way with songs with which we fall in love, one part in particular, namely the hook on the line "you can convince me I am pretty"), and the seemingly uniformly positive reviews that greeted My Maudlin Career only whetted my appetite for what turns out to be another record jam-packed with goodies. It's essentially the same kind of high-gloss, brightly yearning indie-orchestral pop as that which made their last so good; I like it very much.

Early(ish) favourites: opening number "French Navy" ("spent a week in a dusty library, waiting for some words to jump at me...") and nagging-in-a-good-way "Swans".

30 Rock seasons 1 & 2

Sharp and funny, and graced with endless watchable, likeable turns from Fey and Baldwin, 30 Rock is as good as they say it is, particularly in the more off-the-wall second season. Yes!

100 favourite albums: # 16: Boxer - The National

... imbued with whatever it is that sets a rock and roll record apart and marks it as something a little bit transcendent ... a future classic ... It has a resonance that can't be mistaken.

Every single song on Boxer is good, and it's perfectly sequenced, its individual tracks subtly reflecting and building upon each other as they go, the whole much more than the sum of the parts. The album leads off with one of its clear highlights, the downbeat anthem "Fake Empire", at once totally contemporary chamber-pop influenced indie rock and classicist synthesis of the several pop music strands to be heard wrapped up in its sound, and then kicks it with the propulsive surge of "Mistaken For Strangers" before rounding off its first suite with the one-two of the murky, lovely brood of "Brainy" (very different sounding from its immediate predecessor on the record, but wreathed in the same post-punk aesthetic) and "Squalor Victoria" 's faster-paced but equally haunted rockisms.

Then, Boxer's dark, velvet heart, "Green Gloves" and "Slow Show": the first mysterious, subterranean and never quite resolving; the second providing the payoff, its coda - "you know I dreamed about you for 29 years before I saw you" - delivering one of the album's most apparently straightforward emotional payloads, yet in a way which still leaves one suspended somewhere between anticipation and resolution.

After that, "Apartment Story", another contemporary take on the Springsteen thing (see also "Keep The Car Running"), and done well, and then two deceptively low-key tracks, "Start A War" and "Racing Like A Pro", separated by probably the album's sprightliest moment (at least on purely musical terms), "Guest Room" ... anyhow, those two - "Start A War" and "Racing Like A Pro" - while not immediately memorable, turn out to be two of the deepest running songs on the record, and certainly two of those which I most commonly find echoing in my head...after which the band brings it home with the relaxed elegance of "Ada" and "Gospel", not stretching for anything over and above the rest of the album but instead finding the ideal way to wind things up in light of what has come before, on a gentle decline in which things continue to unfurl and re-ravel. - 1/9/08

Only a lukewarm review, but ...

... this looks like it might be quite the charming little film.

Jim Woodring - The Portable Frank

The world of 'Frank' is inscrutable and surreal, populated by grotesque, non-speaking animal-humanoids moving through a fluid landscape filled with peculiar amoebic and geometric formations and phenomena, not so much abstract as reminiscent of a distorted naturalism, rendered in the stark black and white lines and fills of Woodring's drawing style. I'm not sure how much I like these cartoons 'as such', but I do certainly respond to their uncompromisingness - there's something striking about them.



(A Christmas gift from Julian F.)

Stephen King - The Stand

This makes at least three times that I've read The Stand, maybe more like four or five. The idea of apocalypse has always had a strong hold over my mind, and I got to The Stand pretty early in the piece; I won't say that it's in any way a definitive account of imagined apocalypse, but it's certainly the one which has most vividly and enduringly impressed itself upon me. All of its characters have stayed with me, and I could recite almost every critical scene, small and large. There's something magnificent about it, both in the sweep and, more particularly, in the detail - it's a genuine achievement of imagination and craft.

100 favourite albums: # 17: Blue Bell Knoll - Cocteau Twins

Possibly the most unambiguously joyful-sounding album the Cocteau Twins ever released, and almost certainly the prettiest, Blue Bell Knoll to me does sound like bells, but just as much like laughter, and running water, and even, in some way that I can't quite nail down, like velvet; everything peals, but most of all Fraser's voice. "Carolyn's Fingers" is the most sheerly thrilling song on the album, and one of the most immediate and immediately great that they ever laid down; the more textural, cascading "Athol-Brose" is even better, running the full shimmering gamut of this, the band's graceful middle period. And in the smooth shear of the title track, with which it opens, and the blissed-out trip of "Ella Megalast Burls Forever", it has a nigh-on perfect pair of bookends.

I think that Treasure is more touched by greatness than this one, and probably Victorialand and the "Tiny Dynamine" and "Echoes in a Shallow Bay" eps too, but it's Blue Bell Knoll that I've most steadily listened to over the years, and which I now think of as my favourite. The Cocteaus' music has always defied description - it's too unique, too far removed from everything else that even gets near it, for words to be useful. Suffice to say that Blue Bell Knoll is one of those albums which reminds me of how magnificently transcendent music can be - after all this time, it's still sprinkled with that same otherworldly magic.

Synecdoche, New York

Complex and confounding, Synecdoche, New York is a marvellous mess. It's a film that demands a kind of openness in order to engage with it, and a willingness to read it in a way that doesn't involve a search for conventional closure or explanations, but the rewards that it offers when grappled with on its own terms are considerable (which is not to say that it wouldn't benefit considerably from a second watching). Of course, Kaufman's complicatedly unspooling and ramifying structures and deconstructions of reality, art and the self wouldn't have been worth a damn as a film without the sterling work of his cast, and Philip Seymour Hoffman turns in a performance that provides the rock around which everything else is built in a role which demands that formal stability while portraying a character who is unstable in every other way possible (not least being seemingly unstuck in time in at least some relevant respects); the others are inevitably in his shade, but not by much (also, I think this is the only film in which my two reigning cinematic crushes, Emily Watson and JJL have both featured). It's wildly ambitious, and I wasn't left with the feeling that everything could be neatly tied together if one just thought hard enough about it; I also wasn't left with the feeling that it would have been the point at all to attempt such a tying together. I don't yet know how good the film is, but it's certainly no disappointment.

Patty Griffin - A Kiss in Time

A wonderful document of a show that Griffin put on at the Ryman in 2003, guests including Buddy and Julie Miller, and Emmylou Harris. Griffin has crept up on me a bit, but I increasingly think that she's something a bit special. She feels like one for the ages.

The Very Best of Dolly Parton

There was a time, a few years back, when Misty was my favourite city bar; I'm not sure, but I think I might have settled on that opinion after dropping by for an hour or so one night to hear first the tail end of the Lost in Translation soundtrack and then Dolly Parton's Jolene, two albums which possibly have more in common that one would at first think, though I'm damned if I can say how. Anyway, the point is that I have warm feelings about Dolly - easy as it is to make fun of her, she has real talent, and a sheaf of great songs, written and sung by her, to prove it. This compilation touches upon the high points of her career (or, at least it seems that way, for fondness notwithstanding, my interest in her music has always been incidental and glancing rather than in any way profound), and it veers more towards the 'countrypolitan' side of things than is particularly my taste, but so be it. It's still pretty darn listenable.

100 favourite albums: # 18: Treasure - Cocteau Twins

I once faintly, as if in a dream, heard someone describe the Cocteau Twins’ music as a floating cloud of fuchsia mist, and I don’t know if I could do much better than that; the quintessential 4AD band, this outfit practically invented dream-pop, and their muse found perhaps its most perfect expression on Treasure. Ringing percussion, guitars which by turns murmur and crash, ethereally shimmering layers of sound, and all topped by Liz Fraser’s outlandish, nonsensical vocals, delivered in the most beautiful voice – this is music in which to lose oneself. ‘Music is feeling, then, not sound,’ or so the poet Wallace Stevens once said, and he was half right, for the truth is that music is essentially and immanently both feeling and sound, and it’s in the interplay between the two that we respond to it. Listening to Treasure, one is haunted by a succession of atmospheres – now funereal, now urgent, now contemplative, now violent, now hymnal, now joyous, always just beyond the limits of ordinary definition – and for a while, at least, what you experience is what you are; feeling and sound, sound and feeling. - 27/2/03

There was a time when the Cocteaus were without a doubt my favourite band, and Treasure was the main reason; nowadays, their music is perhaps over-familiar, for while it's still transportive, it's relatively rare for one of their records to take me anywhere new. Still, there's an essential mystery to the outfit's music which endures, and perhaps especially on Treasure, an aptly named record if ever there was one, for there's something distinctly jewel-like about it, something glittering and multi-faceted and beautiful. It doesn't sound like anything else I've ever heard; the pictures it paints are all its own.

Georges Perec - Species of Spaces and Other Places

"Two days may be enough to start to get acclimatized. The day you find out that the statue of Ludwig Spankerfel di Nominatore (the celebrated brewer) is only three minutes from your hotel (at the end of Prince Adalbert Street) whereas you've been taking a good half-hour to get there, you start to take possession of the town. That doesn't mean you start to inhabit it." (64)

"... the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual ..."

"Describe your street. Describe another street. Compare." (210)

I've been interested in Perec since this, and finally managed to pick something of his up just before going overseas late last year. I've been reading Species of Spaces and Other Places on and off since then. Elegant, reflective, and determinedly grounded in the everyday, the numerous short pieces collected in it have provided much food for thought but, more to the point, have shaded my perspective on things differently at just the time when I've been concentrating anew on opening myself up to the world and taking things as they present themselves, perceptually, intellectually and otherwise.

"Realism" (MTC)

Definitely the best of the season so far (with all due apologies to Poor Boy), "Realism" carries with it the thrill of genuine theatre. Though one doesn't realise it at the time, the first three-quarters or so is really just an extended set up for the final turn (and subsequent coda) in which the 'Tragedy of Meyerhold' is actually enacted...though having written that, to describe it as 'just' a set up does the play a disservice, for it's essential to the whole that what is to come be framed by the relatively naturalistic earlier stages - all the parts speak to each other. And nor is it particularly didactic, I don't think - though, equally, it doesn't fall into the trap of merely 'presenting' the differing perspectives on realism, etc that it embodies. The cast is generally strong, and overall very engaging; the set is magnificent (the new theatre on Southbank Blvd is working out really well), and the direction intelligent. I really feel like reading "Realism" now, and perhaps seeing it again. A great success.

[part of an MTC subscription with Steph, Sunny & co]

100 favourite albums: # 19: On The Beach - Neil Young

There are some artists whose music particularly lends itself to 'moments' - by which I mean frozen points or periods in time with which particular music not only becomes inextricably associated but is actually integral to the association itself - and Neil Young is certainly one of those, and On The Beach the crucial record in that respect; a partial history might go something like this, this, this and this.

In some ways, On The Beach is quite a concise statement - it's all over in just eight songs, and most of them about average length - but it also hints at the epic, that latter sense enhanced by the long tail-off engendered by the way that its last three songs, "On The Beach" itself, "Motion Pictures" and "Ambulance Blues", are not only all slowed-down rockist meditations, and collectively stretch longer than the first five. The legibility of both of those impulses in the album, in fact, probably has something to do with the way that each of the eight individual songs making up the record has its own distinct sound and feel, from the relatively straight up Young-style country rock of "Walk On" through the Wurlitzer-led tenderness of "See The Sky About To Rain" and "Revolution Blues" ' fiery guitar-led urgency to the stripped-back banjo-and-dobro sketch that is "For The Turnstiles" and then Shakey's fluid take on the blues, "Vampire Blues", before that final trio, the title track, almost unbearably stark, "Motion Pictures" more gently wistful, and then finally "Ambulance Blues", a remarkable, extended rumination that closes things on a restrained, suspended note.

What makes it cohere is simply the unforced and unmistakeable sensibility that Young brings to everything he does - it would be a mischaracterisation, a category error even, to call it 'vision', because it seems rather like a natural, almost unconscious tapping into some common experience or feeling that then resonates down the line...whatever it is, On The Beach has it. It touches something timeless and real.

A propos of nothing in particular

...this is a delightful blog.

100 favourite albums: # 20: The Boy With The Arab Strap - Belle and Sebastian

In retrospect, The Boy With The Arab Strap is the moment[*] where the relatively unadorned folk-pop of Belle and Sebastian's earlier work met the more varied tonal palette that would characterise most of their subsequent records, and perhaps that liminality goes some way to explaining the fragile air of the album, the feeling that, despite the vividness of the melodies and the sounds it houses, it would all fall apart if you so much as blew on it...but then again, that not-quite-made-for-this-worldness infuses all of the band's best work, amongst which Arab Strap stands very high indeed.

Indeed, The Boy With The Arab Strap is the last unequivocally great Belle and Sebastian album (albums one and two, Tigermilk and Sinister, go without saying; Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like A Child, which came next, has its moments but is ultimately cut of a different cloth altogether, and nothing since then has come near), and also their most prettily, melancholically autumnal. Even its most sprightly numbers - songs like the delightfully skipping "Dirty Dream Number Two" and the positively jaunty title track - are wrapped up in a wistful haze, never mind the actual slow songs (of which "Seymour Stein" is the best); that said, there's a brightness to it, a vibrancy that runs through the whole, from pensive opener "It Could Have Been A Brilliant Career" to the gentle rise and fall of "The Rollercoaster Ride" with which it ends, and a lightness of touch and a knowingness which keeps it all in check.

Along the way are two of the most totemic (for me) individual songs in the band's back catalogue, "Is It Wicked Not To Care?" and "Simple Things", both delicate slices of disaffectedness, but ultimately it's the mood of The Boy With the Arab Strap which lingers rather than individual moments, and which gives the record its lasting effect. In many way, it's an unassuming thing, but I return to it over and over, and when I think about the soundtrack of my last five years or so, this is one which comes very quickly to mind. In rain or in sunshine (or very possibly both at once), this one's a keeper.

* * *

[*] Excluding, that is, their eps, which, with Belle and Sebastian, admittedly means that one is really only telling half the story.