Pretty unimpeachable, of course. One of those artists whose music genuinely resonates down the years without ever getting old. Also, I don't think I've heard "The Other Woman" before; it's wonderful.
Sunday, April 29, 2012
Strength in Numbers - Telluride Sessions
The Heartland anthology is one of my favourite records, and this older album was recorded by some of the same crew (Edgar Meyer, Mark O'Connor, Sam Bush, Bela Fleck, Jerry Douglas). It's kind of a chamber-y, lightly jazzy take on bluegrass - melodic, rhythmic, and good.
The Drones - Gala Mill & Havilah
A pair of urgent, raw-throated, rough-edged rock albums, Gala Mill and Havilah tend to churn along, at times seeming more about texture and dynamics than about songs or melodies or even clear guitar licks, only for sections to suddenly emerge from the general clangour as standouts/highlights (on Havilah, "I Am The Supercargo" and "Oh My", say).
I think I like Wait Long... a touch more than either of these, but there's probably a dose of 'the first one you listen to will always be your favourite' there - and all of them have a great sense of heft, heaviness, which means they continue to have a lot to offer, and to give new things, on repeated listens.
I think I like Wait Long... a touch more than either of these, but there's probably a dose of 'the first one you listen to will always be your favourite' there - and all of them have a great sense of heft, heaviness, which means they continue to have a lot to offer, and to give new things, on repeated listens.
Okkervil River - I Am Very Far
Another good album from Will Sheff and co. Not many bands can match the sheer anthem-ness of an Okkervil River anthem, and on I Am Very Far, the anthems are out in force. The sound on this one is denser, and I think the songs themselves are too; the biggest ones, all of which I remember from their show last year, are "The Valley", "Rider" and "We Need A Myth".
Tiny Vipers - Life on Earth
I say this with absolutely no snide intention, but I hadn't picked up from either listening to the wonderful "Dreamer" or the picture on the front of this album that the singer in Tiny Vipers is female. Does knowing her gender make any difference to my appreciation of her music? Probably not. Anyway, the record is all sombre, intricately written voice-and-guitar pieces, somewhat hypnotic.
Between the Lines 3: Stories of Lovers and Lunatics
Like volume 4 in the series, a high quality 2-cd set of independent and independently-minded music; has perhaps a bit more of a rootsy/folky slant than the other.
Favourites:
* Bob Dylan - "Love Sick"
* Lisa Hannigan - "Ocean and a Rock"
* Okay - "Natural"
* Frenk Lebel - "When Systems Collide"
* Woven Hand - "The Good Hand"
* Howe Gelb - "World Stand Still"
Favourites:
* Bob Dylan - "Love Sick"
* Lisa Hannigan - "Ocean and a Rock"
* Okay - "Natural"
* Frenk Lebel - "When Systems Collide"
* Woven Hand - "The Good Hand"
* Howe Gelb - "World Stand Still"
Saturday, April 28, 2012
"Love and Devotion: From Persia and Beyond" (State Library)
I went to this collection of 13th-18th century illustrated manuscripts, mostly Persian but also including some Moghul and other related pieces, because Kevin was running a tour - as always, it was impressive to see books that are so old, the fineness of the illustrations adding another layer.
(last time)
(last time)
Game of Thrones season 1 (again)
Watched this through again, this time at a more leisurely pace. Having re-read the book in the meantime, it's apparent how cleverly the show has taken the many elements of the book and knitted them together into something that works very well in the different form; it actually departs from the book in a whole range of little ways, while still managing to be very faithful. The show is less ugly, cleaner than the book - but not by a whole lot. It is well done.
Wednesday, April 25, 2012
Dirty Three - Toward the Low Sun
Dramatic and fiery, Toward the Low Sun is the kind of record that summons moods and invokes emotional landscapes. Violin, electric guitar and drums shiver, shimmer, crash and chime; the path taken by the album is wending and impressionistic rather than being oriented towards crescendos or clear closure. Favourites - the haunted "Sometimes I Forget You've Gone", guitar-led, Neil Young-y "That Was Was", and gentle, sighing "Ashen Snow".
Sunday, April 22, 2012
Red (MTC)
Watching this was a slightly odd experience for me. Rothko's works often provoke a response in me that nothing else comes close to; seeing his Seagram pieces in the Tate Modern last year, for example - their composition is central to "Red" - was an almost spiritual experience (a word I don't use lightly). It's not overstating it to say that he's an iconic artist for me. And having browsed or read any number of monographs about him, I've picked up far more about his approach to art and about his life than I normally do about artists I like (generally, I prefer to try to let the art itself speak to me, without the distracting context of the artist themselves, however artificial that idea may be), and that background knowledge gave "Red" a faintly uncanny feeling, with all of the key ideas, figures, events that it presents already being intensely familiar, and not only that, but all wrapped up with my own feelings, thoughts and associations around Rothko's art.
At first, I found it a bit talky and insular - a bit too self-focused - but the play had largely won me over by the end; I realised that my heart was beating much faster than normal as it came towards its end. It's far from a great play - its construction as something similar to a Socratic dialogue between the artist and his assistant (although it moves beyond that in the closing stages) is limiting, particularly when the ambition of the play is to say something about artistic truth, and the presentation of Rothko himself felt somewhat reductionistic (even as the play itself has Rothko rail against the tendency to reduce the lives of those he considers his peers in just that way). But it does succeed in at least grappling with some of the key concerns that animated Rothko's own work and life, and dramatising them reasonably effectively - if a bit programmatically, principally through the conversations / monologues about 'red' and 'black'.
And it acquires a bit of an emotional charge at the end - the final scene, opening with the assistant discovering the painter lying flat on his back in his studio, red paint streaks on his wrists, is haunted not only by the audience's autobiographical knowledge that that was how Rothko himself was found, dead by suicide, but also by a few lines of dialogue earlier in the play where the painter speaks of 'when', rather than 'if', he will commit suicide, overwhelmed (the play would have it) like his contemporary Jackson Pollock, by a Nietzschean sense of tragedy. Indeed, that last scene, with Rothko setting his assistant free and adjuring him to go out and create new art himself, in the brave new world of Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Lichtenstein, Warhol et al, even though it means figuratively killing those (like Rothko) of the generation before, can be read as a directive from beyond the grave from Rothko himself - and, perhaps, a final affirmatory 'what do you see?' 'red' answer to the 'black' fear of being weighed and found wanting as one looks at once to the past and to the future.
(w/ Cass, Andreas, David, Steph N, Alice)
At first, I found it a bit talky and insular - a bit too self-focused - but the play had largely won me over by the end; I realised that my heart was beating much faster than normal as it came towards its end. It's far from a great play - its construction as something similar to a Socratic dialogue between the artist and his assistant (although it moves beyond that in the closing stages) is limiting, particularly when the ambition of the play is to say something about artistic truth, and the presentation of Rothko himself felt somewhat reductionistic (even as the play itself has Rothko rail against the tendency to reduce the lives of those he considers his peers in just that way). But it does succeed in at least grappling with some of the key concerns that animated Rothko's own work and life, and dramatising them reasonably effectively - if a bit programmatically, principally through the conversations / monologues about 'red' and 'black'.
And it acquires a bit of an emotional charge at the end - the final scene, opening with the assistant discovering the painter lying flat on his back in his studio, red paint streaks on his wrists, is haunted not only by the audience's autobiographical knowledge that that was how Rothko himself was found, dead by suicide, but also by a few lines of dialogue earlier in the play where the painter speaks of 'when', rather than 'if', he will commit suicide, overwhelmed (the play would have it) like his contemporary Jackson Pollock, by a Nietzschean sense of tragedy. Indeed, that last scene, with Rothko setting his assistant free and adjuring him to go out and create new art himself, in the brave new world of Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Lichtenstein, Warhol et al, even though it means figuratively killing those (like Rothko) of the generation before, can be read as a directive from beyond the grave from Rothko himself - and, perhaps, a final affirmatory 'what do you see?' 'red' answer to the 'black' fear of being weighed and found wanting as one looks at once to the past and to the future.
(w/ Cass, Andreas, David, Steph N, Alice)
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
George R R Martin - "A Song of Ice and Fire" 1-4 & A Dance with Dragons
I re-read the first four as a kind of extended run-up to A Dance with Dragons, but that latest one was really the main event - a chance to find out more of what happens to all, or at least most, of the remaining/surviving characters, not to mention a few significant new ones (most notably more of the various Dornish and the revelation of the young Aegon having been raised in exile).
The storylines increasingly knit together, and the building continues towards what will seemingly end up being an ultimate confrontation between whoever's left standing on Westeros once the game of thrones is bloodily (and fierily) played out and the Others north of the Wall. Exactly how Martin intends to get us there, though, is still to be seen - including whether he'll continue to be as brutal about killing off main characters as he was particularly through the first three books of the series.
I have to say that while A Dance with Dragons is an improvement on A Feast for Crows, it does feel a bit like a book 5 out of 7 - there's a fair bit of moving the pieces around, and not a huge amount of actual action or really memorable character moments or set pieces. (Plus, the Meereenese sections are nowhere near as interesting as the others.) But the whole thing is so compelling and so well imagined, and so effectively keeps the reader guessing, and the investment that it induces so great (particularly investment in characters who are genuinely morally ambiguous and who undergo real change and reversals), that these kinds of structural weaknesses are almost beside the point - there's more than enough momentum there to keep it completely engaging.
(previously - 2nd reading 1-3, 4; next reading)
The storylines increasingly knit together, and the building continues towards what will seemingly end up being an ultimate confrontation between whoever's left standing on Westeros once the game of thrones is bloodily (and fierily) played out and the Others north of the Wall. Exactly how Martin intends to get us there, though, is still to be seen - including whether he'll continue to be as brutal about killing off main characters as he was particularly through the first three books of the series.
I have to say that while A Dance with Dragons is an improvement on A Feast for Crows, it does feel a bit like a book 5 out of 7 - there's a fair bit of moving the pieces around, and not a huge amount of actual action or really memorable character moments or set pieces. (Plus, the Meereenese sections are nowhere near as interesting as the others.) But the whole thing is so compelling and so well imagined, and so effectively keeps the reader guessing, and the investment that it induces so great (particularly investment in characters who are genuinely morally ambiguous and who undergo real change and reversals), that these kinds of structural weaknesses are almost beside the point - there's more than enough momentum there to keep it completely engaging.
(previously - 2nd reading 1-3, 4; next reading)
Monday, April 16, 2012
Little Scout - "The Dead Loss" & "Different in the Distance" eps
Sometimes it takes me a while to get around to listening to (and writing about) music; I got these two eps pretty soon after seeing Little Scout supporting the New Pornographers back in November 2010. Their sound is pleasantly jangly, lilting indie-pop - there's plenty of this kind of stuff around, including made by Australian bands, but I am very fond of the style. And while Little Scout's take on the genre isn't especially distinctive, listening to these eps this afternoon did make me feel a bit nostalgic - momentarily melancholy - in the usual partly specific, partly intangibly general way.
Peter Gabriel - So
I know that this one is highly regarded by many, but it doesn't do much for me. I like the drama and sweepiness of it and the songs are generally pretty good, but it doesn't excite me ('too 80s', maybe).
Friday, April 13, 2012
A Dangerous Method
Appropriately for a film about the 'talking cure', A Dangerous Method has a lot of talking in it, but that doesn't make it any less absorbing. Psychoanalysis interests me, and Cronenberg's take on Freud (Viggo Mortensen aka Aragorn - v.g.), Jung (this Fassbender that everyone has been talking about lately) and Jung's patient (and later colleague) Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley, effective in a role that calls for the manneredness that comes so naturally to her) - on their characters and interactions - is apt, somehow at once opaque and revealing. The script assumes a working knowledge of many of the key psychoanalytic concepts, but the film is just as interested in the human psyche itself - in the ways that identity and selfhood are formed and made visible - as in the establishment of the field and the men (and, in Sabina, at least one woman) who were responsible for it. Not a warm film or an easy one, but rewarding.
(w/ Steph N, Alice, Andreas)
(w/ Steph N, Alice, Andreas)
Friday, April 06, 2012
Emilie Simon - The Big Machine
There's something a bit mad about Simon - in a good way - and it may not be coincidental that, on this record, she sounds a fair bit like, variously, Kate Bush and Tori Amos at times. The melodies can be jagged; the mood shifts somewhat unevenly from song to song - but for all that, this is a good album, listenably interesting, and winsome despite its edges.
(The Flower Book)
(The Flower Book)
"2011 - Where I Was, What Was Passing Around Me"
Most of Trang's mixes have only a tangential connection to the mainstreamish contemporary, but this one, a document of her 2011, is an exception. She picks mellower songs from two of the key records of my own 2011 ("I Know Places" from Wounded Rhymes and "Rest Your Head On My Shoulder" from Seeker Lover Keeper) as well as my favourite from another in high rotation last year and this (the title track from Fleet Foxes' last), along with plenty of others that are no strangers to the radio (Little Red's "Rock It", Adele's "Rolling in the Deep", Bon Iver, Beirut). A nice mix.
Janelle Monae - The ArchAndroid
An impressive mix of pop, soul, hip-hop and folk, superbly produced and put together, and highlighted by Monae's remarkable voice. Feels like a journey - epic - with lots of high points along the way.
Dum Dum Girls - Only in Dreams
More glossily produced - less scratchy and clattery - than their debut (neither a pro nor a con, though the more lo fi sound of I Will Be did set it apart a bit), and a bit more even than that other. Enjoyable.
Cold War Kids - Robbers & Cowards
I'd heard a fair number of these songs before - mostly from mix cds from David, I think - and they tended to be the more memorable ones. I've had this for a while but it hasn't really stuck.
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