I've listened to All Hell a few times through now, and haven't fully made up my mind about it yet. On the one hand, it's appealing - Gibson's country-noiry vignettes sliced up by some anachronistically modern electro-pop textures, underpinned by his smooth baritone, which variously calls to mind Johnny Cash, Stephin Merritt and Matt Berninger - but on the other, it can feel a bit much about the concept, and not enough about the songs themselves. Still, at the very least interesting, and on a few tracks genuinely compelling ("A Young Girl's World" and "In The Beginning" are stand-outs, as is the croony "Rain on a Highway").
Monday, July 30, 2012
Sunday, July 29, 2012
Kathleen Edwards - Voyageur
Another incremental development in Edwards' sound, and another step more expansive - Voyageur sometimes sounds a bit like Emmylou Harris' late 90s-onwards airy, widescreen version of americana, in a good way. There's more space in Edwards' songs than ever before, and a lightness in the arrangements and production that works well with the more stretched-out direction that her songwriting takes nowadays; this is very nice. Favourites: "Change the Sheets", "Mint".
(Failer; Back to Me; live; Asking for Flowers)
(Failer; Back to Me; live; Asking for Flowers)
Emeli Sandé - Our Version of Events
These days, a lot of the new music I listen to comes from having been heard playing somewhere - cd stores, bookshops, cafes, etc - but Emeli Sandé is the first that I've sought out after hearing it at my hairdresser's salon. Our Version of Events is a nice album - opening with the drama of "Heaven" (reminiscent of Massive Attack) and big pop-soul anthem "My Kind of Love", hitting another high point near the middle with "Maybe" and "Suitcase" back to back, and ending with a strong ballad in "Read All About It (Pt III)", and pleasant enough in between. Good voice, good songs, all round very solid.
Parks and Recreation seasons 1-3
So...I've become the kind of person who watches tv series. I went through these pretty much in a single, hazily jetlagged, week and found them pretty delightful - season 1 is kind of bad, but it picks up dramatically after that.
There are a range of things that make it work, but foremost amongst them is the way it matches Amy Poehler's energetic-on-the-verge-of-manic comic persona perfectly with the character of Leslie Knope that the show creates. Over these three seasons, the show has got to a point where it has the balance - between the quirks, foibles and situations that drive all sitcom characters and a kinder, more humane perspective on its characters and their relationships - pretty much right for her (and for the other characters), so that you can't help but find her basically adorable while rooting for her in her somewhat monomaniacal do-gooding. Then there's Ron Swanson, who is basically great - plus a good, and well-used, ensemble cast (again, the balance seems right with the arrival of Adam Scott's Ben as straight man and Rob Lowe's ridiculously positive Chris).
All up, it's funny, smart and likeable (and occasionally deliciously crude) - all round good.
There are a range of things that make it work, but foremost amongst them is the way it matches Amy Poehler's energetic-on-the-verge-of-manic comic persona perfectly with the character of Leslie Knope that the show creates. Over these three seasons, the show has got to a point where it has the balance - between the quirks, foibles and situations that drive all sitcom characters and a kinder, more humane perspective on its characters and their relationships - pretty much right for her (and for the other characters), so that you can't help but find her basically adorable while rooting for her in her somewhat monomaniacal do-gooding. Then there's Ron Swanson, who is basically great - plus a good, and well-used, ensemble cast (again, the balance seems right with the arrival of Adam Scott's Ben as straight man and Rob Lowe's ridiculously positive Chris).
All up, it's funny, smart and likeable (and occasionally deliciously crude) - all round good.
Sunday, July 22, 2012
Saturday, July 21, 2012
Haim - "Forever" ep
A three-song (plus remix) ep of pop-minded, percussive folk-rocky tunes; the title track in particular is ace.
Patrick deWitt - The Sisters Brothers
1851, the wild west, and notorious killers Eli and Charlie Sisters are going to California with murder on their mind. The story is told by the younger and more troubled by their line of work of the brothers, Eli, in an archaic voice that is at once formal and immediate, and also often droll; the novel's appeal is difficult to pin down, but has a lot to do with that voice. It's bloody, funny and sad (but not depressing); it's easy to imagine the Coen brothers, say, making a movie of it. Potential not fully realised, but still a good read.
Europe museums wrap
Madrid
V. jet-lagged and tired for trip to the Reina Sofia, so didn't get full value from what looked to be a pretty good collection. Introduced me to Santiago Rusinol via the mysterious "Aranjuez Garden. Arbor II" (1907). And liked the James Coleman installation "Box (ahhareturnabout)" (1977).
The Prado's collection, while huge, is basically all about pre-20th century art and pretty light-on for 19th, and therefore basically exactly outside my own interests. I sort of drifted through it a bit, but we were in there for several hours nonetheless; two that sunk in were Joachim Patinir's "Rest on the flight into Egypt" (1518-20) and Bernard van Orley's "The Virgin of Louvain" (1520).
The Thyssen-Bornemisza was much more to my taste, housing a strong selection of late and post-impressionist stuff. Two of the Monets particularly grabbed me - "The Thaw at Vetheuil" (1881) and "The House Among the Roses" (1925). I looked at that latter for quite a while before making out the house itself amidst the roses; seeing that large, late Monet water-lilies painting hung amidst Rothkos and other recognised examples of abstract expressionism at the Tate Modern last year has really opened up his work to me, giving me a new appreciation for it. Apart from pieces by some of the usual suspects (van Gogh, Kandinsky), was also drawn to a naturalistic landscape that I thought had some symbolist elements, Thomas Cole's "Expulsion, Moon and Firelight" (1828) and Ivan Kliun's abstract "Composicion" (1917).
Fortuitously, also on at the Thyssen-Bornemisza was an Edward Hopper exhibition - small to medium sized, but something of a career survey, and satisfying. It included a range of his earlier works (from the earliest, somewhat expressionist pieces, through the 1920s as many of his signature images emerged - eg women observed in rooms, light coming from outside) and some of his finely detailed sketches and watercolours, as well as many examples of his most famous pieces, including "Cape Cod Evening", "Morning in a City" and "South Carolina Morning". I was struck by "Railroad Sunset", which I think I've actually seen before (maybe at the Whitney in NYC a few years back), and certainly in reproduction, but never fully registered.
With the ones that I already knew well from books and/or previous viewings, their 'painting-ness' was particularly apparent, which somehow added to their depth and appeal, a bit despite the realism of Hopper's style. I guess that what I really like about his work is the way that it's invested with a sense of the extraordinary - perhaps the infraordinary, rather - an effect achieved through his evocation of light and shadow, and use of colour, mood and composition - and in some sense that's augmented by being able to see the paintings themselves.
St Petersburg
We went to a lot of museums and the like in St Petersburg. As far as I can remember:
* The Hermitage lived up to expectations, massive, sprawling, and filled to overflowing with all types of art, including large numbers of the old masters - Rembrandt, da Vinci, etc. My focus was on the extremely comprehensive selection of 19th to early 20th century art, with all of the key figures in the development of representational, figurative and colour-oriented painting represented by multiple pieces - Cezanne, Gauguin, van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, Kandinsky plus the lesser but still important figures of Derain and de Vlaminck.
* The Museum of Political History of Russia had an absurdly complicated floor plan and itinerary to follow through across two buildings and three levels - I half-suspected that the desk people were playing some sort of trick (Russian bureaucracy etc) when they marked it all out for us on a map, but it turned out to be deadly serious. The exhibitions had names like "Death Penalty: Pros and Cons", "Lenin's Study", "The Accursed Civil War", "It Cannot Be Forbidden...To Be Stored" and "What Do We Know About Petr Stolypin?". Sadly, "Collapse of the USSR: Historical Inevitability or Criminal Conspiracy" was one of the ones without English notes, so the answer to that particular question remains a mystery.
* The Vodka Museum was a bit of a non-affair, particularly with all the captions in Russian only. Andreas enjoyed the tasting, though.
* The Nabokov and Dostoevsky Museums were each located in houses that their respective subjects lived in and filled with a range of more or less interesting author-related material. I'm not mad for these kinds of biographical excavations, but didn't mind wandering through.
* Pushinskaya-10, a graffiti-covered and industrial-looking building, houses several more or less unmarked galleries, including a couple comprising 'The Museum of Noncomformists Art'. We only explored a couple.
* Another art centre was 'Loft Project Etagi' - well worth the seeing, particularly given that it also housed (along with a hostel) a nice rooftop bar/restaurant where we had dinner and drank Soviet champagne as the afternoon faded behind us.
Helsinki
There was a neat Georgia O'Keeffe exhibition on at the Helsinki Art Museum - Tennis Palace, meaning that, along with the Hopper in Madrid, I was able to see two of my absolute favourites within the space of just a couple of weeks - a real treat. There's a sense of infinity in her paintings, and an endless interplay between abstraction and representation (flowers, skulls, landscapes) - it's so easy to get lost in the light and colour of her work, in the luminosity of all of the tones and shades (even the browns and greys), which perhaps comes from the New Mexico desert setting in which most were done; "Dark Tree Trunks" (1946), say, is far more compelling than in reproduction in books, partly for that reason...although interestingly, the later "Blue Black and Grey" (1960), which is very close to pure abstraction, has that same luminous character.
The Ateneum Museum was featuring a large exhibition of work by Helene Schjerfbeck (1862-1946); I hadn't come across her before, but apparently she's a key Finnish painter. I was most drawn to some of her earlier paintings, which had a poignant, somewhat nostalgic (if maybe a tiny bit sentimental) air - "Once Upon A Time (Old Memories)" (1892), "The Broken String (By The Rivers of Babylon)" (1892) - oil paintings, but with a dusty, hazy air and glow. Over her career she moved to a more simplied, reduced style, plainer and flatter, and often wan-looking, physically rubbed and thinned out; more and more distortions were introduced into her work, taking on an expressionist and even cubist flavour.
And the Kiasma contemporary art museum impressed me, both as a building and for the art it held. Two exhibitions, both, as far as I'm concerned, highlighting the best type of thing that contemporary art has to offer, at once serious and playful, conceptually interested but grounded in a rigorous artistic practice: "Eyeballing: The New Forms of Comics" (best were Hannerrina Moisseinen's "Cloth Road", Mari Ahokoivu's "Rumour Birds" and Katja Tukainen's hyper-kitsch "Paradis k (Kidnap)" (something of a guilty pleasure for me, that last); and "Camouflage: Visual Art and Design in Disguise" (best: Jiri Geller's "Sugar" series of brightly coloured plastic sculptures, Kariel's (Muriel Lasser & Karri Kuoppala) 'room' installation "Pier", and Idiot's (Afke Golsteijn & Floris Bakker) series of taxidermied animals melded with precious stones and man-made objects, which manages to surprise and please despite the seemingly obvious idea).
(Despite its being the longest leg of the trip, no museums in Iceland - there was more than enough to see out of doors!)
V. jet-lagged and tired for trip to the Reina Sofia, so didn't get full value from what looked to be a pretty good collection. Introduced me to Santiago Rusinol via the mysterious "Aranjuez Garden. Arbor II" (1907). And liked the James Coleman installation "Box (ahhareturnabout)" (1977).
The Prado's collection, while huge, is basically all about pre-20th century art and pretty light-on for 19th, and therefore basically exactly outside my own interests. I sort of drifted through it a bit, but we were in there for several hours nonetheless; two that sunk in were Joachim Patinir's "Rest on the flight into Egypt" (1518-20) and Bernard van Orley's "The Virgin of Louvain" (1520).
The Thyssen-Bornemisza was much more to my taste, housing a strong selection of late and post-impressionist stuff. Two of the Monets particularly grabbed me - "The Thaw at Vetheuil" (1881) and "The House Among the Roses" (1925). I looked at that latter for quite a while before making out the house itself amidst the roses; seeing that large, late Monet water-lilies painting hung amidst Rothkos and other recognised examples of abstract expressionism at the Tate Modern last year has really opened up his work to me, giving me a new appreciation for it. Apart from pieces by some of the usual suspects (van Gogh, Kandinsky), was also drawn to a naturalistic landscape that I thought had some symbolist elements, Thomas Cole's "Expulsion, Moon and Firelight" (1828) and Ivan Kliun's abstract "Composicion" (1917).
Fortuitously, also on at the Thyssen-Bornemisza was an Edward Hopper exhibition - small to medium sized, but something of a career survey, and satisfying. It included a range of his earlier works (from the earliest, somewhat expressionist pieces, through the 1920s as many of his signature images emerged - eg women observed in rooms, light coming from outside) and some of his finely detailed sketches and watercolours, as well as many examples of his most famous pieces, including "Cape Cod Evening", "Morning in a City" and "South Carolina Morning". I was struck by "Railroad Sunset", which I think I've actually seen before (maybe at the Whitney in NYC a few years back), and certainly in reproduction, but never fully registered.
With the ones that I already knew well from books and/or previous viewings, their 'painting-ness' was particularly apparent, which somehow added to their depth and appeal, a bit despite the realism of Hopper's style. I guess that what I really like about his work is the way that it's invested with a sense of the extraordinary - perhaps the infraordinary, rather - an effect achieved through his evocation of light and shadow, and use of colour, mood and composition - and in some sense that's augmented by being able to see the paintings themselves.
St Petersburg
We went to a lot of museums and the like in St Petersburg. As far as I can remember:
* The Hermitage lived up to expectations, massive, sprawling, and filled to overflowing with all types of art, including large numbers of the old masters - Rembrandt, da Vinci, etc. My focus was on the extremely comprehensive selection of 19th to early 20th century art, with all of the key figures in the development of representational, figurative and colour-oriented painting represented by multiple pieces - Cezanne, Gauguin, van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, Kandinsky plus the lesser but still important figures of Derain and de Vlaminck.
* The Museum of Political History of Russia had an absurdly complicated floor plan and itinerary to follow through across two buildings and three levels - I half-suspected that the desk people were playing some sort of trick (Russian bureaucracy etc) when they marked it all out for us on a map, but it turned out to be deadly serious. The exhibitions had names like "Death Penalty: Pros and Cons", "Lenin's Study", "The Accursed Civil War", "It Cannot Be Forbidden...To Be Stored" and "What Do We Know About Petr Stolypin?". Sadly, "Collapse of the USSR: Historical Inevitability or Criminal Conspiracy" was one of the ones without English notes, so the answer to that particular question remains a mystery.
* The Vodka Museum was a bit of a non-affair, particularly with all the captions in Russian only. Andreas enjoyed the tasting, though.
* The Nabokov and Dostoevsky Museums were each located in houses that their respective subjects lived in and filled with a range of more or less interesting author-related material. I'm not mad for these kinds of biographical excavations, but didn't mind wandering through.
* Pushinskaya-10, a graffiti-covered and industrial-looking building, houses several more or less unmarked galleries, including a couple comprising 'The Museum of Noncomformists Art'. We only explored a couple.
* Another art centre was 'Loft Project Etagi' - well worth the seeing, particularly given that it also housed (along with a hostel) a nice rooftop bar/restaurant where we had dinner and drank Soviet champagne as the afternoon faded behind us.
Helsinki
There was a neat Georgia O'Keeffe exhibition on at the Helsinki Art Museum - Tennis Palace, meaning that, along with the Hopper in Madrid, I was able to see two of my absolute favourites within the space of just a couple of weeks - a real treat. There's a sense of infinity in her paintings, and an endless interplay between abstraction and representation (flowers, skulls, landscapes) - it's so easy to get lost in the light and colour of her work, in the luminosity of all of the tones and shades (even the browns and greys), which perhaps comes from the New Mexico desert setting in which most were done; "Dark Tree Trunks" (1946), say, is far more compelling than in reproduction in books, partly for that reason...although interestingly, the later "Blue Black and Grey" (1960), which is very close to pure abstraction, has that same luminous character.
The Ateneum Museum was featuring a large exhibition of work by Helene Schjerfbeck (1862-1946); I hadn't come across her before, but apparently she's a key Finnish painter. I was most drawn to some of her earlier paintings, which had a poignant, somewhat nostalgic (if maybe a tiny bit sentimental) air - "Once Upon A Time (Old Memories)" (1892), "The Broken String (By The Rivers of Babylon)" (1892) - oil paintings, but with a dusty, hazy air and glow. Over her career she moved to a more simplied, reduced style, plainer and flatter, and often wan-looking, physically rubbed and thinned out; more and more distortions were introduced into her work, taking on an expressionist and even cubist flavour.
And the Kiasma contemporary art museum impressed me, both as a building and for the art it held. Two exhibitions, both, as far as I'm concerned, highlighting the best type of thing that contemporary art has to offer, at once serious and playful, conceptually interested but grounded in a rigorous artistic practice: "Eyeballing: The New Forms of Comics" (best were Hannerrina Moisseinen's "Cloth Road", Mari Ahokoivu's "Rumour Birds" and Katja Tukainen's hyper-kitsch "Paradis k (Kidnap)" (something of a guilty pleasure for me, that last); and "Camouflage: Visual Art and Design in Disguise" (best: Jiri Geller's "Sugar" series of brightly coloured plastic sculptures, Kariel's (Muriel Lasser & Karri Kuoppala) 'room' installation "Pier", and Idiot's (Afke Golsteijn & Floris Bakker) series of taxidermied animals melded with precious stones and man-made objects, which manages to surprise and please despite the seemingly obvious idea).
(Despite its being the longest leg of the trip, no museums in Iceland - there was more than enough to see out of doors!)
Back to Back to Black
An uneven track by track tribute to the Winehouse album compiled by Q magazine; the weakest entries come across like novelty versions, but the best are pretty good...those would be Dry the River's folky take on "Me & Mr Jones", the fractured but still grand version of "Back to Black" by the Cribs, "Love is a Losing Game" being turned into something sounding like a lost soft-rock classic from the 70s by the Temper Trap, and the Balearic Folk Orchestra's (great name!) pretty "He Can Only Hold Her".
Metric - Synthetica
Following the extreme good-ness of Fantasies, my hopes for this one were high; unfortunately, while it's perfectly serviceable, it's not as good as its predecessor. There's something less fizzing, less exciting about it, and Haines' voice seems somehow to have less conviction about it, though the good songs - "Youth Without Youth", "Speed the Collapse", "Nothing But Time" and the title track - are very good.
[Edit (4/8): Turns out I was too quick to dismiss Synthetica. I've kept on listening to it, initially because those good songs that jumped out at the start kept on being good, really good actually, and then as more of the album's tracks kept coming forward and getting stuck in my head - the glossy sheen of the record coexists with a bit of bite in just the way that they do in all of Metric's best moments...]
[Edit (4/8): Turns out I was too quick to dismiss Synthetica. I've kept on listening to it, initially because those good songs that jumped out at the start kept on being good, really good actually, and then as more of the album's tracks kept coming forward and getting stuck in my head - the glossy sheen of the record coexists with a bit of bite in just the way that they do in all of Metric's best moments...]
Margin Call
Despite its absence of a real story arc or plot, Margin Call is completely gripping. It's well served by a sterling cast - Jeremy Irons' magisterial entrance in the boardroom scene is particularly magnificent - and brings out the human and moral dimensions of the financial drama that unfolds...you know how it's going to end, but it holds you all the way to that end. A fantastic film.
P G Wodehouse - "The Crime Wave at Blandings"
A miniature Penguin. Tickled my fancy, the crime wave consisting of a series of air gun shootings of the deserving.
Dmitry Glukhovsky - Metro 2033
A cracking premise - following a nuclear/biological war, possibly the only remaining human life on earth is isolated in the Moscow underground metro system, which had doubled as a massive bunker, each station operating as a more or less autonomous community, connected by a range of loose confederations (religious and/or political or pragmatic - including communists, trotskyists, a 'fourth reich', and many others), and troubled by a range of monsters, some created by fallout from the war and others seemingly with a more supernatural or spiritual/mystical origin. That concept is strong enough to make the book worth plowing through, despite the awkward prose, overwrought existential digressions, and frequent long-winded soliloquies about the meaning of existence that all of its characters seem to love.
Jeffrey Eugenides - The Marriage Plot
I always find Eugenides very readable, but I've never seen the greatness in him that so many others seem to find, and The Marriage Plot hasn't changed my mind. I liked reading it, enjoyed the paths that it led its characters down and the ideas that it played with, and even empathised at points, thinking that it snapped with something real-feeling, but still, in the end I thought the novel was merely very good rather than anything more.
When the Raven Flies
Supposedly this 1984 film, following an Irish warrior as he avenges himself on the Viking raiders who killed his parents and abducted his sister when he was a boy, is something of a classic of Icelandic cinema, being highly regarded for depicting a grittier, more realistic image of Viking life than generally prevailed at the time. Andreas enjoyed it more than me; the brochure cites Leone and Kurosawa, but the director it made me most of think of was Verhoeven, in its gritty, nasty violence and flat style.
Roberto Bolano - The Skating Rink
By happenstance, his first novel - a fluent, engaging read, narrated by three chancers of various kinds who became caught up with a beautiful ice skater, the private rink built for her by an admirer, and a murder. It's a bit minor, but the voice and the writing are strong enough to make me want to read more of his.
Snow White and the Huntsman
Our wanderings through Helsinki took us past a cinema, so Andreas and I decided to watch a movie. Snow White was enjoyable, dramatic to the nth degree, and filled with visual spectacle along with a dark element that worked well (also, Charlize Theron makes a great bad guy) - though it's one of those that I doubt I'll watch again... (I wonder if Kristen Stewart was worried about being typecast when she agreed to do this one.)
Nevil Shute - On The Beach
Despite the possibilities of its wonderful premise - the inherent melancholy of the end of the world amplified by the way that the characters, in Melbourne, can only wait for the fallout that has taken the rest of the world to finally drift far enough southwards to take them with it - this is a pretty bland novel, mostly lacking in literary merit (flat writing is the main killer), though still, I suppose, interesting from a cultural perspective.
Don Thompson - The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art
"This is business, it ain't art history". That line, from a deputy chairman at Christie's, sums up a lot of what this entertaining book is about. No one expects the prices paid for contemporary art to reflect any kind of 'intrinsic' or purely 'artistic' (much less aesthetic) value, and Thompson's systematic traversing of the processes of branding that lead to artists' and their works' valuations, through the interactions of dealers, auction houses (especially the two big ones, Christie's and Sotheby's), collectors, museums and critics - via auctions, private sales, galleries and art fairs - is illuminating. Saatchi and the Gagosian loom large, also Damien Hirst, with some attention also given to Koons and Tracey Emin (none of whom I particularly like).
Sebastian Faulks - Birdsong
Birdsong fits comfortably into a certain literary genre - it's about Love, War and the Human Spirit - but it's also subtle and intelligent in how it deals with those themes and with loss and suffering, and powerful and affecting. Liked it.
Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
Watched this on the plane going over to Europe. More of the same, really, but enjoyably so.
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