Doing it for the Kids

Neat Creation compilation, including a nice MBV song called "Cigarette in Your Bed" that I hadn't heard before. I particularly like the Jasmine Minks song, "Cut Me Dead"; the cd also reminded me that Heidi Berry (a) exists and (b) is good via "North Shore Train".

The Cell

Quite the confection, this. It's genuinely visually spectacular - and stylish - and quite unnerving at points; there's not that much to it, narrative-wise, but the imagery is striking enough, and the pacing tight enough (albeit only just), that I didn't notice until thinking about it afterwards.

Girls - Album

Not that dissimilar from Father, Son, Holy Ghost (which came after this one), and similarly good. "Hellhole Ratrace" and "Summertime" in particular are excellent.

"Time will forget your name": The Everybodyfields - Nothing is Okay

It's good to know what you like, but only up to a point - at a certain point, having too defined an idea of what you like becomes an obstacle to openness and to fresh experience, and sometimes I wonder if my own tastes in music are heading in that direction. But there's nothing to shake off thoughts of that kind like hearing something new and great, squarely in the strike zone of 'what I like' - in this case, modern alt-country-folk - but cutting through in a way that reminds me of why I fell in love with the genre in the first place.

It's really first song "Aeroplane" on this 2007 record from the Everybodyfields, hailing from Johnson City, Tennessee, and showing that they've got a way with this kind of genre-straddling americana. Four bars of strummed guitar, then come the fiddles and steel string, a yearning male vocalist (Sam Quinn) joined soon by plangent female harmonies (you can never help but think of Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris in this kind of connexion, but they really are both the archetype and the exemplar), and we're off for three and a half minutes of confident, high and lonesome balladeering that struck me, hard, the first time I was listening to it, and doesn't seem to be wearing off at all - it's the kind of song that lodges in the throat and in the chest, that seems like a single falling swoon from start to finish. It's wonderful.

Next song "Lonely Anywhere" is gorgeous too, Jill Andrews taking centre stage on a slow, sad one that falls halfway between Alison Krauss and Gillian Welch, but more fragile and abandoned than either. And the rest of the album, while it doesn't reach the heights of that opening pair, goes on in a similar vein; I mentioned Gram & Emmylou before, but in fact the most immediate reference point for the Everybodyfields is Whiskeytown, if Caitlin Cary had done more of the singing. All in all, a find, and a reminder, and the ideal soundtrack for this time of year, as the year begins to wind down and we fall towards summer.

Bat for Lashes - Two Suns

Two Suns, the first Bat for Lashes album I've listened to, starts very strong, with four memorably spacey, dramatic songs in a row, opener "Glass" the best of them. It doesn't quite maintain that standard thereafter, and its influences (Bjork, Tori Amos, Kate Bush) are writ large, but the music and the artist come through with a strong, distinctive voice - pretty good.

Dum Dum Girls - "End of Daze" ep

Only In Dreams has proved to have a surprising amount of staying power, a measure of the pop sophistication that lay beneath its glossy sheen, and this ep is similarly good, the only mis-step being the dull "Trees and Flowers"; the other four songs are all strong, and interestingly, seemingly heading slightly in a Cults type direction as far as their 21st century 60s girl group quoting pop vibes go.

(I Will Be)

The Prestige

Still good, even when you know exactly where it's going.

(first time [and further]; second time)

"Gregory Crewdson - In A Lonely Place" (Centre for Contemporary Photography)

I've been intrigued by Crewdson since whenever it was that I first came across his work (extemporanea tells me that it was pre-2007, at any rate), and this exhibition, gathering selections from three of his series, was satisfying.

The most striking - and well-known - images were from 'Beneath the Roses' (2003-2008), large scale and full colour, carefully staged and lit vistas of alienation and loneliness from the American unconscious (I think most, if not all, were shot in small town New England, but the location is as much one of collective imagining and association as of specific geography). Some appear to be part of a narrative, while others appear more as single moments in time, but all share a certain frozen quality - an unnatural stillness. The subjects are people, buildings, human-made structures, natural surrounds, but always with an air of the oblique and the unknowable - unmet gazes, unexplained actions, inexplicable configurations (the one of people walking along a long train track, a house on fire in the background, is only the most obvious), submerged histories, impulses and thoughts.

The ones from 'Sanctuary' (2010) have the same air of being like still shots from a dream - abandoned, haunted - though their setting is different, being taken at and around the closed Cinecitta studios in Rome, and being all in black and white. The reference point here is more de Chirico than Hopper, more melancholy than subtly troubling and disturbing, but the mood is ineffably similar.

And, lastly, those from 'Fireflies' (1996) - befitting their subject, they're tiny, all showing little flecks of light against dark, wooded backdrops; it's easy to see why Crewdson was drawn to them given his artistic preoccupations with light and shadow, and captured moments in time.

Laura Cantrell - "Humming Songs: Acoustic Performances from the Flowered Vine"

Pleasant but decidedly inessential; doesn't add anything to the wonderful source record.

Anne Tiernan - Power Without Responsibility

Looks at the role and operation of Ministerial advisers, from a few years back - I came to it after reading something that Tiernan wrote in response to BCA CEO Jennifer Westacott's recent speech about the public service. Its academic origins are apparent in the writing style, but it reads as pretty even-handed, drawing on interviews with a range of frequently anonymous advisers, public servants and others, and ends with some suggestions for filling the 'accountability gap' that she diagnoses.

Aimee Mann - Charmer

Another elegantly great pop record from Mann, continuing the run that she started with Bachelor No 2 and that has since taken in Lost in Space, The Forgotten Arm [*], @#%&*! Smilers and now Charmer.

Musically, it's a turn for the sunnier, although certainly not lyrically; my early favourite, "Labrador", offers perhaps the most vivid contrast, brightly chiming instrumentation (piano and synths especially, those having replaced guitar as Mann's main instrument since Bachelor - though the electric guitar is a highlight when it does show up, as in the second half of other early highlight "Soon Enough"), uppish mid-tempo pop tones, soaring chorus, and an extended metaphor for the singer's inability to change in the face of a hopeless, unhealthy relationship.

Having said that, though, I've spent so much time listening to Mann's music, absorbing the sweet-sourness that's one of its greatest pleasures, that I don't know if I could hear anything recorded by her as uncomplicatedly upbeat, even if, unprecedentedly, it had lyrics to match. And it's also that amount of immersion in her music that makes it impossible for me to tell just how good, actually, Charmer is (though its best moments certainly bear comparison to anything she's done before) - how much of the way that I rate each of her records is driven by my personal receptiveness and associations at the time that I came across them (the more important those elements being, the more likely her earlier albums are to forever remain unsurpassable landmarks in my mind) - of course, the answer is that it doesn't matter, when each new record, and all of the old ones, continues to bring me so much pleasure.

Parlour Games @ Rice Queen

Zoe was in this and it was on Brunswick St on a Sat night, so I went. An enjoyable show that was just what it said it would be: "Think smoky jazz standards, old-school musicals, great crooners, silent films, Parisian nightclubs, Piazzolla tango numbers and more"; apart from the music itself being good, it was impressive how much the show did evoke a sense of the past in its stylings (part of Fringe Festival). [fb]

(w/ Jarrod and Farrah)