"You can't plan on the heart" (2012 cd)

In some ways, 2012 was all a bit of a blur - and now, well, it wasn't that long ago, but it's already a whole month into '13 and it feels like the new year is well and truly on. Anyhow, soundtrack cd for the year, possibly thoughts to follow at some point later.

1. The Bad in Each Other – Feist
Metals (Arts & Crafts; 2011)

2. Alex – Girls
Father, Son, Holy Ghost (True Panther; 2011)

3. The World – Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi (feat. Jack White)
Rome (EMI; 2011)

4. Helplessness Blues – Fleet Foxes
Helplessness Blues (Sub Pop; 2011)

5. To A Poet – First Aid Kit
The Lion’s Roar (Rabid; 2012)

6. This Girl’s Prepared For War – Bic Runga
Belle (Sony; 2012)

7. Different Worlds – Brittany Cairns
[“The Voice”; 2012]

8. That Was Was – Dirty Three
Toward The Low Sun (Bella Union; 2012)

9. New Year – Beach House
Bloom (Mistletone; 2012)

10. Circumambient – Grimes
Visions (4AD; 2012)

11. Chameleon/Comedian – Kathleen Edwards
Voyageur (Zoe; 2012)

12. Aeroplane – The Everybodyfields
Nothing is Okay (Ramseur; 2007)

13. Pretty Girl From Chile – The Avett Brothers
Emotionalism (Ramseur; 2007)

14. Illusory Light – Sarah Blasko
I Awake (Dew Process; 2012)

15. I Got Nothing – Dum Dum Girls
“End of Daze” ep (Sub Pop; 2012)

16. All I Can – Sharon Van Etten
Tramp (Jagjaguwar; 2012)

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Previous years

2010 & 2011
2009
2008
2007
2006
2005

List

There are a couple of things I should get done this evening, but really I just feel like lying around and listening to music, and so in the interests of procrastination, the 50 songs that I've apparently listened to the most since the advent of itunes in my life - ie last five or six years:

1. Different Worlds - Brittany Cairns (199 plays)
2. This World Can Make You Happy - Amaya Laucirica (122)
3. It Must Come Through - Jen Cloher & The Endless Sea (115)
4. New Year - Beach House (113)
5. 23 - Blonde Redhead (95)
6. Out Loud - Mindy Smith (87)
7. Coming Home To Me - Patty Griffin feat Julie Miller (80)
=8. Aeroplane - The Everybodyfields (77)
=8. Blue Lips - Regina Spektor (77)
10. Ode To LRC - Band of Horses (76)
11. Godspell - The Cardigans (75)
12. Circumambient - Grimes (74)
13. Even Though I'm A Woman - Seeker Lover Keeper (73)
14. All I Can - Sharon Van Etten (71)
=15. Slow Show - The National (70)
=15. Hey, Snow White - The New Pornographers (70)
=17. I Got Nothing - Dum Dum Girls (69)
=17. Lie In The Sound - Trespassers William (69)
=19. Modern Love - The Last Town Chorus (66)
=19. The Bleeding Heart Show - The New Pornographers (66)
=21. Joints - Holly Miranda (65)
=21. Mexico City - Jolie Holland (65)
23. Alex - Girls (63)
=24. Wishes - Beach House (60)
=24. This Girl's Prepared For War - Bic Runga (60)
=24. To A Poet - First Aid Kit (60)
=24. Fake Empire - The National (60)
28. Helplessness Blues - Fleet Foxes (59)
=29. Let's Get Out Of This Country - Camera Obscura (58)
=29. What I Thought Of You - Holly Throsby (58)
=29. Bloodbuzz Ohio - The National (58)
=29. House of Cards - Robert Plant (58)
=33. Abducted - Cults (57)
=33. Chameleon/Comedian - Kathleen Edwards (57)
=33. Dream About Changing - Sally Seltmann (57)
=33. Heart Skipped A Beat - The xx (57)
37. No Bad News - Patty Griffin (56)
=38. I Am Going But I Am Not Gone - Jen Cloher & The Endless Sea (55)
=38. Ride The Wind To Me - Julie Miller (55)
40. Zip City - Drive-By Truckers (54)
=41. Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains) - The Arcade Fire (53)
=41. Breakaway - Kelly Clarkson (53)
=43. That Was Was - Dirty Three (52)
=43. Vomit - Girls (52)
=43 (* with a bullet). State of Grace - Taylor Swift (52)
=43. Chinatown - Wild Nothing (52)
=47. Fall At Your Feet - Boy & Bear (51)
=47. Wichita Lineman - Clouds (51)
=47. Top Of The World - Dixie Chicks (51)
=47. Unless It's Kicks - Okkervil River (51)

Two thoughts:

• Not that this is news to me, but the disproportionate number of female singers is striking. I guess that's just how I'm wired.
• I would be a happy man if I could somehow have this list based on lifetime stats.

(previously - Feb 09)

Beasts of the Southern Wild

Beasts of the Southern Wild is really good, and it feels memorable, but it's difficult to describe exactly why. It has a vision to it; it just is.

(w/ Meribah)

"I sometimes lose my faith in luck / I don't know what I want to be when I grow up": Brandi Carlile - Bear Creek

A likeably diverse alt-countryish record, Carlile doing well with a full gamut of country-folk-rock singer-songwriter styles: contemporary nu-grass ("Keep Your Heart Young"), stormy rockers ("Raise Hell"), pretty Patty Griffin / Dixie Chicks-styled ballads ("That Wasn't Me", "What Did I Ever Come Here For"), melodic modern country-pop ("100", "Rise Again"), warm Rosanne Cash-ish folk-tinged anthems ("In The Morrow"); though then again there's "I'll Still Be There", one of the highlights, which really mainly sounds like Brandi Carlile. (I've kind of dipped in and out of Carlile's songbook in the past, hearing a few songs from her debut and rather liking next lp The Story, but haven't kept up since.)

Bored Nothing - Bored Nothing

A nice piece of guitar-y indie, Australian no less. Somewhat similar to (at various times): the Pains of Being Pure at Heart, early Primal Scream, Elliott Smith, the sweeter end of Big Star's spectrum, Girls, etc. Has that chimingly jangly, brightly faded feel going, and an impressively high ratio of distinctive to generic songs.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Inevitably in the shadow of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and lacking by comparison to those others; it's at once less epic, with a feeling of much less at stake (despite the bits seeded throughout that are designed to foreshadow the events of LOTR), and less tautly paced, so that at times this first Hobbit installment feels just a bit long. Still, of course it looks great, there are some exciting bits, and overall it does a pretty good job of evoking the pathos in the dwarves' situation and quest (the guy who plays Thorin is good) and staging that against Bilbo's progression, and there are far worse ways to spend three odd hours in a cinema, particularly of a Friday night after a long week.

(w/ Cass)

More on Red

A substantial and good, if at points breathlessly and hyperbolically enthusiastic, series of PopMatters pieces about Taylor Swift and Red (even the titles are good), all by different writers:

• "Is Taylor Swift Still Country? Do We Care?"
• "In Defense of Taylor Swift and Gen-Y Pop Music"
• "Indie Love for Taylor Swift's Hipster-Baiting 'Red' "

(Also, a more measured but still positive review from the same site.)

Evidently, still on high rotation over here, albeit mainly the 50% or so of the record that's particularly grabbed me...addictive.

Taylor Swift - Speak Now & Red

I've liked Taylor Swift from the start, which for me was hearing "Love Story" on the radio and immediate purchase of Fearless a few years back (also, her debut), and kept on listening to her, or at least to the songs that had stuck with me, pretty consistently since then.

I'd been aware that she was still going around, and becoming bigger and bigger, but hadn't really followed her career; it seemed entirely possible that I already had all of her music that I needed. But then there were two things that made me think I should catch up: first, it seemed like something interesting had happened with the phenomenon of 'Taylor Swift', whereby not only had she become a full blown pop megastar but a fair degree of critical acclaim had followed; and second, having my attention caught by a music video on tv one weekend morning, spoken word intro, catchy hyper-pop lines, and arresting-looking blonde singer, which I realised partway through was in fact Swift.

So, Speak Now came out a couple of years back, and it's a strong album, building on the strengths of her earlier records and showing Swift's increased facility for anthemic, memorable pop songs, sometimes with a sweetly countryish air and sometimes a bit harder-edged.

But Red is the one that really arrests; the song-writing is stronger and more consistent, and the (stadium/dancefloor) pop elements now fully entrenched and indeed the foundation for many of the album's most striking, and best, moments - the airily driving, U2-esque "State of Grace", title track "Red", "I Knew You Were Trouble" (the one I'd seen the video for) and "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" (the two most obviously state of the moment pop-infused), and late-album entry "Starlight"...impressively, it runs for 16 songs and stays good the whole way through.

It's hard to know just how knowing Swift is in her invocation of youth and dropping of its vernacular throughout; who knows, because it's entirely plausible that most 22 year olds would be just as aware of their own time of life-ness as she is on the song of the same name, "22" (it's tempting to see it as an update on her previous "Fifteen"), while still speaking in exactly the kind of argot that she brings to her lyrics. It probably doesn't matter, anyway - either way, she captures the giddiness and drama of that time of life, as well as the all-round exhilaration, and it's that as much as the catchy-verging-on-ridiculous hooks on which she builds so many of her choruses and bridge transitions, and her winsome, characterful singing (highlighted throughout, but often particularly on the less pyrotechnic tunes like "Treacherous" and "The Lucky One"), that makes Red such a gigantic, and fantastic, pop record. Inevitably there are no doubt any number of elements that have come together to lead to fame, fortune and praise for Swift - but I think the most important is simply that she's really good.

Argo

Very well made. The most striking thing about it is how tense it is all the way through, creating a tight feeling in your stomach from the beginning and keeping it there all the way through (and for a fair bit after, too); in that sense, it reminded me a bit of The Hurt Locker. Some nice humour around the Hollywood machine too.

(w/ Kai)

Paul O Williams - The Breaking of Northwall

There's a story to this one. For many years, I've had the faintest of memories of having read a book - or perhaps it was books - when I was younger, probably late primary school, maybe early high. I remember them from my local library - the Pines - and they were in the young adult section; all I could remember is that they were set in a post-apocalyptic America whose inhabitants had lost the use of technology following some great disaster (presumably nuclear), many years on, that one of them had a cover with a giant ship on it, and that the title had something to do with a wall. Also, the book, or books, or perhaps it was just the cover(s), made enough of an impression on me that I wanted to re-read them.

I think they probably slipped my mind for quite a while after whenever it was that I was exposed to them, probably resurfacing at some point in uni, maybe mid-uni. Thing was, though, no matter how many people I talked to, and even with the bottomless reservoir of information that is the internet, I couldn't find the name of the book/s - what little I remembered just wasn't enough to be able to track them down. So I'd more or less resigned myself to never being able to revisit them and find out what it was that made them linger, albeit in such a trace kind of way, in the first place.

Then, a few months ago, what in retrospect should've been obvious: going to the wikipedia list page for 'fantasy novels' (or somesuch similar) and ctrl+f-ing for "wall" - and voila, 'The Breaking of Northwall' by Paul O Williams. And after all that, it turns out to be only alright, not bad but not captivating either, at least now; I can't remember whether I read this one (I did find the cover image that I'd remembered - book 4 in the series), but in any event don't remember its events at all, and while the story is decent enough, the characters, of whom there are far too many, are on the thin side, and the way that all the different tribes (warring remnants of the country's former population, with no recollection of the time before the 'great fire' whose existence folklore has passed down to them) come to work together is a bit bland. (It's also worth noting that it's quite rigorously 'realistic' - no orcs, dragons or even mutants of any kind here.)

Possibly this is one of those series that takes a while to gather momentum - first books are often fantasy series' weakest, at least unless they go on for too long and bloat at the end - or maybe it was just the concept that captured my imagination enough for it to linger down the years, as whichever one/s I read were probably the first I'd come across to be set in this kind of post-apocalyptic setting - that is, one in which memory of the times before has been lost, while the world's reduced inhabitants make their way surrounded by the mysterious remnants of those former times, Ozymandias writ large; both the imagery and the ideas itself would have struck me strongly, I suspect, such that even if the execution and writing are merely serviceable, some kind of fascination would have arisen. I don't know if I'll read the rest - probably, at some point, maybe.

Music in moments

On the tram, coming home today through Carlton, "Mike Mills" by Air came up on my ipod, and it was like it dropped me straight back into the past - specifically 2004, when I was listening to Talkie Walkie and especially that song. I don't have any strong specific associations or memories associated with the song - the nearest is a faint recollection of Penny, or maybe it was Kate B, remarking that it sounded like a music box, the snippet of conversation snap-frozen for some reason - but those opening chimes really took me straight back with a startling vividity...

* * *

This is a bit different, but I had another sharp, piquant music experience on the weekend - caught drifting slightly aimlessly in the city (unusual in these time-poor times), Francoise Hardy's "Ce Petit Coeur" came on and was immediately the perfect song for that very moment; as music does, it soundtracked and at the same time coalesced the moment itself.

Kit White - 101 Things to Learn in Art School

I don't think I ever aspired to go to art school, but despite its title, this excellent little book has as much to say about appreciating and engaging with art as about actually creating it. 101 short insights, focusing variously on the concept of art, its formal and compositional elements, and its practice, and each illustrated by a line drawing, many of which are 'after' (ie in the style of) an illustrative famous work. I got a bit out of this one, particularly the more compositionally-focused ones, which have given me some new ways of thinking about my own experience of art.

Some examples (somewhat out of context without their elaborating text and illustration):

3. "To return to things themselves is to return to that world which precedes knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks." - Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 'Phenomenology of Perception'
12. Perception is a reciprocal action.
14. All images are abstractions.
25. Style is the consequence of something being described in the way most appropriate to its content.
26. Abstraction comes from the world.
41. Porosity, not solidity, now defines our view of the world.
54. Time is an essential element in all media.
69. Color is not neutral.
89. Eliminate the nonessential.
92. The shape of an image carries a hidden metaphor.
100. Art is the means by which a culture describes itself to itself.

Batman Begins

Rewatched this in a few sittings, between other things. Struggling a bit lately with bad heat and other-related sleep deprivation. Continues to be v.g. (on the subject of that abbreviation, incidentally, also saw most of Bridget Jones's Diary on tv the other night - as charming as ever)

Les Miserables

So the approach they took with this adaptation was essentially to transpose the stage musical directly to screen, which has pros and cons. Foremost among the pros, given that Les Mis has been the musical as far as I'm concerned since seeing what I'm pretty sure was its last main stage production in Melbourne back in 1998 for a school french excursion (I also read the book extracurricularly, brick of a thing, around the same time), is that it then becomes essentially a glossier, and at least potentially more spectacular, version of the musical, with the bonus of movie stars in the main roles.

Three fairly significant cons, though:
1. As a direct transposition, it drags a bit in places on screen, particularly at two and a half hours long, with the shifts from one scene/song to the next more jarring than on stage.
2. More generally, the suspension of disbelief needed to be really carried along by the spectacle and larger than life-ness of the thing is significantly harder with a movie than on stage.
3. The singing is variable, and extremely shaky in some cases, which was actually surprisingly distracting. (On that front, pass mark for Jackman (though a bare pass), not so much Russell Crowe (just doesn't having the singing chops to sell Javert), Anne Hathaway pretty good, likewise Eddie Redmayne as Marius (also the actor who plays Enjolras); Amanda Seyfried not terrible but a bit shrill; Samantha Barks as Eponine possibly the best of the lot, but then I've always had a particular soft spot for that character).

Having said all of that, even an only so-so adaptation taking such a faithful approach, and with watchable leads and secondaries as this has, was bound to be pretty enjoyable, and this was. The big moments come through and it's stirring and emotionally affecting in places, as it's meant to be - so, all up, while not without its problems, pretty good.

(w/ Cass)

George Megalogenis - The Australian Moment

Enjoyable - essentially a flying chronology of Australian politics, and broad social trends, from Whitlam onwards, read primarily through an economic lens, and based around an underlying argument that a succession of market-oriented and deregulationist reforms have left Australian uniquely well-placed amongst western nations to deal with the economic challenges of the 21st century.

Gillian Welch - The Harrow & The Harvest

Timing is so important. Welch became one of my favourites during that period when I was discovering her music, 2004-05ish, and all of her records to that point, Soul Journey, Time (The Revelator), Hell Among the Yearlings and Revival, really resonated. Then, finally, in 2011 came The Harrow & The Harvest, which I bought almost straight away but still, after more than a year of listening on and off, hasn't spoken to me in the same way as those others. It's a fine record, and in much the same way that Time (The Revelator) in particular is, but it seems that I just haven't been as attuned to Welch's and Rawlings' alluring take on roots/americana as I was back then - perhaps its time will come again, and with it a fuller appreciation of this one.

Krystle Warren & the Faculty - Love Songs: A Time You May Embrace

Hearing Love Songs in Basement Discs the other day made twice that Krystle Warren's remarkable, deep, rich voice had made me sit up and take notice; when I saw that it was her, and remembered how good she was in "Way to Blue" (that having been the first time), I figured that was enough that I should buy the cd.

So - it's a good one, Warren weaving jazzy, soulful sounds in with some folk and even lightly country touches; at times it makes me think of Nina Simone, at others (particularly at her most expansive) of Antony Hegarty. Best are two gorgeous, swooning ballads near the beginning, "Forever is a Long Time" and "Every Morning", and the bare bones, voice + guitar "Love You" that closes the affair; the whole thing is thoroughly, unabashedly romantic.

First Aid Kit - The Lion's Roar limited edition boxset

Compiling my end of year cd made it clear that The Lion's Roar has ended up being my favourite album of 2012 (Bloom was the only other that got close) and being reminded of its loveliness inspired the purchase of this boxset.

Three additional songs - "Wolf" riding a percussively tribal rhythm with vocals to match and representing a bit of a different direction for them, "Marianne's Son" on the indistinct side, and "Just Needed A Friend", on oceanic folk shanty which would've fit right on to the original record. There's also a short documentary with a bit of concert and behind the scenes footage and brief interview grabs, a poster that I'd put up somewhere were the time for putting band posters up not behind me, and a guitar pick that I'd use if I'd played guitar since high school.

Battlestar Galactica

Miniseries + four seasons. Very good, and each season better than the last - once it got going, it really made me want to find out what would happen next and how things would end. Reminded me a bit of Lost - not least in its more metaphysical tendencies - although more tightly plotted. And its focus on choices and their consequences, and the moral elements of the decisions made by all of its major characters is effective, as is (with some caveats re: occasional lack of sophistication) its staging of classic societal and political issues in its sci-fi context of a beleaguered last 50,000 survivors of the human race fleeing their robot antagonist through space in a giant fleet. I wouldn't say this was a truly great show - it's no West Wing, say - but it was plenty enjoyable.