Marnie Stern - The Chronicles of Marnia

An intriguing record - makes me want to keep listening to it. Stern's little-girl yowls are possibly an acquired taste, as is the way that they cut in and out and over the top of her zig-zaggy and often ferocious guitar lines in the ten miniature epics making up The Chronicles of Marnia. But tart-sweet, ecstatically, vividly spiralling (say on "Still Moving" and the title track), stop-start propulsive ("Noonan", "Proof of Life"), sometimes fractured indie-lullaby-y ("East Side Glory"), occasionally suggesting a subliminal Life Without Buildings influence ("Immortals") and at other times nailing a punkily melodic indie-rock reminiscent of the great Pretty Girls Make Graves (especially on closer "Hell Yes"), it strikes a chord with me.

Broken

There are very few figures from literature who have really stayed with me - who really feel like they're a part of my life - but Scout from To Kill A Mockingbird is one. And so of course I was alive to the resonance of the name - and character - of 11 year old Skunk in this one (convincingly portrayed by Eloise Laurence), and particularly when she has a Boo Radley-type figure living in her neighbourhood. As the film goes on, it becomes clear that the parallels are entirely intentional, although not exact - and while Broken shares with that antecedent a certain clarity of vision, it's not the same powerful moral clarity, but instead a kind of humanist optimism embodied in Skunk's nature and trajectory amidst an otherwise murkily nuanced set of characters and actions.

There's some pretty tough stuff in this film, and elements of the social realist genre that I generally so dislike, but a deftness of touch (not to mention top-notch performances across the whole cast - Tim Roth and Cillian Murphy being just the two most recognisable, although both are certainly also notably good) and a command of the material that enables the film to work through a frankly melodramatic series of events, particularly at its climax, without actually registering as melodramatic at the time, and to strike the right, hopeful but unsentimental, note in its final scenes. Nice soundtrack too. I wouldn't have chosen to see this on my own, but I'm really glad that I did see it.

(w/ Meribah - and a grand total of two other people in the cinema. I guess it wasn't the most obvious Sunday evening fare; as it was, we were there only because dinner had taken longer than expected and we were too late for the screening of Cloud Atlas that we'd intended to catch)

Monet's Garden (NGV)

"It took me a while to understand my waterlilies." -CM

Monet's grown on me over the years. To the extent that he registered at all, I used to find his paintings all too wispy, pretty, exemplified by the idea that his most emblematic subject was, of all things, waterlilies. But time has brought a different perspective, and this exhibition was a timely chance to see a large collection of his work. It was good, of course; my favourites tended to be the particularly colourfully luminous, dream-lit ones from the 1880s (flowers, fields, cliffs, beaches), and there were also a couple of late-period ones that struck me in quite a different way (a blurry 1919-20 "Wisteria" and poignant 1925-6 "Roses"). Which isn't to say that some of the waterlilies, which of course made up a large part of the exhibition, glowing and vivid, weren't also memorable.

Anyway, circumstances weren't ideal as I was fairly groggy and the gallery was very busy - possibly staggering in mid morning on a Saturday wasn't the smartest in that respect - which may partly explain why my experience of all this wasn't deeper. But I expect to go again, so there'll be at least one more go at it.

The National - Trouble Will Find Me

It's frightening how fast time goes by; it sure doesn't feel like three years ago that I was coming to High Violet, already drunk on the greatness of Boxer and Alligator.

So the thing with Trouble Will Find Me is that it's good - I like it. In a time when rock music is probably less immediately important to me than at any point in the last 15 or so years (ie the whole of my adult life and then some),* listening to it is nonetheless like pulling on a warm winter coat and going for a leisurely walk in the crisp, lovely cold. Several of its songs - "I Should Live in Salt", "Sea of Love", "Graceless", "I Need My Girl", "Pink Rabbits" - are excellent, and all are good. It's graceful, velvety, elegiac, just like those other ones. But, for one reason or another, it hasn't gotten under my skin in the same way as the last three - this one's nice, not life-changing.

(also, Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers, and live, twice)

---

* I say 'immediately' important because of course the years of being immersed in it have marked me deep, even if I don't spend much time day to day listening to the stuff nowadays.

Shovels & Rope - O' Be Joyful

"From the Crescent City to the Great Salt Lake, it ain't what you got, it's what you make."

"Birmingham" is a riot, next track "Keeper" (highlighted by a whole range of excited shouts and whoops) in a similar ballpark and similarly good. Those are the high points, and I like this record most in the moments when it approaches the kind of exuberance that animates those first two. Overall, likeable but probably not a big replayer, I suspect.

"So Real: 15 tracks of the best new music" (Uncut cd)

The Buckley-referencing cd was one of the main reasons why I picked up Uncut rather than some other magazine in the airport on my way back from Sydney the other day, and happily, it's ace. There's no obvious theme or box into which these 15 songs can be put - no bad thing - beyond a certain alt-ish roots/folk tendency to a lot of them and some seriously great use of guitar.

Stand outs, some of which I'll definitely be chasing down more of:

• Mikal Cronin - "I'm Done Running From You". Fuzzily pop-y indie-rock - good!
• Sallie Ford & the Sound Outside - "Devil". Stompy modern rockabilly sounds.
• The House of Love - "Holy River". Mellow, cruisy guitar-rock slider.
• MV & EE - "Trailer Trash". I can't even describe this one. Good textures, really really good strung-out "Cortez the Killer"-style guitars.
• Shovels & Rope - "Birmingham". A girl, a boy, and harmonies. Plus a groove and a twang. Yee-ha! This song makes me smile.
• Evening Hymns - "You And Jake". Sad sad folk-pop.
• Marnie Stern - "Noonan". Jittery, excitable indie, v interesting guitar vibe going on. Reminds me a bit of Laura Stevenson.

Hem - Departure and Farewell

She told me that I'd like it when I was buying it at Basement Discs the other week, and I do. Departure and Farewell doesn't have quite the sustained beauty of Hem's first two, Rabbit Songs and Eveningland, nor any absolute high points like "When I Was Drinking", "Half Acre", "Lazy Eye" or "Pacific Street" from those others (although top "Departure and Farewell" and almost-tail "Last Call" are close), but it shares with them a sheer loveliness in its heartfelt, swoonily pretty melding of folk, country and elements of many other streams. It's a cliche, but Sally Ellyson's really is a voice that I can imagine listening to sing almost anything, and it helps that there's so much space in these songs for it to come through.

Patty Griffin - American Kid

For me, Patty Griffin's music often feels as if it accesses something, connects to something in me, in a way that I haven't felt consistently with any other artist for a long time. The experience is basically inarticulable (it resides in my chest and throat, beyond words); it's a kind of resonance, going beyond emotion to pure feeling. This may sound hyperbolic, but when I've thought about this in the past, the word 'miraculous' often feels about right, especially because those responses are often produced by her most subtle songs.

On American Kid, her latest, it's track 4, the ruminative "Wild Old Dog" that most fits what I'm trying to get at, but all of the first four songs are pretty much perfect, the others being gentle opener "Go Wherever You Wanna Go", the heavier stomp of "Don't Let Me Die in Florida" and then lovely, graceful, mysterious "Ohio", which I'd been listening to a lot in the lead-up to the release of the album - it's reminiscent of the prettiest moments on Raising Sand, and not just because Plant is quietly harmonising in the background.

Overall, it's a quiet record - I read an interview with Griffin a while ago, where she said that she's always attracted to the sad songs that tend to appear near the end of albums, often second from last, and that kind of comes through on American Kid, just as on her previous recordings, maybe most notably the earlier ones. And it's a really good one (not to mention well-suited to my current mood); I have a feeling that it, and her music generally, are going to keep on giving me a lot in the months, and longer, to come.

* * *

Incidentally, I've been thinking lately that just maybe this kind of music - broadly, the kind of Americana/country/folk that I like so much - may actually be my favourite kind of music nowadays. Boundaries are always blurry etc, but it does seem that the music that means the most to me these days - in terms of immediate, as opposed to historical, importance - is more often in this ballpark than the pop and rock that has always been, in various forms, the main event for me. If so, it's been a while coming - but noteworthy anyway, and a real change from the way that I've always seen my own musical tastes.

F Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby

It's a cipher for who we are and where we are at any given time in history and our lives. When I read the book in high school, I thought of it as a traditional love story and saw Gatsby as this hopeless romantic, but reading it as an adult, I see it as a tragedy and Gatsby as this really hollow man, not at all in touch with reality.

... so said Leonardo DiCaprio in an interview I read the other day. Not bad, Leo - not bad at all.

Gatsby is, of course, a touchstone for me - for a while there, the one that I thought of as my single favourite novel.* The last time I read it was a fair few years ago, and this time round it read quite differently to me, though I'm not sure I can say exactly how; I certainly read it attentively, but the more important thing would've been the different perspective that the intervening years have brought in terms of how I make sense of the whole, and of the figure of Gatsby in particular.

I think that for me, the tragedy of the character, and of the whole milieu for which he in some ways stands, has always been in the foreground, but on this pass, I didn't get anywhere near the sense of romanticisation or idealisation of that tragedy that I think I had previously; and, maybe relatedly, the novel itself didn't seem to have quite the same savour of greatness that it's always held for me...though I wonder if perhaps it isn't rather that another layer of complexity has opened up in my response to - and understanding of - it...a cipher indeed.

---

* The list in full: Wuthering Heights (late high school to earlyish uni), The Crying of Lot 49 (most of uni), then Invisible Cities (perhaps the very tail-end of uni through to the beginning of work) and then Gatsby (thereafter until, I don't know, maybe a few years ago, when the position of 'favourite novel' became vacant somewhere along the line - not that I'd read it in the intervening period, but then our relationships with novels, or any works of art, don't depend on immediate contact).

The Matrix, The Matrix Reloaded & The Matrix Revolutions

I got it into my head that it might be interesting to rewatch these, a fair bit on now. Though I liked the first one at the time, the second and third more or less passed me by, and more generally I was never a huge fan of these films in the way that so many others were. Anyhow, they're not too bad - amusingly pretentious at points, both in terms of the 'philosophy' and the extreme portentousness (Laurence Fishburne in particular, for all that he's nonetheless enjoyable to watch) but in their best moments showing real style.

No

I thought this one was only so-so, to be honest. The account of how the dark arts of advertising were turned to Chile's 1988 plebiscite on democracy/Pinochet was interesting enough, but I don't know, maybe not quite dynamic enough for me.

(w/ Mehnaz)

Natalie Maines - Mother

Well, now this is very nice. I like the Dixie Chicks, Maines' old band, a fair bit, and so I would've expected to like a solo record from her anyway, but what propelled me to pick it up so quickly was seeing that it included versions of two songs from albums that I listened to a lot during my teenage years, "Mother" (from The Wall) and "Lover, You Should've Come Over".

So, as to those two - the first, which also gives the album its title, is reinvented as an acoustically-based lament, while still retaining some of the weird overtones of the original, and done well. And then "Lover...", in some ways a braver cover choice than "Hallelujah" (which has been tackled by plenty of others, post-Buckley) or "Last Goodbye" (the most transcendent moment on Grace - an album, incidentally, that only grows in stature over time - but not as simply, wrenchingly building and sprawling as "Lover..."); I wasn't sure about Maines' version for the first couple of listens - while she conveys the emotion, some of the high notes are slightly beyond her - but it's now fully won me over...the sure way to tell being that listening to it, all 7 minutes, brings a direct connection to the song itself and to what it stirringly evokes, and not just in a subsidiary way in relation to Buckley's magnificent original.

Overall, Mother leans more on the rock side of things than the country  - far fewer harmonies than her old band, for one thing (in some ways a pity, as they were always a high point, but this album represents enough of a different direction that they're not actually missed) - but it's all a continuum, and there was plenty of ecumenicism in the Dixie Chicks' approach too. There's a cover of a Patty Griffin song, "Silver Bell", but it doesn't stand out; opener "Without You", apparently an Eddie Vedder original, does, as do the chugging, mid-tempo "Come Cryin' To Me" (not the only song on the album to remind me of Tift Merritt) and closing ballad "Take It On Faith".

(Taking the Long Way; Fly; Home; Wide Open Spaces & Top of the World (live))

Bored Nothing - "Another EP" ep

More nicely washed-out, lo-fi but crisp guitar/keyboard-based tunes &c. I particularly like "Do What You Want, Always" and "Baby, Won't You Be My Glove?".

(lp)

Throwing Muses - Throwing Muses (2003)

It's about trajectories. Throwing Muses had their heyday (late 80s/early 90s) well before I ever heard of them some time in the early 2000s, whereupon I intensely felt their music for a while (specifically, The Real Ramona) and then didn't really follow on - being drawn more in the Belly / Tanya Donelly direction - and so paid no attention when this one, their second self-titled, came out after, in 2003.

And now, a decade on, it came into my hands and turns out to be not too bad at all, though it took me a few listens to get my ear back in for Hersh's zigzaggy, stop-start, somewhat abrasive songwriting style. For mine, it's unusual for a pop (using that term loosely) album in that it's quite backloaded - most of my favourites are in its second half..."Speed and Sleep", "Solardip" and closing pair "Half Blast" and "Flying", all jaggedly guitary.

My Brightest Diamond - Bring Me The Workhorse

Possibly this is a bit harsh, but this record strikes me as a bit 'sound and fury, signifying nothing'. It's all very dramatic and ornate, but it doesn't feel like there's a lot to it. May be telling that the two covers that brought My Brightest Diamond to my attention ("Feeling Good" and Radiohead's "Lucky") are both much stronger than anything on this album of originals.

Buddy Miller - Universal United House of Prayer

It's nice the way so many of my favourites on the current americana scene collaborate so frequently with each other and generally appear so mutually enmeshed. Take Buddy Miller - for example, and very incompletely:
... he produced Patty Griffin's Downtown Church as well as performing on it,
... a record which, like many of Griffin's, also featured vocal contributions from, amongst others, Emmylou Harris and Julie Miller,
... Julie Miller in fact being Buddy Miller's wife as well as regular musical collaborator (eg),
... unsurprisingly, Patty and Emmylou have both lent vocals to Julie Miller's records (eg 1, 2),
... Emmylou also having, I'm pretty sure, cut more than one record to which Buddy Miller has brought his guitar (eg)
... and then there was that surprising pair of Robert Plant records, Raising Sand (with Alison Krauss and produced by T-Bone Burnett, both legends in their own rights) and Band of Joy (produced by Buddy Miller, with backing vocals from Patty Griffin throughout - it's even been reported in despatches that Plant and Griffin are nowadays an item).

So, anyhow, Universal United House of Prayer is from 2004, it's Buddy Miller's take on an americana gospel record, and it's wonderful. On the subject of collaborators, the gospel singers Regina and Ann McCrary, to whom I was introduced by Downtown Church, are strong presences, and are great, and Julie Miller and Emmylou Harris turn up too, but it's clear that this is Buddy's show, guitar-playing, singing and all-round interpreting all outstanding, on a dusty, crisp, rootsy record with those gospel elements deeply embedded.

The centrepiece, and at the moment for me, the highlight, is a version of a Bob Dylan song called "With God on Our Side" that I'm not familiar with. Whatever its earlier incarnation(s), though, here it's a nine minute odyssey, epic, yearning and eternal-sounding in that folky kind of way - I wasn't surprised, upon looking it up, to find that it dated back to Dylan's earlyish days (1964) - and captivating. Interesting how often covers of Dylan songs are great (to name just two, Lisa Miller's "You're A Big Girl Now" and 16 Horsepower's "Nobody 'Cept You").

Elsewhere, there's a sprightly and sincere update of the Louvin Brothers' "There's a Higher Power" (known to me via the Sadies' energetic live cover), with the rest mostly co-writes, not - least with his wife Julie - their "Fire & Water" is a particular reminder of how wonderfully their voices mesh in harmonies - including one, the charmingly sidelong-cowboyish "This Old World", with Victoria Williams...it's pretty much all good.

Steven Erikson - Malazan Book of the Fallen series

Escapism is genuinely a large part of why the fantasy genre has appealed to me so much in the past and to some extent still does, but it'd be rare for me to have begun reading any novel, fantasy or otherwise, so deliberately seeking escapism as when I picked up Gardens of the Moon for a revisit a few months ago. It was night time and I was (obviously) at home, but beyond that I can't remember the circumstances, except that I specifically felt the need to immerse myself in a different world - in other words, to escape - and that it seemed the ideal way to do so.

I also remember thinking that it wouldn't just be a case of reading that first one, and that maybe I'd just end up re-reading it and the next two, Deadhouse Gates and Memories of Ice, which collectively seem to represent the first stanza of the 10-book series...not that there's a lot of 'just' to that, with each book a pretty sizeable undertaking in its own right. In the end, though, I ended up re-reading the whole lot (this was more or less my third pass), in no small part to continue that immersion - escape - deciding at some point that, once I'd finished it and gotten in my final masters paper (the latter's still to come) it would need to be the time for me to start trying to do something active on the Life front again, after the lull of the last really several months.

Anyway, that autobiographical context aside, it remains compelling on a second re-reading, complicatedly plotted in layers upon layers but pulling together to a massive, satisfying ending, while also leaving plenty of room for further elaboration in the several other books that Erikson and collaborator Esslemont have written alongside and since, only a couple of which I've read. I guess inevitably some of the visceral impact and excitement is gone at this point, but the flipside is that much more of the detail sank in this time through, and both the world and many of the characters felt richer, fuller, not least because, even though I don't know if I've ever consciously thought about them between readings, I've now lived with them for quite some time (the Malazans - all of them - have always been the most memorable character(s), but this time Tavore was really at the heart of it, too). It's still genuinely awe-inspiring, in scope and execution, and completely gripping.

(Previously: [1-8], which is as far as Erikson'd got at that point, and then starting again with [1-3], [4 & 5], [6], [7], [8], [9] & [9 (again) & 10].)

16 Horsepower - Sackcloth 'N' Ashes

Pretty good - their debut album. But Secret South remains the complete summit for me of 16 Horsepower's intense, old testament-style fire and brimstone appalachian rock, and truthfully, I can't see myself returning to this one too often. There's no doubt about it - what they have (had) going on is something unique.

Ryan Adams - Gold & Easy Tiger

From 2001 and 2007 respectively, and wikipedia tells me that Adams released no fewer than six lps between them...which is maybe telling, because my strongest impression across Gold and Easy Tiger is that Adams really needs an editor - ie some kind of quality control. There's some good stuff on Gold in particular, but it's far too long, and tends to descend into a sort of generically country-rock-influenced pleasantness, whereas very possibly it might have been a really solid record if it had been a fair bit tighter. Adams certainly isn't bad, but on the strength of the parts of his solo output that I've come to so far, nor is there anything to him to get really excited about.

(in a similar vein, Ashes & Fire)

Patty Griffin - 1000 Kisses & Impossible Dream

Two older records, both wonderful. Impossible Dream (2004) in particular is astonishing - one of those magical, lump-in-throat-inducing records that just penetrates (sometimes, in moments, actually making me feel like crying) - and 2002's 1000 Kisses isn't that far behind.

It's striking that those kinds of emotional responses aren't particularly generated by 'glory moments' of the kind that you'd find in a typical mainstream pop (or, for that matter, pop-country) ballad, but rather seem to arise organically from the subtle, almost understated musical and lyrical streams of Griffin's songs. And also striking is how off-the-scale marvellous both her songwriting and singing are; for mine, she's probably the best songwriter in the americana vein going around today, and her voice, unforgettable live (I don't know if I've ever seen a better vocal performance in concert), is something on record too.

A fair few of the songs across these two albums were already familiar to me, one way or another - from Impossible Dream, "Top of the World", iconically done by the Dixie Chicks but here given a barer, rawer and maybe even more heart-wrenching reading by its writer, and from 1000 Kisses, several that made their way on to the live record A Kiss in Time ("Rain", "Be Careful", "Long Road", "Nobody's Crying"). And many others stand out, especially, from Impossible Dream, "Useless Desires", "When It Don't Come Easily" and "Florida". Patty Griffin has been a bit of a slow burn for me, but more and more, I've come to feel that she's really remarkable - something special.

(The impetus for going and listening to both of these being the imminent release of a new one, American Kid, whose first single "Ohio" is brilliant.)