broken blossoms

Maybe because its stately songs sound like Antony and the Johnsons reaching deeper into the realm of life's melancholic abstractions, The Crying Light already engaged me more on my first few weeks of listening than I Am A Bird Now (2005) ever did. No rinky-dink celebrity walk-ins like before but the musicians backing the singer filled in most admirably with their classicist-like restraint, providing these songs that broach into mortality's mysteries with its singular force - no small task considering that Antony Hegarty's startlingly mournful voice is the obvious linchpin of these chamber pop ballads ("One Dove" and "Another World" are the standouts in that mold). On the gorgeously orchestrated The Crying Light, Antony reins in his expressive range as if eager for us listeners to slowly take in the strength of these new compositions (likewise, the lyrics written are more economical). The haunting quietude of "Dust And Water" is especially moving, while the broken-blossom soulfulness of "Aeon" elevates The Crying Light into the medicated fog of a phantasmic waking dream.

night of the atavistic junkies

The new Franz Ferdinand record basically confirms two things that many would have suspected about these Scottish pop stars: that they have already said all they needed to say in the 39 minutes of their incendiary self-titled debut in 2004, and that the prototype Franz Ferdinand sound isn't half as resilient when taken away from their familiar (i.e. dance-rock) settings. Actually I'm more or less hedging on the latter point, for Tonight: Franz Ferdinand clearly does not attempt to drift too far away from their clubland assets, and wisely so too, as this is a band blessed with almost mutant abilities to dish out hedonistic post-punk like it's a junk routine.

Where this third Franz Ferdinand album does different is in coming up with a neat little concept, Alex Kapranos having claimed that the songs revolve around a wild night out partying and the morning after. This being Franz Ferdinand, their splenetic energy is on display throughout ("Ulysses", "No You Girls", "What She Came For") and then there are also some newfound sound elements roped in: a dose of indie/LCD electronics (main offenders: "Live Alone" and "Lucid Dreams") or a few daps of tribe/dub beats here and there, nothing too distinctive to distract from the neo-discotheque riffs. Taking a cue from the album's concept, Tonight does get more interesting down the stretch when things turn way looser and everybody's done getting stoned - the woozy futuristic commercial jingle of "Dream Again" isn't too bad at all, a percursor of things to come perhaps.

let the right one in (2008)

Last thing we need is another teen vampire movie, you think, and perhaps rightly so. But obviously Tomas Alfredson's Let The Right One In, made and conceived in wintry Sweden, promises to be something different. Yes, technically speaking there is still blood and gore but the film revels more in subverting the prosaic details of everyday surburban horror, the literal kind. As 12-year-old Oskar (Kara Hedebrant) befriends Eli (Lina Leandersson), the female vampire who has been 12 "for a very long time", the setup is remarkably simple and economical (minimal effects, in other words) while the urban-legend narrative is elegantly paced throughout its 114 minutes to unsettle the viewer from frosty frame to frame. What's great about Let The Right One In is that the filmmakers clearly do not hesitate to fuck around with genre conventions, oftentimes making direct references to the pangs of adolescence (isolation, puberty, bully trauma) and it's interesting that John Ajvide Lindqvist, the writer of the novel and screenplay, made specific references to imagining a vampire's existence to be "miserable, gross and lonely". And rooting this tale of horror in a story that is fundamentally about two misfits slowly drawn towards each other, the uneasy ending of Let The Right One In (no spoilers intended) leaves me with the impression that this film is also Alfredson and Lindqvist's updated ode to to teenage vigilantes.

silence kit #6

Four Tet
Rounds [Domino, 2003]

In another one of those supposedly random things, I was thumbing my way through this Haruki Murakami novel (After Dark) when the Four Tet song "My Angel Rocks Back And Forth" drifts, via my earphones, into the chance late-nite reunion at Denny's between two old acquaintances, the young, aspirant jazz musician Takahashi and foreign studies undergraduate Mari in her Red Sox cap. There are probably tons of other anecdotes that you and I can similarly cook up like this, about particular songs or melody being matched to particular books or movies or just moods, but I think such a random-fuck approach holds up pretty well for Kieran Hebden's music. In the book, Takahashi and Mari held conversations about everything from her sister's long slumber to plenty of other people's problems, the chapters keeping time dutifully while the post-midnight Tokyo portrayed by Murakami bristles with sensuality. To me, Rounds captures the the same passively infinite rhythm as some of Murakami's conversation pieces and Hebden never quite managed to hit the same high mark in his several follow-ups. And despite it being, for all purpose and intent, electronic instrumental music, the line of beauty of Rounds is all in the sense of naturalism Hebden brings to the songs, an assortment of spaceshifting, inconspicious sounds bulging across your consciousness.

silence kit #5

Matt Sweeney & Bonnie 'Prince' Billy
Superwolf [Drag City, 2005]

On the liner notes for Superwolf, Will Oldham thanks "the SWEENDOG for kicking it so hard". Those among us jonesing for a little more medicine for melancholy were rejoicing and thankful too for this, an album of crumbly beauty that is easily an essential piece of the Will Oldham canon. Sweeney wrote the music, with Oldham authoring the lyrics, and Superwolf mixes the sublime and the creepy in a mesmerizing way perhaps only these two are capable of. The guitar-folk feel of songs like "Only Someone Running" and "Lift Us Up" are actually not far afield from the other Bonnie Prince Billy records that the prolific Oldham has been putting out, save for sounding much more bareboned and relieved of country afflections. "My Home Is The Sea" is a complete different beast though, taking on the guise of a rock bruiser and yet Sweeney's guitar playing is more erratic than epic. Superwolf reaches equilibrium with Oldham's most self-deprecating pleas on "Beast For Thee", as appropriate a song as it comes for bloody valentines (I used to joke that I'm gonna marry the first girl I could find who digs Will Oldham as much as me but well, that joke is getting to be kinda unbearable now and absolutely unfunny, for I did manage to meet a person of said description on my travels, and naturally she turns out to be practically unattainable), Will turning on his charms ("I will toil for years and years/Give you muscle, tone and tears/ Overcome and flay all fears/ Leaving me, a beast for thee") and joined by Sweeney's simple, most plaintive melodies. Vulnerable, spontaneous, softly wrenching and yet sounding a bit sordid: "Beast For Thee" is exactly the kind of offhand genius that Oldham has consistently delivered, be it in more intimate song cycles or in tutelary collaborations like Superwolf, kicking it hard with kindred musicians. (Oh I forgot to mention: Matt Sweeney used to play in Chavez, Zwan and a few other outfits.)

lovers on the bridge (1991)

Rewatched Leo Carax's 1991 film Les Amant du Pont-Neuf recently. Here is one of the most indulgent cult-cinema contrarians of France making his grand statement about dispossession and I spent half of the movie's length imagining what it would be like to hang out with Juliette Binoche's character, the half-blind painter girl Michele who is just maybe a bit too well acquianted with the pains of being pure at heart. Carax takes these two precarious souls, Michele and the vagrant performance artist Alex (Denis Lavant) and plunge them into the fragmentary existence of living out on the streets. There is purpose and poetic pleasure to how the director frames the pair's increasingly debilitating relationship, as if to create an obsessive bird's-eye perspective of presumably doomed romance and shatteringly sad little moons.

mixtape (february 2009)

Relationshipness (rollerskating at night)
Belle and Sebastian "The Rollercoaster Ride"
Can "Moonshake"
Califone "Your Golden Ass"
Yo La Tengo "Demons"
Throbbing Gristle "United"
Animal Collective "Taste"
Beach House "Used To Be"
The Antlers "Bear"
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart "Young Adult Friction"
The Velvet Underground "Here She Comes Now"
Ancient Crux "In Teen Dreams"
Broadcast "Before We Begin"
Lotus Plaza "Red Oak Way"
Wilco "Cars Can't Escape"

Truths: So the first time I test-drove this mix on a night jog, there were actually these two kids rollerskating along the canal with me, young boy and a girl who inspired the latter part of the mixtape title, for the short length of time Throbbing Gristle runs into Animal Collective runs into Beach House, seamlessly I like to think. The version of "Demons" I used was originally the one from the Genius + Love = Yo La Tengo record, which I replaced with the one appearing on the I Shot Andy Warhol movie soundtrack because I really like the slightly-crazed feminist/gendercide rant by Lili Taylor (in character as the unsucessful Warhol assassinator Valerie Solanas) tagged on the end of this soundtrack version. "Cars Can't Escape", one of my favorite Wilco compositions, is still officially unreleased to the best of my knowledge, Jeff Tweedy's lyrics I misheard on this particular song ("relationless") having something to do with the word "relationshipness" used here.

non-pain

Something I wrote at the end of my last post referencing the Velvets, plus the fact that I wasn't in the best of moods and worrying about things the whole day (on a weekend for fuck's sake), prompted me to dig into some old Deerhunter, specifically their 2007 album Cryptograms. I previously wrote, albeit briefly, about the very impressive Microcastle/Weird Era Cont Deerhunter released last year and I'm planning to write about that one again, very soon. Also I did happen to write a capsule-type review about Cryptograms some time back; good times better times back then, maybe not... Here is a 'reprint', which I can't help but subject to a heavy edit:

John Cale’s self description of the music made by the Velvet Underground as “controlled distortion” comes to mind when listening to Deerhunter. A soporific spree, the songs on Cryptograms careen from flittering guitar shoegaze to introverted bedroom psychedelia with a dozy enthusiasm that goes a long way to prove that the influence of the Velvets never goes out of fashion. Updated with krautrock-driven shards and fragments, the spaced-out aesthetics is the right tool for pivoting around singer Bradford Cox’s somewhat morbid mood ranges. Best Cryptograms moment to remember Deerhunter by: the nocturnal melodic haze of “Spring Hall Convert”, the engrossed sound of someone blowing his mind out in a car.

judy let's go for a walk

More worldly followers (or ex-followers) of Belle and Sebastian would probably be unmoved but I still got a huge kick out of my first spin through The BBC Sessions, already well familiar with the songs of course (at the very least, the first nine tracks), though unarmed with a tracklist and therefore unaware of the song order (which is perhaps the best way for old fans to listen to this - with an element of surprise). I don't think these immaculately recorded radio sessions does much of a service to the band as a live document, which is why I didn't bother to listen to the companion live-in-Belfast disc at all; that's understandable. Instead it does something else altogether when you get sufficiently drawn into Stuart Murdoch's wide-eyed verbiage: like you're being welcomed back to when the Belle and Sebastian was first unearthed, back into the folds of schoolyard experiences, old loneliness and other strange encounters at the end of youthhood. The evocative arrangement and Steve Jackson's singing on "Seymour Stein" sound more elegaic with time, more defiant in its indietrack career declaration. The band also runs through a spooked, pulpy rendition of "Sleep The Clock Around", sounding not unlike a nascent Velvet Underground, unsullied.

silence kit #4

Califone
Quicksand/Cradlesnakes [Thrill Jockey, 2003]

A few years back this dude I met, upon hearing that I’m a huge fan of Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, implored me to check out Califone. Turns out this dude was right on the money – I immediately understood why Califone are often seen as being one of the most perennially underrated bands around (a Pitchfork review quite nicely describes them as being “stupidly underappreciated”), a band led by Tim Rutili (who was also the creative force behind Red Red Meat) that produced a string of avant-rustic rock albums of wild, restlessly intricate imagery that rank easily among my favorite things this decade. Quicksand/Cradlesnakes, their second full-length and the first I heard, is quite possibly my favorite Califone record (but ask me in a few months and I might tell you different), while their other stellar albums like Heron King Blues (2004) and Roots and Crowns (2006) each have their own unique feel and are very worth checking out too. On Quicksand/Cradlesnakes, things unfold surely but slowly, like some of the better rendered Coen brothers pictures (understated noirshit like The Man Who Wasn't There and No Country For Old Men come to mind, specifically when listening to this music - though some may find more Califone affinity with the Appalachian folk music featured on O Brother, Where Art Thou?). “Horoscopic Amputation Honey” stretches and shimmers over seven fuzzy minutes to the measured pacing of a crime short story (“we’ll cut our hair and fake our deaths”). The domiciled blues of “Leon Spinx Moved to Town” and “Mean Little Seed” slither around in unpredictable trails, while the spellbinding “Michigan Girls” radiates spacey folk fumes thick enough to fill your lungs with soot. Then there is the amazing “Your Golden Ass”, the swamp rocker that throws a huge spanner into the sprawl of Quicksand/Cradlesnakes, the effect of which I've always imagined to be the sound of a thousand tin lizzies coming into life, Rutili mouthing such sweetly ominous non-sequiturs that could potentially rupture the confidence of any aspiring trafficker of stream-of-consciousness: “Early minor Japanese pitcher sidearm slow tic a wolfish mouth/ On a mouseish face lady from Shanghai 3rd man/ Shot wild in the house of mirrors vicodin itch bite/ Your lip take it all in but it ain't sticking it ain't sticking it ain't sticking it ain't sticking”