living room sound fidelity

Where the Yo La Tengo side project, the Condo Fucks and the recently released record Fuckbook, sees Ira Kaplan, Georgia Hubley and James McNew doing a pretty tasteful job of vintage punk entomology, my attention is turned more towards the actual Yo La Tengo record that the Condo Fucks reference. Released in 1990 when the band’s formative lineup is made up of Ira, Georgia and two other dudes (James would only join a few albums later), Fakebook was clearly the handiwork of pop music addicts mucking about in the living room, an album of covers and a few original songs radiating with Yo La Tengo’s familiar idiosyncrasies. The casual, unostentatious songcraft kicks off in mellow fashion with Ira’s “Can’t Forget”, and listeners won’t take long to trace its lost-love country melodies to the Flying Burrito Brothers revisited later down the tracklist on “Tried So Hard”. Fakebook is littered with many such signposts of Yo La Tengo’s musical influences: Ira’s all-time songwriting hero Ray Davies is represented here by the wickedly scathing ditty “Oklahoma, USA”, from the underappreciated Kinks gem Muswell Hillbillies; the exquisite ballad “Andalucia”, one of two John Cale songs the band have covered; the obligatory Daniel Johnston cover, “Speeding Motorcycle”. Yo La Tengo would move on to much greater things but it’s fair to say that the trio would never quite recapture the kind of jangly epiphanies expressed on earlier records like Fakebook, the kind of unassuming record perfect for listening to when you happen to be alone at home on a rainy afternoon, trying to piece back together half-remembered scraps of an earlier daydream.

mixtape (march 2009)

The thicket that exploded
Black Dice “Street Dude”
Little Girls “Venom”
Richard Hell “Blank Generation”
Deerhunter “Nothing Ever Happened”
Crystal Stilts “Prismatic Room”
Crocodiles “I Wanna Kill”
Handsome Furs “All We Want, Baby, Is Everything”
Public Image Ltd “Annalisa”
David Bowie “I’m Waiting For The Man”
Dum Dum Girls “Brite Futures”
The Mayfair Set “Already Warm”
Vivian Girls “Surfin’ Away”
The Yardbirds “Stroll On”
The Black Lips “Drugs”

Deeper into movies: Just around the same time when many dudes around me are making peace with the fact that Liverpool FC won’t be taking the English title this season (some having made that contention earlier of course), I caught the latest Terence Davies film Time and the City (2009), the British filmmaker’s Proustian documentary about his hometown Liverpool. Davies is the greatest living British filmmaker, in my opinion, and the soot-flecked portrayal of working class consciousness that characterized his two greatest movies (1988’s Distant Voices, Still Lives and 1992’s The Long Day Closes) is evident in the barbed, revealing commentary (Davies did the voiceovers himself) accompanying the reels of vintage archival photos and celluloid footages used in Time and the City, along with some of the most hauntingly evocative use of music you’ll find in the cinemas these days (never mind that this is one filmmaker who hates the Beatles). Most potent is the weight of memory’s darkest and most fiercely perseverant contraptions that seems to be wired into every frame of Time and the City, Davies’ artistry clearly having a much more powerful effect than any of the chance-generated ambiguities of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (which I happen to quite enjoy as well). And well if David Fincher had made a more punk-ass version of Benjamin Button, then this latest mixtape might well serve as the soundtrack.

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.