decade's best #23

23. Interpol
Turn On The Bright Lights [Matador, 2002]
While the music of Interpol may always be inextricably tied to comparisons to Joy Division – most of which doing them little favor, it must be added too – there is no doubting that Turn On The Bright Lights managed to tap straight into a synecdoche for their hometown New York in such a prescient manner that few other bands are capable of replicating. The ruinous slo-mo grandeur of “NYC”, with Paul Banks singing about being “sick of spending these lonely nights, training myself not to care”, captures the very essence of the city that has often inspired such ambivalent feelings and disconnect, while the band prop up the album’s s shadowy ambience with a suite of the howling guitars, pitched as a tightwire act and seemingly lifted right out of the post-punk playbook – indeed, the edgy verve and relentless musicianship on display throughout Turn On The Bright Lights is the surest argument that Interpol are more than the sum of their familiar influences. Elsewhere, a sense of altered moods permeates “Obstacle 2” and “Leif Erickson” – again, the guitars shaking off the somnolence of Banks’ haunted vocals – while “Say Hello to the Angels” comes across as a violent repudiation of their music undeserved rep of being, well, mere Joy Division regurgitations.

no easy way down

Here is something that I believe I wrote about ten years ago; probably still one of my favorite piece of writing from when I was younger (But I was so much older then/I'm younger than that now):

It is the rare gift of a supreme songwriter to be able to connect intuitively to his listeners, something that Mark Eitzel accomplishes with such ease.

His songs are never of the morbid death-wish variety. It is more about getting reflective: about the day that didn't turn out fine, about contemplating dashed dreams as you crawled into bed alone, and about the faithless lover who just left. And the cruel ironies of life and death he mocks so readily when he sings "nobody cares if I live or die" on his second solo album West (1997). And Eitzel could probably write a drinking song better than anyone, from the early barfly wisdom on American Music Club songs such as "Somewhere" to the sublime beauty of "Some Bartenders Have the Gift of Pardon" (off his first and best solo album, 1996's 60 Watt Silver Lining), on which the lyrics and title of the song pretty much says it all ("Just some old poets drinking the last nightmare in/ and the comfort of the dark and being forgotten").

Eitzel just lets it bleed so well, and it is to 60 Watt that I keep going back for more. It is here that his personal vision really shone through, on an almost concept album revolving around a near deserted bar by the shore. From where Eitzel sits in a corner, quietly observing the lonesome people and washed-out drifters that come around. The empty man forever distracted by his memories of decay and the old ghost by the wild sea, sad-eyed Cleopatra Jones with the drunken smile, all too disarmingly kind to strangers. Or of the old friend, gone beyond any salvation, as they sit down for a drink and conversation down at mission rock resort. The vivid imagery are all there, from the wrecked ship on the album cover to the many oceanic and barroom references in the songs; "a bar has a longer history than a country," he reminds us as he proceeds to drink to the last drop of his own reflection.

The song arrangements are appropriately sparse, with trumpeter Mark Isham lending much to its mood of elegaic weariness. On 60 Watt, Eitzel finally got around to being what he perhaps wanted to become all along - a torch singer par excellence, the way Chet Baker once was before that fateful day he came falling through his hotel window. In his own drab fashion, Mark Eitzel also comes across as curious hopeful in his songs, giving the promise of deliverance for the hangarounds from their troubles. "And there is no safety net in this world/ I have no time for good luck charms/ But I still long for your touch/ 'cause I know I'm saved," he muses on "Saved", almost enough to turn the stoniest-faced detractors into believers.

Make no mistake about it; this is not social music for the masses. Eitzel's songs are made for the downtrodden, the terminally disappointed, the haplessly drunk, the loveless and heartbroken. And those bartenders who have the gift of pardon.

mixtape (march 2010)

Kidsmoke and cigarette gusts
Grizzly Bear "Marla"
Palace "Winter Lady"
Gillian Welch "Lowlands"
Ryan Adams "Tomorrow"
Feist & Ben Gibbard "Train Song"
Calexico "Crystal Frontier"
Davey Graham "Both Sides Now"
Cat Power "Who Knows Where The Time Goes"
Odetta "Tomorrow Is A Long Time"
Tom Waits "Hold On"
M. Ward "Here Comes the Sun Again"
Joanna Newsom "Good Intentions Paving Company"

Happens to know me pretty well: I thought, this brief hiatus from regular blogging - if you can call it an "hiatus" or this "regular blogging" - can only do me good. This mixtape is half inspired by Jacques Rivette's amorphous early films and half put together while I'm nursing another bout of self-doubt and directionlessness... but all with good humor though of course, so there you go.

decade's best #24

24. Super Furry Animals
Mwng [Flydaddy, 2000]
Inside the Super Furry Animals canon, Mwng stands out and not only because it’s an album sung entirely in their native Welsh tongue – how often have their songs sounded as spontaneous, cohesive and purposefully inscrutable as on this priceless, somewhat underrated psychedelic pop record? The creative infrastructure of Mwng is loose but immense, pulling all of the band’s strange misshapen ideas and musical eccentricities into an alluring whole. Of course, a big part of the intrigue is in not being able to comprehend a word of what Gruff Rhys is singing. Rhys still sounds pathologically mellow as ever, but there is a sense of stridency to his vocals on Mwng, perhaps buoyed by the rarefied song material. “Drygioni”, an 1½-minute prog-rock flight of fancy, marks a meaningful start of something for this psychedelic troupe, while adenoidal tunes such as “Ymaelodi A’r Ymylon” and “Dacw Hi” romp into new enchanting dimensions, unpredictable and carefree in the knowledge that there is method to the madness of Mwng and its unusual medley of songs.

decade's best #25

25. M. Ward
Post-War [Merge, 2006]
I think it was Bob Dylan who once said something to the effect that songs should be heroic enough to give the illusion of being able to stop time. The sort of magical transcendence described by Dylan may well apply here as Matt Ward’s operative mode on his fifth album Post-War, as he gracefully stitches together micro narratives of nostalgia that bear the indelible mark of his smoked-tinged croon: songs about time lost and time regained, songs about love in the time of unspecified wars. Ward has always sang like a man of constant sorrow and he put that moody tenor to good use on the opening “Poison Cup” and especially on the title cut – the introspective pull of “Post-War”, its lyrics curdled in a familiar warmth (“Don’t they love you in mysterious ways/ You say yeah but this is now and that was then/ Put a dollar into the machine and you’ll remember when”) as Ward pines for the better times of old over a fog of vintage keyboard notes, is quite remarkable. Aside from sad songs, he also tempers the blues-drenched melancholia with vivid joy in a few of the album’s up-tempo, rockier numbers; to have such accomplished musicians as Mike Mogis, Jim James and Neko Case backing him isn’t too bad a deal, of course, as the contemplative “Chinese Translation” and a raucous cover of Daniel Johnston’s “To Go Home” work especially well in this full-band setting. And yet, it is his haunted voice that you can’t quite shake off, as the curative comforts of Post-War transport you into a state of antiquarian bliss, unsure as to how it is that you got to feel this way in the first place.

beau travail (1999)

I've recently watched Claire Denis's beautiful Beau Travail for the third time (this time on DVD) during the long weekend. Here is an edited version of what I wrote about it exactly three years ago:

The weirdest thing happened at the theatres, just before Beau Travail screened, when this middle-aged patron demanded to find out from the ushers why so few people were in attendance. (I counted about nine of us, which was a reasonable enough audience I suppose for such niche fare. I’m always infatuated with the emptiest picture houses anyway. Very Goodbye Dragon Inn.) It was a strangely profound moment, but whatever.

That evening in February 2007 was actually my second viewing of Claire Denis’ film (first caught it in 2000) and this French filmmaker’s brooding, obsessive work still retain that strange effect on me as in the first time round – it's a film still capable of fucking up my mood for days on end like few could. It’s like these mysterious objects at play in Beau Travail have hid out in the deepest and most remote outskirts of my consciousness for several years, only to return as these deep-dark dream sequences soaked in brine.

Denis seems to be building her story of an emotionally remote soldier’s personal reflections, which borders on suicidal remorse, more from her own life experience living in postcolonial Africa and only vaguely from the Herman Melville story that the film was supposed to be based on. Her regular cinematographer Agnès Godard (who also shot Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire), always have an unerring eye for the most ridiculously sublime images. How do you erase from your mind these scenes of haunted legionnaires ghost-trawling through a ghetto dawn, bare male bodies going through lavishly choreographed calisthenics routines under the sun, or that final shot of lead actor Denis Lavant gyrating wildly to the excruciating Corona dance-hit “Rhythm of the Night”?