Pynchon in the Times

Kakutani sticks it to Pynchon for being a cartoonish relic, or something:

Though “Inherent Vice” is a much more cohesive performance than the author’s last novel, the bloated and pretentious “Against the Day,” it feels more like a Classic Comics version of a Pynchon novel than like the thing itself. It reduces the byzantine complexities of “Gravity’s Rainbow” and “V.” — and their juxtapositions of nihilism and conspiracymongering, Dionysian chaos and Apollonian reason, anarchic freedom and the machinery of power — to a cartoonish face-off between an amiable pothead, whose “general policy was to try to be groovy about most everything,” and a bent law-enforcement system. Not surprisingly, the reader is encouraged, as one character observes, referring to George Herriman’s “Krazy Kat” comic strip, to “root for Ignatz,” the anarchic, brick-hurling mouse, not Officer Pupp, the emissary of order and law.

Also, "Against the Day" was neither bloated nor pretentious. For the record.

Prinzhorn Dance School

[Photo Via Flickr]

Pitchfork has a review of Prinzhorn Dance School's album, giving it an 8.2. They write:

Only 70% or so of Prinzhorn Dance School's debut album is made up of music. The rest is... well, it's hard to say. What do you call the space in a song that lingers between the guitar parts, vocals, and beats? It's not exactly empty space, since it takes on properties that change according to sounds in the surroundings. And it's not "negative space" as plied by sculptors, whose hold on nothingness needn't account for fluctuations in drama brought about by time. So what do we call this space, then? Is it material, immaterial? Is it music?

I don't know what it is either, but I'm kind of hooked. The songs on the album are oddly catchy in spite of all the clang and noise. It's sort of like eavesdropping on noisy neighbors. But there's also this sort of gleeful dislocation from the awareness that you're listening to something odd. It's like the first time you heard the Ramones. That brief, what the? And then, oh yeah. The same for the Violent Femmes, or the White Stripes, or Pavement. It's the left-field-ness of it that appeals.

The full album is streamed here and you can judge for yourself.

Too Little Too Late for the Magic Numbers?

A Pitchfork review announces that the Magic Numbers' second album, Those the Brokes, may finally (finally!) be arriving in the states. It's a pretty lukewarm (6.3) assessment:

The only people in the music business successfully marketing sounds like the once fervently hyped Magic Numbers'-- that is, unassumingly sentimental folk-pop even an exhausted Baby Boomer could love-- are in the coffee business. Almost as remarkable as the songs on the Magic Numbers' self-titled 2005 debut was their indifference to fashion, both underground and mainstream.

More than eight months after the UK edition hit well-stocked import aisles, this slimmed-down domestic release of Those the Brokes won't bring commercial success to the band any more readily. At least, not unless the sort of people who don't usually seek out new music somehow discover the disc's best tracks. If they do, they'll hear several solid-to-excellent songs that extend the rootsy trajectory of the Magic Numbers' fine first outing, making up in winsome intensity what they lack as far as edginess or sex appeal.

First UK single "Take a Chance" encourages us to risk our pride for love. The burnished harmonies of the group's two sibling pairs-- Trinidad natives Romeo and Michele Stodart along with London-born duo Angela and Sean Gannon-- make it easy to overlook any risks the cheery power-pop arrangement declines to take itself. The video for second single "This Is a Song" shows the band playing to a slowly growing assemblage of cross-legged young people, a real sleeper hit. Despite the apparent obviousness of the title, this is a song against itself-- as broken-hearted as it is upbeat and catchy. ("Don't wanna hear it," comes a backing vocal.) The questioning "Let Somebody In" and comparatively muscular "You Never Had It" each glide by on the kind of inchoate magic that in more credulous days used to be called "soul".

Regardless, The Magic Numbers are a hugely talented band that deserve better than the treatment they've received from the music industry and the press. If music has been left to the coffee houses then so be it. I'll take Starbucks over Hot Topic any day.

St. Vincent Review in Pitchfork

Pitchfork gives a rave review to the Annie Clark's St. Vincent record, Marry Me. They actually like it more than I do which makes me feel better for feeling like I like it more than I should.

Anyway, here's what they have to say in their 8.0 review:

In the case of music like this, the devil to conquer is preciousness and indulgence. No doubt, in lesser hands Clark's quirks and eccentricities would mark the St. Vincent project a no-go from the start. But at every turn Marry Me takes the more challenging route of twisting already twisted structures and unusual instrumentation to make them sound perfectly natural and, most importantly, easy to listen to as she overdubs her thrillingly sui generis vision into vibrant life.

Good stuff.

"The Bird And The Bee" - The Bird and the Bee

Finally picked up the full album from The Bird and the Bee (and for $5.99 from iTunes, how could I resist?) I really liked the first single, "Again and Again", but I worried that they wouldn't be able to sustain their quirky sound for a full album. The early reviews didn't help either, characterizing the album as nice but not great. But the truth is that this is a very lovely album that packs a lot of great stuff in a very short time. Songs like "Birds and the Bees" and "Preparedness" have the sleek sound of bands like Zero 7 and Frou Frou, while tunes like "I Hate Camera" and "F-cking Boyfriend" demonstrate a quirky sense of humor. It's like the perfect date: cool, sexy, funny, smart, and stylish.

The End of a Sub-Genre

In case anyone cares, this a fantastic and negative review of Captivity.

I don’t want anyone to see this film — I want it to fail spectacularly. I want the filmgoers of this nation to prove that we’re above this sort of contempt and hate of the female sex. That we’re not actually a nation of sick, twisted frat-boy fuckers who’d get off on this sort of deprivation. That there is a line, and that we, collectively, recognize that it’s been crossed, and we won’t subsidize it anymore. That we can reluctantly accept the insulting comedies, the drab thrillers, and the tiresome, lifeless romantic comedies, but that this sort of noxious cinematic poison is not only deplorable, but morally criminal.

Let's hope this is the end of this particular brand of "horror." I certainly won't waste any more time worrying about it.

Terry Eagleton on Bakhtin

Though he can't avoid taking a few pointless swipes at Saussure and Postmodernism, Eagleton has an interesting review in the LRB and Bakhtin is always an interesting subject.

In Rabelais and His World, this orgy of signification takes to the street in the form of a carnival. In the Russian tradition of the holy fool, the ancient art of the people debunks all transcendental signifiers and submits all official values to satiric parody. Like the novel, it celebrates flux and mutability, the dynamic and unstable. All absolute values are ridiculed and relativised. Against the high-mindedness of official doctrine is pitted the lethal power of laughter. Travesty, disfigurement and inversion (nose/phallus, face/buttocks, sacred/profane, man/woman, high culture/low culture) rampage for a euphoric moment through the byways and marketplaces. Rigid oppositions are scabrously dismantled. Birth and death, destruction and renewal, body and spirit, wisdom and folly, the anal and the angelic are sent packing with their tails in each other’s mouths. Orifices are seen as the places where bodies breach their boundaries and merge ecstatically into each other. Everything about the practice is ambiguous, Janus-faced, too slippery to be pinned down. Carnival deflates the sublime and portentous; and behind this desublimation lies the bathos of the Christian gospel, for which salvation comes down to the gift of a cup of water. As the first movement in history to consecrate the common life, Christianity stands at the source of Bakhtin’s preoccupation with the everyday, just as it lurks distantly behind the current fascination with popular culture.

This a wonderfully descriptive paragraph with all sorts of amazing ideas to unpack. Debunking transcendental signifiers. Ridiculing and relativising absolute values. Travesty, disfigurement, and inversion. Dismantling rigid oppositions. This all sounds very postmodern to me and its a shame that Eagleton can't get past his bias and distaste. Perhaps it is the insistence that Eagleton reads through Bakhtin that there must be something behind the Carnival, a source for his preoccupation with the everyday. Some find Christianity, others would try to replace it with Marxism. For a postmodernist, there is nothing behind the desublimation. It is hyperreal, it is simulated, it is self-referential. The everyday and the fascination with popular culture is the life we have, nothing more. Travesties and monsters are there to remind us that language and art are themselves the forces that "make for human misery and oppression [and the forces that] can also make for emancipation and wellbeing".

Art Brut - "It's a Bit Complicated"

OK, so Art Brut don't have to like The Stone Roses if they don't want to, and I'm free to like them both if I choose to.

The music itself is pretty generic, a young person's notion of what post-punk sounds like: somewhere between Weezer and Green Day on one side and the Arctic Monkeys and The Strokes on the other. The real hook of the band is the talk-singing delivery of the lead vocals which give the songs their shape and personality. As with Mark E. Smith of the Fall or Jarvis Cocker of Pulp, the songs are compulsively listen-able because the voice is distinct and irrepressibly chatty, and the stories always surprising and unexpected. It's like that friend you like to hear from who always has a story and a joke.

The danger for a band like this is that the songs have a sameness to them, and if you're not listening attentively it sounds like the same song over and over. But for now they have enough attitude and ideas to pull it off.

The best track is "Nag Nag Nag Nag" available at Salon for free.

NYRB Reviews Falling Man

The struggle to make sense of the events of 9/11 goes on. It was a black swan; beyond meaning, and beyond metaphor.

The New York Review of Books has this to say about Don DeLillo's new book, Falling Man:

DeLillo the novelist prepared us for September 11, but he did not prepare himself for how such an episode might, in the way of denouements, instantly fly beyond the reach of his own powers. In a moment, the reality of the occasion seems to have burst the ripeness of his style, and he truly struggles in this book to say anything that doesn't sound in a small way like a warning that comes too late. Reading Falling Man, one feels that September 11 is an event that is suddenly far ahead of him, far beyond what he knows, and so an air of tentative rehearsal resounds in an empty hall. What is a prophet once his fiery word becomes deed? What does he have to say? What is left of the paranoid style when all its suspicions come true? Of course, a first-rate literary intelligence can eventually meet a world where reality acknowledges the properties of his style by turning them into parody, and in these circumstances, which are DeLillo's with this particular novel, the original novelist may be said to be a person quietened by his own genius. This is another American story—the story of Ernest Hemingway and Orson Welles—and it gives us a clue to the weakness of Falling Man.

"What is left of the paranoid style when all its suspicions come true?"

Alexandra DuPont Reviews Pirates

Alexandra is the most fascinating and readable movie reviewer of the internet era. And she's back, to review Pirates of the Caribbean 3!

Unfortunately, "World's End" is also saddled with carrying on a horrible, horrible two-film story. Taken together, the two sequels are one big bloated "Three's Company" episode with pirates -- with something like two dozen betrayals and pointless shifts in allegiance and too many new characters and mythologies that feel half-developed and half-assed.

Read the whole thing to truly appreciate her style and her persona.

The National Reviews

The other must-have of the week is Boxer by The National. Stylus gives it an A and Pitchfork drops an 8.6 and adds it to the list of Best New Music.

I'm not one of those people who really got into Alligator, but I am intrigued nevertheless.

Rufus Reviewed in Pitchfork

I was kind of hoping Pitchfork wouldn't review this one. A rating of 6.7 isn't the end of the world, but something tells me the kids at the fork aren't exactly down with the whole Broadway Cabaret vibe. Here's the meat of the review:

Release the Stars finds Wainwright flitting between opposite poles-- lovestruck and glib, opulent and gimmicky, overblown and undercooked-- with rumpled uncertainty. To be fair, it doesn't take much to locate the source of his wanderings; unlike most new artists, Wainwright came out of the gate with an incredibly assured aesthetic. Both his 1998 self-titled debut and his 2001 follow-up Poses were remarkably developed records-- the former establishing his way with a wending, operatic arrangement; the latter proving his songs nicely amenable to tidy flourishes of 70s AOR. Since then, whether out of boredom, excitement, or desire for the mainstream acceptance he's so frequently pined for, Wainwright's expanded his sound, tempering his natural inclination towards opulence with different song styles and textures, always with mixed results.

It's a meaningless ramble. Either they like it but don't want to admit it, or they hate it and don't want to hurt any feelings. But come on: "lovestruck and glib, opulent and gimmicky, overblown and undercooked". Aren't those the opening lines from the Pitchfork Record Review Guide of Style?

P.S. It's a great record. Do yourself a favor.

Record Reviews at the New York Times

Good stuff at the Times today.

Jon Pareles likes the new Wilco more than most:

The production is straightforward, but the song structures aren’t; that’s where Wilco’s idiosyncrasies still hide out. The tunes amble into instrumental interludes that stack riffs into steely patterns or let Wilco’s lead guitarist, Nels Cline, slice through the calm surfaces. Wilco’s new music is contemplative, stripping away past distractions, but it’s far from placid.

I'm still willing to give this one a chance, but the prospects seem slim, and more than a few diehard Wilco fans have already sworn off the new direction Tweedy's taken the band.

Meanwhile, Nate Chinen revels in the new Rufus Wainwright:

Who else but Mr. Wainwright could come up with a peppy lament for a former paramour with the title “Between My Legs”? Who else would have the British actress Sian Phillips rasp a villainous recitation on that track, over a chromatic horn part lifted from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Phantom of the Opera” theme? And who else would memorialize a brief meeting with a fellow singer (Brandon Flowers, the lead singer of the Killers) by composing a waltz with lines like “Your face has the Marlon Brando Club calling”?

If the answers are obvious, the music somehow isn’t. Remarkably, Mr. Wainwright infuses “Release the Stars” with enough honest emotion to overcome the grandiosity, or at least undercut it a bit.

I've just listened to Release the Stars and it is indeed a surprising and exuberant piece of music. All of the best parts of Poses and the Want records show up in unexpected new incarnations with no filler.

The Clientele - "God Save the Clientele"

For the first time in a long time, I leaned over and pressed play when this album finished so I could hear it all again.

It's just a beautiful record and like Feist's The Reminder, this is a follow-up which follows the template of previous works (namely 2005's Strange Geometry) while deepening and enriching the songwriting and musicianship.

There are great little textures here as well. Like on "I Hope I Know You" the vocals seem to come in on the up rather than down beat. On instrumental "The Dance of the Hours," guitars and piano chime over an insistent drum beat and the background whispers of the band.

I was concerned that "Bookshop Casanova" meant that the Clientele were trying to go for a new guitar pop sound, with Beatle guitars and Beatle lyric references ("you've got my name, look up the number"). But on God Save the Clientle, you find instead the same contemplative Simon&Garfunkely electric folk that places them somewhere in the vicinity of bands like the Kings of Convenience, the Kingsbury Manx, and early Belle & Sebastian while still maintaining their own light, gliding sense of the everyday and the bitter sweet.

Bjork - The Earth Intruders

After seeing her on Saturday Night Live, I am suddenly fascinated with Bjork and her new single "The Earth Intruders." It's got driving percussion, otherworldly vocal, and an off-the-wall Of Montreal lyric. None of it should work, but Bjork is so far beyond the rest of us, she can easily convince us that she knows the answers to questions we cannot yet formulate.

I've read that there are all sorts of important things we should know about Bjork's collaborations this time with Timbaland and Antony (of Antony and the Johnsons) and others, but Bjork is ultimately Bjork. She's more likely to influence their future work than vice versa.

In that vein, I am so far behind on her music, I haven't bought any of her records since 1995's Post and I got that years after it originally came out. So I've decided to get Homogenic to see if the world has caught up to where Bjork was a decade ago. I'm certain it's not ready for her latest message from the future. See you in 2017 Volta!

The Fratellis - "Costello Music"

I've been waiting for Pitchfork and the like to review this one before picking it up, but I guess it wasn't indie enough. Maybe it was uncool of Apple to use the single "Flathead". Who cares? This is the most fun I've had listening to a new record since the Lily Allen album finally arrived stateside.

I guess they know how to have more fun in the U.K., because the Fratellis are unabashedly having a good time and it's infectious. Take all the most up-tempo bits from The Clash, Supergrass, and the Arctic Monkeys, add a slightly goofy outlook, and there you go. It plays like the lost soundtrack to the original U.K. version of The Italian Job.

Very much recommended.

Modest Mouse - "We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank"

Stylus didn't like the record much either, and there seems to be a backlash afoot to Modest Mouse's move toward the mainstream.

There's a lot of love recently for the new !!! and LCD Soundsystem records which I don't get. And Patrick Wolf? Panda Bear?? Just the album covers scare me. Indie record reviewers are redrawing the battle lines that separate the cool kids from the rest of us (namely, me).

I'm falling out of touch; getting old maybe. Just like Modest Mouse themselves. And if the record is about anything so far, it seems to be about middle aged angst, mortality, and death. I've only listened to it once so my knowledge and/or impressions will deepen and change.

In terms of criticisms, the stuff I don't really like is the same stuff that annoyed me (a little) on earlier albums. The "I Love Tom Waits", barky dog delivery. The temptation to dirge.

If anything, it's fun to try to pick out which guitar bits might be Marr's and imagine Isaac as the anti-Morrissey (but not in a bad way, just aesthetically).

So I'll give it some time to soak in and post updates if anything amazing reveals itself.