Ugh. I began to write this entry while procrastinating a week’s worth of hell, and I finished it doing the same thing. Only this time it was a different week. Regardless, this list took a lot longer than the last, for obvious reasons, and only makes me dread making part 3 (the movies list) sometime in later January in ways that still somehow allow me to look forward to it. Either way, it’s a nice feeling of relief to know I’m done with this, and I like my picks. I’m eager to see how different mine are from Pitchfork. After all, that’s the only reason I wanted to put this out so soon – to beat Pitchfork and to prevent myself from being influenced. Anyway, here goes.
Posts Tagged TV On The Radio
What kind of summer has it been; Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson review
With Helena’s arrival today, I will be marking the final phase of summer vacation, this last week in town. This summer shot by like a bullet – a hot, thunderstormy, musical, bloggy bullet. I didn’t get to hang out with my friends as much as I wanted because my schedule was the opposite of everyone else’s except Ben, who had the same schedule, and was just as drained as I was at the end of work, but we hung out a reasonable amount anyway. He’s cool. He’s a cool guy. With everyone else, it feels like I missed an opportunity. Sad face. I don’t think it was this blog’s fault, because I wrote almost all of my entries after 2 AM, so it didn’t really take away from anything but sleep.
The reason I felt the need to sum up was because I think I’m going to take a break until I get to Oberlin, which is August 19th. This next week’s going to be very crazy, and this blog would complicate things too much. But I will check up every so often to see if anyone else wrote reviews to fill the void (hint, hint). But once class restarts, I will be in a creative writing workshop, so get ready for creative writing pieces to start becoming a bigger part of this site. I don’t know if they will take the place of reviews the day they post them; I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.
I knew Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson first when he opened for TV On The Radio at their free awesome concert at McCarren Park Pool last summer, and I thought he sounded a lot like Alec Ounsworth of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, but he seemed really cool and he was as good as any opener-for-an-opener I’ve seen. So when I saw Pitchfork review his debut album, and I found it available online, I wanted to give it a try. Wouldn’t you?
Well, having given the album a really good listen or two, I can say that my comparisons of MBAR to Ounsworth were not as accurate as I had thought, but not completely off. His self-titled album (Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson, for those keeping score) is at once classic singer-songwriter fare and anything but. Listeners can tell that his studio recordings are just beefed up versions of songs originally meant for one man and his guitar, and his songs are very personal (and fucking DARK); but his influences of Grizzly Bear and TV On The Radio (GB’s Chris Taylor produced the album, and TVOTR’s Kyp Malone contributed to it as well in ways that I’m not exactly sure about, but I’m guessing they at least included backup guitar) take the songs to a shambling, ethereal place reserved for the aforementioned bands that have such a clear idea of their own sound that they can do anything within it. And speaking of shambling, ethereal places, I should mention that this album is entirely about drug use and depression, using personal experiences which are way more intense than I anticipated.
Well, not every song is chiefly about drug use, but it’s all at least inspired by it and tangentially having to deal with it. Album opener “Buriedfed”, also the best track on the album (why does that always happen? Have some place to go, people!), is a story about a man who kicks open the casket at his own funeral and the crazy things that happen to him after. But there’s also an aside about drugs, in which MBAR slurs, “Reckless ruin is killing high/A great, fine victory we’re still alive/My, my, what a surprise/I got home late, I don’t care/Better late than never, dear.” It starts out contemplative and mournful, and turns into a rousing anthem (though I don’t want any anthems to exist for drug use or kicking open caskets) and campfire chant. It’s also one of two songs whose lyrics I could get in their entirety; the only other one was second track “The Debtor,” which is more directly, and more poetically, about, ahem, drugs.
In it, Miles mumbles, “Tried to stop the bleeding/It’s a shame that you failed/The red fell so hard, it hailed/Tried to kick on Tuesday/But I didn’t succeed/The air was too thick to breathe.” I don’t want to imply that MBAR is unintelligible, he just acts like the druggie he portrays in his songs, and was before and after this album was recorded back in 2006, though he, if you read the article I linked to, is clean now, meaning he smokes a ton of weed, but nothing else.
After reading that article, I found that MBAR fascinates me. If his success grows, he will have lived the rock star life to its fullest, in the best and worst ways.
As a whole, this album is very compelling, and musically interesting, but it lacks charisma after the first few songs, which means that even at a reasonable length, this album drags. But then again, that’s the difference between MBAR and bands like Grizzly Bear and TV On The Radio: they’re more developed, more confident, so they know what to do with their sound. So I can’t give this album a positive review, just a pretty good. But that doesn’t mean I’m not looking forward to his next. I think Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson can go places, especially if he finds something better to call himself. Jeez.
Dropping acid under the hood; Walkmen review
So when I originally planned to write the review, that title was what I first wrote, because I wanted my little “this is my life” paragraph to explain how when I got my car inspected, they found that my car battery was leaking acid inside the car, which sounds a lot worse than it is. But that’s really all I had to say about it; that and thank God my car is okay, I love everything about the way it drives, I just want to take its CD player outside and viciously murder it. But that’s that about that.
I’m overjoyed at how my contributors have stepped up their game of late. Their reviews, probably as a result of being less frequent, are overall better than mine, which I love. Feels like bringing in hired guns (and if you wish to see that analogy explored further, check out my own contributor bio over at BOTO). And I also know that this is probably a punctuated equilibrium thing, and that these runs will be the exception, not the rule, and I’m perfectly cool with that (but I do dare my contributors to prove me wrong). Still, if it gets me to step up my game, awesome.
This review was long-delayed, and I think it was because I wanted this review to be bigger than the album itself, because I think this jumped to my favorite album of the year basically the second time I listened to it all the way through and has only solidified itself as such since. I was just looking for an angle, and thanks to previewing it with Ben and Kriti, I think it’s well-developed enough to finally write about here.
I think that this album is important in balancing out this year in music. Up until this album’s release, the physical version of which will happen on August 19th (you can buy it digitally for 5 bucks that go to charity here! Do what I did and be a good person!), the great indie rock albums of the year, which in my opinion are: Devotion by Beach House, Red, Yellow & Blue by Born Ruffians, Visiter by The Dodo’s, Nouns by No Age, and Vampire Weekend’s self titled album, have all been youthful. When I say youthful, that can be applied in different ways; Born Ruffians is about teenage awkwardness and the love that is borne and hampered by it, Vampire Weekend is so college it just switched majors from “Being like by all the cool kids” to “Being dismissed, but still secretly liked, by all the cool kids”, Nouns is an album that glories in being undeveloped, ragged, and teenaged, The Dodo’s are just generally bright-eyed, and Beach House implies in both theme and the name of their band what they stand for – a summer vacation.
The Walkmen stand for none of these things on their newest album, You & Me. The one word that has stayed in my mind about it is mature. All of the albums mentioned above were either the first or second full-length from their band; this is the Walkmen’s fourth LP, fifth if you include their note-by-note cover of Harry Nilsson’s 1974 Album Pussy Cats, titled Pussy Cats Starring The Walkmen, and you can really hear how confident they are in their sound. In addition, all the above albums except for No Age were released in March or earlier, with Nouns coming out in May. The music industry had taken its yearly break for summer tours and festivals, and those of us who can’t blow hundreds of dollars one weekend for a music festival have been without something fresh for a while. So here comes You & Me, the perfect introduction to the second half of the music year, hopefully an indicator of things to come, in addition to showing us why child’s play is just that.
Beyond that, however, you can tell that this album is about adult love, not young love. And this isn’t even the adult love I talked to Kriti about, where you go on a first date, a second date, and you begin a relationship with having a relationship as the stated intent (as opposed to young love, where you see a girl in your chemistry class and you Chem Is Try to get her to make out with you). There’s both the “I’m still in love with you, after all these friggin’ long years” love (“On The Water”), the “we’re both older and without love, so what the hell” love (“Canadian Girl”), there’s the “I’ve spent so long being your friend that I’m fucking tired so I wish were in love” love (“Seven Years of Holidays”), and a different kind for every song. None of these loves are physical, except in “Red Moon”, where the “you’re beatiful” line still feels more like an emotional thing than lust.
This album really could be considered a concept album, in that I can imagine that every song here can be sung on some old riverboat going gently down the Mississippi River, just with different characters with different histories on each song. This goes beyond just maturity, it’s world-weariness that’s downright charming and enrapturing. I mean, all of these lyrics (and this is a mark of incredibly well-developed songwriting) could be just read as a poem and still be understood and appreciated. In “Postcards From Tiny Islands”, lead singer Hamilton Leithauser croons: “I’ll be drunk before too long/And I’ll keep up this sappy talk/This letter does it all/It’s too much to enclose/These postcards from tiny islands/do more than you know.” Leithauser is best known for having the most Dylan-esque voice around, if a little raspier and higher, but throughout the album he takes the similarities a bit further, adding Dylanesque sentimentality to his bag of tricks, while keeping the songwriting a little less verbose, a little more “read-between-the-lines”.
On a purely musical level, this album doesn’t really have any flaws, and isn’t all that ostentatious. The drums from Matt Barrick are totally solid, but not spectacular like on previous records, but that’s more than tolerable; this isn’t as drum-centric as 2004’s great Bows & Arrows was, but as Drowned in Sound, the only journalistic review I could find already published, says, “The musicianship is almost routine in its excellence; Matt Barrick’s drums in particular kick and roll throughout, propelling the songs with a sick-at-sea feel…”
The classic Walkmen sound is back, with lots of space in the music for echoes (not reverb) from the guitar and the cymbal crashes. But the difference here is that unlike previous albums, either with the keyboard in their first two or the brass band in A Hundred Miles Off, the four key rock components (vocals, guitar, bass, drums) are the only primary sounds on the album. A couple trumpet flourishes aside (most notably, and beautifully, in “Red Moon”), this is a self-contained effort, and I think the album benefits from it. These songs don’t need a keyboard to make them better; they’re great as is.
Individual highlights, while hard to pick out since really, every song is great, are probably these: “Red Moon”‘s slow, slow waltz is absolutely sublime, and “Canadian Girl”, which follows it, shows Leithauser channeling Motown with his “ahh-ah-ahh’s”, and flexing a bit of versatility. “On The Water” is the most aggressive song on the album, but it still manages to keep some benign influence to prevent it from being just another repeat of their breakthrough single “The Rat” from back in ’04.
Well, 2008, you don’t seem to be done cranking out the great music, but you’ve still got a lot of work to do if you want to surpass ’07. If TV On The Radio matures like the Walkmen have in their third effort, that should make it a lot easier.
A movie review will probably come tomorrow.
Happy birthday to me; The Sting review
No, it’s not my birthday today, or tomorrow; it is still the 28th of September, but the world of audiovisual media seems to have already known that, so get on the ball already, willya? Band-crush TV On The Radio drops their next album – Dear Science, – on the 23rd of the month (and yes, the comma is in the title; I like that creative choice) and The Fall, a little-seen movie that I believe is the best movie of the year so far (don’t look so indignant, WALL-E and IMDb number one Dark Knight, you guys were great too), comes out on DVD on September the 9th, plenty of time for me to show it to everybody! Don’t roll your eyes, dammit, it’s a great film!
Anyway, The Sting is one of the all-time classics, so I’m told, directed by George Roy Hill and starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, AKA two of the all-time Hollywood pretty boys who could act to boot. Their other great duo feature was Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, also directed by Hill. The two movies have a little similarity in the way the two leads play off each other – in both, Paul Newman plays the wisecracking, confident senior partner, while Redford plays the roguish, dashing young gun with a chip on his shoulder. Hill’s directing probably has a lot to do with it, since lots of the looks these guys give are the same – the looks, I feel, are more a director’s influence than the delivery of the lines, since it’s harder to control the way an actor says each word than whether or not he raises his eyebrows, and here it’s Newman’s smirk and his sideways glance, and the way Redford looks down, rolls his eyes and grits his teeth when he gets shut up or has to take an earful.
If you think that analysis was a little too subtle, then you probably think that The Sting‘s greatness is a little too subtle, because on the surface, it’s like an older, smaller-scale Ocean’s 11 – a movie about con men getting personal, getting dangerous and looking good doing it. But where the latter movie is the slickest of slick entertainers, the former is gritty and more believable. In Ocean’s 11, you never really feel any sort of danger for the characters; Terry Benedict seems intimidating, but he’s more comical than anything. Robert Shaw (also known as Quint from Jaws) is downright scary as Doyle Lonnegan, and in other scenes, you really think there’s a chance Redford’s Johnny Hooker could die at the hands of Lonnegan’s men.
You also never lose the feel of the Great Depression era that the film is set in. That’s why it won/got nominated for all the technical Oscars; it had an authentic feel, even if it was inaccurate (and I didn’t look it up, so I don’t know. I’m not a Wikipedia fiend all the time, like some people). The music was also great, and it won a terribly-worded Oscar for that as well, so I’m not sure what its qualifications were.
I actually don’t have much else to say about this movie, because it was so straightforward, which is I think what people dig about it so much – it didn’t try to make anything more artistic or more stylized than necessary to tell the story well, and the film is really carried by the actors. Other than the three that I previously mentioned, who were all incredible, Charles Durning was great as the Joliet crooked cop who goes a little overboard and winds up in over his head. If you recognize that name from something recent, it’s because he won this past year’s Lifetime Achievement Award from the Screen Actor’s Guild. As a character actor whose IMDb page is too long to believe, he really did deserve it, and I can’t wait to see the movie that he’s most famous for, Dog Day Afternoon.
I’ll see if I can knock one more movie review off tomorrow before I get back to random combinations of music and movies. Also, keep on the lookout for some more guest contributors making their debut, because I’m looking forward to them probably more than you guys all are.
Second of the Siren reviews: Dragons of Zynth
Let me start this review off by saying that Ethan pleaded (pled?) with me to shut the Dragons of Zynth off while I was re-listening to them to write this review. “It’s not music, it’s just a guy screaming over a weird guitar part and a weird drum part.” He had only listened to the first three songs, but that’s a crudely accurate description of the first part of this album. The DOZ want nothing more than to fuck your shit up, they said as much in an interview with the Village Voice to promote Siren. I like to think that they’re TV On The Radio without the white guy to keep them in line – and with a little less talent.
I love DOZ, but I don’t love their music. I like it, I think it’s pretty good. They call their music “Afrotek”, and it’s just a bit (really, not a lot) less pretentious than it sounds for them to have come up with their own genre. It really is a whole different animal, though; this music is fucking hard to describe. Really, my TV On The Radio comparison isn’t fair. Only on atmospheric “Anna Mae” are the similarities definitely there, and less obviously on closer…ahem, “Closer”, and beyond that, they are loud, they are unconventional, and they are black.
Don’t think that calling them black was for some stunted shock value or just to be funny; they wear their identity out on their sleeve here, like with the beginning of “Who Rize Above,” which combines a Jimi Hendrix-ish guitar dabble with hip hop self-introduction before launching into a raucous “beat explosion” coupled with the shouts and yelps of Aku O.T., the lead singer who can do anything he wants with his voice. They then just jam at this ridiculous pace in their Esau to jazz’s Jacob, abrasively, but then again, they aren’t making this music so you’ll like it. They want to “show their intent,” as they say in the above article.
The next track, “Take It to Ride”, sounds like a kind of parody of “Ticket to Ride”, but it’s really an apocalyptic version of Caribbean rap, as I understand it. You get the little glockenshpiel (I think) figure, sounds pretty straightforward, and then you get unrelenting, half-screamed raps over equally unrelenting mashed guitars that mirror the original glockenshpiel beat.
But I haven’t even mentioned the best song on the album yet. That’s second track “Breaker”, which, after a little pause from the opener, just breaks your skull with a badass guitar riff straight out of Guitar Hero that I did NOT see coming the first time I heard it. It was one of my favorite moments in music that came out in 2007, looking back. Another one comes a few seconds later, when the guitar goes almost to your breaking point in pitch, and hangs while Aku sings/yells “Send sweet, unholy breaker…” As he hangs on the “y” in unholy, the song just explodes in a fit of percussion and hard guitars which look a lot like this:
Aku O.T. being badass with a guitar
And the song goes on from there, in much the same vein of badassery.
Now, I can completely understand someone not liking this album, or not even wanting to hear it based on my review. It’s some of the most out-there shit I listen to, and I didn’t realize it until I heard these guys at Siren right along with yawn-inducing Islands and when they gave Ethan a headache with measly laptop speakers. I’m not going to push these guys on anybody. I’m just happy and content in my knowledge that these guys are completely out of their minds and glorying in it.
Again, a bit of a short review, but two in one night will do that to a person. You’re cool with 645 words, right? Right.
Getting through a long movie; Wolf Parade review
So I’ve been trying to watch Lawrence of Arabia lately, and I’ve discovered that I’ve lost a lot of my attention span for movies. I’m always pausing and walking away to do things, and I’m beginning to frustrate myself. I used to be really good about watching movies – I wanted to just watch it, and I could get engrossed really easily. I don’t know what’s changed – maybe it’s the environment, and I’ll be better about it when I get back to school. I hope so.
Anyway, Wolf Parade is another in a long list of bands about which I don’t know the full story. This is what I know. Their two frontmen are Dan Boeckner and Spencer Krug. Dan Boeckner is also the frontman for a band called the Handsome Furs; Spencer Krug is also the frontman for a band called Sunset Rubdown. Both of them sing in kind of gruesome, wobbly tones that you either can tolerate or not. I tend to tolerate it; the only annoying-voiced frontman I can’t get over is Colin Meloy of the Decemberists – don’t ask me why. Maybe it’s because of that weird micro-vibrato? I really just don’t know. But anyway, it’s hard enough to keep a band together with two lead singers and songwriters, and it’s even harder to keep it together when they have their own separate bands. After their great debut, Apologies to the Queen Mary, they separated to pursue other projects, and had a really tough time reconciling the directions they had since taken. There’s more to the story, I’m sure, but I just don’t know it.
The first thing that jumps out to me about this album is how conflicted it is. I don’t think there’s a single song of these 9 that stays in minor or major keys the whole time, and often the switches go back and forth rapidly; sometimes you can’t even tell what key the song is in. The tempos also are very fluid – lots of breakdowns, give-and-take with fast verses and slow choruses, and of course, two different singers that each take their own songs, until the 10-minute, 52-second closer, “Kissing the Beehive”, in which they trade in the middle.
Reading iTunes’ album notes, I discovered that most of this album was gleaned from improv sessions. That doesn’t surprise me much – it has that kind of feel, that of searching for something great in the song, thinking that you found it, and trying to hold onto it for as long as possible when in truth, those kinds of great moments are almost instantaneous and always fleeting. Take opener “Soldier’s Grin” for example. The song is solid most of the way through, but it sounds undecided. However, there are these two moments that are absolutely sublime, and they happen in close range of each other. When Dan Boeckner sings, “Horse shapin’ fire dragging stereo wire” (I have no idea what it means either), his voice does a really cool trick on the word “stereo” that I just fall for. Shortly after, as the verse gets more insistent and the guitar gets angrier (at about 3:10 in the song), the guitar finally breaks to the front of the mix to rip this fucking badass figure, going way down on the strings where only power chords dare to tread. Thank god they don’t try to repeat that over and over – even the second and final time they do it, it lacks much of the same impact.
The album is a really good listen, especially for songs like “California Dreamer” – the title of which I do not condone and which doesn’t really represent the aesthetic of the song – and aforementioned closer “Kissing the Beehive”, which has a Pink Floyd-like patience about it that may turn some off, but not people like me who dig that kind of patience in putting a song like that together.
However, the constant conflict does get grating sometimes, and most of their choruses’ lyrics seem meaningless to me. The in-verse lyrics are tolerable in a read-between-the-lines kind of way, but jeez. Give some more effort on the lines you repeat. Still, those two drawback don’t prevent me from liking the album on the whole, but I can definitely see this album getting lost in iTunes, only to be rediscovered down the line in a Party Shuffle session – sorry, but that sems to happen for everybody below TV On The Radio in the alphabet (especially sorry about you, Wilco). Give it a try, though. Tell me what you think.
I Ate My DVD Collection 