Pages tagged “issue 14”

In this era of bling-bling hip-hop and ultra-calculated teen pop, sometimes it’s just great to hear—and kick back to—an album that doesn’t have any pre-fab designs on your pocketbook. A record that appears to exist simply as well-conceived catharsis for its creators. Looking to be this decidedly disarmed? Look no further than Room Noises, the almost ABBA-lovable debut from home-schooled Texas family band Eisley. One listen and you can’t keep yourself from surrendering—the disc sounds so serenely beautiful, so unusually assured that it’s difficult to believe the group’s oldest member, guitarist Chauntelle DuPree, is only 22.

In fact, the album’s focus is so uniform, so consolidated, it’s downright scary. Granted, it’s produced by pop-minded ace Rob Schnapf. But there’s much more happening in the DuPree genealogy than Schnapf can take credit for. Vocals bounce between co-guitarist Sherri and her keyboardist kid sis Stacy, 15. And the melodies on sing-song tracks like “Memories,” “Telescope Eyes,” “Marvelous Things” (culled from a pair of earlier EPs) and the Beach Boys-like “Golly Sandra” feel like some old Victorian-era music box wound at half-speed.

There’s a delicate, fragile atmosphere about these DuPree numbers (with family friend Jon Wilson, 20, on bass)—like they could be instantly shattered if the CD case isn’t handled correctly. Brought up in a religious East Texas household, these youngsters don’t proselytize. Instead, the songs wind up as relatively gregarious, non-sectarian takes on life in general—nothing too finger-pointing, nothing too safe, either. Maybe it’s all that home schooling from their road-manager dad, Boyd.

But Eisley has developed its own unique, almost anti-populist sound, and a healthy, inquisitive sensitivity, to boot. These whippersnappers might’ve encountered dogma growing up, but they’re wise enough to explore it and map out its pro/con parameters as budding adults. Are there answers on Room Noises? No. In the same way you won’t find any answers on ABBA’s Arrival. Sometimes you just have to relax and let the music wash over you, taking with it all those faux-art pretensions.

We’re halfway through the oughties, Seinfeld has been released on DVD and the Nirvana box set is sitting on shelves. Apparently sufficient time has passed that backward glances at the ’90s are gradually coming into focus, which means nostalgia-fueled debates about “what it all meant” are inevitable. The broad swath of music that fell under the “trip-hop” banner provided one of the many soundtracks to those lighter times. At its laziest, trip-hop seemed a functional commodity existing outside notions of good and bad; it either “worked” (effectively set a mood) or it didn’t. It was easy to like, hard to fall in love with.

At first blush, the debut of New York’s Brazilian Girls seems intent on resurrecting downtempo chill for the full-band format. Out front is European Union postergirl Sabina Sciubba, who comfortably and sexily sings in five different languages (she was raised in Nice and Munich). The three other members ably craft head-bobbing beats, incorporating samples of swirling strings nicked from some abandoned space-age bachelor pad. Didn’t we cover this ground somewhere between the Swingers soundtrack and Thievery Corporation’s sophomore effort, you ask?

Yes, but there’s more than exotic mood music happening here. First, Brazilian Girls has written a handful of excellent pop songs that deal in insistent tunefulness rather than atmosphere. The title hook on the lush, inviting house track “Don’t Stop” instantly embeds itself in your mind, possessing a catchy pop structure but enough meat to be stretched into a well-earned extended dance mix. “Lazy Lover” has already received the 12-inch remix treatment by noted house producer Matthew Herbert, and in light of how this band occasionally sounds like his collaborations with vocalist Dani Siciliano, his association with Brazilian Girls makes perfect sense.

Brazilian Girls’ secret weapon, however, is rhythmic versatility. The appealing beats of “Me Gustas Cuando Callas” set a Pablo Neruda poem to a mid-tempo Latin shuffle, and it succeeds on its variety, transcending even the gimmicky language shifting. Alongside nods to clubby house are tracks like “Pussy,” which adds groovy djembe hits to a woozy, circular calypso lilt reminiscent of Blondie’s version of “The Tide is High,” and “The Corner Store” with booming horns that give the flavor of a stein-hoisting German drinking tune.

The album’s standout tracks are strong enough to help us forget how close it comes to wallpaper banality. “Long,” “All We Have” and “Ships in the Night” are either Portishead retreads without the drama or auditions for a future James Bond soundtrack. The Brazilian Girls are off to a promising start but they stand at a Frostian divergence. The road less traveled carries them down a more experimental, freewheeling path exemplified by the band’s unusual live show (Sciubba typically performs behind a mask), while the other leads to numbingly familiar “mood scores” that’ll have an audience as long as JC Pennys have sound systems. May they choose wisely.

Standing alongside labelmates like Robert Earl Keen, it’s always been tempting to lump Reckless Kelly into that bleary category of hard-drinkin’ pseudo-sensitive good ol’ boys whose primary job is to get coeds drunk, weepy and romantically entangled at UT/A&M tailgates. This may still be true, but Wicked Twisted Road earns whatever tipsy salutes it might garner through its 13 beautifully wrought songs and an instrumental finesse belying Reckless Kelly’s ability to push the limits of externally imposed categories.

Thibodaux, La., native Mary Gauthier’s song “Wheel Inside the Wheel”—from her new album Mercy Now—is rich with references to the colorful lifestyle of her home state’s most famous city, New Orleans. In Gauthier’s version of the Big Easy, where fantasy and reality become one, “Marie Laveau promenades with Oscar Wilde and big funky Stella Twirls her little red umbrella.” The song—reminiscent of Mule Variations-era Tom Waits—wafts like smoke from the dingy doorway of a New Orleans cocktail lounge.

“In ‘Wheel Inside The Wheel,’ I wanted to write about the way people in New Orleans treat death,” Gauthier (pronounced Go-Shay) says. “I love the way they handle it down there, from the perspective of the passage in Ezekiel—that part about the wheel inside the wheel, and how death is not the end or beginning of anything, that life is just this big thing that swirls and whirls. I love the idea of them throwing a parade when someone dies and celebrating the release of the pain in this life and celebrating the spirit entering into a new phase, whatever it is. We can’t possibly know, of course. Some people call it Heaven or have other names for it, but there is a mutually agreed presumption down there, deep in the culture, and the people believe it absolutely. I think it’s beautiful and I wanted to try and tell people about it.”

Mercy Now, Gauthier’s fourth release, is inhabited by hard-living characters akin to those of her earlier work. The album abounds with vivid descriptions of the disappointment and pain of lost love, but—even if her creations can’t—Gauthier has found a way to make sense of the dilemmas in her own life.

“You can count on spiritual principles,” she says. “That’s what I count on. And they won’t let you down because they are absolutes—not in me, or in you or us, but in themselves. And that’s where I hang my hat. People [will] let you down, and you’ll let them down, because we’re human. ‘When you wake up with that ache before you’ve even opened your eyes,’” she says, quoting her song “Drop In The Bucket,” “you have to find comfort in knowing that the love that is killing you right now is going to be able to save you when you find someplace to put it.”

A mixing console is an unlikely subject for an urban legend, but Jamie Hince—aka Hotel, the six-string-slinging half of U.K. blues-punk duo The Kills—was intrigued enough to spend a month in the American Midwest in its presence.

While producing another outfit in France, the admittedly obsessive musician caught wind of a mysterious Flickinger mixing desk, one of only three manufactured in the late ’60s, this one personally tailored for Sly Stone himself. As the mythology went, recalls Hince, “Sly had wanted it to levitate in his house, and he had it all black-lighted so he could see his cocaine on the top of the board. And when the guys came to fit it into his studio, he had armed guards that held them at gunpoint and basically kidnapped these guys for a week and said ‘You’re not leaving this house until you fix this console up and show me how to work it.’ Then he piled a bunch of coke on the desk and actually kept these guys there at gunpoint. So there were all these ghostly stories about this desk, but,” Hince pužs up proudly beneath his black leather jacket, “I managed to locate it, the actual desk that all these stories came from. And it was in Benton Harbor, Michigan.”

Naturally, Hince hopped the next jet to Chicago with his partner Alison “VV” Mosshart in tow, and drove deep into the Midwest night to their mixing-board destination. A couple kids had somehow gotten hold of the Flickinger and installed it in a warehouse studio. “And the story continues,” adds Hotel with a creepy shudder. “Because these kids phoned up the guy that had originally fitted it into Sly Stone’s studio, called him a dozen times but he’d just hang up every time, until finally he said, ‘I don’t want anything to do with that desk. I don’t wanna remember that time in my life—at all!’ So we were just desperate to use it.” Which they promptly did for the writing/demo sessions for No Wow, the bare-knuckled followup to their primal-blues Rough Trade debut, Keep On Your Mean Side. And they made themselves at home, he says, “in that poor tragedy of a town. We stayed at the studio, and it took us three days to get onto our Kills schedule, which was waking up at dusk and going to bed at dawn. So we just wrote and wrote and wrote, just kept going, really.”

“We knew we were going to nowhere,” adds the Florida-bred, now-London-based VV, who plays most Kills gigs standing sideways at the mic, facing Hotel with her long brown bangs obscuring her face. “We knew there’d probably be no inspiring art or writing available to us, so we brought our typewriters, journals, notebooks, and art and poetry books—stuž from home to build our little camp in the wilderness, and then lock the door and not leave for a month.” Several new Kills cuts, like the fuzz-guitar-heavy “The Good Ones” and the handclap-rhythmed “At The Back Of The Shell,” were inspired by tiny Benton Harbor and its curious weekend nightspot—the Myers supermarket, where local singles regularly hook up.

VV and Hotel quickly high-tailed it to record Now Wow in New York. But was the fabled Flickinger everything Hince imagined? He scratches his chin, thoughtfully. “Well, when there’s something that you’ve imagined, and there are all these legends surrounding it, it kinda grows in size in your mind,” he finally decides. “But when I finally saw the console, my first reaction was … ‘It’s really small!’ Because I’d built it up into this huge … thing with all this history around it. So yes, it was a physically small desk. But it sounded absolutely amazing.”

It’s become something of a weekly ritual for Ambrosia Parsley, she’s pleased to report. Every Thursday in her native New York, art-pop trio Shivaree’s dusky diva heads down to her favorite restaurant, Cafe Havana, with a stack of daily newspapers tucked under her arm. The routine is the same. “I sit down, order a bloody mary and huevos rancheros,” explains the 33-year-old, over an afternoon margarita at her Bay Area hotel. “Then I go through the papers, rhyme it up, go sing it, and they play it on Friday” on the new Air America Radio network, in a wacky regular segment dubbed “Ambrosia Sings The News.” “I do that every Thursday, and that’s how I’ve got health insurance,” she chuckles, grabbing a handful of bar snacks from a bowl on her table. “We love health insurance. And this spicy peanut mix—those are the only two things in life you need.”

And, perhaps, a decent record deal. Which Shivaree finally nabbed with the Zoë imprint after watching its spooky ’02 sophomore set, Rough Dreams, get dropped from the Capitol release schedule. What’s worse, Parsley sighs, a Capitol accountant called to tell her the bad news, on the eve of what should’ve been a triumphant 25-date European tour. “Which explains the really long period where nobody saw us,” she adds. “We just said ‘Bye-bye record let’s go make another one’.” Which she did, with the gorgeous, neo-vaudevillian Who’s Got Trouble? and its flagship, more politically-minded EP Breach. Parsley’s voice is still cabaret-smoky, almost Brecht/Weill-voluptuous, and her bandmates Duke McVinne (guitar) and Danny McGough (keyboards) conjure up suitably lush soundscapes for her to traverse (including a Gothic cover of Eno’s “The Fat Lady Of Limbourg”).

But it hasn’t all been sour grapes, Parsley points out. Filmmaker Quentin Tarantino was so taken with early Shivaree track “Goodnight Moon,” he included it in the closing credits of Kill Bill, Vol. 2. And impresario Hal Willner recently cast her voice in his Brooklyn-staged Neil Young Project. But how does this harmonic Huntley/Brinkley decide which news tidbits are trillable? It’s not easy, Parsley shrugs. “Because the world is an incredibly damaged place right now. And Shivaree actually wrote a song a few years ago that never got finished, the story of that Florida woman whose fantasy was to have her house broken into and to then be murdered in her house. So she met this guy online, she sent him a plane ticket, said ‘Some time between this day and this day, break in and kill me.’ And he did.” With her Air America show, she’s quickly learned, “that’s the trick—knowing what to cover. Because some things — like that story — just aren’t funny when you sing ’em.”

Homer and Milton dominated the epic market for years, when “epic” referred to a narrative poem chronicling heroic deeds. Then movies came along, and the noun became an adjective, describing anything with majestic sweep (and typically a big budget, lots of extras, and a tyrannical director). But couldn’t it be argued that bold explorations of “ordinary” life and the craggy topography of the heart also qualify as epic? The most recent spate of Criterion releases throws the idea of an epic into unique relief, with audacious portrayals of grandeur as well as detail and nuance.

By the time he took on The King Of Kings (1927), Cecil B. DeMille was already the acknowledged master of classic epic, and the film found him trying to top his own reputation. Not surprisingly, his silent portrayal of the Passion of Christ is more mannered than Mel Gibson’s, but it also shows more audacity and imagination. Whether depicting the spectral seven deadly sins abandoning Mary Magdalene the moment she sets eyes on Jesus or employing a brief blast of Technicolor for the Resurrection, DeMille pulled out all the stops. The two-DVD set is suitably sprawling, with both the original 155-minute 1927 version and the truncated 1928 cut.

Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander (1982), the film is more an epic of imagination and memory. Though he was associated with subtler drama and existential angst, Bergman proved as visionary as DeMille with his tale of two siblings navigating worlds of good and evil, wondrous fantasy and harsh reality. The emotional detail of the film gives it an epic sweep. At one point in Bergman’s own feature-length documentary, The Making of Fanny and Alexander, an assistant director offers a young extra her character’s personal history before the cameras roll and pan past her in a teeming market scene. Criterion’s deluxe five-DVD set is equally epic, with both the theatrical release and the far-superior cut made for Swedish television.

With Short Cuts (1993), Robert Altman offered something of a post-modern epic, using the short stories of Raymond Carver as his source material (the set includes a volume of the stories). While no stranger to ensemble pieces (such as A Wedding and Nashville), here Altman seems more intent on exploring the specific points of intersection between human beings, even in the sprawling expanse of Los Angeles.

While not an epic in form necessarily, Fritz Lang’s M (1931) holds a towering reputation as an essential film classic. Relating the tale of the child killer Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre), the film is the acknowledged template for crime dramas in general and the serial killer genre in specific. This edition replaces a previous Criterion release with a beautiful new transfer of the recently discovered original negative and an entire disc of impressive new supplements. Of particular note are William Friedkin’s Conversation With Fritz Lang and archival commentary by Paul Falkenberg, the film’s editor, as well as a stills and storyboard gallery that highlight Lang’s meticulous compositional approach. So while the film may be filled with crooks and maniacs, the tale of its preservation is truly heroic.

When Kings of Leon released their full length debut, 2003’s Youth & Young Manhood, I found it hard not to meet them with the same casual disinterest I typically reserve for The Strokes, Jet and other faux-retro bands that look like Sweathogs but smell like Gap models. I mean, sure, rockist snots like myself can abide the pseudo-vintage craze by acknowledging that at least it’s preferable to the boy-band tsunami of years past, but embracing a band of the Kings’ ilk feels eerily like settling for a soy burger when you’re craving a nice bloody steak. Hell, when a group’s key selling point is that they sound like so-and-so, you owe it to yourself to be at least healthily skeptical. Referential chic, after all, is simply bored/jaded nostalgia prompting you to buy stock in the inferior ghosts of yesteryear’s great bands.

Listening to Kings of Leon’s sophomore offering is admittedly far more satisfying when you drop all the Skynyrd and Creedence expectations and simply let yourself hear the songs for what they are. Despite these brothers’ suspicious fashion statements, there’s something about Caleb Followill’s junkyard growl and Matthew Followill’s grit-jangle licks that suggest depths beyond the obvious influences. In that respect Aha Shake Heartbreak sounds like a promising step forward, particularly in the way producer Ethan Johns offers squiggles of texture (a deft keyboard here, a sweetened guitar there) that nudge the Followill boys ever so slightly out of the garage. Make no mistake, the menu still serves up plenty of ’60s and ’70s Southern rockisms, but hints abound that the compositional range of the Kings extends well beyond the swamps.

At the end of the day, what keeps Aha Shake Heartbreak from being a really great album is that it’s a vicious tease from start to finish. In song after song there are moments where it sounds like the band is weaving its way into a fantastic instrumental jam section, only to have the new idea abruptly cut short by the track’s end or an obligatory return to the next verse. It’s almost as if the entire disc was meticulously edited for some 3-minute AM radio world that no longer exists.

The closest the band comes to catching fire is the clever ending of cynical one-night-stand tune “Slow Night, So Long,” but even then you’re left holding on for some dynamic bass-and-drum interplay or a solo or scat or something other than the next track, only to have it duly wind you up again just enough to leave you flat when it refuses to cut loose into exploration. Either the Kings of Leon are afraid of exposing the limits of their instrumental prowess, some A&R guy refused to let Heartbreak resemble a jamband album due to marketing considerations, or Ethan Johns forgot what decade we were in and mistakenly assumed he only had a tenth-inch of real estate left on the 45.

Quite a shame, really—Aha Shake Heartbreak contains thirteen songs stood up on the launch pad, just waiting to blast off if anyone deigned to allow these Welcome Back, Kotter refugees a slightly longer leash. Count this one a missed opportunity and an exercise in the difference between being numbly tided-over and truly satisfied.

When Living Colour’s “Cult of Personality” exploded on MTV in 1988, it became an example of how much had apparently changed since the network dropped its unofficial “color bar” by playing Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” in 1983. It was equally easy to view Living Colour as an anomaly—a black rock band who, with Mick Jagger’s help (he produced demos for the group and guested on their debut), managed to catch a break.

The story wasn’t so simple. Neither MTV nor the music industry as a whole had moved very far in terms of racial pigeonholing; black artists who didn’t fit into the industry’s stereotypical “black” categories—i.e., R&B and rap—found it nearly impossible to get in the door, much less get a deal, with record labels. Black audiences don’t listen to rock, went the refrain, and white audiences don’t want to see a black rock band. Perhaps these circumstances make the “Jagger as white patron” story line more believable, but Living Colour came to the singer’s attention partly because the band got a push from the folks who formed the Black Rock Coalition.

That’s only one point Maureen Mahon makes in her excellent Right to Rock. But while Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid helped organize and is still the best-known member of the BRC, Mahon doesn’t make the band her book’s focus. Rather, she approaches the BRC not as a music writer but as an anthropologist (she currently teaches in the African-American Studies Program at UCLA), investigating what it means to view music both as an expression of racial identity and an assertion against narrow-identity politics.

As she tells it, the BRC first came together in 1985 as a loose cooperative of musicians and fans in downtown NYC, spearheaded by Reid, producer Konda Mason and journalist Greg Tate. If the BRC had anything like a manifesto, it was Tate’s 1986 Village Voice essay “Cult-Nats Meet Freaky Deke.” “The point is that the present generation of black artists is cross-breeding aesthetic references like nobody is even talking about yet,” Tate wrote. “And while they may be marginal to the black experience as it’s expressed in rap, Jet and The Cosby Show, they’re not all mixed up over who they are and where they come from.”

For the most part, BRC members were middle-class, college-educated twenty- and thirty-somethings who grew up listening to the entire spectrum of American popular music and integrated it all into their music. The frustration came when labels and club owners resisted those synthetic sounds by claiming they “weren’t black enough.” BRC artists often addressed those concerns directly in their music, like Civil Rite’s “Corporate Dick” and “Black Assid,” with its telling refrain, “I’ve done nothing wrong / I put my heart into my song / And hear what you say / Just like Frank / I’m gonna do it my way.” We may be black, but we can claim Sinatra, too—not just James Brown, George Clinton and Jimi Hendrix.

And, as Right to Rock concludes with a chapter taking its name not from Hendrix but from Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks,” as long it’s still considered “idiosyncratic” for a black band to sound like Living Colour (or, for that matter, Mos Def’s rocked-up side project, Black Jack Johnson) we still need groups like the Black Rock Coalition.

It’s nothing new to argue that Americans don’t pay enough attention to foreign fiction; one wonders if the situation were ever different. Nineteenth-century audiences crowded docks to receive the latest installments of Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop, but the author, whose outsized creations bump against the sky of one’s mind like Thanksgiving Day parade balloons, probably inspired a similar extravagance in readers. And when a foreign work does register on our radar, it’s typically from Europe, Japan, Central or South America. With rare exceptions—Achebe, Gordimer, Soyinka—even book junkies don’t hear much about African fiction. So here, drawn from reading lists, friends’ recommendations, Internet jags and bookstore browsings, are four compelling works of African fiction not titled Things Fall Apart.

To experience Tsitsi Dangarembga’s prose is like drowning in shallow water—her classic Nervous Conditions is narrated so plainly you don’t notice your own absorption in it. The story of a young girl trying to attend school in 1960s Rhodesia, Nervous Conditions dramatizes the injustice of sexism while entertaining far more potent and unanswerable questions about the twin Trojan Horses of education and economic development. There’s nothing didactic here: Larger questions arise from Dangarembga’s fierce, simple depiction of her main character’s struggle.

Slightly less tense but still eloquent and informative is Mariama Ba’s So Long a Letter, a heartfelt attack on polygamy as practiced in 20th-century Senegal. Ba empathetically renders the feelings of a woman who has shared her husband’s bed and raised his children, but now must watch with slavish equanimity as he marries a much younger woman. But there’s more to this novel than polemic: Because she provides an encompassing perspective of her main character’s life—the quotidian drama of childrearing and working and growing old—Ba’s attack on polygamy hits harder.

Issues of sex—and religion, politics and seemingly everything else—also turn up in Karen King-Aribisala’s Kicking Tongues, an ambitious meditation on modern-day Nigeria. She brilliantly adapts the framework of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; this time, the pilgrims are Nigerians from various social classes, headed by bus to a Holiday Inn in the country’s new capital, Abuja. By maintaining her framing device, giving everybody their say, and endowing her narrator with a multi-dimensional personality, the author creates unity from multiplicity, and her microcosm of contemporary Nigerian life becomes believably complex.

Chris Abani depicts a war-torn, politically unstable modern Nigeria through the eyes of a young Elvis impersonator in his debut novel, Graceland. What lingers about this book, though, is its exact portraiture of the shame, gratitude and self-absorption of its protagonist, a sensitive person who slowly realizes he’ll only survive this world by the kindness of people meaner than himself. Graceland, indeed.

The mid-tempo balladeer kicked off her latest tour with this concert in Nashville, a retrospective of both her albums that’s setlist easily (too easily?) bridges the distance between Ellington and Townes Van Zandt. Cute and unassuming as ever, Jones weathers the fringed-dress tornado of Dolly Parton’s cameo, and then charms the rustically sedate Gillian Welch. The 5.1 mix sounds like a train station, but the smooth cameras catch every one of Jones’ awkward smiles.

Legions of loyal Edheads gobble up every tune quirky acoustic- rock quartet Eddie From Ohio has put out. This Is Me—the group’s ninth album on its own Virginia Soul label—once again leans heavily on the folk tradition, but this time sounds more electric, more Americana, and even more countrified, thanks to picker/producer Lloyd Maines.

“We’ve been moving more towards country in the past few years,” singer/guitarist Robbie Schaefer says. “When you work with Lloyd, that country feel is going to be there. It was what we wanted. And we wanted to use electric bass, electric guitar and get a more rootsy Americana feel with slide guitar, dobro and steel. He’s made a career out of doing stuž like that and he can meld Americana—which I think is an overused term—with country and roots-rock music.”

On previous albums, Schaefer says, the tunes were rehearsed, taken to the studio and recorded with minimum fuss. This time the process was more open-ended. “Lloyd brings a sense a freedom,” he says. “He created a work atmosphere that made us feel free to experiment, have fun and screw up, without it becoming a free-for-all. There was a great balance, and he understood where we wanted to be from the get-go.”

There’s a distinct thematic thread weaving through The Beekeeper, the latest opulent project from visionary keyboardist/vocalist Tori Amos. If only the scattered songstress could make up her mind exactly what it is. To begin with, she opens a rambling hourlong chat with a humble apology—all morning long, she’s been working furiously in her home studio, a 300-year-old barn on an estate in rural Cornwall, England. “Sometimes it takes me a minute to refocus, to gather my thoughts,” she explains. “Just so you know that and you don’t end up thinking, ‘Will she hurry up and talk?’ I’ve been mastering the record, and since November 2 [of last year], the album has taken a different turn, mainly because there were a couple of life-changing things that happened to me.”

Ask anyone who’s ever met the green-eyed, delicate-framed, flame-haired singer—Amos, 41, comes across as one of the sweetest, most environmentally concerned people on the planet. Sometimes awkwardly so. In 2002, when discussing her last effort Scarlet’s Walk—which explored her part-Cherokee heritage—she frequently broke into tears recalling all the Earth-revering Native American lessons our country has forgotten in two short centuries. The mother of a four-year-old daughter, Natashya, Amos cares so much it often hurts. So it’s no surprise when she gets choked up again over her recent painful epiphanies: “One was that we all had to face the reality of the next four years, and the choice. And then I lost my brother in a tragic car accident a couple of weeks ago.”

Bush’s re-election, Amos says, forced her hand, politically. She hastily added two new indictments to Beekeeper—“General Joy,” which references “a soldier girl and a willing coalition”; And a duet with Damien Rice, “The Power Of Orange Knickers,” which she intended as a statement “that violence isn’t the answer to everything, and using the idea of terrorism to get what you want—whoever you are—should be a thing of the past.”

Her sibling’s sudden passing at 50 hammered home the sheer brevity of life. “The idea of somebody being here one minute and gone the next is a reality to me right now, in a big way,” Amos murmurs. “So it could be a reality that all of us aren’t here one minute—as many past civilizations have come and gone, we could too. We all know the ice caps are melting. We all know the climate changes and these things that are happening.”

So is this the focus of the ambitious, 19-track Beekeeper? Well, not really. The mincing minuet “Jamaica Inn” invokes local U.K. pirate lore in the tale of a ship lured to its rocky doom by lantern-flashing smugglers. The Far Eastern-filigreed “Goodbye Pisces” sketches a turbulent moment in Amos’ marriage when, she confesses, “plates will definitely fly—if it weren’t such a passionate relationship, I guess we’d just be pen pals.” “Parasol,” with its bongo backbeat and gossamer chorus, is based on French pointilist Georges Seurat’s masterpiece “A Sunday On La Grand Jatte,” and the implied idea “that if a woman was thrown out of the house in Victorian days, all she could do was walk the streets and be a prostitute.” And the funky, reggae-tinged “Ireland” concerns, well, Ireland.

Naturally, Amos employed the concept of “beekeeper” as a much grander metaphor. “There’s a great tradition in Britain of beekeeping,” says the artist, who also maintains a residence in Florida (and yes, she flew home on Nov. 2 specifically to vote). “And whatever civilization is going on, right wing or left wing, the bees have got to pollinate. And this tradition has sustained through different religious wars and ideologies, which really affected me because it’s so intertwined with nature.”

Puzzled by the current U.S. “culture war,” and the simultaneous popularity of Mel Gibson’s The Passion Of The Christ and Dan Brown’s diametrically opposed The Da Vinci Code, Amos—also fuelled by Elaine Pagels’ The Gnostic Gospels—set out to explore Christianity on Beekeeper, as well. The child of a Methodist minister, she used Old Testament language in songs like the Magdalene-honoring “Marys Of The Sea” and “Original Sinsuality.”

Amos isn’t pleased with Gibson’s passive portrayal of women in his film. But she understands its appeal. “Think about how people are reacting to the terrorists that are so committed to their religion,” she notes. “People [in America] were terrified by these people, and they needed something that felt like, ‘Well, this is our banner, and it’s older than yours!’ When you’ve been invaded, physically, psychologically, then you reach for what you can … it doesn’t have to make sense. So this time, as a daughter of the Church, I needed to … you know that saying, ‘If it’s too loud, turn it up?’ I needed to walk into the Christian ideology that’s controlling the country, where people are holding up Bibles and making decisions based on them.”

More career achievements from this singer who rose to multi-platinum prominence in 1992 with Little Earthquakes—an album that dealt unflinchingly with rape (Amos would go on to create anti-sexual-assault organization RAINN)—are mapped out in her new autobiography, Tori Amos—Piece By Piece, co-penned with Village Voice scribe Ann Powers. But sitting down at her trusty Bosendorfer piano, Amos swears, “is the only way I can really combat what’s going on, combat these turbulent times. By playing these pieces on my piano, I actually find peace.”

Before Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me, Nathaniel Kahn’s My Architect and Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation, there was Ross McElwee. The father of the first-person documentary has been making films since the late ’70s, his most famous work being the 1986 feature Sherman’s March. His latest movie, Bright Leaves, is a gorgeous return to his native South.

“I had an idea for a long time that, since I’m from North Carolina, I should make a film that deals with tobacco,” says McElwee. “But I also knew that I didn’t want to do a standard condemnation of the tobacco industry. It’s been done. I wanted something different. A cousin reminded me that a great grandfather [of ours] was involved in the tobacco industry. Then a second cousin told me that yet another cousin, John McElwee, had some kinds of pictures that had something to do with my great grandfather.” It turned out that Ross’ cousin John didn’t just have pictures, he had a whole movie—a Hollywood melodrama called Bright Leaf that starred Gary Cooper and seemed based on the life of their great grandfather. “I thought, ‘This is too much. This is the door I’ve been looking for. This is how I’m going to make my movie about tobacco.’”

Despite easy access to preparation material, McElwee sought a truth beyond the facts. “I think it’s somehow imperative not to do any kind of research because I think you lose some kind of spontaneity. What I’m after is not data or facts or exposition. It’s really more nuance and spontaneity. Part of what I was trained to do was to expect the unexpected and to be willing to change course completely as you make your film. That always excited me. I very much favored the school where chance is everything and you see what life will hand you.”

McElwee uses the story of his great grandfather as a springboard to explore and reflect on a host of ideas: fame, religion, family, history. McElwee’s great grandfather invented the Bull Durham tobacco brand, which was then stolen by the Duke tobacco company. The court battle raged for years, with the Dukes emerging victorious and becoming one of the richest families in the South, while the McElwees turned to other endeavors. Ross captures this dichotomy by visiting the huge, immaculately groomed Duke historical mansion and then the small, barren park named after his great grandfather.

If the Dukes got all the money, the McElwees at least got a movie starring Gary Cooper. Or so it seems. One of the running themes in Bright Leaves is McElwee trying to track down the origin of Bright Leaf. He interviews Patricia Neal, one of Cooper’s co-stars, but that goes nowhere. He skillfully compares clips of the movie to known facts about his great grandfather’s life, but they’re inconclusive. He even interviews film theorist Vlada Petric, which is both one of the strangest and best scenes in the film. Petric conducts the conversation with McElwee sitting in a chair that’s wheeled around by Petric, who pretends he’s a grip on a movie set. The fact that the interview takes place on a fake movie set (with a fake movie marquee in the background) only adds to the scene’s layers. What’s real? What’s fiction? How does a film approximate reality? How does a home movie accomplish this? Where does a personal documentary fit in? Or a movie like Bright Leaf? As Petric puts it, a film is “life caught unawares … but what do you do with it?”

These meta-issues reach their apex in McElwee’s home movies. Beautifully evocative shots of his son Adrian at the age of four, then eight, then twelve contrast older film of Ross’s father. At one point, Ross comments that all the footage makes his father seem like a fictional character. “As you look at the footage over and over again, and also as a person’s identity changes in your memory over time and as people become more iconic and emblematic of something in your life—the small ‘f’ father becomes the capital ‘F’ Father—then his life takes on a fictional quality. Your father may be heroic or dastardly, but it becomes part of a story that has a fictional sheen to it because we can’t hold on to all the immediacies. … In the same way, the four-year-old Adrian is dead, he doesn’t exist anymore. The twelve-year-old Adrian is the one who exists now, but even that age is gone. Filmmaking is this futile attempt to lock down and fix that kind of evolution.”

“It felt strong and good to be near mountains without names,” concludes Cutuk Hawcly, briefly returning to the trackless rural Alaska of his boyhood. Readers who sympathize will probably enjoy every minute of Seth Kantner’s lumbering but impressive debut novel. Kantner writes as one who feels rural Alaska; his wintry metaphors seem exactly the type to which a sensitive young man growing up in an igloo with his artist father and two siblings would resort.

Despite its uncommon setting, Ordinary Wolves plays out as a fairly typical American coming-of-age novel with an equally typical strain of frontier Luddism. By the second section, Cutuk, grown up and living in the city, vacillates between the native Inupiaq culture that has influenced but never accepted him, and a white urbanity that both attracts and repels. His Hamlet-style dithering grows tiresome, but you can’t help rooting for a hero capable of sharp insights into consumerist civilization—“Seems like people design great chairs then … I don’t know. Pay bills in them? … When I think of humans as one big herd? I see winter coming, and them scurrying and thinking about sex or losing their keys.” Or, more pithily, “White people—everything talked to pieces until all the pieces had numbers.”

For all its bleakness, both in portraying the city and an Inupiaq culture caving in from slow suicide, the novel is humane in its portrayal of the relationships that provide Cutuk an anchor—with his sister, with trader Melt Wolfglove and the man’s daughter, Dawna, whom he loves, and with his stubbornly independent father. His story ends the only way a novel about split identity honestly can—with nothing decided, everything in midair.

The photo gracing the cover of this two-disc set is apparently a relic from the Australian trio’s early days. It features the band stretched out in microbus sleeping quarters, scruffy and gaunt: an image that betrays a decidedly crunchy and patchouli-scented aesthetic still lingering about its live set. That’s not to say Josh Cunningham and sisters Donna and Vicki Simpson aren’t consummate professionals. Their triple guitar interplay is bracing and often gorgeous, providing an excellent setting for throaty, passionate vocals and sweet harmonies. Moreover, they clearly know how to please their fans, interspersing heartfelt performances of their back catalog with disarming humor and playful banter. Indeed, it’s the welcoming family vibe that causes the proceedings to succeed so winningly. So while they can come off a bit too precious—as on “London Still” and the self-celebratory title track—even the most hardened cynics might find themselves singing along with the enthusiastic crowd.

The Cure’s “return” to its punk roots in 2004 was a total wash. But now’s your chance to get the bad taste of the band’s KoRny joint venture with nü-metal production hack Ross Robinson out of your mouth; to renew your faith in the World’s greatest Goth band with the long-awaited domestic issue of its seminal U.K. debut. In correlation with the 25th anniversary of its initial release, Rhino presents this expanded version of 3IB, which includes the original LP along with a bonus disc containing b-sides, cassette-only tracks and home demos, including songs that later appeared on the band’s equally essential U.S. debut Boys Don’t Cry.

“When we first started, we knew everyone was gonna hate it,” Alan Sparhawk sighs. “But if you believe in what you’re doing, then it’s OK if no one else gives a shit. It’s OK if you show up to play and everybody leaves.”

Sparhawk, the lead vocalist and songwriter for Duluth, Minn.’s Low (along with wife/percussionist Mimi Parker and bassist Zak Sally) may be a decade deep into a remarkably successful career, but he’s still surprised by Low’s unbroken reign as the go-to band for kids seeking layers of slow, gloomy drone. “If you had told me when we started that this would last 12 years, I would have laughed in your face,” he confesses.

Sparhawk’s humility is not entirely surprising: Critics have long wondered if Low’s self-ascribed limitations (album after album, the trio has plodded dutifully through thick, majestic “soundscapes”) have left the band creatively paralyzed, trapped by its now-iconic slo-mo restrictions. But 2005 has Low primed for a colossal reinvention: boldly adopting a new label, producer and a freshly tweaked sound.

Since 1993, Low’s desire to transgress its slo-core origins has been impressively steadfast, as the band gently modified its founding aesthetic, deviating from trudging, atmospheric lethargy just enough to persuade most nonbelievers. Low played a Halloween set in the frenzied, leg-kicking style of The Misfits in 1988, and in 1999, the band released a famed Christmas EP of up-tempo takes on holiday classics (the band’s version of “Little Drummer Boy” was featured prominently in a Gap commercial later that year). Low released its seventh full-length in January. The Great Destroyer, a tough, raucous rock record, instantly—and violently—distinguishes itself from the rest of Low’s terse, moping discography. Finally, Low fans have something to sing along to in their cars, bobbing their heads and pounding their steering wheels: The Great Destroyer is not the Low of yesteryear.

“After we made our first couple of records,” Sparhawk admits, “we recognized that [the Low aesthetic] was going to be something we would be leaning against for a long time. The Low sound, essentially, was built on rules—even before we had songs, we knew we wanted to play as slowly and as quietly as we could, and still have it sound like music. But we’ve always been pushing against those rules, and this time we finally thought, eh, let’s just do whatever we want. Let’s just see what these songs want to do.”

With its roaring mood swings (flitting incessantly from introspection to poppy sweetness to something awfully close to metal) and heavy guitar (witness, even classic solos!), The Great Destroyer is brave, brisk and transcendent—a fully realized, indignant hop away from all preconceived Low notions. Both Sparhawk and Parker are casual about the transition, understanding the album as only the most logical, organic step for the band. “It was just something that happened,” Parker shrugs. “There was no discussion, it was never ‘OK, we’re going to do this now.’ I think we’ve been hinting at it for a while.”

Certainly, dedicated fans will recognize traces of The Great Destroyer from previous Low tracks (the prophetic noodlings of “Canada,” from 2002’s Trust, or the leisurely pop of “Dinosaur Act,” plucked from 2001’s Things We Lost in the Fire). But Low’s recording habits have long belied a penchant for brash experimentation. Over the course of numerous releases, Low has tinkered with its genre-de½ning swells, investigating new and varied production techniques, opting to record both in shiny, professional studios (working with celebrity knob-twiddlers Steve Albini and Tchad Blake) and in the Sparhawks’ comparably modest Duluth home. “We’ve learned that limitations are what make interesting things happen,” Sparhawk explains. “Don’t feel like you need to go hi fidelity, Pro Tools, 80 tracks—I mean, there are great records that are made that way, but most of my favorite Low stuff was done on a four-track or an eight-track, where we really had to pare down what we were doing.”

For The Great Destroyer, Sparhawk—now freshly cleansed of inhibitions—decided to think big: “I realized I didn’t want to just go and make another Low record. I wanted do something I’d never done before. I wanted to go visit Phil Spector in jail, and have him record my record. From jail!”

Penitentiary aspirations grounded, Low opted for the next best thing: Flaming Lips/Mercury Rev producer Dave Fridmann, indie rock’s unassuming, reverb-pushing answer to Spector’s infamous dramatics. “With Dave, it was the first time someone had ever come in and said ‘Let’s try this song a little faster, let’s try a dižerent sound on the guitar here, let’s try something on the drums here.’ In the past, we’d mostly worked with people who just recorded what we did,” Sparhawk explains. Like Steve Albini?

“Yeah!” Sparhawk laughs. “Yeah. Steve’s great. You go in there, and it’s just you and your stupid songs and a really good engineer. But we wouldn’t have been able to do our first couple of records with Steve, because we were all, ‘Uh, I dunno, I just have these songs.’ We barely knew how to play. And then we went on and learned quite a bit, and now I wanted to work with someone who knows more than me. I wanted to work with the guy who recorded that stinking ‘Goddess on the Hiway’ song [by the Flaming Lips]! It never really hit me until I heard that song. I went, ‘Holy crap—we’ve got songs that are this good. Why don’t they sound like this?’”

“Dave wasn’t afraid to throw his two cents in, which was good,” Parker agrees. “We kind of need that sometimes—we’re the same three people, we get in ruts, we need someone to jostle the mix a little bit.”

Instead of dropping the completed tapes off at Kranky, Low’s label since 1997, the band took them to Seattle’s Sub Pop Records. The decision to split, Sparhawk emphasizes, was wholly amicable. “Kranky is a great label. They were fans of Low, and put out our records, and did a great job. But they were always like, ‘Look, we’re two guys here, and this is all we want to be. We’re not into glad-handling or buying ads in magazines. But if you ever want that, and a label comes along, go there.’ Eventually we started poking around, and before we know it we’re in L.A., meeting with a couple of big labels. We’ve been through that before—it’s like, ‘Thanks for lunch, buddy, but no.’ So the rumor got around, and Jonathan from Sub Pop called us. And we were like, ‘Great, Sub Pop, they have The Shins! Let’s go there!’”

“We’re happy with the change, and hopeful that things will be good there,” Parker adds. “We loved Kranky, so it wasn’t a falling out. It’s just that Sub Pop can ožer a different perspective.”

Besides being relentlessly pigeonholed for its sound, Low has endured much speculation about the band’s political and religious affiliations (both Alan and Mimi are practicing Mormons). The topic reached an uncomfortable apex in the German tour film Low in Europe, which traced Low’s stint as opening act for Radiohead’s 2003 European tour.

“It was really annoying, actually,” Sparhawk sighs. “We were in London around the time there were these huge, pre-Iraq-war protests. The whole city was flipping out. And the film became sort of political. It’s very well done, but it makes us look like fence-sitters. Because at the time it was kind of confusing—it was like, what’s going on? There was a time where it wasn’t quite so obvious; of course, a couple weeks later it became very obvious that it was totally f---ed up. But the film was shot in that in-between time, which completely sucks because I hate this administration. I think they’re the devil. It’s so sad to see this guy waving the flag in the name of Christianity, and it’s like, well, gee, Hitler was Christian, too.”

Sparhawk exhales slowly. “The thought of what could happen for the next four years is just too much to deal with. But I’ll do everything I can. If voting doesn’t make things better, I’ll do something else. We’re not all homeless and eating bagels like we were in the early ’80s.”

You’ll never mistake a Guy Maddin film for the work of another director. His style is so unique and consistent that—with only six feature films under his belt—he’s carved out a niche solely his own. Nostalgic, melodramatic and heavily influenced by silent films, his movies have gained a rabid following among cinephiles over the last few years. And now, with the DVD release of the more accessible The Saddest Music in the World, he’s ready to expand his audience.

Maddin didn’t start making movies until he was 30. “That seemed really late to me,” he says, “since every independent director I knew had been making films since the age of 12.” When Paste caught up with Maddin in December, he’d just returned from a whirlwind promotional tour that took him across the U.S. and Europe. After a week in Paris, he came back to Toronto where he’d been teaching a college class. Though jet-lagged and exhausted from grading papers, he was ready to discuss his career and where it might be heading.

Maddin arrived on the scene in 1988 with Tales from the Gimli Hospital. In 1990 Archangel followed, as well as Careful in ’92. These early films are an acquired taste. Of Archangel, Maddin admits, “I watched it once after ten years, and I couldn’t follow it. [But] I’ve actually had a chance to go back and do the cut of Archangel the way I always wanted to. For the DVD release, I was able to insert the 30 original intertitle cards that I had shot but had never had the money to put in. Those clarify everything.”

Maddin explains the inaccessibility of certain films he’s made in terms of his relative isolation in the Canadian city of Winnipeg. “It was so hard in my earliest years to find someone to watch my movies to get any feedback,” he says. “The environment in Winnipeg was so hostile to the films I was making. If I showed one of my first three films for feedback, they’d say ‘You shoulda made it in color’ or ‘You’ve got a continuity problem there’ or some f---ing infuriating, useless piece of moronic feedback. I was literally forced—you can tell I’m still hostile about it—to make these movies in utter privacy. I had to keep my editing door locked because people would come by and say, ‘Geez, what’s that? There’s some bad continuity.’ These continuity watchdogs.”

All of this changed in 2000. More than most directors, Maddin enjoys making short films, and when “The Heart of the World” was shown at the 2000 Toronto Film Festival many film critics took notice. Maddin followed in 2002 with the rapturously beautiful Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary. Based on a production by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, the movie is a re-creation of that ballet from a cinematic perspective. Mostly shot in black and white, with a few metaphorical dashes of color, the film revels in its gorgeous soundtrack and hypnotic dancing. Maddin’s decision to render all the dialogue in intertitles (a la silent film) adds an appropriately otherworldly element. The Dracula story has never looked so elegant.

In 2003 Maddin made another virtually silent movie, Cowards Bend the Knee. While the soundtrack is full of music and sound effects, the minimal dialogue is printed, not spoken. Though Maddin claimed this was a more accessible work than his earlier films, its odd narrative—about a hockey player named Guy Maddin, a bordello/abortion clinic and severed blue hands—certainly wasn’t for all tastes.

“I didn’t actually know much about silent movies when I started,” he says. “I was more influenced, I think, by Luis Buñuel. But as I developed my style, I realized that there were certain aspects of my films that echoed silent cinema. So I figured I should start watching these old silent movies. Of course, I wasn’t seeing beautiful prints. I was watching these musty, old prints that were almost falling apart. But that’s part of what I liked about them, the nostalgia that comes from watching something old and decaying.”

This aspect of decay is a central element in Maddin’s work. It’s not just the intertitles and black-and-white photography of silent cinema he appreciates. He’s also fond of the flickering cinematography, the over-exposed lighting, the herky-jerky editing, and the radial fade-to-black. Maddin filmed Cowards in grainy Super-8 and then dirtied the footage to make it seem even older. The stories of his movies often involve bodies in disrepair. In The Saddest Music in the World, a beautiful amputee (played by Isabella Rossellini) uses beer-filled glass for her prosthetic legs, glass that could conceivably crack in cold weather.

This might not sound accessible, but The Saddest Music in the World is practically a Hollywood movie by Maddin’s standards. It tells the story of a strange contest held in Winnipeg to discover the saddest music in the world. Interspersed with various musical numbers is a love triangle involving the beautiful Rossellini and an old flame who’s also trying to win the contest.

“My producer approached me and said he had this script by Kazuo Ishiguro,” says Maddin, “and he said there was no reason this couldn’t reach a lot more people if my script were more accessible. And I wouldn’t let him say anything else because I couldn’t agree more. I had been saying the same thing to myself for years. I finally figured out how to tell a story and not lose 80 percent of the people.”

It helps that the movie stars Rossellini (who was cast in a ten-minute phone call) and Mark McKinney (of Kids in the Hall fame). Audiences are more willing to follow an unusual narrative if they can identify with the primary characters, and familiarity is always an advantage. Furthermore, Maddin was aided by his old friend Ross McMillan. “He helped me direct the movie,” Maddin says. “He’s not credited, but he was unofficially a dramaturge. He ran rehearsals for me in my absence. He met with McKinney and Rossellini to rehearse in her apartment about a week before the movie. It felt nice to have them arrive camera-ready, not the usual arrangement where actors arrive and are woefully unprepared. Everyone was really keen, too, to give the project their all.”

That enthusiasm was critical as the movie was filmed in an unheated steel factory in the middle of one of the coldest winters in Winnipeg history. “Seasonal affective disorder was rampant during the shooting. It was literally 40 below, sometimes 45 below, indoors on this cold concrete and steel floor and without sunshine. Every once in a while, a pigeon would freeze to death and drop from the rafters. One landed on Isabella’s lap once during a scene. And we’d have love scenes at 40 below. We brought in flame throwers, but they made no difference.”

Maddin has shot all of his films in Winnipeg, though he’s somewhat ambivalent about being called a Canadian filmmaker. “I’ll tell you what kind of filmmaker I am. I’m one that’s watched a lot of American films and a lot of American television my whole life. And I’ve watched films from all decades. I love the charisma and forward propulsion of most American movies. But I have one foot in the old world as well. Jim Hoberman of the Village Voice recently called me—and I’ll take it as a great compliment because it’s the position I want to be in—the most experimental mainstream filmmaker or the most mainstream experimental film-maker. To be halfway between the two fields feels good to me, because that acknowledges that I’m accessible if people can find me.”

With the success of The Saddest Music in the World, Maddin now has even more opportunities to reach a larger audience. “I’m thinking of making a contemporary horror film. I want to come up with something that’s really atmospheric but doesn’t necessarily have my DNA in it. If that works, I can go on doing that. But if not, people can say I should go back to what I do best, which I’d be happy to do.

“I have a great opportunity to build on a lot of good will and trust, but people love to yank that away from you if you make the wrong move. If film were just an art form, I’d be happy to do movies along personal lines and what