Pages tagged “issue 28”

It was my first real job, and every day on our lunch hour, Jeff Elwell and I walked up Peachtree Industrial Boulevard to the Del Taco, where we ate cheap and got free Dr. Pepper refills in our 32 oz. plastic cups. The lids worked great as Frisbees, and we'd sail them back and forth across the huge warehouse before getting back to work, splicing giant reels of tape. One day, though, I sailed a cup lid over Jeff's head and onto the roof of the office structure in the back. Looking back, I can't imagine why, but he was determined to retrieve it. He climbed up, crawled across and disappeared from my sight with a crash. A minute later, Jeff reappeared from inside the office covered in debris. It was one of the funniest things I'd witnessed in all my 14 years, but a good portion of my wages that summer went to helping repair the office's drop-tile ceiling.

The rest went to music. I grew up listening to my brother's records. Rich was eight years older and played a lot of Eagles, ELO and Steve Miller Band. I had been more into Prince, Michael Jackson and Duran Duran, but now I was going to be a high-school freshman. It was time to graduate to classic rock, albums that had stood the test of time (you know, like Bad Company, .38 Special, Boston and Foreigner).

It was a short-lived love affair, as my next summer job was at a one-hour photo store with a couple of college-radio devotees who challenged me on why I didn't listen to any new music. They turned me on to bands like P.I.L. and Joy Division, and I started trading in my brothers' classic rock for the more modern fare my sister taped from her boyfriends-R.E.M., The Cure, The Smiths, U2, Depeche Mode and The Mighty Lemon Drops. Thus began my own rewarding hunt for new music to fall in love with, and the many, many other jobs I had during high school each had a slightly different soundtrack.

At one point during my junior year, Paste co-founder Nick Purdy asked me what music from the '80s would be considered classic rock 20 years out. At the time, I assumed none of it would last. The pop music on the radio already felt disposable to my young ears, and I certainly couldn't envision bands I loved becoming the decade's most durable, that some of the biggest bands of '06 would sound a lot like the smallest bands of '86.

These days, I'm more optimistic. There are only a handful of recent pop songs that have entered our culture's shared musical canon-"Hey Ya!," "Crazy," "Since U Been Gone," "Boulevard of Broken Dreams," "Gold Digger," "Clocks," "Feel Good, Inc." and a few others. But when I try to imagine what music of the new millennium will have lasting impact, I'd go ahead and put my money on some bands that got their start on the same college radio stations as their now-iconic '80s brethren: Wilco, Death Cab For Cutie, Modest Mouse, The Arcade Fire, My Morning Jacket, The Decemberists (whose album was our favorite of 2006, p. 48) and The Shins-this issue's cover subjects, whose third album, Wincing the Night Away, has kept me from listening to much else these past few weeks.

You can call it indie rock, but most of the bands listed above have graduated to major labels after paying their dues for years in the indie minors. And, unlike the grunge that dominated the early '90s, there's not a common sound or region tying these groups together. What's lifted each of them above their peers is songcraft and originality. I just like to think of it as the classic rock of 2027.

Platform: Nintendo DS
[Atlus]

Role-playing games traditionally thrive on their utter separation from the real world, but Gameboy Advance title final Fantasy Tactics Advance broke down that wall with devilishly fun results. The premise was that a typical final Fantasy fan (e.g., a young social pariah) got magically transported into the world of his favorite video game, which made for good times and good fan outreach all at once.

A new action-RPG, Contact, ups the ante for meta games: instead of assuming the role of the main character, you play yourself, conspiring with a benevolently mad scientist to help a young man named Terry repair a wrecked spaceship on a strange planet. The mechanics of this transaction are inscrutable—the Professor has been sending signals out into the universe, which your DS has somehow received, and you become a silent Svengali, controlling Terry’s movements, making him fight, fish, cook and change costumes. The battle system, which makes you stand around getting pinched by crabs until your attack meter recharges, leaves much to be desired. But the game’s quirky sense of humor and fresh conceit are compelling reasons to make contact anyway.

Gifted singer/songwriter opts for deconstruction and electronic fillips

If Paul Brill’s life is part rural and part urban, part coastal and part landlocked, then his music is similarly hedged between competing binaries. The one-time marine biologist is also a sometime film and radio composer who writes, records and releases all of his own music. This vocational transience surely informed Brill, whose captivating 2004 release, New Pagan Love Song, cast the songwriter as more of a song tapestry maker, with dissimilar parts cut, pasted and eventually interwoven. A bit farther down this path stands his latest full-length, Harpooner, a stunning collection of pastiche where electronic soundscapes distantly meet straightforward Americana-pop songwriting fare. Opening track “Consanguine” brilliantly shakes, blips and creaks with Yankee Hotel Foxtrot-like deconstruction and dissonance while a melody and chorus frailly teeter on that same craggy ground. Brill probably programs more than he strums, but the results are still warm and lush with soft earth-worn elements grounding his sharp sonic abstractions.

Unnerving survey of folks desperate for the spotlight.

Ever bragged about your chance encounter with a movie star? You might be “Basking in Reflected Glory,” demonstrating “Belongingness Theory” or in need of a complete Narcissism Personality Inventory.

In Fame Junkies, NPR commentator Jake Halpern finds a dizzying array of academic theory to help explore America’s obsession with notoriety. His achievement lies in turning what could be dismissed as psychobabble into a solid treatise on a merit-based culture that’s been blindsided by self-esteem.

From the bloated extravaganza of a kid’s talent expo, to the Association of Celebrity Personal Assistants (who knew?), to interviews with aging character actors at Hollywood’s Motion Picture Home, Halpern turns a jaundiced but sympathetic eye onto a subculture often blindly craving media attention.

It is a subculture, though, so Halpern’s thesis falters somewhat when he suggests that we are all complicit in the tragicomic dreams of wannabes. Still, there is no denying that even one water-cooler conversation about Brangelina indicates a vested interest in people we do not know, and with whom we share, ultimately, nothing. Talk about a monkey on your back.

A young woman looks where she shouldn’t—into her father’s past.

A hint of commedia dell’arte grotesqueness pervades the characters in Natalie Danford’s novel Inheritance. Diane is a read-aholic with a wandering eye. Luigi has given himself a “sega”—a wank—every Saturday morning for 34 years. Giovanni has an extra tooth that protrudes from his gums. And then there’s Olivia, who travels to Italy after finding a deed to a house in Urbino among the effects of her deceased Italian immigrant father, only to hear rumors that he had a dark hand in what befell the house’s original Jewish inhabitant.

This movie-like novel crosscuts between Olivia’s trip and Luigi’s past. Cinematic too is Gianfranco, the lawyer Olivia falls for. He drives too fast and feeds Olivia the ideal postcoital feast: He’s the perfect man of her dreams—and most of ours. But watch this light-filled first novel for Luigi, the character you’ll remember most vividly. When you think of him, your heart will break.

In the summer of 1966 I formed my first garage band. I’d recruited three kids from the neighborhood, and we set up shop in the Dunfee’s garage.

Greg Dunfee, two years older than me—and, at 13, a wizened man of the world—actually owned an electric guitar, and he had straight blond hair that fell down into his eyes. The neighborhood girls adored him. He proclaimed himself lead singer, and the rest of us were in no position to argue. I didn’t have a guitar, but I could write songs, and I could mimic the Guitar Hero moves I saw on Shindig! and Hullabaloo. And so I was content to serve in the background, practicing power chords on my tennis racket while making sure Greg got the lyrics right. Greg’s brother Joe played tennis racket as well, and Tony Clay pounded on cardboard boxes and coffee cans and kept a steady backbeat. We called ourselves The Four Scholars, thereby anticipating Nerd Rock by a good 15 years.

“You’re not doing it right,” Greg informed me after our first practice. “You have to move your fingers like you’re playing real chords. There are really only four of them you need to know. Here, put your fingers like this. That’s a B. Then like this. That’s an A. Then like this. That’s a C. And then like this. That’s an H.”

“Bach?” I said.

“Right,” Greg informed me. “Those four chords were the ones he used all the time. That’s why they’re named after him.”

With those kinds of influences we could have been the first prog-rock band, concocting a heady mixture of classical music and rock ’n’ roll.

But, instead, we performed protest music.

“I’ve written a song called ‘The Terrible War,’ and we’re going to work on it today,” I informed the assembled Scholars at our second practice. “Listen to this…”

Down in the valley
Far below me
Stands a soldier brave and true
Fighting and dying for me and you
In the terrible war

My clear tenor (what else could it have been at 11?) rang out, all aquiver with righteous indignation—just the way I’d heard Barry McGuire sing “Eve of Destruction.”

“The Terrible War” went on for 10 insufferable verses. To his credit, Greg memorized the words, and did his best to sing them convincingly. But his heart wasn’t in it.

We practiced, with one guitar and coffee cans, throughout the fall. After a concerted band pitch to the parents, Christmas found us with two electric guitars (one mine), a drum kit, a bass guitar and four amps. We were a real band. I wrote new songs and grew my hair longer so that it fell down into my eyes. Greg learned that there was no “H” chord. We all learned a little bit more about which chords actually worked together.

And at each practice we continued to play “The Terrible War,” even though the rest of the band moaned at every opportunity. One Saturday afternoon in the spring of 1967 it came to a head.

“It’s a good song,” I told them. “Let’s just keep working at it. I’m telling you, it will be a hit some day. You think Joan Baez doesn’t practice her protest songs all the time?”

“It’s boring,” Greg said. “It’s too long. And the soldier dies at the end. What about all the soldiers who come back alive? Did you ever think about them? Nobody ever writes a song about them. It’s stupid, and I’m not going to play it anymore.”

And he didn’t. “The Terrible War” passed from the repertoire, effectively ending my fledgling career as a writer of protest songs. We worked out a few covers—“Satisfaction,” “Please Please Me,” “You Really Got Me”—and Greg and I wrote a few originals. We focused on songs about girls, and a couple of the subjects showed up at our practices on a fairly regular basis. Greg wrote a song about Jenny, and pledged his undying love. It wasn’t that good, but then again, we weren’t that good. We were just four guys fueled by adolescent hormones and a desire to make some noise and say something meaningful. And we didn’t do protest anthems anymore.

As it turns out, The Four Scholars never made it out of the garage. And Greg, he never made it out of high school. It turned out that he wasn’t much of a scholar after all, and he dropped out after his junior year and joined the Air Force as soon as he turned 18. When I was home for spring break my freshman year of college, I heard he’d been killed in a bombing raid over Haiphong. He was one of the last American casualties of the Vietnam War. I think about him sometimes, and that damned, stupid song, and wish that he was still around to moan about it.

“This is the record I’ve been wanting to make for a while—a hip yet mature album with a certain kind of lushness,” Lucinda Williams says of her decision to tap Hal Willner to co-produce her latest album, West. It’s one of those rare recordings in which every note seems preordained, as if it couldn’t have possibly come out any other way. But the path that led to this intimate, subtly refined song cycle was a winding one. “It’s a really unusual process we went through with this record,” the artist, who just turned 54, recalls.

West had its genesis early in 2005, as Williams experienced an unprecedented songwriting burst. “I was just on this roll,” she says, as if in awe of her own right brain. With a dozen freshly penned songs in her pocket, Williams summoned her band—guitarist Doug Pettibone, drummer Jim Christie and bass player Taras Prodaniuk—to Hollywood’s Radio Recorders, in order to demo the new material with the help of her engineer friend, Michael Dumas, who co-owned the facility. They recorded in the evenings—Williams singing and playing acoustic guitar with her band while several of her friends watched from the control room—and Dumas rolled tape and manned the console. The vibe was palpable—“There was this sense of, ‘Wow, there’s some magic happening,’” she says. “Every few days, I’d take another song in to the guys, and everything was comin’ out just real fresh. And since the songs were so new, there was a spirit to the way I was singing them.”

It turned out to be Williams’ most gratifying recording experience—a far cry from the numerous stories of impossible demands, occasional meltdowns and erratic behavior that had given her the reputation of being difficult, if not downright impossible, in the studio. “That’s not to say it didn’t come without my neuroses and obsessiveness,” she acknowledges with a self-effacing laugh. But the positive vibes were bringing tangible results. “We’d gone in there just to do demos, and they ended up bein’ more like basic tracks,” she says.

LEAVE IT ALONE OR TAKE IT AWAY

After cutting 24 songs, Williams was faced with a crucial decision: either doing what she’d always done—overdubbing some additional instruments and putting out what was essentially another set of live-in-the-studio performances—or taking these new recordings to another place altogether. It was her fiancé, Tom Overby, an executive at Fontana Distribution (yes, she’s gone over to the other side after a series of volatile relationships with musicians), who suggested she check out Willner, who’s been the music supervisor for Saturday Night Live since 1981, and whose reputation is based in large part on his boldly unconventional, star-studded tributes to Thelonious Monk, Kurt Weill, Carl Stalling, Edgar Allan Poe and others. Overby put Marianne Faithfull’s Willner-produced Strange Weather into the stereo, and the sounds coming out of the speakers captivated Williams.

“Everything was very present, especially the vocals,” she says. “There was obviously a lot of production involved, but it didn’t sound over-produced. And that’s what I wanted to do—a record that was really a production, rather than ‘the band’s in the room and we play the songs and that’s it,’ which is pretty much what I’d done in the past. So asking Hal to do it made sense.”

Williams called Willner, who could hardly believe his good fortune, having had Lucinda’s name on his wish list ever since producer Joe Boyd had raved to him years earlier that this single-minded artist had redeemed his faith in music. After comparing notes on the kind of record each envisioned, they went into Village Recorders in West L.A. to “test the waters,” cutting a cover of John Hartford’s “Gentle on My Mind” for the film Talladega Nights and reconvening for a song on Willner’s sea-chanteys project.

GILDING THE NITTY GRITTY

Once Lucinda was satisfied that Willner “got it,” she allowed her music to be “worked on” for the first time ever. After listening to the Radio Recorders tracks, Willner decided to keep all of her original vocals. “We were gonna start from scratch again,” he says, “and I went, ‘Damn, why?’ And that made her really happy because she felt that she had put a lot into them.” He also opted to keep Pettibone’s guitar parts. “Doug is the perfect guitarist for Lucinda,” says the producer. “He does the same thing—just gets right to it.” The album would be built around these in-the-moment performances, with the help of what Willner describes as “our dream band”: drummer Jim Keltner, bass player Tony Garnier, guitarist Bill Frisell, keyboardist Rob Burger and violinist/string-arranger Jenny Scheinman.

“I look for things in a musician that go far beyond technical ability,” Willner explains. “Like what they do with it. All the musicians on this album listen to lyrics, which you don’t find in a lot of session players.”

The tracks were then stripped down to their essence and re-imagined from the inside out, with Willner adding understated sampling in certain places and engineer/mixer Eric Liljestrand performing the countless minute edits needed to achieve aural coherence and flow. The whole point of this laborious process was to put Williams’ vocals into the most resonant settings possible—Willner compares the job to creating the ideal frame for a brilliant painting—and for good reason: these were the most natural and heart-wrenching performances of her career. “She’s one of those artists who are their art,” marvels Willner, who cites “Rescue,” West’s centerpiece, as his favorite production. “She’s amazing in how she removes that boundary that separates a lot of artists from saying directly what they mean. These particular songs deal with her life over the last few years, starting from the end of a relationship to anger to redemption to finding a new love. The songs are so personal.” I’m really excited about this record and the future,” says Lucinda, sounding shockingly upbeat. “I’ve always been a late bloomer, and I feel like I’m only just now peaking as an artist—just coming into my own. I’m getting more comfortable in my own skin.”

Correction: This article, as it appears in issue 28 of Paste incorrectly credits “Gentle On My Mind” to Jimmy Webb. In fact, it was penned by John Hartford. It has been corrected for the web.

Hometown: Los Angeles, Calif.
Fun fact: This Bloomfield Hills, Mich., native worked as a recording-studio runner when she finally made it to Hollywood. But her whimsical bow Fool doesn't trumpet Tinseltown—just the virtues of the Midwest. “Once I got to L.A.,” Stela explains, ”I just couldn't stop writing about Michigan.”
Why she’s worth watching: She looks—and sounds—just like a young Carole King.
For fans of: Carole King, Tori Amos, Kate Bush

Parental blame might work for some artists. But not Annie Stela. Sure, she says, her Russian-born father was incredibly strict—as a teenager, she was forbidden from making the 45-minute drive to catch concerts in nearby Detroit. And at home, she was forced to plod through piano lessons. Dad had some of his own ideas about education, too.

“I went to a public school, but for a few hours a day they bussed all us artsy/dorky kids to a creative school,” recalls Stela, who kept her songwriting secret until senior year. “And then I really came out of my shell. … I ended up playing an original song at that art school’s graduation. That was a really good day for me.”

Time to head west to stardom, Stela thought. Not so fast, her pop countered. “I wanted to go. I was ready to go. But my dad said ‘I will not pay for you to go to L.A. right now—you must go to college and get your degree,’” says the 25-year-old, who enrolled “kicking and screaming all the way. But now I’m so glad that I did, because I spent those four years performing as much as humanly possible around the campus, and I don’t think I would’ve been prepared for California otherwise.”

Father did, indeed, know best. Stela subsisted on tuna, cereal and Spaghetti-O’s, and detailed the experience in Fool’s title track. “The first few months I was out there, my car was broken into, I got into an accident, and then I got mono—I was just a mess,” she recalls. “But I was like, ‘If I come home now, I really will jump off a bridge—I’ve gotta stick it out.’ So thank God my dad made me take those piano lessons, ’cause what would I have done for a job if I didn’t have that?”

Stashed away at the back of my TV cabinet is a special stack of games. Each tells an epic tale of adventure that promises to cast me as the naive assistant-to-the-regional-stablehand who’s suddenly thrust into danger and revealed as the one man (or sometimes woman) chosen by prophecy to stop an overwhelming evil. Each title takes upward of 100 hours to play—and that’s if you’re rushing. I doubt I’ll ever finish them all.

It’s not that I don’t want to. Okami, Dragon Quest VIII, Neverwinter Nights 2, Final Fantasy XII—these are best-of-the-year titles, but beyond that, I’m a total sucker for a good saga. I want quick fights and gigantic gauntlets-off knockdowns, I want to be surprised and betrayed, and I don’t mind a little romance. (Annah, you prickly thief with your Scottish accent and your long rat-like tail, I’ll never forget our time together.)

“Destiny” plays a big part in these games. It explains why you can show up and sucker-punch dragons 10 times your size, while all the knights and mercenaries and ninjas in the land, with their years and years of training and experience, get lit up like kindling. But more than that, you’re “destined” to win. Role-playing games are the easiest games in the world. The puzzles are simple, the tactics are light, and best of all for spazzes like myself, they take zero hand-eye coordination. They only ask for one thing: persistence. If you master every finger-bending move in Ninja Gaiden, your friends will offer a low whistle; but if you finish Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, all they’ll ask is, “Damn, how long did that take?”

And the endings are rarely worth it. The story always builds to the giant, climactic fight where you throw everything you have at the biggest, rankest villain in the game. You kill him. He comes back to life. You kill him again. He morphs into a giant fire lizard. Kill that, and finally you’re done—and then you watch a little movie, and the credits roll. You’re a champion for a split second, and then the game is done with you.

So why do I squeeze out the hours to play these games? I think the point isn’t to beat them, but simply to step in and start exploring them. Zelda designer Shigeru Miyamoto credits his boyhood walks through the woods around his house as his biggest inspiration, and that’s what the best adventures feel like. There’s always a new corner to turn or bridge to cross, and along the way, you grow up from the clumsy knuckle-dragger you create at the game’s outset to the wizened traveler you’ve become by the end. The pivotal scenes are milestones, like the armor-clad equivalent of your first day at college or last day at a job. And all the while you’re becoming stronger, more capable—and more cynical.

Because by the end, you realize there’s nothing left. You’ve seen and done it all. Beating that last villain isn’t a triumph: it’s the end of the line, and you can’t do anything but start over somewhere else. What’s worse than going from zero to hero, and then back again?

Flawed yet enjoyable Modest Mouse bio treads shallow water.

The unauthorized biographer, lacking access to his subject, has to rely on clever research and keen insight. Alan Goldsher’s problematic biography of Modest Mouse, nee Isaac Brock, cobbled together from the public record, doesn’t contain any information you couldn’t find on Wikipedia. Instead of trying to paint the bigger picture, Goldsher pads out trivia with equivocal speculation and proleptic arguments, and draws only the most obvious inferences from Brock’s lyrics and interview quotes.

And we aren’t helped by the inclusion of too many pages devoted to musicological descriptions of Modest Mouse songs, capped with unsupported proclamations as to whether or not they "work." Goldsher claims to only be interested in the facts, but he then proceeds to spin them relentlessly in his hero’s favor. The practice becomes rather icky when he summarily brushes off an ambiguous rape allegation against Brock. Despite all this, Goldsher’s enthusiasm for the band and his lively prose reasonably justify the book’s title.

Director: Rachid Bouchareb
Writer: Olivier Lorelle
Cinematographer: Patrick Blossier A.F.C.
Starring: Jamel Debbouze, Samy Naceri, Roshdy Zem, Sami Bouajila, Bernard Blancan
Studio Info: The Weinstein Company/IFC Films, 120 mins.

The little-discussed plight of the ill-treated North African soldiers who valiently fought for the Allied Forces in WWII (and were subsequently denied the pensions to which they were rightfully entitled) is the topic of a new film by French-Algerian director Rachid Bouchareb. Days of Glory concerns itself with how the utter poverty young Algerians faced at home drove them to join the French military campaign against the Nazis. However, once recruited, the men—unsentimentally played by a quartet of actors including Amelie’s Jamel Debbouze—struggle to not let discriminatory treatment by the military brass quell their patriotism for the “Motherland.” Their resistance is bold and transformative in the face of not only institutional prejudice but also the bleak war which Bouchareb realistically and brutally—though not gorily—captures. The story arc, the actors’ competent intensity and the film’s depressing but true-to-life coda all make this a fine edition to the WWII canon of films, as well as a history lesson that’s both important and beneficial for us all to absorb.

Scotsman finds new worlds in ancient melodies

“When the map and fact mismatch, I will burn the map” Scots folkie Alasdair Roberts proclaims on “Where Twines the Path,” and then he proceeds to prove it by wandering from his native Highlands to “tornadic Arkansas and Alabama” in the space of one verse. It’s a manifesto that drives the 11 original songs on The Amber Gatherers. Deeply indebted to the Scottish folk tradition, Roberts’ ancient melodies, sweet tenor and gentle burr take in bird’s nests, kings covered in seaweed, the Rhine River (which, according to this new geography, arises somewhere in Scotland), the sire of Hell, and a place called “the library of aethers.” He goes a-roving, as countless troubadours have done before him, and finally returns from uncharted lands.

Portland punk-popsters gone but not forgotten

As the ghosts of James Dean or Richey James could tell you, nothing flashes as brightly as the untimely passing of a young star-in-the-making. Portland, Ore.’s Exploding Hearts began the decade as one of the bustling scene’s most promising bands, releasing the instantly classic Guitar Romantic and kicking up considerable buzz among internet intelligentsia. In July 2003, the Hearts’ star was snuffed out in a single tragic moment when their tour van flipped over on the way back from a San Francisco gig (ironically, one of only two the group ever played outside of Portland), killing singer Adam Cox, bassist Matt Fitzgerald and drummer Jeremy Gage. Shattered collects the group’s remaining material, compiling a handful of singles, alternate mixes and unreleased tracks in one simple, inexpensive package. It also includes a wildly energetic five-song snippet from the band’s final performance at San Francisco’s Bottom of the Hill, leaving us all to wonder just how far they could’ve taken their Clash-indebted Rose City Rockers routine had fate not intervened so decisively.

It’s easy for documentary filmmaker Robert Levi to explain the attraction of his latest subject, composer/arranger Billy Strayhorn.

“[The story] had elements of glamour, film-noir, and a Tom Sawyer parallel,” he says effusively of Billy Strayhorn: Lush Life, which airs in February on PBS. “It was a wonderful opportunity to explore one of the very few meaningful relationships in the history of the arts and culture that had not been fully explored.”

The relationship is the one that existed between Strayhorn and jazz icon Duke Ellington, who served as a mentor and friend, and whose flamboyant persona often overshadowed Strayhorn, preventing the composer from getting his due as one of the great musical minds of the 20th Century.

Strayhorn, (1915-1967), worked with the Ellington band from the late ’30s until his death, and nearly every jazz fan can hum a few of his songs. He penned “Satin Doll,” “Something to Live For,” “Chelsea Bridge,” and “Take the A Train,” which became Ellington’s theme. Yet, in part due to his homosexuality, the composer kept a low profile.

“Billy Strayhorn had been such a loyal, deferential, party-line person that he made sure that he was never going to take any of the spotlight away from Duke Elllington,” explains Levi. “He did very few interviews; he was a true clandestine character in this array of oddball characters that surrounded the Duke Ellington enterprise.”

Levi tells the story via archival footage and photographs, interspersed with performances from leading jazz artists like Hank Jones, Dianne Reeves, Joe Lovano and Bill Charlap performing Strayhorn’s [compositions?]. Also, actor Dulé Hill (Psych, The West Wing) voices some of Strayhorn’s comments taken from public records.

Levi is a veteran miner of the Ellington mystique. His 1991 film, Duke Ellington Reminiscing in Tempo, won an Emmy, and the production of this work overlapped with the creation of a 10-part radio documentary on Ellington. In his youth, Levi, a native New Yorker, met Ellington, and the jazz legend remains a Bunyanesque character for him: “He was five outsized and brilliant personalities all at once.”

Levi doesn’t worry about ever running out of material. “The Ellington oeuvre is so rich and dense that no biographer will ever exhaust it,” he says. “It’s music built on compositional genius and 17 quirky personalities; What could be more attractive for a storyteller?”

In 2003, Kele Okereke—the industrious frontman for a then-unknown guitar band named Bloc Party—managed to sneak copies of his group’s single into the influential paws of both Franz Ferdinand vocalist Alex Kapranos and beloved Radio One DJ Steve Lamacq. Okereke’s hubris soon became the stuff of art-rock legend. With the help of Lamacq, and Kapranos’ offer to let the band open for Franz Ferdinand, Bloc Party signed to Vice/Atlantic and released its debut long-player, Silent Alarm, in 2005.

Almost immediately, Bloc Party seemed destined to become another young, quasi-cursed band recognized more for its trail of hype—NME fawning, hipster clamoring, thin comparisons to Joy Division—than the sounds it made. Two years later, facing down a seemingly inevitable backlash, Bloc Party confronts a classic sophomore conundrum: How does a band tinker its formula to re-excite the streets, while still sounding enough like itself to stretch its cachet?

Okereke and bassist Gordon Moakes are in New York City promoting A Weekend in the City, Bloc Party’s hysterically anticipated second effort, and Okereke and I are trying to make lunch plans. The band’s publicist tells me Okereke is looking for something “really American,” and we arrange to meet at the Waverly Restaurant, a tiny West Village diner with an enormous plastic menu, wood-paneled walls, red vinyl booths and a framed, autographed picture of Mötley Crüe nailed above the bar. Today, as every day, frantic, sweaty servers in black pants and white shirts are slamming plates and saucers into dish bins, hollering into the kitchen and shoveling French fries onto chipped oval platters.

“I Will Survive” is playing on the radio. Okereke is distracted, fiddling with his phone, periodically asking me to taste his water, and whispering about whether the dark-haired man ordering at the counter is actually Al Pacino. Okereke is willing to talk about Bloc Party, although he appears infinitely more interested in conversational strains that have less to do with emergent British rock bands and more to do with Joanna Newsom’s new record or modern American pop music or Beyoncé or the scope of the Waverly’s dessert menu. An hour later, I know that Okereke doesn’t like pumpkin pie or Bob Dylan, but I still can’t quite figure out what it must have felt like for his band to be declared the newest occupiers of Britain’s ever-tenuous rock throne.

Just a few days earlier, after getting injured playing American football, Bloc Party drummer Matt Tong pounded through the band’s set with a collapsed lung and landed in an Atlanta hospital, where doctors intervened, treating Tong and advising him not to travel for several weeks. So Bloc Party was forced to cancel its remaining U.S. shows—22 dates in all—with Panic! At the Disco. “[Tong] was working out so hard for the Panic! dates that he actually destroyed his lung,” Okereke sighs. “He’s a real monster when he plays.” Okereke isn’t numb to the poetic nuance of a musician soldiering through injury, hunching over an instrument despite being barely able to breathe. “It’s a shame it was for a room full of Panic! At the Disco fans,” he snorts, before mumbling something about 13-year-old girls.

Okereke and Moakes jetted to New York for a handful of press days before retreating to London; the cancellations (including two sold-out shows at New York’s Madison Square Garden) were devastating to the band and its American fans but, today, Okereke seems almost a relieved to be heading home. “This short stint touring reminded me that we’re going to be going for the whole year next year, so any time at home…” He trails off. “It can be hard being away from loved ones for a long time, but [touring allows for] a very immediate response to what we create. Playing to a room full of people who are losing their minds is a great thing.”

A Weekend in the City is based loosely around the pacing and noise of contemporary urban life—the crush of public transportation, the skronk of horns, the hot hum of 10,000 simultaneous conversations. “I think the actual physical space of the city is fascinating,” Okereke nods. “The speed at which people move—I’ve always been inspired by the rate of cities.” New track “Hunting for Witches” opens with a stream of blips and static, bits of found sound and samples fading into a prickly guitar melody; the cumulative effect not dissimilar to trying to cross town and listen to your iPod at the same time. “It starts with a field recording of me on a train,” Okereke says, “and then walking to my house—it kind of morphs into a song, catching the [exterior] sounds and incorporating them [into the track].” Still, Okereke, who has lived in London since 1988, is now prepared to ditch the city for more novel climes. “I would very much like to leave. I’ve been living there all my life. Everyone I know in London has come to London from other places, for university or for work. I had my love affair [with the city] earlier than most people,” he admits.

A Weekend in the City features all the spindly, textured guitars that earned the band a deluge of comparisons to Gang of Four and Franz Ferdinand, but it feels warmer, richer and bigger than its predecessor.

“I think ultimately there are certain musical tics that are very much a part of our sound, and they’re still there,” Okereke explains. “But I think there’s more texture and a larger palette [on the new album]. But it’s still very much a Bloc Party record. It’s not really scratchy or minimal. The first one wasn’t, either. The first one was very layered and atmospheric.”

Like any member of an emerging band, Okereke sounds alternately tired and defensive of Bloc Party’s presumed influences and the ways in which they’re hollered, incessantly, by the press—as plenty have since pointed out, in 2005 it was hard to find an article about the band that didn’t also mention Franz Ferdinand. “I don’t think [the comparisons] necessarily hurt us,” Okereke says. “If anything, that sort of labeling really made us conscious of this new record, to do something sonically that was as far from that as possible—from Gang of Four, Franz Ferdinand, New Order. The aim was to make something that didn’t sound like anything from the past. You know, to sound like a rock band in the 21st century, just as inspired by [those bands] as modern pop music.”

After lunch, Okereke, his publicist and I stuff ourselves into the backseat of a cab, scooting up Sixth Avenue to Atlantic Records’ New York offices. Okereke has another interview scheduled, so I meet up with Gordon Moakes. Along with Okereke and the other journalist, we’re escorted into a conference room with two leather couches, a couple of electric guitars and a glass coffee table with a big pair of scissors on it.

Moakes, sipping bottled water, appears equally ambivalent about the premature finale of the band’s U.S. tour. “It was the longest tour we were ever to have played. It was a real challenge for us. We felt like we stood out slightly on the bill, in terms of being a bit more left-of-field. But I think we were making an impact. It was so early, we had hardly gotten going, so we have mixed feelings about [the cancellations]. We did talk about [finding a replacement drummer] because our drum tech is quite familiar with the songs, and it could have worked. But it just wouldn’t have felt right, not having Matt there; it would have felt weird. So we felt that the best thing for him was to relax and recover, not worry about trying to get back to finish the tour.”

Bloc Party signed up celebrated producer/remixer Jacknife Lee to man the knobs for A Weekend in the City, banking on his experience tweaking a startling variety of bands and sounds—from U2 to Run DMC. “It’s funny, because in the beginning of last year, we knew we had to start thinking about [a producer],” Moakes explains. “We knew we wanted to try something new. There were several names that came up, and his was one that registered with me, kind of vaguely, and then I forgot about it. We tried out a number of people. And then we got around to actually having the record written, and we were still trying to decide and somebody said ‘What about Jacknife Lee?’ The Snow Patrol album [he worked on] is a really interestingly produced record. And I had been a huge fan of Compulsion, which was [Lee’s] first punk band. And he’d obviously done some DJ/electronic things, so it worked for this record. He sort of spanned the gap.”

With most tracks already written, demo’d, and tested live, Bloc Party settled into Grouse Lodge Recording Studios in rural Ireland, eschewing the record’s main inspiration—London—for the hushed calm of Rosemount, a small village about an hour outside Dublin. Moakes didn’t miss the buzz: “The flat that I’m about to move out of was super noisy, on a main road in East London. The noise of the street seems to echo up from a back alley into my room; it’s just that loud of a place. Shouting, drunkenness. We get a lot of ambulances and police cars and sirens. It’s hard to tune it out. We started the songs on the road, but we wrote most of the record in the heart of East London. The funny thing is that the recording was done in the countryside. After spending all this time in London, thinking about London and writing about London, we wanted to make it in London. But when we sat down with [Jacknife Lee], he said that he had to have us in isolation for four weeks. ‘I want your absolute concentration, I don’t want you drifting in and out. You need to be there, on hand, at every moment, so we can record at all times.’ So we went out into the country, in Ireland, and it was the complete opposite of what the songs were about. Complete peace and quiet.”

After a full year of nonstop press (and an album directly inspired by urban noise), the idea of Bloc Party heralding some unexpected quietude isn’t particularly shocking. It seems only appropriate that the band hole up in the countryside, block out the buzz and reconnect with its sound. The product, A Weekend in the City, is much like the process —starting in stillness, growing louder and louder until it’s teeming with sonic bustle. It’s a declaration that Bloc Party is back, and ready to let its noise echo through the streets.

Giddy Norwegian songwriter goes punk, sort of

Norwegian songwriter Sondre Lerche first popped up in the U.S. in 2002, with the release of Faces Down, a curious collection of spry, jubilant pop songs as inspired by 1980s European radio as Bossa Nova, British folk and Tin Pan Alley. With his smooth vocals and crisp arrangements, Lerche sounded anachronistic but modern, like a retro-kitsch microwave in a ripe shade of avocado green: ridiculous, a tiny bit tacky, but strangely comforting all the same.

Phantom Punch, Lerche's fourth full-length since signing with Virgin Norway in 2000, is also his grittiest, least-ethereal long-player to date. Produced by Tony Hoffer (who has twiddled knobs for Beck, Belle and Sebastian, Grandaddy and Air) in Los Angeles last spring, Phantom Punch features Lerche's latest backing band, The Faces Down Quartet, and a shocking number of distorted guitar riffs and almost-hollers. Phantom Punch is hardly seething garage rock, but tracks like the effects-soaked "The Tape" sound more like Hot Hot Heat than Serge Gainsbourg, and Lerche repeatedly eschews his trademark guise (jaunty, wistful ditties, sometimes with orchestration, always with a jazz inflection) for scrappier, yelpier renderings.

Several of these tracks were cut live, and Phantom Punch feels appropriately brash and immediate: opener "Airport Taxi Reception" sees Lerche's fey cooing hit brisk guitar and a hip-swinging chorus, with Lerche pining persuasively ("I left my mind at the airport / My thoughts in the taxi / My heart at reception / The last thing I saw was you"). Likewise, "Face the Blood" is full of almost-punk guitar and thrashing drums, with Lerche twisting his perfect croon into a convincing growl. You'll feel less like politely nodding your Beret-topped head and flicking a hand-rolled cigarette, and more like throwing your elbows around and dancing like an awkward American, equal parts sweaty and stupid, knocking things over, wheezing and giggling.

Phantom Punch might be a departure of sorts for Lerche, but it's still infused with familiar tricks: the record features jazz rhythms and cool, sprightly melodies, Lerche's vaguely bizarre lyrics (his colloquial English isn't perfect, although his verses are considerably less clumsy than they were four years ago) and sweet, jubilant delivery-think pop-punk performed by Rufus Wainwright. And it's still oddly (but gratifyingly) difficult to discern exactly where Lerche fits into the contemporary indie landscape-his folkier pieces have earned him a handful of comparisons to Nick Drake, but his vocals are too tinged with barely contained glee (even when singing about conceptual self-hatred, like in "Tragic Mirror") to ever convincingly mimic Drake's dim sighs . And maybe that's the thing about Sondre Lerche: no matter what he's up to, he always sounds like he's having an embarrassingly good time.

Listen to her best record yet before summer returns

A pretentious title, perhaps, but when you've got a voice like this you can get away with it. Sykes is often seen with a cigarette in hand; hearing her latest, one worries she's done away with filters. For three records now her instrument has grown deeper, richer and spookier, alternately evoking Cat Power, Grace Slick and Karen Dalton. Backing her is The Sweet Hereafter-led by ex-Whiskeytown guitarist Phil Wandscher-who keeps it simple, occasionally augmenting with strings and horns. The songs are simultaneously catchier and darker than on her earlier records, the incessant repetition on "Air is Thin" and "How Will We Know?" evoking a world of anxiety and compulsion. This album is made for cold, rainy evenings.

Rock that cracks and pops.

Hometown: New York, N.Y.
Fun fact: This band scours pawnshops and antique stores looking for unusual instruments or “found objects” that can produce new sounds in their music.
Why they’re worth watching: Phonograph is already generating some major buzz—and, ’til now, hadn’t even released an album. The group was discovered by Mekon Jon Langford, and Wilco bassist John Stirratt loved them so much he invited them to open for Wilco.
For fans of: Spoon, Wilco, Tom Petty

"We’re not another band trying to be another band,” says Matt Welsh, lead singer and primary songwriter for Phonograph. The band, which has had hard-to-live-up-to labels like “the next Wilco” slapped on it, is eager to let the music speak for itself. And with their new eponymous debut they’re confident it will.

“I write the way I write,” says Welsh, “and I’m not trying to be anything other than what comes out.” What comes out is a sound that is the product of five distinct musicians coming together from disparate personal and musical backgrounds. Despite their differences, what brought these five together, Welsh believes, is a common approach, which consists of crafting a solid, traditional song structure in the vein of ’50s-era country crooners—and then tearing it apart.

The band members provide each other with “checks and balances”—bouncing ideas off each other, each contributing their own expertise and musical voice to the mix. The result is a sound that appeals to a wide variety of tastes with its mix of old and new, familiar and innovative. On songs like “T.V. Screens,” “Have I Told You” and “You’re a Giraffe,” the band gives traditional Americana songwriting “a bed of soundscapes to lie on.” Incorporating elements of electronic music, jazz and British shoegaze, and using improvisation and samples of “found” noises, the members of Phonograph create a unique, complex sonic landscape.

The Wii controller shakes up a classic series.

Nintendo knows its archetypes. The travails of a protagonist like Link, the emerald-clad hero of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, hew close to the rules laid out in Joseph Campbell’s A Hero With A Thousand Faces. Link’s monomyth begins when he’s zapped into a parallel universe on the edge of day and night. Trapped in the form of a wolf he begins his quest to set the world right. If this adherence to arcs traveled by everyone from Christ to Luke Skywalker was all Nintendo had going, its offerings would be lost in the sea of video games’ sword-wielding do-gooders. Nintendo’s secret weapon is its talent for dealing in prototypes.

The innovation here comes by way of the Wii’s motion-sensitive controller. Sword slashes are dealt with a flick of the wrist. Arrows are aimed by pointing and loosed by pulling a trigger. A speaker built into the controller creaks with the sound of a taut bowstring. Though they sound like new-fangled gimmicks, these new ways to play immerse us in the game differently and arguably more effectively than hyper-real graphics.

The underpowered Wii just can’t crank out the pixels its next-gen competitors can. And yet The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess succeeds visually despite limited power. Where The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker used a Chuck Jones-inspired cartoon-art style, the gauzy earth tones of this more serious game do more with less by echoing the verdant worlds of anime master Hayao Miyazaki. And it feels like game designers invested just as much thought in the way the game unravels as you play. At a time when virtual sandboxes are all the rage, it’s both comforting and invigorating to find oneself knee-deep in an assured creation. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess is an ornate puzzle box that’s a pleasure to lose yourself in, because no matter how insurmountable the odds seem, the game’s creators never leave you floating adrift.

A quiet human quest. No rings, no dragons.

You know how it is when you go back to a book or a movie you once loved and discover that either you or it has changed. Either way it’s disappointing.

More often than not, I’m disinclined to revisit a fondly recollected favorite for that very reason, but I was lured back to Robert Hellenga’s The Fall of a Sparrow by his latest novel, Philosophy Made Simple, which is, simply, irresistible.

I can now report that Hellenga holds up at least equally well to rereading. His gracefully allusive, comically direct and colloquially complex style delights in much the same way as the blues lyrics that run through his work. Just as with the blues, there is that simultaneous sense of strangeness and familiarity, the feeling that every time you regard the subject, it will refract the light in a new way.

The Fall of a Sparrow is, like Philosophy Made Simple, the story of a man and his three daughters, the stuff of fairy tales, as Hellenga remarks, and like a true fairy tale it’s full of light and dark, promise and menace, comedy and tragedy. In this case the story focuses on a philosophical quest. Well, if that makes it sound too academic, why not just call it a humanistic quest for—meaning? Closure? How to narrow the gap between the inner and outer man?

It is in any case a journey undertaken by Alan “Woody” Woodhull, a professor of Classics, whose oldest daughter, Cookie, was killed in a terrorist bombing of the Bologna train station in 1980. The book ends with a memorial service nine years later and the much-debated choice (it causes the break-up of his marriage) of a gravestone inscription that for Woody reflects the hard truth of human experience: “Against the strength of love,” Woody translates from the medieval Latin, “you will find no herb; against the strength of death no herb grows in the garden.”

The Fall of a Sparrow is propelled almost entirely by curiosity. It is infused with a sense of exploration and delight and, driven by Woody’s open-ended embrace of all life’s contradictory impulses, it illuminates subjects as diverse as sex, cooking, the nature of forgiveness, bats, terrorism and chaos theory—everything, in fact, except the elephant who paints abstract canvases in Philosophy Made Simple.

For Woody, literature makes “sense out of human life. He had great faith in books.” But it is clear from this book that he has even greater faith—if that’s the right word—in the richness of unmapped (but not unexamined) human experience. Nihil humani a me alienum, he declares, “Nothing human is alien to me.” And if you don’t like the bleakness of Cookie’s gravestone inscription, you can always choose the lyrics from one of the blues that Woody comes back to again and again. “Trouble in mind,” he sings, accompanying himself on a National Steel guitar, “I’m blue / But I won’t be blue always / Cause the sun gonna shine / In my back door some day.”

Tampering with nature isn’t all it’s cut out to be.

Botany has never been much of a conversation starter. Chlorophyll can only be so sexy. For most of us, diagrams of a flower’s stigma and filament began a long high-school career of doodling in biology class.

Still, there’s something worthwhile to be said about flowers, particularly their business, a global industry that rakes in an easy $40 billion. More flowers are bought than Big Macs, and that, these days, is saying something.

flower Confidential by Amy Stewart does something most professors only dream of doing: It makes flowers interesting—to a point, of course. The book captures the attention of the everyday person with legends of the first blue rose and the race to make the perfect flower. Still, more often than one might wish, the text bogs down in methodical language that can make the chapters, while intelligent, equally laborious.

Despite the conversational approach to a usually tepid subject, sometimes science is just science. No amount of flowery language can change that. Stewart’s writing is impressive; it’s the subject matter that doesn’t always bloom.