Pages tagged “issue 30”

Experimental Atlanta band straightens up, flies crazy

Taking stylistic cues from Can, Sonic Youth and The Jesus and Mary Chain, Atlanta's Deerhunter often creates decidedly uneasy-listening music. And yet, the band's accomplished second full-length occasionally surprises with its accessibility. Originally intended as a pair of separate EPs, Cryptograms opens with ominous atmospherics via a wash of guitars and ethereal vocals, its latter half silver-lined with glorious, psychedelic pop. Much like avant-innovators Liars (whom they count as friends), Deerhunter chooses to celebrate creativity and find beauty through decidedly deconstructive methods. This impressive offering is a fortuitous one, considering that the band's frenetic, unpredictable live show deserves pairing with a truly ferocious studio counterpart.

"If you’d asked me a couple of years ago, I think I’d have said I’d retired,” says Tracey Thorn, reflecting on her extended hiatus from music in the wake of her recent return. “I really had drifted off into another world where I was completely happy and not missing it at all.”

That other world was populated not just by Ben Watt, her partner in life and in duo Everything But the Girl, but also by the couple’s three children. Last year, however, with their youngest having started school, Thorn suddenly found herself with time on her hands. “And I thought, well, I’ve got to get back to doing something,” she recalls.

Her first impulse was to write an autobiography, an exercise that made her realize how much she loved being a musician. “I think it reminded me a little bit of who I was,” says Thorn. So she quit writing about making music and began recording a new album. The result is Out of the Woods, the 44-year-old singer/songwriter’s first solo album since 1981’s A Distant Shore and her first full-length studio effort since EBTG’s Temperamental in 1999.

Like Temperamental, Woods is electronica-based, with Ewan Pearson (Goldfrapp) producing, and features collaborations with some of clubland’s finest, including English house mix master Charles Webster, Cagedbaby, and Alex Santos of Darkmountaingroup, which is signed to Watt’s well-respected underground-house label, Buzzin’ Fly.

Some of the disc is aimed at the dance floor, including first single “It’s All True” and the slinky cover of ’80s NYC avant-disco maven Arthur Russell’s “Get Around to It,” with sax supplied by The Rapture’s Gabe Andruzzi. But Thorn has always been a writer who understands the walking wounded, so Woods also has a fair share of downtempo numbers, including “A-Z,” about gay teens being bullied at school, and the gossamer opener, “Here It Comes Again.”

Thorn’s many fans will be disappointed to know she’s “completely” set aside her memoir and has no plans to tour, but they can take comfort in the news that she fully expects to make another album. “I do feel like I enjoyed doing it,” says Thorn, “and it’d be a shame to stop again.”

Director: Jake Kasdan
Starring: David Duchovny, Sigourney Weaver, Justine Bateman
Studio/Running Time: THINKFilm, 87 min.

In The TV Set, David Duchovny plays Mike Klein, a man who sells a script based on his brother’s recent suicide to a television network run by Lenny (Sigourney Weaver), a brash neurotic who’s intent on fluffing Mike’s show into a harmless counterpoint for the Reality TV that’s anchoring her fall schedule. Casting, shooting and editing The Wexford Chronicles requires extreme compromise, and Mike is forced to swim the poop chute between art and commerce. Yuck.

Unfortunately (and ironically), The TV Set also appears to have had most of its guts ripped out during production. Despite early belly laughs and some promising performances (Judy Greer as Mike’s clueless manager and Justine Bateman as his supportive wife), most of the characters are lethargically predictable. Bum editing doesn’t help Kasdan’s crippled plot, which slows to a crawl about 15 minutes in. With just a little less effort, The TV Set might’ve been perfect for the 8:30 Tuesday slot on The WB.

Singer/songwriter prodigy accelerates growth process on second release

Having been appointed by overeager journalists to be nothing less than the second coming of Johnny Cash, it's easy to forgive Willy Mason for taking himself too seriously on his second album. Now 22 years old, and with three years of hard touring under his belt, the one-time Conor Oberst protégé has lost little of his everyman appeal, and his second batch of songs are no less steeped in the sort of lived wisdom and slice-of-life poignancy that made his debut a humble triumph. With evil-sounding violin licking around the reverb-drenched thuds of "Simple Town," Mason captures small-town life with a perfectly conflicted mix of reverence and revulsion, one of many tracks where he'll dress up his homespun arrangement in chilly strings, richly chiming mandolins and fluttering keyboards. Peopled by broken but hopeful characters, these are songs that ache with a quiet desperation that feels familiar after his debut, but Mason's tendency to undersell his strengths as a performer are gone. Instead, these songs are more melodically direct, sonically dynamic and lyrically probing. Mason proves he should be around long after his prodigy status expires.

Britain's street-jazz chanteuse gets back to her parent's roots, again

Amy Winehouse debuted in 2003 with the thoroughly reprehensible album Frank. Its elevator jazz/hip-hop-lite affectations paid equal and stunning tribute to both Manhattan Transfer and Vanilla Ice; its massive marketing campaign, multiple Mercury Prize nominations and the requisite schoolgirl-ish praise of the English music press failed to fill its aesthetic vacuum. Bewilderingly, a United Kingdom under the sway of Jamie Cullum's cruise-ship lounge stylings and the souring reputation of Tony Blair went bananas for it.

The follow-up to Frank, Back To Black, should erase most of these troubling memories. BTB finds Winehouse's formidable vocal potential set against a charmingly synthetic Motown-style backdrop, courtesy of hot producers Salaam Remi and Mark Ronson. The result is very effective, occasionally thrilling, and suits the 23-year-old's vocal and songwriting capabilities more appropriately than the embarrassing pretensions of her debut.

"Rehab," the disc's leadoff track, is one of the most exciting things to come out of England in years. A Martha and the Vandellas-like stomper that quickly went Top 10 in the U.K., it jumps out of the speakers with the immediacy of an early Jackson 5 cut, authoritatively setting the tone for the album. "Me and Mr. Jones" finds Winehouse doing her best Ronettes while still managing to mutter about "fuckery" and a Slick Rick gig. The unfortunately titled "Love Is A Losing Game," a fine ballad stolen unashamedly from the early Bacharach/David songbook, is delivered with the tender weariness of a singer well beyond Winehouse's years.

Back To Black raises some questions as to whether Winehouse is actually the person she sings about being. Much has been made of her family's working-class jazz pedigree and her supposedly excessive boozing, the kind of biographical ingredients traditionally invoked to bestow authenticity. Regardless, the album carries a slight-but-distinct theatrical odor. The songwriting and production, so invitingly nostalgic, are simultaneously contrived, leading a listener to ponder if Winehouse is merely creating a flashy new musical home for a character invented by the tabloids or if she's creating a truly singular vision.

Witness Smokey Robinson-homage-gone-wrong "Tears Dry Up On Their Own"; she sounds tired of herself by the middle of slurring through another tipsy tale of ill-fated love. Likewise, her insistence on littering BTB's sometimes profound lyrics with awkward streetisms might play to her target demographic's definitions of what passes for poetry, but it pales against the angst so many of Winehouse's obvious influences were only allowed to imply through masterful phrasing and tone. While she possesses a capable enough voice to carry the day alone, the wince-inducing thuggery merely amplifies the confines of her age and artistic credibility.

Given the pressure she's likely under to stick with a winning formula, Winehouse deserves plenty of credit for stretching out on the follow-up to her highly successful debut. Back To Black is an unexpected surprise from an artist smart enough to pull the ace from her sleeve before the going got ugly.

Videogame blockbuster makes global warming sound attractive

In the comment section accompanying a particular blog post about Capcom’s epic third-person shooter, Lost Planet, a U.K.-based gamer quips, “Adverts for Lost Planet are on TV a lot and my very narrow-minded father had this response: ‘Ever since films like this came along, the world is going to hell!’”

While our planet’s moral trajectory is certainly debatable, one thing is not: contemporary videogame shops are increasingly taking their cues from Hollywood film studios in both their marketing strategies—Capcom reportedly spent in the neighborhood of $40 million to develop and create awareness for Lost Planet—and creative execution (“I like what you’ve done here, but can we have a red-leather-clad she-hero leaping off that futuristic skyscraper when the base charges detonate?”). Due to the stunning graphical horsepower of next-gen consoles, it’s hardly surprising that someone might confuse the trailer for a blockbuster game with Michael Bay’s newest fictional documentary on exploding helicopters.

Lost Planet, the brainchild of Keiji Inafune (famous for creating the Onimusha and Mega Man franchises), takes place on a snow-swept planet called E.D.N. III. You control the hero, Wayne, whose father has been killed by one of the many ferocious bug-like Akrid inhabiting the planet. These critters burst through the snowy terrain unexpectedly, eager to devour you and your precious thermal energy. I’m not particularly high-strung, and I flinched more than once when Akrid exploded into view at my feet.

The game could not have created a more hostile environment for Wayne to navigate. Your thermal-energy gauge is constantly depleting due to the frigid weather and you must replenish lost energy by soaking up the orange puddles of energy left behind after putting a rocket-launcher shell between the eyes of a screeching, five-story praying-mantis-like Akrid. There are malevolent snow pirates on the prowl as well, fixing their cross-hairs on your chapped forehead.

The snow pirates also have mechanized VS’s (Vital Suits)—heavily armored robotic suits equipped with rocket launchers and gatling guns—that they can pilot. It’s not hard to understand Japan’s preoccupation with mecha in its anime, comics and video-game culture; it’s a fantasy of humanity’s next evolutionary leap coming from the mechanical—as opposed to the natural—realm. And who feels like waiting on nature anyway?

Luckily for you, the enemy forces have conveniently (and, yes, a tad foolishly) left empty VS’s lying around and Wayne doesn’t need a key to hop in the cockpit and crank their jet-fueled engines. The most enjoyable moments in the game are spent controlling a Transformers-like VS, rocketing loudly through the air while enemy missiles weave trails all around you, exploding into the sides of cliffs and covering you in clouds of black smoke and raining debris. It’s a completely immersive adrenaline rush. The Akrid bosses are similarly a wonder to behold, all claws and writhing tentacles and orange-glowing joints that explode messily when you sink enough bullets into them.

If only the game’s story and dialogue approached the torque of its adrenalized action sequences; instead, you get dorky, overwrought voiceovers where characters sound like they’re auditioning for a daytime-TV pilot while speaking English as a second language. Then again, it’s hard to be too critical of a person going to the trouble of avenging his father’s murder. Face it, you’d probably just get really angry and cry a lot.

On his millionth album, Bill Callahan drops the Smog moniker but keeps the rest

Mr. Callahan has finally completed his two-decade transformation from malevolent provocateur to aphoristic folk-rocker. Smog was a concept—inscrutable, misogynistic; he peppered his daunting lo-fi albums with abrasive no-fi experiments. In truth, Callahan could've dropped the Smog moniker a couple albums ago, and it makes sense that the creator of A River Ain't Too Much to Love's dreamy naturalism, and his latest's upbeat trad-folk might want to distance himself from the persona he'd finally escaped. The way that time-tempered baritone patiently enunciates wry wisdom on the gospel-tinged Whaleheart is deeply familiar—rivers and sycamores are condensed symbols; a girl dances until she becomes a diamond—and one feels glad for Callahan, for his long-delayed emergence into a spiritual clearing.

As a visual, kinetic medium, cinema isn’t particularly well suited to exploring the work of a writer—the silent ordeal of stringing together words and sentences and the mental exercise of trying to reach out from the page to interact with a reader’s thoughts and feelings. No matter how vibrant the prose, the act of writing is about as cinematic as a box of rocks.

But that hasn’t stopped filmmakers from trying, at least superficially, to depict writers’ lives. Countless films revolve around mild-mannered scribblers surrounded by insanity that must, one day, be captured on the page. They may be caught up in adventures beyond their control, as in Misery, Barton Fink or Swimming Pool, or they may be the agents of their own mayhem, as in His Girl Friday or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Or they may fall somewhere in the middle, like the famous writer in Capote and Infamous.

But these movies focus on the gathering of raw material, not the writing itself. They show us the mining of clay instead of the sculpting, or they sum it up briefly with a shot of a typewritten manuscript placed confidently on an editor’s desk (the best work he’s seen in ages). They’re not insightful about the process, but who can blame the filmmakers for avoiding the drudgery? As the writer played by Jack Nicholson in The Shining says—or types, repeatedly, for days—“all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”

Stranger Than Fiction, Adaptation and the Danish film Reconstruction subject their characters to the turbulence of the writing process, directly and self-consciously, but the emphasis is not on the creator; it’s on the characters, poor souls trapped in the dim space between the ink ribbon and the page, suffering the whims of an omniscient wordsmith. Movies like Memento have such aggressively unconventional story structures that they can’t accurately be called literary—they’re pure cinema—but the best of them clearly draw ideas from written fiction: The heavily symbolic screenplay for Hiroshima Mon Amour was written by a novelist, Marguerite Duras, and Pulp Fiction’s very title reveals its origins.

WHEN THE SPACE TIGHTENS

My favorite film about writing is Chantal Akerman’s The Man With the Suitcase, though I’ve only seen it once. It’s about a woman who borrows a friend’s apartment to write, unaware that someone else will be using the apartment—a man who arrives with a suitcase and who, by all appearances, intends to be there for a while. On paper, it’s fodder for sitcoms or pulpy movies like the aforementioned Swimming Pool.

But Akerman has a long-running obsession with personal space, especially the way it relates to a person’s identity, and her ideas are especially fitting in this context. I’ve heard the film called a comedy, but it doesn’t seem funny when the woman stops working and holes up in her room, hiding from the man, listening to his every move, monitoring his comings and goings so she can sneak out for a breath of fresh air or a trip to the shower or the kitchen. Seldom do we see her working, and, yet, unlike many movies about writers who never write, this one is aware that the situation is choking her. Film critic Anthony Lane has said that writing ought to be wedged into real life; that writers are probably at their best when made to huddle in stairwells. Maybe so, but for some of us that’s an existence on the edge, dangerously close to not writing at all, not breathing at all. Akerman’s story clearly has a feminist undercurrent—the man who goes about his life, cooking, shaving and working, is barely aware of the woman who bends, who crumbles, to accommodate his presence—but it’s also a painfully true look at the life of a writer for whom space and freedom are oxygen.

At the end, the man takes his suitcase and leaves for good, the film closing with the joyous sound of a typewriter and a shot of the woman—played by Akerman herself—working. Working! I’m not sure if the end marks Akerman as an optimist or simply a realist, but either way it’s a release. The conditions have arisen, miraculously, that allow the writer to write.

Sadly, The Man With the Suitcase isn’t available on DVD, and it’s rarely screened in the U.S. because no one has bothered to subtitle the French dialogue. When I saw it at California’s Pacific Film Archive, an employee read an English translation into a microphone to help us understand the film’s few words. So this movie about the fleeting moments that writers crave is itself hanging in a muffled state of hesitation.

Nevertheless, it’s locked in my brain, and I should be sleeping instead of writing, so now I’m off to bed to dream a movie-dream and, with any luck, write again tomorrow.

At 10 a.m., at his sprawling 200-acre Lake Shasta estate in northern California, Merle Haggard is already deep into his daily chores, washing the breakfast dishes before he and his wife Theresa stroll out to tend the celery, shallots and cherry tomatoes growing organically in their garden. Although he’ll be touring soon to promote three recent albums—solo set, Chicago Wind; a duets collection with George Jones, Kickin’ Out The Footlights... Again; and Last Of The Breed, a brand-new 22-track showcase with longtime chums Ray Price and Willie Nelson—he delights in such mundane duties. When you hit 69, he sighs, putting down his dishcloth, “You’ve gotta have some sort of routine in your mind, you’ve gotta come up with things to entertain yourself. You’ve gotta come up with lies that distract you from things that you know are inevitable, because right down the road somewhere, you and I—in the wink of an eye—are gonna meet our maker.”

Depressing? Anything but, guffaws Haggard, who’s always been a bit of a philosopher. Mortality? “We don’t wanna sit around and dwell on that,” he declares. “We’ve gotta come up with something to satisfy ourselves, like ‘Aw, maybe there’ll be something that’ll happen before it comes our time, and maybe we won’t have to die!’ Why, I was wondering just this morning, ‘What if tomorrow comes early? It’d be a big-time collision, wouldn’t it?’ I know it’s not possible, but it’s ridiculously funny. And it’s what we talk about, and what crosses your mind every morning when you get to be my age—you say, ‘Oh! Still another day, huh?’”

Haggard isn’t waiting on any cosmic answers. He’s happy with the riddles themselves. So he just keeps right on doing what he’s done since the early ’60s—writing, recording, performing and enjoying the sparse downtime in between. “I think each one of us has some pre-ordained situation that we’re supposed to follow,” he says. “Now, we may vary from that and go off in different directions, as humans will do. But I think that there is some route we’re supposed to stick with, and each one of us is indelibly gifted with that, just like a fingerprint.”

SLINGS AND ARROWS Lord knows the country legend struggled against his destiny for many colorful years. After his father’s death, the Oklahoma transplant left his Bakersfield, Calif., home—a converted railroad carriage—at 14 and started hopping actual working boxcars to see the country. The journey didn’t end well. After landing in several reformatories, Hag—as he would soon be known—did a three-year stint in San Quentin for armed robbery. But it was there, in 1958, that he witnessed and was inspired by one of Johnny Cash’s infamous prison performances. Haggard was paroled (later receiving a full pardon from then-governor Ronald Reagan and the California Supreme Court) and barreled back into Bakersfield just as its Buck Owens-helmed, electric-guitar-centered scene was revving to life.

“I tried to enlist in the Marines when I was 14, and I would’ve been in Korea,” Haggard recalls. “But they wouldn’t let me in, and instead I was riding boxcars. … I’m proud of it—I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world. I’ve had so many things happen in my young years that I actually believe was meant to be education, and I don’t think it was meant to be anything else. And as it turned out, 12 Supreme Court judges from the state of California saw fit to give me a pardon. And I probably wouldn’t have done any time at all if I’d have been a rich boy. But I was just a poor kid, so I got to experience some things that I would never have understood [otherwise].”

With a thumbs-up from Cash—a ‘Hey, didn’t I see you in the crowd at San Quentin?’ quip on his TV show—Haggard started scoring late-’60s hits with prison-themed originals like “Mama Tried,” “The Fugitive” and “Sing Me Back Home,” tracks that would influence later country renegades like Gram Parsons. While his tongue-in-cheek redneck anthems “Okie From Muskogee” and “The Fightin’ Side Of Me” were eagerly taken by Republicans like Nixon and George Wallace at face value, Hag leans brazenly left with new songs like “Chicago Wind” and the staunchly anti-war “Rebuild America First” (“Let’s get out of Iraq / And get back on the track”). His voice, despite time’s seasoning, is every bit as hickory-stick booming as it was in his “Okie” era.

MISCHIEF AT ANY AGE
Price and Nelson are also in fine form on the Fred Foster-produced Breed. Haggard contributed a new cut (“Sweet Jesus”), as did Nelson (“Back To Earth”), but mostly it’s just three Country Music Hall of Famers crooning classics like “Night Watch,” “Why Me, Lord,” “Heartaches By The Number” and “Mom And Dad’s Waltz,” over echo-y arrangements often backed by The Jordanaires. It was Price who initially came up with the trio concept; He convinced Nelson, who then phoned Haggard, who explains, “this was bound to happen anyway—we’ve been recording and doing each other’s material, doing shows together for so many years,”

The sessions reportedly spanned a whopping two days, and a spring tour is also on the docket, sure to be a party with the notorious Nelson in tow. But it’s the 81-year-old Price who worries Hag the most. “He loved his chickens, and he gave me a rooster one time, a big fighting cock, and he knew that I didn’t have no place to carry that sonofabitch. I was about 26 years old, and he was having fun with the young kid—he gave me this goddamn chicken, and it flew all over the bus and shit on everything. And don’tcha know Ray just laughed! So he’s got something planned for this tour, I just know it.”

“Life’s been good to me,” Haggard concludes. “I’ve gotta look at it that way. I’ve been fortunate enough to maintain good health, I’ve got a 14-year-old son whom I’m very proud of, and I think four or five great-grandsons. I’ve got a pretty wife, and if I live to April 6th, I’ll be 70 years on this Earth. And touring for me is like swimming—it’s really good exercise and good for the health.”

RAY PRICE COMES FULL CIRCLE
Like his pal Merle, Ray Price has a rural routine each non-tour day. “I’m up at 6 o’clock in the morning,” he outlines, while roosters crow and hens cluck in the coop where he’s scattering grain. “We have 17 thoroughbred racehorses, and we have to feed ’em, take ’em outta their stalls and put ’em in the paddocks. Then we feed the chickens, the racing pigeons, the bird dogs and the little rabbit beagles—it’s quite a job, but it’s something I like.”

Did Price really play fowl on Hag’s bus? “It’s not true at all, though Merle may think it is,” he says, laughing. “But chickens are a hobby I’ve had for years—I just love ’em, and I ship mine all over the world.” Price, who once roomed with Hank Williams, switched to an orchestra and dinner jacket for his “Good Times” ’60s. Now, with Last of the Breed, he’s returned to his honky-tonk roots. And the irony doesn’t escape him.

“Our music has been refused to be played by the power-that-be and all the radio stations,” growls the artist, who cites the late ’70s “Urban Cowboy” movement as the beginning of country’s end. “… But now, all of a sudden, the people have rebelled and stations have started playing the classics again. I’m not mad at the people—they’re out to make money. But they sure did hurt us for a long time.

“But now everything’s cool, everything’s fine, and my career looks like it’s beginning to bloom open again. And that just tickles me to death, ’cause what greater blessing could you have at the age I’m at?”

If Rivers Cuomo’s thoughts on the future of music retail would make most shop owners wince (“I guess I’ve already forgotten about the record store”), the Weezer frontman and avid iTunes customer admittedly owes a massive debt to one store in particular: Tower Sunset.

When hired as a clerk in 1990, he was a devout metalhead who knew little about music. But his tastes expanded radically during the subsequent year-and-a-half—he even, believe it or not, became a world music buyer.

“Working there was my crash course in music,” he says. “That’s where I first heard Nirvana, the Pixies, Sonic Youth, Pet Sounds. I remember the moment [I heard Nirvana’s Sliver/Dive,/i>] ... and it totally blew my mind.