Pages tagged “issue 35”

Serving up “food that pleases” since 1929, Atlanta’s Majestic Diner feels like Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks come to life, only with hung-over hipsters taking the place of Hopper’s fedora-clad ’40s cats. The diner has seen a lot over the years, so it’s fitting that The Black Lips are here, sitting in a booth on a balmy summer afternoon. For a bunch of guys in their early 20s, they’ve seen a lot, too.

In fact, bassist/vocalist Jared Swilley and drummer/vocalist Joe Bradley are grizzled vets in their city’s vibrant rock ’n’ roll scene. They shake their heads in wonder at the prospect. “I feel a lot older than 23,” Swilley says. “We’ve been touring since Joe and I were 16. This year it’s going to be over 10 months [on the road] probably, but I used to work here at The Majestic. I’m just happy I don’t have to come here every day anymore.”

Instead, Swilley and Bradley, along with guitarist/vocalist Cole Alexander and guitarist Ian St. Pe, travel the world playing their self-described “flower punk,” a joyous mix of garage rock, vocal harmonies and other more fuzztastic influences. Fittingly, they recorded their last album, the raucous Los Valientes del Mundo Nuevo, live in Tijuana, Mexico.

Returning home to record a new studio effort, Good Bad Not Evil, they somehow tamed a baker’s dozen of their latest tracks, tricking them onto wax and capturing the finest representation of their sound to date. Highlights include hilarious call-and-response rocker “Bad Kids” and also “Katrina,” which treats the infamous hurricane like a brutally unforgiving girlfriend. Polishing the band’s usual savage inclinations ever so slightly, Good Bad Not Evil is the sound of these ATLien knuckleheads maturing.

“When I think about our early tours and recording sessions, it’s a different world,” Swilley says. “That was six, seven years ago. I had no idea it could get to this point. … It would be scary to be one of those bands that get picked up, first thing, by a major. All this money gets thrown at them, and that album is make-or-break or you’re in debt for the rest of your life. Luckily, we have a fallback plan. We still manage ourselves and we know a lot of other people who have been through this before, so we’re smart about everything.”

A Book for Dog Days

I’ll admit it: I didn’t like Marley & Me, John Grogan’s blockbuster memoir about life with a destructive dog. Sure, he has an ability to take a common topic—in this case, dog ownership—and squeeze out a laugh or two, but the book is no great work of art and does little to illuminate why we’re so attached to our pets. It certainly wouldn’t make me want to run out and get a dog.

For me, that book was Caroline Knapp’s Pack of Two. Knapp was an exceptional journalist and essayist, and her writing dug into the roots of a neurosis that plagued her. By putting herself on display, she showed us much more about ourselves and the society that shapes us—whether she was writing about alcoholism (Drinking: A Love Story) or anorexia (Appetites: Why Women Want).

She also wrote about her dog, Lucille. First published in 1998, Pack of Two was ahead of the dogs-as-celebrity-accessory trend, even if Knapp did write about spoiled “nineties” dogs.

Like Knapp, I lived by myself. Like her, I had just gotten out of a relationship that I knew would never work. I was lonely. I needed a friend. I didn’t go to the shelter expecting to find Lassie or my other half in the form of four legs and fur—just an animal to wag its tail when I walked in the door, and something to take the edge off of loneliness by being in my own pack of two. And while Emily—the Jack Russell Terrier who wound herself around my life—and I are less than perfect companions, she has changed me, hopefully for the better. Even when she tinkles on the carpet, yaps at a squirrel or nudges me while I work, she brings me a serenity I haven’t found anywhere else. Through life with Lucille, Knapp has an idea why.

“The personal voids that dominated my landscape when I ventured out to the shelter to find Lucille are in many ways cultural voids as well, ones that have been blasted open by thirty years of social upheaval,” she wrote. “Loneliness. Transience. The breakdown of family and the search for alternative sources of support. The stresses of life in urban America, which is at once more crowded and more isolated. And, in the midst of that, 55 million pet dogs.” That number is now 74.8 million. Knapp was ahead of the curve.

The author died from complications of lung cancer in 2002, and Lucille was by her side. That, as I look at Emily curled up in my lap, doesn’t sound like a crazy notion at all.

There’s not a lot of room to maneuver in this small New York bagel shop—just one dinky table and a couple of barstools by the window. But even the most mundane surroundings can host the unexpected when Scottish tunesmith KT Tunstall is around. Grabbing the window seats, she bounds gleefully into a discussion of Drastic Fantastic, the new Virgin Records follow-up to her platinum debut Eye To The Telescope. It’s a bit late in the day, so few folks venture into the deserted little joint. Except one: a tall, shaggy-haired figure in rumpled clothes with a huge black-widow tattoo on his forearm, who seems to have just woken up. As he orders his coffee, Tunstall gasps. “Is that... is that who I think it is?” she whispers.

Why yes, it is Julian Casablancas, the reclusive leader of The Strokes, who strolls over, says, “Hello,” and reports on his latest doings with a deadpan, “Oh, you know me—I’ve just been sitting around, contemplating the shattered shards of my broken existence.” Turns out he and Tunstall are huge mutual fans. By conversation’s end, they’ve made a pact to someday work together, should their busy schedules ever permit it.

“I can’t believe that just happened!” Tunstall gushes once Casablancas has departed. “It was really Julian! And he was actually smiling! You never see him smiling in photos.” Turns out Tunstall is just getting started in the surprise department. The mention of smiles leads to a discussion of teeth, and from choppers Tunstall segues into one of her typically off-the-wall revelations. “That just reminded me that my mom and I were having this conversation recently, that when I was a child I had to go to the dentist to have my teeth filed down, because I grew fangs,” she notes, matter-of-factly. “I grew natural fangs, and people were commenting. I was only five, and it was horrendously unpleasant getting them filed down. But I think I was probably fairly vicious if I got into fights back then—I was aware of my fangs. I didn’t bite anyone directly, but I did some nipping, just mucking around with my brother. But I was actually scaring people, scaring other children.” She pauses, stroking her necklace thoughtfully. “If only the dentist could’ve handed me the fangs afterward—I could’ve worn ’em around my neck like a shark’s tooth!”

Fangs. Shark’s teeth. At points like these, one has to step back and take a long objective look at Tunstall. She looks normal enough: diminutive, 5'2'' frame; hip, but not cloyingly chic, clothes—white jeans, black T-shirt and gold buckle-strapped Converse; pretty, but not overtly made-up features, the result of her Scottish-Chinese heritage; and a chameleonesque way of blending in with the populace that allows her to travel virtually unrecognized through New York. But share a bagel and some coffee with Tunstall, and the truth is as sharply defined as her rapier wit—there’s nothing even remotely pedestrian about her. She’s truly unexpected, and delightfully so.

For example, here’s how the 31-year-old sums up her late-blossoming career: “I was really blown away by Sin City, the Frank Miller adaptation film by [Robert] Rodriguez. And after seeing it, it dawned on me that this is just a total comic-book existence, what I do. Minus the X-ray vision, of course. You go to weird places, you meet weird people, and you end up in totally mad situations. I remember being in Pittsburgh, and we couldn’t get a cab into town before the show, and me and the bass player ended up in this weird old sportscar full of dog hair and tin cans, getting a lift into town with some redneck after playing to 4,000 people in a different city. Or Elton John says, “hello,” at a soundcheck, then I end up in a helicopter flying through the French Alps, then finish the evening with a cup of tea, staring at the Empire State Building, just going, ‘This really isn’t possible.’ It feels like time-travel—a week feels like a month; a day feels like a week.”

Maybe it was the lass’ curious childhood that set her apart. Hailing from St. Andrews, Tunstall first left Scotland at age three, when her physicist father was transferred to UCLA and the family moved to Encino, Calif., for a year. At 17, she returned to the States, first attending a Connecticut boarding school, then moving to a hippie-ish community in Vermont where she formed her first band, The Happy Campers, and tracked demos at the local radio station. Proficient on piano, flute and guitar, she relocated to London and booked herself into any pub or club that would have her. The years passed; no industry executive swept down to sign her. Her big break came in 2004, when an ailing Nas begged off his Later With Jools Holland TV appearance, and Tunstall was ushered in as a last-minute replacement. Solo, she stomp-strummed a sprightly original—“Black Horse and the Cherry Tree”—and the show’s phone lines lit up. Who was this stunning young performer? And where could her album be purchased? The originally independent Eye To The Telescope had to be hastily re-released to keep up with the overnight demand. Soon, the album would earn her a nomination for Britain’s coveted Mercury Prize, plus three Brit Award nominations (winning for Best British Female Solo Artist), and even a Grammy nomination earlier this year. Her “Suddenly I See” single—which followed the breakthrough “Black Horse” and its addictive “Whoo-hoo” refrain—was one of five finalists for Hillary Clinton’s campaign theme song.

Tunstall hasn’t done anything by the book. A good portion of her “Suddenly” video features her serenading a strangely attentive border collie on a park bench (“Actually, Hokey the dog was looking ever so slightly past me to his owner holding a huge steak,” she explains). And her U.S. breakthrough occurred courtesy of The Today Show, where she was hastily booked on a Tuesday for a performance the following Friday. Rather than drag her backing band along, she showed up with nothing more than her trusty guitar and an AKAI E2 Headrush loop pedal, and proceeded to knock ’em dead. The Headrush—via two floor buttons, Record and Play—lets its owner overlay as many as 27 separate loops, thereby creating the illusion of a full backing combo. “First, I did a percussive chk-chk on the strings, then a tap-ring thing, and then I did two harmonies,” she recalls. “And after I finished, it was like a big party in the studio—everybody was so excited. Because, to be honest, every time I pull that off I’m f—ing amazed that I haven’t completely ruined my opportunity by doing it wrong. That’s why I call the AKAI Headrush the Wee Bastard—it never gets anything wrong; it never, ever breaks. But I f— up quite regularly, and it captures everything.” God forbid you accidentally punch both buttons at once, she shivers. “Then it turns into a delay pedal, this third weird option that might be something really amazing, I dunno. Maybe next tour I’ll be like, ‘Watch this,’ press both buttons and poof! A wormhole!”

But if it’s a rabbit hole that this Alice has tumbled down, she certainly seems to be holding up well under the pressure, judging by the tea-party-ish experience of Drastic Fantastic. Tunstall kicks off with her stock in trade, a jangly strummer with handclap percussion called “Little Favours,” which segues into the dissonant chiming of “If Only,” the first of many self-examinations/recriminations. “Hopeless” feels like a classic country ballad; “Paper Aeroplane” tacks a funereal acoustic/keyboard motif onto lines like, “This road that I’m on is leading me to hell”; the mandolin-accented “Funnyman” is a punk-chorded powerhouse in disguise; and “Black Horse” fans will rejoice to hear toe-tapping singalongs like “Hold On” and “Saving My Face.” “Someday Soon”—with its eerie National Guitar twang and shufflebeat—feels the most pensive, with its composer making a to-do list of mind-expanding exercises that ends with, “turn myself into the grass, and I’ll grow.”

“I know, it sounds comedic,” Tunstall says of her grass lyric. “And I don’t really wanna turn into grass. But actually, that song was written when I split up with Luke [Bullen, her drummer and longtime boyfriend] for a day. We had this massive argument, and the argument started when he said ‘F— off!’ So I did. I kinda f—ed oΩ, like ‘Oh yeah? I will f— off, then!’ And he didn’t call me for three days! He was following some kind of ‘Men’s Guide for When to Phone Women,’ and I was like ‘Oh, so that’s it then? We’re done. And that’s how you’re finishing it?’ I wrote it in a letter and stuck it under his door, and I thought, ‘I can either stay home and be depressed, or I can go have a beer and write a song.’ So I chose the beer and the song.” By the time Bullen dropped by to apologize, “Someday Soon” was complete. “So we’re also considering splitting up for a few days in the future, just so I can get more songs done.”

Tunstall is staring idly out the cafe window when a teenage girl pauses outside to preen herself in the reflective glass, oblivious to the artist sitting inches away on the other side. This suddenly reminds Tunstall of another new number, “Saving My Face.” “It’s about old ladies having plastic surgery,” she chuckles. “I’m fascinated by our culture’s reaction to and treatment of beauty. It must be so difficult for young women who grow up ridiculously gorgeous to look in the mirror one day and go, ‘Oh my God, I have a neck like a f—ing turtle!’ Then they have work done, and they look so strange, younger than what they are, but like the Emperor from Star Wars. It’s really weird.” She’s happy to run through other Drastic tracks, too: “Hold On” (“A take on one of my favorite Bob Marley songs called ‘Judge Not’—before you point your finger, remember that someone else is already judging you”); “I Don’t Want You Now” (“I was totally let down by someone, but I can’t say who—writing derogatory songs about people is bad karma”); and “White Bird” (“It’s a dove, a city pigeon, that I kept seeing when I first moved to London, a personification of where I was at—a country girl moving to the big city”).

But her music doesn’t address her other passion—the environment. The vegetarian has gone totally green; allied herself with the environmentally conscious Global Cool campaign, and met with then-outgoing British Prime Minister Tony Blair on its behalf; and she’s partnered with Origins Natural Resources skin care as well as Carbon Neutral, the latter of which has dedicated more than 5,000 new trees in her honor in Scotland’s Carrifran Wildwood. “But it just doesn’t inspire me to write songs about being angry or depressed,” she clarifies. “The crux of it is—the most important thing a musician can do is keep a grip on reality and remember that the people who are actually interested in what you’re saying are only interested because they like your music. They’re not coming to your shows because they wanna hear polemics about whatever politics you’re into, so you have to [raise awareness] in a way where it’s a choice for the people who might be interested. And especially with the green issue, you have to put your own house in order first. You can’t go out and tell people what to do and then be driven home in your Hummer limo.”

After diving momentarily into deeper thematic waters, Tunstall returns to her wacky self. And after a brief discussion of insects and their egg-laying abilities (she’s an obsessive fan of both the Discovery and Animal Planet networks), she’s craving some fresh air, a stroll through New York. Again, no one bats an eye as she shoves her way down the busy sidewalks, happily anonymous among a sea of possible fans. Hence the “Drastic” and “Fantastic” in her new album’s title—the changes in her life lately have certainly been both. “I’ve actually managed to stay out of the tabloid press,” she says. “I don’t get photographed, I don’t get hounded, and unless something very unfortunate happens to you, I think you can still choose whether or not you want that.”

It’s at this precise moment that a heedless vacationing family in a speeding Bronco comes barreling through a red light, literally missing Tunstall by inches, just as she starts across the intersection. “Suddenly I see,” she gasps, parroting her own smash single as she staggers backward. “A deadly S.U.V.!”

Unexpected, to the bitter end.

Hometown: Zagreb, Croatia
Listening to lately: The White Stripes, 89.9 FM Los Angeles public radio
Fun fact: The character, Eugene (Shea Wigham), is based on Dukic's friend, Eugene Hutz of Gogol Bordello. The gypsy rockers even provided the music for Eugene's band in the film.

Most people are afraid to say the word “suicide” in polite company, not to mention making a film that engages the subject directly. But first-time feature filmmaker Goran Dukic had no reservations about adapting Etgar Keret’s novella Kneller’s Happy Campers—the story of an afterlife created exclusively for suicide victims—into the dark comedy Wristcutters: A Love Story. “All subjects should be free to discuss,” Dukic says matter-of-factly. The film, starring Patrick Fugit (Almost Famous), Shannyn Sossamon and Tom Waits, (with a cameo from Will Arnett) somehow approaches suicide with both humor and compassion.

“Everything’s the same here; it’s just a little worse,” main character Zia says after cutting his wrists and then finding himself in an unexpectedly familiar afterlife. “I’ve thought about suicide again, but I’ve never tried it. I didn’t want to end up in a bigger shithole than this one.”

In order to relay this sense of “the same, only worse,” Dukic carefully planned the film’s setting. “Every location was a little bit damaged,” he says. “We tried to create this world that’s not really comfortable.” The film was shot mostly in downtown Los Angeles, and the setting isn’t far off from the seedier parts of any metropolitan city, only the bars and streets seem dirtier, and the people seem sadder.

Dukic’s characters work at pizza joints, live in apartments and shop for groceries. They’re in dysfunctional relationships, and they face everyday struggles. We even see an entire family of suicide victims—mother, father and two sons. In a poignant dinner-table scene, the father says, “Not every family is as lucky as we are.” Since the characters are so realistic, Dukic made a few distinct adaptations to the story to emphasize the absurdness of a world populated only by suicide victims. There are no stars in the sky of this Great Beyond, and nobody smiles. Characters remember smiling in their former lives, and they want to smile, but it’s physically impossible. “In a story you can say people are emotionally damaged,” says Duckic, “but in a movie you have to show it.”

To further distinguish between the afterlife and life on earth, Dukic incorporates suicide flashbacks. Before the opening credits, we see Zia methodically clean his room before slitting his wrists over the bathroom sink, slowly falling to the floor and dying. We see Eugene, a rock star, electrocute himself on stage. We see a teenager overdose on pills. It’s uncomfortable to watch, to say the least, but essential for understanding the characters.

Dukic argues that the spirit world he created may not be as absurd as it seems. When most people think about what happens to dead people, they picture clouds and angels, pits of fire or complete nothingness—something drastically diΩerent from the world in which we live now. But Dukic doesn’t think we can get away from our problems so easily. “If there is anything out there, wherever people go after they commit suicide, they will go with the same problems they tried to get away from,” he says. “That’s why I think people should work on their problems in this life - so they don't have to work on them in the future."

Stubbornly Fresh
Hip-hop's squarest peg busts rhymes and non-sequiturs by the pound

Hip-hop has always cleared a little extra space in the attic for eccentrics—the rappers too weird for the mainstream but too influential to be ignored. Whether taking the form of Kool Keith’s unhinged Dr. Octagonecologyst, MF Doom’s Marvel Comics-inspired alternative urban reality, Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s slobbering telegrams from the edge of sanity or Biz Markie’s half-crazed, half-sung, half-assed attempts at incorporating humor into verse, the genre has somehow maintained a fairly cozy relationship with Crazy Uncle Whodat even as it devolved into a musical form primarily devoted to the glorification of bling, blunts and bedtime conquests (where d’ya think all those skits came from, anyway?). Think of it as the Redd Foxx wing of the House of Rapresentatives—the sun may’ve long since set on the prime-time days of Sanford and Son, but we’ll always have all those dirty-assed Laff of the Party records to fall back on. Turns out that this is where the real action always was anyway.

Long Island-born MC and producer Aesop Rock—better known to his mother as Ian Bavitz—has come to represent the modern manifestation of this hip-hop archetype. Like the Beastie Boys before him, Bavitz has remained something of a cultural outsider as an Anglo working squarely within hip-hop culture, quietly locating other non-conformists with whom he can collaborate (such as Company Flow’s El-P; producer Tony “Blockhead” Simon, son of NYC sculptor Sidney Simon; and wife Allyson Baker, guitarist for San Francisco-based rock group Parchman Farm).

Since the independent release of his first album, 1997’s Music for Earthworms, Aesop’s commitment to keeping it real (in his case, weird) has been abundantly clear. His backing tracks have often been little more than mere wisps of melody dominated by discordant drum parts in odd rhythmic meters, while his distinctive vocals have typically sounded like nerdy sectarian harangues squeezed out of his throat in rapid spasms as if a shower of letters during a spelling bee. Then there are the lyrics—vast streams of altered consciousness and observational detail punctuated by Dada-esque absurdity, random pop culture references and, increasingly, a leftist labor sympathy that’s as far from the Cristal crowd as Prague is from Provo. Not exactly anthems for spending your Saturday night “all up in da club,” to be sure.

Nevertheless, on None Shall Pass, his first full-length in four years and most uncompromising LP to date, Aesop Rock comes correct with a diamond-dense package of 15 tracks (including the scathing anti-corporate bonus cut, “Pigs”) that makes no concessions to current hip-hop culture or fan demands, failing to acknowledge any artist but himself. It’s as if Bavitz’s version of hip-hop has shut itself in the bunker post-9/11, developing a claustrophobic strain of beat/rhyme alchemy that’s almost completely divorced from hip-hop itself, reimagining what’s possible while casting a shadow on the formulaic tripe that currently dominates the Billboard charts.

That said, Aesop Rock’s album is all the better for his apparent hard-headedness, consisting as it does of occasional bouts of self-mythologizing meant to arouse curiosity while simultaneously knocking the cluetrain off its tracks (the Portishead-dark “Catacomb Kids”; his funk-striped collaboration with El-P, “39 Thieves”) and, of course, paeans to the ubiquitous Sucka MCs among us. The very first cut, “Keep Off the Lawn,” creates an intentional distance between Aesop and his less-savvy brethren, even as the language he chooses throws up a veil of vagary: “When they aren’t telling stories they are multiplying grossly on the lawn—let ‘em loiter, never let ‘em spawn / The apparitions have been drinking his water for too long, so when they gathered by the bird bath in the morning he would tell 'em 'I mean no disrespect, but you've all outstayed your welcome.'" And that's only the first stanza. Whew.

Ultimately, what Bavitz is doing here amounts to nothing less than an offhanded attempt to save hip-hop from itself, criticizing the genre for its reliance on proven clichés (the title track improbably manages to rhyme “heart Huckabee” with “art fuckery”) while using it as a platform for change, to show what can be done if it’s approached creatively enough. Considering Bavitz’s undergrad art degree from Boston University, it’s not altogether surprising to find him attempting to affect cultural revolution from inside the belly of the beast. Aesop Rock may very well be—in his stubbornly off-kilter way—the wittiest man in hip-hop today. But make no mistake: As Rakim once insisted, he ain’t no joke.

Fine soul singer brings everything but the songs

There’s an ongoing tug of war throughout Raul Midón’s sophomore album. On one side, vying for the listener’s affections, are Midón’s obvious musical gifts—a supple, soulful vocal delivery that recalls Stevie Wonder; a driving, percussive acoustic-guitar style; a soaring falsetto; and the uncanny ability to perfectly mimic a trumpet with his voice. On the other side, threatening to undo all the goodness, are the songs themselves, which range from blandly nondescript odes to positive thinking to embarrassingly muddled metaphysical meditations on war, suffering, God and the Devil. Midón can surely sing, and he’s at his best on “Save My Life,” an old-school evocation of mid-’70s Philly soul, and “Ain’t Happened Yet," a joyous dollop of street-corner doo-wop. But the hamfisted social commentary sabotages this album at every turn. Midón is no Marvin Gaye. What’s goin’ on is insipid songwriting, and it hinders what could have been a neo-soul classic.

Love Hurts
Morgan Freeman narrates three intersecting love stories in a tranquil Oregon town

Release Date: Sept. 28
Director: Robert Benton
Screenplay: Allison Burnett
Based on the Novel by: Charles Baxter
Starring: Morgan Freeman, Greg Kinnear, Selma Blair
Studio/Run Time: Lakeshore Entertainment/ MGM, 104 mins.

Based on Charles Baxter’s much beloved third novel (a finalist for the National Book Award in 2000), Feast of Love follows the romantic pratfalls of a trio of local couples. Troubled teens Chloé and Oscar (played desperately, frantically, by Alexa Davalos and Toby Hemingway) grind coffee together at Jitters, a local café owned by Bradley Thomas (Greg Kinnear), whose softball-playing wife, Kathryn (Selma Blair) just ditched him for a female shortstop. Bradley achieves comfort in the slobbery embrace of a dog also named Bradley and, incidentally, the lithe arms of real-estate agent Diana (Radha Mitchell), who’s simultaneously engaged in an extramarital affair with the grizzled David (Billy Burke). Chloé and Oscar, in dire need of cash to acquire a home of their own and, subsequently, ditch Oscar’s alcoholic father, the Bat (Fred Ward), consider a compromising proposition. All romantic action is monitored and digested by philosophy professor/Jitters regular Harry Stevenson (Morgan Freeman), who, along with his wife, Esther (an elegant Jane Alexander), is striving to recover from his estranged son’s heroin overdose while offering his pals the best bits of Kierkegaardian advice he can muster.

Directed by Robert Benton (who won a Best Director Oscar for 1979’s legendary Kramer vs. Kramer), Feast of Love was shot on location in Portland, Ore., and each frame of film is, accordingly, overloaded with deep, Pacific Northwest greens: If the film fails on any level, it’s because of its overly bucolic, idealized landscape, where each interior looks professionally designed, and even the cruddiest part of town seems fairly quaint (when Chloé rides her bicycle to a dodgy Oregon strip to see a psychic about Oscar, the surrounding area looks relatively tame, although, in the novel, Baxter describes the stretch as “the Twilight Zone … these old humping kickass grounds of steel and scrapyards”). And while this is a love story, with all the activities entailed therein, Benton manages to sneak in a bemusing amount of gratuitous nudity (every main female character in the movie—save the grandmotherly Esther—is shot entirely naked at one point or another). Witness classic Hollywood aggrandizing: Wipe away the dirty parts, squeeze in as many boobs as possible.

Clothed or not, though, the cast turns in steady performances: Selma Blair only enjoys a tiny slice of screen time, but her depiction of a woman abruptly noticing a new way to love is riveting. As Harry Stevenson, Freeman assumes the standard professorial stance—sheepish, wizened and weary—but while the role may seem archetypal, Freeman is so convincingly sagacious onscreen that it’s impossible not to empathize (and feel vaguely envious) when Chloé asks Harry and Esther to unofficially adopt her and Oscar. Most folks will understand Chloé’s desire to camp out in the Stevensons’ basement, curling into an afghan, reading old hardback books, accepting hot mugs of tea from Esther, nodding at Harry’s sage advice—doled out, always, while he peers gently over his spectacles, folds his newspaper, wears a sweater.

Adapted for screen by Allison Burnett (who, unfortunately, also penned the atrocious Autumn in New York), the screenplay thwarts the novel on a handful of plot points—most notably, the film is narrated by professor Stevenson, not Charlie Baxter (and, unlike the book, the narrative perspective never shifts), it takes place in Portland rather than Ann Arbor, Mich., and the ultimate providence of Aaron, Harry and Esther’s son, is left unambiguous here. Still, the film manages to capture both the evocative earnestness of Baxter’s prose and his vital, Shakespearean sense of love’s frivolity, whimsy and, above all, indispensability. (Thematically, there’s plenty of overlap with A Midsummer Night’s Dream.) Despite a few wretched revelations, Feast of Love is hopeful, convinced of love’s transformative powers, and optimistic for its characters’ futures. For both Benton and Baxter, love is as redemptive as it is intense; for the men and women of Feast of Love, there is no such thing as benign, non-catastrophic passion. Whether it’s Chloé and Oscar’s potent, all-consuming union, Harry and Esther’s tender lifelong partnership, or Diana and David’s abusive, forbidden episodes, love is inevitable and paramount—it changes people, it cannot be controlled or predicted, it seeps into every single thing we do and say. As Bradley concludes: “Love is the only meaning there is in this crazy dream.”

Four men and a little Greek tragedy

Release Date: Sept. 26
Director/Writer/Editor: Jessica Yu
Cinematographers: Karl Hahn, Russell Harper
Starring: Hans-Joachim Klein, Mark Pierpont, Joe Loya, Mark Salzman
Studio/Run Time: IFC Films, 90 mins.

I’ve only seen one of Jessica Yu’s previous films, the disappointing Henry Darger documentary In the Realms of the Unreal (see Paste #14), but Protagonist is in another league entirely. Like Errol Morris did for his brilliant Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, Yu interviews four men with seemingly unrelated stories: a karate fanatic who was bullied as a child, an evangelist who suppressed his gay feelings, a German terrorist who became disillusioned with violence, and a bank robber. She combines these interviews with such skill that themes begin to emerge, a tangled thicket of men seeking to define themselves through strength, discipline and self-transformation. She neatly uses puppets—yes, puppets—to recreate key scenes from the men’s lives and, even riskier, she breaks the film into sections that relate to Greek tragedy. Initially, the cold recitations of the chorus are jarring next to the fascinating interviews, but by the end it’s clear Yu has found modern examples of human traits that are ancient indeed.

Charlie’s Angels screenwriter delivers witty head-scratcher of a film

Release Date: Aug. 31
Director/Writer: John August
Cinematographer: Nancy Schreiber
Starring: Ryan Reynolds, Hope Davis, Melissa McCarthy
Studio/Run Time: Newmarket Films, 99 mins.

As a feature directorial debut, The Nines is sharper than I’d expect from the guy who wrote the Charlie’s Angels movies, but still, it peaks early. Consisting of three segments that star the same three actors playing three roles each, the film begins with Ryan Reynolds as a TV star on house arrest for possession of crack, Melissa McCarthy as a publicist keeping an eye on him, and Hope Davis as the bored housewife next door. Over the backyard fence, Davis smirks that she, too, is on house arrest, an example of the witty bite that writer/director John August weaves in so effortlessly. The characters make knowing references to Misery, but the film’s charm begins to evaporate in the gimicky second act and then vanishes entirely in the dreamy sci-fi finale that tries to link everything together and blow some minds. August is on solid ground when he’s riffing on Stephen King and celebrities, but he’s stretching when he tries to be David Lynch, which would require a distinctly different kind of brain damage than this Hollywood screenwriter can simulate.

Under-realized power-pop supergroup makes its best album

I've tended to file the New Pornographers away in my mind as essentially a power-pop group with a certain amount of indie-rock clothing, which would tend to trap them in not one but two echo chambers.

Generally, power-pop records are largely known quantities before you even play a single note. And for all its aesthetic and musical virtues as a genre, so often power pop is neither particularly popular nor necessarily packed with power. Save for the odd distorted chord, the ubiquitous chirpy organs and singalong lyrics are more pinkish wafts of fancy than an actual gut-level wallop, and it goes without saying how far the “pop” of today’s airwaves has strayed from the cooing template of The Raspberries or their ‘50s/’60s idols. Like deep blues, it has become a sort of classical form best and most appreciated by music-geeks who can spot the influences and understand the nuances of their repackaging and assimilation into each new song.

And while the potential limits and pitfalls of indie-rock flag-waving are a screed best saved for a longer column, it suffices to say that the tendency toward snarky song titles, self-indulgent and somewhat half-assed performances (notable particularly this year at Coachella, where The New Pornos burned about 10 minutes making fun of a particularly plangent Travis set one stage away), and a general air of inside jokery either forces you to shower the band with compliments to show you’re cool enough to be in the club or else become a total hater and strain to cut them down to size.

As an ersatz supergroup, often The New Pornographers feel like less than the sum of their parts. Neko Case’s overmodest involvement in the group has always been something of a tease or red herring, and their records generally lack that sense of courageous howl against a foreboding wilderness that shakes your corners when you hear one of her solo albums. And while Dan Bejar’s songs are among the more ornate in The New Pornos canon, his work with the group lacks the complexity and intensity of Destroyer’s best work. Even the joyful classicism of Carl Newman’s Zumpano days sometimes seems blunted by the multitude of cooks and apparent overthought.

Still, for all their on-paper flaws and tendency to be overrated for the wrong reasons, The New Pornographers’ records are always enjoyable and consistently work as collections of songs. They’re the sorts of albums you complain about even while you buy them, and up until sometime after the second listen when you’re stuck with the reality that you’d actually like to turn around and listen to the thing again.

For its part, Challengers stands out as a particularly strong effort within a very even catalog. More than the band’s other works, it carries a sense of place, as “Myriad Harbour” offers a lyrical, panoramic freeze-frame of New York while the “heat wave humming in the house of cards” in “Unguided” seems a similarly urban stir, the song unfolding into a zoom-out anthem. There’s a thread of romantic claustrophobia that winds its way through the music’s textures and rhythms, and it zings like a West Village wind on the first snap of autumn. As an album built by, for and about young overthinking urbanites, it has a knowing charisma that’s never cloying, even as it retreads familiar motifs. (“Failsafe” borrows the tremolo rumble from “How Soon Is Now,” and “Mutiny I Promise You” takes the “Louie Louie” riff, spins it 45 degrees and chirps it up before burying it under a sugarburst chorus.)

The New Pornographers’ performances on Challengers are consistently excellent. Newman’s voice has warmed and grown more open while, for her part, Case’s appearances are sparse but dazzling, particularly on the title track, where two apparent lovers contemplate untangling themselves from separate cohabitations against guitar strums and a piano part so warm and open that you know they’ll manage to do it.

Listening to Challengers, one gets the sense that The New Pornographers are shooting higher than even before—there’s even a reassuring polish of darker strains in the American present, with “Adventures in Solitude” unleashing a loving “we thought we lost you … welcome back” to a soldier returning from war and “My Rights Versus Yours” contemplating the exercise of power and the turns of history over a French horn, effortless guitar and a vocoder. It’s a nuanced, artfully constructed record that gets better with each listen and crawls its way out of any box you might choose to put it in.

Choice selections from reigning Queen of American Music's canon get second, glorious look

Great voices create civilizations. They sing, compose, interpret, collect and appropriate living words, offering them up in songs befitting the occasions, events and epochs in the stories they sing. The great voices lyricize reality. They tell us what happened, what’s going on, and how it all feels. As Shakespeare put it, they give to an otherwise airy nothingness a local habitation, a name and a way of looking at our own life together.

By now, no self-respecting listener of English-language music should require a persuasive word when it comes to the majesty of Emmylou Harris. Like Johnny Cash or Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen, she is not of an age, but for all time. Now, with Songbird: Rare Tracks and Forgotten Gems, we’re made to understand that her awesome stature as a vocalist is part and parcel with her career as a lyrical archivist whose own songwriting is seamlessly connected to her role as a faithful steward of other people's songs. Her voice gives life to other voices, creating new contexts for people’s stories to be told. Her records make a record of the times. Her songs are a summons to research. Her music bears witness.

This 78-track retrospective, it must be said, is only the tip of the iceberg (one longs for her celebrated take on Donna Summer’s “On the Radio,” or Sinead O’Connor’s “This Is To Mother You”), but it’s the tip of the iceberg according to Emmylou. It’s as if the shifting logic and personnel of record companies finally gave light of day to the treasures with which they were entrusted. “Important gems in the string of pearls that each album strives to become,” Harris calls them.

Never programmed to practice the music of the country as “country music,” she was never made to do it “the right way,” as she puts it. This freed her to make music the way that felt right to her. Beginning with a 1969 recording of "Clocks," introducing us to the "funny little people dancing ’round my head,” we’re dropped into a wide-open space of democratic dignity where stirring renditions of The Louvin Brothers’ “Satan’s Jewel Crown” and Bruce Springsteen’s “My Father’s House” can reside next to live footage of a performance of John Lennon’s “Imagine.” She’s drawn to any and all primal longing, and Songbird covers a wide range of melancholy; all of it thick with human-interest stories.

Hearing “Prayer in Open D” or Julie Miller’s “All My Tears” (included here in the Spyboy versions) it’s odd to imagine Harris—as a very young woman who sang Dylan’s “To Ramona” over and over again—writing to Pete Seeger to share her fear that she’d known too little hardship to sing songs of lament and suffering with conviction. Seeger wrote her back and assured her that a hard time or two was likely just around the corner.

She credits Gram Parsons with giving her "whatever is unique in my voice" but the statement is belied by a moving version of Bill and Taffy Danoff's "Falling In A Deep Hole" (heretofore unreleased, Harris has no memory of the recording, but it predates her introduction to Parsons). Longtime listeners will also be overjoyed to hear a Daniel Lanois-produced version of “In The Garden,” originally recorded for the All The Pretty Horses soundtrack.

Like most musical luminaries whose work is associated with the country genre, the country-music industry has often responded to her best work with ambivalence at best and, at worst, blatant disregard. Back in 1975, long before “alt.country” became all the rage, Harris was recording Beatles songs and receiving a chilly critical response (“For No One” from Pieces of the Sky is included here). And while Nashville almost turned a blind eye to the proposed demolition of the historic Ryman Auditorium (now touted as the Mecca of country music), Harris recorded a live album there (“Get Up John” and “If I Could Be There” from 1992’s At The Ryman also appear). The record is widely credited with waking up Music City to its own legacy.

Songbird reminds us of the scope of Harris’ creativity and how it’s always connected to her magnanimity, her deep affections and her deep concerns. Great music always defies genres. It won’t be boundaried by marketing categories. And the big music of Emmylou includes Dolly Parton, Beck, George Jones, Chrissie Hynde, Linda Ronstadt, Steve Earle and Johnny Cash. The sad, sweet old cosmos she channels, song after song, continues to defy commodification.

Sensitive Ritter meets new outlaw Ritter with superlative results

Well-crafted, traditional tunes can expand our historical memory and shed light on the human condition; for this, they’re indispensable. (And here it’s worth pausing a moment to think about what “traditional” could possibly mean after global media saturation. That’s a nasty piece of work to inflict on a review of someone’s album, even one as resilient as The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter, so in this case let’s just say it’s shorthand for folk-derived genres that don’t heavily avail themselves of postmodern theory or emergent technologies.)

But as much as I enjoy, say, North Carolina Public Radio’s Back Porch Music, my natural disposition tends toward musical styles where embryonic technology has enabled startling new expressions of old ideas about incantation, harmony, meditation and rhythm. I love ambient music and rap, techno and noise, electro-pop and laptop drones. I don’t imagine these styles to be superior to folk idioms predating the extended historical moment when recording technology, consumer electronics, and the digital revolution created new paradigms for making and thinking about music. It’s just that my interest tilts toward the emergent in all things.

I find the emergent to be particularly suppressed in the genre known loosely as “Americana,” and if a band is playing into this genre, it takes a lot to get my attention. Sufjan Stevens? Yawn. Wilco, other than Yankee Hotel Foxtrot? Double-yawn. But I like Josh Ritter. I like Josh Ritter a lot. He’s just that good; the kind of songwriter that sweeps away the techno-conceptual apparatus from my listening habits and opens my ears to more time-worn, pithy expressions of truth. Put simply, Ritter is the most gifted interpreter of Americana, as an arranger and a lyricist, working today.

Granted, just like on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Ritter manages to work some awfully extraterrestrial noises into his earthy, traditional tunes. The first sounds we hear on Historical Conquests—on rambling stomper “To the Dogs or Whoever”—are icy splinters of guitar and piano just like the ones that arduously hoist the Arcade Fire’s “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)” aloft, and later in the song, what sounds like reversed, flanged piano makes ragged incisions in the juke-joint shimmy. But these moments are few and far between, artfully book-ending and supplementing the long, limpid passages.

Make no mistake: despite his knack for oddball twists, Ritter could be the Americana poster boy. The Idaho-born musician named one of his albums The Golden Age of Radio, got one of his songs (“Wings”) covered by Joan Baez, created his own American History Through Narrative Folk Music major at Oberlin (after studying the decidedly un-folk field of neuroscience), and has a rough-and-ready croon that mixes a heavy dose of Dylan with a dash of Steve Earle's durable twang (in fact, jangling country ballad, “Open Doors,” has a pronounced melodic similarity to Earle’s “Fearless Heart”) and a fine dusting of Appalachian grit.

And here the influences threaten to issue forth uncontrollably: because Ritter is mining such a rich seam of American songcraft, you’ll hear parallels to Springsteen, Woody Guthrie and Townes Van Zandt. Canadian songcraft, too—how could one not be reminded of Leonard Cohen when Ritter sings a parable about Joan of Arc, Calamity Jane and Florence Nightingale in the belly of a whale, or whenever he’s couching complex human transactions in dense extended metaphors? But instead of bogging down in a catalog of incidental echoes, we’d do better to think about what’s actually happening on the album.

Ritter’s last record, 2006’s excellent The Animal Years, was a carefully constructed affair. Despite midtempo rockers like “Lillian, Egypt” and “Wolves,” it was relatively somber, dominated by twinkling, slow-building waves of guitar and piano. But where The Animal Years excelled in the art of restraint, Historical Conquests excels in exuberance. Ritter and producer/bandmate Sam Kassirer packed a Maine farmhouse with eager musicians, beefed up Ritter’s compositions with keyboards, strings and horns, and chiseled the tunes into dirty, barn-burning bruisers and subtle, rough-hewn ballads. The resulting album is as lean, rambunctious and snarling as its predecessor was stately.

Despite his rep as a sensitive troubadour, Ritter can talk tough. Gunslinger imagery peppers the album, especially on “Mind’s Eye.” Low, sustained piano chords echo through a concertina-wire guitar slash, and Ritter bites off each syllable like the pin of a hand grenade. “I got you in my mind’s eye,” he sings, and while he may be waiting on the “bullet that [he’ll] never see come,” one feels more apprehension for whomever he's addressing, as he makes his “mind’s eye” sound more like a bull’s-eye. Liam Hurley’s muscular drums, which splash and explode across the record, lend credibility to the slit-eyed outlaw stance Ritter adopts on the edgier songs.

But when he’s not addressing “real mean mommas,” as on the piano-fueled rave-up “Real Long Distance,” Ritter can still do gentle with aplomb. On “The Temptation of Adam,” amid feathery acoustic arpeggios and breathy horns, he spins out a pitch-perfect vignette about tentative love inside a bomb shelter, letting most of the grit sift out of his voice. He affects the same frictionless purr on “Still Beating,” a mushy yet affecting ballad that slowly lathers flickering acoustic guitars into a lambent orchestral blur. And two different versions of “Wait for Love” find him at his loosest and most retiring, intoning the hopeful refrain all around a shaggy chord progression.

While it’s tempting to divide Ritter's songs into two piles—"bawlers" and “brawlers”—to take a cue from Tom Waits is a mistake: Any given track on Historical Conquests would be a bit of both. Nowhere is this balance of emotional vulnerability and square-jawed resolve more perfectly balanced than on album standout “Rumors,” where Ritter narrates the tale of a heartbroken musician who “can’t seem to forget you, and the music’s never loud enough.” Creeping piano and drunkenly lovelorn horns tensely interlock to evoke the sorrow-dampening music, and while Ritter could’ve gone too far by inserting explicit musical counterparts to lyrics like “I put a whip to the kick drum” and “the string section’s screaming like horses in a barn burning up,” he doesn’t—he’s got too much tact and talent to fall back on such ham-handed gestures.

Indie rockers teach us to say embarrassing stuff without embarrassing ourselves

From belching, primal rockabilly to the lurid excesses of contemporary divas, messy and shameless displays of emotion have long been a cornerstone of pop music. It gets a lot more complicated (and usually less satisfying) when irony and other self-conscious devices enter the mix, however few things are more off-putting than narcissists pretending they’re too cool to bare their souls, while actually inviting you to thrill to every detached sigh. But, as Jerry Lee Lewis might say, if you’re not listening to tap into someone’s deepest emotions, what’s the damn point?

Craft and polish can still be a significant part of the process. Early Roxy Music (in the Eno days) is a perfect example of how concept-rich high art can be melded with basic rock ‘n’ roll, amplifying, rather than diminishing, the raging passions that shape the songs. In its more modest way, Earlimart’s gently mesmerizing Mentor Tormentor is another. A superficial taste of the California trio's fifth album might lead to suspicions of easy-listening hipster mush, since the sweeping widescreen melodies, the elegant arrangements and Aaron Espinoza’s apologetic vocals could be mistaken for inducements to roll over and go back to sleep. But for those who listen closely, there’s a rich bounty of frustration, disappointment and hurt feelings to explore.

The soul of Mentor Tormentor can be found in the unsaid, the contradictions and the context, rather than on its soothing surface. The album kicks off with the most Roxy Music-leaning song of the bunch: As the dramatic chords of “Fakey Fake” build like a gathering storm, Espinoza croons a queasy little tale of role-playing, describing a relationship where one person victimizes the other, and he also implies that the roles are ultimately interchangeable. Similar scenarios of disconnected lovers create a mood of nagging malcontent throughout the album.

Ariana Murray takes a rare lead vocal on the graceful, wrenching piano lament "Happy Alone," throwing out the cutting question, “Would it be fair to say you’re in love with love?” and wishing she could manage by herself, since this seems to be her fate. Laced with ominous heartbreak strings, “The World” strikes a similarly downcast chord, asking, “The world is all around us, but have you noticed me?” (Alas, it appears the answer is no.) A tug of war between wanting not to care and caring too much erupts in the airy “Don’t Think About Me,” the title of which echoes the old Simple Minds hit “Don’t You (Forget About Me).” Espinoza murmurs, “Do you ever think about me?” before concluding, “It’s just too bad.”

Before relegating the poor sap to loser purgatory, however, note that there’s usually a strong streak of resentment—even open hostility—lurking in the most pitiful also-ran. Although “The Little Things” finds Espinoza pathetically sighing, "Everyone I Know is running out of love," a curdled, irritable edge creeps into his voice on the breakneck “Everybody Knows Everybody,” where this presumed wimp confesses, “Only wanted revenge, or someone else to offend.” (Best not grab him on the rebound!) He confronts religious bullying in “Just Because,” muttering, “One more smack in the mouth, learn what fear is all about / Open your eyes, find your faith in Jesus Christ.” And the toe-tapping, countryish “Bloody Nose” alludes to shady capers with an unreliable partner who lies and spins tales of “drugs in the morning.”

In the mesmerizing, disturbing dream that is Mentor Tormentor, Espinoza and Murray wrap their sweetly uneasy voices around misty melodies, while the deceptively sophisticated production reinforces the sense of uncertainty. Pretty guitars, pianos and strings come and go, creating a layered wall of sound effects, but it’s hardly a seamless construction. Oddly compelling electronic squiggles and blips are embedded in virtually every track, implying that whatever takes place in the foreground, there’s a contrary undercurrent bubbling underneath. (Danger Mouse employed a similar strategy with his inspired production work on The Good, The Bad & The Queen.) Notes Espinoza near the end of the album, “Nothing makes sense / Nothing is true.”

If Mentor Tormentor is primarily about relationships, it’s also about the failure to communicate, and thus probably not good mixtape material for that new crush. The optimist may insist that all this psychodrama indicates a desire to understand and transcend misery, much as one sees a therapist in search of relief. The less-resilient—those who like to wallow in their sorrows—will likely feel even more depressed, but it’s hard to imagine a lovelier bring-down. Grab a crying towel, and enjoy.

Box set showcases criminally overlooked band

Pentangle's music never fit within well-defined musical categories. As its many-sided name suggests, the group incorporated elements of traditional British folk music, blues, jazz and '60s psychedelic jams into a heady mix that sometimes led to puzzling conundrums: opening gigs for Alice Cooper, Charles Mingus covers featuring glockenspiel, 20-minute extended improvisational workouts on centuries-old murder ballads. With a lineage like that, it figures that they're great—and virtually unknown. With any luck, The Time Has Come will restore them to the prominence they deserve.

Though overshadowed by better-known contemporaries Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span, Pentangle spearheaded the Trad revival of the late '60s and early '70s. And as this 4-CD box set amply illustrates, they defined the hoary template and then took the music to timeless, marvelously inventive places. Comprised of a jazz rhythm section, requisite folk thrush Jacqui McShee, and two superb albeit very different guitarists in medieval enthusiast John Renbourn and alternate-tunings maestro Bert Jansch (who taught Nick Drake a thing or two), Pentangle obliterated boundaries at every sonic turn.

This box set splits the difference between the career overview for newbies and the rarities/outtakes approach for hardcore fans. All of the group’s best-known songs are here, though at times in live or alternate versions. It’s a generous five hours of music, during which you’ll hear about half the tracks from the group’s six studio albums, the entire 1968 Royal Festival Hall concert (portions of which appeared on the band’s second album, Sweet Child), and several tracks from Renbourn and Jansch solo albums. It’s a fine primer, and longtime fans will appreciate the previously unreleased tracks from early-’70s TV appearances and long-forgotten soundtracks. Although the sound quality is somewhat dubious, there are incandescent takes on “Tam Lin” (same words, but very different music from the well-known Fairport Convention version) and “Pentangling,” an extended improvisation that showcases Renbourn and Jansch in full flight. With neo-folkies like Beth Orton and Devendra Banhart appearing on and championing the latter-day Jansch albums, the release of this box couldn’t be more auspicious. Want to discover a great band? The time has come.

Heartwarming indie-poppers circle all the way past irony, back to earnestness

The Brunettes arrived Stateside from their native New Zealand with plenty of attractive luggage: guitars and amplifiers borrowed from The Shins, a stage show resembling The Flaming Lips on Viagra and a sound somewhere between the lo-fidelity punch of The Velvet Underground and an opening montage from Sesame Street. Song titles include “Her Hairagami Set,” “Credit Card Mail Order” and “If You Were An Alien.” Got it? Heather Mansfield’s voice is a sweet amalgamation of Karen Carpenter and Björk that fits nicely into the group’s cheekily arranged cosmo-pop, allowing Jonathan Bree’s warbling contributions to salt everything to taste. Like their countrymen, Flight of The Conchords, The Brunettes have spread the irony thick enough to resemble a kind of postmodern earnestness.

Sounds like it’s the Editors’ end that’s starting

In 2005, Editors crafted a surprisingly solid album from oh-so-trendy sounds: taut Joy Division vocals, whisper-to-a-scream Icicle Works guitars, and an aggressive Gang of Four rhythm section. Their follow-up, An End Has a Start, returns to those same postpunk elements again—and again and again and again. Their formula works well enough on opener “Smokers Outside the Hospital Doors" when it sounds fairly new, and the interplay between Chris Urbanowicz's guitar and Ed Lay’s drums on “Escape the Nest” proves they can tweak the formula forcefully. However, An End Has a Start yields predictably diminishing returns. With lyrics that often prove as saccharine as a Keane ballad (“Every little piece of your life will mean something to someone,” Tom Smith sings on “The Weight of the World”), these 10 songs repeatedly strike the same dynamic and evoke the same vague drama, each sounding more perfunctory—and more soulless—than the previous.

The kids are better than alright

Sister vocalists Sherri and Stacy DuPree could’ve been Aly & AJ with the right highlights and pink jogging suits. But instead, on their 2005 debut, Room Noises, the young vocalists offered shiver-inducing harmonies in the midst of songs that could’ve been written by Lewis Carroll. Finally, a teen band that isn’t precious, just precociously talented. Eisley—which also includes guitarist Chauntelle DuPree, drummer Weston DuPree and bassist Garron DuPree—is a family band from the Bible Belt stronghold of Tyler, Texas, and it’s always seemed like a band for kids who prefer reading to watching TV. While Room Noises offered a childhood fantasia, Combinations takes on topics you’d expect from kids whose ages range from 15 to 23: heartache, rebellion, love. It is, almost literally, a sophomore effort. The DuPrees have become better musicians since their debut, and they want to show it off, on songs like guitar-driven opener “Many Funerals.” It's hard not to miss the wide-eyed mystery of the first album, and there’s nothing here to rival the otherworldly “Marvelous Things,” but you can’t stay in Wonderland forever. Instead, we get lovely, dreamy love songs like the title track, which Sherri wrote about her husband, New Found Glory’s Chad Gilbert. And if the music-placement folks are doing their jobs properly, “Taking Control” (a stiff-arm ditty about independence) will be featured soon on the latest teen melodrama. Because, hey, even kids who love to read enjoy a little CW.

Gretchen who?

I went to high school with girls like Miranda Lambert: cutoff-wearin’, fly-fishin’, tanning-bed tomboys who would have slapped my prissy little ass to the next county line if I so much as made eye contact with their boyfriends. And that’s the stuff country music is made of. Lambert’s clever songs, feisty delivery and glossy Nashville production make for a record that’s as empowering as it is addictive. She’s got good taste in other people’s songs, too—the Gillian Welch and David Rawlings-penned “Dry Town” is a modern-day country-music masterpiece (let’s just say it rhymes “transmission” with “fishin’”), and Lambert’s spunky rendition of “Getting Ready” would do Patty Griffin proud. But she’s got a soft side—ballads like the classic-bluegrass-influenced “Love Letters” and woe-is-me “Desperation” are just as convincing as the rockers. And what does Lambert do when she’s feeling desperate? She waits by the door with a lit cigarette and a shotgun (“Gunpowder & Lead”) and starts rowdy bar fights (“Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”). Some will write off Lambert for competing on Nashville Star, opening for Toby Keith and plastering winged guns all over her merchandise. The rest of us raise a can of Miller to the best thing that’s happened to mainstream country music since the Dixie Chicks.

Live latin-rock powerhouse fails to translate to the studio

For years, deSoL was one of those “ya gotta see ‘em live” bands—literally. The Latin rockers didn’t record a full-length album until 2004, four years after they coalesced in Asbury Park, N.J. (The self-titled disc was re-released in 2005.) It’s taken another three years for the band’s sophomore record to arrive. Unfortunately, it doesn’t realize the promise of deSoL’s debut. On My Way comes out kicking with the title song’s scraping, stinging guitar and heavy bass groove, but the muscle of that rockin’ manifesto and the addictive hook of first single, “Sing it All Night,” too quickly slackens into lite rock a la Santana’s Smooth. Albie Monterrosa is a fine vocalist and the musicianship is top-notch, but songs like “El Salvador” drag and, despite occasionally wonderful lines like, “Hey, did you hear me on the radio / trying to win your love” (“Night”), Monterrosa plucked way too many words from his rhyming dictionary. Songs like "Teardrops" actually might sound better in Spanish. On My Way, overall, is too uneven. But you still gotta see 'em live.