Pages tagged “issue 41”

Boys gone mild

Sad young literary men may find Mark, Keith and Sam familiar. The three dudes in this debut novel fitfully display their views on women and letters and our times as we follow them out of college and into East Coast life. These searching souls, like three blind mice, fail and fall and fart around. They win a little now and again, the way most of us do, but even their triumphant moments feel sad, young and, yes, literary.

Gessen offers a kind of print version of Sex and the City, a book that will most appeal to young guys who live in big cities and go to tony colleges and want to be writers, maybe, who labor in the fields of GQ style and have as many pipe dreams as bed partners.

The Russian-born author—who founded n+1, the controversial, wildly ambitious litmag—has talent, wit and now a fictive benchmark. We’ll look forward to more daring work. Dostoevsky is watching.

This unassuming husband/wife duo’s music has graced sitcoms like Grey’s Anatomy and Scrubs, not to mention Sundance hit Friends With Money and major TV ad campaigns. They’ve also collaborated with pop-star-turned-singer/songwriter Mandy Moore, and their new record Hideaway—an irresistible collection of introspective folk-pop songs—is their most delightful work to date. But at the end of the day, The Weepies are just a busy young couple trying to make beautiful music without waking the baby.

Franchise finally admits war is hell
Platform: Nintendo DS

At its core, Days of Ruin doesn’t tamper much with the time-honed formula of the Advance Wars franchise. Players take command of land, air and sea units to defeat rival armies on strategically rich maps. An intuitive rock/paper/scissors mechanic governs combat, which is deepened immeasurably by the individual units’ strengths, weaknesses and movement capabilities, as well as mechanics like terrain bonuses and fund allocation. But Days of Ruin’s dark tone definitively breaks with the franchise’s lighthearted tradition. This is evident in its setting—a post-apocalyptic dystopia—and in the talking-head sections between battles. Out with adorable cartoon officers supporting and affirming one another, seemingly oblivious to war’s human toll, and in with murderous anarchists and neo-fascists talking hardcore tactics and ethics. But this shift to a grittier realism is somewhat disappointing, as the franchise’s juxtaposition of Candyland-tone and grisly carnage has always been part of its weird charm.

Game designers prove they’re anything but green Platform: Windows Vista/XP/2000

A great puzzle game is one your brain continues to play on your eyelids long after you’ve finished. Fairway Solitaire is such a game. It’s a golf sim disguised as a card game—or is it the other way around? Each hole on its 70 courses contains a different layout of cards to be cleared. The simple premise belies remarkable complexity: Remove cards only in sequential order, or draw a new one from your pile. Leaving cards on the board results in a score above par—and the remonstration of the crowd.

The core mechanics are so well conceived that Fairway Solitaire’s polished presentation seems almost superfluous. Yet the development team has accomplished something remarkable, rendering artful visuals and high-fidelity audio. No, the game probably didn’t need ambient sounds unique to each course, nor a witty commentator. But a game this unexpected never seems necessary until you play it.

Scuba diver’s wet dream? Or just a floating goldfish?
Platform: Wii

Until now, most sandbox-style video games have leaned toward Grand Theft Auto’s design philosophy. In these living, breathing virtual worlds, players are free to act on whim. This freedom has usually meant blowing up whatever they want. Endless Ocean may be one of the first open-world games where death and destruction isn’t the primary mode of interaction. Players don a wet suit and take on the role of a freelance scuba diver. Their domain is the Manoa Lai sea, a fictional puddle in the South Pacific that’s home to a wild variety of sea life, dramatic underwater topography and, of course, tons of sunken wrecks.

Players explore Manoa Lai’s depths at their leisure. With a shimmering New Age score featuring singer Hayley Westenra, Endless Ocean aims to soothe. But the calming waters and placid aquatic wildlife can leave you snoring. None of Manoa Lai’s potentially dangerous sea life poses a threat. The bends and other potential diving maladies are off the table. The player can’t drown, die or even prune up. This invulnerability is both liberating and problematic. By stripping away any sense of danger, you also lose the giddy wonder that comes with exploding your comfort zone. When the player encounters the pulse-quickening sight of a massive humpback whale or an ancient ruin, the initial buzz quickly wears off, leaving you to seek the next point of interest.

Part of Endless Ocean’s problem is the way it shoehorns—but doesn’t fully integrate—elements of proven Nintendo games into the mix. Players can train dolphins a la Nintendogs. But they’re also required to pet all the sea life, even the spiny poisonous ones. Like Pokemon Snap, players have access to a camera, but there’s no way to personalize, share or even name their shots. It’s also Pokemon’s “gotta catch ‘em all” impulse that drives players to encounter and catalog every life form in the game. It’s hard not to become an Ahab, ruthlessly elbowing past familiar wonders in search of that last unseen fish. Endless Ocean’s violence-free approach to gaming is admirable and it has great potential as an educational tool, but the game’s emotional range feels as flat as its glassy seas.

Bay Area rapper cooks up chunky hip-hop dancehall-pop stew

If Lyrics Born’s music were a soup and you were reading the recipe, it’d be fair to assume the final product might taste downright disgusting, what with all the disparate ingredients: Pointer Sisters synths, Living Colour guitars, Bootsy Collins bass, blaxploitation horns and thoughtful raps in a Tone-Loc growl with a C.L. Smooth cadence. But, in this case, on the Asian-American MC’s fourth solo hip-hop album, the stew is tasty. Sure, the first five tracks sound like they could’ve been on a 1990s House Party soundtrack, but the flashback—as with the Ed Lover Dance-worthy “Differences”—turns out to be refreshing. From there the album shape-shifts with varying success, moving from the Rick James-ian “I’m A Phreak” and the dancehall riddim of “Top Shelf” to the poppy Toni Basil handclaps of “Do U Buy It?” The album truly is everywhere at once, and for that it at least deserves a taste.

Getting nowhere fast

In the film Waking Life, Louis Mackey poses this conundrum: “Which is the most universal human characteristic: fear or laziness?”

The answer is both, and in this, her debut novel, Tara Yellen shows us how easily—and inevitably—we get stuck in our ruts.

The employees of the Almost Home Bar and Grill are no exception. Instead of pursuing personal ambitions, they indulge in fantasies while perpetuating the behaviors that keep them down. They could do this and should do that, they think. But they never do.

Energies misplaced, they mistake the longings of the flesh for the longings of the soul—and seek to fulfill them by drinking, smoking, coupling, thieving and generally playing out a whole slew of self-destructive—or just plain futile—debaucheries.

This book is about a universal affliction—the sense of restlessness, misdirection and discontent we feel, even after we settle for the familiarity of those feelings.

Soaring pop-rock record only dips toe into emo muck

In an age when the single is king, it’s probably unfair to expect an entire album to resonate. Can we accept—even embrace—an indie-pop band that puts out seven solid songs and falters on a few, as does this accessible Austin, Texas, quartet on its new release? Yes. So let’s laud What Made Milwaukee Famous. Never mind that the last tracks wade into emo slop. The first are special: sweet and soulful vocals, some ghostly harmonies and ambitious arrangements that veer from Snow Patrol to Old 97’s to Ben Folds. Coherence isn’t this band’s thing, but that doesn’t matter much—it’s fun to marvel at how they put flamenco handclaps, chugging-train drums, orchestral piano and layered horns all on one album. We can ignore the Jason Mraz-style oversinging and kinda cloying lyrics on tracks like “To Each His Own” and “The Other Side.” Seven out of 12 ain’t bad.

BoDeans keep on keepin’ on

Sammy Llanas and Kurt Neumann—the duo behind Wisconsin’s BoDeans—are working on a fruitful 20-year partnership that’s seen highs (touring with U2) and lows (persistent obscurity). The fact that they’re still around and making records is a testament to their perseverance and to the malleability of their rootsy sound. Still, their eighth studio album and first on their new label He & He LP, adheres to the group’s modest strengths: Llanas and Neumann’s tight harmonies, plainspoken lyrics, chiming guitars and catchy hooks (see “The First Time” and “Wonder Wonder”). The album opens inanely with Llanas and Neumann’s “Pretty Ghost” (“Why you gotta be so beautiful?”), but on “Round Here Somewhere” The BoDeans settle into the durable, sometimes predictable bar rock they do best—and sustain it for 10 more songs. They haven’t changed their sound over the years, but Still suggests there’s no need to fix what ain’t broke.

Denver collective refines its earth-encompassing sound

Lauded for the ability to pluck and embellish elements from the musical heritage of Eastern European and Latin American folk traditions, DeVotchKa continues to refine its gift of blurring musical geography. While A Mad and Faithful Telling—the band’s first album of all original material since 2004’s How it Ends—doesn’t exactly break new ground, it offers a much fuller realization of dynamic and structural sensitivity. Due in large part to the underscoring of Shawn King’s distinctive percussion, the unique songs carry the band safely away from world-music clichés. The tightly organized Mariachi-meets-Balkan instrumental “Comrade Z” showcases the band’s musical proficiency, while the promenading “Blessing in Disguise” highlights the developing vibrato of singer Nick Urata. Once a distraught warble, Urata’s voice sits well within Telling’s balladry, but it struggles languidly in the urgency of songs such as “Transliterator.” These moments of misdirection are rare and, as exemplified in “The Clockwise Witness,” when the strengths of the group coalesce, the results are stunning.

Neo-Gothsters invoke Midwestern furies

This impeccably named Indiana quartet’s fourth album brims with classic Middle American imagery of death and revenge festering amidst hope for redemption. The band animates these themes with a cinematic approach to structure and melody, part Arcade Fire and part early Radiohead, all anchored by singer Adam Turla’s molasses drawl. The songs follow a loose storyline that sometimes threatens to collapse under the severity of its own ambition. Regardless, the album triumphs on the sheer energy of the band’s performances—every one of them swirling, unapologetic tours-de-force.

For sophomore album, young punks beef up sound without shedding scrappiness

On Be Your Own Pet’s debut, the Nashville teens sounded like a Muppety thrash-punk version of Yeah Yeah Yeahs or The Gossip. It would be misleading to say they’ve grown up: Thematically, Get Awkward still revolves around teenage anarchy, teenage apathy, bad drugs, fun parties, stupid boys, cute boys, preppy girls and brain-eating, and lead singer Jemina Pearl’s caterwaul is still terrifically bratty. But, musically, they’re well beyond their years, augmenting their paroxysmal tantrums with sturdy touches of glam, cock rock, ’70s metal and points outlying. Particularly format-breaking and fantastic is the unlikely pop confection “Becky,” a high-school murder melodrama that successfully weds BYOP’s signature rawness with classic girl-group content and style. While the band is ferocious and tight, Pearl in particular has attained force-of-nature caliber formidability, not just in the burgeoning mastery of her commanding rapid-fire squeal, but in her frankly sexual gaze and world-devouring disdain for all things not awesome.

FACT
This magazine article employs a time-honored literary device called Wishful Thinking.

FACT
That means some of what you are about to read is a lie.

FACT
But not the part about the chinchilla obsession.

FACT
Or the band’s landmark gig in London this summer.

When My Bloody Valentine takes the stage at the Roundhouse in London this June 20, the show will conclude a 16-year cycle for one of rock’s most fascinating bands. After the end of 1992’s Loveless tour, the last shows My Bloody Valentine performed, it seemed the musicians had pushed their aesthetic as far as it could go. Instead, they turned to the studio, where they’ve become almost superhumanly productive, despite some bizarre and devastating challenges.

The band’s earliest incarnation was nothing to write home about: a Dublin-based crew of second-rate Nick Cave wannabes. After some lineup shuffles, forgettable records, and dalliances with sunny indie pop, their style reached maturity in 1988 with a pair of EPs and the remarkable Isn't Anything album. It was druggy, time-bending and mercilessly loud, built around songwriter Kevin Shields’ tremolo-crazed guitar assault, a tidal wave of noise through which his and Bilinda Butcher’s breathy voices beckoned like flickers from a lighthouse. From then on, “You Made Me Realise”—its 30-second white-noise bridge sometimes expanding to more than half an hour on stage—inevitably served as the finale for their shows. An entire scene emerged around the band: “shoegazer” acts like Ride and Chapterhouse, who emulated MBV’s virtues of dreamy melodicism and blistering guitar noise.

It took three years and an extraordinary amount of money—estimates range from a third- to half-a-million dollars—to record MBV’s first masterpiece, 1992’s Loveless. Aside from Butcher’s vocals and a short sample collage by drummer Colm O’Ciosoig, Loveless was essentially Shields’ solo project: He played all the guitar parts himself, obsessively perfecting and tweaking every sound. The band was in top form on the album’s tour but—in his mind—Shields had already moved on to its next phase. For the next two years, the only MBV release was a 7” single that came with an American fanzine.

Finally, faced with an impatient record company and a band that hadn’t played on its own records in years (as well as a rapidly dwindling cash flow), Shields made a desperate move: He shelved the tapes he’d been laboring over. He spent a week teaching the band a set of 11 new songs and adjusting a microphone he’d built himself. And then, on July 21, 1994, after two years of tinkering, tweaking and woodshedding, My Bloody Valentine turned on a monophonic tape machine and recorded ...If live to one track in just over an hour.

Shields insisted that ...If had to go out unmastered and un-EQ’ed: If the suits at Island wanted him to cut the perfectionism and make a record, they had to be prepared for a record that was as raw as it got. ...If was a tougher record to love than Loveless; it was a ranting prophecy of newness instead of an enveloping wash of texture. But it was visionary stuff, and it broke the dam. For the next year and a half, there was a new EP or mini-album every month or two, while MBV’s backlog of material made its way to disc.

The drum ’n’ bass influences the band had been absorbing became gradually more evident, especially once Swiss multi-instrumentalist Alex Buess briefly joined the band for the 1995 EP Chilly and its subsequent expansion, Chinchilla. (Butcher and Shields were major chinchilla buffs—they owned more than a dozen at one point.) When, at last, five months went by in 1996 without a new My Bloody Valentine record, fans started to worry that the well had run dry again. Shields declared that he was just reconfiguring the band’s sound, and that the threat of running out of money kept him producing new work. The Riser EP made good on his promise: a ferocious, baffling record with almost no guitar, driven by O’Ciosoig and bassist Debbie Googe’s breakneck rhythms.

But that was it for over a year, with Shields instead working on a stage-musical adaptation of J.D. Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” intended for Broadway and London’s West End. (It closed after a single preview performance—large pockets of the audience, unaccustomed to Shields’ preferred volume, stormed out of the theater before the show’s conclusion.) My Bloody Valentine returned to form, and then some, with the legendary “green album,” released just in time for Christmas in 1997. It was an untitled record with ten untitled tracks, and Shields’ and Butcher’s voices were now so deep in the mix that nothing could be heard of them but a few stray phonemes.

It was the best-selling MBV record to date, but recording costs had spiraled out of control, and the band members started side projects to make ends meet—O’Ciosoig played with the Warm Inventions, and Googe with Snowpony. Shields made an unlikely deal with Axl Rose to contribute guitar parts and two legendary but yet-unheard songs, “Dying Dream” and “Empire,” to Guns N’ Roses’ Chinese Democracy. But thanks to a forgotten clause in an old recording contract, four different labels claimed the rights to the recordings. Despite Shields’ best efforts, Chinese Democracy—and G N’ R’s career—are still in limbo nearly a decade later.

Shields’ and My Bloody Valentine’s next few years are shrouded in confusion. Only a half-dozen MBV EPs were released between 1998 and 2000, although a handful of the other monochromatic, psychedelic, uncredited records that sprang up in the wake of the “green album” have been attributed to them as well. Around the same time, the band recorded original music for the video game Duke Nukem Forever, but has apparently never been able to mix it to their satisfaction.

After an “inspirational” meeting with Robert Pollard at the beginning of 2001, Shields sprang back into action, writing and recording three My Bloody Valentine albums from scratch in a single week. Étant Données, Finnegans Wake and The Sistine Chapel all have extraordinary moments, although some fans dismiss them as “rushed.”

Over the next few months, Googe, then O’Ciosoig and finally Butcher left My Bloody Valentine, for reasons they didn’t disclose at the time; Googe quit the music business altogether, assisting American writer Harper Lee with research for her second novel.

After recording four songs for the soundtrack to Lost in Translation, Shields reconvened the group. Their first step was revisiting the music of their years as a live act. The year 2003 saw two MBV box sets: the dodgy three-disc 1984-1987 and the mammoth 1987-1992, which contained three hours of live material, a pile of outtakes and five newly recorded versions of unreleased songs from the Loveless era. Sadly, the mastering didn’t go as planned. A device Shields had invented to give his old guitar tracks a three-dimensional effect caused an electromagnetic pulse, shorted out the entire studio and briefly blacked out London. In the process, Shields discovered to his horror that he’d accidentally fried all the tapes for Neil Young’s decades-in-the-making, eight-disc Archives, Vol. 1 retrospective, which was being mastered down the hall.

After an unfortunate chinchilla-related incident, Shields and Butcher found themselves broke again. Only Shields’ iron will—and a fatefully timed death in the art world—got the band through the difficult recording of their next disc, Shudder. Shields was reduced to picking up whatever commissions he could find, including playing “effects guitar” on tour with Justin Guarini and providing the final mixdown for a series of ringtones featuring the Aflac duck. Then, just as the band was about to start hawking its equipment to pay for studio time, an anonymous art collector’s will bequeathed a million pounds to The KLF’s Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, on the condition that they burn it as a reprise of their famous 1994 art project. When Drummond and Cauty refused, the will earmarked the bequest as “the next best thing”: a recording budget for My Bloody Valentine.

That brush with disaster brought MBV closer together than ever; since then, they’ve been single-mindedly dedicated to cranking out a torrent of albums. (Sometimes at the cost of other work: Dr. Dre recently explained that his Detox album still hasn’t appeared because he’s been trying to get Butcher to deliver a promised backing-vocal session since 2004.) But technology had one more cruel surprise in store.

In response to Radiohead’s In Rainbows initiative, Shields decided to make a genuinely radical move: My Bloody Valentine, he declared, would be the first major band to leave physical releases behind. All of their CDs and LPs were withdrawn from record stores, henceforth to be available solely in digital form; the hundreds of thousands of fans who returned their old discs to the band for destruction were rewarded with high-bit-rate copies and bonus material.

And then, on Christmas Day, the “Love” virus hit: a computer worm as ingenious as My Bloody Valentine’s early records, attributed to a disgruntled member of the corps of engineers who’d worked on Loveless. Within hours, every sound file attributed to post-1991 MBV on every Internet-capable computer was erased, and the few physical copies remaining from their latter-day catalog instantly became impossible-to-find collector’s items.

The band has once again been knocked off its feet, and is now returning to live performances out of necessity, concerts being the only way for its music to be heard now that “Love” erases everything they try to record. Shields remains hopeful that he’ll find a way to overcome his digital troubles, but it’s possible that My Bloody Valentine’s recording drought may have only just begun.

FACT
Since 1991’s Loveless, My Bloody Valentine has released only two tracks, both of which appeared on compilations.

Release Date: April 4
Director: Hou Hsiao-hsien
Writers: Hou, François Margolin
Cinematographer: Mark Lee
Starring: Juliette Binoche, Simon Iteanu, Fang Song
Studio/Run Time: IFC Films, 113 mins.

Chinese-born/Taiwan-raised director adapts fantastical children’s short film into beautiful movie for adults

It’s tempting to put the latest movie by Hou Hsiao-hsien into a neat little box. Although it’s not a film for kids, it’s an homage to Albert Lamorisse's endearing children’s short The Red Balloon, and at times it seems as buoyant and aimless as a helium-filled toy. Hou is working in France instead of his usual Taiwan, and with Academy Award-winning actress Juliette Binoche instead of his cast of regulars, which makes the entire project feel like a detour for an artist best known for complex, austere films about Taiwan’s pulsing present and tumultuous history.

But Hou has taken flights of fancy before. He mined his childhood memories of the warm, buzzing countryside for A Summer at Grandpa’s, and he ventured to Japan for Café Lumiere, his minimalist homage to Ozu. Even when he’s working with simple ingredients, he brings along his masterful sense of space, timing and everyday observation, which gives an actress like Binoche ample room to shine. In Flight of the Red Balloon, she’s a busy single mother, vibrant and wonderful, glowing from beginning to end.

Of course, she glows within Hou’s framework, his layers of light. He carves her tiny Parisian apartment into sections: the sliver of a kitchen, the front door that leads to chaos, the corner for video games and the table that sits front-and-center, anchoring the patient, slowly panning camera.

Lamorisse’s short is about a loner of a boy who has the best of all possible friends, an amazingly reactive balloon, but Hou’s film is a realistic look at the inside of this fantasy, at the modern-day stresses on close-knit families. He slips behind Lamorisse’s facade like the Taiwanese amateur filmmaker who takes a job as Binoche’s nanny, an echo of Hou within his own story; the nanny even tells us how special effects make the balloon move.

Since Flight falls at the simple-but-elegant end of Hou's spectrum, the mysterious and lyrical finale in the Musée D'Orsay comes as a surprise; this balloon is anchored by some heft.

Release Date: March 28
Director: Pierre Salvadori
Writers: Benoît Graffin, Salvadori
Cinematographer: Gilles Henry
Starring: Gad Elmaleh, Audrey Tautou, Marie-Christine Adam
Studio/Run Time: Samuel Goldwyn Films, 103 mins.

French gold diggers hit rock bottom in flaccid romance

Priceless strives to capture the humor of classic date movies like Pretty Woman and French Kiss, but can’t raise the camera past its superficial sex appeal and product placement. While the eye candy of Audrey Tautou (Amelie) and Gad Elmaleh is alluring, the characters—two modern-day prostitutes who manipulate themselves into the bank accounts and undergarments of the idle rich—have the depth of a bidet. The script completely neuters Tautou’s bright-eyed charm, making her a callous gold digger completely undeserving of Elmaleh’s desperate adoration. This ambiguous morality completely repels the appeal of their chemistry. The contemptibly naive men (and woman) who subject themselves to this obtuse manipulation are just as unlikable as the actual con artists, leaving no sympathetic characters. The film’s revolutionary message, that it’s more fun to have sex with someone you love than for money, should already be obvious.

Yuk, comma, yuk yuk, period

The McSweeney’s Joke Book of Book Jokes will have you laughing at the dead. John Hodgman, in his introduction, says authors and books are funny “because they are sad. They are as sad as zeppelins are, they wish to soar, but they are using a technology that is old, largely forgotten, highly flammable.”

Still, the combustible pages contain some damn funny parodies. Here is Cormac McCarthy writing a letter to the editor of the Santa Fe New Mexican: “A traffic light is needed, and that soon. Or we will continue to inhibit our temporary souls which wait like cowed children at stop signs, as it always was before those signs crept like stalks from the Earth.”

In “Jane Eyre Runs for President,” the candidate complains about the insufferable Chris Matthews of MSNBC: “I curl my fists into tiny balls beneath the interview table.”

The 70+ pieces in the book are a lot funnier than sad.

Release Date: April 4
Director: Martin Scorsese
Cinematographer: Robert Richardson
Starring: Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts, Ronnie Wood
Studio/Run Time: Paramount Vantage, 120 mins.

Martin Scorsese gets his ya-ya's out

To paraphrase what the late Douglas Adams once wrote about highway bypasses, you’ve got to make Rolling Stones documentaries. Everyone knows that. And anybody wanting to try will be stepping to weighty company: the Maysles brothers’ apocalyptic Altamont chronicle Gimme Shelter (1970), where a man is beaten to death with a pool cue; Jean-Luc Godard’s accidental prequel Sympathy For the Devil/One Plus One (1968), filled with lush in-studio shots of the Stones creating the film’s title song; Robert Frank’s debauched and unreleasable Cocksucker Blues (1972), where the band jams a soundtrack to a roadie/groupie mini-orgy on its private jet. And let no fan of cinema forget Julien Temple & co.’s IMAX spectacular At the Max (1991), notable for being really, really big.

Enter Martin Scorsese, who is onscreen from the first moments of Shine a Light, suited and gesticulating in urgent, vérité black-and-white. While we get snippets of the Stones offstage in various international locales, city names flashing importantly, Scorsese plays the part of monomaniacal director. It’s a hopefully intentional caricature. As he winds up to the October 2006 show, the Stones feel almost like incidental characters.

“That’s normal movie stuff, is it?” drummer Charlie Watts offers dryly at the banks of lights being set up in Manhattan’s Beacon Theater. In a scene that recalls A Hard Day’s Night, the band goes through a series of meet-and-greets with Bill and Hillary Clinton. Grizzled Ronnie Wood meets matronly Dorothy Rodham. Hilarity briefly ensues.

“Hello Mr. Clinton, I’m Bushed,” Keith Richards cracks to Watts during a break in the endless photo op, atavistic schoolboy insolence kicking in. But sometimes benefits for ex-presidents (cheap seats: literally $60,000) require a little hand-shaking, and the Stones are happy to play the game—especially because it ensures them the ability to remake the Beacon’s stage, adding catwalks and stocking the well-spaced front row with attractive people.

The band hits with “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” and Scorsese’s sympathies are obvious. The Stones get total coverage—which is to say that there are cameras on Jagger, Richards, Wood and Watts. If they happen to pick up bassist Daryl Jones, the backing vocalists, horn section (led by longtime saxophonist Bobby Keys, once credited as “TV Repairman” with Richards in Cocksucker Blues for their actions on a hotel balcony) or acoustic stunt guitarist Blondie Chaplin, so be it. Indeed, when Richards has a moment with Keys during “Live With Me,” the cameras are all trained on Jagger, grinding with special guest Christina Aguilera. Where David Byrne and Jonathan Demme cloaked roadies in black in reference to Japanese Noh theater for Stop Making Sense, Scorsese simply edits them out.

Pulling from what Jagger calls their “medium-known” songs, the Stones rely more on charisma than musicianship to sell a set without many greatest hits. Musically, the songs occasionally stretch Jagger’s credibility, his scatting during “Shattered" helplessly recalling Jack Black, his balladeering diminished to overarticulation during “As Tears Go By.” Jack White emerges for a joyful “Loving Cup,” growling along with Jagger.

They’re still Stones songs, though, and carry a certain weight for that alone. When the over-40-year-old band finally gets to the hits and Jagger prances familiarly in from the theater’s rear during the introduction to “Sympathy For the Devil,” the continuum becomes obvious: the London dandies performing this song for Godard’s camera, in front of pool-cue-wielding Hell’s Angels on a Northern California motor speedway and, now, at a party attended by international heads of state.

Besides the occasional and quite welcome newsreel flashback, Shine a Light has no architecture or ambition besides being a late-period concert film. Only after the music begins does one realize how entertaining Scorsese’s presence was, and how—besides himself—he has nothing at all to offer his well-filmed subjects. He barely even tries.

Just as the Stones use their own magnetism as a conceit to cloak musical inadequacies, Scorsese uses the notion of the silver screen to cloak his. Shine a Light is worth seeing in a movie theater, because it’s cool to see the Stones in a movie theater. After that, it’ll just feel like another shark-jumping concert DVD. Hopefully there’ll be some cool bonus features.

Emotionally intricate and exquisitely crafted, Unaccustomed Earth’s descriptions of love and conflict are rendered through the lives of people whose traditions include arranged marriages and cultural cohesion. Much of the older generation seeks to honor tradition, and the younger seeks to explore personal choices.

“Only Goodness” poignantly deals with such choices, as an exceedingly successful daughter struggles with guilt over her role in her younger brother’s personal failures. Lahiri’s masterful unspooling of time allows us to freshly experience the characters’ hopes and their dread.

The longer form of this collection straddles those of Lahiri’s first two books, the Pulitzer Prize-winning short-story collection Interpreter of Maladies and the acclaimed novel The Namesake. In some ways, it mirrors the predicament of her characters—Indian Americans who, as in the previous works, straddle cultures. In essence, the stories compare the lives of young, American-reared Indians to the lives of their parents who immigrated to America, parents who have worked hard to establish family security, holding on to Indian traditions as they try to make their offspring successful American citizens.

The source of the book’s title is its epigraph, from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Custom-House, which ruminates on the good to be gained from a family’s diaspora. It reads in part, “My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.”

Indeed, the title story concerns an adult daughter and her widowed father who find themselves in unfamiliar territory. The daughter, Ruma—after being well educated and earning a six-figure income as an attorney—has become a stay-at-home mom to her preschool-age son as she awaits the birth of her second child. Having moved from Brooklyn to Seattle, where her American husband has a new job, she considers whether to ask her father—visiting from his new one-bedroom place in Pennsylvania—to move in with her family, as would be traditionally expected of her.

Having never been very close to him—never even alone with him because of his role as bread-winner and her mother’s constant presence—Ruma fears catering to him as her traditional mother did. Shifting from the daughter’s perspective to the father’s, the story flashes back in time through memory exploring the disparate and overlapping emotions of these two characters. Sections of a puzzle slowly fit together to reveal the layered realities of father and daughter.

One reality is that, for the father, Ruma “resembled his wife so strongly that he could not bear to look at her directly.” Another is that, despite Ruma’s reluctance to care for her father, she finds herself living her mother’s life, tending to children and home while her husband travels for work. Meanwhile, her father—a self-sufficient world traveler since the death of his wife—has a girlfriend he’s reluctant to reveal. And he encourages Ruma to reconsider giving up the career for which she has worked so hard. Ultimately, the story is about change, showing that as younger generations advance into their adult lives and culturally diverse futures, older generations slip away, either in death or into ways of life parenthood kept from them. This, too, is unaccustomed earth.

In “Hell-Heaven,” the book’s second and shortest story, a young girl observes her mother’s friendship with a Bengali grad student who is new to Cambridge, Mass., and happy to meet a Bengali family so far from Calcutta. Clearly but chastely attracted to Pranab Chakraborty, Usha’s mother cares for him like a wife—she’s happy when he visits (cooking and primping for him), and sulks when he’s away. While the girl’s father somberly pursues his own research, the mother, daughter and Pranab entertain each other until Pranab falls in love and marries Deborah, an American student.

When Deborah invites Usha to stay longer at the wedding reception as her parents are ready to leave, her mother says no. (“As we drove home from the wedding, I told my mother for the first but not the last time in my life, that I hated her.”) One of Lahiri’s great strengths is to concentrate myriad conflicts into individual scenes like this, where cultural, romantic and family betrayal coalesce.

Stories of star-crossed lovers are not new, but when handled by Lahiri in the book’s second section, “Hema and Kaushik” becomes a nearly perfect example of the linked story form. Mostly epistolary, the stories are so richly detailed in their accounting of time, and so socially layered, that the meeting feels convincingly like destiny rather than contrivance.

In a reversal of a Jane Austen romance, the section ponders what could cause a well-educated, internationally aware Indian American woman to choose an arranged marriage to a man she cannot love. Like Austen, Lahiri is brilliant at describing ambivalent emotions, unleavened by humor. And the romantic novel’s standard is present: The story’s male object of desire is handsome, aloof and adventurous—a photojournalist documenting world horrors.

Almost all of Lahiri’s characters are driven by the pressure to succeed. Attending Harvard, MIT or the London School of Economics, hardly anyone is mediocre. And for all of their cultural awareness, the Indian characters seem inexplicably unaware of American ethnicities other than Caucasians. But these are interesting omissions, once again suggesting personal and cultural choices. As Lahiri’s Indian characters become more immersed in America, it seems they will attend to even more of its riches and sorrows.

John Holman is the author of Luminous Mysteries and Director of the creative-writing program at Georgia State University.

Basia Bulat can’t remember exactly when she started taking herself seriously. But at some point (“Maybe three or four years ago?” she figures. “No, three? Three and a half?”), the 24-year-old Ontarian went from being “that girl with the guitar outside, playing the Ghostbusters theme song,” to that girl laying down tracks with Howard Bilerman at his Hotel 2 Tango studio, to that girl with the Rough Trade debut album. Oh, My Darling is a collection of songs Bulat penned in her teens and early 20s and recorded in spurts over the last few years. It’s a spry, wistful jaunt through late adolescence, and—though green—her backwoodsy chamber pop boasts dazzling potential. For that reason and the following, we’re happy to wait three, four or however many years ’til the promise pays off in full.

She’s an indiscriminate instrumentalist.
After cutting her teeth on the ivories, Bulat arrived at her current mainstays—guitar and autoharp—via upright bass and saxophone. And then came the ukelin. “It doesn’t look like a ukulele or a violin, but they claim it’s a cross,” she says. “I find all these misfit instruments at garage sales or on eBay that no one else can play or wants to play. And I can’t play them either, but they look really cool.”

She’s bilingual and whimsical.
Growing up in the suburbs of Toronto, Bulat was transfixed by the dancing skeletons (les squelettes) featured on Telefrançais, a TV show (hosted by a talking pineapple, l’ananas) aimed at teaching French to Canadian kids. She pays tribute to the boogieing bones in her music video for “In the Night,” one of Darling’s standout tracks.

She’s folk and anti-folk.
Though Bulat cites acts like the Carter Family and the folkways tunes collected by bohemian archivist Harry Smith as major influences, she’s no traditionalist. “We did this showcase with Jeffrey Lewis, which was really fun because he’s amazing,” she enthuses. “Herman Dune and all those guys—I’m kind of in love with that. Kimya Dawson has been one of my favorites for years.”

She’s well-versed in, well, verse.
While studying English literature at the University of Western Ontario, she became enamored with the works of American poets like Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman—the latter of whom she particularly admires for his lifelong obsession with revising his pseudo-autobiographical masterpiece Leaves of Grass. Hopefully, she’ll remain similarly unsatisfied.

Hometown: Toronto
Album: Oh, My Darling
For fans of: Feist, Jenny Lewis, Neutral Milk Hotel

Master of gloom continues drift toward rousing rock anthems

Coming after an unexpected detour with Grinderman, the brutishly snarling garage band he fronted with three Bad Seeds alumni, it’s no surprise that Nick Cave’s official return to the family fold further deconstructs the frenzied sprawl explored on 2004’s Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus. But few traces of the brooding piano balladry or subtle orchestral elegance that formed that set’s second half remain, as Cave resumes his conflicted-evangelist role with leering intensity. He wraps these 11 character-driven songs in unkempt organ grooves and smoldering choruses that emphasize primal energy over careful craftsmanship. But despite the melodic directness and eruptions of guitar feedback, the emphasis is squarely on Cave’s writing, and his portentous storytelling has rarely been more vivid. In his hands, Lazarus is resurrected in modern NYC and is hounded by the paparazzi into a life of drug abuse. Confused protagonists wander lonely landscapes, pursued by monsters and posing questions to God. In other words—even though the mood is more menacing than morose—it’s vintage Cave.

Both kinds of music: indie and rock

Blog-hype victims for a SXSW minute in 2006, Minneapolis’ Tapes ’N Tapes get to work on being a band on sophomore album Walk It Off. While retaining just enough self-subversion to make it sound properly indie (a voice crack here, a buried vocal there), they’re the sound of Stephen Malkmus and Isaac Brock’s spasmodically unique disaffection regularized into the pulse of modern alt-rock. “Demon Apple” is a demented blues march—Dave Fridmann’s spaciously psychedelic production framing singer Josh Grier’s promise (that “we will be in touch with time”) before a bridge leads to a thrashing coda. “Blunt” likewise builds to an explosion that owes as much to the Warped Tour’s descendents as the original Lollapa-losers. Satisfactions abound, even if Tapes ’N Tapes’ concept-free guitar hooks make them a bit hard to differentiate from other bands ’n bands.

Boys just wanna have fun

Following its pair of bizarrely excellent albums for tiny indie imprint Ace Fu, Man Man has signed to Anti- Records, and it feels like some sort of alien-to-mothership homecoming. After all, aside from the Philadelphia quintet being granted a larger platform from which to spew its raucous circus chants, Man Man is now labelmate to fellow shit-stirrers Nick Cave and Tom Waits.

Some curmudgeonly purists will inevitably scream “sell out,” concerned that a larger imprint will corrupt such a weird young band. Not only is this scenario irrelevant (remember those labelmates?), Man Man is too gloriously oddball and defiant to be swept up in some puerile notion of what’s mainstream or accessible. To bastardize a Young Jeezy lyrical nugget, the closest the members of Man Man have ever been to commercial is when they watch TV.

Of course, we must acknowledge the band’s songs. Those unassailably joyous songs—bursting with xylophone, bouncy piano, wailing horns, children’s toys and the gruff, occasionally mournful noises emanating from lead singer Honus Honus. Rabbit Habits traffics in familiar Man Man territory: namely, the strange playground where all of these elements not only cohabitate peacefully but actually collaborate. Indeed, it’s the same fertile, unpredictable soil from whence Waits, Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa unearthed their muse—and these reference points are both apt and, unfortunately, overused in describing these Pennsylvanian knuckleheads.

What isn’t said enough about Man Man is that the group creates damn fine compositions. Some of them are goofy, and many weird, but these are the songs trapped in our dreams—songs filled with notions most of us are too sheltered or terrified to indulge. These songs are unhinged and unself-conscious. They are what rock ’n’ roll is meant to be and, frankly, what most rock bands have forgotten altogether: These songs are fun.

The Deal sisters stumble back into the sunshine for another winning set of delicate heartbreakers

Four songs into Mountain Battles, Breeders singer/guitarist Kim Deal announces in her sweet, pensive hiss, “No council, no grand strategy, no sword to fall on … just the light on my face.” This simple statement of purpose comes amidst the gentle minimalism of “We’re Gonna Rise,” the kind of gorgeously gauzy song that made The Breeders one of the more revered bands of the alternative-rock era.

“We’re Gonna Rise” isn’t really about the plight of a group that spends five to ten years between albums. It’s hard to know exactly what it is about, since Deal’s lyrics are as compellingly vague as the music. But the song could refer to Deal and her identical twin sister Kelley’s struggles to maintain control of their lives long enough to put out a new set of music on a regular basis.

Let’s rewind: The Breeders formed in 1988 as a side project for Kim Deal, the frustrated, bass-playing supporting songwriter for the Pixies who was held back by domineering frontman Black Francis. Deal and another frustrated supporting songwriter, Tanya Donelly of Throwing Muses, recorded The Breeders’ outstanding debut, Pod, as an outlet for their pent-up creativity. But the group turned out to be more Deal than Donelly, and the former Muse soon left to form her own band, Belly. Deal worked uncharacteristically quickly at putting together a new Breeders lineup, with sister Kelley replacing Donelly. The result was 1993’s Last Splash, a now-classic album that benefited from the post-Nirvana alt-rock boom. It reached No. 33 on the Billboard 200 albums chart and spawned the No. 2 modern-rock hit “Cannonball.”

For fair-weather alt-rock fans, that’s where the story ended—The Breeders were a one-hit wonder, bound for VH1’s “Where Are They Now?” junk heap. The assumption was reasonable, given that they were soon sharing pop gossip columns with Courtney Love, their drug problems and squandered royalties overshadowing any new musical projects. In 1995, while Kelley Deal was in rehab for a heroin addiction, Kim released an album by a new band, The Amps, and then promptly disappeared. Kelley surfaced from rehab a year later with the Kelley Deal 6000, released a pair of albums, in 1996 and 1997 respectively, and then also disappeared. End of story. Or so we thought.

A funny thing happened in 2000, seven years after Last Splash. The sisters announced they’d reformed the band with guitarist Richard Presley and bassist Mando Lopez, both former members of West Coast hardcore band Fear, and punk drummer Jose Medeles. The resulting album, Title TK, was as good as anything The Breeders had ever released. But it was fleeting. Years passed, Deal got back together with the Pixies for some high-profile reunion shows, and The Breeders seemed to be gone again.

Wasn’t it Alice Walker who wrote about not being able to keep a good woman down? If that’s true, then it’s impossible to keep two good identical twin sisters down. What makes the Deal sisters tick is their evergreen naiveté, their willingness to probe life’s dark underbelly in a musical haze of bittersweet simplicity that sounds timeless, even downright natal. And Mountain Battles is perhaps their simplest work ever.

The album begins with the whisper-shouted words “I can feel it” in a wash of reverb over clattering, Keith Moon-like drums and occasional backward guitar loops. It comes off like arena rock in a fish aquarium, followed by the minimalist electronic garage rock of “Bang On,” which finds the Deals chanting, “I love no one and no one loves me.”

The album’s sequencing is impeccable, as the band segues into airy atmospherics for “Night of Joy” and “We’re Gonna Rise,” the album’s most tender, melancholy and meditative tracks. The Deals experiment with odd vocal juxtapositions on the gritty “German Studies,” a song that makes the angular, Wire-like experiments of younger bands like Bloc Party seem amateurish by contrast. A jazzy standup bass line gently props up the album’s spare centerpiece, “Istanbul,” which includes the mysterious chanted refrain, “Where you going? To the city. Where you going? Istanbul.”

The only real misstep on Mountain Battles is the band’s cover of “Regalame Esta Noche,” a ’60s-era bolero written by Roberto Cantoral of Los Tres Caballeros and recorded by numerous Latin stars, from Javier Solís to José Feliciano. What prompted the band to put their warbly alterna-whisper and weird Spanish phrasing to such a classic is a mystery, but the experiment doesn’t work. The song is designed to be sung from the gut, but Deal sings it as if she has marbles in her mouth. By contrast, the sisters’ twangy take on their Appalachian folk-like “Here No More” does work, in a sort of Carter Sisters-via-Ohio way.

Mountain Battles closes with its droning title track, which recalls the ’70s minimalism of Brian Eno and Robert Fripp. It’s an achingly beautiful ballad, its slurred lyrics seemingly expressing deep regret—perhaps for all the wasted time, all those years The Breeders could have spent producing so much more.

Roots rocker delivers his finest album

Matthew Ryan has played the sadsack poet for more than a decade now, and he’s not about to change. In the world Ryan inhabits, relationships are in a perpetual state of disintegration, loved ones die or are incarcerated, and nothing lasts except lingering regret and remorse. So the fact that he has a new band—the Silver State in the record’s title—shouldn’t matter that much. But it does. For the first time in his lengthy career, Ryan’s backing musicians match the whipsmart poetry and smoldering vitriol of his lyrics, and the results are endlessly satisfying—from the shambolic, ragged glory of Replacements soundalike “Hold On Firefly” and the howlingly pissed-off roots rock of “Drunk And Disappointed” to the soulful fiddle and mandolin riffs that dominate “Dulce Et Decorum Est,” his updated take on a devastating Wilfred Owen poem. There are 11 songs here, and absolutely no filler.

“I’m just tryin’ to stay clean,” Ryan rasps in one of his typically dour anthems. “You don’t know what that means / You don’t want to know.” But of course we do. And this time the terrible knowledge is accompanied by a jagged guitar line that perfectly matches the angst. It’s one of the many revelatory moments on his finest album.

Five-year-old duo looks forward by writing for 76-year-old R&B legend

Ghosts—sonic and spectral—cruise Attack & Release, the fifth album by Akron indie-blues mainstays The Black Keys. The sonic come warbling like Theremins—at least partially at the behest of producer Brian Burton (Danger Mouse)—on songs like “Strange Times” and “Lies.” The spectral arrive from the late Ike Turner, for whom the duo originally conceived the 11 songs before Turner’s cocaine overdose in December. Wonderful as they are, imagining the 76-year-old “Rocket 88” creator singing the weary gospel of “Remember When (Side A)” or the reflective “Things Ain’t Like They Used To Be” makes Dan Auerbach’s vocals sound tragically demo-like. Burton’s presence is more authentic than a moonlighting hip-hop producer might suggest, expanding the Keys’ minimalist leanings on subtly lush arrangements like “Oceans & Streams.” Contributions from avant-garde specialists Marc Ribot and Ralph Carney (drummer Patrick Carney’s uncle) grace Attack & Release with a full spectrum of haunt.