Pages tagged “issue 8”

I can’t remember which philosopher observed that life is a series of back and forth movements, from positions of risk to positions of relative safety. This is true not only on an hour-to-hour level—driving a car, then sleeping in a cozy bed—but in a larger sense. We go on life journeys, personal odysseys, and return home to regroup. In this way, we grow, we become wiser; as T.S. Eliot said, we “arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” The Innocence Mission is a band for the home half of the cycle.

In the summer of 1995, after working and going to school in Manhattan for two years, my wife and I moved back to St. Louis—my hometown. I was entering the seminary. Life seemed to stop in its tracks, because we had been moving, bustling, trying, stretching, accommodating, and now we were back on familiar ground with a stack of theology textbooks and a course schedule card. We lived with two cats in a carpeted apartment. On Sunday afternoon you might hear the dryer clicking, and occasionally the bells at St. Roch would chime. Nothing else.

For me, it was the perfect season of life in which to discover The Innocence Mission’s Glow—Karen Peris’ shimmering vocals describing, in lucid fragments, what it means to live at home among family and friends. “Hearing your voice in the blue light, / calming people in the house, / traveling upstairs — / good to be there / now, right now,” begins the first song on the album, “Keeping Awake.” It goes on to describe voices floating around the house, plans being made to go on a picnic, a sister running into her room. The speaker seems to be moving in and out of a dream-state as she says, “Oh I’m near to sleeping, I’m keeping awake … // In the house / In the heart of paper vines.”

“Bright as Yellow,” explores the integral role of personal relationship to the joy of being at home. “And you live life with your arms reached out. / Eye to eye when speaking. / Enter rooms with great joy shouts, / happy to be meeting.” The speaker wants to be bright and warm, not thorny or ostentatious. But in these lyrics you can see that Peris’ lyrical style is quite abstract. She takes the joy of home out of its comfortable narrative, casting it instead in small shiny phrases, the kinds of words that might run through your head when you’re drifting off … nearly napping.

“Brave” brings a twist; there’s trouble. Of course, we don’t know exactly what it is, but we have hints. “You cry up in your room,” she says. “You see how I go to pieces … // And I always go to pieces. /And I have it in my mind / that the sky is tall and heavy, / when I could be / brave, / brave.” The poet I think of when I hear the sky described as “tall and heavy” is 19th-century French symbolist Arthur Rimbaud. He sees the world as a collection of concrete objects, shifting and regrouping; in his poetry, feelings and ideas become things.

Later that fall, I sold my hip urban Volkswagen Golf and bought a 1984 Chevrolet Caprice station wagon. Talk about a comfortable ride—it had cushy, velvety bench seats and the crappiest tape deck imaginable, with big plastic knobs. It had this smell that only GM cars have. I began to realize The Innocence Mission and my new Chevy complimented one another. There was something about cranking up that old V8 engine, lowering the power window in the tailgate, and steering the car quietly down the street—crunching leaves and twigs under massive squishy tires—that felt like home. The car symbolized pure emotion.

Home is about people, the shapes of people, their eyes, their expressions, cast in deep psychological memory. “Cars and trees go by me,” Peris writes in “Happy, The End”; “You are in the yard, / and in my arms again.” The very next track, “Our Harry,” begins: “We will squint into the sun, / waving madly at the camera, / Harry standing in the front. / And I will be sitting on his shoulders.” Later, in “Everything’s Different Now,” Peris returns to earlier imagery—“Now we’re in the yard. / Aunt Mary’s car is coming, coming. / And all of our plans / are giants in this light, / now that we’re coming away.” You can see that, even to Peris, the car is a kind of emotional object. People, cars, yards lights, and plans constellate around one another. From song to song, they break up, move and reconnect in different patterns.

But how does a sense of home persist when everything’s different now? “Everything’s changed,” she tells us; “Everything, even the sun.” This, I think, is what Eliot is referring to in the lines quoted above. We know the place for the first time, partly because our travels have changed us, but also partly because the place itself has changed. Peris is right: everything changes. This would be immensely sad if not for powerful moments of grace throughout the poetry of Glow. Even in the first track she tells us, “My room is held in someone’s arms, / my bed is held in someone’s arms. / I am—I’m held now.” In the last, she renews this idea with another symbol:

Say about iron bridges.

I will not be alone there.

The hope expressed in Glow is one that transcends the cycle of risk and comfort, travel and return. It is a hope that, no matter where you go, you are “held in someone’s arms.”

For those who lived through the ’60s, the name Robert McNamara provokes an entire range of emotions and experiences. But even those too young to remember the former U.S. Secretary of Defense will find Errol Morris’ amazing new film, The Fog of War, an incredibly relevant portrait of a man who helped shape the 20th century.

"I'M AT AN AGE WHERE I CAN LOOK BACK AND DRAW SOME CONCLUSIONS" — ROBERT MCNAMARA

The primary thrust of the movie is a series of interviews Morris did with McNamara (pictured right) beginning in May 2001 and continuing through the winter of 2002-03. They used Morris’ famous Interroton device, a movie camera that also allows an interviewee to look at a video monitor featuring Morris. It creates the illusion McNamara is looking directly at the audience.

“The phenomenon of McNamara interests me,” says Morris, “—how he managed the hat trick of being hated by the left, the right, and the center.... At my heart, I’m a contrarian. If people tell me I have to believe x, I’m likely to not believe x. But I’m not a knee-jerk contrarian, I’m a skeptic.” Morris was also interested in McNamara’s central role in many key events of the 20th century: the fire bombing of Tokyo during World War II, the rise of the Ford Motor Co. after the war, the Cuban Missile Crisis and, of course, the Vietnam War. “He embodies the 20th century,” says Morris. “Like Woody Allen’s Zelig, he pops up in the most unexpected places. But unlike Zelig, he doesn’t pop up in some peripheral position at the edge of the photograph. He’s right in the center of the photograph.”

"WE MAY HAVE KILLED 100,000 PEOPLE, BUT WE DIDN'T DESTROY NATIONS." — ROBERT MCNAMARA

The movie opens with McNamara’s extraordinary reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis. Unlike the film Thirteen Days—in which the Kennedy administration looks like a well-run, thoughtful group of men struggling but succeeding to make the best of a difficult situation—Robert McNamara makes the whole conflict seem like a roll of the dice. If one mid-level State Dept. official hadn’t been in the room at a certain time, JFK might have heeded the bellicose advice of his generals and bombed Cuba, a move which would’ve certainly provoked an all-out nuclear war. “We lucked out,” McNamara practically shouts into the camera, the implications clear and deeply troubling.

This segment leads to the first of what Morris has dubbed “Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert McNamara”—“Empathize with your enemy.” The rest of the movie is structured both chronologically and around the other 10 rules, which include #2 “Rationality Will Not Save Us,” #7 “Belief and Seeing Are Both Often Wrong” and #11 “You Won’t Change Human Nature.” If that sounds too much like a dry history lesson, fear not. It’s rather an exhilarating ride through the realms of foreign policy, psychology, history, and human nature.

"THE HUMAN RACE NEEDS TO THINK MORE ABOUT KILLING, MORE ABOUT CONFLICT. IS THAT WHAT WE WANT IN THE 21ST CENTURY?" — ROBERT MCNAMARA

Most viewers will come to the movie interested to hear McNamara expound on the Vietnam War, but his reflections on WWII prove even more illuminating. In one of the most riveting interviews seen on film, McNamara recounts how the fire-bombing of Tokyo was designed—with ruthless efficiency. He then describes the subsequent bombing of 66 other Japanese cities, ending with the admission that, if the U.S. had lost the war, he would almost certainly have been tried as a war criminal. It’s an absolutely startling claim, especially given that he’s referring not to Vietnam, but to the “Good War.”

Morris amplifies this section with his customarily helpful archival footage. Rarely seen movies of fire-bombed Japanese cities contrast with McNamara’s trembling mouth and hands. The coup de grace, though, comes through a simple use of text. Morris puts up the name of a Japanese city and lists both how many people were killed and what percentage of the population (often 50-70% of the total population). Then the city’s name dissolves into the equivalent American city: Tokyo becomes New York, Kyoto becomes Washington D.C. The names change, as the death toll mounts. By equating Japanese and American cities, the film strikes home the enormity of the destruction. And as each city is listed, Morris’ editing grows ever faster, creating an indelible momentum that’s unnerving.

"WHAT MAKES US OMNISCIENT? DO WE HAVE A RECORD OF OMNISCIENCE?" — ROBERT MCNAMARA

Not enough can be said of Morris’ rhythmic editing style. He’s a master of the subtle use of slow- and fast-motion. It’s reminiscent of Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, one of Morris’ favorite documentaries. The musical score by Philip Glass is certainly one of the finest of the year. Its propulsive minimalism perfectly matches Morris’ editing, creating both energy and drive. At other times, it heightens what the director calls the “existential dread” of war, as archival footage from WWII and Vietnam flash on screen. When asked in Toronto about his working relationship with Glass, Morris (pictured right) replied, “He sends me something. If I don’t like it, I send it back. And I keep sending it back until I get something I like.” If only all directors did the same.

"IT IS MUCH HARDER TO EXAMINE ERROR THAN APOLOGIZE FOR IT." — ERROL MORRIS

Many commentators, especially leftists of a certain age, will certainly take issue with the movie, in particular Morris’ handling of McNamara. The Nation has already weighed in on the matter, accusing Morris of being duped. But this misses the point entirely. The film is in no way an apology for either Vietnam or McNamara. As Morris points out, “I feel that I have to remind people, lest they forget, that this is not about whether the Vietnam War was a good war or a bad war. My feelings about the war haven’t changed since I was a student demonstrator at the University of Wisconsin. The war was appalling then. It’s appalling now.” The larger question becomes, what can we learn from the mistakes of the Vietnam War? In this, McNamara proves an able guide.

The film’s current relevance is also startling. When McNamara states authoritatively, “If we can’t convince nations of comparable values of the rightness of our course, we need to re-examine our position,” it’s almost impossible not to think of a contemporary context. And McNamara’s discourse on how group-think overtakes an administration, causing it to see only what reflects its imagined reality, is eerily prescient. “I didn’t want the movie to try too hard to make the connection between then and now. I think it loses something by becoming something directed just to the present,” says Morris. So he took out McNamara’s primary lesson on Vietnam: “One of the lessons of Vietnam is that some conflicts have no military solution.” But it’s no accident that the one shot of President Johnson shows him asserting, “We have declared war on tyranny and aggression” as he talks of escalating the war in Vietnam.

"IN THE END IT'S NOT A HISTORICAL MOVIE. IT'S A MOVIE ABOUT "WHAT SHOULD WE DO NOW?'" — ERROL MORRIS

The Fog of War is principally a movie about war, which is why McNamara’s 13-year reign as the president of the World Bank is unfortunately ignored. However, the film raises enough issues, provokes enough questions and challenges enough assumptions to make it essential viewing.

In The Ballad of Ramblin’ Jack, a documentary released in 2000, Aiyana Elliott tells the life story of her folk-singing father, Jack Elliott. When she wishes aloud that her father had done more parenting than rambling, the musicians from Jack’s past say, well, yes but then we wouldn’t have the music of Ramblin’ Jack and might not have the music of Bob Dylan. In My Architect, Nathaniel Kahn seems to be searching for someone who’ll say something similar about his father, architect Louis Kahn, but the hypothetical scenario is more complex in Kahn’s tale. As an illegitimate child, he wouldn’t exist if his father had been a more traditional family man. Lou, as his son calls him, was an architect who slept on a roll of carpet in his office, easily lost track of whether it was night or day and juggled three simultaneous families, with at least a child each. The first time Lou’s progeny met was at his funeral in 1974.

Nathaniel is the youngest child—he was 11 when his father died—and My Architect is his very personal attempt to understand the man who dropped by the house once a week to see him and his mother. Despite being a quiet labor of love shot mostly on video, the movie features interviews with some architectural heavyweights—Philip Johnson, I. M. Pei, Robert A. M. Stern and, briefly, Frank Gehry. Nathaniel is a calm and focused interviewer. He reveals his feelings through his questions, which probe for details about the man rather than his work or methods and are generally presented in carefully edited sequences of gestures and facial expressions. He approaches Lou’s buildings the same way, exploring them inside and out, noting the details, looking for evidence of his father. He forms the movie’s most memorable images by lingering on his favorite parts of those buildings, returning frequently to concrete courtyards flanked by multi-story wings stretching toward the horizon, his father’s parallel lives disappearing into the sunset, with Nathaniel roller-skating between them.

Although Nathaniel himself is more contemplative than emotional—Lou’s been gone for decades—the movie is weakest when it attempts to squeeze tearful moments from a couple of its interviewees, with the camera zooming quickly into watery eyes, an embarrassing, twice-repeated ploy lifted from the local news that feels out of place here, as if a TV crew has momentarily taken over the camera. But overall Nathaniel’s interviews are balanced, and his attempt to find his father in his buildings, scars and all, is credible and well-paced, with neat visual rhymes that circle back to points raised earlier. His search leads him eventually to Bangladesh where Lou built the capital building and where the movie arrives at a genuinely touching conclusion that somehow brings things to a close without really tapping into the mind of Louis Kahn. To this day, Nathaniel’s mother believes that when Lou died alone in a railway station bathroom, he was on his way back to her. Nathaniel says that this is “a good myth to have.” Perhaps the movie’s conclusion in Bangladesh is Nathaniel’s own good myth.

Iranian director Jafar Panahi burst onto the world cinema scene in the mid-’90s with The White Balloon. What appeared to be a simplistic tale about a young girl trying to buy a goldfish for New Year’s was revealed to be much more—a moving meditation on a changing Iran, driven home by an extraordinary freeze-frame ending. His next two features, The Mirror and The Circle, both garnered critical acclaim but couldn’t match the subtlety of his debut. Crimson Gold, which won major prizes at both the Cannes and Chicago film festivals, is a move in the right direction but is still tripped up by Panahi’s occasionally clumsy direction.

The movie opens with a spectacular, long, static shot, which features the end of a store robbery gone bad. Because the camera doesn’t move, it’s sometimes hard to tell what’s going on (a nice effect), and we’re forced to rely on the evocative, ambient soundtrack. The scene ends with the apparent suicide of one of the robbers, a heavy-set man known as Hussein.

The rest of the movie is a flashback, revealing who Hussein is and how he came to rob a jewelry store. Hussein turns out to be a compelling figure: courteous, about to be married, and working as a pizza deliveryman. His deliveries take him to some of Tehran’s richer neighborhoods. Indeed, this is one of the first Iranian films to reach the west that reveals the wealthier side of the country. Hussein’s interactions with the rich are sometimes friendly, sometimes rude, but always awkward, and the contrast between their opulence and his lack of opportunity is striking.

Indeed, maybe a bit too striking. Panahi and screenwriter Abbas Kiarostami are so intent on driving home the contrast that they drag out each scene a good two or three minutes longer than necessary. An early confrontation in the jewelry store is powerful at first but undermined by the sheer length of the scene. And a final sequence in a condo high above Iran dissipates its powerful message in a long coda.

Nonetheless, Crimson Gold is filled with tremendous acting, especially from Hussein Emadeddin as Hussein, and Panahi’s visual style continues to develop. The Iranian New Wave’s penchant for portraying ordinary but compelling characters struggling through their daily lives is a welcome contrast to Hollywood’s fixation on the stylish and famous.

For those who lived through the ’60s, the name Robert McNamara provokes an entire range of emotions and experiences. But even those too young to remember the former U.S. Secretary of Defense will find Errol Morris’ amazing new film, The Fog of War, an incredibly relevant portrait of a man who helped shape the 20th century.

The primary thrust of the movie is a series of interviews Morris did with McNamara beginning in May 2001 and continuing through the winter of 2002-03. They used Morris’ famous Interroton device, a movie camera that also allows an interviewee to look at a video monitor featuring Morris. It creates the illusion McNamara is looking directly at the audience.

“The phenomenon of McNamara interests me,” says Morris, “—how he managed the hat trick of being hated by the left, the right, and the center.... At my heart, I’m a contrarian. If people tell me I have to believe x, I’m likely to not believe x. But I’m not a knee-jerk contrarian, I’m a skeptic.” Morris was also interested in McNamara’s central role in many key events of the 20th century: the fire bombing of Tokyo during World War II, the rise of the Ford Motor Co. after the war, the Cuban Missile Crisis and, of course, the Vietnam War. “He embodies the 20th century,” says Morris. “Like Woody Allen’s Zelig, he pops up in the most unexpected places. But unlike Zelig, he doesn’t pop up in some peripheral position at the edge of the photograph. He’s right in the center of the photograph.”

The movie opens with McNamara’s extraordinary reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis. Unlike the film Thirteen Days—in which the Kennedy administration looks like a well-run, thoughtful group of men struggling but succeeding to make the best of a difficult situation—Robert McNamara makes the whole conflict seem like a roll of the dice. If one mid-level State Dept. official hadn’t been in the room at a certain time, JFK might have heeded the bellicose advice of his generals and bombed Cuba, a move which would’ve certainly provoked an all-out nuclear war. “We lucked out,” McNamara practically shouts into the camera, the implications clear and deeply troubling.

This segment leads to the first of what Morris has dubbed “Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert McNamara”—“Empathize with your enemy.” The rest of the movie is structured both chronologically and around the other 10 rules, which include #2 “Rationality Will Not Save Us,” #7 “Belief and Seeing Are Both Often Wrong” and #11 “You Won’t Change Human Nature.” If that sounds too much like a dry history lesson, fear not. It’s rather an exhilarating ride through the realms of foreign policy, psychology, history, and human nature.

Most viewers will come to the movie interested to hear McNamara expound on the Vietnam War, but his reflections on WWII prove even more illuminating. In one of the most riveting interviews seen on film, McNamara recounts how the fire-bombing of Tokyo was designed—with ruthless efficiency. He then describes the subsequent bombing of 66 other Japanese cities, ending with the admission that, if the U.S. had lost the war, he would almost certainly have been tried as a war criminal. It’s an absolutely startling claim, especially given that he’s referring not to Vietnam, but to the “Good War.”

Morris amplifies this section with his customarily helpful archival footage. Rarely seen movies of fire-bombed Japanese cities contrast with McNamara’s trembling mouth and hands. The coup de grace, though, comes through a simple use of text. Morris puts up the name of a Japanese city and lists both how many people were killed and what percentage of the population (often 50-70% of the total population). Then the city’s name dissolves into the equivalent American city: Tokyo becomes New York, Kyoto becomes Washington D.C. The names change, as the death toll mounts. By equating Japanese and American cities, the film strikes home the enormity of the destruction. And as each city is listed, Morris’ editing grows ever faster, creating an indelible momentum that’s unnerving.

Not enough can be said of Morris’ rhythmic editing style. He’s a master of the subtle use of slow- and fast-motion. It’s reminiscent of Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, one of Morris’ favorite documentaries. The musical score by Philip Glass is certainly one of the finest of the year. Its propulsive minimalism perfectly matches Morris’ editing, creating both energy and drive. At other times, it heightens what the director calls the “existential dread” of war, as archival footage from WWII and Vietnam flash on screen. When asked in Toronto about his working relationship with Glass, Morris replied, “He sends me something. If I don’t like it, I send it back. And I keep sending it back until I get something I like.” If only all directors did the same.

Many commentators, especially leftists of a certain age, will certainly take issue with the movie, in particular Morris’ handling of McNamara. The Nation has already weighed in on the matter, accusing Morris of being duped. But this misses the point entirely. The film is in no way an apology for either Vietnam or McNamara. As Morris points out, “I feel that I have to remind people, lest they forget, that this is not about whether the Vietnam War was a good war or a bad war. My feelings about the war haven’t changed since I was a student demonstrator at the University of Wisconsin. The war was appalling then. It’s appalling now.” The larger question becomes, what can we learn from the mistakes of the Vietnam War? In this, McNamara proves an able guide.

The film’s current relevance is also startling. When McNamara states authoritatively, “If we can’t convince nations of comparable values of the rightness of our course, we need to re-examine our position,” it’s almost impossible not to think of a contemporary context. And McNamara’s discourse on how group-think overtakes an administration, causing it to see only what reflects its imagined reality, is eerily prescient. “I didn’t want the movie to try too hard to make the connection between then and now. I think it loses something by becoming something directed just to the present,” says Morris. So he took out McNamara’s primary lesson on Vietnam: “One of the lessons of Vietnam is that some conflicts have no military solution.” But it’s no accident that the one shot of President Johnson shows him asserting, “We have declared war on tyranny and aggression” as he talks of escalating the war in Vietnam.

The Fog of War is principally a movie about war, which is why McNamara’s 13-year reign as the president of the World Bank is unfortunately ignored. However, the film raises enough issues, provokes enough questions and challenges enough assumptions to make it essential viewing.

“Exterminate all rational thought.” The work of William Burroughs could well be said to follow this edict, dodging all traditional aspects of narrative and decorum. It’s also a phrase spoken by the protagonist early of this remarkable film adaptation of Burroughs’ most notorious novel. Strangely, what makes the film so compelling is just how rationally director David Cronenberg handles his source material. And the great irony is this—never has such a wealth of insight into the mind of William Burroughs been available, until now.

Much has been made of how unfilmable a novel Naked Lunch really is. In a documentary included on the set’s second disc, Cronenberg notes just how daunting but attractive the task was for him. Rather than directly transpose the disjointed and hallucinatory narrative of the book, Cronenberg created a meta-narrative in his script, incorporating aspects of Burroughs’ life to create a meditation on the transitory nature of reality and the potential horrors of pursuing the writing life.

The “story” follows William Lee (Peter Weller), a cynical and stoic New York exterminator who is forced into writing after becoming addicted to his own bug powder and killing his wife (Judy Davis, in one of her finest performances). As his hallucinations become indistinguishable from reality, he spirals into his own imagination; lost in a horrific world of monstrous creatures called mugwumps and insectoid typewriters.

While at times truly grotesque, the film is gorgeous, with lush cinematography by Peter Suchitzky and Carol Spier’s detailed production design. Naked Lunch is a brilliant examination of one of the 20th Century’s most iconoclastic literary voices by one of its most unique filmmakers.

Whale Rider tells the story of a young girl, Paikea, who lives in New Zealand with a stern grandfather who, apparently, needs to get modern. Every scene tells us this and gives us an opportunity to tsk-tsk his staunch rejection of his granddaughter who he believes, despite her lineage, can’t inherit the leadership of this Maori village because of her gender. She’ll need to convince her grandfather she can lead just as well as the boys can, and she’ll need to do it before the end of the movie.

But just when you think you have the film pegged, its sincerity manages to break through the thin characterizations and age-old plot. Young actress Keisha Castle-Hughes gives Paikea a richly expressive voice, and the turning point is an astonishingly heartfelt speech she delivers at a school program for parents. The soundtrack goes silent and the camera sits at the foot of the stage looking up at her while she talks about her admiration for her grandfather, explaining how she destroyed a long line of chiefs by being born. In everything she does, she balances a challenge of authority with obedience and respect, as if trying to find a way to simultaneously accept both herself and her grandfather’s tradition, rather than rejecting tradition outright, which would’ve been simpler for a movie like this. Castle-Hughes’ grace and beauty on the screen is probably the main reason Whale Rider became a surprise art-house hit last year.

The third act—where all our predictions come true—has a quiet dignity and, although it moves from A to B as expected, how it gets there is surprisingly mysterious. The common ground on which the girl and her grandfather land has more nuance than the setup would seem to allow. The village has a problem that manifests itself physically on its beaches, and we recognize immediately that this is the moment when Paikea must prove herself to her grandfather. But her proof doesn’t involve boat motors, fighting sticks, or feats of skill like we might have guessed. It’s more mystical than that. Destiny quivers in her fingers. She has the option of doing nothing; instead she acts, responding to the call of her ancestors and her village, which she is the link between. In her final voice-over she focuses neither on herself nor her grandfather but on her people and their future, a born leader, through and through.

The Triplets of Belleville—an animated film that hearkens back to the glory days of silent cinema with a story that’s both brilliant and wickedly funny—is one of the most inventive and enchanting movies you’ll see this year. It captures the spirit of both Jacques Tati and children’s picture books. The former is embodied by the hilarious jokes that spring up out of the simplest devices. A hand grenade thrown into a swamp, a dog and a piece of chewing gum and a whistle in a grandmother’s mouth are all used to sublime effect. Triplets captures the way silent comedy used everyday items in unusual and highly unexpected ways. The movie has a pitch-perfect sense of timing, capturing the elusive pause that precipitates the release of a fantastic belly laugh.

The reference to children’s books arises out of the film’s exaggerated characters and striking colors. Though subtle 3-D animation was used, the movie relies on traditional forms, creating an almost watercolor wash. The effect isn’t so much nostalgic as captivating. One of the most amazing scenes involves an ocean crossing. An elongated freighter is contrasted with a simple paddle boat, and both are placed beautifully against water, sky and storm.

The best animation relies on facial expressions, and again Triplets stands out. The dog, which spends its time barking at trains and waiting to be fed, is a worthy addition to the ranks of cartoon animals, and the grandmother, with her wisp of a mustache and steely glare, is priceless.

The film takes some unexpected turns, and its story can be viewed as a pretext for some marvelous visual jokes and stunning animation. Those aspects are combined in the film’s villains—the French mafia drawn as merging, black rectangles. The few bits of dialogue are in French (so I guess it’s a foreign film), but they’re so unimportant they’re not even subtitled. The movie pokes fun at Americans’ obsession with bigness (and big food), but it taunts the French in equal measure.

If Finding Nemo didn’t already have a lock on the Oscar for Best Animated Film, I’d be rooting for this dark horse. While most film “cartoons” pander to a younger audience, Triplets of Belleville raises the bar. Chomet has claimed Nick Park’s Creature Comforts as an inspiration. Park should be proud.

Erin McKeown is nothing if not surprising: the quiet girl wearing the Fluevogs and an impish smile is also the Brown-educated multi-instrumentalist who writes gorgeous, literate pop songs and looms much larger than her petite five-foot frame when she’s performing onstage.

But today her surprises have nothing to do with music. As she and her fellow artists prepare for the photo shoot in a suite at the Holiday Inn, one of the publicists is having trouble remembering the name of the Mets’ Class A minor league baseball team in Brooklyn.

“The Cyclones,” murmurs McKeown.

“Oh, are you from New York?”

“No. I’m just a sports fanatic.”

McKeown, who probably would have gone to college on a field hockey scholarship if not for a newfound love for songwriting, enjoys all sports, but none more than baseball. Add the Baltimore Orioles to Judy Garland, ornithology, cinema, Tin Pan Alley and Django Reinhardt on her list of passions.

Her diversity of interests has carried over to her first two albums, especially her most recent, Grand, which is stylistically all over the map.

“I really think I’ve gotten it out of my system to need to have 10 different kinds of things on one record,” McKeown says. “I think I’m finally over it. … Sonically, I can tell what I want [the next album] to sound like. It’ll probably be more of an extension of the Distillation sound, which was like pretty raw, and a lot more space. I could just see it be a really intricate record, with a lot of instruments.”

She also says it will be a much more personal album after the more detached Grand. Her debut, Distillation, was filled with lines like, “Something about success that lies / Something about success / That lies, lies next to me / In a strange bed” and “Untie these strings, from my heart / And when they’re gone / Well, I fall apart in your hands / And I am undone.” But Grand mined Arthur Miller short stories, Igor Stravinsky anecdotes and the ever-present Judy Garland for inspiration.

“Some personal things that have gone on have made me want to put the best of myself in my songs again, instead of stuff from someone else’s. What I discovered most about Grand, is that the songs that are more emotional—whether they’re about me or someone else—are easier to play. It’s easier to find a way to do those every night. It’s like a self-fulfilling energy. I actually felt “Slung Lo” do its job. I’ve been tired and frustrated, and I’ve sung that song and felt better … even if it’s for three minutes.”

McKeown has only recently returned from her first headlining tour in Ireland after two trips opening for The Be Good Tanyas. The theatrical atmosphere at some of the venues suited her cinematic style particularly well. But her favorite place to play was a little black-box theatre in Cork, which also had space for people to dance and drink.

“I feel more like a musician when people are dancing than any other time,” she says. “ There are many ways to experience music, but one of the most primal is so that people can dance. You can’t really dance without music. I always feel I’m really doing my job when people are dancing. When I was in university, I used to drum for African dance classes and it always felt like what a musician really should be doing.

“When people analyze songs or listen too much to the words or think too much about concepts of albums and things like that, it’s getting a little too far away from what you make music for in the first place. … You don’t have to think when you dance. If people are just staring at you, you wonder if there’s a connection. But if people are moving their head or dancing, you know that they’re listening.”

And they’ll be listening for a long time to come.

Corey Harris has always been a musicologist, and his subject of choice has always been the blues. His college experience took him to Cameroon where he learned that the area’s Juju music was a seminal form of American blues, and further study back home gave him the ability to pick a player’s geographical base simply from stylistic anomalies.

On his new album, Mississippi to Mali, the Delta blues player once again explores the connections between African musical dialects and American blues traditions. He originally intended to make a duets album with older blues players but when Martin Scorsese tapped him to host the Feels Like Going Home episode of his recent PBS series, The Blues, Harris retooled his album concept to reflect his African journey.

“I had toyed with the idea of recording there before, but it was more like just a wish,” says Harris. “I hadn’t really pursued it. A venue where there’s not all that equipment readily available appealed to me in a way. And also I was able to get performances [from] people where they felt most comfortable and not in a studio, which can be a different space if you’re not used to it.”

Utilizing the field recording method, Harris worked with African masters Ali Farka Toure, Ali Magassa and Souleyman Kane in Mali, then lived with the tracks for nearly a year before taking the same approach to recording with Sam Carr, Bobby Rush and Sharde Thomas and the Rising Star Fife and Drum Band in Mississippi. The stripped down, spontaneous nature of the recordings inspired Harris throughout the process.

“One of the nice things was we were able to put together what we did and have it be not overly rehearsed,” says Harris. “It was more getting the atmosphere and conversing and getting comfortable.”

A few quiet strides into the shadows behind the snappy pop culture of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the joyous literacy of Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series, Robin McKinley’s absorbing urban fantasy Sunshine illuminates a war-wounded modern landscape washed in humanity’s darkest mythic fears.

The protagonist, nicknamed Sunshine, drives a car equipped with spells as well as seatbelts, and the cops who frequent her coffeehouse specialize in crimes committed by creatures of the night. When vampires attack her, society finds this assault less remarkable than any other mugging—except that Sunshine escapes, as no one ever has.

Catalyzed by her vampiric encounter, the plot punches through what the heroine thought were the solid walls of her workaday world. Unlocking doors on closeted truths, Sunshine’s personal peril embodies a slowly revealed threat to all humanity and draws her into a struggle she never imagined. While I do not delight in conspiracy stories, I admire the art with which McKinley constructs her complex societal web, locating friends and foes on both sides of the law in the best X-Files fashion.

Brisk first-person narration immediately engulfs the reader in Sunshine’s life but edges into the eerie with the realization that none of the characters share this articulate intimacy. Though she loves her family and friends, Sunshine is a woman of silence and forgetting, an adult child of divorce and war. This dessert-baking, daylight-craving, vegetarian bookworm is the opposite of all things vampiric. But not all opposites are solely antithetical; some, like female and male, are also complementary, and that mystery empowers Sunshine even as it threatens her sanity.

Fantasy often stingily reserves its tropes of self-discovery to adolescents, as if surviving teenhood should somehow free us forever from questioning our identity and purpose.

This convention can alienate adult readers denied the “happily ever after” granted every juvenile hero. Sunshine rehabilitates the sudden revelation of magic powers, mysterious lineage and world-saving vocations for those with steady jobs, committed lovers and a diploma on the shelf. In her most original novel since her unforgettable Newbery Honor book, The Blue Sword, McKinley brings a familiar nightmare to an adult awakening, where no end is “ever after,” and “happily” is pursued again each day.

Damien Jurado doesn’t feel like writing songs about his life. Sitting next to me on a barstool at the dimly lit Echo Lounge music club in Atlanta, maintaining admirable posture, he takes a squinting drag on his most recent cigarette and expresses his profound distaste for autobiographical songwriting. He’s got a happy marriage, he enjoys fatherhood (his son’s name is, I swoon, Miles Davis Jurado), he’s not ashamed of his conservative politics. But, in lieu of songs about PTA meetings and watching football games with buddies at the local sports bar, Jurado entertains a fascination with life’s darker corners, the cobweb-filled pockets of misery and evil lining the pages of Chuck Palahniuk and Bret Easton Ellis novels.

Jurado’s newest project, a slimly packaged 5-song acoustic EP entitled Holding His Breath, opens with the neo-Pauline confessional, “I Am The Greatest Of All Liars,” in which he detachedly sings, “I’m the suicide with blanks / I am fire in the tank / I’m the dishes in the sink.” The disc’s other two original tunes relate the tale of a carriage ride with The Man In The Black Pajamas (“Oh Death Art With Me”), as well as the plea of a broken man unable to convince his lover that he deserves another chance (“Big Let Down”), backing vocals on the latter song courtesy of the ever-lilting Rosie Thomas. His cover of 764-Hero’s “Now You’re Swimming” employs the muted background yelling technique David Bazan used in Pedro the Lion’s early tune, “Almost There.” And the album closes with a folky rendition of Peggy Seeger’s “Butcher Boy,” about a woman who kills herself for love, found dangling from a rope by her poor father.

You’ve been warned. This is not a feel-good album. But it’s a damn-good album.

I’ll admit it—I never liked Guided By Voices. Pretty much the same way I thought tight vintage t-shirts with ironically cheery iron-ons were insufferably pretentious. And let’s face it—there’s a daunting amount of GBV you’d have to pick through to find the choice material assembled on Human Amusements. But I’m big enough to concede that these are some of the hookiest, quirkiest, most intelligent tunes I’ve ever laid my uncultured ears on. I lack the space to tell of the charms of “14 Cheerleader Coldfront,” or “I Am a Scientist” or any of the other 30 excellent tracks, but suffice to say I will be catching up on Robert Pollard and Co. with this record for some time to come. If you, too, missed the GBV bandwagon, Human Amusements is probably a more attractive alternative to surfing your neighborhood Pollardite’s collection, and less embarrassing, since your intransigent pride kept you from some of the best rock of the last decade. Swine.

These popular Portland psych-poppers abandon lo-fi on this album—the guitar and bass have that small-venue clipped buzz, singer Martyn Joseph sounds like he’s throttling the mic stand, and Rebecca Cole’s keyboard gets layered over everything—yielding a sound reminiscent of XTC before they went pastoral. Fans of that group—and of The Minders’ colleagues in the psych-pop Elephant 6 collective—will enjoy the sharp high-energy lyrics and strong hooks, while those still waiting for another E6 album to equal the vision and majesty of Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea will have to keep waiting. Probably for a long time.

Modern blues albums can be a tricky sell, so musicians add to the traditional sound in order to broaden their appeal. Not only is this tricky, it often leads to a tangle of blues, boogie-woogie, jazz and reggae with no real center or substance. Such is the case with Chris Daniels’ latest. The Spark starts out with the pseudo-reggae, jam-band-esque “50/50” and quickly disintegrates into sappy ballads (“Way Out West” and “If I’d Only Taken You Dancing” being the two main offenders). Daniels’ brand of blues has more in common with the Bacon Brothers than T-Bone Walker. And with nine of the 12 tracks clocking in at over four minutes, you may want to have your finger squarely on the skip button. Spark? It’s barely a flicker.

For those of us who knew him only through his songs, the unwelcome news of Elliott Smith’s suicide on the morning of October 21 last year might not have been completely shocking; anyone who listened closely to his lyrics tended to worry about him. His self-destructive patterns were nearly as legendary as his profound melodic and lyrical gifts—with rumors of rehab, forgotten lyrics at shows, and repeated album delays further mirroring his achingly sensitive body of work. Sickeningly, a tragic death seemed the most likely coda to his tormented oeuvre. But for those who knew him personally—those who had watched him struggle toward finding a better place in life—the news came as much more of a surprise.

“In a way, I think Elliott Smith dying, for me—I had the same reaction as seeing the World Trade towers falling. Just that sense of ‘Oh my God, I didn’t think that was possible,’” explains Blake Sennett, a member of the group Rilo Kiley, which was among the first generation of indie rockers to grow up with Smith’s music as a formative presence. “He was—or still is—one of the great pillars of the music I like to think of myself contributing to,” Sennet continues, showing the impact Smith’s passing had on those who saw the 34-year-old as standard-bearer for a movement toward openly vulnerable songwriting—an artist who cemented a legacy in only five albums. “He definitely was doing so well … he seemed to be in good spirits.”

As such, if there was a time to finally breath easy, the golden, lazy month of October seemed to be it. Recent interviews had depicted an Elliott Smith reputedly clean and optimistic, readying the release of From a Basement on the Hill, his first album since 2000’s Figure 8 and a double disc that held the promise of being his most ambitious work to date. “It’s always a shock,” says Dave Pajo, former Zwan guitarist and current driving force behind Papa M, “but at the same time, he wanted to be on good terms with everyone and to have them know him when he was on his feet, to remember him not when he had hit rock bottom. But that’s occasionally when something like this happens, because he’d sort of made his amends with everyone, too.”

Such sentiments were echoed many times in the hours following Smith’s suicide. The profound sense of loss brought on by his death resonated through the tears of family and friends in his hometown of Portland, Ore., the tributes of musicians across the world, and the statements of label reps on both sides of the Atlantic. Within two weeks he was being remembered en masse at a sold-out memorial concert in Los Angeles, where artists from Beck to Beth Orton to Lou Barlow joined to remember him in spirit and song, the proceeds going to the charity Smith started for abused children. For a man who’d been perennially below the average music buyer’s eyelevel—having made his most memorable public appearance awkwardly saluting the Grammy Award’s home audience at Celine Dion’s side in 1998—it this was an amazing amount of attention, something Smith most likely wouldn’t have been at ease with had he been alive to receive it.

“I think that’s what really made him uncomfortable, all the attention he got,” says Jim Putnam, leader of experimental country-rockers the Radar Brothers, another band that played Smith’s tribute. “Because he was kind of guarded in a way, he was really sensitive, and it was difficult for him to be the center of attention. He never talked like he was doing something great. All the times I hung out with him, he never talked himself up.”

Of course, Smith had more than earned the right to lay a stone at the altar of his legacy, as few if any songwriters in the last 25 years have married melody and lyric, humanity and pain, so brilliantly. He was John Lennon without the optimism, unable to escape the naked vulnerability of Plastic Ono Band; George Harrison turning his spiritual search inward, finding solace only in extrapolating his pain; and Nick Drake, heartfelt and sensitive but unable to rally enough self-confidence to be so romantic. If Beck spent the ’90s expanding the boundaries of what a singer-songwriter could be, Elliott Smith was realizing how much potential remained within the traditional boundaries of the form. But attempting to discover who Elliott Smith really was—sorting through the layers of musician, man and myth—only muddies the waters surrounding a musician whose artistic direction couldn’t have been clearer.

For Pete Krebs—a singer-songwriter who worked odd jobs with Smith and cut his artistic teeth on the same Portland indie-rock scene that nurtured Smith and his first band, the unjustly overlooked Heatmiser—the Elliott Smith legend began to take shape early. “Even back then, he would play a show or break out a new tune and it was pretty earth-shattering, because it was so far and above everything else that was going on there that everybody learned really fast what he was capable of doing.

“My awareness of him was kind of before he went to New York and L.A. When he [left he] changed a lot, in a number of ways,” Krebs adds, drawing a tentative distinction between the person he knew and the one with whom he lost touch. “The Elliott that I knew was always a really witty, funny person that was always self-effacing and not egotistical at all. He was just a really nice guy to be around because he was really humble and interested in what you were doing and what you were talking about. He was just a really good friend. He had really good taste in music, but wasn’t the type who would ever show off. He would just do these random things, and it was like, ‘I didn’t know you could play the piano.’ And he’d go, ‘Oh yeah, I played a little bit when I was a kid.’ And then a couple of months later, you’d see him sitting at a piano, and you’d walk over and he was playing this Rachmaninoff piece or something … He was always surprising us.” And while those who knew him can remember him quite differently, the uniting thread is always the innate ease with which he produced his art.

No stranger to ornate songcraft himself, Putnam says of Smith’s lyrical and rhythmic phrasing, “It’s so melodic and pleasing that you wouldn’t immediately say, ‘Oh, this is complex.’ Because they are pop songs in a way. But if you start dissecting them, you realize there is something pretty complex going on in there.”

Just as he came across as the brooding genius to some and the wry joker to others, his music communicates personally with each listener. “There’s just a lot of depth to it. He understands how to write a simple song, too, which to me is always the hardest thing,” explains Pajo, for whom the difficulty of Smith’s death can be heard in the way his speech wanders between present and past tense. “And he could do it in a way that was really effective. He understood music definitely, and he used it in a way that most people try to achieve, but in a way that almost seemed effortless.” The struggle Smith had finding happiness in life was equally balanced by the ease he had expressing himself musically, touching something strangely universal in the process.

Says Pajo of what made Smith such a unique talent, “Magical songs played by a guy who played guitar so well and sang so beautifully and earnestly … I felt like I related with him. I felt like he articulated so many things that we can’t put into words ourselves.”

That deeply personal integrity—especially with indie rock moving more toward irony and caricature and popular music toward juvenile aggression and endlessly replicated teen divas—rang out startlingly for those listening for a voice of honesty in an era of excess. The heart of Smith’s music was timeless.

“He was really sensitive to the way music sounded … He was like one of those savants that just got it. He understood how music was,” says Krebs. “He didn’t have that obstruction of trying to figure it out, because he already had it figured out. The technical aspect of what instrument to use or what notes do you play on it—that seemed to come really naturally, and that left him without a distraction. And he was able to engage his songwriting that much more. He was already a deeply sensitive person … that’s the thing about really sensitive people, sometimes they can engage it in a healthy way, and sometimes they can’t pull their punches even a little bit. He was able to access that side of himself, and really in that way—because he was so representative of his generation or a pretty broad group of people with similar backgrounds—he was awash in this mishmash of exploding culture, but with a punk sensibility under it all. For a generation without a center, he was able to articulate what it’s like to be that way. And the people that really responded to it, responded really deeply and emotionally because he gave a voice to them.”

Still, the question remains as to how to most appropriately remember an artist of such grace. “There will be people who will check him out because of his death, but I think it will plateau after awhile, and in the future, there’s going to be some kind of revival,” says Krebs, measuring his words carefully. “I think that his music will come into its own even more. And at that point, his work will overshadow his death, but there is also the unfortunate point of his death becoming mythologized and adding to what I’d term a negative appreciation, to have someone lionize him as a troubled, drug-addict genius. There’s nobody around here [in Portland] who has that point of view, but we don’t really have control over his legacy, either.”

“I think it will be an interesting part of the story, like someone like Nick Drake,” says Pajo of Smith’s early death. “I don’t think people will listen to his music because of that, though. There was a write-up in the LA Weekly where someone wrote about Elliott being really aware of a ‘rock star death.’ They almost posed the idea that it was a career move in some way, and it really pissed me off. Really made me angry.” Here, again, the tendency to make Smith a martyr á la Kurt Cobain is more than a little enticing for those who want to see him as a representing a tragic life of postmodern angst and directionless ennui.

“I do think that there will be a group of people who will read all kinds of stuff into his lyrics, hopefully not in a way that justifies what he did,” continues Krebs, unwilling to romanticize his friend’s death. “It’s horrible. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy in a lot of ways, and it destroys a lot of people’s lives. I’d hate to see this happen again when the next Elliott comes around. I really don’t see that it did the world any good to have Elliott die the way he did.”

Still, with such a deeply personal body of work, where every line groans with humanity, there is danger inherent in reinterpreting the product of a life where songs often seem like individual sentences in a suicide note.

“I hope not. If you look at his work, it kind of makes sense. It definitely seems like it’s part of the package, maybe, as sad as it is,” admits Putnam, turning considerably more pensive when asked to reflect on Smith’s death as an extension of his work. “He definitely was in a lot of pain.”

At moments he transcended that pain—moments far from the stage or recording studio, where his generosity and modesty became his defining characteristics.

“I expected him to be a lot more shy—withdrawn, and hard to access,” says Sennett, a musician whom Smith didn’t hesitate to take under his wing, giving the younger songwriter a few impromptu lessons in performance. “But the guy I met, I got to know as this really sweet and generous soul. He didn’t wear the misery that is in his songs on his sleeve at all. He wanted people to feel good and be happy. If misery loves company, he certainly didn’t want miserable company. He wanted to make people happy. He’s the kind of guy who, if he saw you pick up a record in a record store, would ask you if you wanted it because he was going to buy it for you. … I guess I expected him to be more like one of these savant-ish people who are real withdrawn, because I’ve met those types, but he was just this really sweet guy. Just a normal, really sweet guy.”

Few artists exemplify indie integrity like the Mekons. Less a “band” than a collective of like-minded friends—a mobile musical kibbutzim spread across two continents—the British punk rockers have kept alive the post-punk dream (of restless experimentation and political critique leavened by a self-mocking sense of humor) through, paradoxically, a deep immersion in American roots music. You could say the Mekons invented alt.country—their classic Fear and Whiskey (1985) married Clash and Cash two years before Uncle Tupelo existed—and though they’ve experimented widely before and since, conducting a ragged march across genres ranging from reggae and techno to salsa, they’ve never since strayed far from the blend they pioneered. In fact, their last few albums have featured some of the band’s strongest country work yet, rooted as always in the contrasting vocal styles of the sweet, melancholy Sally Timms, the hard-charging punk yelper (and part-time Waco Brother) Jon Langford, and Tom Greenhalgh, the very voice of whiskey-sodden regret.

So what drove this restlessly creative outfit to do an album of self-covers?

“Last year, we decided to try and do some shows just playing the early songs,” explains Langford. Expecting to be embarrassed, Greenhalgh said they instead found the songs “quite satisfying to do, like archeology.” Langford agrees: “There was sort of a strength to them, a continuity [with later work] we didn’t really know existed.”

This continuity is especially surprising because Greenhalgh and Langford are the only holdouts remaining from the late-’70s Mekons lineup that first recorded the songs exhumed and reworked on Punk Rock (Quarterstick), the group’s 21st album. As part of the fertile, creative Leeds, England, punk scene, the Mekons quickly tired of the typical chugging sound of their early releases. “I was kinda bored with going dudda dudda dunt,” says Langford. For the second album, the band “all swapped instruments and made songs up in the studio,” Langford continues, leading to “the beginning of the Mekons as I think of it.” But audiences didn’t know what to make of the new material. So, says Greenhalgh, “We went underground and refused to play live.” Langford elaborates—“Around ’81, ’82, we had this sort of secret bedroom band. We didn’t think anybody wanted to hear us, but we just used to make recordings for our own pleasure.”

Circumstances—and praise from unexpected sources—changed that. “By the summer of ’83 there was this kind of weird backwash of interest, actually, from the States,” Langford says, with critic Greil Marcus praising the band in Artforum and Lester Bangs writing the liner notes for the under-the-radar The Mekons Story (1983). The group returned to live gigging during a miner’s strike, which it hoped to support by playing at benefits. By this time, Langford was experimenting with “writing some quite tuneful songs,” some influenced by Hank Williams.

No one was quite prepared for the records that resulted—Fear and Whiskey, Edge of the World (1986), Honky Tonkin’ (1987) and the Crime and Punishment EP (1986). Critics like Marcus and Bangs noticed a certain humor and vision in the band’s earlier material, but the Mekons’ expansive, imaginative revision of country was something new. They could be cerebral to the point of didacticism, but they also conjured the plainspoken power of Williams and Cash. One had only to listen to the horrifying “Big Zombie”—Langford howling the words “I’m just not human tonight!” over an amphetamine country stomp while the band full-throttles the tune into a ditch—to see that the Mekons’ manic punk roots allowed them to fully explore the current of nihilistic, destructive desperation that always ran through classic country.

But the band was heading for a ditch of its own. After a successful run of independent releases, the Mekons signed with A&M, which failed to promote the anti-music industry Mekons Rock ’n’ Roll (1989). Corporate censorship? “Corporate ineptitude,” says Langford. A&M then refused to domestically release the group’s stylistically diffuse followup, Curse of the Mekons (1991). After another troubled courtship with Warner Brothers, the group decided cashing in wasn’t worth it. “The worst times,” says Greenhalgh stoically, “have always involved proximity to major labels.”

In the 1990s, the band made up for lost freedom, retreating from country on Retreat From Memphis (1994) and trying every style imaginable on later records, while group members pursued various side projects, even doing art shows and (in Langford’s case) the comic strip Great Pop Things. With half the group now living in America and the other half in the UK, they’ve found certain procedures that work well. “Due to geography, etcetera, it helps to identify some themes and rules to work from, so we usually have a strong idea of what we're about on a particular project,” says Greenalgh. This explains the inner cohesion of albums that vary widely in style: the pop-rock of I [Heart] Mekons (1993), the slicked-up techno-glam of Me (1998), the return to country-rock on OOOH! (Out Of Our Heads) (2002).

These days, Langford delights in the unexpected relevance of the old material that makes up the Mekons’ new album, finding that a song like “Corporal Chalkie” still resonates with the current situation in Iraq. But don’t expect this band to stay in one place for too long. “We’re gonna go on tour in March. It might not be a punk rock tour—it’s kind of a deliberate attempt to counterpoint styles from that time with the possibility of doing totally different things. That’s what we do. No limits, maaan,” he says, laughing. As for the next record? Greenhalgh, who’s also writing songs for a side project of his own, says “We want to work on the next album in a different way from the last few … to base it much more on a live-band sound,” he says. “Like a bulldozer—a great big monster demolishing everything in its path.”

At the top of the pop world these days, it’s hard enough to find an artist who can sing well without the aid of ProTools. Never mind one that also arranges, plays an instrument (besides duct-taped tambourine), writes her own songs and produces her own albums. Alicia Keys does all these things and more—at 23-years-old no less—and for that, she has my utmost respect. That said, the follow-up to her listenable, though uneven multi-platinum debut, songs in A minor, is a step in the right direction. But a baby step.

On diary, Keys takes what she did on the first album and does it a little better. Better engineering, better production and—though there’s no obvious pop classic here, nothing with a hook that stands up to Key’s biggest hit “Fallin’”—the writing is better. Diary’s stronger tracks include “Heartburn,” a slightly over-polished yet ultra-funky modern take on ’70s soul (more Curtis Mayfield than Isaac Hayes); “If I Was Your Woman/Walk On By,” a well-written soul-pop tune with a killer sitar hook and Keys’ chiming harp-like piano accents that eventually morph into sparse, pretty jazz chords during the verse; “I Ain’t Got You,” a beautiful, wintery soul-jazz tune with great harmonies; and the soulful “Wake Up,” with its poignant string accents and powerful vocal performance. But there’s also brilliant moments gone awry like “You Don’t Know My Name,” a song that glides along in perfect soulful bliss until a painfully sappy spoken section rears its ugly head, crashing an otherwise well-done song into the ground. And yes, the repetition of the word ‘soul’ is important—because Keys is at her best is when she eschews the straight-up pop and hip-hop-inflected modern R&B approach in favor of more traditionally influenced soul numbers.

By now, the sound of Keys’ voice grinding smooth against her delicate piano and driving, programmed drums has become instantly identifiable. But perhaps she might do well to drop the electronics and do a stripped-down soul, funk or gospel album, recorded mostly live-in-the-studio with a great band. Go analog, leave the blemishes—maybe even bring in an old-school producer like Willie Mitchell (Al Green), or someone more modern like Cody Chesnutt (The Roots) who’s become a torch-bearer for that old sound, taking it somewhere new while keeping one foot planted firmly in the genre’s roots. Even The Neptunes, who produced Key’s “How Come You Don’t Call Me” single, might help her make a much-needed creative breakthrough.

Until then, diary will stand as a valiant effort by a talented artist who’s still failing to reach her full potential, which—I’d venture—is extremely high.

Making the leap to a major label—after years of earning his audience one listener at a time through exhaustive touring and a series of five independent releases—Matt Nathanson translates his tuneful, heartfelt singer/songwriter pop into a more imminently palatable format. Loaded with crisply produced chiming guitars and subtle touches of cello and keyboard, Nathanson is a bit too calculated and studied here, though, having rounded off rough edges to the detriment of his distinctive gifts. As such, John Mayer, Matchbox 20, the Goo Goo Dolls, and Train are reasonable touchstones, and Nathanson boasts both the hooks and the radio-ready sheen to prove he could easily become a similar commercial breakthrough should radio warm up to him. All in all, he delivers often and obviously, with the only regret being that he dresses up his most timeless gifts in such decidedly modern garb.