I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: MOGWAI-Mr. Beast (2006).

After several mellow, quiet albums, Mr Beast brings back a lot of the Mogwai noise.  I distinctly remember listening to Mr Beast when it first came out because it was the first time I was home with my son and I exposed him to something other than kids music (he was 8 months old at the time).

Mr Beast changes things up from previous disc in a few ways.  There’s no long songs on the disc (5:30 is the longest), but there’s a return of some of the noise from earlier discs.

“Auto Rock”, although featuring keyboard, is a pretty heavy track, with big drums and loud layers of music that try but fail to disguise a riff.  But the best song on the album comes next “Glasgow Mega-Snake” is that awesome Mogwai beast: rocking guitars, a memorable riff and powerful drumming.  It’s recognizable once it starts, it’s got cool screaming solo notes and just when you think it’s going to end quietly, pow–it is indeed mega.

Despite all evidence to the contrary I think of Mogwai as an instrumental band.  So it’s always surprising when they have vocals on a song.  But it’s even more surprising when the song has steel guitars, is exceedingly mellow and has gently sung, slightly synthesized vocals.  And that’s what “Acid Food” is.  It’s followed by “Travel is Dangerous” which features the least processed vocals of any Mogwai track that I can think of.  It’s a wall of sound from the guitars, but it’s also a pretty conventional verse/chorus structure–will wonders never cease?  Despite that, there’s some wonderful screaming feedback during the solo portion of the song.

Diversity is the name of the game on this album though, as “Team Handed” is a gentle piano ballad.  “Friend of the Night” is one of their catchiest melodies–the piano runs through a series of riffs and ending with a beautiful piano line.  “Emergency Trap” and “Folk Death 95” are two more mellow tracks, but these have some intricate guitar lines running through them as opposed to the ashes of sound from previous discs.

“I Chose Horses” has a spoken vocal part from Tetsuya Fukagawa from the Japanese band Envy.  He speaks slowly and placidly over a beautiful piano melody. The disc ends with “We’re No Here” a final blast of noise to show that they’ve not gotten all soft.  It starts like many of the other songs, but by the end, the guitars are ratcheted up, with a simple but powerful solo taking over the back half of the song until a final descending feedback closes out the disc.

It’s an amazing piece of music. The bonus DVD shows how they made the disc.  I think it was the first time I’d ever seen/heard the guys in the band.

[READ: July 6, 2011] Wonderstruck

Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret was a fantastic pastiche of gorgeous pictures and exciting text–not quite graphic novel and not quite illustrated book.  While the story was wonderful, the pictures were truly amazing–beautiful pencil (charcoal?) pages, many of which spread across two pages.  They were textured and very detailed.  And they brought to life elements of the story in a way that the text couldn’t.

Wonderstruck follows the same format: several pages of wordless illustrations followed by several pages of text.  But unlike Hugo Cabret, the words and pictures tell two very different stories.  The pictures tell the story of a young deaf girl.  The girl adores the actress Lillian Mayhew and even sneaks out to the movies to watch her films (this is set before “talkies”, when the deaf could watch films the same as everyone else).  We follow her through her life as she runs to the New York City and runs into several important figures in her life.  There several surprises are in store for her (and the reader), which I will not spoil here.  Suffice it to say that several times I said, wow!

The text story concerns a boy born deaf in one ear.  As we meet him, he is sleeping in a bed in the house next door to his.  It is slowly revealed that his mother has just died and he is now on his own.  On a stormy night he goes back to his house–for the first time since his mother died, and looks through her things.  He finds some clues, including a book called Wonderstruck which leads him to think that maybe he can find his father in New York City.

His travels lead him to a bookstore and a museum.  He meets a new friend and learns incredible amounts of information about himself, his family and where he came from.

The two story threads merge (although as you begin the story you can’t imagine how they could) in a wonderfully satisfying way.  Indeed the whole story was emotionally powerful and satisfying.

The endnotes indicate that Selznick did a lot of research in to Deaf Culture as well as into 1920s/30s and 1970s New York City.  He also researched items in the museum including the Panorama of the City of New York (in the Queens Museum of Art).

That in itself was very satisfying to know, and it provided an excellent epilogue to the wonderful story.

There are so many wonderful ideas and concepts in the book (not least of which is having the young deaf girl’s story told in pictures only).  Selznick has once again blown me away.