SOUNDTRACK: METRIC-Live It Out (2005).
I enjoyed Metric’s Fantasies album so much that I bought their previous album (an album that I had written down as worth checking out about 5 years ago). At first I was a little disappointed–the album doesn’t have the glow (or perhaps sheen or polish) of Fantasies. Normally I prefer raw to polished, but it’s surprising to go the other way sometimes. And after a couple more listens I really started to appreciate this album’s rawness.
The guitars are loud and pushy. There are keyboards that dominate some songs, but they never make the songs poppy. And Emily Haines’ voice sounds great. The opener “Empty” has a lot of quiet sections, but the guitars really just burst forth. It’s 6 minutes long but that’s mostly through a long intro and outro. The rest of the songs stick firmly in the 3-4 minute range. “Glass Ceiling” has a cool stuttering riff and a kind of awkward bridge–these first two songs kind of resist admittance (the piano/guitar solo is certainly a weird combination–which I like now of course). “Handshakes” shows their more commercial side–a slick kind of guitar riff with Haines’ more aggressive vocals. True the siren sound may turn off some, but it’s certainly a signature. “Too Little Too Late” is a slow sultry number, but even more sultry is the sleazy-feeling (no doubt because of the keyboards) “Poster of a Girl.” In addition to a cool spoken word section in French (the whole song is bilingual), we get the English lines “Coming in your pants/For the off chance/With a…poster of a girl.”
“Monster Hospital” is a fun punk blast that is still a live favorite for the band. “Patriarch on a Vespa” has another rough riff with some cool bass. It also features some disconcerting singing (ahahs that sound more than a little spooky). “The Police and the Private” is one of the cool songs with easily singable but easily confusable lyrics. While “Ending Start” has some great guitar riffs near the end. “Live It Out” ends the disc with a staccato punk number. It’s a perfect summation of Metric before they got more commercial. And it’s a great addition for fans of the band.
[READ: July 8, 2012] The Big Meal
This play came as a supplement with Lucky Peach issue #4.
I have often maintained that it is much better to see a play than to read one. Not a daring opinion, by any stretch. I have taken that to something of an extreme however, which means that I pretty much never read plays. This has severely limited by Shakespeare intact, naturally. It also means that a lot of great works are lost to me.
I’m using that information by way of introduction, not because I think this play compares to Shakespeare, but because this is one of a few plays that I have read recently that I’ve really enjoyed. So I’m retracting some of my earlier thoughts about reading plays. True, some plays with multiple characters can be confusing to keep straight (since defining characteristics are not given). But in shorter plays or plays with not too many characters, it’s not so hard to read them. And in fact, it can be a quick and enjoyable read.
Although this play complicates things immensely because of its (very cool) setup. The setup is described in the introduction to the play: “The actors play multiple generations of one family…as they glide through time. As the characters age, their “essences” pass from younger to older actors.” So, the story takes places over a few generations of time. There are eight actors. Each actor plays multiple roles. These roles correspond to the characters at certain ages. So, for example, the youngest actor plays Character A as a child; the adolescent actor plays Character A as an older child; the middle-aged actor plays Character A as a middle-aged person, etc. So that’s a little confusing (although I’ll bet it makes sense seeing it live). What I like though is that this “gimmick” is not so much a gimmick at all, but a real indication of how we turn into our parents and an indication of how quickly time passes in this play. (more…)
I Just Read About That... 