I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: BUILT TO SPILL-Ancient Melodies of the Future (2001).

After their live album, Built to Spill returned with Ancient Melodies of the Future.  For many fans, this album concluded their first trilogy of great records.  The album is similar in style to Keep It Like a Secret, but there are some new elements added.  Sam Coombs, who supplied keyboards on one song on the previous album is back on this one with prominent keyboards on three tracks (which adds a rather different vibe to the Built to Spill sound).

“Strange” is yet another stellar leadoff track.  It’s got an interesting riff with some great lyrics and what evolves into a stupendously catchy chorus.  It features Sam Coombs on Rocksichord, which has a rather unique sound.

“The Host” has strings, which is quite a departure.  The song is mellow with a simply great vocal line for the verse. “In Your Mind” has an interesting acoustic guitar line with some wild backwards guitar effects over the top. I really like the way the vocal line gets loud and high when he gets to the “in your mind” part.

“Alarmed” slows things down with bigger, louder strings. There’s a lengthy crazy keyboard solo from Sam Coombs

“Trimmed and Burning” gets a little heavier sounding   “Happiness” has a slide guitar—a very unusual sound for BTS. The song picks up pretty quickly and rumbles along.  “Dont Try” comes in with a much louder fuller guitar sound (Brett Netson contributes guitars to this and 3 other songs).

“You Are” is probably my least favorite BtS song, it doesn’t really do anything.  But it’s followed by the up beat and wonderful “Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss” which has really fun guitar solo and is just so catchy.

The disc ends with the acoustic guitar ballad “The Weather.”  It builds to a slightly bigger sound by the end of the song, with interesting effects on the guitars.

I tend to overlook this disc somewhat when I think back to my favorite BtS music, but there are some real gems here.  It might be a little more mellow and introspective than some of the other discs, but it’s still great.

[READ:June 1, 2015] Flunked

I brought this book home because I thought Sarah would like it.  She never got around to reading it, but I decided it might be fun so I read it pretty quickly.  Calonita has written a number of YA books but this is her first series for younger readers (so says the blurb at the back, under her strangely unflattering author photo.  This is a new series (unclear how many books, but the next one is due out next year).

It’s another book that twists around the ideas of fairy tales (which I like).  The premise behind this series is that Cinderella’s stepmother Flora is really, really sorry for what she did to Cinderella (now Princess Ella).  And in order to make it up to the land of Enchantasia (nice) she decided to convert her old castle into Fairy Tale Reform School.  The school is designed to teach bad kids, villains and delinquents the ways of righteousness.  Some teachers include the Big Bad Wolf (Xavier Wolfington), the Sea Witch (Madame Cleo) and the Evil Queen (Professor Harlow).  More than five hundred gnomes, trolls, dwarfs, elves, mer-folks and other fairly tale students have been admitted in the past five years and there is much praise for the school.

Our protagonist is Gilly Cobbler.  Gilly is a young girl, oldest of five.  Her parents are cobblers (and live in a shoe).  Indeed, her father is the one who invented the glass Slipper for Cinderella.  But once it became a hit, the Princess started having them magically made, effectively putting Gilly’s father out of business.  So Gilly has taken to thieving (much to her parents’ grave disappointment).

As the story opens we see Gilly stealing from royals–she has a huge grudge against the royals (not unfairly I admit) and only steals from them.  But on this occasion she is caught and it’s her third strike.  So she is sent to FTRS.

Once she gets there she is determined to escape, but that proves harder than she thought.  At first because the school is so well guarded and later because once she learns what’s actually happening there, she realizes the extent of the danger Enchantasia is in.

She meets a few kids in FTRS–Kayla, her roommate who is a fairy and is a bad student (but nice-ish to Gilly). But mostly she enjoys hanging out with Jax.  Jax is constantly trying to escape but he keeps failing and keeps getting  punished for it.  He had been at the school for so long, he’s become quite good at the various activities–flying Pegasus, ballroom dancing, etc).

Here’s where I have to jump in with a minor complaint.  I realize that Gilly wants to escape because she feels she needs to get back home and steal for her family, but FTRS is about 400 time nicer than her boot.  The advantages at the school are really incredible and you’d have to be a stupid kid not to see that three months in FTRS would be an amazing opportunity to do so many things.  I mean, just flyingon a Pegasus would be worth the time in there.

Especially later when she tells her sister to try to get a job instead of stealing-it all seems much easier than the crisis which the book presents (of course, there wouldn’t be a book, now would there?).

Anyway, she also makes friends with Maxine and Ollie.  Maxine is a troll (there are troll wars here just like in so many other fantasy books).  And there is much enjoyment with having a troll in the book.

There are some great ideas in this book.  The four Princesses Snow White , Rose (a.k.a the expert sleeper) and Rapunzel all reign over the kingdom like on big, happy family. “Yeah Right.”  I also enjoyed that the Magic Mirror can travel to any mirror where he is needed.  And I really liked the Happily Ever After Scrolls that provide updates and news.

I really liked that the book was written from the point of view of a peasant living in this enchanted kingdom–an idea that we don’t hear from too much.

However, I was a little confused by the “bad guys.”  Jocelyn is the sister of Harlow and is quite a nasty character, but there’s not a lot of information given about her.  I’d like to know a bit more about what makes her tick.

Alva and Gottie are the at-large villains whom Flora wishes to capture. Perhaps I wasn’t paying enough attention when they were first mentioned, but I felt like they were not really relevant until they became crucial and then I found their whole problem with the castle to be a little confusing.  Not unreadable confusing–they are bad and the school kids are good–but the details were a little shoddy.  There were a few other things that were really important to the story that it seemed like should have been reinforced at least once.  They kept talking about a prediction that was made earlier in the book, but it was never stated a second time–Gilly could have just recapped for those of us who didn’t remember exactly what was said.

There are more books in the series and I kind of hope that the royals become more of a presence–I’d be curious to see how they are handled and what they have done with themselves over the years.  I wanted to like this a little more than I did–I’ve just read so many good Fairy Tales-esque stories lately, that this one came up a little short.  Although there was certainly plenty to like in it too.