I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: LOWER DENS-Tiny Desk Concert #84 (October 10 2010).

Lower Dens are a band from Baltimore who I’ve heard of but who I didn’t really know.  And after hearing this Tiny Desk, I immediately fell in love with their peculiar song structure and wonderfully expansive sound.

The set opens with “Two Cocks Waving Wildly At Each Other Across A Vast Open Space, A Dark Icy Tundra” which has a long (nearly 2 minutes) instrumental opening.  And then the song proper changes style completely.  It has great interplay of guitar and bass and gentle vocals.  And amazingly the song is only 4 minutes long, even with all that build up.

“I Get Nervous” is slower with waves of guitar washes.  It builds and ends quite suddenly.

Just before the third song, “Rosie” you can hear singer/guitarist Jana Hunter whisper “This is fun.”  She busts out an old beat up acoustic guitar on which she plays a slow 90 second guitar pattern before the chords kick in and then seconds later the vocals come along.  I love the soaring electric guitar over the top.  And again it is over before you suspect (the song is only 3 minutes).

The final song, “What Isn’t Nature” is moody and minor key.  It goes on for longer than the other songs and is just as good.

I have to check out more from this band who totally fell under my radar.

[READ: July 12, 2015] Who is AC?

I really like Hope Larson’s books and I especially like her drawing style.  So I was a little bummed to see that she didn’t draw this one.  Tintin Pantoja’s art style is very different and it was easy for me to forget this was a Larson story.  I liked Pantoja’s style but not as much as Larson’s–it’s just very different.

At the same time I didn’t really like this story that much.  There were some very cool elements but whether it was poorly explained by Larson or if the illustrations didn’t quite convey what was meant to be there, I’m not sure.

The book starts with Lin on a plane writing her zine, Rhea Ironheart.  She is flying to a new city and misses her friends already.  But mid-flight she receives a strange phone call from a number that is all binary.  She answers the phone and blacks out, but what could it mean?

She lands in the small town of Barnhurst, population 2,647.  The best thing in town is the photocopy store when Lin is able to make copies of her story.  The guy who works there is named Trace.  For reasons I’m unclear about, Lin is mad at Trace when he asks if she needs a hand.  (At least that’s what her expression shows…it’s pretty weird to be mad at the guy for asking if she needs help).

Then we see that Trace and Mel (the girl who works in the next building) are going on a date.  Mel’s coworker warns her about him but he seems nice enough.  During their date he mentions that he has read her blog which, inexplicably, pisses her off.  He asks about her ex, named Hunter and she freaks out and says that he is dead.

Why is everyone so angry in this book?

When Lin realized that she left her wallet in the photocopy place, she rushes back only to see that it is being held up (Trace is not working, but rather it is a boy with dreadlocks). She panics and calls the police but instead it rings the binary number and she is transformed into a  superhero of sorts.  We see that the call went to a guy in a room (who I thought was Trace, but it clearly isn’t) who seems to connect her superpowers to her, although he also seems a bit evil.

In the process of being a superhero she crashes into Trace and knocks off his glasses.

When Trace gets home his parents are amazingly dickish asking if he made his date cry (really?) and when he says he lost his glasses they just tell him to sit closer to the board (wtf?).  There is an amazingly incomplete backstory in which he looks at a photo of his family and then says, “Oh right.” But there is no actual explanation for what that could mean.

The story shifts to Mel who is blogging about her night.  She is contacted by /me who promises to make her online life disappear.

Meanwhile Trace realizes who the superhero was and he is super pissed.  Again, why is everyone so angry?  He posts a nasty review about what she did and calls her AC Anonymous Coward

About 3/4 of the way through, we get a slight explanation of what’s going on with Lin and her superhero mentor, when a woman named Pollux shows up and tries to explain things–but she’s pissed off too.

The story converges with Mel and Trace meeting again, with Mel possessed and AC going to save them. Of course Trace is still pissed and the guy who “wrote” her is pissed because of something and at the end everyone is still kinda pissed.  And the final four panels are a very poor epilogue.

I read that this was supposed to be the first part of a series, but there’s no indication of a second book coming anytime soon.