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Archive for the ‘Translation’ Category

Judith Schalansky–Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Island I Have Never Set Foot on and Never Will (2009)

Posted in 18th Century, 19th Century, Adventure, All Songs Considered, Christine Lo, Culture Shock, Death, Foreign Books, History, Judith Schalansky, Metric, Nature, Russia, The Flaming Lips, The Swell Season, Translation, Travel on August 29, 2011| 1 Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: METRIC-Live at the 9:30 Club, June 18, 2009 (2009).

I love the new Metric album and this tour supported that disc, so, it’s a win-win for me!  Metric sound great live, and the notes on the NPR page where I downloaded this give a fascinating history of the band.  Evidently they burnt out in 2005 while touring for Live It Out.  So they made solo records and kind of went their separate ways.  Then:

in March 2008, Haines was on stage, in the middle of a live solo performance, when she had an epiphany: She was tired of being sad. While playing one of the standout cuts from her gloomy but beautiful album Knives Don’t Have Your Back, Haines stopped, turned to the audience and said, “I don’t want to play these songs anymore.” Instead, she spent the rest of the show performing her favorite Metric tunes.

The band reunited and made Fantasies, the poptastic album that I love so much.

This show plays pretty much all of the album (except “Collect Call” and “Blindness”) and they rock the house!  The only odd part for me is the opening track, “Satellite Mind.”  The band chose to have the first half of the song performed with just the keyboards, so it has no bottom end at all.  It sounds kind of tinny and weird.  Then when the guitars and bass kick in (for the rest of the show, thankfully), the band sounds whole again.

The other weird thing is Emily Haines’ banter.  I like chatty lead singers (–The Swell Season’s banter is great, Wayne Coyne’s banter is emotional but enjoyable), but there’s something about Haines’ musing that are just kind of…lame.  She’s very earnest, but her thoughts are kind of, well, vapid.  So, I just skip past all the chatter and enjoy the music.

It’s a really great, rocking set and the crowd is very into it.

[READ: August 25, 2011] Atlas of Remote Islands

If you need an unusual but doubtlessly cool book, my brother-in-law Ben is your man.  For my birthday and Christmases he often gets me books that I have never heard of but that are weird and interesting.

This book is no exception.  As the subtitle states, this is a book about fifty remote islands that virtually no one lives on.  True, some are inhabited, but many are not.  And a goodly amount of them are little more than icebergs (I wonder how they will survive global warming).  There’s even one that the accompanying story implies was created from bird droppings. (more…)

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Five Dials Number 15: The November Issue (22 November 2010)

Posted in Advice, Alain de Botton, Anne Cloutier, Émilie Andrewes, Bob Mould, Books about writers, Canadian Content, Claude Mathieu, Craig Taylor, Culture Shock, Dana Bath, Daniel Sanger, David Foster Wallace, David Homel, David Shields, Denis Villeneuve, Essays, Fears, Five Dials, Foo Fighters, Gail Armstrong, Gaston Miron, Gil Courtemanche, Gustav Flaubert, Heathecote Williams, History, Hockey, Incendies, Jean Gautier, Julie Doucet, Leonard Cohen, Madeleine Thien, Maxime Catellier, Michel Temblay, Michel Vézina, Mireille Silcoff, Niven Govinden, Oscar Wilde, Poetry, Raymond Chandler, Rebecca Harries, Richard Thompson, Robbie Dillon, Robert Lévesque, Roxanne Bouchard, Rush, Sarah Steinberg, Short Story, Translation, Travel on July 30, 2011| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: FOO FIGHTERS-Wasting Light (2011).

The Foo Fighters are huge.  Duh.  But when I think of that, it amazes me that a) the Foo Fighters are the band from “the drummer from Nirvana” and that b) while Dave Grohl knows his way around a melody, he is a metal dude at heart, and some of his most popular songs are really heavy.  He can scream with the best of them.

I’ve enjoyed the Foos for many years, but I didn’t listen to their previous discs all that much (or at least I didn’t listen to the mellow disc from In Your Honor and I don’t remember anything off of Echoes…), but this new one is fantastic.  There’s not a dull song on the disc, and Grohl has hit new heights of catchiness and singalong-ness. 

I also like how noisy the disc is.  It opens with some great discord before turning in a majorly heavy rifftastic scream fest in “Bridge Burning.”  Despite the screaming and noise of the opening, the chorus is super catchy.  “Rope” was said to be inspired by Rush.  Knowing that, I can hear a lot of little Rush-isms in the track: The main riff is very Rush-like, there’s a cymbal tapping that reminds me of Neil Peart in the verses, as well as a little drum solo in the middle (with a cowbell!) and the solo is very Alex Lifeson. (It also feels longer than 4 minutes).

“Dear Rosemary” features Bob Mould on backing vocals (but you can hardly tell it’s him).  It’s got a great chorus as well.  “White Limo” is a wonderful punk song, completely incomprehensible lyrics and all.  Meanwhile “Arlandria” (whatever that means) is another totally catchy track (I find myself singing it a lot).

“These Days” should be the next single: catchy and easy on the ears.  I wonder why it hasn’t been released yet.  “Back and Forth” has another great noisy riff.  One thing that I like a lot about the Foos is that they put different things in the same song:  so “A Matter of Time” has a very simple verse and a catchy chorus, but there’s some really buzzing heavy guitars too.  “Miss the Misery” has a kind of sleazy feel which I think is new for the Foos.  And “I Should Have Known” is a kind of angry ballad (I’d like to see Richard Thompson cover it). 

The final track, “Walk” is a fast rocker that sums up the album really well.  Bravo Dave Grohl.  I can’t get enough of this disc, regardless of how popular it is.

[READ: July 2, 2011] Five Dials Number 15

After the brevity of Number 14, Five Dials Number 15 comes back to a fuller size.  It’s strange to me that the issue is titled The November Issue, in part because they never tell us when the issues were published, but even more because this is actually the Québec Issue.  Most of the authors are Quécbecers and the issue release party was in Québec as well.

I’d like to point out that while I was looking something up about this issue (more later) I discovered the Five Dials News Page.  There are currently 43 pages worth of posts.  But most of them are short.  If there are any especially noteworthy ones, I’ll add them to reviews of future issues, but for the most part so far they’re just announcements of how well received their books are (I’ve already made notes to read two of them).  They also give release dates for the issues, which is how I have been able to retroactively attach dates to some of them.

There are many Québecois writers included in this issue (thoughtfully translated into English), as well as some standard features by Alain De Botton and frequent contributors David Shields and Raymond Chandler.

CRAIG TAYLOR-On Our Québec Issue, and Young Novelists
Taylor’s introduction discusses many Canadian’s attitudes about Québec and their (seemingly perennial) vote concerning separation from the country (“so, let them go”).

creepy beard

The confusing thing here is that it appears that Taylor is Canadian (or at least lived there in 1995/6).   But surely he is British, no?

There’s lots of information about Québec in here but no grand statement (except that Celine Dion’s husband’s beard is still creepy).

He also introduces a new section called “Our Town” which is all about London.  The final section of the note says that

we are releasing our second Five Dials list of Top Ten Novelists Under Ten (or ‘Ten Under Ten’,or ‘Ten-Ten’, or as some of the writers themselves call the list: ‘Tintin.’) As you know, many of the writers we chose for our first Ten Under Ten list went on to things such as high school.

This is how I discovered the Five Dials News page, because there certainly was no Ten Under Ten section in a previous issue of the magazine.  Of course, nor is there any mention in the news that I have seen.  So I can’t decide if the whole thing is just a big joke or what.  I assume it is (but I’d hate to not give credit to the waaaay precocious kids at the end of the issue). (more…)

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Jun’ichirō Tanizaki–“The Gourmet Club” (Lucky Peach, No. 1: Ramen: Summer 2011)

Posted in All Songs Considered, Black Mountain, Food, Funny (strange), Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, Lucky Peach, Magic, McSweeney's, Neil Gaiman, Paul McCarthy, Short Story, Translation, Yuck! on July 17, 2011| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: BLACK MOUNTAIN-Live at Sasquatch, May 30, 2011 (2011).

The previous Black Mountain live show I downloaded from NPR was a real disappointment.  For me the major problem was Amanda Webber’s voice–she applied a really harsh vibrato to the end of every single line.  It was so pronounced it sounded almost like a stutter.  I found it very distracting.

She doesn’t do that here, which automatically makes this set 100 times better (she has a minor vibrato on a few places, which is totally fine).  This Sasquatch concert covers songs from all three of their albums, which really showcases the diversity they explore within their trippy, space-rock, metal sound.  It works like a (brief) greatest hits for the band.

And the band sounds comfortable and fresh in this live setting (the guitars are fantastic and the keyboards add a wonderful spacey feel to the mix).  The two tracks of “Wucan” and “Tyrants” is particularly amazing; it’s interesting that they play four songs from their middle album and only three from their most recent.

Regardless, this release has won back my faith in Black Mountain live.

[READ: July 13, 2011] “The Gourmet Club”

I’d never heard of Tanizaki before and I haven’t really read that much Japanese fiction.  This translation by Paul McCarthy was really fantastic, and I never felt like I was reading a translation.

When I started this story (the first fiction from Lucky Peach), I was concerned that it was going to be the same kind of story as Neil Gaiman’s “Sunbird” (I realize “Sunbird” was published much later than “The Gourmet Club” originally written in 1919), but I’m glad it didn’t.

Essentially, this story focuses on five Japanese men who live to eat.  They are Epicurean to the highest degree, eating only the best at least once a day and often to bursting.  They go through all of the restaurants in Japan, traveling across the island to find new foods.  But they soon reach the end of their new food options. (more…)

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Five Dials Number 9: The Fiction Issue (2009)

Posted in Advice, Alain de Botton, Alice Hoffman, Anna Kelly, B.S. Johnson, Bao Ninh, Books about writers, Chloe Aridjis, Craig Taylor, Daniel Kehlmann, David Shields, David Vann, Death, Essays, Fears, Five Dials, Funny (ha ha), Funny (strange), Harper's, Helen Oyeyemi, James Kelman, Language, Letters, Marriage Trouble, Philip Langeskov, Philip Roth, Poetry, Rainer Maria Rilke, Shane Jones, Short Story, Simon Prosser, Summer, Teenage Fanclub, Translation, William S. Burroughs on June 18, 2011| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: TEENAGE FANCLUB-Shadows (2010).

Back in the 90s, Teenage Fanclub released a few noisy, feedbacky records that were quintessential 90s alt rock.

Since then they have mellowed considerably, and this album is one of their most mellow to date. Usually for me this kind of mellowing is a sign that I’m done with a band; however, Teenage Fanclub’s songwriting gets better with every disc.  And these folky tracks are all fantastic.

What’s neat about the arrangement of the album is that each of the three members of the band writes four songs.  They are collated so that you cycle through each singer before repeating. You get maximum diversity–and it’s easy to tell which songwriter is your favorite.

The opening two songs, “Sometimes I Don’t Need to Believe in Anything” and “Baby Lee” are two wonderful upbeat pop confections.  They sound very different and yet both are infused with wonderful pop chops.

It seems that Blake is my favorite songwriter on this disc. He did “Baby Lee”, “Dark Clouds” (a pretty piano based number) and by far the prettiest song on the disc “When I Still Have Thee.”  It’s an amazingly catchy folk song that sounds timeless (and even has the great couplet: “The Rolling Stones wrote a song for me/It’s a minor song in a major key.”

That’s not to dismiss the other songwriters at all.  In fact, hearing their different takes on pop music is really pretty amazing.  It’s a shame that it takes them so long to put albums out (about 5 years these days).

[READ: June 10, 2011] Five Dials Number 9

Five Dials Number 8, The Paris Issue, was pretty big (45 pages), but it had a lot of pictures.  Five Dials Number 9 is also pretty big (41 pages) and it’s (almost) all text.  For this is the Fiction Issue, and there are a lot of short stories in here.

CRAIG TAYLOR-A Letter from the Editor: On ‘Summer Reading’ and Fiction Issues.
Since most of what I talk about in the introduction to these posts is covered in Taylor’s Letter from the Editor, I figured I’d switch formats and start talking about his letter right away.  In this letter, Taylor talks about the serious pitfalls of  ‘Summer Reading’: We pledge to read mammoth books over the summer, but really we never finish War and Peace over the summer, do we? (except those of us who finished Infinite Summer, am I right?).  And so, this Fiction Issue was released in December (finally, a date is given to a Five Dials!).  Taylor briefly talks about all of the authors who contributed (including a pat on the back to Five Dials for securing the rights to a Philip Roth contribution in its first year of publication).  He also talks about the essay from David Shields that is decidedly anti-fiction.   And the final note is that Taylor’s own father has a piece in this issue (nepotism is alive and well!) (more…)

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Five Dials Number 8 bis (3 December 2009)

Posted in Art, Books about writers, Five Dials, Guy de Maupassant, Marielle Durand, Mogwai, Sex, Short Story, Siân Miles, Translation, Travel on June 12, 2011| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: MOGWAI-EP +2 (1999).

There’s a fascinating release history behind this EP (which mostly means fans wind up with three copies of “Stanley Kubrick.”  First it came out as EP with 4 tracks (which I ordered on import).  Then it was released in the US as EP+2 with two songs from the Fuck the Curfew EP (which was not released in the US) and finally in 2000 it was reissued again as EP+6 with ten songs in total (compiling 1997’s 4 Satin, 1998’s No Education = No Future (Fuck the Curfew), and 1999’s EP–I didn’t buy this version because by then I had the original imports).

“Stanley Kubrick” is a slow burner with a great repeated mournful guitar.   It’s one of their best songs. “Christmas Song” is a slow, upbeat track with a very pretty melody.  “Burn Girl Prom Queen” opens with some really quiet guitar.  After about 90 seconds, a brass band kicks in adding amazing horns over the simple guitar melody.  It’s my favorite track on the disc.  “Rage: Man” is the first song on the album where Mogawai’s noise tendencies really come to the fore.  Once again, it’s a simple slow melody (with piano).  About two minutes in, the song is bombarded with noise guitars that take over the song but don’t obscure the melody.  There’s also a noisy guitar solo played over the noise.  Soon enough all the noise ends, and the simple, harmonic’d guitar comes back and the song ends peacefully.  It’s a great example of Mogwai dynamics.

The other two tracks, “Rollerball” and “Small Children in the Background” come from the other EP as I mentioned.  It’s odd to squeeze in songs from a different release, but Mogwai don’t sound terribly different on these early EPs, so these songs work well together.

Despite their length, Mogwai EPs are pretty uniformly wonderful.

[READ: June 1, 2011] Five Dials Number 8 bis

After publishing Five Dials Number 8, they quickly rushed out this addendum to the issue, which they’ve called Five Dials 8 bis.  According to the introduction: “The definition of ‘bis’ is a passage to be repeated, so here is a small bis for our eighth issue.”

It’s only 9 pages long and really only contains one long piece.  Primarily, this is a memento of their Paris-issue release party, which they held in Paris (duh).  The opening pages includes scans of postcards (“One of our volunteers waded into conversations and asked attendees to write down their own thoughts on Paris. We’ve reprinted five of our favourites.”)  The editor’s letter, which explains all about the party and this issue, is not credited to anyone, so I can’t so who is responsible.  [This lack of proper crediting is the one major flaw with this publication–just saying illustrations by, and then not saying which is whose, or not including the date of publication is maddening].

The big article is by Guy de Maupassant (translated by Siân Miles). (more…)

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W.G. Sebald–Austerlitz (2001) [translated 2001]

Posted in Anthea Bell, Culture Shock, Death, Holocaust, James Joyce, Kate Bush, Nazis, Roberto Bolaño, The Rolling Stones, Translation, Travel, W.G. Sebald, War on May 23, 2011| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: KATE BUSH-Director’s Cut (2011).

Kate Bush has re-recorded eleven songs from her two least-loved discs, The Sensual World and The Red Shoes.  According to the story at NPR, this seems to have been inspired by the Joyce estate’s granting Kate the right to use part of Ulysses as the lyrics for the song “The Sensual World” (in the original version she paraphrased the book).  So, she decided to re-record a bunch of other songs from those two albums as well.

I admit that neither one of those discs is high on my repeat play list, with The Red Shoes being a particular disappointment.  (Although there are some great songs on each).  When I read that these songs from those two albums I wasn’t terribly excited to hear them.  But I must say that these new versions have really reinvigorated these tracks.

I’m surprised by some of the choices (redoing “This Woman’s Work” is something of a shock, as is redoing her only real hit from The Red Shoes, “Rubberband Girl”), but whether it’s that she chose the best songs, or the new version have more life to them, this is a wonderful collection of songs.

Actually, rechecking the track listing, it does appear to be the best tracks from both discs, but I’m pleasantly surprised to seen how many good songs were actually on The Red Shoes to begin with,

from The Sensual World

  • Sensual World (retitled “Flower of the MOuntain”)
  • Deeper Understanding
  •  This Woman’s Work
  • Never Be Mine

from The Red Shoes

  • The Song of Solomon
  • Lily
  • The Red Shoes
  • Moments of Pleasure
  • Top of the City
  • And So is Love
  • Rubberband Girl

For the most part, the music seems to be the same (although there are some glaring exceptions).  I admit to not remembering the originals for all of them all that well).  But she has mostly rerecorded her voice (and possibly other lyrics, if NPR is accurate).  Her voice is unmistakably Kate, but in some places she sounds noticeably older (which she is, so duh).  She doesn’t seem to be able to hit quite the highs of before, but her voice has a throaty excellence to it now that brings something new to the songs.  It’s not noticeable on every song, although it is most notable on “This Woman’s Work,” which began with high sopranos, and now begins with lower alto notes.  But she can still hit some of the cool screechy notes on “Top of the City”

There are some tracks that are very different, “A Deeper Understanding” (a song about love via modems) replaces the earlier style of singing with a heavily autotuned computer voice.  It’s unsettling but very cool sounding.

The biggest changes come in “This Woman’s Work” and “Rubberband Girl.”

“This Woman’s Work” is a far more sedate track now. It doesn’t have any of the soaring moments of the original.  It seems to have more depth in this version, but I miss the “Oh darling make it go away” moment.  Nevertheless, it sounds really pretty in this more mature version.  It’s simply a very different song now.

As for “Rubberband Girl,” I’ve always had a real fondness for the original, so I don’t know how I feel about the rerecorded version (which is so very different).  The original is very elastic with cool music and weird vocals and is kind of trippy (and may not even be all that good), but I have grown quiet attached to it.  The new version is a simple guitar sound (it reminds me of a sort of unplugged Rolling Stones song now).

Overall, this is an exciting revitalization of Kate’s back catalog, and I hope it inspires her to make another new album in the next few years or so.

[READ: May 14, 2011] Austerlitz

I read about Sebald in Five Dials. And the glowing talk about him made me want to read one of his books (specifically, this one).

Austerlitz is a strange novel which I enjoyed but which I never really got into.  I feel like rather than absorbing me into its words, the book kind of held me aloft on the surface.  As such, I have a general sense of what happened, but I’d be very hard pressed to discuss it at length.

The basic plot summary is that an unnamed narrator runs into a man named Jacques Austerlitz.  Austerlitz talks to him at length about his life. They run into each other at various points over the years, and Austerlitz’ story is continued.  And literally, that is the book.  Now, of course, Austerlitz’ story is multifaceted and complex.  But we will never forget that this is a story within a story (it’s impossible to forget because the phrase “said Austerlitz” appears about 500 times in the book. (more…)

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Ludmilla Petrushevskaya–“A Withered Branch” (The New Yorker, April 18, 2011)

Posted in All Songs Considered, Anna Summers, Books about writers, Culture Shock, KEXP 90.3 FM--Seattle, WA, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, New Yorker, Short Story, The Head and the Heart, Translation, Travel on May 6, 2011| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: THE HEAD AND THE HEART-KEXP in Studio, September 14, 2010 (2010).

My saga of The Head and the Heart continues.  Sarah had ordered me the disc for Christmas, but the self-released CD had gone out of print.  This is because Sub Pop was going to re-release the record sometime in the new year.

Well, NPR loved the album, so why wouldn’t they have more recordings by them?  (This is one of the great things about enjoying new bands…they are far less likely to restrict listening and downloading abilities online).  So, this session (September) was recorded shortly after they released their album (July).  I have still yet to hear the actual album, but I have fallen in love with these songs.

This set (which has some very brief interview portions) is five songs. The band sounds great, with wonderful harmonies.  The first two songs “Cats and Dogs” and “Coeur d’Alene” meld together seamlessly, and it works wonders.  “Lost in My Mind” is an amazingly catchy single: the “whoo whoos” (which sound not unlike a train) are wonderfully catchy (in a Mumford and Sons kind of way).

They also play “Ghosts” (another catchy catchy song) and the non-LP song “Down in the Valley” (which has the slightly uncomfortable opening lyrics: “I wish I was a slave to an age-old trade”).

This neo-folkie revival has generated some great bands, and The Head and the Heart are yet another one.

[READ: April 14, 2011] “A Withered Branch”

This is a very brief short story (a page and a half) translated by Anna Summers.

A young woman hitchhikes into Vilinus.  She is picked up by a trucker and is unbothered until they get to a rest stop.  While they are having dinner, one of the drivers wonders who she will sleep with that night.

But that is the prelude to the story.  When she arrives in the city, she meets a woman of about fifty who, when the narrator asks if there is any place to stay, offers her own house to the (dirty and sweaty) stranger/narrator. (more…)

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Franz Kafka & Coleridge Cook–The Meowmorphosis (2011) [prepub]

Posted in Angst, Boredom, Coleridge Cook, Dreams, Fears, Franz Kafka, Funny (ha ha), Funny (strange), Futility, Humiliation, Joss Whedon, Mash-up, Quirk Books, Translation on March 24, 2011| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: ANGST-“The Weather’s Fine” (1988).

I recently rediscovered the band Angst.  They were part of the second wave of SST bands (the ones who never went anywhere and were summarily dropped with no forwarding address).  I know of Angst from their song on The Blasting Concept Volume II (which I love).  I decided to investigate Angst a little further and my good friends at YouTube came through with a number of Angst tracks that I’d never heard.

Like this one.

Angst is a kind of jangly pop band.  This song in particular would not be out of place on the radio in 1992 or indeed now.  It has an early R.E.M. feel, but I think what makes it stand out somewhat is that the chorus feels kind of short–you kind of expect Peter Buck to sing a second part of the chorus, but that never materializes.

Angst is a band that could have been huge (SST was not much for marketing).  And as far as I can tell all of their discs are utterly out of print.  Pity.  This is some good stuff.

Tap your feet along!

[READ: March 22, 2011] The Meowmorphosis

I received this book as an Advance Reader’s Copy.  I absolutely loved Pride & Prejudice & Zombies.  I didn’t read Quirk Classics’ other mash-ups: Sense & Sensibility & Sea Monsters or Android Karenina (although I love the title of that one).  Nor did I read any of the other mash-ups that Quirk Press did not print.  It became rather passe after one great idea.

But this one seemed different somehow….  In part, Kafka.  But also, it’s not a classic novel plus horror.  It’s more horror plus…cats.  And the opening line is wonderful:

One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that he had been changed into an adorable kitten.

Anyone who has read The Metamorphosis knows that it’s about 85 pages long.  So, how did Coleridge Cook (which is a pseudonym, FYI) get 200 pages out of it?  Well, it’s not simply The Metamorphosis.  It incorporates aspects of  The Trial and the short story “Little Woman” (and quite possible some other things as well).

And in that respect, it’s pretty neat.  He takes these three separate Kafka stories and interweaves them, all keeping with the same basic structure of The Metamorphosis with Gregor as a cat.

And so, as in the original, Gregor is abused by his family.  But unlike the original, he eventually escapes outside where he meets Josef K. and is put on trial.  He is eventually let go and returns home where he imagines the tearful return he will have with his sister.

But here’s the problem.  Unlike P&P&Z which made a whole new plot and added so much excitement to the original story, all that this mash-up does is to change him from a cockroach into a kitten.  So really, the story is exactly the same but instead of scenes with creepy, gross cockroach detail, we get scenes with cute and cuddly kitten details.  And as such, it’s hard to understand exactly why the family is so creeped out by him. (more…)

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Banana Yoshimoto–“Platanus” (The Walrus, July/August 2004)

Posted in Banana Yoshimoto, Canadian Music, Michael Emmerich, Romance, Sarah Polley, Short Story, The Sweet Hereafter, The Tragically Hip, The Walrus, Translation, Travel on February 16, 2011| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: THE TRAGICALLY HIP-Fully Completely (1993).

Even thought Road Apples was good, Fully Completely is amazing.  The band has traded in some rawness for textural complexity and yet they haven’t lost the rocking groove of their earlier sound.

This album has some of my favorite Hip songs: “Courage” (the Sarah Polley cover in The Sweet Hereafter is also beautiful in a very different way). “At the Hundredth Meridian” (a title which should tell you that the lyrics of the song aren’t going to be typical rock fodder), and “Fifty Mission Cap.”   “Fifty Mission Cap” is about the fascinating story of Toronto Maple Leaf Bill Barilko, another atypical lyrical concept and an amazing song from start to finish (although, honestly the opening chords make it sound like it’s going to be a lame 80′ metal anthem…maturation as a band made this song brilliant instead).

The duel guitar opening of “Pigeon Camera” is also gorgeous, as are the wonderful vocal harmonies on the bridge.  And the rawness isn’t all gone either.  “Locked in the Trunk of a Car” rocks as hard as anything on Road Apples.  There’s also a mellow folk song in “Wheat Kings.”  It slows the disc down a bit after the intensity of the amazing “Fully Completely,” and “Fifty Mission Cap,” but the last two songs are a string ending to an already great disc.

Even though I think that Fully is an amazing record, I think that mostly it’s preparation for the even more amazing Day for Night which came out two years later.

[READ: January 26, 2011] “Platanus”

Anyone playing along might have noticed that February is Canada month here.  All of the authors this month have been from the Great White North.  This story breaks with that, but I feel that it still counts because it came in a Canadian magazine.  But Banana Yoshimoto is Japanese (no, really!).  With a name like “Banana” (which is a pseudonym), it’s hard to forget this author.  I even bought Kitchen (her first translated book) when it came out (although I haven’t read it yet).

This story is translated from the Japanese by Michael Emmerich.  It is set in Mexico, specifically in the village of Mendoza.  The narrator (aged 35) and her husband (aged 60) enjoy escaping Tokyo and spending time in this sleepy village.

The story provides some interesting familial background of the two characters (both of their families disapprove of the marriage) and the kinds of things that they get up to in Mendoza.  And really that’s all there is to the story. (more…)

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Amos Oz–“The King of Norway” (New Yorker, January 17, 2011)

Posted in A Serious Man, Amos Oz, Bjork, Death, Dido, Frou Frou, Guy Siggsworth, Heather Nova, James Joyce, New Yorker, Religion, Short Story, Sondra Silverston, Tori Amos, Translation on January 28, 2011| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: FROU FROU-Details (2002).

Many years ago I bought Imogen Heap’s debut album because it was described as being similar to Tori Amos’ work.  I think that it’s really closer to someone like Heather Nova, but regardless, it was enjoyable, with her cool voice that had an unexpected falsetto thing that I rather liked.

I promptly forgot about her, although the single “Come Here Boy” stuck with me.  I was recently turned on to Frou Frou somewhere even though this album came out almost ten years ago.  Since a decade is a long time I can’t recall if 2002 was the time of this sort of music or not (well, Dido came out in 1999, so maybe this was the tail end?)

Anyhow, this album plays nicely into the continuum of slightly more complex than normal pop songs sung by a woman with a cool if not unique voice.  Heap provides the vocals, and I suppose the most notable quality is her breathiness.  She seems to be able to sing in a whisper, which is pretty neat and, again, there’s that falsetto which doesn’t seem to get higher so much as otherwordly.

She’s an excellent match for Guy Siggworth who creates music (at least I assume he did the music, I’m not sure how it was divided exactly) that is interesting and electronic but also soft and welcoming.  Despite the fact that the music is obviously a dude with a keyboard, his choices are not electronic and dancey, they are more enchanting (although they are also very catchy and dancey).

They work wonders as a team, and if you miss this sort of not-pure pop album (circa 2000), this is a great disc to pick up.  Heap’s voice may be one to get used to, but I find it far more engaging than the autotuned voices circa 2010.

A couple of stand out tracks include: “Must Be Dreaming” which has some especially nifty effects that make the song stand out.  The most Björkian song “Psychobabble” also offers cool sound effects which take it well out of the pop realm (her voice is particularly cool on this track).  And “Maddening Shroud” is probably the best poppy song I’ve heard in a long time.

[READ: January 11, 2011] “The King of Norway”

In my mind Amos Oz is a capital-A Author, somehow promising Thoughts.  Maybe it’s because he writes in Hebrew.  Maybe it’s because of the mystical name Oz, but he seems like a Prophet or something.  And in that respect, I suppose I am simply not full of Grace enough to get the Point of this story.

I know that it is utterly unfair to hold this man up to these made up standards, especially since I’ve never actually read him before.  But that’s all moot, because I feel like there’s more to this than meets the eye and I am just not that interested in finding out what.

It’s utterly coincidental that tonight we watched the first half of A Serious Man (which also features Hebrew prominently), but I am suffused with Jewish thought this evening.  (I enjoyed A Serious Man a lot more than this story, by the way). (more…)

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