I recently came across Basia Bulat via NPR. She played a Tiny Desk concert and I discovered that she had several other entries in the NPR canon.
Basia is Canadian (of Polish descent); she has a beautiful strong mid-range/throaty voice and a great sense of melody. She also has a bit of a gimmick: she plays all kinds of instruments (guitar, piano, sax, etc) including some really weird and unexpected instruments: Zither, pianoette (!) and autoharp–a couple of years before PJ Harvey brought it back to the mainstream.
pianoette
“In the Night” is a wonderfully chipper poppy song. And that autoharp gives it just a tinge of “huh?’ that makes it more than just a simple pop song. The beat is fast and energetic, the harmonies are wonderful and the melody is top-notch.
I really like this song a lot, and the other snippets of songs that I’ve heard from her are equally wonderful. I’ve even noticed that lately she’s been singing a song in Polish!
[READ: July 12, 2011] “Gastronomania”
I’m not going to go crazy reviewing all of the book reviews in Harper’s (that way lies madness), but occasionally an author I like writes a bit that I want to mention. So Will Self, who I like but have not read a lot of, wrote this essay/book review about food. He reviews three books, but what I especially liked about it was his introduction, which uses Luis Buñuel’s Le fantôme de la liberté [The Phantom of Liberty] as its starting point. In the film (which I have not seen), the house’s dining room is actually a well…watch this clip:
It’s a wonderfully bizarre introduction to an essay about food.
It was unclear to me what made Will Self suitable to review three books about cooking. And then (news to me) he revealed that he used to be a food critic (columns are collected in his book Junk Mail) and that Anton Ego in Ratatouille (yes thatRatatouille) bears “an uncanny, if not legally actionable” resemblance to him.
This essay was so much fun. Self is as viciously negative about these books as he apparently was about food back in the day. But he’s not dismissive of them as cookbooks per se, he’s more about trashing the current worship of food (and many other things too of course). Continue Reading »
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. Continue Reading »
Girl Talk is the product of Gregg Gillis. Gillis doesn’t play any instruments. All he does is mash-up different songs into a killer DJ mix. There is absolutely nothing legal about what he does (in terms of copyright), and for that reason alone, I love it. But beyond that, he does a great job of mashing two (and more) songs together.
Mostly this is a fun way to play “spot the song” [Hey: “In Your Arms,” Hey “War Pigs”]. And when you give up you can check out the samples list (which has 37 entries under the name D alone). [Hey, Spacehog’s “In the Meantime”]
I knew a lot of the songs that he sampled, but he also put in a lot of rap which I didn’t know. The rap works well over the original music (what sampling would be like for real if it was legal). [Hey, Portishead!]
Mostly you get a minute or maybe a little more of each song, [Radiohead’s “Creep”] sometimes the clips are sped up or slowed down to merge perfectly with the other. And it’s a whole lot of fun. [The Toadies!] As someone described it, it’s like listening to a whole bunch of radio stations at once [“Cecelia”]. And, if you don’t like the song that’s on [two seconds of the Grateful Dead?], just wait a couple seconds. [INXS].
Gillis doesn’t (really) sell his music. Indeed, you can download all of All Day for free fromIllegal Art. [Hey, the middle of Edgar Winter’s “Frankenstein”].
I’m not sure if it’s art, per se, but it’s clearly a lot of work, and it takes a lot of skill to make it so seamless [White Zombie!]. It probably works very well at a party too.
[READ: June 20, 2011] Five Dials Number 13
Five Dials 13 is more or less the music issue. It is specifically dedicated to festivals and their overindulgence of everything. And so it is long (63 pages), it is full of rather diverse points of view, it even has clouds! Thankfully it’s not full of overflowing portapotties. It also has lots of artwork from Raymond Pettibon, which is pretty fantastic in and of itself.
CRAIG TAYLOR-Letter from the Editor: On Festivals and George Thoroughgood
The letter opens with some comments on Festivals–two paragraphs of complainants about festivals with a final admission that the interlocuter is going to Glastonbury. The end of the letter is devoted to a story from George Thoroughgood. Usually I agree with the Five Dials‘ tastes without question, but I have a serious complaint about their love of Thoroughgood, about whom it would be charitable to say that he has written one song seventy-five times. And I have absolute incredulity at this quote from George:
The promoters had gone to another festival where we played on Thursday before Roskilde, and they were so knocked out by the power of the performance they called me the next day and asked if we would mind if they changed our show time to close the festival.
Are you seriously telling me that they would change the headlining act a weekend before the festival? How pissed would you be if your headliner was bumped for 90 minutes of ‘Bad to the Bone’? Good grief. Continue Reading »
SOUNDTRACK: THE DECEMBERISTS-Tiny Desk Concert #135 (June 20, 2011).
NPR has loved the Decemberists for years, so it’s no surprise that they made it to Bob Boilen’s office for a Tiny Desk concert. And yet they are probably one of the biggest bands to appear at the Tiny Desk, so I was quite excited to hear this show. They play 3 songs, all from The King is Dead: “Down by the Water” (naturally), “Rox in the Box” and “The June Hymn.”
Colin is in good chatty form (after almost getting hit in the face by a violin bow) and makes a very funny comment about thinking that everyone would be working while they played. He also—I think a first in Tiny Desk history—screws up a song (“The June Hymn”) and has to restart the whole thing—it’s a very minor flub, only noticeable if you listen a few times, but he noticed and clearly felt bad (and didn’t curse either).
The songs sound great even if they’re not radically different from the recorded version (the harmonica solos are the big “improv” moments). And this set confirms what a solid bunch of songs The King is Dead is.
[READ: July 7, 2011] Wildwood
I had this book signed by Colin and Carson at BEA. I was so psyched to see that they were signing there, that I got up super early, took the bus into Manhattan and got to the convention center before it opened (I thought they were signing at 7:30, but it was actually 8:30). Of course, I didn’t see the fine print that said I needed a ticket to meet the author and illustrator. In fact, I didn’t even realize that people were holding tickets until I was next on line. I asked the nice BEA worker if I could still go. She said they wouldn’t sign a book, but that I could say hello.
I told Colin and Carson that I loved their stuff and I gushed over them like a little fanboy (even mentioned having a Tarkus album) and they gave me a copy of the book anyway (signed by them both). How cool!
So this book is an older children’s book (I would say on a level of The Mysterious Benedict Society–which the book reminded me of because Carson did the illustrations for that series as well, although the books are nothing alike in content).
I have always loved Colin’s lyrics (yeah, he signed my book, we’re on a first name basis now). They are fantastical and fantastic, and he has a great vocabulary, pulling out obscure words for rhymes. There’s a generally accepted tenet in writing that poetry is more powerful than prose because poems are typically honed with perfect word choices, whereas prose tends to be a bit lazier because there’s so many more words to play with (ideally, prose should also be finely honed, but it’s much more noticable in poetry). And so given this, I guess it’s no surprise that Wildwood is not as impactful as Colin’s songs. There are couplets from Decemberists songs that run through my head all the time, but there weren’t any great phrases in the book that really stuck with me. Of course, at 540 pages you wouldn’t expect too many phrases to jump out at you (images and scenes and chracters yes, but phrases, no).
All of this is a long way of saying that I really enjoyed the story, but I wasn’t blown away by the language of the book.
The story follows Prue McKeel, a young girl who is pretty ordinary. She lives in Portland (the Wildwood of the title is in Oregon, not New Jersey, which isn’t surprising since they’re from Oregon, but a Jersey kid can hope), goes to school and has a pretty happy home life. Her mom and dad are nice (I love that her parents are suffused with all the trappings of hippie Oregon–it’s like Portlandia in print!) and her baby brother, Mac, is pretty okay too. The image that will stick with me is of Prue taking her brother for a bike ride: she transports him through the most peculiar (and reckless and dangerous) way I can imagine–she attaches a Radio Flyer wagon to her bike and plops him in the wagon. I just have to ask–how did he not fall out??
The story immediately announces itself as fantastical when a murder of crows swoops down out of the sky and grabs Mac from the ground and flies away with him. Now, Prue was supposed to be watching Mac, so although it’s not her fault a bunch of birds grabbed Mac and flew away with him, it is her fault, you know? So Prue hops on her bike and follows the birds through the city (a very exciting scene of reckless bike riding). She skids to a halt when she sees them fly into The Impassable Wilderness. Continue Reading »
When I first heard Gogol Bordello, they were touring for this album (thanks NPR). Consequently, I knew this album pretty well when I bought it. At first I felt that it didn’t have the vibrancy of the live show (how could it?). But after putting it aside for a few weeks, when I re-listened, I found the album (produced by Rick Rubin) to be everything I expect from Gogol Bordello: loud, frenetic fun, a bit of mayhem, and some great tunes that sound like traditional gypsy songs, but which I assume are not.
While I was listening to the album, I kept thinking of The Pogues. They don’t really sound anything alike but they have that same feel of punk mixed with traditional music. For The Pogues, it’s Irish trad, and for GB it’s a gypsy sound–I’m not sure if it is attributable to any specific locale. But they have a common ground in a kind of Spanish-based trad style. From the Pogues, you get a song like “Fiesta” which is overtly Spanish. From GB, you get songs like “My Companjera” or “Uma Menina Uma Cigana.” Singer/ringleader Eugene Hutz has been living in Brazil, and he has really embraced the culture (and the accent). He also sings in a kind of drunken tenor (his accent is probably more understandable than MacGowan’s drunken warble, but not always).
I’m led to understand that previous albums were a bit more high-throttle from start to finish. This disc has a couple of ballads. At first they seem to not work as well, but in truth they help to pace the album somewhat.
It’s obvious this band will not suit everyone’s tastes, but if you’re looking for some high energy punk with some ethnic flare, GB is your band (and if you like skinny guys with no shirts and big mustaches, GB is definitely your band. It is entirely conceivable that Hutz does not know how to work a button).
[READ: June 20, 2011] All the Anxious Girls on Earth
I’ve really enjoyed Zsuzsi’s stories in recent issues of The Walrus. So much so that I wanted to get a copy of her new book. It wasn’t available anywhere in the States yet, so I went back and got her first collection of short stories.
This collection felt to me like a younger, less sophisticated version of Zsuzsi’s later works that I liked so much. This is not to say that I didn’t like them. I just wasn’t as blown as w.
“How to Survive in the Bush”
I had to read the opening to this story twice for some reason. The second read made much more sense and I was able to follow what was going on (I think there were a few terms that I didn’t know–a 1941 Tiger Moth, East Kootenays–that were given context after a few pages. It transpires that this is a story o a woman who has given up her life to move to the boonies with/for her husband. The whole story is written in second person which while typically inviting, I found alienating. It made the story harder to read for me, but once I got into the groove of it I found it very rewarding. Continue Reading »
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! Continue Reading »
NPR has introduced me to Wye Oak (with two concert downloads). This is the official single from the recent album Civilian.
It is a cool swirly track which avoids being ethereal because of the rocking drums. It feels a bit like the Cocteau Twins without being otherworldly. And then there’s Jenn Wasner’s voice which is deep in a kind of Alison Moyet way. This song features an awesome guitar swirl in the center which is sort of a guitar solo but isn’t.
The song builds over the course of the three minutes with more instruments and more voices layered over and over–there’s no real chorus. Not bad for a duo. Soon they’ll be some full concerts reviews of the band.
[READ: June 29, 2011] Babymouse: Queen of the World!
So this is the first Babymouse book: Queen of the World. This one sets up the series and satisfies so many unanswered questions. No, not really.
This first book has all of the trappings of the other two books that I read: fantasy sequences drawn in pink (good diversity here–a horror story, a space story, Cinderella), the same cast (including the arch-enemy Felicia Furrypaws), and more humorous interactions between Babymouse and the narrator (and a lot of Babymouse’s slogan: “typical.”) Continue Reading »
SOUNDTRACK: KOPECKY FAMILY BAND-Embraces EP (2008).
I learned about Kopecky Family Band from NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert. When I investigated further, I found that I could download this EP for free. I compared their Tiny Desk show favorably to The Head and the Heart. This earlier EP has a bit more punky edge to it (as their other stuff may as well–Tiny Desk doesn’t really lend towards punk).
And so this EP leads me to compare them more towards Stars. But perhaps we’ll call them a more acoustic version of Stars. There is some wonderfully intense musical construction on this EP, and the dynamic of the duel vocalists really bring great tensions.
This is a wonderful EP. The strings belie the rather heavy chords (especially on “Trainwreck”) and the harmonies throughout are really infectious.
[READ: June 30, 2011] “A Mouthful of Cut Glass”
I’ve really enjoyed Tessa Hadley’s recent stories in The New Yorker. So I decided to go back through their archives and read the other stories of hers that they have published. It turns out that she has been published in the New Yorker since 2002. But many of the earlier stories were collected in her previous collection which I’ll read one of these days. But rather, I started with the first ones that have yet to be collected.
“A Mouthful of Cut Glass” is a conflation of two expressions, neither of which I was familiar with: “talking through a mouth full of plums” and “an accent like cut glass.” The malaprop came from the protagonist’s boyfriends’ mother. And yet, I say protagonist as if Shiela is the real protagonist. The story quite clearly opens with Neil.
In 1952 Neil was born into a very poor household. But over the years, he was able to rise above his sattion and become a successful University student. It was at University that Neil met Sheila. Sheila grew up in a vicar’s house with a gaggle of brothers and sisters. The two of them hit it off very well and began a serious relationship. Continue Reading »
This song was NPR’s song of the day on July 7th. I’d never heard of Rockwell Knuckles before. He’s a rapper from St. Louis and has at least one other album out as far as I can tell. I was rather fond of this song for, as the NPR page says, he often prefers to be absurd.
This song has fast, manic music–jittery and confusing and the rap over the top of that music, especially the chorus, is equally frenetic and hard to fathom on one listen. But the chorus has a interesting twisty melody and the lyrics (the ones that I can follow) are bizarre and thoughtful and not typical “street life” lyrics.
I listened to this sevral times in a row, and will defitely check out his full length (which you can stream here, and the songs I listened to are equally weird and catchy).
[READ: July 6, 2011] Lucky Peach Issue 1
McSweeney’s has yet another new periodical to occupy my ever diminishing reading time. This one is a food magazine which, as the cover states is “the new food quarterly from Momofuku’s David Chang.” I don’t especially like food magazines (Sarah subscribes to several, but I just can’t get into them–reading recipes to me is the equivalent of looking at XHTML code for most people). I mean, I like to cook sometimes, but I don’t look for new recipes or anything like that. So, I am probably the least likely recipient of this magazine. Not to mention I’ve never heard of David Chang and only know about Momofuku because of the Elvis Costello album.
And then geez, the first issue is about Ramen? Who gives a fuck about Ramen? It’s that crappy stuff you buy 10 for $1 at the supermarket. And you’re really going to devote 174 ad-free (except, obviously lots of mentions of Momofuku) pages to ramen?
Well, yes they are. And holy shit if it wasn’t amazing. David Chang is a really funny guy and co-editor Peter Meehan is a great foul-mouthed humorist. [I have never seen so many “fucking”s in a cooking magazine before–in fact I suspect I’ve never seen any in a cooking magazine before]. The articles were funny and a little low brow (I doubt most cooking magazines mention people throwing up either), but they were engaging and interesting too. Continue Reading »
This Guster album is confusing. It’s rather short (compared to their other discs). Combined with the (kind of flimsy) cardboard packaging, it feels almost like an EP. It also seems to be kind of religious (although I don’t think it is)–like a themed EP. And yet it isn’t off-putting or anything (a few mentions of Jesus is all, although that’s a lot more than usual).
But, like most of Guster’s releases, it’s super catchy kind of alternative jangly pop. After one or two listens the songs are instantly recognizable. There isn’t a bad song in the bunch. However, they’re also mildly underwhelming compared to their previous releases. The songs feel a bit more subtle, but really it seems like they might be just a little too smooth. The dynamics aren’t quite as exciting as they have been.
Having said all that, the disc is still pretty great and I find myself humming a lot of these songs all day long.
[READ: June 18, 2011] Five Dials Number 12
Five Dials Number 12 has a theme explicitly stated on the cover. The premise of the theme is that the Conservative Party of Britain had been claiming (in their TV ads and billboards) that Britain was broken. This idea was relentlessly pushed across Britain. And Five Dials wondered if people thought that that was true in general. So they asked 42 citizens (no idea what kind of random sample it may have been, realistically) and they recorded the results.
The rest of the issue has some of the standard Five Dials material we’ve come to expect: essays and fiction, advice and lists. The theme gives an interesting tone to the proceedings.
CRAIG TAYLOR-A Letter from the Editor: On Broken Britain and Nick Dewar
Taylor addresses much of what is said above. David Cameron (I still can’t get used to him being Prime Minister, it’s still Gordon Brown in my head–I guess Cameron hasn’t done much yet) is the man who keeps trying to “mend our broken society.” Even though (and statistics are similar in the U.S.):
They found that violent crime had almost halved since 1995, while crime generally fell by an extraordinary 45%. The figures for teenage pregnancies – a favourite of those talking about social decay – remain constant since Labour came to power in 1997; so too do those for teenage abortions.
The rest of the letter is devoted to the passing of Nick Dewar. Dewar drew the illustrations for Five Dials Number One. I really liked Dewar’s style, and his absurdist sensibilities. Taylor says that Dewar’s color work was even better. And I think he’s right. Continue Reading »
SOUNDTRACK: BASIA BULAT-“In the Night” (2008).
I recently came across Basia Bulat via NPR. She played a Tiny Desk concert and I discovered that she had several other entries in the NPR canon.
I Just Read About That... 