Top Ten Albums 2008: Kanye West - 808s & Heartbreak

MICROPSIA - Top Ten Album of the Year

(No hay links a los álbumes seleccionados)

Kanye West’s first three albums, all with education-themed titles, have been cemented as a true trilogy, not just a nominal one, by the release of his fourth album, 808s and Heartbreak, which moves in a different direction. The move seems instinctive, from the gut and based on the specific circumstances of his life: his mother passed away and his relationship with his girlfriend dissolved. It’s mostly the latter that these songs cover, though the former no doubt influenced the sad demeanor of the album. “I can’t stop having these visions,” a line goes on the second song, “Welcome to Heartbreak”. Across the album, it’s as if he has a compulsion to sing about heartbreak, as if he couldn’t get himself to stop writing one more song about how cold his ex was towards him and how cold he feels now.

It’s a confessional concept album, but one where the mood communicates the concept even better than the lyrics. The songs tell no cohesive story arc, lyrically, though there’s plenty of bitterness, sadness, confusion, betrayal, and the like. The album projects all of these actions and emotions, but it’s the stark yet intricate music that does it best. The lyrics are generally run-of-the-mill, not that far removed from your average emo band, even if they came from his real-life pains and have a different starting place. West is a multi-million-album-selling artist worried about public image and the paparazzi, after all, and that’s part of the subject here too. It helps feed his loneliness. But as the title makes clear, the concept is not just heartbreak, but 808s. It’s about building an aura of heartbreak from a simple machine, by today’s standards: the TR-808 drum machine that was the foundation of so much rap music in the ‘80s. It’s about the heartbreak and the 808s becoming entwined as one sound.

West sings on all of the songs, but his singing isn’t as distant from rapping as you might expect. It seems cobbled-together, adapted to suit a specific purpose, which is how his rapping was at first, too. He was a successful producer figuring out a way to rap, so he could make music on his own terms start to finish. His rapping style always had an amateurish, guy-down-the-street quality to it, even though he has progressed in skill with each album. His singing is even less professional than that. He’s never going to be the next Marvin Gaye, just like he’s never going to be Rakim. In both arenas he’s not innately gifted, nor technically proficient. And he isn’t trying to be. Across 808s and Heartbreak, he doesn’t sing like this album is his breakout move to become known as a singer. His voice works mainly as texture. The way he sings adds to the album’s mood. It’s a stylistic choice, one of many choices he makes to create the album’s distinct atmosphere.

One tool he uses to give his voice a particular texture is Auto-Tune, or some similar pitch-correction/voice-filtering software. He turns the most explicit manifestations of these effects on and off throughout the album, not randomly but purposely. He turns it on to make his voice cold and robotic, to make it blend in with its surroundings. Even the most specific lyrics project feeling more than specifics he sings like this. In “Welcome to the Heartbreak”, for example, he’s telling stories about life as a lonely celebrity, but it’s the tone of the story that leaves the impression, not the stories themselves. He turns the vocal effects off to sound naked, vulnerable. The lyrics that hit most, emotionally, are those sung the most straight, like on “Street Lights”. (The exception is the album-ending live-freestyle “Pinocchio Story”. It is the most meandering track, an uninteresting diary entry without exciting music to bolster it.)

Perhaps he picked up on this Auto-Tune technique from its current-day popularity among R&B singers (T-Pain, most notably). But the way he uses it is not about mimicking others’ success. Nor is it an attempt at perceived perfection, at seamlessness. If he were trying to sound like a professional, skilled singer, his whole approach to singing, and to the album, would have been different. Instead it’s about getting that science-fiction sound, about his voice bleeding into the cold clang of the drum machine, becoming one with the machine… and then separating from it, at key points. Either he listened to modern-day R&B and heard loneliness in the technique, or he heard the tool’s capacity to create a feeling of loneliness and isolation. Or, perhaps more likely, he heard it and just thought it sounded cool, a clear motivating force behind his music from the beginning.

The album’s opening track, “Say You Will”, sets the mood well. Two simple synth notes repeat like a game of Pong, back and forth, lending strangeness. ‘80s soft-pop piano gives an emotional foundation, while other synth chords hover like a choir. The song’s extended outro keeps the music going a couple more minutes after West has stopped singing. This hammers home the feeling of the song while introducing the fact that West’s presence as a composer/arranger is as important, maybe even more important, to 808s and Heartbreak as his presence on the microphone.

On each of West’s successive albums the music has grown in sophistication and impact. 808s and Heartbreak is another step forward in that direction. The thematic focus of the album is driven by the music; West singing these songs ‘unplugged’ with a guitar or something (not that that would happen) would be mostly boring. Though the vocals as presented here play a significant role in the sound, an instrumental version of this album could almost communicate the same stories of heartbreak and loneliness. Then again, it’s easy to listen to this album almost as an instrumental work already, as a film score, with West’s voice just another instrument, albeit one of the leads.

It’s all of the small sounds together that make the music so impactful. This is stark music that relies on almost primitive tools: a past-date drum machine, some synthesizers, some strings (also synthesized, perhaps). It will be described as “minimalist”, and does sound minimalist. But at the same time it’s layered, filled with small, interesting sounds that at first go un-noticed or seem unimportant. “Coldest Winter” uses a machine-gun blast of electric fuzz and funky drums to liven up what might otherwise resemble a Seal ballad.

“Amazing” is filled with unusual sounds. At first you just notice how the coldness of his voice, singing a purposely repetitive tune, is balanced by choir-ish vocals and keyboard. But there’s also lower, growling backing vocals that eventually turn to a Chewbacca-like grunt, which together with the beats conveys a toughness even while the song creeps forward with gentle melancholy. The peak of the song is when jungle-like cries, which could be animal, human or robot, give way to silence…and then Young Jeezy jumps in with the first true rap of the album. He’s a menacing MC, the perfect choice for the cold atmosphere of the album. Both guest rappers, Jeezy on “Amazing” and Lil’ Wayne on “See You in My Nightmares”, were smartly chosen. Their tough voices fit the milieu perfectly. Guest singers are used when the hook benefits from a true singer, either to state it clearly or to set up a commentary that stands outside of West’s own perspective of the hurt one, the angry one.

The way this album was recorded relatively quickly, announced unexpectedly, and released earlier than expected may give the impression that it was tossed-off or rushed. But the album itself is confidently constructed, choices carefully made. Song after song builds up a mood effectively, piece by piece. “Love Lockdown” starts with a heartbeat-like bass tone that manages to be melodic even though it’s barely there. His voice twists from sinister to heartfelt and back, and at one point goes into a brief robot scream. A nice piano melody emerges, and then high-powered drums, like marching-band drummers joined by aggressive hand-claps, kick the song up a thousand notches.

“Love Lockdown” through “Street Lights”, the fifth through eighth tracks, are where the album really takes off. This is where he translates the dark feeling of the album into pop-music gold. “Paranoid” and “Robocop” are two of the bleakest or even meanest tracks lyrically, but are also triumphant pop songs that convey the album’s feeling of heartbreak while lifting off in jubilant ways. “Paranoid” begins with an insistent tone repeating, then introduces a great melody, and then people laughing, at or with Kanye I’m not sure. Then there’s a big 1980s-sounding chord, and then, 50-seconds-in, the song leaps upward, becoming a big, bright pop jam, filled with energy, while all of these pieces keep moving on and even twisting themselves around in different ways. “Robocop” picks up from that, with a similar tenor but lighter and almost busier by nature, with crashing drums paired with delicate strings that keep changing the melody up slightly.

After these buoyant tracks, “Street Lights” is the comedown, a moment of mellow, but it’s also the album’s most precise and impressive channeling of the mood. Part of this is that the lyrical references to street lights passing by like memories, like time, feel like a resolution of sorts, a progression from some of the name-calling he indulges in. And his singing hits the rawer emotional place that as a listener you want him to hit on an album like this. But it’s mostly about the music being brilliantly odd. There’s a wavering keyboard sound that almost resembles the noisy feedback of an experimental rock band but is used emotionally, as a melancholy tone that lingers in the air, threatening to fade but still always hanging on. West lets it sink into the background but also stops to shine a light on it, taking the song to still-motion to highlight the feeling. Lush layers of backing vocals are played against this ‘noise’, absorbing and complementing the strangeness to make the ballad tender as it needs to be. Put this next to previous hip-hop artists’ versions of the sad-love ballad, like say LL Cool J’s piano ballads, and you’ll see that West isn’t worked with musical clichés here. He’s taking the song-form of the lonely-hearted ballad and giving it his own spin, with depth of sound that generates a depth of feeling.

On 808s and Heartbreak, West might be making his own hip-hop version of Sea Change or In the Wee Small Hours, or countless other concept albums where the concept is sadness. But he isn’t fitting a cookie-cutter mold, he’s innovating. As a whole the album draws lines between ‘80s pop, electro, rap, current-day R&B, and other genres, while furthering the production and composition skills that have been West’s true skill from the start. Lyrically these songs contain none of the cleverness of his previous raps, but the music expresses way more than the lyrics even reach for.

The success of 808s and Heartbreak doesn’t hinge on Kanye West’s decision to not rap. This is a different style of album and he chose a different style of vocals for it. It isn’t successful just because he is channeling real-life emotions, either. He has always had a confessional aspect to his songs, even though usually he cut back against it with jokes. The album is so successful because of his winning ways with both song and album construction, and with the way he captures a particular feeling through unusual, evocative, carefully crafted music that’s both simple and complex, cold and warm, mechanical and human, melodic and harsh. (Popmatters)

The Lovely Sparrows - Bury The Cynics (2008)

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I don't know whether I'm peeved or impressed that the Lovely Sparrows' debut full-length doesn't include a lyrics sheet. Head Sparrow Shawn Jones is a brainy songwriter with a gift for wordplay, unexpected rhymes, and occasionally startling imagery, and he gingerly combines indie whimsy with a personal despondency without coming across as cute. He's soundtracking Chris Ware panels, not Wes Anderson movies (cough Noah cough Whale). So it seems admirably modest that he doesn't reprint his lyrics, but instead lets them remain purely musical and slightly mysterious, as if his songs were musical rather than literary endeavors.

Still, Bury the Cynics almost demands to be digested with lyrics sheet in hand. The album's acoustic shuffle only sounds simple, but as on the Lovely Sparrows' previous EP, Pulling Up Floors, Pouring on (New) Paint, these arrangements twist and turn unexpectedly, exploring blind alleys and strange avenues as if mimicking Jones' lyrical approach. The music tends toward spare and folksy, favoring shaken sleighbells, demonstratively strummed acoustic guitars, soft-focus backing vocals, thrumming organs, and a Vince Guaraldi flute in the background that puts me in mind of Snoopy roaming the French countryside. More streamlined and subtle than those on the EP, these indie folk songs are inventive and ornate but neither busy nor showy, and even if there should be more drums to liven up some of the lulls, everything here sounds calibrated to frame Jones' sentiments in a diorama of emotional confusion. "Love me tender, love me true," he sings on opener "Wraith" as acoustic guitars shiver behind him. It's an obvious Elvis reference, but with a new ending: "and I'll make a wreck of you."

Although "Wraith" eventually contorts itself into such a state that the twin electric guitars sound perfectly appropriate, Bury the Cynics sounds more like a one-man show than a full-band album. The Lovely Sparrows, which offshot from the Austin band Larks & Owls, has clearly developed into a vehicle for Jones, which is just fine. Both his physical and his lyrical voices are particular enough to anchor these songs in his own creative space, to make them personal despite some obvious influences. He's wryer than Eef Barzelay, but less studious than Paul Simon. Which pretty much describes everyone in the world, but Jones takes enough from those and other artists to construct his own musical identity.

Occasionally, he sounds a bit too clever-- too in love with his own ideas on "Department of Forseeable (sic) Outcomes" and the impending-apocalyptic "Devil's in the Details" ("I've got a feeling that the horse and the rider are the same/ And if you whistle, they'll come running"). "Let's sign a new deal," he sings on the title track, "saying this one's for the cynics and this one's for you." A veteran of lower-level indie bands for nearly a decade, Jones knows how to navigate the minefields of the scene, but his braininess gets away from him. Still, he's bearable not simply because of the grain in his voice, but because he never sounds bitter, accusatory, or-- by extension-- self-righteous. His cleverness is a defense mechanism: hope in the face of cosmic indifference.

• MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/thelovelysparrows

- Stephen M. Deusner, October 2, 2008 (Pitchfork)

Couscous and Family: A Story of Sustenance (The New York Times)

By STEVEN ERLANGER

PARIS

ABDELLATIF KECHICHE has just turned 48, and the film he finished two years ago has finally come to the United States, to New York, which he calls “a city where one doesn’t feel like a stranger.”

Mr. Kechiche’s relationship to France, where he grew up from the age of 5, is more complicated, which gives his film, “The Secret of the Grain,” much of its power.

The extended family he depicts in the southern French port of Sète is founded on immigrants, but they are also French, and the mixture of cultures is shown with care, with long scenes of conversation that move with the bustle and sometimes the longueurs of cinéma vérité. The combination of cultures is not always benign, and the portrait of the second and third generations has some bite and regret, turning the film, at the end, from an expected sentimentality into tragedy. (It opened Wednesday in New York.)

Mr. Kechiche was born in Tunisia, and — while he denies it — the film shows few “normal white Frenchmen,” as the comedian Coluche used to joke, who have much generosity or compassion. Instead they seem to represent the petty provincial businessmen and politicians of Balzac.

“My desire wasn’t to make anyone detestable, but on the contrary, amiable,” he said over coffee in the Belleville district of Paris. “For me the family I describe is French — even if its origins are elsewhere, it is French.”

He did not want to do “a movie on some community,” he said. “It’s what’s universal in this family that interested me,” he added. “What I really wanted to describe was a social milieu and a family we can find in all the families of the world: all the secrets, the affections, the heart-wrenchings, the treachery are things we find in every family.”

Still, Mr. Kechiche is sometimes less sunny. In an interview last year with Le Monde he said he did not like to talk about his early life, “which was marked by the difficulties and racism suffered by a child of immigrants.” He added: “I fear falling into a dramatic story that would go against why I make movies. I have always lied about the subject, thinking that the only way to heal is to not remember.”

The title itself is a kind of compromise. There is no “secret of the grain” per se, but it’s a more evocative title than the one the British distributors gave the film, “Couscous.” “I think it’s O.K.,” Mr. Kechiche said carefully about the American title. “I can’t judge what will catch on with the public.”

The French title is “La Graine et le Mulet” (“The Grain and the Mullet”), a reference to the fish couscous that drives the plot. But it is the mullet of the original title that carries the strongest symbolism for Mr. Kechiche, who sees the abundant Mediterranean fish, a staple of the poor, as emblematic of the endurance of common people like his hero, Slimane.

“Mulet” in French also means mule, and some believe the fish — strong, adaptable, ornery, pigheaded — is named after the mule. The same wordplay works in Arabic too, in which the word burro, from the Spanish, finds its echo in “buri,” the word for mullet.

“It’s a fish with true character,” Mr. Kechiche said. “I’m convinced it’s called mulet because it’s hard to catch and has extraordinary energy. It’s the only fish that has the capacity to jump over the nets. It’s a very strong symbol for me. I consider that it’s almost a part of the popular classes, and at the same time it carries that capacity of revolt.”

Slimane, who is tall, gray-haired and dignified, is a man of few words, much like Mr. Kechiche’s father, to whom he dedicates the film. His father came to France and worked hard for his children; Slimane (Habib Boufares) does the same, in a shipyard in Sète. “My father could be like that,” said Mr. Kechiche (pronounced keh-SHEESH). “Especially after a day of work, there is a silence that settles in, due also to fatigue, to the weight that they carried.”

Slimane has complicated his life, with four grown children from his ex-wife and a new romantic relationship with the woman who owns a cheap hotel where he stays, who has a daughter, Rym, played by Hafsia Herzi. He tries to move between the two women and their children, and their children’s spouses — including the Russian wife of his irresponsible son Majid — doing his duty and dodging their rivalries and jealousies, which center on him. And yet they all care deeply about him in some powerful way, even when he is being obtuse.

He is both a beast of burden, a hard worker who is laid off, and a man of some nobility and patience who labors doggedly to use his severance pay and the sweat of his family to buy a ruined boat, repair it and turn it into a dockside restaurant for fish couscous.

The film turns on his efforts to succeed and on the opening-night party, which his entire rivalrous family strives to carry off. And when disaster seems to strike, it is his “new” family, and especially Rym, who contribute in an extraordinarily selfless way. But Mr. Kechiche has a sadder ending in mind.

The critical success of “The Secret of the Grain” — it won four Césars, the French counterpart to the Oscars — has made financing easier as Mr. Kechiche works on a new film, he said. That film, which he hopes to finish this summer, is based on the story of Saartje Bartman, the “Hottentot Venus,” an African woman who was taken from South Africa to Europe in 1810, at the age of 21, and displayed as a curiosity, her buttocks often bare, until 1815, when she died.

Her corpse was dissected, and her brain and genitals were preserved and displayed at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris late into the 20th century before her remains were returned to South Africa for burial in 2002.

“A film takes up a lot of time and space in a life,” Mr. Kechiche said. Finding a subject is not the problem, he said. “Desire is not difficult. It is satisfying it that is hard.”

Top Ten Albums 2008: Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago

MICROPSIA - Top Ten Album of the Year

(No hay links a los álbumes seleccionados)

UNCUT Magazine

Rootling around the internet the other day, I came across an interesting picture of Justin Vernon, the 27-year-old singer-songwriter from Wisconsin who records under the nom de guerre of Bon Iver. In the photograph, it is snowing heavily. Vernon and his friend Keil are standing on the edge of dense woodland, wearing fluorescent orange outfits and holding rifles. The two men are going hunting, and we learn from the interview (at stereogum.com, incidentally) that during the recording of his debut album, For Emma, Forever Ago, Vernon slaughtered, butchered and ate two deer.

It is not the sort of backstory that usually comes with a hip American indie record, and listening to Vernon’s extraordinary debut, it’s hard to equate this gun-toting man – albeit one whose methodology is closer to Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall than Ted Nugent - with the thoughtful, tender, at times angelic folksinger who inhabits the songs. But while the details might disturb squeamish vegetarians like myself, the sometimes gory realities of self-sufficiency and survival are integral to For Emma. . .

On one level, we could bracket Bon Iver – the name’s an artful misspelling of the French for “Good winter” - as part of a revitalising new wave of Americana, along with Fleet Foxes, Dawn Landes, Sam Amidon, plentiful fingerpickers like Jack Rose, The Cave Singers, even more raucous rock bands like Band Of Horses and Howlin Rain.

I suspect, though, that Justin Vernon would recoil at the prospect of being part of a scene. For Emma, Forever Ago is a record entirely predicated on isolation. It operates so securely and intensely in its own world – a world of snow and silence and long-percolated memories – that to listen sometimes seem like an intrusive act.

The album was recorded, crucially, in his father’s log cabin, out in the woods of North-east Wisconsin, about 70 miles from Vernon’s hometown of Eau Claire. In November 2006, after his band DeYarmond Edison (no, me neither) broke up, Vernon headed up to the cabin for three months, planning to “hibernate”. As the weather got colder, he found his own food, chopped down trees for wood, collected his thoughts and formulated them into a suite of songs. Some extra drums and horns were added later, in a studio in Raleigh, North Carolina. Fundamentally, though, For Emma, Forever Ago is a genuinely solo record.

At its heart is an acoustic guitar and Vernon’s calmly expressive falsetto, and since 500 copies of the album first appeared on the singer’s own label last autumn, standard review practice has seen fit to compare the sound with that of Iron & Wine. But it’s how Vernon treats that guitar, that voice, and the environment in which they were recorded that makes For Emma such a magical, hyper-real experience.

It begins straightforwardly enough, with “Flume”, and with the sound of an acoustic guitar being strummed in an empty room; scuffy, ungated, revelling in the space. After 20 seconds, though, Vernon’s voice wafts in. “I am my mother’s only son. It’s enough,” he is singing, and there’s an echoey quality to it which is soon exacerbated by some celestial multitracking. After two and a half minutes, a brittle scrabble of guitar has come into the foreground, and for a few seconds the song dissolves. There are some discreetly unnerving electronic creaks, scrapes and gurgles, but we can also hear Vernon moving around the room, detect the inhospitable weather beyond the walls. Somehow, he seems to capture the performance with a forensic intimacy, while simultaneously imbuing it with an extra, ethereal dimension.

“Flume” sets the tone for the eight songs which follow it. “Lump Sum” opens with a swooning choir of Justin Vernons, as if he has somehow corralled the voices in his head into some useful, harmonious work (talking of voices in the head, For Emma… is best experienced in headphones, the better to hear every squeaking string and profound sigh). “The Wolves (Act I And II) finds his multitracked voice taking on a faint gospel tinge, set against a remorselessly spare guitar, tapped as much as strummed. “Someday my pain will mark you,” he intones, “Harness your blame and walk through”. Far in the distance, mystifyingly, there appears to be a police siren.

Plenty of For Emma seems to deal with a vague kind of anguish, and the lyrics often skirt impressionistically around clear meaning. But the emotional heft is increased – rather than dissipated – by the layered vocals, so that when the words are direct, the impact is huge. “Skinny Love” finds him exasperated and recriminatory: “I told you to be balanced,” he rails, “I told you to be kind/ Now all your love is wasted?/ Then who the hell am I?” “The Wolves” climaxes with him incanting, “What might have been lost don’t bother me,” with the voluptuous soulfulness of TV On The Radio, while rumbling drums sound like exploding fireworks in the background. If we crudely assume that Vernon has undergone some terrible personal heartbreak, making rapturous music in the middle of nowhere is evidently no mean consolation.

And so For Emma flows on, through “Blindsided”, where the subtle electronic shading recalls the Austrian avant-gardist, Fennesz. Through “Creature Fear”, where hammered drums and a marauding bassline lead on into “Team”, the album’s seething equivalent of an instrumental freak-out. The guitar fuzzes and strafes, closer to that of Kevin Shields than any of Vernon’s supposed folk peers. Finally, he starts to whistle, creepily, a foreshadowing of the woozy New Orleans horns which garnish the title track. This one is a loping conversation (the lyric sheet reveals) between two parting lovers. “So apropos: saw death on a sunny snow,” he begins, as if remembering the morning’s successful kill.

At the end of “re: stacks”, after Vernon has achieved some kind of resolution that “Your love will be safe with me”, you can hear him put his guitar down and walk away. Whether he is heading out of his father’s cabin towards a long, significant career is hard to predict, and the perverse romantic in me almost wants him not to bother trying. For Emma, Forever Ago is such a hermetically sealed, complete and satisfying album, the prospect of a follow-up – of a life for Vernon beyond the wilderness, even - seems merely extraneous.

JOHN MULVEY

UP CLOSE & PERSONAL WITH JUSTIN VERNON:

UNCUT: So what made you head up to your father’s cabin at the end of 2006?

JUSTIN VERNON: I’d nowhere else to be really, and I needed to get out of Raleigh, North Carolina, where I was living. I knew I had deer meat up there, I knew I had beer.

Why did you need to get out of Raleigh?

My bandmates and I (in DeYarmond Edison) were really close – we’d been playing together for ten years - and we broke up. It was really hard. I didn’t have anything going on there, and without the band, it was a personal struggle. I had a kitchen job ten hours a week that I hated. I needed to get out.

How could you afford to hide away for so long in the cabin with no money coming in?

Well, I didn’t need any. I was up at the cabin. I went deer hunting, and every ten days my dad brought in water and leftovers for me; meat or some corn, random stuff. I really ate more deer meat than you can possibly imagine.

Did you go there with the idea of making an album?

No. I always have my stuff with me, and I figured I’d play guitar or something, but I didn’t intend to make a record or anything.

So what were you intending to do?

To hide away, to just have some stillness. I had nowhere else to go. I had the opportunity to spend some quality time in nature, by myself, at a place that was pretty sacred to me. There were a lot of things underneath a lot of surfaces in my life that I needed to deal with. And I think the space given to me by the woods, both the mental and physical space, gave me so much room to breathe and excavate and examine.

Are the songs predominantly about one old relationship?

No, they’re not. It’s centred around an ancient, long-lost love. But, as happens in people’s lives, old relationships often have plenty to do with new relationships as they come along. A lot of the album is about me trying to grow up, about trying to grow into new love and failing at it. It’s telling a story of one last relationship and how other ones collided with it

So is Emma a real person?

Yeah, kind of. The person is real, the name is also somewhat real, but not real. I’m not even lying to you, it’s not her first name.

How does she feel about the record?

It’s kind of old enough. The people who are close to me, including her, knew that I was having trouble. Trouble gaining new perspective, trouble growing up from these old memories and these old loves. Everybody who’s known me has known I’ve been hung up, circling some kind of drain of mediocrity in my life, and it all seemed to stem from this ancient love

Are you by nature a solitary person?

No, I’m a pretty sociable person, as a matter of fact. I was football captain at my high school. But oftentimes I’ll just overflow, and then I’ll need to spend a week alone and not talk to anybody or call anybody. I’m pretty hyper-aware of what I need in any given moment, and I think anyone needs time alone.

Do you think emotional and practical self-sufficiency are connected?

I think so, I just think mentally I was in a good place. If I got cold when I recorded, I’d have to go and chop wood to put in the fire, if the dishes were dirty, I’d have to wash them. In so many instances in the world, people have crazy routines in their life, but often none of them include a moment to do nothing, to examine your day and what paths your thoughts have taken. Yes, they are connected, because I spent so much time alone examining things.

What else did you do?

There’s a tractor and a barn up there, my dad has a sawmill. So I’d cut trees down or saw wood. I built a huge cavernous closet in the barn, I built things in the woods, I’d mow the pines, just random chores that needed to be done.

Do you have a moral justification for hunting?

No I don’t, and I understand why it would need to be explained. I do think that there are trophy hunters and then there are people who are hunting for the right reasons. Killing an animal with your own devices, the experience it gives you, makes you feel really close to the earth. When you do it, it’s not a fun thing - you don’t throw your hands up in the air, or I don’t. When it happens you’re stunned by the power that you’ve just wielded. Afterwards it’s a very humbling experience to clean and butcher an animal, it’s not one that you’re super pumped about. But the justification is that if someone eats meat, why not get it from a place that is completely natural? When you kill an animal, you feel terrible, then you feel remorse, then you feel a gladness that you did something that was extremely natural and safe. You feel as if, when you die, you’ll feel closer to justifying your own death

Are you daunted by the prospect of making a follow-up?

Not really. The big champion thing for me on this record was that I learned how to excavate. I’ve always written as a follower and as a seeker, but at this point I feel like I’ve found The Way, with a capital W, how to write and how to exhume things from my psyche. Now that I’ve got that, all I really have to worry about is recreating something. I’ve purposely not written anything for the next record yet because I want to sit down and do it all in one period, so that the songs can grow from the same context. I don’t think the next record is going to sound anything like this one, and I think that’s good.

INTERVIEW: JOHN MULVEY

Arcade Fire - "Burning Bridges" (mp3)

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"Burning Bridges" is a previously unreleased track from the Neon Bible Archives.

The Rules of the Game: A Conversation with Miguel Gomes (Cinema Scope)

By Mark Peranson

In Arganil, a poor and sparsely populated mountainous region known as “the heart of Portugal,” the beloved month of August is abuzz with natives, tourists, and drunken activity, with fireworks, boar hunting, religious celebrations, roller hockey, alien abduction, and, if you’re part of Portuguese film critic-turned-filmmaker Miguel Gomes’ intimate circle of friends, filmmaking. Gomes set off north from Lisbon, brick-sized script in tow, to make a somewhat conventional film about the affective relationship between father, daughter, and cousin, all three members of a barnstorming middle-of-the-road Portuguese pop band called Estrelas do Alva—although he didn’t have a cast, nor enough money to make the film as intended. But instead of packing up, Gomes and his skeleton crew decided to document the people and the celebrations they saw around them, in the course of their adventures discovering the liveliness of their country, and, whilst playing quoits, a few fresh faces that in an alternate universe could easily become superstars.

In his second feature-length film, with the greatest of ease, Gomes moulds documentary into fiction and vice versa, bridging scenes together by the grace of their own movement and popular Portuguese melodies. In the process, traditional boundaries are obliterated, then rebuilt in a way that defies simplistic logic—a pattern seen in his debut feature, the remarkably obscurantist The Face You Deserve (2004), a kind of claustrophobic version of Rivette by way of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)and late Godard, but that’s only the second half. Organically constructed and impressively humble, Our Beloved Month of August shows the fantastic, mythic elements present in everyday life, and the mundane realities present in filmmaking, presenting the two as links in a neverending chain of dominoes—and goddamned if, against all odds, it doesn’t all come together. But such is life, connections magically folding and unfolding, in a series of invisibly refereed games.

And such is Gomes’ magical oeuvre of, as he has often labeled them, “musical comedies”—along with two features, he has directed six shorts, all of which screened this year at the Viennale (further complete retrospectives will surely follow, Buenos Aires being confirmed as the next). Their oblique subjects range from a coming-of-age ménage a trois (Meanwhile, 1999), a holiday tale of children and their toys that in 1/6th of the time puts Arnaud Desplechin to shame (A Christmas Inventory, 2000), and St. Francis of Assisi (Canticle of All Creatures, 2006). Then there’s a black-and-white whatsit wherein adults claim they are children, and, when they open their mouths, yawp drone-like gibberish (Kalkitos, 2002). For 19 excruciating minutes. In Vienna, a Q & A after a shorts program began with interrogator Olaf Möller challenging: “What the fuck is Kalkitos?” It’s a question not out of line, and a question that might be asked of pretty much every one of Gomes’ films. The answer, but of course, is: “A remake of The Wizard of Oz (1939).”

A Gomes film is likely to evoke numerous cinematic comparisons, but also comprises wild shifts in tone, a characteristic traceable to a keen yet impatient intelligence. All come together in Our Beloved Month of August, one of the year’s best films and an unlikely—to say the least—Oscar nominee from Portugal. Nashville (1975) without its sense of world-historical importance, it’s a film about the creative process possessed inherently by all people on this planet, and only betrays its true nature on multiple viewings. Halfway in, there’s a scene with two nonprofessional actors chatting, surreptitiously recorded by Gomes. One of them complains that the director keeps changing the lines on him, that he’s nervous, and why not. Minutes later, they walk through the old town and the other, who we first met performing karaoke but who becomes the band’s drummer in the second half, is whistling a throwaway tune, which, about half an hour later, is performed for the first time by Estrelas do Alva. It’s the title track, at first just another song among many songs, and only becomes catchy when performed by the full band, vocals and all. This small recognition hints to the ways that in Our Beloved Month of August direction, screenwriting, and editing have molded as one in a magical place somewhere over the rainbow.

Cinema Scope: So what the fuck is The Face You Deserve?

Gomes: Is that a real question?

Scope: Yeah, that’s a real question. Why did you want to make this movie?

Gomes: Let me try to remember. Well, I wanted to do a film about this, you know, crisis of being 30. In Portuguese, there is this sentence that goes, “Until 30 you have the face that God gives you, then after you have the face you deserve.” And so I had this idea to create a character that at a certain point just could not continue. So he was interacting with other people, and then he gets abandoned, and comes down with the measles. And then the film turns into Snow White, so he has to return to his childhood and try to…well, he becomes like a film director, he has to make a film to save himself.

Scope: I told you before it took me two weeks to figure out what the film was about, and I concluded that it was about filmmaking—even if all films are about filmmaking in some way, this one is in particular. But my interpretation is not just that he acts as a director, but the moral of the film—as fairy tales have lessons—speaks to the view that all the rules you know up to 30 you have to forget, you have to start again. And, in particular, regarding how films are made, how they have been made in the past. In The Face You Deserve—in all of your films, including the shorts—there’s an obvious preoccupation with rules, and, actually rules that are often completely absurd. Here the actors obey the rules, and they realize they are absurd by the end.

Gomes: Yes, the rules in my films may be a little bit ridiculous, but I also think that most rules in the world outside my films are also ridiculous. We are even, me and the world. But in this case, yes, I wanted to have this Oz world in the forest and the friends, who are like the seven dwarfs, and, yes, they are obsessed by rules. The film progresses until there is a moment where one of them breaks the rules, then they start to doubt them. When that happens, you’re fucked, and then the film must end. So the last sentence in this film is “Goodbye my friends,” which is a sentence you hear before when one character, Nicolau, buries grasshoppers in a little grave. So this, “Goodbye my friends,” is goodbye to the old rules, but it’s very sad, too.

Scope: In a general sense, though, were you also thinking about changing the old rules of narrative filmmaking, as a process a serious director must do once they’ve reached a certain level of understanding, or maturity?

Gomes: I think there are lots of films that I really like—we’ve talked about The Wizard of Oz, but there’s also Moonfleet (1955)…

Scope: Disney. And in The Face You Deserve you see a lot of Rivette.

Gomes: Yes, and Rivette is very obsessed with rules, and games. But that also comes, for instance, from the classical American cinema, where you can solve a problem with a bet, or just summon up destiny. For instance, I love American screwball comedies. In Bringing Up Baby (1938), the characters behave like children—it’s all games all the time. It’s very regressive.

Scope: Most, if not all, of the short films, are about children—or naïfs, like Saint Francis. Games and fairy tales have an appeal to children, obviously—adults don’t believe in fairy tales any more, or in magic…or, say, in The Wizard of Oz.

Gomes: I believe in those things, but I also think they are kind of ridiculous, so I guess my films have both of those things in there at the same time. They do strange and maybe silly stuff, like burying the grasshoppers…

Scope: They are all rituals, too, not just games, and maybe this is more the point in Our Beloved Month of August—to simply exist people need games, or rituals, or legends. Or a job. There are things society requires to stay together. And every filmmaker has to choose what part of society to concentrate on. You can’t have a believable film with people interacting unless there is something binding them together, even on the most basic level—language, for instance. Language is a rule-based system that can even be absurd, like in Kalkitos.

Gomes: I think the important thing is not rules, but people believing in the rules. There is a time where people believe in certain rules, then there’s another time when they don’t believe in them, but believe in another set of rules.

Scope: That’s what the first short is about.

Gomes: That’s a very bad film.

Scope: Technically, though, you just described a rite of passage film, which is what Meanwhile is.

Gomes: Adolescence is like no man’s land. You have childhood, when you believe in things, then in adolescence there is a moment, for instance, you understand that grown ups are sometimes full of shit and they tell lots of lies…

Scope: The moment you realize that God doesn’t exist.

Gomes: Yeah, sure, and then adolescence, and you start to accept other rules—you are forced to accept them, you need money to live…

Scope: In Our Beloved Month of August, there’s an awareness of the rules of fiction and documentary, and their absurdity, and the willingness to keep some and throw others out and not worry about the consequences.

Gomes: Maybe that’s why I’m now writing a script that has two parts, again. I never thought about these two-part things, maybe it has something to do with creating rules and then destroying the rules you created, imposing another set of rules, and seeing how the rules in the two parts are mixed, or clash, or something like that.

Scope: What rules did you have while making this movie?

Gomes: I had one golden rule. As we were invading this place, Arganil, so we should be in this film. Because we were demanding the locals to play characters, we had to do the same. And everything that was brought with us from Lisbon should be in the film. So every piece of equipment is in the film—the camera, the tripods—that was a rule.

Scope: Why was this so important to you?

Gomes: The film is a clash between cinema with this part of the country, so us and everything that was with us should appear. Normally there is behind the camera and in front of the camera, and this time I wanted to put everything in front of the camera, and even what’s in the middle should appear—which is the camera.

Scope: Some people don’t get this point, and think the appearance of the crew—and you—in the film is, well, self-indulgent.

Gomes: Yeah, they call me a “wannabe Fellini.” But I think it was only fair to do it. In this part of Portugal, they don’t have cinema, or theatre…but I think it’s a film about the common desire of making films.

Scope: For making films or making art in general? Is the guy who jumps off the bridge a filmmaker?

Gomes: This guy Paolo Miller is a simple character. But he’s always acting. He was completely drunk all the time, but he kept acting, almost until he passed out. I let him do his own mise en scène, and it’s the centre of the first part. In the first part I’m looking for people to play characters, and I couldn’t ask him to be a character in the second part because he’s already a kind of character in the first part. The other people give him roles, so in a way he’s bigger than life. And you can see he’s lying, he’s acting. So he concentrated his movement of the film in himself, which is why I chose not to ask him to return in the second part.

Scope: It’s easy to say that the difference between the two parts is that one is documentary and the other is fiction, but that’s not quite accurate. Maybe it’s this point, that in one part the actors are making the mise en scène, and in the other part you are. Is that accurate?

Gomes: Yeah. At least, I’d like it if people think of it in that way.

Scope: It’s not exactly true in one sense—when I was watching the second part again, I was looking at the camera style and trying to see if there was a noticeable difference in the way that scenes were shot…

Gomes: No, I tried not to. I even tried to prevent my cinematographer from putting equipment in the shots, but he snuck things in—you can still see them. But it could not exactly be the same because we knew what was going to happen most of the time. Anyway, some of the scenes with the most explicit mise en scène were in the first part, in the scenes with my producer, and the dominos…those Spaghetti Western scenes.

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Actress Ann Savage dies (AP)

Ann Savage, who earned a cult following as a femme fatale in such 1940s pulp-fiction flicks as "Detour," has died.

Savage's manager, Kent Adamson, says the 87-year-old actress died in her sleep at a nursing home on Christmas Day from complications following a series of strokes.

Her credits include more than 30 crime tales, Westerns and other movies in the 1940s and '50s.

Savage's Hollywood career has been over since the mid-1950s, yet she has had a resurgence over the past year with a starring role in Canadian cult filmmaker Guy Maddin's "My Winnipeg."

Adamson says Savage is being buried at Hollywood Forever Cemetery.

Hot Chip With Robert Wyatt and Geese EP (2008)

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Hot Chip have announced details of a new EP, to be released on December 22.

As its title suggests, 'Hot Chip With Robert Wyatt And Geese' features collaborations with legend Robert Wyatt and electronic duo Geese.

The four-track EP will be released on a limited run on CD, but the band are making two songs available for download for free on Hotchip.co.uk - the first of which is available today (December 11).

The full tracklisting for 'Hot Chip With Robert Wyatt And Geese' is:

'Made In The Dark (with Robert Wyatt)'
'Whistle For Will (with Robert Wyatt)'
'We're Looking For A Lot Of Love (with Robert Wyatt And Geese)'
'One Pure Thought (remixed By Geese)'

The band release 'Made In The Dark' (with Robert Wyatt) as a free download from Hotchip.co.uk today, while 'We're Looking For A Lot Of Love' (With Robert Wyatt) will be given away on the website on December 19.

The 20 Best Films of 2008: Film Comment

It’s an annual tradition. Every year Film Comment polls its many contributors and members of the critical community for the scoop on the twenty best films of the year, and delivers the goods in their January/February issue.

TOP 20 RELEASED

1. Wendy and Lucy Kelly Reichardt, U.S. 580
2. Flight of the Red Balloon Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan/France 564
3. A Christmas Tale Arnaud Desplechin, France 557
4. Happy-Go-Lucky Mike Leigh, U.K. 538
5. WALL·E Andrew Stanton, U.S. 534
6. Still Life Jia Zhang-ke, Hong Kong/China 521
7. Paranoid Park Gus Van Sant, France/U.S. 465
8. Waltz with Bashir Ari Folman, Israel/France/Germany 424
9. My Winnipeg Guy Maddin, Canada 406
10. Milk Gus Van Sant, U.S. 356
11. Let the Right One In Tomas Alfredson, Sweden 351
12. The Duchess of Langeais Jacques Rivette, France/Italy 335
13. The Class Laurence Cantet, France 334
14. Synecdoche, New York Charlie Kaufman, U.S. 297
15. Hunger Steve McQueen, U.K. 289
16. Silent Light Carlos Reygadas, Mexico/France/Netherlands 286
17. Ballast Lance Hammer, U.S. 283
18. Man on Wire James Marsh, U.K. 282
19. The Exiles Kent Mackenzie, U.S. 257
20. Gomorrah Matteo Garrone, Italy 253

TOP 20 UNRELEASED

1. The Headless Woman Lucrecia Martel, Argentina/Spain/France/Italy 201
2. 24 City Jia Zhang-ke, China/Hong Kong/Japan 171
3. Summer Hours Olivier Assayas, France 154
4. Still Walking Hirokazu Kore-eda, Japan 102
5. Tulpan Sergey Dvortsevoy, Germany/Switzerland/Kazakhstan/Russia/Poland 84
6. RR James Benning, U.S. 83
7. 35 Shots of Rum Claire Denis, France/Germany 78
8. Of Time and the City Terence Davies, U.K. 76
9. Tony Manero Pablo Larrain, Chile/Brazil 74
10. Liverpool Lisandro Alonso, Argentina 70
11. Sugar Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck, U.S. 55
12. Tokyo Sonata Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan/Netherlands/Hong Kong 51
13. Birdsong Albert Serra, Spain 48
14. The Hurt Locker Kathryn Bigelow, U.S. 47
15. United Red Army Koji Wakamatsu, Japan 40
16. Night and Day Hong Sang-soo, South Korea 36
17. Four Nights with Anna Jerzy Skolimowski, France/Poland 33
18. Me and Orson Welles Richard Linklater, U.K. 31
19. Il Divo Paolo Sorrentino, Italy/France 29
20. Chouga Darezhan Omirbaev, Kazakhstan/France 28

Best Films of 2008 Poll Participants:
Sam Adams, Thom Andersen, John Anderson, Melissa Anderson, David Ansen, Michael Atkinson, Saul Austerlitz, Miriam Bale, Margaret Barton-Fumo, Marjorie Baumgarten, Bruce Bennett, Nick Bradshaw, Richard Brody, John Caps, Michael Chaiken, Andrew Chan, Chris Chang, Tom Charity, Godfrey Cheshire, Travis Crawford, Gary Crowdus, Mike D’Angelo, Evan Davis, Sam Di Iorio, Lisa Dombrowski, Bilge Ebiri, Cheryl Eddy, David Edelstein, David Ehrenstein, David Fear, Paul Fileri, Scott Foundas, Patrick Friel, Graham Fuller, Susan Gerhard, Gary Giddins, Jason Gross, Larry Gross, Dennis Harvey, Molly Haskell, Logan Hill, J. Hoberman, Robert Horton, Johnny Ray Huston, Harlan Jacobson, J.R. Jones, Kent Jones, Kristin M. Jones, Dave Kehr, Glenn Kenny, Laura Kern, Stuart Klawans, Robert Koehler, Michael Koresky, Nathan Lee, Dennis Lim, Phillip Lopate, Cynthia Lucia, Scott Macaulay, Todd McCarthy, Maitland McDonagh, Don McMahon, Joe Milutis, Wesley Morris, Rob Nelson, Geoffrey O’Brien, Mark Olsen, Mark Peranson, Jake Perlin, Tony Pipolo, Richard Porton, John Powers, James Quandt, Jed Rapfogel, Nicolas Rapold, Megan Ratner, Bérénice Reynaud, Jim Ridley, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Joshua Rothkopf, Andrew Sarris, Richard Schickel, Lisa Schwarzbaum, Gene Seymour, Gavin Smith, Vivian Sobchack, Chuck Stephens, Bob Strauss, Jim Supanick, Amy Taubin, José Teodoro, Kenneth Turan, Brynn White, Donald Wilson, Genevieve Yue, David Zuckerman

Top Ten Albums 2008: The Lucksmiths - First Frost

MICROPSIA - Top Ten Album of the Year

(No hay links a los álbumes seleccionados)

Como sucede también con otro de los discos seleccionados para este Top Ten --esperen, ya vendrá--, no se trata tanto del álbum en sí lo que se celebra en esta elección sino, en mi caso, el haber descubierto una banda que lleva quince años de carrera en Australia y a la que desconocía por completo. Gracias a las miles de opciones que ofrece internet, logré bajarme una discografía completa de estos hijos directos de The Smiths y Belle & Sebastian y, unos meses después, apareció este disco que confirmó todo lo bueno que había escuchado en los discos previos.

The Lucksmiths no es una banda que sorprenda, que innove, que busque sonidos nuevos. Lo suyo es un continuo y refinado homenaje a la canción pop. Es de esa clase de bandas que, aún cuando uno puede inferir de donde proviene casi todo lo que hace y cuales son todas las referencias e influencias, te ganan a fuerza de melodías irreprochables, de esas que suenas tan redondas que uno se queda preguntando si no las escuchó antes, que cómo puede ser que nadie hizo una canción así en todos estos años.

Canciones para silbar y tararear, entonces, para recordar con cariño y tener ganas de volver a escuchar. No para descubrir sonidos extraños ni formulaciones originales, sino para celebrar el hecho de su existencia. Canciones que nos recuerdan, a cada segundo, que todavía hay millones de cosas simples que se pueden hacer en el espacio de dos o tres minutos con un par de acordes y una instrumentación clásica. Indie-pop, classic-pop, baroque-pop, super-pop. Pónganles el nombre que quieran a las canciones de The Lucksmiths (no sólo de "First Frost", sino de todos sus discos), lo cierto es que al final del día quedarán rondando por sus cabezas como esas cosas que nunca se olvidan del todo. Recuerdos del mañana.

Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavillion (2009)

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Jay Bennett - Whatever Happened I Apologize (2008)

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“It is stark, stripped down, and acoustic based—more so than any other record I have made. I really wanted to capture the simpler and more emotional nature of the songwriting, and I knew that the only way I could do this was to put it together quickly, with no second-guessing, and no heavy deliberating about minor details. Consequently I would have to learn to embrace the resultant imperfections—and I have. All of the vocals are done live to my own acoustic guitar accompaniment, so it has some “warts,” but, in my effort to not forsake integrity for technical perfection, the album ended up feeling more honest, immediate, naked, and cohesive to me. I am very proud of presenting myself without my typical voluminous bells and whistles. I am left wondering why I haven’t done this more often in the past.” - Jay Bennett (former Wilco member, turned soloist)

Top Ten Albums 2008: TV On The Radio - Dear Science

MICROPSIA - Top Ten Album of the Year

(No hay links a los álbumes seleccionados)

What does it actually feel like to be haunted? Children, squealing with delight at Halloween stories, think it's kind of fun. Horror movie makers portray the experience as a series of startles, full of crisis and romance. In reality, everybody lugs around a few ghosts, some personally generated, others inherited. We dance, fight and make love with them grabbing at our wrists.

"Dear Science," the third album from the Brooklyn-based art rock band TV on the Radio, is a vivid, angry, sensual soundtrack to the haunted life. A leading cult band in the post-Radiohead era, when cult rock is an end unto itself, TVOTR digs out some hooks from the deeply layered mulch of its sound on "Dear Science." The "ba ba ba" vocal line in the album's opener, "Halfway Home," and the bratty electroclash beats and rap-punk ranting on "Dancing Choose" are just two examples of the sunlight now hitting the band's deep post-punk noise-collage grooves.

But TVOTR's take on pop is still highly intellectual, more connected to Warhol's Factory than to the Brill Building or Timbaland's Virginia Beach, Va., studio. For this quintet, more accessible songcraft isn't an end in itself as much as an entryway into new thematic territory. If past efforts found beauty in urban decay and post-millennial tension, "Dear Science" takes a risk on the opposite impulse: exploring how desire and the drive toward self-expression survive in an America that's falling apart.

Singer-songwriter Kyp Malone gets explicit on "Lover's Day," a long, heavy come-on that would be a dirty blues if not for its chamber-pop arrangement. That might be a bagpipe in there along with the Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra horns or just a twist of guitarist-producer Dave Sitek's knobs. Either way, it's a clever reworking of the usual musical seduction. Tunde Adebimpe, the band's other vocalist and main songwriter, gives his longing a more gentlemanly cast on "Family Tree," whose resonant string arrangement lends a Victorian sheen to a melancholy marriage proposal.

In the lyrics, Adebimpe refers to the "gallows of your family tree" -- a gothic image that means more when considered in the light of an old folk song, the hanged man's lament "Gallows Tree," and the history of lynching that it invokes. Four of TVOTR's members are black, and more than ever on this funk-infected set, its music reflects the struggle to love, hope and speak truth that all compassionate people face in a society that hasn't outlived the legacy of those hangings.

On "Dear Science," TVOTR embraces emotions of the here and now -- lust, anger, the dancer's bliss -- but still asks us to honor the ancestors whose grip we can't shake off.

--Ann Powers (Los Angeles Times)

Sight & Sound: Top Ten Movies 2008

1 Hunger (Steve McQueen, UK)

2 There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, USA)

3 WALL•E (Andrew Stanton, USA)

4 Gomorrah (Matteo Garrone, Italy)

=5 A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin, France)

=5 The Class (Laurent Cantet, France)

7 Of Time and the City (Terence Davies, UK)

8 Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh, UK)

=9 The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel, Argentina/France/Italy/Spain)

=9 Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, Sweden)

Lost In The Trees - All Alone In An Empty House (2008)

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Lost in the Trees is a folk orchestra from Chapel Hill, NC, led by composer/songwriter Ari Picker. All Alone in an Empty House is the anticipated follow up to the critically lauded Time Taunts Me EP, released last year by Trekky Records. The new album shows ringleader Ari Picker fully realizing and extending his compelling synthesis of American folk and traditional classical music and showing that disparate musical styles really stem from a common voice. While Picker certainly utilizes his professional training from the esteemed Berklee College of Music, All Alone In An Empty House is far from the cold calculation and gridded “correctness” some associate with classical music. Rather, it is intensely personal (almost uncomfortably so) and never allows the rules of classical music to limit the emotional weight delivered in each song.

Picker draws heavily from his autobiography, exploring how the relationship between his parents went on to affect his own relationships with loved ones in his life. He is not attempting to take sides or place blame for the traumatic influence of his parents. He is simply trying to recreate the byproduct emotions that came from dealing with issues such as bipolar disorder, self-absorption, artistic creativity, mathematical proficiency, and sexual and emotional abuse. Picker uses the unifying familiarity of traditional folk to face these haunting issues with optimism, not dread, and uses his orchestra of strings and horns to objectively correlate the feeling of the song to the listener. Thematically and sonically, All Alone in An Empty House is extremely intimate.

The album was recorded by Ryan Pickett (My Morning Jacket) with the help of Picker. Additional tracking was done at The Owl Room, Trekky Records' new in-house studio. Picker's orchestra features members of the Trekky Records Collective, professional classical musicians and student musicians from local universities.

Trekky Records

The Haunting: Revolutionary Road Review (Los Angeles Weekly)

By Scott Foundas

No writer ever gazed deeper or more despairingly into the prison of middle-class American conformity than Richard Yates, which may explain why none of his books sold more than 12,000 copies in his lifetime, and why it’s taken more than 40 years for one of them to reach the big screen. It is said we go to the movies to escape, after all, and Yates’ great subject was the very thing many of us seek to escape — namely, the lives of prefabricated mediocrity we settle for when personal ambition yields to the desire to be “just like everyone else.” Decades before divorce lawyers and prescription pharmaceuticals became convenient panaceas for all that ails us, Yates (1926-1992) pulled back the curtain on Auden’s “age of anxiety” and found that the Plasticine dream of suburban bliss was something closer to a waking nightmare.

So there’s a wonderfully perverse irony in the fact that the film version of Yates’ first and most lauded novel, Revolutionary Road, stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet — the very actors who, as the star-crossed lovers in James Cameron’s Titanic, defined ever-lasting movie romance for an entire generation of filmgoers. Here, Kate and Leo again strive to keep their heads above water, gasping for air. Only, in Revolutionary Road, the sinking ship pulling them under is their own marriage.

Like many of Yates’ characters, Frank and April Wheeler appear to be the most average of postwar average Americans — he a midlevel worker bee for the same New York corporation where his father eked out a similarly anonymous existence, she a stay-at-home mother of two with a well-kept house in a tree-lined corner of western Connecticut. But it wasn’t so long ago that Frank was a combat-vet-turned–Lower Manhattan bon vivant — “an intense, nicotine-stained Jean-Paul Sartre sort of man,” Yates writes — and April was a young starlet who fell under his worldly spell. And despite their newfound comfort and prosperity, they have both held on to this memory of earlier times, used it to convince themselves that they were once “interesting” people and could be so again. Deep down, they know that this life of suburban anonymity isn’t for them. Deeper down, they fear they may be wrong.

In what may be a last-ditch attempt to save themselves, April makes an inspired proposal: Why don’t they just pack it all in and move to Paris, where she’ll take a job and Frank will be free to ... well, to “find himself”? And for a while, their escape plan buoys the Wheelers, gives them even greater contempt for the pettiness — the “hopeless emptiness,” as Frank memorably terms it — of everything around them. Until, that is, April gets the news that sends their can’t-miss plan on a collision course with a metaphorical iceberg.

Directed by Sam Mendes from a scrupulously faithful adaptation by Justin Haythe, Revolutionary Road isn’t a great movie — it lacks the full, soul-crushing force of the novel — but what works in it works so well, and is so tricky to pull off, that you can’t help but admire it. By no means an easy candidate for adaptation, Yates dwells in the shadow area between people’s conscious and subconscious selves, between the faces they show to the world (and even their spouses) and the ones they see when they look in the bedroom mirror at night. To fully grasp Revolutionary Road is to understand that two people can be at their most alone when they are together — and Mendes, whose American Beauty rendered a similar investigation of suburban anomie as a gallery of over-the-top comic grotesques, willingly goes there. Where the earlier movie was easy to brush off, this one gets under your skin: It is to Mendes’ great credit that Revolutionary Road will likely lead to some tense moments between many a young couple on their drive home from the cinema.

Some will quibble that Kate and Leo are too glamorous to convincingly portray the dream-deferred middle class, but it’s essential to Revolutionary Road that Frank and April come across as the sort of ordinary people other ordinary people envy, and in that respect, the casting is spot-on. As Winslet has already demonstrated once this season (in The Reader, where she is the only compelling reason to see the film), among her seemingly boundless gifts as an actress is an acute grasp of bright young women beset by some intractable inner torment. DiCaprio, meanwhile, plays Frank with the faintly emasculated authority of so many outgoing, well-bred young men who still haunt the corridors of corporate America — men who may have once aspired to live la vie Parisienne or play pro ball or write the Great American Novel, before time and tide made them settle for less Olympian lives. But the movie’s one stroke of real genius arrives in the form of the tall, jittery character actor Michael Shannon, who shows up for two scenes as the paranoid schizophrenic son of the Wheelers’ matronly real estate agent (Kathy Bates). Brought to meet Frank and April as part of his attempted re-entry into society, he immediately recognizes the unhappy couple as some kind of fellow travelers, and Yates (who himself spent time in various “bughouses”) imparts to him the story’s most resonant observation: “Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.”

Perhaps owing to his stage background, Mendes is the sort of movie director who tends to come up with a single, all-encompassing stylistic concept and then rarely deviates from it. That seemed like a shortcoming in his previous films, but in Revolutionary Road it translates into a stately, semi-detached, observational approach that makes it seem as if Frank and April Wheeler’s Good Housekeeping home were itself directing the movie. Which is only fitting for a film that, by the end, turns into a far more unsettling haunted-house story than The Amityville Horror. A friend who attended an early Revolutionary Road screening complained that it gave him the feeling of watching two John Cassavetes characters trapped in a Yasujiro Ozu film; but this, it seems to me, is precisely the point. Even after Frank and April’s climactic knockdown-dragout argument, chez Wheeler is markedly undisturbed — sitting there, biding its time, waiting to devour its next victims and their futile ambitions.

REVOLUTIONARY ROAD | Directed by SAM MENDES | Written by JUSTIN HAYTHE, based on the novel by RICHARD YATES | Produced by JOHN N. HART, SCOTT RUDIN, MENDES and BOBBY COHEN | Released by Paramount Vantage

Top Ten Albums 2008: Santogold - Santogold

MICROPSIA - Top Ten Album of the Year

(No hay links a los álbumes seleccionados)

If you haven't heard of Santogold by now, your hype machine is surely out of order. Since the tip-off of 2007, the 32-year-old Bed-Stuy resident, born Santi White, has toured with Björk, graced countless magazines in all her neon-leggings- with-frosted-jean-cutoffs-and-gold- door-knocker-earrings glory, and been hailed as the next M.I.A. Indeed, the two iconoclasts share more than a loud fashion sense: Santogold also calls Diplo and Switch her producers and makes genre-defying—or, rather, genre-blending—music.

With her eponymous debut's deft mix of dap, punk, rock, pop, house, reggae, and hip-hop, she won't completely live down associations with the famous Sri Lankan (whom she also counts as a friend), but the result emerges as much more than a mere imitation.

On "Creator"—with drums thumping, helium-tight vocals squealing, and Atari-like noises chirping—Santogold comes off as playfully braggadocious, making a declaration that defines the entire album: "Me, I'm a creator/Thrill is to make it up/The rules I break got me a place/Up on the radar." Though nearly every track is laced with the chopped-synth sounds you'd expect from her production crew (also including John Hill, Disco D, and FreQ Nasty), the star attraction incorporates an impressive musical know-how gained as frontwoman for the short-lived indie-punk band Stiffed. "Lights Out" and "I'm a Lady" channel the Pixies with a punk-pop sound fueled by spare guitar plucks, simple drum patterns, and lyrics delivered in a talk-sing stutter with random falsetto breaks; the reluctant love song "My Superman" ("Well, you're a liar and your cues are all wrong/But I can't count all the ways you woo me") and "Anne" go goth, with thick basslines burbling beneath the wobbly vocals and wolf howls.

But the music of the Philly native gets better as her influences get more muddled. She hits her stride in the hard-to-understand (due to gibberish lyrics and a faux West Indies accent) but impossible-not-to-move-to tracks like the single "L.E.S. Artistes" (which ironically lambastes downtown hipsters over a 1980s-meets-2000s mix of melodies), the island-bop feel of "Shove It," and "You'll Find a Way (Switch and Sinden Remix)." The latter is Santogold's biggest banger: Listening to the original sped-up ska version (track two) and then encountering the same song 10 tracks later with a completely different feel—the rock instrumentation stripped away in exchange for sexy beats building on each other and fusing to Santi's isolated vocals—proves that sometimes, hype happens for a reason.

By Katie Hintz (Village Voice)

Harold Pinter, Nobel-Winning Playwright, Is Dead at 78 (The New York Times)

By MEL GUSSOW and BEN BRANTLEY

Harold Pinter, the British playwright whose gifts for finding the ominous in the everyday and the noise within silence made him the most influential and imitated dramatist of his generation, died on Wednesday. He was 78 and lived in London.

The cause was cancer, his wife, Lady Antonia Fraser, said Thursday.

Mr. Pinter learned he had cancer of the esophagus in 2002. In 2005, when he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, he was unable to attend the awards ceremony at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm but delivered an acceptance speech from a wheelchair in a recorded video.

In more than 30 plays — written between 1957 and 2000 and including masterworks like “The Birthday Party,” “The Caretaker,” “The Homecoming” and “Betrayal” — Mr. Pinter captured the anxiety and ambiguity of life in the second half of the 20th century with terse, hypnotic dialogue filled with gaping pauses and the prospect of imminent violence.

Along with another Nobel winner, Samuel Beckett, his friend and mentor, Mr. Pinter became one of the few modern playwrights whose names instantly evoke a sensibility. The adjective Pinteresque has become part of the cultural vocabulary as a byword for strong and unspecified menace.

An actor, essayist, screenwriter, poet and director as well as a dramatist, Mr. Pinter was also publicly outspoken in his views on repression and censorship, at home and abroad. He used his Nobel acceptance speech to denounce American foreign policy, saying that the United States had not only lied to justify waging war against Iraq, but that it had also “supported and in many cases engendered every right-wing military dictatorship” in the last 50 years.

His political views were implicit in much of his work. Though his plays deal with the slipperiness of memory and human character, they are also almost always about the struggle for power.

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Glasvegas - A Snowflake Fell (And It Felt Like a Kiss) (2008)

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Recorded in spooky Transylvania, Glasvegas have put togther a Christmas album, A Snowflake Fell (And It Felt Like A Kiss), that will be made available to download on December 1, and will be included a bonus CD available on a limited edition of the band’s debut album. But those looking for Christmas cheer will be disappointed. The songs include Cruel Moon, a tale of homelessness during the festive period, as well as a track titled F*** You, It’s Over. On Please Come Back Home, a heartfelt mid-tempo tune, frontman James Allan sings: “The beauty and the elegance of this time of year. I want you so bad.” It appears this will be one Christmas EP you won’t want to listen to alone.