MUSIC
Belle and Sebastian
The Life Pursuit
[Matador; 2006]
Rating: 8.5
from pitchforkmedia.com
Every religion began as a cult. In their early years, Belle and Sebastian possessed near-totemic powers for their small but impassioned band of disciples, as fervent as the followers of similarly wistful, self-deprecating, and sometimes sexually conflicted artists like the Smiths, Felt, and Orange Juice a decade prior. The common sacrament was pop, with true believers bearing witness in their communal alienation, badges, battered cassettes, and fanclub memberships. The Scottish group only heightened that devotion by shrouding themselves in mystery-- not answering questions, not appearing in proper photographs, not available in stores.
On sixth proper album The Life Pursuit, Belle and Sebastian want to teach the world to sing, in however imperfect harmony. Where the recent live re-recording of 1996's If You're Feeling Sinister draped their most appealing songs in apposite finery, the band's latest extends their newfound confidence to content as well as delivery, and stands as the finest full-length by Stuart Murdoch and his shifting collaborators since that distant pinnacle. About his early-90s recovery from chronic fatigue, Murdoch told a recent interviewer, "Spirituality and songwriting were my crutches." Spanning glam, soul, country, and 70s AM rock, this record is a deceptively wry, wickedly tuneful testament to the fragile beauty of faith, in deities as well as in pop.
Belle and Sebastian seem to have found new life in their evolution from shy bedsit savants to showy pop adepts. The Life Pursuit's lavishness renders the burgeoning bubblegum of 2003's Trevor Horn-produced Dear Catastrophe Waitress merely transitional, rewarding the Job-like righteous after the trials of the band's mid-career disappointments. Recorded in Los Angeles with Tony Hoffer, who oversaw Beck's divisive Midnite Vultures, the album runs over with flute, horns, call-and-response vocals, and even a funky clavinet (on soul survivor "Song for Sunshine"). The playing, meanwhile, is surprisingly chopsy, down to the breezy guitars and Hammond organs-- a far cry from the days when indie meant never having to say you tried.
Faith, after all, takes work, and if in one sense The Life Pursuit is about belief in the redemptive power of music, it's also a manifestation thereof. On opener "Act of the Apostle, Part One", a girl with a seriously ill mother imagines an escape, plays the Cat Stevens hymn "Morning Has Broken", and contemplates an endless melody before stumbling upon the album's central question: "What would I do to believe?" Ostinato bass, splashy piano, and Sarah Martin's gentle harmonies point the way. Toward the end of the album's loose storyline, on "For the Price of a Cup of Tea", the heroine seeks solace in "soul black vinyl," as Murdoch channels an irrepressible Bee Gees falsetto.
In between the opener and "Act of the Apostle, Part Two", nine tracks later, The Life Pursuit sets aside the nascent narrative to offer several of Belle and Sebastian's catchiest pop songs yet. "The Blues Are Still Blue" and "White Collar Boy" both incorporate glossy T. Rex boogie, Murdoch delivering one of his most indelible hooks on the former and uttering an uncharacteristically soulful "huh!" on the latter. Early mp3 preview "Another Sunny Day" sounds more like earlier Belle and Sebastian, setting country/western guitar licks to a sunny but sad love song that ambles past soccer, midges, Eskimos, and haunted hearts. First single "Funny Little Frog" slyly relates a love that turns out to be from afar, tellingly comparing the feeling to a sound from the narrator's "thro-at." Sharing its efficient Motown guitar style is the lone Stevie Jackson contribution, "To Be Myself Completely", which happily holds its own, observing, "To be myself completely/ I've just got to let you down."
Still, there's little to fault about this album's songcraft, and Murdoch is also at his best detailing some of his famously quirky characters. "Sukie in the Graveyard" makes room for a pristine guitar solo, organs, and horns in a loose, animated tale of a runaway. On melancholic centerpiece "Dress Up in You", Murdoch at first seems to be describing an encounter with a groupie, but ultimately is revealed to be singing from the point of view of a woman to a former rival-turned-star.
Of course, the album also wrestles with the struggle to have faith in God. To be sure, Murdoch's Catholic beliefs have been central to his songs since long before you could say "Sufjan." The religious references here have more in common on their face with the Godspell gab of Waitress's "If You Find Yourself Caught in Love" than the sardonically wrought church scenes of "The State That I Am In" or "If You're Feeling Sinister". Amid atypically fancy guitarwork and Martin's breathless scat on "We Are the Sleepyheads", Murdoch recalls, "We talked about the things we read in Luke and John." With the feel of Paul McCartney doing Tin Pan Alley, "Act of the Apostles, Part Two" finds Murdoch returning to the girl from the introduction. "The bible's my tool/ There's no mention of school," he sighs, then merges the album's twin motifs: "My Damascan Road's my transistor radio." Converted to pop, she was converted to Jesus.
Though the music may be even shinier and happier than on Waitress, the girl's religious impulses don't resolve themselves nearly so blithely. Midway through "Part Two", the album climaxes when she determines to find "the face behind the voice": Synths flutter like stomach butterflies as the melody from "Part One" returns and the young protagonist attempts to attend a church service, only to be told to "bugger off." Next she places her hopes in music alone, spending the night with a man who makes her "the village joke." Closer "Mornington Crescent"-- named for a London Underground stop and a laughably complex strategy game-- sketches a final fall from grace, giving itself to sin and countrified guitars out of "Wild Horses".
Only a few bands have managed to successfully reinvent themselves a half-dozen or so albums into their careers. Granted, Murdoch's is a very different group today than the one that caught the ears and hearts of pop-music zealots a decade ago, with different members and a newly unrestrained sound. "Make a new cult every day," Murdoch once sang, but of course, Heaven's Gate and Waco compounds aren't for everyone. The Life Pursuit is a baroque pop cathedral, welcoming the faithful and newly converted alike.
+ Yeah Yeah Yeahs: "Gold Lion (Diplo's Optimo Remix)"
It's unclear what kind of gotcha DJing Diplo's on when he debuts a remix for a track people have been dying to hear, before said track has even dropped. The new Yeah Yeah Yeahs album, few of us know, has a jingle-jangle campfire vibe to it at times, so this remix is a bit misleading: kitschier, crazier. Diplo turns up the flux capacitor on Karen O's already heaving chorus and transfigures it into Q*Bert-style squawk. In doing so he makes a suitably sleepy slow-burner into the kind of contortionist freakout he's done well with Gwen and the Bloc boyz and that M.I.A. person. Gone are guitars, in are the squelch and synths. Fitting; here's Karen's chorus-time coo: "Take our hands out of our control."
More on the Yeah Yeah Yeahs:
In July of 2004, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, a rock trio from New York City, opened for Devo, the new-wave group, in a show at the band shell in Central Park. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ 2003 début album, “Fever to Tell,” had gone gold, a considerable achievement for a noisy and idiosyncratic band that lacks a bass player and has a sound that is sometimes thin and spiky. The group had sold half a million records, in part because the video for “Maps,” a stirring love song that is as close as the band gets to a ballad, had become a staple on MTV2.
The Central Park gig was the trio’s most high-profile to date in its home town. It had been raining, and clear plastic ponchos had been distributed to the audience, about three thousand people, some of whom shouted “Devo!” during the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ set. The band members were fighting the crowd, the weather, even their clothes. Under a poncho, Karen O, the lead singer, who is twenty-seven years old and long-legged, was wearing a leotard that looked like a stained-glass window and appeared to be a couple of sizes too small. Eventually, Karen O (her last name is Orzolek) removed her poncho and tied it protectively around her waist while she romped around the stage, hollering and throwing her hands in the air. It was a typical performance for her: simultaneously aggressive and vulnerable. And, like everything the Yeah Yeah Yeahs do, the show was both off-kilter and mesmerizing.
“Show Your Bones,” the group’s second full-length album, which will be released in March, is a testament to its ingenuity. Karen O and her bandmates—Brian Chase, the drummer, and Nick Zinner, the guitarist—put primitivist graphics on their album covers and appear with bands, like the Liars and Black Dice, who think noise is its own reward. But beneath the art-rock trappings the Yeah Yeah Yeahs are pop musicians. Theirs is a slightly scruffy version of pop, made with cheap instruments and Karen O’s surreal lyrics, but their songs—like their performances—have all the traits of Top Forty hits: economy, momentum, personality, and pleasure. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs value joy over indie credibility, and they want to be catchy. (The group’s albums are each less than forty minutes long, and its other two releases are brief EPs.)
Chase, a compact, bespectacled young man, who attended Oberlin College with Karen O, is one of rock’s most satisfying drummers; he is capable of complicated polyrhythms but rarely plays anything fussy. Zinner, who played in a duo with Karen O before they formed the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, is fine-featured and rail thin, with a nest of black hair and a talent for writing elegant, howling guitar motifs that often echo, but never overwhelm, her singing. Both men need to be this good to hold their own against Karen O, whose fearsome charisma would have made her a success had she appeared with nothing more than a microphone and a pair of maracas. She stalks the stage, plants her feet wide apart, pours beer on herself, and flings equipment around with no apparent regard for whom she might hit. (On the band’s Web site, she is depicted breathing fire, with one foot resting on an enormous cartoon rabbit.) Her outfits, which are made by her friend the designer Christian Joy, are a jumble of kindergarten and runway: short, shiny skirts worn with Converse high-tops, ripped fish-net stockings, and, on at least one occasion, a Wonder Woman-style capelet. Karen O’s voice lacks the power of Björk’s, but she is as versatile a performer. Sometimes she sounds like a barroom country singer; at others, like an Eastern European folksinger, or a ditzy pop star.
The Yeah Yeah Yeahs played their first show in 2000, opening for the White Stripes at the Mercury Lounge. The following year, they recorded a five-song EP, which they released themselves. It quickly became popular, and was re-released by the respected indie label Touch & Go. One track, “Art Star,” is a gleeful parody of the art world. “I’ve been working on a piece that speaks of sex and desperation,” Karen O deadpans, boasting, “I got a dealer in Tokyo. I got a rep in Paris. I got an agent in Cologne. Shit, I got a gallery in New York!” The chorus consists of her screaming “Art star!” for a very long time, as if she were being electrocuted. Just before you reach to turn the howling off, she does so herself, chiming, “Doot doot doot doot, doot di-doot di-doot.” (Perhaps the art star has overcome her anxiety attack and is skipping down the street to the bank.)
The song that seemed to stick with people, though, was “Our Time,” which begins with a primal drumbeat common to girl-group songs from the sixties; it sounds like the opening of the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby,” only slowed down a bit. Karen O sings about what could be a romance gone bad—“I’ve been sunk by your lies, and my heart, baby, is cold and blue”—but in the chorus the words become more ambiguous: “It’s our time, sweet babe, to break on through. It’s the year to be hated, so glad that we made it.” Is she talking to her lover? Or to her bandmates, imagining that the Yeah Yeah Yeahs are on the verge of becoming big enough to be resented? Karen O understands that rock lyrics aren’t necessarily better when they’re clearer.
“Gold Lion,” the first single on “Show Your Bones,” is more like a traditional rock song than much of the band’s previous work. The opening measures are unexpectedly generic, consisting of a simple beat, basic acoustic guitar chords, and a mysterious phrase: “Gold lion’s gonna tell me where the light is.” But soon the drums become commanding, and the echoey, growling guitar parts stack up, one after another, until the music reaches a cacophonous peak. Karen O is making poetic promises. “We’ll build a fire in your eyes,” she says, before breaking into a girlish “ooh, ooh,” as the guitar whines like a violin being played over a walkie-talkie. The next song, the gentle and plangent “Way Out,” borrows liberally from R.E.M., Sonic Youth, and Nirvana, which is a sign of confidence; the Yeah Yeah Yeahs know that no one will mistake them for anyone else, however much they plunder the past.
The entire record seems hopeful. It is rife with cheery catchphrases—“we’re just another part of you,” “good things happen in bad towns”—and tremulous guitar parts. “Phenomena,” one of its most exuberant songs, is destined to be remixed as a dance tune. The beat is heavy, and Zinner switches between robust metallic riffs and hollow, spooky oscillations. In the chorus, Karen O sings, “Something like a phenomenon” —a lyric lifted from Grandmaster Flash’s “White Lines,” which is based on a classic eighties dance track, Liquid Liquid’s “Cavern.” In the next breath, she modifies the phrase to “Something like an astronomer.”
In the chorus of “Cheated Hearts,” a gorgeous, yearning track that could become the album’s big hit, Karen O sings one phrase over and over in a crescendo: “I think that I’m bigger than the sound.” The band responds with a convincing eruption of noise, elegantly belying her claim. The moment neatly captures Karen O’s appeal: in her recordings and in her live performances, she satisfies the audience’s need for a star while allowing us to see the ordinary person struggling with that role. “It’s important for kids to feel bigger than they usually do,” Karen O told me. “We’re trying to make you feel a little bit cooler than you might actually be.” Kids listening to “Show Your Bones” will recognize the insecurity she describes, and feel it drain away.
24
from the new yorker
When “24” débuted, on Fox, in November of 2001, it was seen as a risky venture; no one had a clue whether the show would hold viewers’ interest for a whole season— a season of twenty-four episodes, in which events unfold in real time over the course of one day—or whether, even if it did maintain an audience, the idea would turn out to have enough going for it other than novelty to make it worth renewing. Well, it all worked out. “24” began its fifth season last month, as entertainment shows and fan sites trumpeted “Jack’s back!” to signal the return of Kiefer Sutherland’s federal counter-terrorism agent Jack Bauer. For me, this meant embarking on my yearly task of trying to hide the fact that I didn’t watch “24.” People I know talk about this show more than any other, and they don’t just tell me that they watch it; they tell me how they watch it. One friend has seen every episode as it aired—which in the days of DVDs and video-ondemand and DVRs bespeaks an adherence to the old ways of viewing that is almost freakish. Some people didn’t watch it at all until they happened to rent the DVDs of the first season and found themselves watching the whole thing in one weekend. (In DVD form, the series could be called “17,” since that’s how many hours a season runs without commercials; still, that’s a lot of couch time for a weekend.) One friend’s next-door neighbor calls her the second the show is over to discuss it. Couples make dates to watch it together.
But sometimes a TV show’s main selling point is the very thing that can keep a person from watching it. I resented the implicit requirement that one watch every episode of “24,” in order. And the show began only two months after September 11th; at that time, watching a thriller with a cliffhanger at the end of every episode and a story line involving the attempted assassination of a Presidential candidate—and, in the first episode, a plane being blown out of the sky—was not on my to-do list. But “24” is a phenomenon, and a growing one; so, after four years as a fugitive from the law of popular opinion, I decided to stop running. At the start of several episodes in the first season, Bauer tells us, “Today is the longest day of my life.” In late January, I set about watching a hundred and two episodes of “24.” It was the longest week of my life.
Of course, there is more to “24” than its concept, and in fact only in the first season did time really seem to be running out. After that, the threats were both broader and more terrifying—nuclear, biological, chemical—and they hit home in a different way. Four of the first season’s episodes were shot before September 11th, but, since the second season, the show has consistently taken into account our national fears. (“24” ’s creators, Robert Cochran and Joel Surnow, started out with the idea for a show that would unfold over twenty-four hours, and then tried to figure out what kind of job or event would call for someone to be up that long. They have said that they begin each season with only about a third of it mapped out, so it’s probable that by now, after six episodes of the current season have aired, the show’s writers are keeping Jack Bauer hours.)
Bauer and his superiors at the Counter Terrorist Unit in Los Angeles find themselves perpetually at the crossroads of urgency and ethics. From the very beginning, in instances too numerous to mention, “24” has forced viewers to conduct a debate with themselves that is similar to the one in Congress last year over John McCain’s amendment to a defense bill, banning “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment” of detainees. If you had in hand a suspect who was almost certainly involved in a plot to set off a nuclear device or release a weaponized virus in a few hours, and that suspect refused to talk, what would you do? Such quandaries present themselves at the highest levels, too: the President of the United States, David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert), who based his campaign on the principles of “integrity, commitment, and, above all, honor,” resorts, without much hesitation, to having a little electricity experiment performed on his national-security adviser, who has lied to him but is such a smoothie that unless he’s given a jolt of juice he’ll never reveal his secrets. (This role is played by Harris Yulin, one of the many wonderful actors who have come and gone on “24.” Another is William Devane, who played the Secretary of Defense in season four. This season, Gregory Itzin plays President Charles Logan, a paranoid and arrogant weakling, and the terrific Jean Smart is his unstable but canny wife. Seeing these old hands playing old hands—there’s nothing better.) However, when it comes to killing, of which there is plenty—it sometimes seems as though the show’s title referred to the number of bodies that pile up in each episode—there’s no point in having a debate with yourself. As in most thrillers, it’s kill or be killed.
“24” works on us a little like a homeopathic treatment, helping us fend off, we hope, what we’re most afraid of these days. If we see Jack’s daughter kidnapped but then rescued, or a nuclear bomb safely detonated in the desert instead of in Los Angeles, maybe that will ward off disaster in our own lives. (By the way, judging by the soundtrack of “24,” when a nuclear bomb does go off the accompanying music will sound something like Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings. Good, because Pachelbel’s Canon is so 1990.) It’s not that simple, though; there are not many happy endings, or middles, in “24.” Viewers were shocked, after all they had been through, by the murder of Jack’s wife by a C.T.U. mole at the end of the first season. The series hasn’t flinched from showing the toll that Jack’s job takes on his life, and on the lives of his colleagues at C.T.U., even the computer jockeys, who are generally in less danger than a field agent like Jack.
Kiefer Sutherland, who at thirty-nine looks both boyish and mature, is terrific in “24”; as he himself has said, it’s the role of a lifetime. Torn between duty to his country and duty to his family, he’s focussed and always on the move, trying to shake the cloud of existential doom that hangs over him. Like most of the actors in “24,” he does a lot with little dialogue. Having found some measure of happiness with a new woman after leaving the unit, he’s pulled back in because he’s needed: no one else gets the job done the way Jack does. You can actually see the moment when he realizes that his new relationship is going to fail because of his work; he’s just driving his car—nothing is said—and if you turn away for a second you miss the look on his face. It’s lonely and desolate, sort of the way Los Angeles itself is in the show.
There’s a tremendous sense of isolation in “24.” The writing and the directing are stripped down and stark, as is the concrete-and-glass interior of C.T.U. There’s little time for tenderness, even between couples, and no time for lingering of any kind; nobody at C.T.U. is sitting around playing Nerf basketball. (The one character who has some real language to work with is the scheming wife—and, later, ex-wife—of President Palmer, played by Penny Johnson Jerald, who is given slow-cooked, theatrical lines befitting a villainess of the Alexis Carrington school. It’s a completely nutty part.) And yet we come to know some of the characters well, especially the computer whizzes Chloe and Edgar (Mary Lynn Rajskub and Louis Lombardi), both of them appealing and highly gifted oddballs, she maladjusted and obsessive, and he overweight and awkward. Even characters we don’t like can touch us as time goes on. Watching the series the way I did, I tended to notice annoying repetitions; it seemed to me that Jack whispered “We’ll get through this” to his daughter, Kim (Elisha Cuthbert), at least five times in every episode she was in, and that almost every bit of Jack’s dialogue was rendered first in an intense whisper and then in an angry shout, as in “Where is the bomb? I said, ‘WHERE IS THE BOMB’! ” (The second line is always said with Jack’s gun thrusting closer to the other guy’s head.) Also, just in case you didn’t pick up the tip in season one about cutting off a dead person’s thumb so that you can use it on the electronic-identification pad at his office, you see it again in season four. Serious as “24” is, it’s a lot of fun, too; fans love to post body counts and implausibilities and share Jack talk online. There is also one element of high comedy in “24”: the computers always work.
NEIL YOUNG: HEART OF GOLD
film review
Even for a sixty-year-old country rocker, Neil Young has been through a lot, so one of the nice things about the concert film “Neil Young: Heart of Gold” is that this artist appears to have found something close to contentment. Surrounded by old performing friends like Emmylou Harris and Ben Keith, and with his wife, Pegi, standing beside him and singing, he gives the impression of having proved whatever he wanted to prove; he has worked through many memories, griefs, and fears, and arrived not at the end but, perhaps, at acceptance of the end. Or so it seems. Surely the genesis of the film suggests an intentionally valedictory myth. Last winter, informed that he had a brain aneurism, Young quickly wrote and recorded a bunch of new songs—the album released as “Prairie Wind.” In the spring, an operation for the aneurism went well, and Young, after recovering, gave two concerts in August at the old Ryman Auditorium, in Nashville, events that the director Jonathan Demme attended, camera crew in tow. Young performs the “Prairie Wind” series and some older songs, too—mostly lyrical ballads in gentle country-rock style, richly scored with backup guitars, dobro, horns, and sometimes strings or groups of singers. The sound is enveloping and deeply satisfying without being challenging in any way. The lyrics are devoted to old friends and performers, to his dad, to life as a dream that may no longer be recoverable. Indeed, “if you follow every dream you might get lost.” Over the years, Young has known a lot of people who got lost; that he has repeatedly found himself is a thought that now inspires little more than muted, rueful celebration.
Demme keeps the cameras right in front of the performers, and he avoids the stale rock-concert ecstasy of swooping and swivelling and shooting into the lights. Nothing in this movie is aggressively sold; nothing in it is intended to change your life. The attitude is “Take it or leave it—this is what Neil Young is.” Ignoring the audience in the hall, Demme concentrates on the music and the lyrics and the relations between Young and members of the band—sometimes just a nod, a smile, a raised eyebrow. Since the sound is unusually clear as well as full, one can actually hear the lyrics in all their mournful nearpoetry. One might call “Neil Young: Heart of Gold” soothing, even becalmed, but mellowness and ripeness, when they exist at this high level of craft, should have their season, too.
Belle and Sebastian
The Life Pursuit
[Matador; 2006]
Rating: 8.5
from pitchforkmedia.com
Every religion began as a cult. In their early years, Belle and Sebastian possessed near-totemic powers for their small but impassioned band of disciples, as fervent as the followers of similarly wistful, self-deprecating, and sometimes sexually conflicted artists like the Smiths, Felt, and Orange Juice a decade prior. The common sacrament was pop, with true believers bearing witness in their communal alienation, badges, battered cassettes, and fanclub memberships. The Scottish group only heightened that devotion by shrouding themselves in mystery-- not answering questions, not appearing in proper photographs, not available in stores.
On sixth proper album The Life Pursuit, Belle and Sebastian want to teach the world to sing, in however imperfect harmony. Where the recent live re-recording of 1996's If You're Feeling Sinister draped their most appealing songs in apposite finery, the band's latest extends their newfound confidence to content as well as delivery, and stands as the finest full-length by Stuart Murdoch and his shifting collaborators since that distant pinnacle. About his early-90s recovery from chronic fatigue, Murdoch told a recent interviewer, "Spirituality and songwriting were my crutches." Spanning glam, soul, country, and 70s AM rock, this record is a deceptively wry, wickedly tuneful testament to the fragile beauty of faith, in deities as well as in pop.
Belle and Sebastian seem to have found new life in their evolution from shy bedsit savants to showy pop adepts. The Life Pursuit's lavishness renders the burgeoning bubblegum of 2003's Trevor Horn-produced Dear Catastrophe Waitress merely transitional, rewarding the Job-like righteous after the trials of the band's mid-career disappointments. Recorded in Los Angeles with Tony Hoffer, who oversaw Beck's divisive Midnite Vultures, the album runs over with flute, horns, call-and-response vocals, and even a funky clavinet (on soul survivor "Song for Sunshine"). The playing, meanwhile, is surprisingly chopsy, down to the breezy guitars and Hammond organs-- a far cry from the days when indie meant never having to say you tried.
Faith, after all, takes work, and if in one sense The Life Pursuit is about belief in the redemptive power of music, it's also a manifestation thereof. On opener "Act of the Apostle, Part One", a girl with a seriously ill mother imagines an escape, plays the Cat Stevens hymn "Morning Has Broken", and contemplates an endless melody before stumbling upon the album's central question: "What would I do to believe?" Ostinato bass, splashy piano, and Sarah Martin's gentle harmonies point the way. Toward the end of the album's loose storyline, on "For the Price of a Cup of Tea", the heroine seeks solace in "soul black vinyl," as Murdoch channels an irrepressible Bee Gees falsetto.
In between the opener and "Act of the Apostle, Part Two", nine tracks later, The Life Pursuit sets aside the nascent narrative to offer several of Belle and Sebastian's catchiest pop songs yet. "The Blues Are Still Blue" and "White Collar Boy" both incorporate glossy T. Rex boogie, Murdoch delivering one of his most indelible hooks on the former and uttering an uncharacteristically soulful "huh!" on the latter. Early mp3 preview "Another Sunny Day" sounds more like earlier Belle and Sebastian, setting country/western guitar licks to a sunny but sad love song that ambles past soccer, midges, Eskimos, and haunted hearts. First single "Funny Little Frog" slyly relates a love that turns out to be from afar, tellingly comparing the feeling to a sound from the narrator's "thro-at." Sharing its efficient Motown guitar style is the lone Stevie Jackson contribution, "To Be Myself Completely", which happily holds its own, observing, "To be myself completely/ I've just got to let you down."
Still, there's little to fault about this album's songcraft, and Murdoch is also at his best detailing some of his famously quirky characters. "Sukie in the Graveyard" makes room for a pristine guitar solo, organs, and horns in a loose, animated tale of a runaway. On melancholic centerpiece "Dress Up in You", Murdoch at first seems to be describing an encounter with a groupie, but ultimately is revealed to be singing from the point of view of a woman to a former rival-turned-star.
Of course, the album also wrestles with the struggle to have faith in God. To be sure, Murdoch's Catholic beliefs have been central to his songs since long before you could say "Sufjan." The religious references here have more in common on their face with the Godspell gab of Waitress's "If You Find Yourself Caught in Love" than the sardonically wrought church scenes of "The State That I Am In" or "If You're Feeling Sinister". Amid atypically fancy guitarwork and Martin's breathless scat on "We Are the Sleepyheads", Murdoch recalls, "We talked about the things we read in Luke and John." With the feel of Paul McCartney doing Tin Pan Alley, "Act of the Apostles, Part Two" finds Murdoch returning to the girl from the introduction. "The bible's my tool/ There's no mention of school," he sighs, then merges the album's twin motifs: "My Damascan Road's my transistor radio." Converted to pop, she was converted to Jesus.
Though the music may be even shinier and happier than on Waitress, the girl's religious impulses don't resolve themselves nearly so blithely. Midway through "Part Two", the album climaxes when she determines to find "the face behind the voice": Synths flutter like stomach butterflies as the melody from "Part One" returns and the young protagonist attempts to attend a church service, only to be told to "bugger off." Next she places her hopes in music alone, spending the night with a man who makes her "the village joke." Closer "Mornington Crescent"-- named for a London Underground stop and a laughably complex strategy game-- sketches a final fall from grace, giving itself to sin and countrified guitars out of "Wild Horses".
Only a few bands have managed to successfully reinvent themselves a half-dozen or so albums into their careers. Granted, Murdoch's is a very different group today than the one that caught the ears and hearts of pop-music zealots a decade ago, with different members and a newly unrestrained sound. "Make a new cult every day," Murdoch once sang, but of course, Heaven's Gate and Waco compounds aren't for everyone. The Life Pursuit is a baroque pop cathedral, welcoming the faithful and newly converted alike.
+ Yeah Yeah Yeahs: "Gold Lion (Diplo's Optimo Remix)"
It's unclear what kind of gotcha DJing Diplo's on when he debuts a remix for a track people have been dying to hear, before said track has even dropped. The new Yeah Yeah Yeahs album, few of us know, has a jingle-jangle campfire vibe to it at times, so this remix is a bit misleading: kitschier, crazier. Diplo turns up the flux capacitor on Karen O's already heaving chorus and transfigures it into Q*Bert-style squawk. In doing so he makes a suitably sleepy slow-burner into the kind of contortionist freakout he's done well with Gwen and the Bloc boyz and that M.I.A. person. Gone are guitars, in are the squelch and synths. Fitting; here's Karen's chorus-time coo: "Take our hands out of our control."
More on the Yeah Yeah Yeahs:
In July of 2004, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, a rock trio from New York City, opened for Devo, the new-wave group, in a show at the band shell in Central Park. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ 2003 début album, “Fever to Tell,” had gone gold, a considerable achievement for a noisy and idiosyncratic band that lacks a bass player and has a sound that is sometimes thin and spiky. The group had sold half a million records, in part because the video for “Maps,” a stirring love song that is as close as the band gets to a ballad, had become a staple on MTV2.
The Central Park gig was the trio’s most high-profile to date in its home town. It had been raining, and clear plastic ponchos had been distributed to the audience, about three thousand people, some of whom shouted “Devo!” during the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ set. The band members were fighting the crowd, the weather, even their clothes. Under a poncho, Karen O, the lead singer, who is twenty-seven years old and long-legged, was wearing a leotard that looked like a stained-glass window and appeared to be a couple of sizes too small. Eventually, Karen O (her last name is Orzolek) removed her poncho and tied it protectively around her waist while she romped around the stage, hollering and throwing her hands in the air. It was a typical performance for her: simultaneously aggressive and vulnerable. And, like everything the Yeah Yeah Yeahs do, the show was both off-kilter and mesmerizing.
“Show Your Bones,” the group’s second full-length album, which will be released in March, is a testament to its ingenuity. Karen O and her bandmates—Brian Chase, the drummer, and Nick Zinner, the guitarist—put primitivist graphics on their album covers and appear with bands, like the Liars and Black Dice, who think noise is its own reward. But beneath the art-rock trappings the Yeah Yeah Yeahs are pop musicians. Theirs is a slightly scruffy version of pop, made with cheap instruments and Karen O’s surreal lyrics, but their songs—like their performances—have all the traits of Top Forty hits: economy, momentum, personality, and pleasure. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs value joy over indie credibility, and they want to be catchy. (The group’s albums are each less than forty minutes long, and its other two releases are brief EPs.)
Chase, a compact, bespectacled young man, who attended Oberlin College with Karen O, is one of rock’s most satisfying drummers; he is capable of complicated polyrhythms but rarely plays anything fussy. Zinner, who played in a duo with Karen O before they formed the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, is fine-featured and rail thin, with a nest of black hair and a talent for writing elegant, howling guitar motifs that often echo, but never overwhelm, her singing. Both men need to be this good to hold their own against Karen O, whose fearsome charisma would have made her a success had she appeared with nothing more than a microphone and a pair of maracas. She stalks the stage, plants her feet wide apart, pours beer on herself, and flings equipment around with no apparent regard for whom she might hit. (On the band’s Web site, she is depicted breathing fire, with one foot resting on an enormous cartoon rabbit.) Her outfits, which are made by her friend the designer Christian Joy, are a jumble of kindergarten and runway: short, shiny skirts worn with Converse high-tops, ripped fish-net stockings, and, on at least one occasion, a Wonder Woman-style capelet. Karen O’s voice lacks the power of Björk’s, but she is as versatile a performer. Sometimes she sounds like a barroom country singer; at others, like an Eastern European folksinger, or a ditzy pop star.
The Yeah Yeah Yeahs played their first show in 2000, opening for the White Stripes at the Mercury Lounge. The following year, they recorded a five-song EP, which they released themselves. It quickly became popular, and was re-released by the respected indie label Touch & Go. One track, “Art Star,” is a gleeful parody of the art world. “I’ve been working on a piece that speaks of sex and desperation,” Karen O deadpans, boasting, “I got a dealer in Tokyo. I got a rep in Paris. I got an agent in Cologne. Shit, I got a gallery in New York!” The chorus consists of her screaming “Art star!” for a very long time, as if she were being electrocuted. Just before you reach to turn the howling off, she does so herself, chiming, “Doot doot doot doot, doot di-doot di-doot.” (Perhaps the art star has overcome her anxiety attack and is skipping down the street to the bank.)
The song that seemed to stick with people, though, was “Our Time,” which begins with a primal drumbeat common to girl-group songs from the sixties; it sounds like the opening of the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby,” only slowed down a bit. Karen O sings about what could be a romance gone bad—“I’ve been sunk by your lies, and my heart, baby, is cold and blue”—but in the chorus the words become more ambiguous: “It’s our time, sweet babe, to break on through. It’s the year to be hated, so glad that we made it.” Is she talking to her lover? Or to her bandmates, imagining that the Yeah Yeah Yeahs are on the verge of becoming big enough to be resented? Karen O understands that rock lyrics aren’t necessarily better when they’re clearer.
“Gold Lion,” the first single on “Show Your Bones,” is more like a traditional rock song than much of the band’s previous work. The opening measures are unexpectedly generic, consisting of a simple beat, basic acoustic guitar chords, and a mysterious phrase: “Gold lion’s gonna tell me where the light is.” But soon the drums become commanding, and the echoey, growling guitar parts stack up, one after another, until the music reaches a cacophonous peak. Karen O is making poetic promises. “We’ll build a fire in your eyes,” she says, before breaking into a girlish “ooh, ooh,” as the guitar whines like a violin being played over a walkie-talkie. The next song, the gentle and plangent “Way Out,” borrows liberally from R.E.M., Sonic Youth, and Nirvana, which is a sign of confidence; the Yeah Yeah Yeahs know that no one will mistake them for anyone else, however much they plunder the past.
The entire record seems hopeful. It is rife with cheery catchphrases—“we’re just another part of you,” “good things happen in bad towns”—and tremulous guitar parts. “Phenomena,” one of its most exuberant songs, is destined to be remixed as a dance tune. The beat is heavy, and Zinner switches between robust metallic riffs and hollow, spooky oscillations. In the chorus, Karen O sings, “Something like a phenomenon” —a lyric lifted from Grandmaster Flash’s “White Lines,” which is based on a classic eighties dance track, Liquid Liquid’s “Cavern.” In the next breath, she modifies the phrase to “Something like an astronomer.”
In the chorus of “Cheated Hearts,” a gorgeous, yearning track that could become the album’s big hit, Karen O sings one phrase over and over in a crescendo: “I think that I’m bigger than the sound.” The band responds with a convincing eruption of noise, elegantly belying her claim. The moment neatly captures Karen O’s appeal: in her recordings and in her live performances, she satisfies the audience’s need for a star while allowing us to see the ordinary person struggling with that role. “It’s important for kids to feel bigger than they usually do,” Karen O told me. “We’re trying to make you feel a little bit cooler than you might actually be.” Kids listening to “Show Your Bones” will recognize the insecurity she describes, and feel it drain away.
24
from the new yorker
When “24” débuted, on Fox, in November of 2001, it was seen as a risky venture; no one had a clue whether the show would hold viewers’ interest for a whole season— a season of twenty-four episodes, in which events unfold in real time over the course of one day—or whether, even if it did maintain an audience, the idea would turn out to have enough going for it other than novelty to make it worth renewing. Well, it all worked out. “24” began its fifth season last month, as entertainment shows and fan sites trumpeted “Jack’s back!” to signal the return of Kiefer Sutherland’s federal counter-terrorism agent Jack Bauer. For me, this meant embarking on my yearly task of trying to hide the fact that I didn’t watch “24.” People I know talk about this show more than any other, and they don’t just tell me that they watch it; they tell me how they watch it. One friend has seen every episode as it aired—which in the days of DVDs and video-ondemand and DVRs bespeaks an adherence to the old ways of viewing that is almost freakish. Some people didn’t watch it at all until they happened to rent the DVDs of the first season and found themselves watching the whole thing in one weekend. (In DVD form, the series could be called “17,” since that’s how many hours a season runs without commercials; still, that’s a lot of couch time for a weekend.) One friend’s next-door neighbor calls her the second the show is over to discuss it. Couples make dates to watch it together.
But sometimes a TV show’s main selling point is the very thing that can keep a person from watching it. I resented the implicit requirement that one watch every episode of “24,” in order. And the show began only two months after September 11th; at that time, watching a thriller with a cliffhanger at the end of every episode and a story line involving the attempted assassination of a Presidential candidate—and, in the first episode, a plane being blown out of the sky—was not on my to-do list. But “24” is a phenomenon, and a growing one; so, after four years as a fugitive from the law of popular opinion, I decided to stop running. At the start of several episodes in the first season, Bauer tells us, “Today is the longest day of my life.” In late January, I set about watching a hundred and two episodes of “24.” It was the longest week of my life.
Of course, there is more to “24” than its concept, and in fact only in the first season did time really seem to be running out. After that, the threats were both broader and more terrifying—nuclear, biological, chemical—and they hit home in a different way. Four of the first season’s episodes were shot before September 11th, but, since the second season, the show has consistently taken into account our national fears. (“24” ’s creators, Robert Cochran and Joel Surnow, started out with the idea for a show that would unfold over twenty-four hours, and then tried to figure out what kind of job or event would call for someone to be up that long. They have said that they begin each season with only about a third of it mapped out, so it’s probable that by now, after six episodes of the current season have aired, the show’s writers are keeping Jack Bauer hours.)
Bauer and his superiors at the Counter Terrorist Unit in Los Angeles find themselves perpetually at the crossroads of urgency and ethics. From the very beginning, in instances too numerous to mention, “24” has forced viewers to conduct a debate with themselves that is similar to the one in Congress last year over John McCain’s amendment to a defense bill, banning “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment” of detainees. If you had in hand a suspect who was almost certainly involved in a plot to set off a nuclear device or release a weaponized virus in a few hours, and that suspect refused to talk, what would you do? Such quandaries present themselves at the highest levels, too: the President of the United States, David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert), who based his campaign on the principles of “integrity, commitment, and, above all, honor,” resorts, without much hesitation, to having a little electricity experiment performed on his national-security adviser, who has lied to him but is such a smoothie that unless he’s given a jolt of juice he’ll never reveal his secrets. (This role is played by Harris Yulin, one of the many wonderful actors who have come and gone on “24.” Another is William Devane, who played the Secretary of Defense in season four. This season, Gregory Itzin plays President Charles Logan, a paranoid and arrogant weakling, and the terrific Jean Smart is his unstable but canny wife. Seeing these old hands playing old hands—there’s nothing better.) However, when it comes to killing, of which there is plenty—it sometimes seems as though the show’s title referred to the number of bodies that pile up in each episode—there’s no point in having a debate with yourself. As in most thrillers, it’s kill or be killed.
“24” works on us a little like a homeopathic treatment, helping us fend off, we hope, what we’re most afraid of these days. If we see Jack’s daughter kidnapped but then rescued, or a nuclear bomb safely detonated in the desert instead of in Los Angeles, maybe that will ward off disaster in our own lives. (By the way, judging by the soundtrack of “24,” when a nuclear bomb does go off the accompanying music will sound something like Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings. Good, because Pachelbel’s Canon is so 1990.) It’s not that simple, though; there are not many happy endings, or middles, in “24.” Viewers were shocked, after all they had been through, by the murder of Jack’s wife by a C.T.U. mole at the end of the first season. The series hasn’t flinched from showing the toll that Jack’s job takes on his life, and on the lives of his colleagues at C.T.U., even the computer jockeys, who are generally in less danger than a field agent like Jack.
Kiefer Sutherland, who at thirty-nine looks both boyish and mature, is terrific in “24”; as he himself has said, it’s the role of a lifetime. Torn between duty to his country and duty to his family, he’s focussed and always on the move, trying to shake the cloud of existential doom that hangs over him. Like most of the actors in “24,” he does a lot with little dialogue. Having found some measure of happiness with a new woman after leaving the unit, he’s pulled back in because he’s needed: no one else gets the job done the way Jack does. You can actually see the moment when he realizes that his new relationship is going to fail because of his work; he’s just driving his car—nothing is said—and if you turn away for a second you miss the look on his face. It’s lonely and desolate, sort of the way Los Angeles itself is in the show.
There’s a tremendous sense of isolation in “24.” The writing and the directing are stripped down and stark, as is the concrete-and-glass interior of C.T.U. There’s little time for tenderness, even between couples, and no time for lingering of any kind; nobody at C.T.U. is sitting around playing Nerf basketball. (The one character who has some real language to work with is the scheming wife—and, later, ex-wife—of President Palmer, played by Penny Johnson Jerald, who is given slow-cooked, theatrical lines befitting a villainess of the Alexis Carrington school. It’s a completely nutty part.) And yet we come to know some of the characters well, especially the computer whizzes Chloe and Edgar (Mary Lynn Rajskub and Louis Lombardi), both of them appealing and highly gifted oddballs, she maladjusted and obsessive, and he overweight and awkward. Even characters we don’t like can touch us as time goes on. Watching the series the way I did, I tended to notice annoying repetitions; it seemed to me that Jack whispered “We’ll get through this” to his daughter, Kim (Elisha Cuthbert), at least five times in every episode she was in, and that almost every bit of Jack’s dialogue was rendered first in an intense whisper and then in an angry shout, as in “Where is the bomb? I said, ‘WHERE IS THE BOMB’! ” (The second line is always said with Jack’s gun thrusting closer to the other guy’s head.) Also, just in case you didn’t pick up the tip in season one about cutting off a dead person’s thumb so that you can use it on the electronic-identification pad at his office, you see it again in season four. Serious as “24” is, it’s a lot of fun, too; fans love to post body counts and implausibilities and share Jack talk online. There is also one element of high comedy in “24”: the computers always work.
NEIL YOUNG: HEART OF GOLD
film review
Even for a sixty-year-old country rocker, Neil Young has been through a lot, so one of the nice things about the concert film “Neil Young: Heart of Gold” is that this artist appears to have found something close to contentment. Surrounded by old performing friends like Emmylou Harris and Ben Keith, and with his wife, Pegi, standing beside him and singing, he gives the impression of having proved whatever he wanted to prove; he has worked through many memories, griefs, and fears, and arrived not at the end but, perhaps, at acceptance of the end. Or so it seems. Surely the genesis of the film suggests an intentionally valedictory myth. Last winter, informed that he had a brain aneurism, Young quickly wrote and recorded a bunch of new songs—the album released as “Prairie Wind.” In the spring, an operation for the aneurism went well, and Young, after recovering, gave two concerts in August at the old Ryman Auditorium, in Nashville, events that the director Jonathan Demme attended, camera crew in tow. Young performs the “Prairie Wind” series and some older songs, too—mostly lyrical ballads in gentle country-rock style, richly scored with backup guitars, dobro, horns, and sometimes strings or groups of singers. The sound is enveloping and deeply satisfying without being challenging in any way. The lyrics are devoted to old friends and performers, to his dad, to life as a dream that may no longer be recoverable. Indeed, “if you follow every dream you might get lost.” Over the years, Young has known a lot of people who got lost; that he has repeatedly found himself is a thought that now inspires little more than muted, rueful celebration.
Demme keeps the cameras right in front of the performers, and he avoids the stale rock-concert ecstasy of swooping and swivelling and shooting into the lights. Nothing in this movie is aggressively sold; nothing in it is intended to change your life. The attitude is “Take it or leave it—this is what Neil Young is.” Ignoring the audience in the hall, Demme concentrates on the music and the lyrics and the relations between Young and members of the band—sometimes just a nod, a smile, a raised eyebrow. Since the sound is unusually clear as well as full, one can actually hear the lyrics in all their mournful nearpoetry. One might call “Neil Young: Heart of Gold” soothing, even becalmed, but mellowness and ripeness, when they exist at this high level of craft, should have their season, too.
posted by D @ 6:14 AM
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