Tag: Review

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Film Features Film/TV

Life After Beth

When reliable performers show up in a film that is neither good nor bad, they appear frozen, bored, cut off. In films like these, placeholding paycheck performances don’t sting much, but the latest versions of the old familiar tricks feel like mirages, too.

Such actorly lifelessness eventually conquers the cast of Jeff Baena’s Life After Beth, which isn’t a high-concept horror-romance as much as it is an impressive collection of talent sitting around while some decent ideas about love, humanity, and violence recede into the suburban background.

Baena’s film initially follows brooding young stormcloud Zach (Dane DeHaan) as he tries to recover from the sudden death of his girlfriend Beth (Aubrey Plaza). Zach grieves by spending lots of time with Beth’s shell-shocked parents played by Molly Shannon and John C. Reilly.

Dane DeHaan and Aubrey Plaza star in Life After Beth

One day, Zach stops by Beth’s parents’ house, but they won’t let him in. Later that evening Zach returns. He sneaks around to the back, peers through a window, and, to his surprise, glimpses Beth walking down a hallway. For some reason, she’s come back, and although she is a bit foggy, she seems fine. So Zach and Beth try to rekindle their relationship. What could go wrong?

Life After Beth is kind of about grief and kind of about teenage romance, but it’s mostly about interesting-looking faces. Reilly’s comic-menacing mug is dominated by a strong, tiered brow that buries his eyes so deeply in his head he suggests an overgrown troll who views the world through a speakeasy door slot. DeHaan’s weary, wrinkled newborn’s eyes and motionless shingle of hair offset his quivering childlike mouth; Plaza’s huge, deadish eyes and bulbous head suggest a predatory hipster insect that’s sucked too much blood.

Life After Beath is seldom raw or intense and never truly funny. It is kinky, though. A scene of joyful, broad-daylight necrophilia in the sands of a public park playground contrasts a romantic evening at the beach that explodes into a Kiss Me Deadly holocaust.

A likely future cult classic, this tantalizing, gender-flipped variation of Warm Bodies checks at least one item off its list — there are fewer people standing around doing nothing at the end than there were at the beginning.

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Film Features Film/TV

Reviewer Reviews Review, Gives it Five Stars

In his 1983 book, Lost in The Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book, Walker Percy proposed an unforgettable thought experiment: “Imagine a soap opera in which a character awakens every morning with amnesia, in a strange house with a strange, attractive man (or woman), welcomed by the stranger, looking out a strange window with a strange view, having forgotten the past each morning and starting life afresh, seeing the window, the view, himself, herself, in the mirror afresh and for the first time. Does this prospect intrigue you?”

Adapted from the Australian TV series Review With Myles Barlow, Comedy Central’s Review, which wrapped up its inaugural season last week, is both a grim riff on Percy’s amnesiac scenario and a long-form comic triumph.

Review‘s premise is perfect for our current epoch of criticism. Each week, critic turned TV personality Forrest MacNeil (Andrew Daly) “reviews” two to three “life experiences” suggested by his audience. (His deathless rallying cry is “Life! It’s literally all we’ve got. But is it any good?”) After he receives his assignment, Forrest’s attractive, quietly mean-spirited co-host A.J. (Megan Stevenson) cheers him on — and occasionally cheers him up — as he leaves the TV studio and sets out to discover what the world has to offer. Whether he’s finding a best friend or attending an orgy, Forrest’s earnest fish-out-of-water spasms and open-minded commitment to every gross, dangerous, and morally questionable thing he’s asked to do provide plenty of opportunities for dark, idiosyncratic humor.

Five-star review for Review

As Forrest’s fragile sense of self is kicked, battered, and bloodied by factors both external (drugs, peer pressure) and internal (self-loathing, boredom), the reviews he’s asked to complete begin to haunt him. Repeatedly, Forrest answers slight variations on the same question: “Who are you?” His star-ratings responses end up validating Herman Melville’s assertion from the 1857 novel The Confidence-Man: “For there is no bent of heart or turn of thought which any man holds by virtue of an unalterable nature or will. Even those feelings and opinions deemed most identical with eternal right and truth … may in reality be but the result of some chance tip of Fate’s elbow in throwing her dice.” One nudge, and you’re a racist. One shove, and you’re shot into outer space.

In a macabre twist, Forrest isn’t allowed to discuss his day job with anyone but his co-workers. As his assignments grow more outlandish, the increasing damage to his family and friends provides a sobering subtext. The episode titles themselves could be the names of unfinished Samuel Beckett plays: “Sex Tape, Racist, Hunting”; “Marry, Run, Party”; “Quitting, Last Day, Irish.” Episode 3, “Pancakes, Divorce, Pancakes,” is the series’ widely acknowledged high point, a mixture of childish gross-out humor and piercing adult despair. But it isn’t as finely tuned as the “Aching” segment of “Revenge, Getting Rich, Aching,” which is the funniest thing I’ve seen this year.

Review‘s near-perfect finale works as both a season and series finale. It would be a shame and a major loss if it didn’t return. Then again, if it ceased to exist, its hard-earned perfection and five-star rating would remain untarnished forever.

Review

Comedy Central

First season just wrapped; available on Amazon Prime and the Comedy Central app

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Book Features Books

Punk’d (Memphis-style)

Among the memorable moments in Memphis punk-rock history, some things you just count on: the New York Dolls playing the Auditorium in ’73, when David Johansen of the Dolls was arrested either for inciting a riot or impersonating a woman (accounts differ); the Sex Pistols at the Talysen Ballroom in ’78 (no incidences, but hey, it was the Sex Pistols); and singer/onstage-defecator GG Allin at the Antenna club in ’91, when Allin was stabbed by a fan.

Other high points are anybody’s guess, and in The Official Punk Rock Book of Lists (Backbeat Books), it’s Eric Friedl — onetime Oblivian, today a True Son of Thunder, and the man behind Goner Records — doing the guessing.

In addition to Friedl’s “10 Things That Made Memphis Punk,” count on #11, supplied by Memphian Jim Cole and his fond memory the 1910 Fruitgum Co.’s “Bubblegum Riot” at the Mid-South Coliseum in the late ’60s. At the top of the bill was Tommy James & the Shondells, but it was the Fruitgum Co. that brought the house down and the police out in force when members of the band went running through the aisles, the lead singer took a swing at a security guard, and a dozen cops dragged the group off the stage.

Which kind of puts Tav Falco’s appearance on Marge Thrasher’s TV talk show (#2 on Friedl’s list) in a kinder light. After Falco and his Panther Burns performed their version of “Train Kept A-Rollin,” Thrasher greeted the group with: “That may be the worst sound I’ve ever heard come out on television.” Falco’s polite reply: “Thank you very much.”

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Film Features Film/TV

Charlie Wilson’s War: a good kind of retro.

Adapted from 60 Minutes producer George Crile’s nonfiction bestseller of the same title, Charlie Wilson’s War tells the story of a relatively obscure Texas congressman (Tom Hanks) who, with the encouragement of a conservative socialite (Julia Roberts) and the help of a disgruntled spook (Philip Seymour Hoffman), spurs an increased U.S. involvement in helping the mujahideen kick the Russians out of Afghanistan in the 1980s, thus setting up the end of the Cold War and, in a law of unintended consequences that’s as much a primary subject of the film as anything, paving the way for the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

But enough of that: Is this really the first time Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts have been in a movie together? Fitting that those two icons — who came of age in the age of Reagan — should come together in a movie that isn’t only set in the 1980s but seems like an ’80s movie.

Charlie Wilson’s War is the kind of coherent, classically directed prestige comedy Hollywood was pretty good at back then, when movies such as Tootsie or Broadcast News could make you laugh and make you think and pick up Oscar nominations along the way. Hollywood product these days is more compartmentalized — the Oscar bait takes itself more seriously while the comedies are on a lowbrow race to the bottom. So, in that way, Charlie Wilson’s War is a welcome blast from the past. If it’s not as serious as it wants to be, it’s still a lot more serious than Crash or The Kingdom and much more entertaining.

This literate political comedy isn’t exactly unprecedented in its throwback qualities. It also rhymes with a couple of similarly pitched political comedies from the ’90s: The American President and Primary Colors. No surprise there, as writer of the former (Aaron Sorkin, creator of TV’s The West Wing) and the director of the latter (Mike Nichols) are the filmmaking team behind Charlie Wilson’s War.

Sorkin’s feel for inside politics is reflected here: One reason Wilson was able to do what he did, the film suggests, was that he had a safe district, which allowed him to vote whichever way, build up favors, and then cash them in for his pet cause.

Politically, Charlie Wilson’s War doesn’t fit into the neat Hollywood liberal box you might suspect. It doesn’t come across as a movie against war or even against covert intervention in the affairs of other countries. Rather, it comes out against an unprincipled lack of follow-through, which might make it a John McCain movie in the context of the current election.

The punch-in-the-gut denouement suggests a government willing to spend a billion to blow something up but uninterested in spending a million to put it back together, with the likes of Osama bin Laden at the end of those screwed-up priorities.

But taking a long view of geopolitics isn’t the only thing this juicy comedy has on the brain. It also strikes out against personal moralizing in politics. Wilson is a fiend for booze and women who may or may not use cocaine in hot tubs with strippers but most definitely has an illicit affair with the younger daughter of a constituent. And yet, the movie suggests, none of these foibles prevent him from being an effective or even well-meaning public servant. Sorkin, who has had his own problems and has written them into his work (see the short-lived series Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip), can relate to this imperfection. I bet Rudy Giuliani can too.

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Coming of Age

God bless Allison Janney.

In the beginning, Juno is almost too much to take. After swigging a jug of Sunny D, our titular heroine (Ellen Page) walks to her neighborhood drug store to buy another pregnancy test. There, the clerk, played by The Office‘s Rainn Wilson, engages with the teen girl in a bout of over-stuffed, over-written, hyper-quirky banter.

“Your eggo is prego,” he taunts her. “Silencio, old man,” she shoots back with a flourish. “This is one doodle that can’t be undid, homeskillet,” he responds. Say what?

And that’s the way it goes. Soon we’re introduced to the kid who helped put Juno in such a bad spot, Paulie Bleeker, played completely to type by Michael Cera (Arrested Development, Superbad) as an awkward, sunken-chest kid.

So, for 20 minutes or so, Juno is in danger of being your worst (or at least my worst) quirky-cute indie-flick nightmare — a hipper, more verbally aggressive, less inept gender-flip on Napoleon Dynamite.

And then Allison Janney saves the day. After an aborted trip to an abortion clinic, Juno returns home to tell her father (J.K. Simmons) and stepmother (Janney) that she’s pregnant. After a few minutes of comic banter as stalling mechanism, Juno drops the bomb and Janney gasps, “Oh God.” It isn’t played as comedy at all. It’s a small moment that conveys the gravity of the situation, and her delivery of the line stopped my breath for a moment.

It’s a flash of humanity that grabs hold of the movie and grounds it in the real world. And from that point on, Juno performs a delicate, effective balancing act between celebrating its heroine’s precocious cool and being honest about her situation.

Page, a splendid young actress who negotiated the demanding indie provocation Hard Candy last year, never lets her character slip into caricature. Her eyes go dark and deep at the right moments — when she registers her father’s disappointment or Paulie fails to properly register hers. And the script and direction follow suit by refusing to enshrine the character as the perfect hipster goddess.

This is most apparent when Juno first meets the potential adoptive parents she contacts out of a newspaper ad: thirtysomething suburbanites Mark (Jason Bateman) and Vanessa (Jennifer Garner). Vanessa is desperate to be a mother but can’t have kids of her own, a delicate situation that Juno, in her motormouth display of cool nonchalance, doesn’t pick up on. When Vanessa makes a comment about the magic of pregnancy, Juno dismisses her by exclaiming that Vanessa’s lucky it isn’t her. Director Jason Reitman lets you see just the briefest flash of hurt in Vanessa’s eyes, which is enough to establish Juno as a girl who, however quick-witted, doesn’t know everything. She’s still a teenager, thoughtless and callow without meaning to be. When she deadpans to her father that she’s been out dealing with things way beyond her maturity level, it’s the truth.

Juno is a movie that finds its way, much like a teenager coming of age, managing to retain its fresh, zingy humor — “I’m a legend,” a very pregnant Juno explains of her treatment at school. “They call me ‘the cautionary whale'” — even as the tone shifts into something deeper. It’s a movie that starts out wobbly and ends up being the best “teen” comedy since Rushmore.

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In the Mix

Twelves months, thousands of records, five critics. Here’s what our 2007 sounded like:

Chris Herrington:

1. Super Taranta! — Gogol Bordello (Side One Dummy): Hedonistic utopian Eugene Hutz opens Super Taranta! on a leap of faith: “There were never any good old days. They are today. They are tomorrow. It’s a stupid thing we say, cursing tomorrow with sorrow,” the Gogol Bordello frontman spits on “Ultimate,” kicking our collective sense of dread square in the teeth. From there Hutz and his Brooklyn-based “gypsy punk” ensemble embark on an epic journey to re-imagine rock-and-roll via a crosscurrent of Eastern European melodies riding on violin and accordion riffs and to reposition America as the pluralistic, multicultural society it is. How appropriate in this election year that the best rock band in America is a group of immigrants who mock assimilation and taunt our (or anyone else’s) patriotism. How glorious it is that they do so with raucous wit, rootsy party music, and such a magnanimous spirit.
2. Kala —

M.I.A. (XL): Sri Lankan-born world citizen M.I.A. mashes up Western pop (Modern Lovers, Pixies, Duran Duran) with Third World rhythms on this follow-up to her ecstatic debut Arular. Where the earlier record was an intensely pleasurable, beatwise brass-ring grab, Kala is a more rattled, woozy sonic miasma. Fantasizing about a Third World stick-up of First World wealth as she demands (or does she?) that soulja boys the world over toss away their guns; losing her mind in the midst of putting “people on the map who never seen a map”; falling in love on a Darfur tour, rapping joyfully with Aborigine kids: No album this year took in more of the world or did so with such a playful, disorienting rush of ideas.

3. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend — Miranda Lambert (Columbia): A big fan of Miranda Lambert’s 2005 debut, I was initially underwhelmed by its follow-up because the songwriting seemed more formulaic, less personal — a common second-album pitfall. But repeated listens revealed what a formal triumph Crazy Ex-Girlfriend‘s early, spitfire singles are and, more crucially, how much better, more seemingly modest stuff is hidden later. The clinchers are late-album sureshots “Guilty in Here” and “More Like Her” — both piercingly ambivalent about the emotional downside of walking on the wild side.

4. New Wave — Against Me! (Warner): On their major-label debut, this Florida punk band sells out the way Nirvana and Sonic Youth did: with music that’s bigger, bolder, and better than what they made before. This is strident political rock that turns stridency into a good joke (“White People For Peace” — har, har). The band articulates its dissatisfaction, which is achievement enough (indie rock: take note), but never lets righteous, reasonable anger crowd out the empathy, humor, and fierce self-doubt that make their shout-along anthems special.

5. The Real Thing: Words and Music, Vol. 3 — Jill Scott (Hidden Beach): Jill Scott is the reigning poet laureate of neo-soul, a strong, precise lyricist in a genre without many. At its very best, The Real Thing is a sex album simultaneously as clinically carnal as Dirty Mind-era Prince and as warm and mature as Sign ‘O the Times-era Prince. Praising her lover for doing her “as if this year’s harvest depended on it,” Scott’s career peak is funny, weird, and erotic all at once. And she purrs, scats, sighs, and shouts the hell out of it.

6. Neon Bible — Arcade Fire (Merge): I never quite connected with the drama on Arcade Fire’s beloved in some quarters 2004 debut, Funeral, but on Neon Bible this Canadian band of ex-pat Americans take their previously private agonies and anxieties public by naming what they fear: “holy war,” inherited debt, salesmen at the door, a rising tide that could drown us all. Musically, this sweeping, mournful lament is more stirring than engaging, in a manner that I’ve rejected in bigger bands such as U2 or Radiohead. But this music is more intimate, more ragged, more organic. I think the range of voices — male and female — helps considerably. I’ve also decided that, rather than an indie-rock U2, they’re more a middle-class Mekons. Clincher: “The Well and the Lighthouse,” a subtle parable about cultural (read: indie-rock) isolation in which the band chooses the lighthouse and the responsibility that comes with it.

7. Sound of Silver — LCD Soundsystem (DFA/Capitol): The snarky glee of James Murphy’s great early LCD Soundsystem singles (“Beat Connection,” “Losing My Edge”) here blooms into dance-rock as melancholy and beautiful as the best of New Order. No album in 2007 peaked higher than Sound of Silver does with the middle-section trifecta of “North American Scum,” “Someone Great,” and “All My Friends,” the last a song-of-the-year frontrunner that feels universal even as it evokes a club/rave culture I know little of.

8. Alright, Still … — Lily Allen (Capitol): This 2006 British debut got an official stateside release back in January, introducing a grounded, sassy songwriter whose persona is around-the-way-girl (London edition) and who takes a cheerfully dyspeptic tone while negotiating a life plagued by bad credit and worse boyfriends.

9. Turn Out the Lights — The Ponys (Matador): The most purely pleasurable guitar-rock album I heard this year: The dense, echoey sound-over-sense world these Chicago garage-rock grads create on Turn Out the Lights is one of clipped, shivery guitar interplay dancing woozily over a rhythm section that takes Motown on a farewell tour of CBGBs.

10. More Fish and The Big Doe Rehab — Ghostface Killah (Def Jam): The late-2006 leftovers collection More Fish and the late-2007 proper album The Big Doe Rehab fall well short of this Wu-Tang master’s ’06 hip-hop insta-classic, Fishscale. But, in a bad year for hip-hop, nobody made more crucial music than can be found on these combined efforts — deep-soul ghetto and/or crime stories (not the same thing) that are vulgar, funny, and vivid, with an underlying moral gravity.

Honorable Mentions: The Voice of Lightness — Tabu Ley Rochereau (Stern’s Africa); Icky Thump — The White Stripes (Warner); Under the Blacklight — Rilo Kiley (Warner); Graduation — Kanye West (Roc-a-Fella); The Hair, the TV, the Baby, and the Band — Imperial Teen (Merge); La Radiolina — Manu Chao (Nacional/Because); Back to Black — Amy Winehouse (Universal/Republic); Let’s Stay Friends — Les Savy Fav (Frenchkiss); Sirens of the Ditch — Jason Isbell (New West); It’s a Bit Complicated — Art Brut (Downtown).

Singles: “All My Friends” — LCD Soundsystem; “Umbrella” — Rihanna featuring Jay-Z; “Beautiful Girls” — Sean Kingston; “The Good Life” — Kanye West featuring T-Pain; “Valerie” — Mark Ronson featuring Amy Winehouse; “Rehab” — Amy Winehouse; “What a Job” — Devin the Dude featuring Snoop Dogg and Andre 3000; “Ticks” — Brad Paisley; “Lip Gloss” — Lil Mama; “Buy U a Drank (Shawty Snappin’)” — T-Pain featuring Yung Joc.

Stephen Deusner:

1. Boxer — The National (Beggars): The blog-rock album of the year, which doesn’t ensure it’s the album of the year. In this case, however, Boxer‘s dark tales of white-collar anonymity, delivered in Matt Berninger’s skewed imagery and resonant baritone, make it immensely relevant as well as endlessly rewarding.

2. The Stage Names — Okkervil River (Jagjaguwar): Roughing up their sound, Okkervil River from Austin continue to prove themselves the darkest portrayers of band life. The moment that closer “John Allyn Smith Sails” turns into a sinister cover of “Sloop John B” is the year’s best plot twist.

3. Ears Will Pop and Eyes Will Blink — Bodies of Water (Thousand Eyes): These four Christian indie kids come across like a ’60s L.A. hippie cult and make music that imagines the Arcade Fire starring in Jesus Christ Superstar, but their curiosity about the nature of God is not an end in itself. Instead, faith is a springboard for the most musically and lyrically ambitious debut of the year.

4. Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? — Of Montreal (Polyvinyl): Kevin Barnes recorded one half of Hissing Fauna in Norway, where his wife was giving birth to their daughter, and the other half in Athens, Georgia, where the rest of his problems lived. Setting his songs in the real world — a first for him — didn’t diminish the playfulness of the band’s music but only ratcheted up the urgency of his Prince-meets-Beatles hooks.

5. Night Falls Over Kortedala — Jens Lekman (Secretly Canadian): The Swedish crooner Jens Lekman finally lives up to the promise of his exceptional early EPs with an album that is both hilarious and devastating.

Honorable mentions: Kala — M.I.A. (XL); Sound of Silver — LCD Soundsystem (DFA/Capitol); Mirrored — Battles (Warp); For Emma, Forever Ago — Bon Iver (self-released); Let’s Stay Friends — Les Savy Fav (Frenchkiss).

Andrew Earles:

1. Turn Out the Lights — The Ponys (Matador): The different elements that made previous albums from this Chicago band occasionally great made this album consistently great. Much to their original audience’s chagrin but to my liking, the early garage-rock roots have been totally shed in favor of a consistently catchy hybrid of early Dinosaur Jr., Rough Trade post-punk circa 1980, Disintegration-era Cure, and the Television influence the Ponys have always held close to the chest. They’re also really nice, unpretentious folks, exemplified when they recently played Memphis with …And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead. They were the band that didn’t spend pre-performance time holed up in an unnecessarily huge tour bus.

2. Saw a Halo — Mouthus (Load): Often incorrectly classified as a noise band, this Brooklyn duo operates far outside the boundaries of that style. The album-opening “Your Far Church” might be the most haunting song I’ve heard in years, putting to shame compositions by Joanna Newsom, Devendra Banhardt, or any flag-bearer of the awfully named “freak folk” genre.

3. Beyond the Permafrost — Skeletonwitch (Prosthetic/Red): It’s easy for me to get behind a band like Skeletonwitch, which effortlessly cherry-picks the best aspects from 30 years of real metal, starting with Thin Lizzy and going all the way to contemporary black-metal moves. Mastodon sort of managed this trick as well, but the likelihood is slim that the Atlanta band will put out another great album, and this will do just nicely for now.

4. The Flying Nun 25th Anniversary Box Set — Various Artists (Flying Nun): At last, what may be the final word in indie-rock history lessons and all of it courtesy of a country the size of California. Over most of the 1980s and into the early ’90s, New Zealand’s Flying Nun label diligently released the world’s best underground art-pop music in the form of the Chills, the Clean, the Bats, the Verlaines, Straightjacket Fits, the Tall Dwarfs, and many, many others. If you regard the Arcade Fire as groundbreaking, prepare to get floored.

5. The Brit Box — Various Artists (Rhino): Less a history lesson than a highly entertaining collection for the car, The Brit Box provides a thorough introduction to Britain’s ’80s and ’90s contribution to indie and alternative rock forms, covering indie pop, its noisier shoe-gazing cousin, and the eventual worldwide takeover propagated by Brit Pop.

Werner Trieschmann:

1. Under the Blacklight — Rilo Kiley (Warner Bros.): That most fans of this brainy former indie band revolted against this glorious, glittery, and audacious album is probably the best argument for it. But there are others. Such as: Lead singer Jenny Lewis has the best voice in rock. Or that “Dreamworld,” the lone instance where Lewis isn’t on lead, is the greatest Fleetwood Mac song since “Hold On.” Or that this album springs not from the head but from the hips, where all great rock comes from.

2. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend — Miranda Lambert (Columbia): It opens with a shotgun blast at an abusive male and ends with “Easy From Now On,” an unsettled hope for domestic bliss. In between, Miranda Lambert goes twangy and traditional (“Dry Town”) and modern-rock edgy (“Gettin’ Ready”). Every song hits a different pleasure center, with maybe the ballads (“More Like Her” and “Guilty in Here”) being the most surprising for being so naked and raw.

3. Because of the Times — Kings of Leon (RCA): The third album for this band of three brothers and a cousin benefits from ambition and discipline. The songs are longer than on the Kings’ first two albums, and the hooks that were in short supply before are plentiful here. Opening with the mesmerizing seven-minute “Knocked Up,” Because of the Times never lets up from there.

4. Release It to the Sky — Jim Mize (Fat Possum): Jim Mize works as an insurance adjuster out of Conway, Arkansas, which might in part explain why this Fat Possum release was, for all intents and purposes, dumped on the market. Writing his own blues-tinged songs and belting them out with the force of a hurricane, Mize will probably remind you of vintage Bruce Springsteen. Certainly this album has the reach of the Boss at his best.

5. White Chalk — PJ Harvey (Island): The power of PJ Harvey’s bleak and odd little album isn’t apparent on first or even fifth listen. Since she sings in a high warble accompanied by her own rudimentary piano playing (she learned the instrument for this record and it shows), there are many who’ll find White Chalk maddening — not to mention depressing. But it is all of a piece and it is haunting.

Honorable Mentions: Spring Awakening soundtrack — Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater (Drifter’s Church); Traffic and Weather — Fountains of Wayne (Virgin); 5th Gear — Brad Paisley (Arista); A Place To Land — Little Big Town (Equity); Neon Bible —Arcade Fire (Merge).

David Dunlap Jr.:

1. Wagonmaster — Porter Wagoner (Anti-): It wasn’t just the last recording made by a country legend. It also marked the end of an era in country music. I had the pleasure of seeing Porter Wagoner perform this past May at the Grand Ole Opry, and his incredible performance was exemplary of his entire career — a goofy, cornpone persona that often betrayed a deeper, disturbed melancholia. There was a slightly uncomfortable moment when Wagoner forgot Opry announcer Eddie Stubbs’ name, but then he quickly righted himself and tore into a couple of infidelity classics.

2. Comicopera — Robert Wyatt (Domino): Full disclosure: I had a stake in Robert Wyatt’s Comicopera being a great record. A month prior to its release, I had named my second-born after him. When you gamble with the repercussions of naming your child after a Communist paralytic prog-rocker who sings like a porpoise, you can only hope that the honoree’s subsequent output will dispel any feelings of regret by virtue of its genius. Thankfully, Comicopera is, like the man behind it, warm, cynical, and brilliant. 

3. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend — Miranda Lambert (Columbia): Nashville Star may not be a better program than American Idol, but it has definitely yielded the most legitimate music star of either program. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is undeniably a product of the new Nashville, but Miranda Lambert’s powerful delivery and insightful lyrics are evidence that there’s a real live human beneath the layers of Music Row gloss. “Gunpowder and Lead” easily bests the Dixie Chicks’ “Goodbye Earl” as a country music domestic-abuse revenge fantasy.

4. The Western Lands — Gravenhurst (Warp): This Bristol-based outfit has, on its third full-length, perfected a distinctly British hybrid sound that blends pastoral folk with shoe-gazer rock. Band leader Nick Talbot moved to Bristol because the blissful haze of Flying Saucer Attack inspired him, and his band is carrying on FSA’s shimmering sonic legacy. 

5. Double Up — R. Kelly (Jive): Without getting into the apocalyptic maelstrom of nonsense that perpetually follows in Kel’s wake, Double Up probably entertained me more than any other release this year. You could write a thesis on the harrowing relationship complexities of “Real Talk,” and yet the song is hilarious enough to warrant a spot on Dr. Demento’s playlist. 

Honorable Mentions: 5th Gear — Brad Paisley (Arista Nashville); Person Pitch — Panda Bear (Paw Tracks); Werewolves and Lollipops — Patton Oswalt (Sub Pop); Ire Works — Dillinger Escape Plan (Relapse); The Art of Field Recording (Dust-to-Digital). 

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Music Record Reviews

The Year in Memphis Music

A lot of the usual suspects in local music were quiet in 2007. Recent headliners Three 6 Mafia, North Mississippi Allstars, Lucero, Snowglobe, the ex-Oblivians (Jack Yarber and Greg Cartwright), and ex-Lost Sounds (Alicja Trout and, to an extent, Jay Reatard) all took the year off as far as releasing new albums. Meanwhile, the past loomed large again in the form of a relaunch of Stax records, which spurred a welcome avalanche of reissue and archival material.

But into this new-music breach, lots of good stuff emerged, including (obviously or arguably) improved sophomore releases from the likes of Tunnel Clones, Harlan T. Bobo, and breakout star Amy LaVere.

Here’s the local music that hit hardest for us in 2007:

Chris Herrington:

1. Anchors & Anvils — Amy LaVere (Archer Records): This second album from the versatile Amy LaVere transcended the local scene more than any non-rap record this year and deservedly so. Produced by Jim Dickinson, it slays her too tasteful, too dawdling debut, This World Is Not My Home, drawing great songs from sources generally close to LaVere (including three from the artist herself and two from boyfriend Paul Taylor) and putting them across with a gritty musical intimacy that echoes Dickinson’s own fine recent solo work. LaVere doesn’t have a showy American Idol voice but arrives here as a sharp, rich interpretive singer, especially on such sure-shots as her own “Killing Him” (one of the best album-openers on any 2007 record) and Taylor’s personal, perceptive “Pointless Drinking.” Smart, sexy, swaggering, funny — this star turn was the highlight of Memphis music in 2007.

2. King Cobras Do — Vending Machine (Shoulder Tap): Where so much indie rock this year (ha — “this year”) felt insular, Robby “Vending Machine” Grant’s King Cobras Do is instead cozy. It’s a home-recorded gem that takes domestic intimacy as its great subject: His son contributes free-associative lyrics; his toddler daughter is the subject of the delicate “Tell Me the Truth and I’ll Stop Teasing You”; his wife gets a tribute on “Rae” that includes images of “dancing in the den” and memories that are palpably lived-in (“Remember when our room was just a bed?”). Even the house itself gets into the act with “Good Old Upstairs,” a song about the attic studio where King Cobras Do was created.

3. I’m Your Man — Harlan T. Bobo (Goner): Harlan T. Bobo became an instant icon in his corner of the local music scene with his lovelorn 2004 debut Too Much Love. To his credit, Bobo declined to offer up Too Much Love 2 with this follow-up, which instead investigates the roots and limitations of the romantic messiness that made his debut so popular. And, over time, I’ve found I’m Your Man to be smarter, funnier, and braver (especially on “Baptist Memorial,” “Pragmatic Woman,” and “So Bad”) than the local masterpiece-by-acclamation that it followed.

4. Make It Stop! The Most of Ross Johnson — Ross Johnson (Goner): Not the most accessible local record of the year, that’s for sure, but Ross Johnson’s “career”-spanning collection of spoken-word rants “set” to music is a sneaky-smart and self-aware series of whooping nonsense, comic tall tales, and raw-but-funny confessionals from a self-described “king of the middle-aged garage-band losers” whose self-deprecation and shamed moral center punctures any threat of hipster romanticization.

5. World Without End — Bob Frank & John Murry (Bowstring): Expatriate Memphians Bob Frank, 62, and John Murry, 27, found each other in Northern California and concocted a high-concept album — a collection of original murder ballads written about legendary crimes — that tops what either of them produced when they lived here.

6. Killers From Space — Jim Dickinson (Memphis International): Dickinson has been making music in one form or another since the ’60s but, until 2006, had (as near as I can tell) only released a grand total of two solo albums. Now he’s released two in two years and both on the same label! I didn’t find Killers From Space quite as revelatory as 2006’s terrific Jungle Jim & the Voodoo Tiger, but Dickinson’s charismatic growl, ragged-but-intimate musical tone, and talent for finding good songs you’ve never heard before are all very much present here. Highlight: Dickinson’s phrasing of the word “mendacity.”

7. World Wide Open — Tunnel Clones (Hemphix): More than just a useful alternative to the aggressive monotony of most local rap product, World Wide Open is strong, assured hip-hop on its own terms: soulful and ambitious; sad, but defiant.

8. Blood Visions — Jay Reatard (In the Red): A late 2006 release that I didn’t get hold of until 2007, this solo debut unites the skeletal drive of the artist’s teen band the Reatards with the musical ambition of Reatard’s subsequent band, the Lost Sounds. Even then, as impressive as this locomotive blast (15 songs in 29 minutes) of pop-rock is, it’s still transitional; a sneak preview of even better things to come, as witnessed by Reatard’s 2007 single for Goner.

9. Break This Record — Deering & Down (self-released): I’m far from the world’s foremost expert on Fleetwood Mac, but I wonder if, had blues guitarist Peter Green and pop chanteuse Stevie Nicks ever crossed paths in various incarnations of that band, the stylistic result would have been something like the charged guitar-and-voice duets of Deering & Down on this novel-yet-familiar local debut.

10. City Lights — Ron Franklin (Memphis International): Whereas too many young musicians who dabble in roots forms like blues and country play up the gravity and torment, Ron Franklin never lets concept impinge on musicality. There’s a playful assurance to his music that suggests jug bands and early rock in the Chuck Berry (covered here) or Bo Diddley vein.

Chris Davis:

1. Make It Stop! The Most of Ross Johnson — Ross Johnson (Goner): A year ago, if somebody told me that Goner was going to put out a best of Ross Johnson collection, I would have probably split my britches laughing. A whole disc devoted to the Panther Burns drummer and longtime Memphis scenester with a reputation for getting sloshed and ranting hilariously on the mic? What a nutzo idea. But Goner did it, and it turned out to be a transcendent collection of wickedly funny Southern gothic literature you can shake your ass to. The liner notes — a thoughtful, funny, and endearing history of the birth of punk in Memphis — are worth the price.

2. Accidentally stumbling across Harlan T. Bobo’s homemade video for the unreleased song “Dreamer of Dreams”: Don’t misunderstand. The release of Bobo’s I’m Your Man was a big deal too. As doomed follow-ups to celebrated debuts go, the new disc is strong. But this impossibly low-tech and completely irresistible video showcases Bobo’s alchemical ability to turn garbage into gold.

3. Falling in love with Amy LaVere … again: Let’s face it. Until this year, the gorgeous, throaty-voiced chanteuse had never put out a recording that lived up to her vast potential. But all of that changed with the release of Anchors & Anvils. “Killing Him” is probably the year’s best original song. And if there were any justice in the music industry, “Tennessee Valentine” would be the theme to every prom from Memphis to Bristol from now until the crack of doom.

4. Among the Wolves — The Third Man (self-released): Smart pop is hard to come by, and the Third Man’s latest release, Among the Wolves, is borderline brilliant. The relentlessly dark, organ-soaked groove of “Psyops Marching On” borrows elements from such great local bands as the Satyrs and Snowglobe and wraps it all up in Nuggets-worthy psychedelia. Mixing electronic flourishes with guitar thunder sounds old as dirt and brand spanking new.

5.The Blasters at the Hi-Tone: In the spirit of full disclosure, my own band, the West Coast Turnaround, opened for the legendary L.A. roots-rock band. And boy, did we get schooled when the Blasters took stage and played the greatest set of pure American rock-and-roll I’ve ever seen anywhere. Period. These guys have been the most underrated band in the world for 30 years. And there they were in Midtown Memphis, in front of maybe 50 people, mixing country, rockabilly, blues, and jazz into a genre-defying stew of sonic bliss.

Andrew Earles:

1. Make It Stop! The Most of Ross Johnson — Ross Johnson (Goner): I’m not sure what I can write about this fascinating document that I or someone else hasn’t already written, so I’ll defer to Johnson and Monsieur Jeffrey Evans’ performance earlier this year at Gonerfest 4. Strategically slotted around 10 p.m. on one of the festival’s busiest nights, their music-to-banter ratio (about 75 percent the latter) resulted in hilariously confounded stares among patrons expecting another succinct set from one of the event’s rock bands. Aside from the messy King Khan & BBQ Show set from two years ago, it was the closest the Gonerfest institution has come to providing a stage for a Situationist prank.

2. Among the Wolves —The Third Man (self-released): Among the wolves is indeed the place that any young indie band will find themselves this day and age, but the Third Man play a strong card with their Southern-tinged, Memphis-centric answer to psych-rock contemporaries like Dungen. Memphis’ shining beacons within the realm of indie rock can usually be counted on one hand at any given point in history (or at least the last 10 years), and Among the Wolves puts the Third Man ahead of the pack for the time being.

3. Oscars/Evil Wizard Eyes split 7-inch (Soul Is Cheap): Solid sides from both bands, with the sludgy Evil Wizard Eyes providing (perhaps unwittingly) Memphis’ fuzzier, friendlier version of the agro-noise-rock revivalist movement led elsewhere by bands such as Pissed Jeans and Clockcleaner.

4. Songs by Solutions — Final Solutions (Goner): In the words of the Goner Records website, Final Solutions finally “belched up” their second full-length album this year. That pretty much says it all.

5. Walkin’ Bank Roll — Project Pat (KR Urban): If you’re thinking this is my token local hip-hop entry,” you’d be 100 percent correct. Regardless, Walkin’ Bank Roll is a great album.

David Dunlap Jr.:

1. Make It Stop! The Most of Ross Johnson — Ross Johnson (Goner): I must confess, Ross Johnson used to drive me crazy. I’m sure that he, in his self-deprecating way, would say that that was the point. But what used to be drunken yammering now seems to my ears to be clever, soul-baring music that is an artistic cousin to classic confessional literature like the books of Frederick Exley or the comics of Jeffrey Brown. With a lifetime’s worth of mistakes stuffed into a decade and a liver that throbs like an injured appendage in a Tex Avery cartoon, I now understand Johnson’s songs much better these days, and he makes it worth the price.

2. William Bell live at the Stax Museum of American Soul Music: William Bell may not be considered first-tier talent on the Stax roster, but his songwriting skills were second to none. Without a doubt, Bell was an A-lister when he performed in the legendary Studio A this past July. His delivery was as smooth as ever, and he was the consummate showman. His performance even featured a half-time wardrobe change. All class.

3. “I Know a Place”/”Don’t Let Him Come Back” 7-inch — Jay Reatard (Goner): My favorite single of the year, Memphis music or otherwise, “Don’t Let Him Come Back,” the Go-Betweens cover, is as beautiful as it was unpredictable, but “I Know a Place” is the best example yet of Jay Reatard’s growing talent. It’s a tuneful strummer that somehow manages to be cocky and contemplative at the same time. When Reatard’s inevitable Behind the Music episode is made, this is the song that will be playing during his slo-mo, “suffering-from-the-ravages-of-fame” final act.

4. “Memphis Flu” — Elder Curry, compiled on People Take Warning! Murder Ballads & Disaster Songs, 1913–1938 (Tompkins Square): This stomping, energetic gospel song from 1930 about Memphis’ catastrophic epidemic is one of the most rocking pre-war recordings I’ve ever heard. The disturbingly judgmental lyrics — “Yes, you see!/Yes!/He killed the rich and poor/And He’s going to kill more/If you don’t turn away from your shame” — only add to the song’s emotional power.

5. “Is This Love?”/”Don’t Talk To Me” 7-inch — The Preacher’s Kids (Wrecked ‘Em): The A-side of this single is high-energy garage rock for which Oxford’s Preacher’s Kids are known. The flip, though, is a great cover of a snarling punk classic from G.G. Allin’s old band, the Jabbers. It’s a testament not only to the rocking abilities of the Preacher’s Kids but also to the fact that Allin had the ability to write infectiously catchy rock tunes.

Categories
Art Art Feature

Taking Stock

From rockabilly and Philip Glass to diamond mines in Africa, this year’s exhibitions ran the gamut of culture, art, and current events, and some of the most evocative artworks were created by already accomplished artists moving in new directions.

For “Perspectives,” the Brooks Museum’s juried exhibition this summer of regional artists, abstract painter Bo Rodda filled an entire wall with a computer-generated world, one with laws of physics different from our own. There were no horizon lines, no solid ground in this alternate universe. Instead, swerving lines, printed on metallic paper in endless shades of gray, read like infinitely complex galvanized interstates careening simultaneously toward and away from the viewer.

Warren Greene, an artist best known for saturate pigments oozing down large canvases, also went beyond color and form to infinite shades of gray in three of his strongest works in “Paleoscapes” at Perry Nicole Fine Art in December. Like a Phillip Glass symphony, the subtle rapid shifts in tone in “Searching for P. Glass” generated unexpected images as what looked like trails of electrons, interference patterns, jet streams, ectoplasm, and snippets of dreams slid our point of view across surfaces sanded as smooth as glass.

David Comstock’s exhibition “Flow” took black-and-white abstractions to new levels of raw power at L Ross Gallery in March. Rods pierced egg-like shapes on frayed and torn canvases in what looked like moments of procreation and checkmate in the well-worn board game of life.

Jonathan Postal’s Waitress, Roadside, TX

Also in March, in an otherwise empty David Lusk Gallery, Terri Jones drew delicate, nearly invisible lines on the wall and on large sheets of vellum that were bathed in the sunlight pouring through plate-glass windows. Those of us who stayed awhile in Jones’ spare luminous space experienced something akin to Buddhism’s Sky Mind.

Bob Riseling’s “Halcyon Days” premiered Memphis College of Art’s new gallery On the Street in November. Pale colors, deep shadows, and haunting monolithic shapes paid homage to the dead trees standing sentinel on Horn Island’s post-Katrina beaches, an ancient hulk of a barge stranded on one of its sandbars, and countless pieces of driftwood washed up on its shores.

Highlights of the year also included Hamlet Dobbins’ luminous textural abstractions at David Lusk in October and John McIntire’s summer show at Perry Nicole that transformed smooth, cool stone into sexual icons, fertility fetishes, and sacrificial gods. And at L Ross Gallery in November, in some of the best works of his career, Anton Weiss scattered scratched and gouged scraps of metal across large earth-toned paintings accented with thalo blue, scarlet, and cadmium yellow.

Last year’s most riveting works of art confronted brutality and oppression. Memphis College of Art’s March exhibition, “Reasons To Riot,” included Zoe Charlton’s searing mixed-media drawing Destiny, in which a man leaned back on his haunches. His face and upper body were whited-out, and the prow of a 17th-century slave ship was strapped around his waist like a dildo. Humanity’s unexpressed (repressed, denied, watered-down) passions were crammed into his phallus, which was as pointed as this artist’s insights, as unadorned as truth, as double-edged as our species’ capacity for cruelty and joy.

A work from David Comstock’s exhibition at L. Ross, ‘Flow’

In early fall, Clough-Hanson Gallery showcased 15 works from Eliot Perry’s collection of contemporary works by African artists, many of them internationally acclaimed. Among them was Wangechi Mutu’s sinuous, cinematic, horrific collage Buck Nose. The images depicted an antelope shot with a high-powered rifle, blood exploding around its head and horns and entrails coiling around a starving girl curled in a fetal position. Most chillingly there’s a manicured hand caressing a gemstone, reminding us that in today’s global market, African diamonds are prized, but life is still cheap.  

In “Two Years,” Jay Etkin Gallery’s December show, we saw Sandra Deacon Robinson’s paintings evolve from Klimt-like mosaics of glittering gemstones to abstractions of Louisiana wetlands. At the top of one of her most beautiful works, the 40-by-60-inch painting Protected, wisps of ochre almost brushed our foreheads, delicate tangles of lines at the bottom reached toward our torsos and legs, and muted golden light at top right suggested we were at the edge of a moist, dark cocoon with a clearing just ahead.

Also at Jay Etkin in December was photographer Jonathan Postal’s “On the Road.” In one of the show’s most disarming images, Waitress, Roadside, TX, a woman with jet-black hair dressed in a white apron and light-pink uniform stands at the side of a thoroughfare. Whether she waits tables in an upscale diner with a retro theme or is working in a smalltown café that looks pretty much like it did when it opened in the Fifties, this woman looks comfortable in her own skin. With a wry, sensual smile she leans back and sizes up Postal (and any gallery viewer who dared to look her in the face).

Postal is best-known for his black-and-white photographs of people living at the edge. While his images of burlesque queens scowling after a swig of hard liquor and wrestling fans howling for blood are fever-pitched and powerful, this body of work’s wide-open spaces and wry waitress boded well for a country at moral and political crossroads in need of citizens, whatever their lifestyles, who can step back and see things clearly.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Film About Joy Division Lead Singer is Effective Rock Biopic

When the Replacements were drunkenly stumbling toward indie-rock immortality in the mid-1980s, lead singer Paul Westerberg was still living and writing songs for his band’s major-label debut in his parents’ basement.

Why aren’t these revealing economic realities ever shown in movies about artists? Maybe most moviegoers can’t stomach the sight of poverty; maybe they like their cult heroes to emerge from the head of Zeus fully formed, rich and famous.

Director Anton Corbijn’s new film Control, about the life of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis, is a bracing success in part because it stares long and hard into what writer Michael Azerrad called “the yawning gap between critical acclaim and financial reward.”

Read the rest of Addison Engelking’s Flyer review here.

Categories
Music Record Reviews

A rap CEO and publisher’s poet on two very different musical memoirs

Dig, if you will, a picture: Rapper Dennis “Ghostface Killah” Coles skips out of his girl’s crib just ahead of a police raid, seeking refuge at the home of his friend and colleague Method Man. Busting in at Meth’s place unannounced, he finds his friend in mid-fuck. At the sound of someone coming through the door, Method Man tumbles out of bed, reaching for his gun on the nightstand, but stubs his toe in the process. The woman, who is asthmatic, grabs at the sheets, screaming and struggling to breathe. The previously rattled Ghost cracks up at this sight; Meth is pissed, his mood made worse because his dick keeps slipping through the slit in his boxers.

This happens on “Yolanda’s House,” one of the best tracks on Ghostface Killah’s new album, The Big Doe Rehab, and it’s typical Ghostface: vulgar, funny, so vivid and in-the-moment you can practically smell the residue of pot smoke and sex in the room.

Lots of rappers — most of them these days — work the same terrain, spinning tales of drug deals, gun violence, casual sex, and conspicuous consumption. But few of them are great artists. Ghostface is the best since the late Notorious B.I.G. at turning underworld/underclass vignettes into gripping and witty musical cinema and at giving these stories moral gravity without speechifying. If any modern rapper should have been a scenarist for The Wire, it’s Ghostface.

You can hear it again on Big Doe Rehab‘s “Walk Around,” a first-person account of shooting someone that goes places contemporary so-called gangsta rap rarely does: The protagonist, so rattled by what he’s done that he vomits in the getaway car, freaks out at the blood and tissue on his clothing. (“Y’all niggas would bug out too if you had somebody’s flesh on you.”)

The Big Doe Rehab is Ghostface Killah’s third full album of new material since March 2006, following his masterpiece Fishscale and the better-than-anyone-could-expect extras disc More Fish. It’s a run that marks him as one of pop music’s most productive artists though one who’s a particularly specialized, even rarefied taste.

On The Big Doe Rehab, Ghostface surrounds his sharp storytelling with the deep-soul samples and off-kilter humor that are his trademarks. The single “We Celebrate” is a blaring paean to the good life, gangsta-style: “Like my baby’s first steps, ya heard!” or “Like one of my goons just came home!” “Supa GFK” is stream-of-consciousness rap over Johnny Watson’s “Superman Lover.”

Still, The Big Doe Rebab is a lot closer to More Fish than Fishscale — a little too heavy on guest stars and posse members and not as coherent. Fishscale came at you in what felt like orchestrated movements; More Fish was, by definition, just a bunch of songs. The Big Doe Rehab is more the latter. Still, Ghostface’s minor work bests a thematically similar major work from his Def Jam benefactor Jay-Z.

With his mature CEO’s album Kingdom Come falling on deaf ears, Jay-Z’s American Gangster feels less driven by personal expression than by a desire to give the people what they want. It’s an album of Jay-Z reminding everyone that he used to deal drugs. And, like the overblown movie that inspired it, American Gangster isn’t thoughtful enough to be great.

There are defensive childhood remembrances (“No Hook”: “I’m so fo sho, it’s no facade/’Stay out of trouble,’ mama said as mama sighed/Her fear, her youngest son bein’ victim of homicide/But I gotta get you outta here, mama, or I’ma die, inside”) and thrilling evocations of the amoral indulgences of drug-trade triumph (the “black superhero music” of “Roc Boys”). But, for the most part, Jay-Z is not a storyteller of Ghostface’s caliber. His primary gift isn’t conceptual or even lyrical, but vocal: the illusion of effortlessness in his honeyed flow. He’s the purer MC — the best since Biggie in his own way — and American Gangster peaks when Jay-Z sounds most relaxed, as on “Success,” where he raps over a spare track of vampy organ and scattered beat, rewriting an old Eminem lyric before discarding his crime-boss persona: “I used to give shit/Now I don’t give a shit more/Truth be told I had more fun when I was piss poor.”

Jay-Z rarely sounds so free on American Gangster, and that’s part of the problem. Ghostface Killah’s lower profile and more modest expectations may be what allow him to be the better artist. The superstar Jay-Z has no choice but to reach for significance, while Ghostface digs deeper by just telling stories and cracking jokes.

— Chris Herrington

Grades: The Big Doe Rehab: A-; American Gangster: B+