My single of the week, Hurts’ “Wonderful Life” applies a DFA-esque production to Johnny Hates Jazz: it’s as spacious and uncluttered as a modern loft, but with walls painted orange and gold. Listen to Arthur Baker’s (!) retro-nuevo madness on the remix.
A buttload of singles, none exceptional.
Dennis Ferrer – Hey Hey (6 out of 10)
Lady Antebellum – American Honey (5)
Powderfinger – Burn Your Name (5)
Nick Jones & The Administration – Who I Am (5)
Gold Panda – Quitters Raga (5)
These New Puritans – We Want War (5)
Timbaland ft. Justin Timberlake – Carry Out (3)
Rihanna ft. Young Jeezy – Hard (3)
The next and, to my ears, most interesting chapter in my discussion with Scott Woods on Roxy Music and Bryan Ferry: the solo years between 1985 and 1999. Listening to this again, I’m not sure how well I defined “sophisti-pop” and how solo Ferry seemed both part of yet above it (the Stylus essay I wrote years ago to which Scott alludes is here). One thing became clear: it’s easier to discuss music about which I’m ambivalent or despise than music I love with some reservations. I didn’t adequately explain why Boys + Girls, Bete Noire, Taxi, and Mamouna are worth listening to, but then again, even the most ardent Ferry fan has problems distinguishing between those four albums anyway.
The thought of Spoon stretching the wings it’s deliberately clipped for more than a decade excited me enough to give Transference more attention than usual; the pseudo-amateurish thrash of “Got Nuffin,” “Trouble Come Running,” and “Written in Reverse” justified it. But so attracted is Britt Daniel to gnomic minimalism that he undercuts the rhetorical flourishes suggested by titles like “I Saw The Light” with a voice whose high, raspy quasi-English tones ooze sexy skepticism, and guitar solos whose two- and three-note clusters evoke “What Goes On” sans the liberation. Unlike strummy romantics like Lou Reed, Tom Verlaine, Stephen Malkmus, and Dean Wareham, Daniel is wary of transcendence. His predecessors used irony as a fount from which they extracted dialectic virtues we often associate with literary sensibilities: silliness as truth; the mating of the absurd and vulgar; the baroque metaphor redeemed and strengthened by sympathetic guitars and rhythm sections, with vocals croaky and strained when required. Daniel by contrast comes off like a disciple of Cotton Mather, conversant in the language of deliverance but afraid to look as if he might make a fool of himself. Transference has lots of songs in which Daniel is content to draw yellow neon arrows around a trope as if it can signify on its own, dressed in appropriate musical finery: “The Mystery Zone,” “Who Makes Your Money.” Even an overt stab at a love song like “Goodnight Laura” ends before he’s gotten comfortable with the emotions that the band’s playing and lyrics demand from him. Gimme Fiction’s similarly styled “I Summon You” is a more successful attempt, yet how significant that it’s about sharing the experience of a lifetime of record collecting; Daniel is set free by, sees the light in refining his craft. The title of this album makes sense: he’s transferred the animating principle that would have capitalized on the breakthroughs of Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga to merely cosmetic embellishments. Always with Daniel I return to where I started: new wheels on an old bicycle.
Yet Daniel’s a sexy motherfucker, and I’m beguiled enough by his approach to art — I recognize it in myself — that alert readers will recognize I even named this damn blog after one of his impressive pellets of wit. While he’s no good at limning scenarios, or even knowing what the hell a scenario looks and smells like, his voice can nail a line to the wall (e.g. the first two verses of “The Mystery Zone”). Guess indie needs its classic rock equivalents.
Scott Woods and I continue our Roxy Music/Bryan Ferry chat, this one concerning the creamiest phase of their careers: Manifesto, Flesh + Blood, and Avalon. I’m fonder of this part of our discussion than the others. We share our thoughts on Roxy’s comeback at the height of punk and at the dawn of the New Romantic scene; the mystery of Roxy’s American non-success; the sight of Bryan Ferry wielding a guitar and actually playing one; and making out with dates who give scant attention to the mood music. Finally, Manifesto (still underrated) and Flesh + Blood get more discussion than I’ve seen elsewhere, maybe ever.
…is back. It gave me great pleasure to let Alicia Keys have it one more time (now go away, Alicia. Please.). Here’s the latest batch, with my score out of ten in parentheses:
8
Vampire Weekend – Cousins (8)
7
Los Campesinos! – Romance is Boring (7)
6
Gil Scott-Heron – Me and the Devil (6)
5
Daisy Dares You ft. Chipmunk – Number One Enemy (5)
Martha and the Diamonds – Hollywood (5)
Alicia Keys – Try Sleeping with a Broken Heart (5)
Wiley and Chew Fu – Take Five (5)
4
Corinne Bailey Rae – I’ll Do It All Again (4)
3
Alicia Keys - Empire State of Mind (3)
A few grace notes aside — Bad Blake (Jeff Bridges) emptying an orange juice carton of his own urine; the scarily accurate fourth-rate bowling alley updated with an incongruously garish, modern bar; the way Robert Duvall handles a fishing pole; the relief that floods over Bridges when he meets a keyboardist with real promise — Crazy Heart feels too familiar, too slack, too earnest about Bridges’ down and out country singer’s “journey.” The AA colony Bridges joins looks like a ski lodge, and when Duvall picks him up at the end of his stay I thought he’d dropped him last Friday. I’m also pretty tired of using kids as cute ol’ things who exist solely as objects of suspense. While Maggie Gyllenhaal has never been better lit or been shrewder about deploying her habit of spacing out words when given a line requiring some complexity, I didn’t believe her for a second as a “reporter” or a critic; and while I know guys have written and directed most screenplays since D.W. Griffith, you’d think they’d realize eventually that no one believes a beautiful woman like Gyllenhaal would fuck, much less love, a man as scuzzy — twenty years (at least) her senior! — as Blake. Finally, the country soundtrack sounds like someone’s idea of country. I believed Gyllenhaal when she remarked, awestruck, that it took Bad Blake a few minutes to compose what it took other songwriters years; co-film producer/composer T-Bone Burnett’s assembly-line rhymes and boring chord changes probably took him a few minutes too, and wouldn’t have gotten him a ticket out of the bowling alley circuit.
I’ve a habit when watching a boring movie: I switch actors and points of emphases. If Crazy Heart really sought a heart, it would have concentrated on Colin Farrell’s glib but thoroughly decent hotshot star (I took him to be a Tim McGraw or Rodney Crowell type), honest about his debt to Bad Blake and generous about sharing the spotlight, but tired too of having to bail out his sorry ass with second-rate bourbon and publishing royalties. A concert scene in which Farrell insists that Bridgers share his mic generates real tension; the camera, taking its cue from Bridges’ wary, begrudging focus on Farrell, circles the actors tentatively. Still, if Jeff Bridges — one of three or four most consistently interesting actors of both sexes of the last forty years — is gonna get his Oscar, he can do worse than pretend he’s in The Wrestler II: Mickey Goes West. His Dude from The Big Lebowski is a funnier scuzzball, but you know, the Academy doesn’t “do” comedy. The best performance in Crazy Heart, actually, is Duvall’s. In a few economical strokes he creates a man who’s put up with a lot of shit and will cheerfully put up with more for a friend’s sake, but try to take his bar — his livelihood — away and he’ll tear your ass open. It takes Duvall seconds. Think Bad Blake’s got that kind of talent?
I’m very flattered that GQ linked to my Roxy/Ferry conversation with Scott Woods. And, wow, that picture of Ferry…
Rather late, but I needed to catch up on a couple more films; in the case of Bright Star, I’m very glad I did. I’m not comfortable with the results, particularly the high showing for Inglorious Basterds, but my ambivalences aside, I can’t shake how well its good sequences play, and how audacious and stupid (stupidly audacious?) the rest is. Nick Davis said it best: it’s a moviee whose barely tempered sadism, its uneven performances and compositional rigor, and its alternations between taut and slack montage” make your teeth grind. “Now, faced with how indelible the best parts of this movie are by the end of 2009, when the best sequences of so many movies I roundly preferred have already started to fade, it became even harder to square my begrudging esteem from my visceral dislike of the movie and its politics.”
As for my two favorite love stories of the year, they underscore the importance of gesture, restraint, and silence in framing: Joaquin Phoenix and Gwyneth Paltrow in Two Lovers, and Abbie Cornish and Billy Whishaw in Bright Star (the camera catching Cornish regarding Whishaw’s ink-stained hand in the dusty light is the erotic moment of the year).
I’ve reviewed most of these films, so use the search entry.
1. The Hurt Locker
2. Summer Hours
3. Inglorious Basterds
4. Drag Me to Hell
5. Fantastic Mr. Fox
6. The Class
7. A Serious Man
8. Two Lovers
9. Bright Star
10. The Girlfriend Experience
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