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Continue reading →: Out of love
After a hasty revisit, the second side of R.E.M.’s Out of Time does contain their most melancholy material, no? Certainly the sequence from “Shiny Happy People” through “Me in Honey” shows a willed accommodation to uncertainty; it’s “Crimson and Clover” extended to almost thirty minutes, beginning with phony optimism and,…
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Continue reading →: Walk in silence
Watching Grant Gee’s excellent documentary Joy Division (which offers more insight into dreary Manchester and the perils of getting involved with Ian Curtis than Anton Corbijn’s Control), I remembered how gleaning any scrap of data about New Order when I was younger felt like a triumph. I became a fan…
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Continue reading →: Item.
I would like to thank Thomas Inskeep and ILM buddy Euler for introducing me to Ronnie Milsap, especially “Stranger in My House.” That’s all.
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Continue reading →: The stupidity of George F. Will
George Will is such a sucker for power that he undercuts his professed elitism. He has a talent for making contrarianism look like sycophancy. He’s useful only when he’s useful, such as his opposition to the Iraq war (on which he demurred only when the bodies started to mount and…
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Continue reading →: Singles!
In this week’s batch, Vampire Weekend unload some manure that smells like an exotic drink, an attempt at pandering to their new audience; Animal Collective are apparently influential enough to deserve answer songs by bands named after shrubbery; Rokysopp almost scrubs my brain clear of Fever Ray; and Major Lazer…
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Continue reading →: “He was so vile”
This Bronson Pinchot interview has circulated over the interwebs the last few days. The former star of “Perfect Strangers” dishes on the continuing mystery of Tom Cruise’s sexuality and the public manifestations thereof, and the meanness of Denzel Washington (“Denzel Washington cured me forever of thinking that there is any…
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Continue reading →: You got the looks, baby
One of the great lost Madonna singles, uncollected in Celebration, and found only on the Who’s That Girl soundtrack. It peaked at #2 for three weeks.
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Continue reading →: War porn
The excellent Digby revives this Rick Perlstein (of Nixonland fame) review of a couple of appalling “revisionist” takes on the Vietnam War, none of which, I trust, are on Barack Obama’s nightstand (I can’t speculate about Gen. McChrystal). Americans, even “neoconservative” ones, are prone to liberal sentimentalizing about the possibility…
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Continue reading →: His friends are gone, his hair is grey
Let’s make this clear: Leonard Cohen can sing. Stamina, gravitas, braggadocio, and any other noun in a foreign tongue applies. That’s not what I expected when I saw him last night at the Bank Atlantic Center: the guy has recorded music generated by a couple of $80 Casio keyboards since…
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Continue reading →: Singles!
Unsurprised by my colleagues’ indifference to Girls’ “Laura” (which is, seriously, a pretty good sampler of the album, if that’s your kind of thing; and, pace Chuck Eddy, yes, the guy’s voice does remind me of Graham Parker and Elvis C’s, thank you) and enthusiasm for anything Terius Youngdell Nash…
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Continue reading →: “Higher Than The Stars”
The first band whose original songs use huge swelling Cure keyboards without smothering their sentiments. This is a minor band, but a really good one, and Saint Etienne once again show their shrewdness as remixers by highlighting the rhythmic underpinnings of TPOBPAH’s post-shoegaze core. At their best they cross The…
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Continue reading →: And another thing…
Why the hell would you watch Capitalism: A Love Story when Drag Me To Hell is a better critique of the free market economy? This time, though, the villains aren’t those fonts of avarice, the banks — it’s old gypsies who live in houses they plainly can’t afford. Where’s Michael…
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Humanizing The Vacuum 