The Pipettes - Earth Vs. The Pipettes
Yeah! Ladystuff! Though one could be forgiven for being wary of any artist describing their foray into genre music as ‘an experiment’, The Pipettes (the name being svengali mastermind, ‘Monster’ Bobby’s sly wink to the ‘meta’ part of the group) were an example of a band that rather than merely putting quote marks round a well-worn sound, managed to reinvigorate the style. … Continue Reading
Laura Veirs
And so winter brings another album written around the turn of seasons, as everybody’s-favourite-artist-ever-to-use-‘spelunking’-in-a-song, Laura Veirs, releases her seventh album in the new year on Bella Union (and her own label, Raven Marching Band Records in the States).
“Drenched in wood-smoke and sunlight”, July Flame is produced by boyf Tucker Martine of Crane Wife/Hazards Of Love fame, and whilst much has been made of the progression from major label to self-release and the stripped back minimalism of the new music, the main strength of the album is not fewer instruments, but that the sound is less cluttered, more delicate. Although she has described this album as “sparse”, and “music that hits you in the gut”, this does her an injustice. Visceral as the songs are, there is certainly a lot of the cerebral about both the lyrics and arrangement. Rarely does Veirs write choruses, preferring instead to rely on the ebb and flow of an abstract lyric on the top of finger-picking and a repeated refrain. She has in the past reiterated the mantra of the pop songwriter, that her lyrics are open enough to appeal to everyone on a different level, but this seems to be slightly misguided, as Veirs’ songs are far from generic, and one could question the mass appeal of re-working Rimbaud poems in folk form. But this is what sets her apart – her oddity, her uniqueness.
Thirst
No one would expect restraint from the man that brought us the ‘Vengeance’ trilogy, but having said that, Park Chan-wook’s latest is really not for the squeamish. Like recent HBO sex-fest True Blood, both the characters and their director have a fascination with bodily fluids. Apart from the oodles of blood, guts and pustules, it is the aural rather than visual aspect that is the most obvious. Whilst the violence might occur offscreen, the soundtrack is loud and explicit. Each bite, suck and scream is lovingly detailed, and the kiss of the vampire is as tantalising as it is threatening. While being repulsed by the cannibalistic aspect of the monster, it is absurdly easy to be drawn in by the menace and allure. And indeed, he is mostly a him. Whether it’s Heathcliff, Satan or Edward Cullen, there is something predatory and seductive about these boys of ‘Byronic’ character. Thirst is still a love story though, but a by-product of its gothic bent means that it is a love story refreshingly tethered to the fleshy, gritty reality of that love – the sounds, the smells, the blood and the body.
The Dodos
November 14, 2009
“HEEEELLLLOOOO LOOONDON!!!” shouts front man Meric Long, as he prances onto the stage in trademark leopard-print leggings and sleeveless vest. NOT REALLY. Shy, retiring and almost certainly bullied at school (“Ooh, I’m really jetlagged,” says Long – NO YOU’RE NOT, YOU’RE SHY), The Dodos (née Dodo Bird) walk onstage at The Scala, staring at the floor, take seats/pick up guitars, and launch into an frenetic rendition of a song that I still don’t know the name of. It’s off Visiter alright, just buy the album. Yes, they do bear a teensy bit of resemblance to Animal Collective – there’s some background yelping and both bands have a very keen grasp of the components of a song (both in terms of individual instruments and song structure), but where they lack some of the inventiveness of Panda Bear, Geologist and don’t care, they excel in melody and build up. They also probably don’t have ADHD. … Continue Reading
The Clientele - Bonfires On The Heath
The title track of The Clientele’s fifth LP, Bonfires On The Heath opens with a dreamy, ethereal rush of reverby guitar licking, as Alasdair MacLean coos ‘Late October sunlight in the wood/Nothing here quite moves the way it should…’
Of the album’s October release date, MacLean writes, “I love the feeling that everyone is experiencing these Autumnal songs just as Autumn kicks in.” The overwhelming motif of the album is less seasonal however, and more of a quasi-pagan obsession with nature and the outdoors. “It’s haaaaaaaarrrrvessst tiiiiime” MacLean and Mel Draisey harmonise on ‘Harvest Time’; “Bats go shivering by” and “scarecrows watch from the verge of the light”. The various subjects of the album spend their time wandering about the countryside in a bit of a daze, listening to the sounds of the fields and seeing ghosts in the sunset. This might smell a bit like Wordsworthian ponce, but the lyrics on Bonfires… are tempered by a darkness of tone and a lightness of touch. It’s not Patrick Wolf anyway, that’s for sure. … Continue Reading
(500) Days Of Summer
‘Offbeat’ romantic comedy, (500) Days Of Summer serves as a kind of catharsis for writer Scott Neustadter, following the dubious maxim quoted in the film, that ‘the best way to get over a woman is to turn her into literature.’ The quote is actually one of modernist author and notorious bastard, Henry Miller, and the film opens with a rather aggressively Miller-ish disclaimer that flashes up on screen: “Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely co-incidental… Especially you, Jenny Beckman… Bitch.”
Bombastically proclaimed by the Daily Mail as “the greatest revenge in the history of cinema”, the film is a dance back and forth throughout various days in the year long relationship and subsequent emotional fallout of Tom Hanson and Summer Finn, a couple in their mid-twenties, employed at a greeting cards company in LA. Pastel animated scenes (of a gradually withering tree – bleurgh) act as chapter headings in the narrative – Day 340, Day 20, etc – letting us know which of the ‘days of Summer’ we’re in. “Tom, I know you think she was the one, but I don’t,” says Tom’s sage-like younger sister, Rachel. “Next time you look back, I think you should look again.” This ‘looking back’ is the film – a retrospective on a relationship.
The film opens as Rachel Hanson jumps off her bike, walks into Tom’s apartment (where Tom stands, smashing crockery on a sideboard with a blank look on his face), and says, ‘Right, start from the beginning’ (which obviously he does not). ‘The beginning’ alone however, is enough to give anyone cause for concern. Tom and Summer are riding a lift together at their work, when her reaction to hearing ‘Boy With The Thorn In His Side’ blasting out of Tom’s headphones, is to sing a couple of lines of the song and yell at him, “Oh yeah, The Smiths. I really like The Smiths.” Tom’s reaction is, “HOLY SHIT.” This, in itself, spells trouble. Honestly, who does that? And who gets that excited about someone liking The Smiths?
As Woody Allen says in Annie Hall (to which (500) Days owes a great debt) whilst sifting through the pieces of his own failed relationship, ‘I have a hyperactive imagination. My mind tends to jump around a little.’ Tom Hanson’s memory is also rather subjective. Thus, the film is able to (despite being lauded as ‘realistic’ by critics with a bar undoubtedly lowered from the week The Ugly Truth and The Proposal came out) escape the restrictions of a realistic narrative, and show its audience Tom’s warped reminiscence of the failed relationship he obsesses over. As a result, his post-coital morning walk to work become a Gene Kelly-esque musical number, high-fiving passers-by and being carried through the park on the shoulders of euphoric supporters, and his crushing post-breakup lows see him casting himself as the moody hero of Godard and Bergman-esque, black and white French films. These odd little vignettes are interesting enough to draw away from the MIND-NUMBING BANALITY of their karaoke/Ikea/job/bar day-to-day.
Summer is underdrawn (as you would expect from a film penned by ‘the ex’), and Tom is, to be honest, a bit whiny. Someone once said that the act of reminiscence involves a necessary splitting of the self, which becomes both the person in the memory, and the person doing the remembering. Unfortunately for Scott Neustadter and Tom Hanson, two parts of the same whole, both these people are tools. Funny at times and gratingly annoying at others, the film is redeemed by its inventive direction and the almost disturbingly likable Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel. The soundtrack is deftly used, and as indie as you would expect, including standard ‘quirky couple necking to Feist’ scene, and montages so cutesy they could be an extended advert for mobile phone tariffs.
In contrast to which, The Time Traveler’s Wife (sic) consists of a film that tries its darndest to murder some excellent subject matter. Having been described variously in the film press as ‘sentimental slush’ and ‘a bulletproof concept’, this rather cack-handed film is carried by what is a fantastic skew on the traditional, linear romance – a familiar concept in unfamiliar surroundings. Rather than a relationship retrospective like (500) Days, Henry DeTamble and Clare Abshire find themselves in the unfortunate position of having a kind of ‘future memory’ of their life together, due to Bana’s character’s genetic abnormality, ‘chronic impairment’, as in his liability to spontaneously time travel at any moment – a bit of a pain in a marriage.
Henry’s time travel is involuntary, and he becomes ‘unstuck’ in time, jumping back and forth between moments in the course of his life with Clare, played by a doe-eyed Rachel McAdams. Clare, it should be explained, acts as a kind of metaphysical anchor for Henry’s jumps – she is the place (and time) that he always returns to. The effect is that the couple (and the audience), experience the relationship out of sequence, but whereas in (500) Days, this was a knowing, formal device designed to emphasise various ironies and flaws in Tom’s relationship, in Time Traveler’s Wife it goes some way towards making the whole thing more poignant. The couple’s wedding for example, that Henry disappears from, missing the ceremony but returning just in time to slow-dance to a waltz version of ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ (sung by Broken Social Scene’s Kevin Drew for some reason, who winks at the camera before presumably wandering off to collect his ‘random cameo’ award). Or the traumatic experience of gestating a child liable to time-travel out of its mother at any moment. … Continue Reading
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