Archives for February 2012

Julianna Barwick’s “The Magic Place”, David Lynch’s Soon To Be, Surely, Muse.

February 24, 2012 by Leave a Comment

It’s hard to avoid using the E word when talk­ing about Julian­na Bar­wick. Her com­bi­na­tion of ethe­re­al, hyp­not­ic vocals with care­ful­ly con­struct­ed lay­ers of metic­u­lous­ly craft­ed sound con­jures up inevitable if unfor­tu­nate visions of Enya.

A more use­ful com­par­i­son might be with Liz Fras­er, and the sort of music that she and her fel­low 4AD sirens were pro­duc­ing with the likes of the Cocteau Twins, This Mor­tal Coil and Dead Can Dance. But there’s none of that angst with Barwick.

The waves of balm that she wraps you up in evoke instead the blissed-up chill-out calm of last year’s With­in And With­out from Washed Out, reviewed here ear­li­er, with the occa­sion­al echo of the qui­eter bits form Pan­da Bear’s Tomboy.

The Mag­ic Place is all of the above, and yet some­how so much more. For despite all that bliss, and calm, and chilled out, yawn, seren­i­ty, it’s an album that man­ages to avoid ever sound­ing in any way monotonous.

Which is remark­able. There are no lyrics to speak of, in the con­ven­tion­al sense. It’s essen­tial­ly a Min­i­mal­ist album, where each piece takes a motif which is then worked on, method­i­cal­ly, almost math­e­mat­i­cal­ly, up to vary­ing degrees of com­pli­ca­tion. And yet, there’s enough vari­a­tion through­out and across each of the nine tracks to draw you in and hold you there. And rather than ever becom­ing bor­ing, the more you lis­ten to it the more beguil­ing become its charms.

Offi­cial­ly, it’s her sec­ond album, but to all extents and pur­pos­es The Mag­ic Place is her first album prop­er and has been out for a year now. It got an impressed 8.5 from the boys from Prav­da http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15147-the-magic-place/?utm_campaign=search&utm_medium=site&utm_source=search-ac. If you missed it first time around, treat yourself.

Filed Under: Music Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

“The Lion’s Roar” From First Aid Kit, Sweden’s Answer To Emmylou And Alison Krauss.

February 17, 2012 by Leave a Comment

first-aid-kit-lions-roarThe Lion’s Roar is the sec­ond album from Swe­den’s First Aid Kit, com­pris­ing of sis­ters Klara and Johan­na Söder­berg, both of whom are bare­ly into their 20s. After their debut The Big Black And The Blue from 2010, they nat­u­ral­ly grav­i­tat­ed to Amer­i­ca to record their sopho­more effort, turn­ing to Mike Mogis to pro­duce it.

As well as being one of the three core mem­bers of Nebraska’s stel­lar Bright Eyes, where he serves as pro­duc­er and mul­ti-instru­men­tal­ist, Mogis has also worked on albums by the likes of Jen­ny Lewis and her band Rilo Kiley, and M Ward and his, She And Him.

While there are clear echoes of Jen­ny Lewis through­out The Lion’s Roar, it’s Nashville’s Caitlin Rose that most read­i­ly springs to mind, whose debut Own Side Now I reviewed here earlier.

As with Rose, there’s a world weari­ness to the songs here that some­how man­ages to be cred­i­ble, not with­stand­ing the unlike­li­hood that either of the man­i­fest­ly jejune sib­lings could ever have grav­i­tat­ed beyond mere mis­chief in their brief lives. And if the songs here sound ever so slight­ly less lived-in that those on Own Side Now, that can prob­a­bly be put down to the added dif­fi­cul­ty of hav­ing to pen them in a for­eign language.

What’s so beguil­ing about this album, as with Rose’s, is the alchem­i­cal mar­riage of a time­less musi­cal tra­di­tion, with a vocal deliv­ery that rings of unblem­ished inno­cence and, there’s no oth­er word for it, puri­ty. This potent com­bi­na­tion is then deployed to lament a pre­ma­ture­ly crushed spir­it and a per­ma­nent­ly bro­ken heart. It’s a heady mix.

The boys from Prav­da gave it an impressed 7.6 http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16205-the-lions-roar/.

And the per­cep­tive review there remarked with qui­et sur­prise, that there aren’t too many girls who would try ref­er­enc­ing Emmy­lou Har­ris and Gram Par­sons as the basis for a chat up line, as they do here on the sec­ond track, Emmy­lou. It’s not so much that there aren’t too many who’d get away with it. There aren’t too many who would try it, full stop. But they do, and it’s bewitching.

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Filed Under: Music Tagged With: , , , ,

“Religion For Atheists”, The Terribly, Alas, English Book By Alain de Botton.

February 10, 2012 by 6 Comments

For many years, schol­ars puz­zled over what appeared to be the out­line of a hideous fig­ure, cow­er­ing in the depths of the ninth cycle of Hell in Dan­te’s Infer­no. Who exact­ly was that frozen for­ev­er in the bow­els of the Earth, more low­ly even than Bru­tus, Judas, and even Satan himself?

Of course we now know that what we find there is a veg­e­tar­i­an, caught for­ev­er in the act of eat­ing a veg­gie burg­er. Why would a veg­e­tar­i­an want to eat a burg­er?

Sure­ly the last thing a veg­e­tar­i­an would ever want would to sink their teeth into would be some­thing that embod­ies every­thing they’ve so proud­ly reject­ed? And yet there they are, on every veg­e­tar­i­an menu in the West­ern world. So we should­n’t I sup­pose be too sur­prised about the lat­est offer­ing from Alain de Bot­ton, Reli­gion For Athe­ists which is based on a sim­i­lar­ly non-sen­si­cal idea. But that does­n’t make it any less lamentable.

Though Swiss by birth, there’s some­thing ter­ri­bly Eng­lish about his new book. Reli­gion For Athe­ists reeks of the same spir­it that moves Angli­can vic­ars to so need­less­ly explain and ratio­nal­ize the para­bles in the gospels and the sto­ries in the bible.

We’re not meant to be able to ratio­nal­ly com­pre­hend the mys­ter­ies in the bible, hence the name we use to describe them. Their truths are beyond mere human under­stand­ing. Ours, famous­ly, is not to rea­son why. That’s why no one is ever pun­ished for behav­ing bad­ly or reward­ed for behav­ing well in the Bible. The only thing you’re ever pun­ished for in the Bible is for act­ing of your own volition.

The one thing that’s demand­ed of you through­out the Bible, and it’s repeat­ed over and over again, is that you sub­mit your will to the high­er and unknow­able will of God. That’s what Muham­mad under­stood hav­ing absorbed the worlds of Judaism and Chris­tian­i­ty, and why he summed up his mes­sage with the sin­gle word Islam; “sub­mit”.

Your beliefs demand that you make a pro­found sac­ri­fice. That sac­ri­fice is that you aban­don your mere human log­ic and rea­son, and sub­mit your will to a high­er and unknow­able authority.

All you suc­ceed in doing by try­ing to explain and ratio­nal­ize the mys­ter­ies that under­pin that author­i­ty is to hope­less­ly weak­en the bonds that bind you and it togeth­er. Your beliefs are only as strong as the sac­ri­fices they demand of you.

That’s why Angli­can­ism is con­stant­ly under threat from the twin pil­lars of Catholi­cism and Protes­tantism, and why in con­trast to the for­mer, Islam goes from strength to strength.

The sac­ri­fice demand­ed of athe­ism, which, some argue, is just a par­tic­u­lar strand of belief, is the fore­go­ing of the insti­tu­tion­al shel­ter and com­mu­nal suc­cour that organ­ised reli­gion so vital­ly offers.

In its efforts to restore to athe­ists pre­cise­ly that which they’ve sac­ri­ficed, de Bot­ton’s book demon­strates a fail­ure to under­stand what belief is for and how it oper­ates, either for athe­ists or believ­ers. He’s try­ing to sac­ri­fice sac­ri­fice.

He seems like an affa­ble sort of chap, and when he sticks to arcane cor­ners of archi­tec­ture, or lay­men’s phi­los­o­phy he can be an engag­ing if slight­ly over-eager guide. But his Reli­gion For Athe­ists bears all the mark­ings of a man with more mon­ey than sense, and one who has far too much – and yet not enough – time on his hands.

Filed Under: Books Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

“Breaking Bad” – AMC.

February 3, 2012 by Leave a Comment

The gold­en age of Amer­i­can tele­vi­sion con­tin­ues, and an august lin­eage that began with The Sopra­nos, The Wire and Mad Men con­tin­ues apace with Break­ing Bad. Series 4 of the AMC show went out in the US last autumn, and the fifth and final sea­son is due to be aired there lat­er on this year. But it’s yet to sur­face on ter­res­tri­al tele­vi­sion here, and many peo­ple on this side of the Atlantic will only be com­ing to it now.

All the best tele­vi­sion depends on a series build­ing a care­ful­ly con­struct­ed micro-world that you com­plete­ly trust in because they know every square inch of it, and into which you’re invit­ed for an hour once a week. What’s unusu­al about each of the above, is that they each focus on two com­plete­ly dis­parate worlds, both of which you believe in and cru­cial­ly, both of which are giv­en equal weight when they inevitably come into collision.

The con­flict cre­at­ed in The Sopra­nos aris­es when the mun­dane domes­tic­i­ty of fam­i­ly life comes into con­tact with the world of orga­nized crime. But both worlds are giv­en equal impor­tance, and each of their char­ac­ters are equal­ly deserv­ing of our sympathies.

Sim­i­lar­ly The Wire has the good guys – the cops, the unions, a school and a news­pa­per – and the bad guys – the street gangs – but refus­es to take sides. Instead, both sides are shown to be equal­ly taint­ed by pet­ty per­son­al pol­i­tics and con­flict­ed loy­al­ties which makes both sets of char­ac­ters all the more fascinating.

Mad Men is a bit more com­pli­cat­ed. The two worlds that come into con­flict here are, on the one hand the black and white cer­tain­ties of the late 1950s, which is what the show looks and sounds like, and on the oth­er the pitch black and oh so con­tem­po­rary cyn­i­cism of the show’s sto­ry­lines and its char­ac­ters, which is what the show feels like.

Break­ing Bad takes this tem­plate and reduces it to its purest form. The two worlds here are the whiter than white col­lar world of an ele­men­tary school teacher and the bleached blond vanil­la world that he and his fam­i­ly live in, and the dank and dark, grim and grimy realm of under­world drugs. When the school teacher (Bryan Cranston) is diag­nosed with ter­mi­nal lung can­cer, he decides to pro­vide for his fam­i­ly by man­u­fac­tur­ing crys­tal meth, and two worlds that ought nev­er to have come into con­tact collide.

What’s so cap­ti­vat­ing about the show is that once that deci­sion has been made, they treat every­thing he has to do, drug wise, as seri­ous­ly as they do fam­i­ly wise. So for instance, when he has to dis­pose of a dead body, they real­ly take you through, step by step, exact­ly what you’d have to do if you real­ly were faced with hav­ing to get rid of a corpse.

Sim­i­lar­ly, when he and his side­kick decide to offer their pristine­ly pro­duced crys­tal meth (he is after all a Chem­istry teacher) to one of the under­world’s main dis­trib­u­tors, and sug­gest that per­haps he might con­sid­er using them instead of his usu­al pro­duc­er to sup­ply him with all his chem­i­cal needs, all Hell breaks loose, just as you’d have expect­ed it to, should such an unlike­ly event have ever occurred in the real world.

All the advance reports on Break­ing Bad were wor­ry­ing­ly rev­er­en­tial. For once, they were entire­ly justified.

Filed Under: Television Tagged With: , , , , ,