SwansTo Be Kind
I only got into Swans recently, but they've fast become one of my favourite bands. Not only do they make some of the heaviest and simultanaeously the most sublime music I've ever heard, they've managed to stay together and keep their standards up for three decades. When I first started listening to To Be Kind, though, I was worried they'd started to slip. It sounds like a poor imitation of Tinariwen, and Michael Gira's vocals are extremely obnoxious - not in the good, aggressive way, but in a way that sounds like someone trying to do a Swans song and failing. Fortunately, things quickly pick up from there. That Tinariwen sound permeates the album - songs like "Just A Little Boy" have that strange desert drone that seems almost stereotypically "exotic" - but on most of the songs, it's done right, and mixed with that Swans mixture of vitriol and profundity, it works pretty damn well. "Toussaint L'Overture" is the stand-ou track, a half-hour epic that starts out with a relentless yet uplifting barrage of guitar, before
simmering down to the same desert drone we've been hearing throughout
the album, complemented with strange, otherworldly chanting from Gira.
It gradually builds to a crescendo and then holds it - just holds onto
the momentum, riding the riff, as if Gira is seeing how far he can ramp
up the tension before the listener's brain explodes. Then, it drops off,
and you're left with skittering rhythm lines and harsh, distorted
guitar chords. From there on in, I won't ruin it for you, but it kicks
some major fucking arse.
The downside of having such an amazing centrepeice is that it kind of overshadows the rest of the album. It's still a great record, but the gap in quality between "Toussaint L'Overture" and the other songs makes them seem lacklustre by comparison. Still, when listened to on their own, rather than as part of an album, songs like "Oxygen" and "A Little God In My Hands" are fantastic. If you've listened to Swans before, you know what to expect - jarring rhythms, sneering vocals, and a heavinness that seems almost meditative, as if the band are trying to induce a spiritual experience in the listener through sheer force of sound. It's great, basically - buy it.
Rating: 8/10
Also, this will be my last post for a while, as I'm going to be extremely busy with various things for the next month or so.
Sunday, 25 May 2014
Monday, 19 May 2014
Review - Elbow
Elbow
The Take Off and Landing of Everything
Guy Garvey is unquestionably one of the best lyricists this country has produced. "The way the day begins / Decides the shade of everything / But the way it ends depends on if you're home / For every soul a pillow and a window please / In a modern room / Where folk are nice to Yoko" - Garvey belongs in the same category as Joanna Newsom and Bill Callahan, among those few who write lyrics that can be read as poetry. His lyrics are similar to fellow Manc song-poet Morrissey in their everydayness, but without the melancholy or the arch wit - rather, Garvey's literary voice (much like his singing voice) is warmer, less distant.
As far as the music goes, it's the same thing we've come to expect from Elbow. Somewhere between Radiohead and Coldplay, it lacks the experimentation of the former but avoids the unbearable blandness of the latter - these are tunes with soul. Basically, this album is another Elbow release - quality music and fantastic lyrics by one of the best songwriters of his generation.
Rating: 9/10
The Take Off and Landing of Everything
Guy Garvey is unquestionably one of the best lyricists this country has produced. "The way the day begins / Decides the shade of everything / But the way it ends depends on if you're home / For every soul a pillow and a window please / In a modern room / Where folk are nice to Yoko" - Garvey belongs in the same category as Joanna Newsom and Bill Callahan, among those few who write lyrics that can be read as poetry. His lyrics are similar to fellow Manc song-poet Morrissey in their everydayness, but without the melancholy or the arch wit - rather, Garvey's literary voice (much like his singing voice) is warmer, less distant.
As far as the music goes, it's the same thing we've come to expect from Elbow. Somewhere between Radiohead and Coldplay, it lacks the experimentation of the former but avoids the unbearable blandness of the latter - these are tunes with soul. Basically, this album is another Elbow release - quality music and fantastic lyrics by one of the best songwriters of his generation.
Rating: 9/10
Wednesday, 7 May 2014
Film review - The Amazing Spiderman 2
Well, they've rebooted the Spiderman franchise - I don;t know why, seeing as the original three films were fantastic, but then Hollywood logic is beyond the understanding of us mere mortals. This one stars Andrew Garfield as Spiderman, Jamie Fox as Electro and some emo kid as Harry Osbourne, Norman Osbourne's slightly androgynous daughter. Garfield quite wisely doesn't try to compete with Toby MacGuire's brilliant performance of a vulnerable, awkward Peter Parker, and chooses instead for a cockier, more confident take on the character - basically, a realistic portrayal of a teenager who's just discovered he has super powers. He plays it well, but I can't help but think that his is a rather shallow interpretation, nowhere near as dramatically interesting as McGuire. Aunt May is more interestingly written, and a more ambivalent character, in this film, so it's a shame she's played by an actor with the emotional range of cheese.
I was pretty excited when I heard that Electro would be the villain in this film - in the TVseries (which I loved as a kid) he's interesting as he's pretty much invincible, and the only way Spiderman beats him is by tricking him into beating himself. In the film, though, they've decided to turn him into a stalker who gets his powers when he's bitten by a radioactive electric eel (because fuck it, why not). They also decide to remove the whole near-omnipotent demi god thing, and make him basically another supervillain who uses electricity to blow shit up and lift up cars etc. So we can add electricity to the list of things that the makers of this film don;t understand. Also on that list: cinematography, character, plot, basic physics, and the difference between diegetic and non-diegetic sound (there's a scene where a song starts playing on the soundtrack and Spiderman says "oh, I hate this song". Fuck you, whoever wrote that. Fuck you so much.) - in fact, it'd be easier to list the good things about this film than the bad. So - Andrew Garfield's sexy accent, Gwen Stacey's legs, the first fight scene with Electro, and the last twenty minutes. That's the really annoying thing - the film's ending is great. The final fight scene, and everything that comes after it, is excellent, and that somehow makes me hate the film more, because I left the cinema feeling like I enjoyed myself but knowing I didn't. You can't make an hour and a half of mediocre, poorly written shite and then give it an awesome ending to trick people into thinking they liked it.
The plot is this: Harry Osbourne is dying of MacGuffin-itis and needs Spiderman's blood. Spiderman refuses to give it to him because it might kill him, which understandably pisses Harry off. Rather than doing what he looks like he'd do - listen to My Chemical Romance and write something bitchy in his diary - Harry makes a deal with Electro to kill Spiderman, and steal his blood. Oh, that's after the terminally ill kid who looks like he has the muscle mass of custard overpowers two security guards and breaks into a high-security mental asylum staffed by the German/Russian/European-or-something mad scientist Dr Kafka. Read that again. Doctor. Motherfucking. Kafka. That one name sums up just how retarded this film is, or at least it comes close, because nothing could possibly sum up the monumental stupidity of everyone involved in making this ridiculous, badly written, poorly plotted, terribly filmed abortion. And no amount of Andrew Garfiled's sexiness can change that fact.
I was pretty excited when I heard that Electro would be the villain in this film - in the TVseries (which I loved as a kid) he's interesting as he's pretty much invincible, and the only way Spiderman beats him is by tricking him into beating himself. In the film, though, they've decided to turn him into a stalker who gets his powers when he's bitten by a radioactive electric eel (because fuck it, why not). They also decide to remove the whole near-omnipotent demi god thing, and make him basically another supervillain who uses electricity to blow shit up and lift up cars etc. So we can add electricity to the list of things that the makers of this film don;t understand. Also on that list: cinematography, character, plot, basic physics, and the difference between diegetic and non-diegetic sound (there's a scene where a song starts playing on the soundtrack and Spiderman says "oh, I hate this song". Fuck you, whoever wrote that. Fuck you so much.) - in fact, it'd be easier to list the good things about this film than the bad. So - Andrew Garfield's sexy accent, Gwen Stacey's legs, the first fight scene with Electro, and the last twenty minutes. That's the really annoying thing - the film's ending is great. The final fight scene, and everything that comes after it, is excellent, and that somehow makes me hate the film more, because I left the cinema feeling like I enjoyed myself but knowing I didn't. You can't make an hour and a half of mediocre, poorly written shite and then give it an awesome ending to trick people into thinking they liked it.
The plot is this: Harry Osbourne is dying of MacGuffin-itis and needs Spiderman's blood. Spiderman refuses to give it to him because it might kill him, which understandably pisses Harry off. Rather than doing what he looks like he'd do - listen to My Chemical Romance and write something bitchy in his diary - Harry makes a deal with Electro to kill Spiderman, and steal his blood. Oh, that's after the terminally ill kid who looks like he has the muscle mass of custard overpowers two security guards and breaks into a high-security mental asylum staffed by the German/Russian/European-or-something mad scientist Dr Kafka. Read that again. Doctor. Motherfucking. Kafka. That one name sums up just how retarded this film is, or at least it comes close, because nothing could possibly sum up the monumental stupidity of everyone involved in making this ridiculous, badly written, poorly plotted, terribly filmed abortion. And no amount of Andrew Garfiled's sexiness can change that fact.
Thursday, 1 May 2014
Review - Johnny Cash
Johnny Cash
Out Among the Stars
Ok - the good news is, there'sa new album of previously unreleased songs by Johnny Cash coming out. The bad news is, the songs are from the eighties, that sad time in between cool, rebellious, young Johnny Cash and deep, soulful old Johnny Cash. So, mixed expectations coming into this.
It starts out well - the title track is a well-written story song that points the way towards the Cash of the American albums, pretty much universally regarded as his greatest work. It's not quite up to their standard, but it's still a decent opener. Things go downhill with the next track, a run-of-the-mill duet between Cash and June Carter, and they don;t get much better with "She Used to Love Me A Lot". This song sounds as if Cash was reaching for the profundity that he had acheived before, and would acheive again, but what comes out is just a rather boring love song. The next two tracks aren't really worth commenting on - they could be by more or less anyone, and I probably won;t remember them in five minutes' time. "If I Told You Who It Was" is awful, just cringe-inducingly awful. "Call Your Mother" is actually a pretty good song, but the saccharine Nashville production robs it of any real power. The same cannot be said for the rest of the tracks on this album. Ultimately, there's no reason to buy this unless you absolutely MUST own everythiong Cash ever released.
Rating: 2/10
And now I'm going to go listen to American V.
Out Among the Stars
Ok - the good news is, there'sa new album of previously unreleased songs by Johnny Cash coming out. The bad news is, the songs are from the eighties, that sad time in between cool, rebellious, young Johnny Cash and deep, soulful old Johnny Cash. So, mixed expectations coming into this.
It starts out well - the title track is a well-written story song that points the way towards the Cash of the American albums, pretty much universally regarded as his greatest work. It's not quite up to their standard, but it's still a decent opener. Things go downhill with the next track, a run-of-the-mill duet between Cash and June Carter, and they don;t get much better with "She Used to Love Me A Lot". This song sounds as if Cash was reaching for the profundity that he had acheived before, and would acheive again, but what comes out is just a rather boring love song. The next two tracks aren't really worth commenting on - they could be by more or less anyone, and I probably won;t remember them in five minutes' time. "If I Told You Who It Was" is awful, just cringe-inducingly awful. "Call Your Mother" is actually a pretty good song, but the saccharine Nashville production robs it of any real power. The same cannot be said for the rest of the tracks on this album. Ultimately, there's no reason to buy this unless you absolutely MUST own everythiong Cash ever released.
Rating: 2/10
And now I'm going to go listen to American V.
Wednesday, 16 April 2014
Lars von Trier Part 2: Antichrist
Ok, first of all, let m admit something: this is actually the second time I've seen Antichrist. The first time around I didn't really know what to make of it (which is a polite way of saying that I thought it was a pretentious pile of shite) but now, I get it. This film is a masterpeice.
It' not without its weaknesses. Charlotte Gainsbourg's acting is rather weak at times (someone really needs to tell her that there are ways of talking other than a whisper) and her dialogue sounds like it was written by someone who has only recently learnt English. Despite that, though, this film is incredible. When I finished watching it, I felt physically drained - it's an emotional and visceral ordeal, particularly the last half hour. The plot of the film is deceptively simple: a greiving couple go to a cabin in the woods, where psychologist Willem Defoe tries to cure his wife of her psychological problems. Much like Melancholia though, Antichrist's true themes are far larger and more complex. First off, it is - like Melancholia - an allegory for depression. Charlotte Gainsbourg is Lars von Trier, Willem Defoe is everyone who's asked him what he's so sad about. Secondly - and this is the big one - it is, like Melancholia, a film about what happens when a rational man (Keifer Sutherland's scientist, Defoe's psychologist) is confronted with something utterly irrational - in this case, the idea that the world is inherently evil. Not in some vague, it's-a-hard-life way, but actively malign. In this way, the film has parallels with the stories of HP Lovecraft - it is, fundamentally, a horror film. Von Trier clearly intended this to be the case, and he makes use of a fair few horror tropes. There is the scene where Charlotte Gainsbourg's character hears the crying of a baby, a sound which seems to come from nowhere, and the acorns that fall onto the roof of the cabin are reminiscent of the showers of stones said to accompany hauntings.
Defoe plays a character who is defined by his rational outlook on life; it is this outlook which first destroys his marriage, and then destroys him. When his wife begins to exhibit symptoms of mental illness, he decides to treat her himself. From that moment on, he is unable to relate to her as a human being, but rather sees her purely as a patient. It is this coldness, this detatchment, that begins to drive the two apart. Once they get to the forest, this rationality begins to fray at the edges, as Gainsbourg's character is gradually proved right; the world is evil, and it does want to make you suffer and then kill you. And that, really, is a very frightening idea.
This film was one of the most intense that I have ever seen, and I cannot recommend it enough.
It' not without its weaknesses. Charlotte Gainsbourg's acting is rather weak at times (someone really needs to tell her that there are ways of talking other than a whisper) and her dialogue sounds like it was written by someone who has only recently learnt English. Despite that, though, this film is incredible. When I finished watching it, I felt physically drained - it's an emotional and visceral ordeal, particularly the last half hour. The plot of the film is deceptively simple: a greiving couple go to a cabin in the woods, where psychologist Willem Defoe tries to cure his wife of her psychological problems. Much like Melancholia though, Antichrist's true themes are far larger and more complex. First off, it is - like Melancholia - an allegory for depression. Charlotte Gainsbourg is Lars von Trier, Willem Defoe is everyone who's asked him what he's so sad about. Secondly - and this is the big one - it is, like Melancholia, a film about what happens when a rational man (Keifer Sutherland's scientist, Defoe's psychologist) is confronted with something utterly irrational - in this case, the idea that the world is inherently evil. Not in some vague, it's-a-hard-life way, but actively malign. In this way, the film has parallels with the stories of HP Lovecraft - it is, fundamentally, a horror film. Von Trier clearly intended this to be the case, and he makes use of a fair few horror tropes. There is the scene where Charlotte Gainsbourg's character hears the crying of a baby, a sound which seems to come from nowhere, and the acorns that fall onto the roof of the cabin are reminiscent of the showers of stones said to accompany hauntings.
Defoe plays a character who is defined by his rational outlook on life; it is this outlook which first destroys his marriage, and then destroys him. When his wife begins to exhibit symptoms of mental illness, he decides to treat her himself. From that moment on, he is unable to relate to her as a human being, but rather sees her purely as a patient. It is this coldness, this detatchment, that begins to drive the two apart. Once they get to the forest, this rationality begins to fray at the edges, as Gainsbourg's character is gradually proved right; the world is evil, and it does want to make you suffer and then kill you. And that, really, is a very frightening idea.
This film was one of the most intense that I have ever seen, and I cannot recommend it enough.
Tuesday, 15 April 2014
Lars von Trier Part 1: Melancholia
I've heard a lot about von Trier - he's a filmmaker who inspires adoration and vitriol in equal measure, one who delights in confounding the expectations of his fans. Some think he's an iconoclastic genius, who follows his muse whereever it may take him; to others, he's a novelty act, the cinematic troll extraodinaire. So I recently decided (recently means this morning) to watch all of his films. At first, I wanted to start at the beginning, but Kirsten Dunst was naked in his last film, so I watched that one first. I guess I'll work from end to beginning.
Melancholia
This film is many things. It's a refutation of cynicism; it's an allegory for depresion; it's a poetic disaster movie; but most importantly, and most fundamentally, it's a story. A story about people's lives, the unravelling of them, and a big fuck-off planet that's going to kill the crap out of everything.
Melancholia is a hell of a film. It's got a stellar cast - Kirsten Dunst, John Hurt, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Keifer Sutherland all turn in excellent perforances. Lines that could have sounded overwrought or cheesy in the hands of less talented actors come out sounding exactly right. The cineatography is also top notch; the lush, almost aggressively opulent colours should be terrible,digital at its worst, but somehow von Trier makes it work, so that the film looks like a Caravaggio portrait, though rendered in far colder colours. The story is great - it starts out as a Pinteresque account of a wedding gone disastrously wrong, but what I love about it is the complete lack of attention paid to the conventions of stortelling. Standard filmmaking logic tells us that if a film starts out as a moving account of marital and familial strife should end the same way, whereas von Trier logic says that if a film starts out as a moving account of marital and familial strife LETS THROW A PLANET AT EVERONE. Seriously, this is a great film. Watch it.
Melancholia
This film is many things. It's a refutation of cynicism; it's an allegory for depresion; it's a poetic disaster movie; but most importantly, and most fundamentally, it's a story. A story about people's lives, the unravelling of them, and a big fuck-off planet that's going to kill the crap out of everything.
Melancholia is a hell of a film. It's got a stellar cast - Kirsten Dunst, John Hurt, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Keifer Sutherland all turn in excellent perforances. Lines that could have sounded overwrought or cheesy in the hands of less talented actors come out sounding exactly right. The cineatography is also top notch; the lush, almost aggressively opulent colours should be terrible,digital at its worst, but somehow von Trier makes it work, so that the film looks like a Caravaggio portrait, though rendered in far colder colours. The story is great - it starts out as a Pinteresque account of a wedding gone disastrously wrong, but what I love about it is the complete lack of attention paid to the conventions of stortelling. Standard filmmaking logic tells us that if a film starts out as a moving account of marital and familial strife should end the same way, whereas von Trier logic says that if a film starts out as a moving account of marital and familial strife LETS THROW A PLANET AT EVERONE. Seriously, this is a great film. Watch it.
Film Review - 12 Years A Slave
So yesterday, I finally got around to seeing 12 Years A Slave, the film that's so great you don't even need to see it to give it an Oscar. And....it's not that great. Don't get me wrong - there are some really good things about it. The performances are uniformly fantastic, the sound mixing is perfect - diegetic sounds are amplified and the music is loud and intense, reminiscent of The Excorcist and old fashioned film scores - and it's pretty well shot. But overall...well, first things first.
It starts out very well. It's genuinely affecting when Northup (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, whose name I copied and pasted from IMDb, because fuck trying to spell that) is kidnapped and sold into slavery, and the first hour or so of the film is very well made. The soundtrack is the real star of the film - the combination of amplified diegetic sound and non-diegetic music that is far more intrusive than in most modern films creates a rich atmosphere, enveloping and uncomfortable, like a really humid summer day. The cinematography is great as well - less stark than in Hunger, McQueen's first film, and closer to the opulent textures of Les Miserables. By the looks of this film, directors are finally learning how to make digital look good.
The problem comes about an hour in (I think it was an hour - it's the first quarter of a film that seems about four hours long). Basically, what happens is...nothing. Nothing at all. There's been a fantastic build-up - characters established, horrors of slavery presented in a way that is just realistic enough to be disturbing, but not realistic enough that Guardian readers won't like it - and then it just...keeps going. Northup keeps having a hard time, the slave-owners keep being dicks (as slave-owners tend to do), things keep being generally awful for the slaves, but there's nothing else there. No drama, no tension, no reason to keep watching. Now don;t get me wrong - I love slow cinema. Hunger is a masterpeice, I loved Drive, and The American is one of my favourite films. But this doesn't have the great writing of Hunger, the meditative beauty of Drive or the emotional drive of Papillion, which I think is the best film to compare it to (and not just because it has the other Steve McQueen in it). Like Papillion, 12 Years A Slave is long; like Papillion, there is no defining plot, just story - the actions of characters, as opposed to the problem-solution line of Hollywood; like Papillion, the film focuses around a free man (McQueen is free in spirit; Ejiofor is literally a free man sold into slavery) trying to escape from a brutal situation (a penal colony in the former, slavery in the latter) and the aproach to sound is very similar. Thing is though, in Papillion, there's some substance - I genuinely want Steve McQueen's character to escape, because the film has an emotional efect on me; I want Northup to escape so that the film will be over. 12 Years A Slave is not some slow-burning, brutal masterpeice of the kind that one might expect from the director of the masterful Hunger. Instead, it's dull, self-indulgent, and really not that shocking. There's a flogging scene that's pretty nasty, but compared to what happened to slaves in real life, it seems like a lot of the horrors have been toned down to appeal to the tastes of white liberals.
Basically, watch Papillion - it's much, much better.
It starts out very well. It's genuinely affecting when Northup (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, whose name I copied and pasted from IMDb, because fuck trying to spell that) is kidnapped and sold into slavery, and the first hour or so of the film is very well made. The soundtrack is the real star of the film - the combination of amplified diegetic sound and non-diegetic music that is far more intrusive than in most modern films creates a rich atmosphere, enveloping and uncomfortable, like a really humid summer day. The cinematography is great as well - less stark than in Hunger, McQueen's first film, and closer to the opulent textures of Les Miserables. By the looks of this film, directors are finally learning how to make digital look good.
The problem comes about an hour in (I think it was an hour - it's the first quarter of a film that seems about four hours long). Basically, what happens is...nothing. Nothing at all. There's been a fantastic build-up - characters established, horrors of slavery presented in a way that is just realistic enough to be disturbing, but not realistic enough that Guardian readers won't like it - and then it just...keeps going. Northup keeps having a hard time, the slave-owners keep being dicks (as slave-owners tend to do), things keep being generally awful for the slaves, but there's nothing else there. No drama, no tension, no reason to keep watching. Now don;t get me wrong - I love slow cinema. Hunger is a masterpeice, I loved Drive, and The American is one of my favourite films. But this doesn't have the great writing of Hunger, the meditative beauty of Drive or the emotional drive of Papillion, which I think is the best film to compare it to (and not just because it has the other Steve McQueen in it). Like Papillion, 12 Years A Slave is long; like Papillion, there is no defining plot, just story - the actions of characters, as opposed to the problem-solution line of Hollywood; like Papillion, the film focuses around a free man (McQueen is free in spirit; Ejiofor is literally a free man sold into slavery) trying to escape from a brutal situation (a penal colony in the former, slavery in the latter) and the aproach to sound is very similar. Thing is though, in Papillion, there's some substance - I genuinely want Steve McQueen's character to escape, because the film has an emotional efect on me; I want Northup to escape so that the film will be over. 12 Years A Slave is not some slow-burning, brutal masterpeice of the kind that one might expect from the director of the masterful Hunger. Instead, it's dull, self-indulgent, and really not that shocking. There's a flogging scene that's pretty nasty, but compared to what happened to slaves in real life, it seems like a lot of the horrors have been toned down to appeal to the tastes of white liberals.
Basically, watch Papillion - it's much, much better.
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