Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Journeys and Adventures

‘La Maison de Mon Reve’ and ‘Noah’s Ark’, the first two albums from beguiling sister duo CocoRosie have been slowly working their way into my consciousness over the last couple of years, and are albums I’ve been returning to frequently in recent months. In light of this, I’ve been keenly anticipating ‘The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn’, their latest kooky musical adventure. The press release for this album, not officially released until April, is so unutterably pretentious as to warrant quoting here in full:

“The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn is a departure from the obscured blur of stained glass reve to a more self-exploitive memoir. Parts are dreamy and parts are savage, but, as with an opera where death represents a secret heaven, the whole record feels like a black diamond in the snow. From her humble beginnings in the South of France, the saga sailed the Seven Seas all the way to that icy crack in the Earth’s crust just outside Reykjavik. Upon return to her Parisian homeland, she shared a mystical rendezvous with beautiful sailors Pierre and Gilles, the album cover being a consequence of that affair”.

Whilst this might do more to obfuscate than to explain (what kind of memoir isn’t ‘self exploitive’? What exactly is a ‘mystical rendezvous’?), it shouldn’t serve to put listeners off completely. CocoRosie have refined an unusual and original form of electronic folk music which is also theatrical and occasionally camp. The arrangements are skeletal but intoxicating, and, in this context, the Joanna Newsom-esque vocal mannerisms actually serve to bewitch and enhance the mood (and the phrasing is as much influenced by smoky jazz singers such as Billie Holiday and Dinah Washington as Newsom or Devendra Banhart).

Despite its mythical sea journey concept, ‘…Ghosthorse and Stillborn’ is neither as lyrically coherent nor as musically enthralling as its predecessors. Some of the meticulous vocal phrasings have been phased out in favour of a half-spoken style bordering on rapping for the first few songs. This also means there’s frequently a less marked contrast between the two voices (the juxtaposition between harsh and delicate was a major part of the group’s appeal). Also, whilst their previous works merged electronic programming with acoustic instruments (or at least synthesisers that closely resembled traditional folk instruments), there now seems to be a heavier reliance on piano emulators and conventional synth sounds. It’s gratifying to hear them branching away from their comfort zone, but it will require more listens before I’m convinced that this works.

When ‘Ghosthorse and Stillborn’ works, however, it still has a special magic. ‘Japan’ is a vivid, potent sea shanty that sounds something akin to Tom Waits jamming with Bjork, and the occasional interjection of operatic vocals, particularly when juxtaposed with the insular barroom jazz of ‘Houses’, is peculiarly effective. ‘Raphael’ harks back to the sound of ‘Noah’s Ark’ and ‘Sunshine’ is beautifully restrained.

The overall sense is of an album that is a little too content to meander, albeit with grace and beauty. The closing ‘Miracles’, with what sounds like Anthony Hegarty joining in on vocals (my promo cannot confirm this), is a particularly wishy-washy note on which to conclude.

Legendary guitarist Ry Cooder has devised a rather different kind of journey for ‘My Name Is Buddy’, and it’s one that enables him to pursue a determinedly traditional route through the American folk canon, joined by Pete and Mike Seeger and Van Dyke Parks, among other illustrious guests. It’s wonderful that Cooder has rediscovered his own creative drive, after years spent as a supporting musician and marketing outlet for the promotion of ‘world music’ (sorry to use the awful catch-all term). His last album, ‘Chavez Ravine’ was a brilliantly constructed and incisive concept album about the disappeared LA neighbourhood of Chavez Ravine, the source of conflict between real estate developers, government and planning activists, eventually bulldozed as a result of a corrupt deal to build a stadium to entice the Brooklyn Dodgers to LA. It’s the closest Cooder has come to a masterpiece outside his film soundtrack work, beautifully packaged, poignant, empathetic, and superbly executed.

‘My Name Is Buddy’ attempts to pick up where that album left off. ‘Chavez Ravine’ was rather modestly subtitled ‘a record by Ry Cooder’. Even more dryly, ‘..Buddy’ is presented as ‘another record by Ry Cooder. It has similarly lavish artwork and packaging, more closely resembling a children’s book with appropriate illustrations than a CD inlay. This time, though, the overall concept is decidedly more whimsical. Through the eyes of a cat forced to relocate and wander the great American terrain, Cooder takes a wryly humorous but frequently illuminating tour through depression-era 30s America. Buddy, the chief character, meets a number of other crucial figures including Lefty the Mouse (a committed Red and Union activist), The Reverend Tom Toad (who enables Cooder to address the issues of racism and the Ku Klux Klan), and a fat, greedy pig pointedly named J Edgar. Cooder introduces each song in the inlay with a short narrative passage providing the context, and all this does bring back memories of children’s tomes such as The Animals of Farthing Wood or Watership Down, the latter of which at least had broader allegorical points to make. Maybe Cooder wanted to ensure that the project wouldn’t come across as overly po-faced, but in his idealisation of a lost benevolent America, Cooder does have serious arguments which may be undercut rather than enhanced by the caricatures of his animal cast. Perhaps, though, a better reference point is George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’, which stated its political case boldly and clearly.

Musically, we’re very much in Woody Guthrie territory, and these 17 (17!!) songs are all authentically rootsy, although much more sedate and less boozy than Springsteen’s outstanding Seeger Sessions project from last year. It’s fascinating that the context of Bush’s squeezing domestic policies and foreign escapades have prompted America’s major musical artists to get historical, and ‘My Name Is Buddy’, however frustrating, is a major contribution to this emerging trend.

The playing is dependably excellent and faithful to its sources, although at 17 tracks, it’s certainly arguable that this is just too long. It’s very refreshing when there is a change in turn, such as on the gutsy blues of ‘Sundown Town’ (with Bobby King guesting on vocals), the Waitsian rasp of ‘Three Chords and the Truth’ (the wonderful title taken directly from Harlan Howard’s masterfully concise description of country music), or the atmospheric, lengthy ‘Green Dog’. The remaining songs are all consistently excellent, and sometimes a lot of fun, but it is something of a challenge to get through the whole album in one sitting. If there’s a problem, it might lie in Cooder’s dry and rather unexpressive singing. Never the greatest of singers, his tone is somewhat monotonous, and ‘…Buddy’ certainly lacks the unexpected passion and variety of vocal performance that Springsteen wrenched out on the Seeger Sessions.

Still, there’s plenty to admire here, and the lyrics are crisp and clever. Whilst it doesn’t quite scale the heights of ‘Chavez Ravine’, it’s still another major statement providing more evidence of just how great it is to have Cooder writing and recording regularly again.

Who Dunnit?

Some thoughts on David Lynch's Inland Empire

First up, a subjective confession: David Lynch is one of my favourite film-makers. I like the fact that his films can be elliptical, unclear and cryptic and that the very point of them may in fact be that they are pointless. I reject the charge of misogyny that many authoritative and respected writers have brought against him, most notably the Chicago Sun Times' Roger Ebert, who savagely demolished Blue Velvet on its original release. Just because you make films in which nasty things happen to women does not logically imply that you hate women, or that you view that degradation as morally justifiable. Lynch explores dark, nightmarish worlds - and with his last three pictures particularly (Lost Highway, the masterpiece Mulholland Drive and now this three hour epic), these worlds are becoming increasingly subconscious and internalised. His films have plenty of forebearers in the art of cinematic obfuscation - Alain Resnais' 'Last Year in Marienbad' springs most immediately to mind, but his style is so singular as to render most comparisons worthless.

Yet, in the case of Inland Empire, for much of its protracted duration a clear parallel formed in my mind. 'Inland Empire' repeats so many of the tropes and ideas of Mulholland Drive that it feels very much like a more indulgent companion piece to that movie, and the relationship between the two films is remarkably similar to that between Wong Kar-Wai's '2046' and its more focussed, masterful predecessor 'In The Mood For Love'. I remember watching the London Film Festival premiere of '2046' with a similarly paradoxical sense of awe and frustration. Visually, I was compelled - but the melding together of scenes across locations and the absense of any coherent narrative drive left me fundamentally confused. Such is the way with 'Inland Empire', and it's clearly Lynch's main intention. Whilst Inland Empire doesn't quite recycle characters from Mulholland Drive in the way that 2046 did with its predecessor (although Naomi Watts and Laura Harring both contribute to the film), its Hollywood setting, manipulation of time and space, erotic undercurrents and surreal mindgames all seem to refer back to that weirdly beautiful film. As with Mulholland Drive, locations are crucial and there are echoes of one place somewhere completely different (which fuels those Lynch followers keen to search for clues to the non-existent solution of a non-existent puzzle), and grand mansions are reinvented in alternate worlds as run down hovels. Most specifically, the cigarette hole through silk material in Inland Empire has a clear parallel with the box that changes everything in Mulholland Drive. Yet where Mulholland Drive did make an unusual kind of sense, if you yielded to its embracing of alternative realities and dream states, I'm not sure there's a real hidden meaning (and certainly not a solution) behind Inland Empire's inherent mysteries.

This film is so much like a dream, or more accurately, a ragingly discomforting, confounding nightmare, that it is undeniably something to be experienced rather than understood. Any attempt at summarising the plot is reductive and banal, and Lynch ratchets up the synaesthetic sensory tricks for which he is justly lauded. Like all Lynch films, Inland Empire has an outstanding soundtrack, with original compositions from Lynch standing alongside great European composers such as Wiltold Lutoslawski. Music is always used to devastating effect in Lynch films - and there's always one scene which will completely transform a famous pop song forever. It's impossible to hear Roy Orbison's 'In Dreams' as a simple unrequited love song after Blue Velvet - it's now laced with an irrevocably sinister poison. Similarly, you won't be able to hear Little Eva singing 'The Locomotion' at a wedding disco anymore without feeling palpably unnerved.

Lynch has spoken of how shooting the film entirely on Digital Video has liberated him, and the film is certainly visually fascinating, relying heavily on peculiar, warped close-ups. The opening shot is bravura, and demonstrates Lynch's admiration for the pure cinematic image - a shaft of dramatic light before a needle is shown descending on a vinyl record's grooves. Laura Dern's expressive, agitated performance carries the film through its entire three hours (whilst I was frequently baffled, I'm not sure I was ever bored), and the deliberately stilted conversation between her and her Polish gypsy neighbour near the outset of the film is audacious but also really quite funny. Dern progresses to master several performances in one, although it's hard to believe even she knew what it was all about when Lynch was directing her. Through her confusion, she elevates her role to something more than just another Lynchian 'woman in trouble' - she's the emotional and theoretical core of the film. There are some brilliant and powerful moments, some genuinely terrifying, others simply mesmerising. There's a real emotional power to the ending too, even if its underlying logic is completely opaque.

Yet, despite all this, there is the lingering sense that the film is both twitchy and patchy. It is captivating, but not at a sustained level. Whilst Mulholland Drive felt like a substantial piece of work that had the wisdom to be moving as well as confusing, much of Inland Empire just seems too bizarre. With its borrowings from short films originally made for Lynch's website, including some very odd sequences featuring a TV sitcom with a cast of anthropomorphic rabbits, it does feel like Lynch is trying to conflate too many ideas here. Where Mulholland Drive enthralled and hypnotised throughout, Inland Empire feels disjointed and fragmented, and in stylistic (if not thematic) terms actually more closely resembles Lost Highway. The central concept of a film-within-a-film (and possibly even another film within that) is hardly his most original construct either. I also felt slightly uncomfortable with the rather dubious connection of the film's sinister, perhaps even evil elements with a Polish contingent repeatedly attempting to penetrate the film's various universes. Yet whilst Mulholland Drive had plenty to say about parallel worlds and the human reliance on conventional ideas of time and space for meaning and logic, Inland Empire feels like a technically dazzling but perhaps somewhat empty mood piece by comparison. When its characters speak in non-sequiturs (I wondered whether most of Harry Dean Stanton's lines were constructed from Bob Dylan references), its easy to feel that Lynch is simply poking fun at his audience and most ardent admirers. Mind you, they're a pretty serious minded bunch of people, so maybe that's no bad thing.

Lynch remains a master of the modern cinema, simply because there is no other oeuvre in which this kind of experiment could possibly be achieved - it's not literary and it's not purely sonic - Lynch has a peculiar inventiveness that requires the careful marriage of image and sound. The title 'Inland Empire' presumably refers to the Hollywood hinterland, but has the obvious metaphorical reference to the subconscious and the interior monologue. Lynch has taken the psychological, subconscious focus to its utmost extreme with this film, and it's hard to see where he can go next, particularly given this film's recycling of previous ideas and themes. Any Lynch film is worth watching though - and Inland Empire is sometimes beautiful and bold.