Back From The Brink?

Neil Young's 'Prairie Wind'

It's somewhat appropriate that I should return from Canada just in time for the latest release from one of Canada's most famous artists. Neil Young has been treading water for quite some time now, from the pleasant but unremarkable 'Silver and Gold' to the ludicrous folly of 'Greendale'. Even the dogged 'Are You Passionate?', recorded with Booker T. Jones, seemed to lack inspiration. 'Prairie Wind' is therefore the first Neil Young album for several years that can come with a sticker attached generically describing it as 'the critically acclaimed new album from Neil Young' without breching the trade descriptions act. Sadly, it's arguably telling that they couldn't find anything more interesting to say about it.

In fact, the whole marketing campaign for 'Prairie Wind' has been a bit bizarre. Reprise are promoting it as the concluding part of the the 'Harvest' trilogy, following 'Harvest' and 'Harvest Moon', obviously in the hope of recapturing some of Young's fans lost in the recent years of underachievement. Hang on a minute though - wasn't that exactly how 'Silver and Gold' was promoted? It seems that Young has conveniently forgotten that he ever recorded that album, such is the similarity of 'Prairie Wind' in outlook, style and even artwork. Anyone expecting Young to return to the tempestuous charms of 'Sleeps With Angels' following his life-threatening brain aneurysm will be sorely disappointed with this defiantly nostalgic, reflective and relaxed work. The themes here are dreams, love, and family, all set against that delicate but wide landscape with which we are now so familiar.

Reviewers have hailed Young's vocals here as his most sensitive and affecting in years. To my ears, 'Prairie Wind' demonstrates marked vocal deterioration, sadly not a return to the ravaged growl of 'Tonight's The Night' or 'On The Beach', but in a slight tendency to drift slightly off-key. It's a more subtle change than the complete loss of control suffered by Bob Dylan, but it's worth noting nonetheless.

It doesn't help that the lyrics are largely mawkish and sentimental, however genuine the sentiment may be. Young should not be condemned for making such an unfashionably conservative record as this, but he can surely express his feelings a little more expressively than 'I just want to tell you you sure mean a lot to me/It may sound simple but you are the world to me'. It does indeed sound simple. Elsewhere, he's frequently pining for his youth and his Daddy, from the initial memory of being 'a growing boy rockin' on my Daddy's knee' in 'Far From Home' or, rather better in the title track, 'tryin' to remember what my Daddy said before too much time took away his head'.

The themes of 'Prairie Wind' only carry real bite when they are aligned with the desolate windswept landscape for which Young also harbours sincere affection - from the rolling red river in 'It's A Dream' to the wheatfields and northern sky of the title track and the 'amber waves of grain' in 'No Wonder'. Best of all is his desire to be buried 'where the buffalo used to roam' in 'Far From Home'. There is an evocative language here trying to escape but, perhaps with a sense of mortality hanging over him, Young doesn't quite seem to have given himself enough time to capture it coherently. Young is famous for his frequent political U-turns, but he seems to strive to forget the outside world entirely here. He threads memories of the immediate post 9/11 environment into 'No Wonder', but does so via references to Willie Nelson's rendition of America The Beautiful and some comments from comedian Chris Rock, rather than anything more contentious. He begins 'It's A Dream' trying to 'ignore what the paper says'.

Musically, it has a handful of highlights (although nothing compares too favourably with any of Young's real career peaks). 'No Wonder' benefits from a more beefy, bluesy sound and an intricate vocal arrangement. It's most reminiscent of Young's best work with Crosby, Stills and Nash. Similarly, the title track is also ambitious and powerful, with as forthright a sound as possible with the constrictions of an acoustic band. It sounds passionate and soulful. 'Far From Home' is whimsical, but lifted by the outstanding horn arrangement, whilst 'It's A Dream' features strings strongly reminiscent of Young's collaborations with the legendary Jack Nitzsche. There's plenty of context here, but the ideas are never really developed beyond references or vague memories.

'The Painter' and 'Falling Off The Face Of The Earth' are pretty on the surface, but they are also pretty inconsequential underneath. Young is on autopilot here - we know he can write songs like this in his sleep. Both could have fitted comfortably on 'Silver and Gold', but neither compare well with the more incisive and moving songs he wrote for 'Harvest Moon'. If we can't here another song as good as 'Birds' or 'Harvest', we could at least hope for something of the quality of 'From Hank To Hendrix' or 'One Of These Days'. Instead we get some cliched nostalgia for Elvis in 'He Was The King', a song that has been written so many times, and perhaps perfected by Gillian Welch in her wonderful 'Elvis Presley Blues'.

It all ends with 'When God Made Me', which is either a testament of personal faith or a questioning of fundamentalism, it's lyrics coded in a series of rhetorical questions. The song seems to have caused a great deal of controversy on the other side of the pond, but it's not explicitly confrontational. The music is uncomfortably turgid, which probably only serves to heighten the rather icky nature of the lyric. It's rather an unfortunate note on which to end such an imperfect collection.

I really hope there is another great album left in Neil Young, but whilst his live concerts with Crazy Horse continue to tend towards the indulgent and portentous, his solo work sees him repeating himself once more. Can Young, like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen have done, find an incisive outlook on encroaching mortality to reinvigorate his artistry?

Tapping In From Toronto

My first impressions are that Toronto is a great city, although perhaps a little more similar to other US cities than I had expected. There seems to be a very 'open' sense of security among residents in the area where I'm staying, and people seem happy (as long as the house is occupied), to just leave the front door ajar. I simply can't imagine this happening even in the calmest areas of suburban London, at least not without some degree of discomfort or paranoia.

It's very cosmopolitan, but the ethnic mix is very much divided into separate areas (Little Italy, Chinatown, the Portugese area). This certainly happens to some extent in London too, but for all its tensions and stresses, one senses that London's diversity is more successfully integrated. Many people cite this as one of the major plus points in our Olympic bid.

There's also a noticeable clash of architecture between traditional stone buildings and very modern, angular, concrete constructions. Nowhere is this more immediately visible than the University, where the main campus is decidedly old fashioned, and very much how you might expect a venerable educational institution to appear. The library buildings, however, are quite brutal in their design. I rather liked them - but I imagine that Prince Charles would not have approved. Of course, there's also the omnipresent CN Tower. We've yet to ascend it - but that seems like a tourist-y obligation that will no doubt be fulfilled before the trip is over. It's also interesting to note that this is yet another city where celebrity architect Daniel Liebeskind is leaving his mark, with the new glass extension to the Royal Ontario Museum. The museum itself seems somewhat depleted while the work is going on - and the extension looks remarkably similar to the new graduate centre at London Metropolitan University (also Liebeskind designed). I used to be a great admirer of Liebeskind's work - and his angular, highly original design for the Jewish Museum in Berlin (which I have sadly yet to see at first hand) seemed to speak volumes about 20th Century Jewish experience. More recently, however, although my knowledge of his actual techniques is certainly limited, there is the sense that he's been repeating the same idea. We'll have to wait and see what he makes of the new buildings in place of the former World Trade Centre in New York - undoubteldly his most high profile contract to date.

What better example of North American culture than the notorious Honest Ed's store. It's impossible to imagine anything like this springing up in London - a multi-purpose general store on a massive scale, developed by a philanthropic former theatrical impresario. No doubt Ed is a much loved figure in Toronto and at the ripe old age of 95, he's still going strong.

It's great, whilst staying with friends, to just savour living in the city, especially while the film festival is on (even though it looks unlikely that we'll brave the rush lines to secure any tickets - in another year, I'll buy myself a pass). Highlights so far have included going to see the Blue Jays play the Boston Red Sox at baseball - a very slow game indeed, lasting over four hours, but an experience to be savoured. We're going to the Rogers Centre Stadium again on Saturday afternoon, for what will hopefully be a more thrilling match. Our own game of softball proved surprisingly exciting - an impromptu match against some rather rough looking chaps who turned out to mostly be quite sporting, although not without the occasional piece of unwarranted aggression.

Low point so far has to be being dragged to see The Aristocrats, which ranks as one of the worst films I've seen this year. I knew I would hate this film before I went, but hoped that my pre-judgment might be proved wrong. Sadly, my sentiments were only bolstered by what was a turgid and completely indulgent 'comedy' documentary. The best thing by far about this film was its tagline, which promised 'no sex, no nudity, unspeakable obscenity'. This suggested that, in a modern desensitised age, it might be possible to be more obscene by suggestion and implication rather than through depiction. The film delivered nothing of the sort. The film is about a supposedly legendary non-joke among comedians, whereby the comedian relates describing an act to a talent agency. The act itself is as horrible and obscene as the comedian wishes it to be - and can involve all sorts of supposedly taboo-busting behaviour from defecation and incest to paedophilia and necrophilia. The punchline is that the act call themselves 'the aristocrats', or in some cases 'the sophisticates'. This at least finally proves that Americans do 'get' irony, but it makes for a rather flimsy premise for what is repeatedly presented to us as an uproariously funny gag, and it certainly makes for a ludicrous premise for a 90 minute film. It's not surprising that it's independently produced - you can't exactly imagine how they'd pitch this to a major studio.

The film itself is a poorly edited rag-bag of mostly American comics trying out their own versions of the joke, or providing fairly banal insights into the reasons for its success. It is unbelievably repetetive and tedious - a bit like listening to a one note guitar solo for 90 minutes. The same rather limited conceptions of obscenity are resorted to again and again - without being either particularly shocking or funny. They are also pasted together mostly at random, with no sense for exploring themes or coherent ideas. It's also horrendously self-congratulatory, with a successsion of comedians basically patting themselves on the back for being so damn brilliant.

It's not without its moments - but these suggest that the use of obscenity is only meaningful or successful when it has a purpose or a context - it's much funnier when the shock tactics are used to debunk the self-importance of artists such as Maya Angelou or, even more contentiously, entire religious faiths. Best of all were the poor taste situation of child abuse brilliantly constructed by Sarah Silverman, or the hilarious mime sequence (which perhaps indicates that visual comedy works best after all). I will concede that I have an inherent suspicion of stand-up and preference for sketch shows and sitcoms. You have to be damn good to sustain the attention of an audience at stand-up, and crude humour is rarely sufficient to entertain me. The scenes which created genuinely challenging situation comedy, as opposed to mere sucking and f*cking, therefore worked best for me.

The film reaches a rather obvious conclusion 3/4 of the way through - namely that it might now be impossible to shock people as it once was. Yes! This is true! We live in an age desensitised by onscreen violence and internet pornography! Basic shock tactics no longer offend! Why, then, have these people even bothered? This film no more pushes boundaries than I push weights. Would this not have been a much better starting point for the film? What followed could then have been a more entertaining and insightful investigation of how stand-up comedians could shock and entertain their audiences in the modern world. Instead, we end with a truly awful scene of Gilbert Gotfried performing in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. We are told that he brilliantly lightened the mood by deploying the aristocrats joke. Yet his telling is one of the least inventive here and his performance is at a gala event - to an audience consisting almost entirely of other comics. The film resolutely fails to investigate how other audiences react to the joke - we simply have to accept that the directors at face value that it is the stuff of legend.

The film's supporters say it is more about the style of delivery than the content of the joke. Perhaps so - but imporvisation, be it comic or musical - depends on an understanding of tradition and form as much as it does individual innovation and spirit. The film could in fact have told us much more about the individual style and approaches of the comedians it featured, but the one-note focus could not provide the necessary insight. Avoid this one like the plague - it's the cinematic equivalent of being anally raped whilst your father kills and rapes your mother in front of you. Torturous, in other words.

Quirks, Geniuses and Frauds

Well sod the dispute over their leader’s nationality, I’m simply delighted that Antony and the Johnsons picked up the Mercury Music Prize this week. He now joins a small group of deserving winners (including Badders and Primal Scream) and must now count as the most idiosyncratic and unusual winner yet. Perhaps this uncharacteristically brave decision from Simon Frith and the panel of judges may indicate bolder selections to come – perhaps we might get a winner from the fields of jazz, folk or contemporary composition next year? Probably wishful thinking! As for the antics of MIA (apparently walking out in protest as soon as the announcement was made and raising her middle fingers to cameras in the protest), how pathetic! To my mind, her album is extremely unlikely to be remembered favourably in even five years’ time – there’s just a wealth of better hip hop and electro music out there to contend with once the novelty has worn off. Why did anyone seriously think the Kaiser Chiefs would win it?

In light of Antony’s victory, and a whole wealth of music from strange, marginal figures suddenly bouncing into the mainstream, it seems appropriate to now catch up on some of these releases.

I’ve asked the question on these pages before, but I’m going to ask it again. Just what is it about Devendra Banhart that is making critics gush so much? I tried so hard to like ‘Rejoicing In The Hands’, but it was resolutely one dimensional, and many of the songs were simply grating. At least his new album ‘Cripple Crow’ has a crisp title, instead of his usual highly pretentious and verbose rambling. As his first release with a full band, it automatically stands apart from its predecessors.

This doesn’t necessarily make it more successful though. For my money, ‘Cripple Crow’ finally confirms Banhart as a colossal fraud. Rather than being in touch with some sort of psychedelic weird folk tradition, Banhart encapsulates the worst and most regressive elements of the defiantly indie mentality. There’s a lot of warbling and not much in the way of melody on ‘Cripple Crow’. There’s also a lyrical obsession with childhood and a return to youth, the effect of which is, ahem, somewhat crippling. ‘Long Haired Child’, ‘I Feel Just Like A Child’, ‘Chinese Children’, ‘Little Boys’ – even the titles are nauseating in the extreme.

On ‘Cripple Crow’, Banhart and his newly drafted cohorts attempt to cover a wide range of genres, clearly in the hope of producing an esoteric masterpiece. With 22 tracks, there’s just far too much material here and the listener is left with the overwhelming sense that this contains at least two separate albums jostling for position. Therefore what many are claiming as Banhart’s most accessible album to date is actually nothing of the sort – it’s his most confounding. This might be a welcome change from the monotonous ‘Rejoicing In The Hands’, but it’s a lurch from one extreme to another. ‘Santa Maria de Feira’ is a woefully unconvincing foray into Latin American stylings whilst ‘Lazy Butterfly’ comes with a hint of Indian mysticism (and a thoroughly painful whining vocal from Banhart). Worst of all is the horrific title track, where Banhart’s tremulous warble is at its most exaggerated and affected. Later in the album, he even attempts to present himself as a countrified southern soul singer. It would appear the only things missing are a stab at Eastern European Black Metal or some rough and tumble free jazz.

There’s never any sense of innovation amongst these genre exercises though. Much like The White Stripes, it seems clear that Banhart has aimed to make this album sound as aged as possible, and many of these tracks seem founded on the production techniques of the mid-sixties. This would not be too great a problem if these techniques and ideas were being manipulated into a new aesthetic, as Jack White has managed so successfully. Banhart, however, seems more content on simple reconstruction and homage. There’s even a song here called ‘The Beatles’ for heaven’s sake!

Luckily, there are some promising moments. ‘Long Haired Child’ benefits from its driving rhythm and unconventional structure, suddenly switching styles halfway through with no prior warning. The opening ‘Now That I Know’ is delicate and underplayed, but its pretty melody is squandered by Banhart’s opaque mumblings. The propulsive bluesy strum of ‘I Feel Just Like A Child’ might be mildly diverting did it not outstay it’s welcome by at least a minute.

There is something fundamentally self-regarding and galling about Banhart’s assumption of a psychedelic guru mantle that makes much of his work difficult to admire, let alone like. Everything on ‘Cripple Crow’ is imbued with self-importance and superiority, even when glimpses of humour are aloud to seep in. Whilst a number of the arrangements are perfectly pleasant until he starts singing, as soon as he opens his mouth I just want to scream ‘hippy tw*t’! Banhart is not the ‘new Bob Dylan’ and we should not be hypnotised into praising this questionable piffle.

Luckily, Banhart appears to associate himself with rather more interesting musicians, his current girlfriend being one half of beguiling sister duo CocoRosie. There is a genuine sense of drama and sophistication to their music, and much of it is unusual and challenging. New album ‘Noah’s Ark’ follows the nomadic existence enforced on the group as they toured their acclaimed debut. It’s a decidedly weird but brilliantly expressive record. At its best, it resembles the theatrical, emotive and highly feminine creative space occupied by the likes of Bjork and Kate Bush.

There’s a whole world of weird and wonderful sounds here that help CocoRosie realise their own hypnotic, fairytale world, from the toy piano sounds of ‘K-hole’ and ‘South 2nd’ to the idiosyncratic electronics of ‘Armageddon’ and the title track. If CocoRosie have a specific formula, it seems to be to take deceptively simple melodic lines and repeat them incessantly, lodging them in the memory like catechisms or chants.

This is before we’ve even mentioned the vocals, which are at once skeletal, frail, wistful and deeply haunting. Perhaps the best example here of their uncanny artistry is ‘Tekno Love Song’, where the vocals sound like a distorted, freakish reincarnation of Billie Holliday. This is all set to a peculiarly synthetic harp sound that plays the kind of melody commonly found emerging from an old musical box. Their imaginary world is enchanting and enticing, but there’s quiet menace lurking beneath the surface.

Despite their harsh vocal mannerisms, the voices often mesh together with disarming beauty, most notably on ‘The Sea Is Calm’, an extraordinary track where strange, sinister electronics burble mysteriously but never quite pierce the magical sheen. Equally brilliant is ‘Beautiful Boyz’, which sounds beautifully elegiac, mainly thanks to the presence of Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons fame. It’s wonderfully absorbed in its own world, isolated from reality and extravagantly expressive. It’s also possibly the gayest thing ever recorded.

This is a gem of an album – highly original, idiosyncratic, mysterious and bewitching. It inhabits its own peculiar realm with quiet confidence and questing experimentalism.

I should really despise The Decemberists for all the reasons I’m suspicious of Devendra Banhart. They are immensely twee. With their sea shanties and epic balladry, they appear to be coming from another era entirely, and they attempt to inhabit a world of which they can surely have no experience whatsoever. And just look at those ridiculous costumes they’ve worn for the CD sleeve! Yet, like ‘Her Majesty, The Decemberists’ before it, ‘Picaresque’ is such a consistently impressive album that such concerns are thrown out of the window. Colin Meloy’s songwriting is more elaborate here and the arrangements have become more expansive to match his lofty ambitions. There’s wit and imagination here as well as the intention to reconstruct a folk tradition.

‘Picaresque’ is their most coherent and accessible work to date, with an endearing balance struck between introverted, delicate ballads such as ‘Eli The Barrow Boy’ and huge, driving pop songs such as ’16 Military Wives’ and ‘The Sporting Life’. The latter is the band’s attempt, as so many have done, to recalibrate the rhythm from The Supremes’ classic ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’. It’s a strong track but possibly owes a major debt to Belle and Sebastian’s ‘Boy With The Arab Strap’. The former is simply outstanding, with its parping brass and rhythmic insistence. There is a slightly elusive attempt here to move away from the historical narrative and engage with the modern world, although the purpose of the song is not entirely clear. Still, it’s immensely hummable and hugely entertaining nonetheless.

They still love their seafaring of course and, despite stretching to more than 8 minutes, there’s the nagging sense that we’ve heard ‘The Mariner’s Revenge Song’ a few too many times before. The appropriately thunderous opener ‘The Infanta’ and ‘The Bagman’s Gambit’ make for less crude epics. The former is especially thrilling, with its relentless military drumming and rapidly strummed chords. I also can’t think of many better ways to start an album than with a song about the coronation of a child monarch. This is perhaps the best example of the peculiar milieu in which this band operates. For the most part, these are highly theatrical songs buried in a distant past. On the more tender moments, though, chief songwriter Colin Meloy does achieve some genuine human interest, and the deceptively simple ‘From My Own True Love (Lost At Sea)’, the closing ‘Of Angels and Angles’ and ‘Eli The Barrow Boy’ are touching despite the band’s numerous affectations.

The range of instrumentation on display here makes for an impressive sound. The album benefits greatly from the presence of the supremely talented Petra Haden (daughter of jazz bassist Charlie – her recent album with guitarist Bill Frisell is well worth investigating) on viola and harmony vocals. The brass section play with vigour, but also in a manner that is complementary rather than overbearing.

Perhaps the major precursor for the fuzz-folk impressionism of The Decemberists was ‘In The Aeroplane Over The Sea’, the masterful 1998 second album from Neutral Milk Hotel, now finally made widely available in the UK courtesy of Domino (clearly putting some of that Franz Ferdinand money to good use by buying up most of the Merge Records back catalogue). Now widely accepted as a classic of its kind, this expansive work veers rapidly from tender understatement to freakish psych rock with gypsy brass band arrangements. It seems to have been a musician’s record, never really achieving much in the way of commercial impact but judging at least from the comments on the slipcase of the CD reissue, inspiring artists as diverse as Franz Ferdinand and Boom Bip.

I was pointed in the direction of this record a year or so ago after I’d heard the Broken Family band’s cover of ‘The King Of Carrot Flowers Pt 3’. Clearly, the band has been massively influential on the writing of Steve Adams. ‘On Avery Island’, the first Neutral Milk Hotel album opens with a song called ‘Song Against Sex’ whilst ‘Cold Water Songs’, the first full length EP from BFB contains a song called ‘Song Against Robots’. The connection, one suspects, is more than mere coincidence. Whereas the BFB version of ‘King Of Carrot Flowers’ is a weary, anguished trudge, the Neutral Milk Hotel original is a scuzzy, unrestrained blast of distorted melody.

Along with Olivia Tremor Control’s ‘Dusk At Cubist Castle’, ‘In The Aeroplane…’ is probably the most significant artistic statement to emerge from the Elephant 6 recording collective. The collective also included the consistently infectious Apples In Stereo, whose Bob Schneider is at the helm for production duties here. The songs flow seamlessly together in an intelligent use of studio resources that serves to emphasise the wild distinctions between the delicate and the frayed and savage. Jeff Mangum’s extraordinary vocals also underlie these contrasts. He’s wistful and reserved on ‘The King Of Carrot Flowers Pt 1’ but harsh and confident on ‘Holland, 1945’.

There is a constant and heavy acoustic guitar strum throughout these recordings, but the imposing songs frequently benefit from more exploratory arrangements. Whilst the structures and chord sequences are deceptively simple, the end result is disjointed but hallucinatory in its effect. The contrast between the bold, ragged ‘Ghost’ and the more sombre and reflective closer ‘Two Headed Boy pt 2’ is impressively controlled.

Lyrically, it’s an elusive, maybe even abstract album that builds and sustains its own mythologizing imagery. Mangum frequently sounds anguished and troubled when singing these peculiar verses, and the effect is weirdly disorientating.

With one foot planted firmly in the classic rock canon (there are hints of The Beach Boys, The Beatles and Pink Floyd) and the other in a pool of more unpredictable influences, including British and Eastern European folk music, Neutral Milk Hotel have crafted an ambitious sound that is difficult to classify. We’re still waiting for the follow-up…

We had better not forget the low-key reappearance of Bjork, following up Medulla with another soundtrack project, this time providing the music for her husband Matthew Barney’s new film Drawing Restraint 9. Barney is a defiant obscurantist and passionate believer in the artistic value of film. It’s no surprise then that both the film and much of the music would appear to be somewhat impenetrable. Bjork did an impressive and effective job with the unfairly maligned soundtrack to Lars Von Trier’s Dancer In The Dark, successfully capturing that film’s claustrophobic fear, disintegration and extreme sadness. Much of Drawing Restraint 9 may prove a challenge to even her most faithful fans.

Barney’s film depicts two guests on a Japanese whaling ship who mutate into whales to avoid drowning when a fatal storm strikes. The music on Bjork’s soundtrack goes some way towards capturing the magical possibilities portrayed in the film, as well as returning to recurring themes within Bjork’s oeuvre, such as the contrasts between tradition and innovation, destruction and beauty. Much like Medulla before it, ‘Drawing Restraint 9’ combines traditional instrumentation and styles with modern production techniques. Unlike Medulla, though, Bjork is frequently a distant, largely directorial presence here, and the emphasis is less on vocals and much more on the uncompromisingly minimalist music. Many of the tracks deploy the traditional Japanese instrument the Sho (played by Miyumi Mayata), and the album focuses more on the unconventional sounds of this instrument rather than relying on Bjork’s preoccupation with programmed beats.

There are moments of brilliance here. The opener ‘Gratitude’ effortlessly melds the soft vocals of Will Oldham with the harp of long-term Bjork collaborator Zeena Parkins. The lyrics brought so vividly to life by Oldham are actually the text of a letter written to General Macarthur, thanking him for relaxing the ban on whaling. It’s an unlikely success, but it has eerie and haunting qualities that cannot be ignored. Equally, the dazzling ‘Holographic Entrypoint’ bears the hallmarks of Bjork’s genius, and also provides some pointers as to where she might go next, with its skeletal percussion and wailing vocals. It’s a remarkably theatrical track, and it sounds completely unique.
Although it is not too long a record, ‘Drawing Restraint 9’ becomes a bit of a chore when taken as a whole. There are a lot of wordless, wailing passages that sound confrontational without ever becoming too aggressive. There are absolutely no pop songs whatsoever – it is very much a mood piece. Taken on that level, it’s undoubtedly impressive (although the brilliant integration of emotional profundity, dazzling musical invention and enchanting mood on ‘Vespertine’ remains unchallenged as her greatest achievement so far). It’s also substantially different from its immediate predecessors, giving advance warning that Bjork still has plenty of ground left to cover in her increasingly unpredictable career. She continues to drift out on her own journeys, now entirely removed from the confines of the mainstream

From The Sublime To The Ridiculous

The sublime being ‘Year Of Meteors’, the fourth album from Seattle singer-songwriter Laura Veirs, an album which, quite unfairly in my view, appears to have divided the critics. An obvious comparison can be made here with the rather lukewarm reaction to Erin McKeown’s ‘We Will Become Like Birds’, demonstrating a clear tendency in the corporate media to castigate female songwriters for attempting to enrich their sound and broaden their appeal. The consensus appears to be that Veirs and McKeown, by embracing what may or may not be a ‘more mainstream’ approach, have diluted their artistry. This may well have been the case with artists such as Liz Phair or Tori Amos in the recent past, but is palpable nonsense with McKeown and now Veirs.

A case can certainly be made that ‘Year Of Meteors’ is a more accessible record than last year’s highly acclaimed ‘Carbon Glacier’ but this is not of itself a criminal offence. ‘Carbon Glacier’ made much of ethereal atmospherics and Veirs’ customary ice and water metaphors, but it also placed greater emphasis on the more abrasive elements of Veirs’ unusual delivery. Here, she sounds softer and more controlled, a style that seems well matched with the delicate pluckings beneath her.

If the songs themselves might be more conventional (and certainly less elusive), this could hardly be said of the arrangements. The wonderful opener ‘Fire Snakes’ crackles and spits delicately like a burgeoning campfire, its subtle interweaving of electronics and acoustics remarkably effective. This track, ‘Black Gold Blues’ and the evocative ‘Parisian Dream’ work particularly well due to the presence of Eyvind King on Viola, who crafts layers of shimmering melody.

Even when Veirs appears to draw reserve from inherited traditions, such as on the Neil Young-esque single ‘Galaxies’, the instrumentation serves to distance her from obvious reference points. ‘Galaxies’ comes alive because of its multitude of keyboard sounds rather than its chugging guitars. On ‘Secret Someones’, a relatively straightforward pop song is imbued with depth by virtue of its offbeat jazzy chords and loose-limbed rhythmic backdrop.

Lyrically, her combination of images of the natural world with memories of love past and present, concealed and lost remains enticing in its directness. For the most part, she avoids pretension, although she is certainly at her best when she avoids overtly ‘poetic’ language. On ‘Year Of Meteors’, her melding of words and music is effortlessly fluid.

Somewhere between the sublime and the ridiculous was the strangely low-key, under-attended live appearance from Ian Carr’s Nucleus at Cargo in Shoreditch. A former teacher of mine, and a massive influence on my knowledge of the jazz tradition as well as my musical ability, Carr is finally receiving some of his dues as a legend of British jazz, a gifted writer and composer and something of an innovator. Ian has played a major role in the promotion of British Jazz through his broadcasting and writing (his books on Miles Davis and Keith Jarrett remain definitive, although the latter is still sadly out of print) as well as through his own composition and performance. I therefore couldn’t pass on the opportunity to see his long-promised return to live performance.

Sadly this was not to be. Now 72, and following an operation earlier in the year, Ian Carr has been left unable to perform. Visibly struggling as he announced the band at the beginning of the show, Carr now seems a much frailer figure than the person who was still teaching jazz workshops just six years ago. He introduced Chris Batchelor, the guest trumpet player who would be ‘playing his parts’ (although presumably improvising his own solos). Well, if you can use surrogate mothers, why not a surrogate trumpeter? Ian’s decision not to attempt to perform may have been a wise one – I remember the deeply unpleasant experience of watching a horribly diminished Freddie Hubbard at the North Sea Jazz Festival a few years ago. Still, whilst 72 is a pretty ripe age to still be playing music, it’s sad that some avatars such as Sonny Rollins and Wayne Shorter are still pushing the envelope at a similar age, whilst others such as Carr, who no doubt wish to be doing the same, are unable to do so.

What initially felt a very strange and uncomfortable experience, as Ian watched the band play from the side of the stage, occasionally smiling and providing directions for effective bandleader and saxophonist Phil Todd, quickly eased into something celebratory and massively entertaining. Featuring longstanding Nucleus regulars such as Mark Wood, keyboardist Geoff Castle (who played with poise throughout) and the aforementioned Todd, the band (re)captured the energy and spirit of Ian’s compositions with considerable gusto.

Never particularly enamoured with entirely free improvisation, Ian Carr tended to prefer groovy, rock-influenced fusions with a keenly felt connection with the blues. Perhaps his intention to refashion the jazz tradition through the spectrum of rock and modern electronics could best be exemplified by the ‘Theme For Jelly Roll’, a tune written as a tribute to Jelly Roll, but written in 7/4 time because, as Ian himself put it at the microphone, ‘Jelly Roll would never have written it like that’. Like many of Ian’s tunes, it’s a driving, playful number with plenty of scope for swashbuckling rhythm playing.

Many of these tunes were staples of the London Fusion Orchestra when I was involved on drums, so it was fascinating to at last hear these tunes played live by the masters. The opening ‘Lady Bountiful’ was a great deal more lush and reflective than we ever played it, although I was pleased to hear the band still rocking out a bit towards the end. The band handled the deceptively simple interruptions of the funky ‘Easy Does It Now’ as if they’d last performed it yesterday, whilst the long ‘Roots’ and ‘Out Of The Long Dark’ had a flowing, almost aquatic vibe. Todd and Batchelor soloed expressively throughout, although the melodies were sometimes obscured by some slightly dubious tuning, probably a direct result of the venue’s excessive heat. The real lynchpin of the group was arguably Geoff Castle, who managed to combine lyrical soloing with punchy rhythmic accompaniments with real aplomb.

Perhaps slightly mis-promoted as a return to live performance from Carr, the small audience mercifully remained highly supportive and appreciative throughout, cheering his infrequent ventures to the microphone to introduce his compositions. The music remains an inspiration to myself and countless other musicians to have passed through his workshops, and it’s greatly satisfying to see DJs such as Gilles Petersen and promoters such as 3Headz bring his work to wider attention and to a younger audience. A line can be traced directly from the exploratory work of new British bands such as Polar Bear and Acoustic Ladyland back to the jazz-rock fusions developed by Nucleus in the 1970s. 3Headz, who completed a three-year mission in organising this concert, are apparently working on a DVD documentary on Carr’s work, which should see the light of day early next year. Those with any interest in the development of British Jazz should seek it out when it emerges, along with the BGO reissue programme of the Nucleus back catalogue, as well as more recent CD packages of the classic Ian Carr-Don Rendell quintet albums and Neil Ardley’s ‘Greek Variations’ and ‘Kaleidoscope of Rainbows’ (major works on which Carr performs).

The ridiculous is ‘A Bigger Bang’, the first collection of new studio material since 1997 from The Rolling Stones, and surely the guiltiest musical pleasure of the year. Critics appear to be falling over themselves to hail ‘A Bigger Bang’ as a return to the ramshackle and exuberant form of ‘Exile On Main Street’. Now, let’s not get too carried away, it’s by no means a five star classic or anything like that. It is, however, the first Stones album in, well, over twenty years if we’re honest, to really capture the sound of a band enjoying themselves rather than simply turning up to work to complete some kind of laboured obligation. The bombastic sound values that have made their live shows dogged and dependable rather than inspired remain in place (Charlie Watts’ drums are massively loud throughout). It’s also frequently crude and impolite, but the Stones have never really pretended to be anything else.

A number of the tracks are characterised by the familiar Stones blustering barroom boogie of ‘Brown Sugar’ or ‘Honkey Tonk Women’, some more successfully than others. Opener ‘Rough Justice’ is raucous and thrilling, with Mick Jagger steadfastly refusing to grow old gracefully. Its first verse is gleefully hilarious, with Jagger spitting out self-referential lyrics with sheer relish (‘once upon a time I was your little rooster – now I’m just one of your cocksssss!’). Maybe it’s all a little embarrassing, but Jagger at last sounds engaged and spirited again. They repeat the trick elsewhere with the fantastic ‘Driving Rain’, which comes with an explosive Keith Richards guitar solo, and the relentless ‘Oh No Not You Again’.

Sadly, a small handful of the remaining tracks built on the backbeat blueprint are somewhat less successful. Keith’s vocal on ‘Infamy’ is refreshingly gutsy, but the song itself is somewhat undistinguished, whilst ‘It Won’t Take Long’ harbours unwelcome memories of the Steel Wheels era generic rockers, with the Stones once again content to play a second-rate model of AC/DC. ‘Let Me Down Real Slow’ is perhaps a touch pedestrian, but at least has a lingering, mildly infectious chorus.

Unsurprisingly, it’s where they veer away from this overworked template that The Stones achieve their greatest surprises and biggest successes. ‘Streets Of Love’ is at once reflective ballad and stadium singalong. It bears a passing resemblance to ‘Sonnet’ by The Verve, but Jagger’s genuinely affecting vocal elevates it. ‘Back Of My Hand’ is a fearful, apocalyptic blues to rival even some of the best moments on ‘Let It Bleed’. Elsewhere, the band seem to have found a love for the simple groove, with the slinky funk of ‘Rain Fall Down’ (which is enjoyable as long as you don’t find the image of Jagger ‘may-yay-yayking sweet lurrrrve’ a little distasteful) and the exuberant ‘She Saw Me Coming’. The latter sees Jagger once more delight in the opportunity to deliver yet another woman-you-done-me-wrong song. Best of all is the gospel-tinged ‘Laugh I Nearly Died’ where the band at last recaptures some kind of subtlety and nuance.

Luckily, there’s also adequate balance to offset the fist-in-the-air stadium rockers. The rueful, uncharacteristically self-deprecating ‘Biggest Mistake’ is a brilliant country-tinged pop song that may have just rendered the entirety of the last Ryan Adams album redundant. Equally touching is the soulful, emotive ‘This Place Is Empty’, with Keith again handling lead vocals.

There is a great collaborative spirit at work on ‘A Bigger Bang’ that seems to have been sorely lacking on the 80s and 90s Stones albums. Keith and Ronnie’s guitars duel with familiar zest, but Mick Jagger also plays a great deal of guitar, enriching the sound in the process. The songs also seem more considered and less rushed, another sure sign that Jagger and Richards have started working in harmony once more. Unbelievably, there’s life in these old dogs yet.
There’s plenty of catching up to do before I jet off to Canada at the weekend, so expect another post before the end of the week (I still haven’t reviewed Sufjan Stevens for heaven’s sake!). At the very least, I won’t be able to resist making some sort of irreverent comment on the Mercury Music Prize (the winner is announced tomorrow night). Now that the London bombings have made MIA’s ‘freedom-fighter-chic’ a little more unpalatable, I’m not sure who is going to win this one. I can’t see the Kaiser Chiefs following Franz Ferdinand for another spiky pop victory. It’s an outsider, but I’m going to plump for the wildly overrated Go Team album as a likely winner at this late stage. I still hope it will be Polar Bear though – one of those token entries is going to have to win it at some stage!

Lights! Camera! Action!

Lots to write about at the moment – especially as posts have become infrequent due to photoshoots, rehearsing and housewarming parties amongst other things.

I’ll start with two absolutely splendid gigs. I thought I’d written about the Broken Family Band so many times that a review for their Green Man warm up show at The King’s Head in Crouch End would be entirely superfluous. Not entirely – as this proved to be pretty much the best BFB gig I’ve seen outside Cambridge’s Strawberry Fair festival, where they always earn their rapturous reception. They were on home turf of sorts here too, as singer Steve Adams now lives ‘just round the corner’ from the North London venue, more well-known as a comedy club but increasingly home to some fine music-themed evenings. Adams was on top form throughout the gig, his trademark dry, borderline-misanthropic humour almost being overworked.

The augmentation of the band to a six-piece really made the evening special. BFB gigs always come deliriously alive when Timothy Victor joins them to play banjo, perhaps somewhat oddly, as he is probably the least animated member of the band onstage. He does however seem to galvanise them into reaching a higher level of energy and enthusiasm, and tonight saw the band channel their ragged, carefree abandon into something highly entertaining. Also joining the band was a girl accordion player (sadly I’ve completely forgotten her name), who added richness and depth to the sound. Also in evidence was a carefully selected setlist, incorporating more songs from the excellent ‘Jesus Songs’ mini-LP, which is too frequently given short thrift. After a visceral reading of ‘Mother O’Jesus’, Steve Adams admitted that they don’t often play the song, perhaps because of the potentially alienating harsh falsetto shriek of the chorus melody. It was a pleasing surprise for me. Some older songs were brought out of retirement too, including the more reflective ‘Song For Robots’ and ‘Gone Dark’ which provided effective balance for the more raucous and unrestrained quality of the newer songs (‘The Booze and The Drugs’ and ‘You’re Like A Woman’ already seem to be live favourites). They also reprised their madcap cover version of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Diamonds In The Mine’, a song they truly make their own. Wonderful stuff.

From a tiny pub basement to what some people have (unfairly in my view) described as a ‘Victorian monstrosity’ and a ‘shed’, Alexandra Palace. Why do people have such a problem with this venue? For large shows, it’s a much more satisfying location than Wembley Arena (hardly less isolated after all) or the hideous Earl’s Court. Whilst the notoriously muffled sound isn’t ideal, to my ears it’s really no worse than the problematic Brixton Academy. Certainly a venue of this nature requires a performer to command the stage and involve the crowd, which is exactly what Nick Cave did last Thursday night. Some rather pious longstanding followers of The Bad Seeds have declared it the worst Nick Cave gig ever on his messageboard, some of them denying those (such as myself) for whom this was a first viewing of Nick Cave any right to have an opinion on the event. I’ve been meaning to see The Bad Seeds for years, but time, money and circumstances have always conspired against me.

For my money, this was an excellent show. Cave is perhaps less ponderous and detached a songwriter than he once was, even embracing self-effacing humour on the recent double set ‘Abattoir Blues’ and ‘The Lyre Of Orpheus’, excellent albums which unsurprisingly provided the bulk of the material for this one-off show. He’s also a magnetic and compelling performer, with limbs flailing everywhere and a now powerful voice that frequently veers (mostly effectively) away from the well-trodden path of conventional melody. Behind him, the band (featuring two of more or less everything, including drummers) cook up a storm. The absence of recently departed Blixa Bargeld is felt much less keenly than one might expect. The combination of the two reaches its zenith with the frighteningly apocalyptic gospel of ‘Hiding All Way’ and ‘There She Goes My Beautiful World’, where the gospel backing vocalists add a touch of soul to the proceedings. The former ends with a violent pronouncement – ‘There is a WAR coming!’ which sounds both chilling and thrilling at the same time. Another clear highlight was the strangely infectious and gripping ‘Come Into My Sleep’, which worked very well indeed.

Most of the gripes seem to have been with the setlist, which certainly favoured the most familiar material from the back catalogue. This wasn’t an intimate club show though and in front of the broadest audience he has yet managed to attract, Cave wisely opted to perform his most enduringly popular songs. What made them powerful were the subtle changes in arrangement, often to incorporate the gospel choir. The melody for the moving ‘Ship Song’ was subtly recrafted (‘a song about ships-n-history-n-shit’ according to Cave), whilst Warren Ellis’ wildly inventive violin playing re-animated ‘The Weeping Song’. ‘Red Right Hand’ was dispensed with surprisingly early in the set, but seemingly with undiminished enthusiasm and commitment.

It would have been great had the set been slightly longer (just over 90 minutes always seems like a bit of a scrimp from an artist with such a substantial catalogue to chose from). This might have allowed for some selections from ‘The Boatman’s Call’ or ‘Nocturama’, two of the many Cave albums left entirely ignored tonight. I also found my attention momentarily wandering around the time Mick Harvey strapped on an acoustic guitar, with a particularly slow ‘O Children’ and a slightly lightweight ‘Breathless’ not quite able to compete with the frenzy and fervour of the more relentless songs. Clearly the intention was to provide balance – again this might have been more effectively achieved with songs like ‘He Wants You’ (from ‘Nocturama’) or ‘Brompton Oratory’ (‘The Boatman’s Call’). Order was restored with a blisteringly intense version of ‘The Mercy Seat’.

These minor concerns seemed like quibbles after a wonderful encore, which managed to effortlessly combine new material (‘The Lyre Of Orpheus’ with amusing audience participation) with older classics (‘Do You Love Me’) and surprise selections (‘Darker With The Day’) ending with a brutal, excoriating version of ‘Stagger Lee’, with Cave shrieking and kicking his legs like a demented banshee, leaving everyone in stunned awe. If the end is nigh, it’s better to end on a high.

There are also a handful of new albums that I’ve yet to cover, starting with the outstanding ‘Leaders Of The Free World’ from Elbow. Just three albums into their career, Elbow’s great skill so far has been in crafting significant variations and developments in their sound whilst retaining a distinctive and recognisable character. Much of that character comes directly from the dour but dryly humorous vocals and lyrics of Guy Garvey – and his development continues apace here. Musically, ‘Leaders…’ is substantially less abrasive and rhythmically chaotic than ‘Cast Of Thousands’, instead opting to emphasise the band’s talent for layered arrangements, melancholy atmospherics and flowing, effortless melodies. There is a preference for acoustic instruments here, whether it be the delicate guitar lines of ‘The Everthere’, the restrained strum of ‘An Imagined Affair’ or the more unusual plucked strings of the marvellously titled ‘Picky Bugger’.

These are consistently high quality, emotionally captivating, slow-burning songs of the kind that Chris Martin simply cannot write. Garvey is completely engaged with sense experience, emotional feelings and, particularly on the title track, with global politics as well. Here, he combines feelings of personal frustration with anger at ‘the commander-in-chief’. Garvey claims that ‘The leaders of the free world are just little boys throwing stones/and it’s easy to ignore until they’re knocking on the doors of your homes’. The song goes beyond critique and into the realms of palpable menace, particularly with its chilling closing lines (‘passing the gun from father to feckless son/We’re climbing a landslide where only the good die young’). It has an epic quality and tremendous power.

Elsewhere there’s a lingering melancholy perfectly captured in quietly affecting opener ‘Station Approach’ with its delicately chiming chords. Better still is the brilliant first single ‘Forget Myself’, which has a massive chorus for which even the overused adjective ‘soaring’ might actually be appropriate. It’s songs this striking that should catapult them into the mainstream. Memories of the hauntingly beautiful ‘Switching Off’ (one of the highlights of ‘Casts Of Thousands’) are conjured by the gradual swell of ‘The Stops’ and ‘Great Expectations’ is wonderfully evocative, relating an unwitting exchanging of vows on the 135 bus to Bury.

It’s mostly restrained and controlled, but its brilliantly consistent and frequently touching. Only on the twitchy ‘Mexican Standoff’ do they really attempt to recreate the unpredictable stuttering rhythms that characterised parts of ‘Cast Of Thousands’. Liberally ‘borrowing’ the riff from Radiohead’s ‘National Anthem’, it marries Morrissey-esque murderous self-deprecation (‘Your sweet reassurances don’t change the fact that he’s better looking than me/Yet he’d look ideal ‘neath the wheels of a car’) with a relentless, turbulent energy. It serves as reverse respite from the mournful balladry that characterises much of the rest of the album.

‘Leaders of The Free World’ continues and expands the band’s talent for atmospherics and arrangements. Somehow, even when they resort to a plodding chug they manage to imbue it with real depth and vision. They may not have a chance of deposing the leaders of the free world, but Doves and even Radiohead might do well to check their mirrors – Elbow have made a strong bid for the epic rock crown.

I must confess that I’m having a little trouble appreciating ‘Love Kraft’, the latest from the dependable Super Furry Animals, despite some well-intentioned perseverance on my part. There is a clear consensus that the Super Furries have ‘matured’ since the neo-psychedelic excess of ‘Rings Around The World’. On their last album, 2004’s ‘Phantom Power’, this meant for an album of breezier, less riotous pop songs. That album rewarded patience to some extent, but there’s something of a paradoxical oppressiveness in the consistently relaxed, hazy vibe that pervades ‘Love Kraft’. The tempos are consistently slow (and frequently plodding), and there is perhaps an over-dependance on ‘Surf’s Up’-era Beach Boys influences, with lush arrangements and mellifluous harmonies predominating. Given that ‘Love Kraft’ is the band’s most democratic effort to date, with Gruff Rhys frequently deferring on lead vocal duties, it’s odd that it’s also probably their most one-dimensional record too.

This is not to say that ‘Love Kraft’ is without its fair share of impressive moments. ‘Lazer Beam’ is loose and funky, a close relation to both ‘Juxtaposed With U’ and ‘Ice Hockey Hair’. The opening ‘Zoom!’ is spectacular, offering more than 8 minutes of choirs, strange electronics and slippery melodies. If ‘Atomik Lust’ were the only slow song on the album, it would stand out as a highlight by virtue of its bizarre switches from infectious pastoral whimsy to freaky distorted chug. It demonstrates once again that SFA can frequently throw more ideas into one song than most bands have in their entire careers. The lyrical sentiment also seems to echo the new ‘maturity’ of their sound in its desire to abandon the confusion of hedonism for something more stable and comforting. This theme is deftly encapsulated in the seemingly throwaway line about wanting to see the end of Citizen Kane. Of the latter tracks ‘Psyclone!’ stands out, perhaps because it has a slightly playful quality.

Recorded in Catalonia, ‘Love Kraft’ maintains a lazy summery haze throughout (‘Ohio Heat’ may be its defining track). It’s musically impressive, with Sean O’ Hagan’s string arrangements underpinning the thickly textured arrangements, many of which repay close attention (if the soporific mood hasn’t already taken effect). Nevertheless, there’s also the lingering sense that it’s all a bit laboured, and much less instinctive than the esoteric sensibility that fuelled their earlier material. Much of ‘Love Kraft’ is very pleasant, particularly when digested in smaller doses, but will SFA ever record something as exuberant and thrilling as ‘Ice Hockey Hair’ again?

By way of contrast, ‘Twin Cinema’, the third album from Canadian supergroup The New Pornographers sees the band expanding their reach beyond a straightforward power-pop brief into something more angular and consistently rewarding. Despite the presence of Destroyer’s Dan Bejar and the beguiling Neko Case, this once again seems to be Carl Newman’s project. Any fears that he used up all his best songs for last year’s solo album ‘The Slow Wonder’ are very quickly assuaged. ‘Twin Cinema’ is simply a superb collection of turbulent, unpredictable pop songs.

The ramshackle, highly energetic opener quickly sets the tone, its puchy call-and-response vocals adding to its sense of urgency. Elsewhere, Newman’s penchant for infectiously melodic, relentlessly upbeat songs is indulged with the crisp ‘Use It’, ‘Star Bodies’ and the utterly outstanding ‘Sing Me Spanish Techno’, as composed and inventive a song as he has yet written. Neko Case shares vocal duties with two other female vocalists and isn’t provided with anything quite as rollicking as ‘Mass Romantic’, instead opting for the more measured delivery evident on ‘These Are The Fables’.

What makes ‘Twin Cinema’ so distinctive is the more angular, edgy quality to many of the songs. ‘Three Or Four’ is jerky, whilst ‘The Jessica Numbers’ seems to veer in several different directions at once. Dan Bejar’s songs are usually more wilfully obscure, but ‘Jackie, Dressed In Cobras’ has vibrant energy as well as structural complexity. On listening to ‘Twin Cinema’ for the first time, I felt that Dave Fridmann surely must have had a production credit somewhere along the line, such were the colossal, clattering nature of the drums. The sound is raw, but also somehow considered. The chaotic sound of Kurt Dahle’s drumming really works against Newman and Bejar’s quirky melodies. File with Low’s ‘The Great Destroyer’ and Sleater Kinney’s ‘The Woods’ in the small pool of 2005 exhibiting indie groups with established sounds branching out from their self-imposed restrictions.

Remarkably, this weekend also left time to watch a couple of new DVDs – two of the most challenging and unconventional films of the year so far, Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation and Fatih Akin’s Head-On. Both movies seem to be made to a very specific aesthetic. The former was supposedly edited entirely on Apple’s iMovie software and essentially one man’s entire life and family history exposed on film, the latter a corrosive and extreme portrait of doomed love among the Turkish community in Germany. Both make for severely uncomfortable yet grimly compelling viewing.

‘Tarnation’ has won Best Documentary awards but the term ‘documentary’ doesn’t really apply here. It would not be exaggerating to stress the originality of Tarnation’s composition – it is like a cinematic autobiography comprising cleverly manipulated still images, home video footage, student film clips and, most importantly, samples of the films and music that most influenced the life and work of its director. The latter is particularly well deployed, from the childhood memories soundtracked by Dolly Parton and Glen Campbell to the haunting elegies of Mimi Parker and Low, via his relationship with boyfriend David, soundtracked with the appropriately giddy Magnetic Fields song ‘Strange Powers’. The resulting collage of sound and image is powerful, occasionally even gut-wrenching.

If the film is to be taken at face value, then Caouette has clearly had a pretty hellish existence – his mother fell and injured herself at a young age and subsequently suffered depression. Her parents followed flawed advice to send her for electric shock therapy, which seems to have left her devoid of any sense of self or sanity. Caouette claims to have been physically and emotionally abused in a serious of foster homes, before returning to his grandparents, with whom he clearly has an ambivalent relationship. The footage of Caouette interrogating his mother and grandparents makes for the most unsetting moments of the film – simply because his subjects do not appear to give their consent to his filming them. At what point did amateur home video become part of this wider project? Is it morally justifiable to expose the suffering of an entire family in this way? The fact that Caouette clearly cares deeply for his mother, despite everything, perhaps serves as his own justification.

Mercifully, ‘Tarnation’ isn’t only about familial dysfunction – it also encompasses Caouette’s fascination with underground and outsider art, his precocious homosexuality (established at a young age – Caouette claims to have disguised himself as a woman to attend New York gay clubs from the age of thirteen). It demonstrates his development as an artist, from hilarious footage of him hamming it up for the camera as a child, via student zombie movies towards a final finished product. ‘Tarnation’ is interesting as much for its insider commentary on artistic development as it is for the harrowing story it has to tell.

I’m not sure that I’d like this film to act as any kind of precedent. Whilst its remarkable and exciting that it has last demonstrated that DIY initiative can result in success (at least if you manage to secure Gus Van Sant as your Executive Producer), it would be easy for the independent market to become saturated with candid, real-life memoirs such as this. For the moment, though, Caouette’s film is worth cherishing for its searing honesty, as well as for its deceptively simple, highly effective cinematic vision.

‘Head-On’ is violently intense film-making that would make for an intriguing double bill with ‘Tarnation’. It’s a fictional story, but it doesn’t seem any less frighteningly real. It begins with a car crash and ends in quiet tragedy and in between there is a whole wealth of doom and gloom. There are sudden and shocking scenes of self harm, rape and assault sequences, as well as a devastating act of jealous rage.

Where ‘Head-On’ succeeds is in its entirely plausible depiction of its central relationship. After both attempting suicide, Cahit and Sibel, both Turkish and living in Hamburg, meet at a psychiatric clinic. Sibel is desperate to escape the restrictive clutches of her family, who prevent her from having free relationships but will accept a marriage to a Turk, no matter who he is. She asks Cahit to marry her, on the basis that she will act merely as a room-mate. She will be free to have sex with anyone she choses, as will he. All he must do is agree to meet her parents on a regular basis and pretend that their marriage is going well.

A lesser film may have given us a conventional narrative in which the two realise they love each other after all and it all ends happily. The realisation of love is actually merely glanced over in the film, with Akin preferring to concentrate on the trauma that follows. Following a jealous act of violence, Cahit ends up in jail and Sibel ends up in Istanbul, where she rejects a safe life in favour of torrid hedonism. The scene where she is assaulted and stabbed is made all the more shocking because, having realised she is under threat, Sibel seems to provoke the inevitable by picking a fight herself. It is extravagantly cruel. Cahit suffers similar cruelty at the film’s conclusion, although chance plays its role here and the suffering is emotional rather than physical. The central performances throughout are naturalistic and convincing, resisting the obvious temptation to over-perform.

‘Head-On’ is not without its flaws. Sometimes it feels too much like it is an attempt to recapture the punk aesthetic of the mid-seventies, as its kinetic camerawork and boomingly loud soundtrack attest. Some of the characters are poorly drawn – we actually learn very little about Sibel’s family other than that they live by judgemental and restrictive conventions. Still, the film has a raw power and gritty reality that make it impossible to ignore, although it offers very little in the way of hope.

Note To Self

Readers of this blog might be interested in the tracking list I've just set up at Rate Your Music for the best albums of the year so far. It's more or less in alphabetical order (no doubt there's a schoolboy error in there somewhere). I'll try and update it when I get the chance - but right now it goes as far as I've heard - namely the new albums from Mew and Elbow, the latter of which is a serious contender for album of the year. Full review coming very soon!

http://rateyourmusic.com/lists/list_view/list_id_is_27682

For Every Highway There's A Cul-De-Sac

Two artists who have kept on doing their thing to little or no fanfare release new albums this month – Manchester’s Alfie and former Longpigs and Pulp guitarist Richard Hawley. Oddly, the lesser of the two releases seems to have suddenly captured critics’ attention. Whereas the Alfie record sees the band expanding their reach with more ambitious song structures and a serious attempt to break out of the indie ghetto, Hawley’s ‘Coles Corner’ merely adds extra strings and reverb to an already familiar formula.

Alfie have travelled a long way since their Twisted Nerve beginnings, even if their slim commercial pickings might disguise this. They have now moved beyond the fey pluckings of ‘A Word In Your Ear’ into something still bucolic, but much less comfortable. With ‘Crying At Teatime’, they have not shied away from the big arrangements. What is most impressive is that these arrangements feel entirely integral to the more ambitious songwriting on display. ‘Crying At Teatime’ finds room both for comfortingly familiar whimsy and for a more expansive approach.

The first half of the album is particularly successful, with the phased guitars and seventies west coast elements of first single ‘Your Little Religion’ sitting surprisingly well alongside the early Pink Floyd-esque psychedelic trappings of the song’s melody. ‘Look At You Now’ is similarly ambitious, striving to avoid the restrictions of conventional song structures, whilst the title track injects a welcome burst of pace.

‘Crying At Teatime’ suffers a little in its second half, with the pace and tone becoming a little uniform, with the songs arguably less distinctive, and the more stereotypically dour tones of Lee Gorton’s vocals coming increasingly to the foreground. This is a small criticism though. Whilst it’s not a great record, ‘Crying At Teatime’ is clearly the work of a promising band continuing to try out new ideas and sounds.

I wonder whether Alfie have failed to reap commercial rewards precisely because of their increasing ambition. These are songs with unpredictable twists and turns and wispy, elusive melodies. The sound of the album is decidedly cohesive and the tracks might well meld into one on first listen. The subtle charms of ‘Crying At Teatime’ are really only revealed with repeated listens.

With his debut mini album and ‘Late Night Final’ album, Hawley seemed like an intriguing prospect brimming with potential. This was certainly old fashioned, barroom music, but the songs carried a glow of genuinely warm nostalgia and considerable charm. With much of ‘Coles Corner’, not only is there the sense that Hawley is delivering diminishing returns, but also that the timeless, old-time atmosphere is starting to feel more affected and less convincing with each passing release.

In places, ‘Coles Corner’ proves that it’s a very thin line between a reverent recreation of the past and schmaltz. Hawley presumably intended the sugar rush of strings on the title track and grandiose first single ‘The Ocean’ to expand his reach, but the result is something sickly and lachrymose. If there is a new element on ‘Coles Corner’, it is an attempt to capture some of the polished warmth of the classic Bacharach/David hits. However, the dreamy, romantic feel of these tracks feel like an assumed persona rather than something actually experienced. This sensation is brought into stark relief by the more delicate ‘(Wading Through) The Waters Of My Time’, where Hawley imitates Johnny Cash in both tone and phrasing. Where once the dour Sheffield reality meeting the Nashville fantasy was quietly compelling, it now feels like a formula that has been repeated ad nauseum.

‘Coles Corner’ does however have a number of highlights, mainly when it is at its most underplayed and restrained. ‘I Sleep Alone’ is mournful and stately, whilst ‘Born Under A Bad Sign’ manages to transcend its reverent title by conjuring an endearingly reflective mood. It is the closest track here to the debut mini album, in its sound, pacing and even the shape of its melody. The wonderfully titled ‘Who’s Gonna Shoe Your Tiny Little Feet’ perhaps doesn’t quite live up to its moniker, as its melody is underwritten and obtuse, but its refreshing just to hear something a little further from Hawley’s well-beaten track.

‘Coles Corner’ is mostly difficult to object to – it sounds lovingly crafted and is often nuanced and detailed. If it were to serve as an introduction to Hawley’s oeuvre, it would justifiably be warmly received. It’s not the emotive classic Hawley still promises though. For that, he will have to drift further from the admiring recreation of a classic sound. Next time, a little more Sheffield and a little less Nashville might just do the trick.

Taking Stock

There's a plethora of potentially superb releases still to come this year:

August

New Pornographers - Twin Cinema
Laura Veirs - Year Of Meteors
Super Furry Animals - Love Kraft
Alfie - Crying At Teatime
Richard Hawley - Coles Corner
Death Cab For Cutie - Plans

September

Elbow - Leaders Of The Free World
Sigur Ros - Takk
Jackson - Smash
Oceansize - Everyone Into Position
Broadcast - Tender Buttons
Mew - Mew and The Glass Handed Kites

October

Broken Social Scene - Broken Social Scene (previously known as Windsurfing Nation)
Grandaddy - Excerpts From The Diary Of Todd Zilla (mini album)
John Cale - Black Acetate
Franz Ferdinand - You Could Have It So Much Better With Franz Ferdinand
Animal Collective - Feels
Boards Of Canada - The Campfire Headphase
Depeche Mode - Playing The Angel
Gravenhurst - Fires In Distant Buildings

Albums with unconfirmed release dates - Kate Bush, Hot Chip, Liars, System Of A Down

Three Months In The Life Of A Cinephile

It’s been absolutely ages since I’ve written anything about cinema – but don’t think that’s because I’ve stopped attending films. So far in 2005, there have been some impressive movies but few, if any, stand out classics.

That situation may now finally have changed with Kim Ki-Duk’s imaginative, evocative and distinctive 3-Iron. I would recommend that any tedious golden ageist still insisting that world cinema is in terminal decline should run rather than walk to see this fine film. It is deeply mysterious, opaque and occasionally confounding, but its languid pace and meticulous control of tone and atmosphere mark it out as a notable and original cinematic achievement.

Kim has been labelled the ‘bad guy’ of New Korean Cinema, largely because of uncomfortably brutal films such as ‘The Isle’. Critics began to hail a change of style with his serene and ponderous take on monastic Buddhism in ‘Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter and Spring’ (remarkable chiefly because of its extraordinary location and staging). That film still contained brief moments of unhinged violence, and the glacial pace of 3-Iron is similarly punctuated with moments of savagery, some systematic acts of vengeance, others seemingly more random and unpredictable. All are rendered compelling and grimly amusing by the novel use of the sport of golf – hence the film’s title.

The film tells the story of Tae-Suk, a young deliverer of fliers for a Pizza takeaway business who breaks into unoccupied houses while the owners are away. Somewhat unconventionally, he doesn’t steal anything. Instead, he merely house-sits, dutifully hand-washing the laundry and even repairing faulty electrical appliances.

During one of his spontaneous invasions, he is shocked to find the house occupied, as he meets the mysterious, long suffering Sun-hwa, victim of a cruelly loveless marriage to an insensitive, controlling and violent husband. In languorous, entirely wordless scenes, they gradually fall in love. After the husband is casually dispatched with some carefully aimed golf drives, the two head off together in search of more houses to occupy.

Kim evokes the love between Tae-Suk and Sun-Hwa with considerably skill and control. 3-Iron assumes a somewhat elegiac quality during its middle section, and the use of some spectacularly cheesy recurrent pop music creates a surprisingly convincing sense of intimacy and discovery. The film seems to exist entirely within its own moral universe – some actions seem to occur with no recrimination whatsoever, whilst others are swiftly punished.

Some critics have criticised the more otherworldly and fantastic elements of the film’s final third. After breaking into a house and finding its occupant dead, Tae-Suk and Sun-Hwa perform a ritual burial which lands Tae-Suk in jail. In some brilliantly staged and highly comic scenes, Tae-Suk trains himself to disappear in jail, eventually mastering even his own shadow. The film’s conclusion allows Sun-Hwa to continue the illusion of her marriage, whilst Tae-Suk returns to be a constant presence in an extraordinary ménage-a-trois, always unseen and unnoticed.

It’s a brilliant conceit, but one that perhaps doesn’t make much sense when approached from a purely realist perspective. However, 3-Iron is decidedly not a realist film. It is primarily a ghost story, whereby Sun-Hwa is initially rescued from her life as a living ghost in a cruel marriage to embark on different haunts elsewhere. Tae-Suk’s self-disciplining enables him to become a ghost – the presence that is always there, but only visible to Sun-Hwa. The result is a curious and occasionally unsettling film, but also a film of considerable beauty and boldness.

Prior to 3-Iron, the only other really outstanding film of 2005 so far has been Ousmane Sembene’s Moolade. Sembene is often cited as the father of African cinema and his latest film has won plaudits across the world. A film about the unpleasant problem of ritual female genital mutilation in Africa might not exactly be considered a ‘date movie’, but rest assured that Sembene has crafted as entertaining a film as could possibly be made about such an uncompromising and provocative subject. Sembene’s film is critical of the barbaric tradition, but without being judgemental or unsubtle. It is an even-handed treatment, careful to recognise the considerable hold of tradition over African village society. It is this emphasis that clears this remarkable film of any charges of didacticism. Indeed, the film’s resisting protagonist, Colle, characterised with powerful sympathy by Sembene, herself resorts to another form of tradition, the protection or moolade that provides the film with its title.

Sembene realises that omnipotent dichotomy between tradition and impending modernity with elegance and understatement. All the women of the village are empowered by their transistor radios, which bring them news of the wider world. Particularly relevant is the fact that even their own government has condemned the practice of excision, yet the all-male village council, insists on its continuation, as no man will accept an uncut woman for a bride. When the village council burns these radios in an attempt to force the rebellious women into submission Elsewhere, there are intriguing characters, including the wonderful Mercenaire, who brings goods back to the village from his travels, and succeeds in profiting from them considerably. His scenes are mostly characterised by light humour, although he eventually becomes a key player in the village dispute, meeting an unpleasant end in the process.

The dispute begins when Colle, who has already refused to have her own daughter cut, provides a place of protection and refuge for four young girls who have run away from an excision ceremony. Interestingly, the confrontation appears to take place entirely between women – the mothers of the daughters who want their children returned and to complete the ceremony (along with the terrifyingly witch-like exciseurs themselves) and Colle and her family. It is only later that men become involved, not least when the dispute reaches the level of the village council. Colle’s husband is shocked by her actions, but only forced to intervene when he is convinced that her intransigence has publicly humiliated him. Despite a barrage of physical abuse, Colle stands firm, and the intercutting of her violent and public punishment with It is at this point that the film broadens its scope – the women are no longer simply protesting about the brutality and danger of excision but are rebelling against the Patriarchal structures of their society and the right for control over their own bodies.

The film is brilliantly executed and staged with precise economy. The location is limited purely to the small village, but its layout is convincingly engineered with real attention to detail. There is a palpable sense of community here, built on self-reliance and subsistence, but with a brace of unresolved tensions. Unlike 3-Iron, Moolade is determinedly realistic, but without the relentless dourness of British equivalents such as Ken Loach or Mike Leigh. Despite the grimness of its subject matter, Moolade manages to sustain an upbeat, frequently comic tone right up to its avowedly uplifting conclusion.

This might be considered a step too far with the wishful thinking of the film’s conclusion. Yet, how could it have ended with anything other than victory for the women? It might provide a note of feel good sentiment that might be somewhat divorced from reality, but the alternative is simply far too grim. It ought also to be noted that the victory does not come without a tinge of sadness, although to reveal any more detail here would be to greatly diminish the harrowing impact of one of the film’s key later scenes. In addition to this, Sembene’s assertion that tradition can be remoulded for positive, progressive action renders the other side of the debate redundant. It becomes a matter of independence against slavery. The victory of the former leaves a lingering impression of dignity and triumph, long after the credits have rolled. Brilliant.

I am still unconvinced by the new hero of American independent cinema David Gordon Green, whose unmistakeable debt to Terrence Malick takes on a new twist with Undertow, to which Malick lends his name (and presumably also his wallet – he’ll need some return on his investment as he is not to be rushed on making movies of his own) as Executive Producer. Green’s acclaimed debut George Washington was massively overpraised, simplistic and slightly dull as it was. Its follow-up, All The Real Girls, in spite of its hideously awful title, was by contrast underrated. Here Green and cinematographer Tim Orr combined their evocative sense for environment and natural beauty with a convincing depiction of a complex emotional relationship. The film captured the relationship’s intimacy, claustrophobia and subsequent confusion powerfully, without resorting to conventional narrative or finding reductive explanations for the actions of its protagonists.

Undertow is a much more conventional film, dependent on a somewhat contrived plot arc and clearly indebted to Night Of The Hunter, Charles Laughton’s sole film as director. Britain’s Jamie Bell, still most famous for stepping into a pair of ballet shoes as Billy Elliot, does a noble job in gritty southern mode as the young lead – it’s a real shame that he wasn’t given more ambitious material to work with.

To its credit, Undertow starts promisingly, with Bell’s Chris chased from his girlfriend’s house by her father who, suspecting him as a tearaway and troublemaker, fires shots at him. Chris impales his foot on a rusty nail in a wooden board, and the audience has to laugh and wince simultaneously as he continues to run with the board attached to his foot. It’s a bravura opening sequence, and one that at least hints that Green and Orr can do kinetic thrills as well as understated moods.

There is then a lengthy period of scene-setting, in which we become familiar with the family’s isolated farm home, whereby the days consist of hard physical work and little social engagement. Chris has a sickly younger brother Tim, played with charm by Devon Allan, who induces unpleasant bouts of vomiting through eating mud, paint and all manner of other inedible substances. Their father favours the younger child, preferring a ‘tough love’ approach with Chris. This isolated, rather backwards atmosphere is established carefully by Green, although it is never clear exactly when this film is set. Is this meant to be modern America? If so, I was constantly reminded of the key line of Warren Zevon’s song ‘Play It All Night Long’ - ‘There ain’t much to country living- sweat, piss, jizz and blood!’

The atmosphere is pierced brutally by the arrival of Deel, the boys’ Uncle, freshly released from prison and harbouring some lingering grudges. Rather predictably, he is a spurned lover, having staked his claim to their mother first, before their father fell in love with her too. Haven’t we seen this kind of slow building confrontation before? When the inevitable violence ensues, it is appropriately savage, but the descent of the rest of the film into mundance chase movie seems thoroughly disappointing and uninspired.

Deel wants the set of valuable coins the boys and their father have stored, and which Chris hurriedly retrieves as he escapes the scene. In between chase sequences, there are moments of breezy charm and insight – such as the black couple who allow the two boys to work, stay for food and earn some money (a neat reversal of the usual southern black/white relationship which is handled sensitively). Yet, every time Green and Orr allow their talent for developing dreamy moods to predominate, Deel turns up again and off they run through the woods.

Had Undertow simply been about Chris and Tim’s escape from a restrictive lifestyle and quick assumption of independence, it might well have been convincing and compelling. The relationship between the two brothers, with Chris emerging as guardian and protector, is touching and believable. The erosion of Chris’ trust in humanity, combined with his natural tendency towards forgiveness, also makes for the construction of some intriguing scenes later in the film. Sadly, the imposition of a rather unimaginative and derivative storyline proves frustrating, and the film feels like an unsuccessful conflation of two separate identities. For an evocative and distinctive mood piece, you’d be better off with Gus Van Sant’s remarkable Elephant. For a simple, plot-driven film, then there are many more substantial options than this.

These might well include Carlos Sorin’s charming Bombon El Perro, a straightforward and endearing film that it is very difficult to dislike. Set amidst the dusty flat landscape of Patagonia (its long, straight roads are marvellously captured here), this tells the story of how one man’s life is suddenly transformed after he is given a giant dog, a prime example of a rare breed.

After losing his job at a gas filling station, mechanic Juan Villegas (played by a non-professional also called Juan Villegas) is reduced to travelling the isolated, thinly populated area and trying to sell hand-crafted knives. He attempts to retain a cheerful, positive demeanour in the face of adversity, as he struggles (at a relatively advanced age) to find gainful employment. Villegas has an extraordinary face – and whilst he only really delivers one expression during the entire picture, that expression can be deadpan, good natured, confused and nonplussed all at the same time.

The acquisition of Bombon (frequently called Lechien during the film – simply The Dog) delivers some overnight results. Juan can now get work in the field of security (although not even the dog can stop him from being something of a generous pushover) and can jump the queue at the bank because the manager is friends with a dog trainer and is immediately taken with this particular specimen.

The scenes in which Bombon rides across the plains in the front seat of Juan’s car are exceedingly funny, both man and dog sharing the same steadfast facial expression. If there’s an In League With Paton award for performance of the year – it might have to go to this dog! The dog show scenes also have a sweetly humourous feel – it’s easy to feel bemused at how seriously the owners take these competitions. Even more inspired is Bombon’s utter failure as a stud for hire – he seems completely uninterested in providing these kind of services, much to his trainer’s frustration.

The film is light, breezy and sedate – but it may just be deceptively simple. It does not gloss over the social and economic problems of the new Argentina, particularly in its early scenes, and the key theme appears to be the newfound status granted to Juan by his new companion. It quietly reveals some significant truths about how we treat each other in the world of ‘human resources’ and whilst it’s by no means as serious (or as overwhelmingly sad), it reminded me a little of Laurent Cantet’s masterpiece L’emploi du Temps.

The more I ruminate on Paulo Sorrentino’s The Consequences Of Love, the closer I get to the conclusion that it is really quite a remarkable film. I imagine it’s a film that will benefit greatly from repeated viewings as its droll humour, underlying sadness and incredibly slow pace have to be yielded to in order to appreciate the full impact.

It is a stylish and mysterious film about an enigmatic and opaque character, the chain-smoking ‘business consultant’ Titta di Girolamo (played with deadpan irony and seemingly emotionless sophistication by the wonderful Toni Servillo). It is emphatically not, as many have bafflingly suggested, a thriller. Perhaps these critics have been blinded by what transpires to be a mafia theme (this would be a considerable plot spoiler were it not already given away in virtually every review the film has received). Girolamo has spent the last eight years living in an anonymous hotel room, entirely isolated and foregoing all social interaction (even with the hotel staff). The glacial pacing of the film reflects the extraordinary regularity and monotony of his routine. Each Wednesday morning he injects himself with heroin, an action he performs to emphasise the enforced routine of his existence, without ever becoming physically dependant on the drug. Once a week, he is given a suitcase of cash to deliver to a possibly criminal bank account.

Sorrentino’s film is one of the most technically masterful films of recent years, with memorably accomplished camera work, and a disorientating synaesthesia of hallucinatory auditory and visual effects, achieved through rigorous and intelligent editing. The sound is particularly impressive, strongly reminiscent of the amplified ambient effects used to considerable effect in Gus Van Sant’s ‘Elephant’. If this display of virtuosic technique might risk emphasising style over substance, it’s worth noting how these effects serve to emphasise the gradual unravelling of Girolamo’s carefully constructed exterior. We observe how his defences are gradually undermined by his burgeoning feelings for the beautiful, flirtatious hotel barmaid, and the film ends with a series of devastating revelations.

The lingering sense at the end of this film is one of profound sadness – of a life controlled and ultimately wasted, of a life denied real friendship or love. Estranged from his family and basically held captive, Girolomo is a genuinely tragic figure. The film’s conclusion is both shocking and devastating. It raises complicated moral questions and more than rewards the necessary patience that the rest of the film demands.

If only to avoid being branded a high-minded film snob (come off it, Ghostbusters is still one of my top five favourite films!), I occasionally give in to the temptation to watch a high grossing blockbuster. I’ve thankfully avoided the third (please let it be the last) film in the bloated Star Wars prequel trilogy, so it may as well be yet another film in the never-ending Batman franchise, with Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins taking us right back to the origins of the story. Nolan is a director of considerable talent (‘Following’ and ‘Memento’ are two of the most impressive and structurally audacious films of recent times) and given that superhero movies are one of my guilty pleasures, I anticipated this film with considerable relish, even if I might ponder whether it is really what Nolan wants to do, or simply where the hard cash is.

After the lightweight and insubstantial diversions of the Joel Schumacher films, Nolan’s film promises a return to the dark, serious vision of the Tim Burton era Batman. On this count, it certainly delivers, providing a backstory for the character which reveals his motivations for selecting the Bat character (Bruce Wayne is confronting his fears) and his research into the nature of evil following the cruel slaying of both his parents. All of this was hinted at in the earlier films, but Nolan has made it the centrepiece of his version of events.

I’m surprised that more critics haven’t picked up on the numerous post-9/11 ‘war on terror’ references that pepper the film. Rescued from torture in prison by Liam Neeson’s League Of Shadows, a group with motivations and methods seemingly very similar to those of Al Qa’eda, Bruce Wayne ends up at an isolated mountain training camp where he learns swordfighting and close combat skills. When challenged to kill another man in cold blood, he cannot do it, thus revealing the crucial difference between the crime fighting vigilante and his terrorising enemies – he (Batman) has respect for human lives. The final confrontation is also brought into sharper relief in light of the recent London bombings as it essentially involves a terrorist act involving chemical weapons that threatens the very infrastructure of Gotham City.

I’ve always admired Batman most among the superheroes because he appears to be a superhero without any specific superpowers. Instead, he has to rely on science, technology, determination and sheer practical ingenuity. Nolan’s film demonstrates these elements of the Batman character with vivid detail, as we see the preparation of the costume and the development of secret weapons through the assistance of Morgan Freeman’s scientist, rebelling against the nakedly corporate mindset that dominates the once philanthropic Wayne Corp, controlled as it now is by a callous megalomaniac played with righteous glee by Rutger Hauer (might there also be deliberate parallels between the charitable gestures of Bruce Wayne and those of Bill Gates? Both the fictional character and the real entrepreneur show a similar mix of ruthlessness and generosity).

The success of Batman Begins lies in its absorption of many of the elements of fear and trembling that dominate the current international climate, and the extension of them into the realms of fantasy and the absurd. A superhero film hardly needs to be constrained by the concerns of plausibility after all – and Batman Begins, whilst serious in its devotion to superhero fandom, doesn’t forget to provide some thrills along the way.

Central to this is the inspired casting of Cillian Murphy as The Scarecrow. With his extraordinary features, he is enticingly handsome, but also very sinister looking. He represents the seductive face of evil, and he relishes the potential for revelling in over-acting. He makes the entire film his stage. Christian Bale does a creditable job as Batman/Bruce Wayne but doesn’t really bring any new elements to the table, despite being gifted with Nolan’s elaborate backstory. Katie Holmes is simply too good to be true as the liberal lawyer potential love interest.

Batman Begins has all the elements of a great blockbusting superhero movie – the evocation of Gotham City is particularly spectacular, as well it should be as much of the film was apparently shot on location in Chicago rather than bound to a studio set. Nolan demonstrates his talent for capturing harsh futuristic landscapes as well as his knack for developing a range of ideas. The question now is where he goes next. Has he gone too far down the road to Hollywood blockbusterdom to produce anything as original and distinctive as ‘Memento’ again?

No Show For Old Crows

...But a plethora of excellent releases from solo artists make up for it.

I had been hoping to post a review of the Old Crow Medicine Show gig at Lock 17 today, but a bunch of callous terrorists have dashed that. I gather that the gig went ahead as planned (as most small venue events have despite recent events) but there was little way of us getting there. Moaning about public transport has always been a favourite pastime of Londoners, but it has reached new heights as we come to realise that the transport network is not merely unpredictable, but also easily exploited by those seeking to maim and kill. It’s not a fun time at the moment, made worse by the attempted attacks this week and the intimation that these have not been isolated one-off events. The thought that London may now be facing a sustained assault is not something anyone particularly wants to have to face.

Still, in a spirit of stoicism, life must go on – and as ever there’s a backlog of new CDs I haven’t got round to reviewing yet, not least three lovely promos I’ve picked up in the last couple of weeks.

First up is ‘Humming By The Flowered Vine’, the rather convolutedly-titled third full length from Laura Cantrell. It comes dedicated to the memory of John Peel, which endears it to me before I’ve even heard the music it contains. Cantrell’s voice is a treacly confection, lending this album a deceptively straightforward quality. Much of it is soft, delicate and understated, and it occasionally veers into whimsical terrain. Like her previous releases, there are only a handful of self-penned songs, the rest of the album being given over to interpretations of traditional material and cover versions of country standards. The covers, however, cannot be considered mere filler as they are absolutely fundamental to the shape and pacing of her collections. They also demonstrate just how comfortable Cantrell is with her material – she has a vast knowledge of country music as any listener to her radio thrift shop show will surely attest.

‘Humming…’ certainly has its moments of, ahem, hummable sweetness, most notably the lovely opener ‘14th Street’ (which somehow manages to make stalking an entirely innocent activity) and Cantrell’s own ‘California Rose’ (a wonderfully restrained country shuffle). Elsewhere, however, there are signs of burgeoning ambitions, not least on guitarist Dave Schramm’s ‘And Still’, which alternates between passages of elusive calm and more striking punctuations, characterised by some expressive fretwork. Best of all may be the traditional murder ballad ‘Poor Ellen Smith’ which Cantrell inhabits with genuine sympathy and understanding.

Throughout, Cantrell’s voice rarely veers away from the melody line – she is a rare breed of singer these days, almost entirely eschewing virtuosity. This makes her all the more adept at handling the constrained emotions of country songs. It’s particularly illuminating to hear her tackle something like Lucinda Williams’ ‘Letters’, the song sounds more vulnerable when stripped of Williams’ gutsy, guttural character.

‘Humming…’ so comfortably fits into a rich seam of tradition that it almost feels like an enticing invitation to another era. From it cover art to the photograph of Cantrell next to a piano inside the sleeve, much like The White Stripes, there seems to be a particular aesthetic at work. Whereas The White Stripes often leave a lingering, knowing smirk, there can be little doubt that Cantrell is entirely sincere. I’ve been meaning to investigate her earlier albums for some time. On hearing this, my resolve is much stronger.

However, Cantrell’s carefully constructed homage to the likes of Kitty Wells and Patsy Cline rather pales into insignificance next to ‘We Will Become Like Birds’, the third official album from the wonderful Erin McKeown. I’ve been hotly anticipating this album since seeing McKeown play an awesome solo show at the Islington Academy and I’m pleased that it does not disappoint. It also doesn’t sound anything like I was expecting it to, perhaps because the Judy Garland tinges and slightly jazzy guitar flourishes of ‘Grand’ are largely absent. In their place is a polished, focussed and immediately accessible collection of breezy pop songs, brilliantly executed and intelligently enhanced through subtle production trickery. Whereas ‘Distillation’ and parts of ‘Grand’ required several listens to reveal their full charms, ‘We Will Become Like Birds’ is immediately memorable and frequently touching. It is a ‘pop’ album in the purest sense and it deserves to achieve sales to reflect this.

It opens with ‘Aspera’, an almost Neil Young-esque slow trudge (which McKeown pulls off surprisingly well) and ends with ‘You Were Right About Everything’, a tender, subtle and affecting ballad. In between is a whole plethora of melodic invention, from the unusual intervals of ‘Air’ to the genuinely anthemic choruses of ‘To The Stars’ and ‘White City’. The latter, particularly, is unlike anything else McKeown has written – its quick tempo and rousing chants providing both immediate pleasures and a lingering impact.

There is a thematic coherence to ‘…Birds’ that reflects the overall confidence of the music and the performances. Many of the songs are songs of courage and defiance, which seem strangely appropriate to the current mood in London. What could have appeared brash and ugly in the hands of, say, Toby Keith, is delivered with grace and elegance by McKeown. Her vocals are consistently light and breezy, but she also demonstrates an inventive talent for lithe and unpredictable melodies. This is songwriting of the highest quality, unafraid of genuine sophistication. Class.

More solo artist action comes from the playful, gleefully chameleonic Jamie Liddell, whose second album ‘Multiply’ entirely forsakes the confusing glitch and stutter of his debut and instead adopts a more funky approach. My friend Alex from Club Treehouse has denounced this as ‘absolutely awful…like a digital Jamiroquai’, whilst my former co-presenter on student radio think it’s one of the best albums of the last five years. I’d probably disagree with both of these views, as they seem to be somewhat extreme. There is far more fun and panache on display here than you might reasonably expect from the twat in the hat, but there are some significant problems, particularly with track sequencing, which rather dilute its overall impact.

It starts brilliantly. ‘You Got Me Up’ is short and decidedly sweet, a lush refashioning of the spirit of Sly Stone. ‘Multiply’ sees Liddell inherit the mantle of more gritty soul singers such as Otis Redding or Joe Tex, and he does this with such natural and unforced enthusiasm that it is hard to resist, even if the song is essentially a genre pastiche. Even better is ‘When I Come Back Around’, which signifies that a more questing and original spirit is at work. There’s certainly a detectable Prince influence, but the falsetto vocals and wurlizer keyboards are filtered through a rather more modernist prism, with a more twisting and unpredictable production style. It’s also an incredibly infectious song, with an incredible energy and confidence.

Things continue to move away from the conventional as the album progresses. ‘A Little Bit More’ makes elaborate use of layered backing vocals (one of the few hints at Liddell’s more uncompromising vocal loops live show), whilst ‘The City’ is stripped right back to just a beat, skeletal bass line and expressive vocal performance. It all makes for incredibly exciting stuff.
The problems arrive because, perversely, Liddell decides to conclude the album with a series of slower, less exhuberant songs, which quickly deaden the pace. Whilst not exactly ballads as such, Liddell clearly aimed to use these as vessels through which to channel the more sultry and seductive spirit of classic soul. Of themselves, they are not entirely unsuccessful, although perhaps a little derivative for comfort. Placed together, they bring an otherwise irresistibly invigorating album to an unexpected and uncomfortably muted conclusion.

It would be easy for the success of The Pixies reunion (although I had my own reservations) to blind us into deifying Frank Black as a solo artist. Nevertheless, 'Honeycomb', his umpteenth album, does bring some surprising pleasures. For this one, Black has indulged himself by going off to Nashville and recording with the musicians largely agreed to have the best chops in the business - Dan Penn, Spooner Oldham and Steve Cropper among them. Reportedly, none of them had heard of The Pixies or even had any idea who Frank Black was. This doesn't seem to matter one jot because the record has such a gentle, easy charm that the combination of a more restrained Black with these session and songwriting legends seems entirely comfortable.

Whereas Black's last few albums with The Catholics have tended towards the conventional and uninspired, this collection offers more considered arrangements and more ingratiating tunes than Black has mustered recently. There are also some audacious covers, among them a slow, drawling and surprisingly effective rendition of Penn's legendary 'Dark End Of The Street'. OK, so this is a standard, and a song so undeniably brilliant it would seem impossible to ruin. Nevertheless we should credit Black with resisting the temptation to transform it into an angsty, primal grunge howl, and instead playing it mostly straight, whilst exaggerating its tempo and phrasing to accommodate for his vocal limitations.

Of Black's own songs, 'I Burn Today' is an effective break-up song, commendable mostly for its restrained and controlled style. Where previously, Black would have articulated his rage in rather more predictably aggressive tones, here he barely rises above a whisper. 'Lone Child' is more rhythmically dynamic than one might reasonably expect, and makes excellent use of the skills of the musicians to create an evocative atmosphere. 'Another Velvet Nightmare' is rather more sinister and despairing.

Its true that it all becomes rather homogenous towards the end, and much the same countrified soul mood is preserved throughout. Perhaps in the hands of a better vocalist this wouldn't have mattered so much (indeed, the combination of Penn and Oldham on the outstanding live reuninion 'Moments From This Theatre' largely avoided this pitfall), but it's a minor criticism of what really represents an interesting diversion for Black and proof that he isn't only now concerned with the big money promised by new Pixies material. I absolutely despise the journalistic cliche of the 'return to form' but, seriously, when was the last time Frank Black produced an album this assured? You'd have to go back to the rather more scattershot, but equally endearing 'Teenager Of The Year'. It's not really a 'return to form' as such, as this is an idiom that Black has given little hint of exploring before (and will probably abandon just as quickly for his next release). It's more of a curious aside.