Demob Happy

Solaris- Steven Soderbergh

Andrei Tarkovsky’s acclaimed 1972 version of Stanisław Lem’s science-fiction novel Solaris was a film I liked to pretend I enjoyed and understood as a wanabee film-buff adolescent. With hindsight the film remained largely obscure to me then, bar some strikingly illusory imagery, particularly those in the memorable final sequence. I haven’t had the opportunity to re-view the film since my old Connoisseur Video copy - remember them, art-house film nerds? - went mouldy in my mother’s garage, having befallen whatever fate is meant to befall the VHS cassette, that most fallible and obsolete of recordable media.

I missed Steven Soderbergh’s take on Lem’s novel, and was horrified to realise that it was released in 2002. Naturally, I was interested to see it when it came out and the fact that seven years have passed since then had me pondering the kinds of unanswerable questions about the perplexing nature of time and adulthood that might make a fitting theme for some interminably long Tarkovsky film. Some brief forays into the internet tell me that the Soderberg film followed in the footsteps of Andrei Tarkovsky’s acclaimed 1972 film epic by focusing largely on the human element of the original story, even if it consumes almost an hour less viewing time. Marketing problems (George Clooney! In space! Pondering the nature of self with an alien replica of his dead wife?! It’s gonna be a hit!) contributed to the film’s grossing well under budget. I might never have seen it had it not been for my old friend Dan Morelle, who sent a copy of the movie - like a true gent - along with a package including presents for my newborn daughter. Thanks again Dan!

It is not surprising that Soderbergh’s ‘Solaris’ wasn’t a blockbuster, being both a film about loss and the fallibility of memory. As in the Tarkovsky version, Soderbergh focuses on the mind-expanding philoshophical implication in Lev’s novel, that the memories which nourish us are often deceptive or even erroneous. Clooney’s dead wife is cloned, by an alien presence, from memories that have warped and deteriorated like old VHS. This 2002 version also retains something of the mood of unnerving isolation and menace that pervaded the original, which was fittingly dubbed the Russian 2001: A Space Odyssey, if not for its running time then for its depiction of humanity out of its element in a universe of rules and presences far beyond its comprehension. “We don’t want other worlds, we want mirrors”, says one character; and it is mirrors they receive, but otherworldly mirrors with mind-altering reflections.

Despite George Clooney and the slick visuals, Soderbergh’s Solaris is finally a low-key, if thought-provoking meditation on love, memory and mortality. If the ending lacks the stunning illusory sequence of the Tarkovsky version, the Soderbergh treatment is somehow simultaneously reassuring and profoundly unsettling: a love that will never die, but also a love that is a faded facsimile of the real thing. “I was haunted by the idea that I remembered her wrong. That somehow I was wrong about everything”, says Clooney’s character, hinting at the absolute loneliness of living with one’s memories. The existential theme running through the film makes it a very human drama, like all the best science-fiction, and recalls comparable threads in Blade Runner. If in the Ridley Scott film we are left to contemplate our own mortality, Solaris deals with an equally dispiriting finitude: the finitude of memory. Both films, of course, also question what constitutes being human.

The mood of isolation and alien menace from both Tarkovsky’s Solaris and Kubrick’s opus is recalled here in no small part by the György Ligeti-esque score, while the rain-lashed metropolis of the sequences on Earth reminded me again of Blade Runner. In fact, the general slickness of the imagery brings Ridley Scott to mind, though the CGI-generated, gracefully orbiting space stations evoke little of the more tangible awe of Blade Runner’s model work (or indeed 2001’s rather suggestive spaceship embarkation to the Blue Danube Waltz, or even Star Wars’ awesome Imperial Star Destroyer). Incidentally a new film, ‘Moon’ starring Sam Rockwell, looks set to kick-start the model work revival, despite having a premise that sounds like the scripts of Solaris and 2001 accidentally mixed up and stitched back together. I’m excited to see it in any case, check out the trailer here.

FIRST PUBLISHED AT THE LINE OF BEST FIT

White Denim - Fits

8/10

Such is the strength and depth (to borrow a football cliché) of music Stateside at the moment that I find myself with three acts on heavy rotation at the moment from Austin, Texas, alone. OK, so Spoon haven’t done anything lately but they’re a band I revisit frequently, while Bill Callahan’s ‘Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle‘ is one of my favourites of 2009 thus far. White Denim is the latest addition to my Austin catalogue and some casual Googling reveals other familiar names that have breezed through my ipod shuffle at one time or another: The Octopus Project , Okkervil River, Explosions in the Sky, to name a few. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised, Austin is the self-styled “Live Music Capital of the World’, a bold claim for only the 16th-largest city in the US (thanks Wikipedia). I haven’t seen White Denim live, but if ‘Fits’ is anything to go by, they must be an exciting prospect.

An exhilarating rush that channels garage rock, psych, hardcore, classic rock and much more besides, ‘Fits’ achieves what Crystal Antlers’ ear-splitting ‘Tentacles‘ didn’t quite: the spasmodic appropriation of multitudinous music styles into three-minute epics. Whereas on Tentacles the detail was often lost in a vortex of organ shredding, White Denim’s shape-shifting excesses are easier to track, despite their brevity. Far from being music for the attention-span depleted, White Denim are sonic adventurers who retain a pop lucidity while busily blowing your mind. There are outrageous Jimmy Page riffs, jazzy codas, bubbly skanks, lo-fi loops; seemingly no rules at all in fact on this restlessly inventive album.

The opener ‘Radio milk how can you stand it’ sets a ferocious tempo of sensationally OTT guitar soloing and a pummelling rhythm section before flipping the script mid-way through, as they have a tendency to do, to craft something wholly new out of chaos that preceded. The album remains at this volatile high tempo with ‘All Consolation’, which is like the distilled climax to some almighty jam, while the rifftastic ‘Say What You Want’ ends with some kind monster duel between guitar and sitar. By the fourth track, sung in Spanish, it’s all getting a bit much, even if the record is barely 10 minutes old, that the comparatively restrained - yet still frankly riotous - ‘I Start to Run’ is a freshener. Irrestistibly funky, ‘I Start to Run’ is equal parts White Riot and The White Stripes: shouty vocals, a rollicking, stripped-down rhythm section, and another mid-point parlour trick - this time being a dubby skank pulled out of an apparently invisible Rastafarian hat.

The next four tracks seem to come in pairs: ‘Sex Prayer’ - a jazzy instrumental interwoven with skuzzy lo-fi loops - forms a cauldron of reverb-heavy psych with ‘Mirrored and Reverse’ , while ‘Paint Yourself’ (”You’re always looking at yourself, deciding what you do not want to see”) and the unjustifiably short ‘I’d Have it just the way we were’ comprise a couple of jaunty, tripped-out ballads. ‘Regina holding hands’ later resumes this mood before erupting into improbably brilliant power pop, while ‘Syncn’ ends the album on an impressionistic note: a hushed collage of loops and a fragile falsetto from James Petralli. Rousing, riotous stuff!

Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle - Bill Callahan

8.5/10

Just as I thought I was tiring of the alt-country/new folk revival, along comes an album - from one of the scene’s relative old timers - of such immersive beauty that I can’t get enough of it. While there is much about Bill Callahan’s ‘Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle’ that is rooted in well-trodden Americana traditions, there is no questioning his authentic, subversive spin on the genre. Callahan’s second under his own name having apparently abandoned the Smog alias (under which his albums must number in double figures). ‘Sometimes … ‘ is a sultry, richly atmospheric pleasure from start to finish. As Smog, it seems Callahan was often painted as some kind of miserabalist Leonard Cohen wannabe. but here the singer is found in pensive and reflective, rather than melancholy spirit. His ruminating, semi-spoken vocal delivery reminds me somehow of a less lascivious Serge Gainsbourg: the loose, the swirling orchestrations that complement these songs are as dynamic as those on ‘Histoire de Melody Nelson’ (minus the Gallic funk) and as richly textured as Lambchop’s ‘Nixon‘ (minus the southern-fried Soul).

According to the sleeve notes, ‘Sometimes … ‘ was produced by ‘Raven! Are you bleeding? Oh! Raven! I did not mean to cut you! Raven! I was only kicking as a cricket in your beak! Raven! I only want to live!’, who unsurprisingly does not feature on Allmusic or Wikipedia. However, Brian Beattie deserves maximum plaudits for the orchestral arrangements throughout the album, which are elegant, wistful, and occasionally even a little romantic. While lush they are never over-wrought, clumsy or over-literal, but hover instead, ebbing and flowing around the Callahan’s baritone. This proves the perfect counterpart to Callahan’s exploratory, unconventional songwriting, melding together into engaging mood pieces that flower and evolve unhurriedly rather than travel in straight lines.

The opening three tracks set an extraordinarily high standard for the album that Callahan almost, but not quite sustains. The opener ‘Jim Cain’ typifies the album’s mood of nostalgia and reconciliation, sounding like a man blissfully at peace with himself, even if the words do not always support this. The brilliant single ‘Eid Ma Clack Shaw’ recounts the singer dreaming the perfect song, awaking to write it down, only to find the lyrics in the morning to be the gibberish of the title. Both funny and somehow touching, it is also the closest the album gets to being radio friendly. By contrast, ‘The Wind and the Dove’ is dark, Arabesque trip hop, with a shiver-inducingly poignant chorus.

After the opening triumvirate, the breezier ‘Rococo Zephyr’ feels less substantial, while the yearning, locomotive ‘My Friend’ would be perfect for watching landscapes unfold. ‘All Thoughts Are Prey to Some Beast’ evolves from a hypnotically dicordant loop of guitar that reminded me vaguely of Boards of Canada’s cassette-warped abstraction, French Horns underlining the rises and falls in orchestral tension. Other songs revolve around economic wordplay. On Too Many Birds’, Callahan sings the touchingly oxymoronic “If only we could skip a heartbeat for just one heartbeat” in refrain, adding a new word with each repetition. Starting with simple acoustic strums, lusher instrumentation imposes itself as the sentence is completed, gradually embellished with violin and piano and increasingly assertive percussion. Similarly, each line in the hypnotic ‘Faith/Void’, with the refrain “It’s time to put God away … I put God away”, is finished with some beautifully low-end guitar notes in a delightful call and response. A heady, evocative album.

Dirty Projectors -Bitte Orca

8/10

FIRST PUBLISHED AT THE LINE OF BEST FIT

Dirty Projectors are a band so singularly unconventional that I wondered how they had managed to gain so much popular attention - although their recent David Byre collaboration (the excellent ‘Knotty Pine’, from Red Hot’s much admired ‘Dark Was the Night‘ compilation) certainly must have helped. Dave Longstreth, we are told, studied classical composition at Yale University, a fact that informs his renegade time-signatures and the tricksy, rug-pulling complexity of his recordings. Moreover, he sings like someone doing an impromptu impression of Anthony Hegarty, or even Jeff Buckley, with dubious accuracy, and on ‘Bitte Orca’ is as at home producing lilting chamber folk as contemporary R&B, two genres not normally caught dead in each other’s company. In fact, these unlikely bedfellows form the album’s stunning centrepiece tracks featuring the female vocalists (presumably) adorning the cover artwork: the summery soul of ‘Stillness is the Move’, sung by Amber Coffman, which sounds like Aaliyah; and the lilting, orchestral ‘Two Doves’, which could be Joanna Newsom, but is in fact Angel Deradoorian. That’s right, Aaliyah and Joanna Newsom.

It is worth going back to David Byrne to gain a slippery foothold in describing such a genuinely unusual band. There is something of Byrne and Brian Eno’s Afro-pop infusion here that might please fans of, say, Vampire Weekend or Yeasayer. There is a hint of Toumani Diabaté’s Malian string pickery on ‘Temecula Sunrise’ and ‘No Intention’, and a distinctly African bent to the chanted melodies of ‘Remade Horizon’. Longstreth, however, exceeds even Byrne in his unadashedly intellectual, and often impenetrable, lyrical concerns. The album title and some of the track names (’Florescent Half Dome’ sounds like it was taken at random from an art catalogue, ‘Cannibal Resource’ sounds like the title of some unreadable essay by Foucault or Derrida) tell you all you need to know: Longstreth is probably cleverer than you, and he doesn’t care if you don’t understand what he’s talking about.

No matter, as if to prove Longstreth’s higher understanding of musical structure (or, just as likely, his knack for a good melody), Bitte Orca’s songs have a way of worming their way into your head. I woke up with the great ‘No Intention’ jangling around my head the other day. The day before that it was Elton John. While occasionally, as on the opener, things initially seem a bit too busy sonically, each listen reveals a new layer of brain-teasing intricacy. While sometimes the avant-garde posturing can make for a chilly listen, emotionally at least, and the fragmented song structures can jar, there is no mistaking the radiating pop sensibility running throughout, which makes Bitte Orca a more accessible record than their past efforts, but a no less inventive one. Compelling. confounding stuff.

Waltz With Bashir - Ari Folman

Hagai Levi, creator of the Israeli TV show ‘Be’Tipul‘ - which became in turn the inspiration for the latest HBO phenomenon, ‘In Treatment’, currently championed in the UK by The Guardian - said of Israel that “one of our problems as a nation is that in our mind we are still survivors, and sometimes we think that we can do awful things to others because we are survivors.” Both ‘Be’Tipul’ and it US counterpart revolve around the psychoanalyst’s chair, each episode a single patient’s session. Psychoanalysis - both individual and that pertaining to Israeli national identity - also pervades Ari Folman’s ‘Waltz With Bashir’. The film is a cathartic act of self-therapy, conducted on and by the director himself, with the help of former fellow soldiers: unpeeling an onion of buried memories revolving around his participation in Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. His need to recover and clarify the past is provoked by a deeply unsettling, recurring dream, which suggests a spectre of guilt regarding the events that lead to the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp massacres, a dark chapter in modern Israel’s short but troubled history - a history dictated perhaps by a national psychology of survival.

‘Waltz With Bashir’ is unusual because parts of the film derive from genuine documentary footage in which Folman meets again and interviews his erstwhile Israeli army colleagues in search of a forgotten past. The interviews, like Folman’s abstract, fallible memories and dreams, have been richly transformed into animation in a manner that recalls Richard Linklater’s visually-striking but emotionally vacant ‘A Scanner Darkly’. The noirish visuals are sumptuous to watch, sometimes almost distractingly so, especially during the interview sections when the sound is flatter, unadorned by dramatic devices such as music. Otherwise the line between fact and fiction, between the remembered past and documented present, is blurred by the consistently arresting animated imagery; up to a final, horrifying awakening. This climax, without playing politics, poses the ultimate question about modern Israel: can the nation continue to live with its nightmares in the all-consuming war for survival? With all the importance attached to remembering Jewish plight (particularly The Holocaust), can they really choose to forget the “awful things” done in the name of Israeli survival? A powerful, thought-provoking, beautiful film.

John Boyne - The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

I’m naturally suspicious of the recent glut of novels marketed as children’s literature for adults (see ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time’ and ‘The Life of Pi’), but this is a darker proposition. The Holocaust makes for a particularly poignant subject for John Boyne’s ‘The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas’, a novella told from the perspective of a naive nine year old German, Bruno, whose father is a concentration camp commander. The climax will seem to readers either overly predictable or horrifyingly inevitable - I fell into the second category: while I certainly saw the ending coming, and had built up a fair head of cynicism during the course of the story, found myself moved at the last nonetheless.

Bruno’s childish naivety recalls comparable characterisations of blindness and self-denial in the World War II-based works of Kazuo Ishiguro: the gentleman detective of ‘When We Were Orphans‘, or the unquestioning butler in ‘Remains of the Day‘. Bruno’s blindness is almost harder to give credence than that of the narrator in the former: Bruno may be a rather sheltered and spoilt nine year old but his ignorance sometimes stretches the boundaries of credibility. The novel reminded me in part of the film ‘Life is Beautiful’, in which an Italian Jew creates the elaborate illusion for his son that life in the concentration camp is in fact a contest to win a tank. This conceit was echoed in turn by ‘Goodbye Lenin’: a young man is impelled to create an illusive reality around his infirm mother to convince her that communism is still alive following the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Bruno, however, is not subject to any particularly elaborate ruse to shield him from the truth, other than an unfailing belief in the sound judgement of his father and the propagandist line that “Germany is the greatest of all countries”. Rather, Bruno is unable to countenance - much like the anachronistic protagonists of Ishiguro’s novels - the fullness and complexity of evil in the world. In the case of ”The Boy with the striped Pyjamas’, it’s an exterminating evil that lies just on the other side of a fence: the kind of perimeter that children typically explore first. A quick read with lasting impact.

BRAND NEU ! - Various artists

8/10

BRAND NEU! is a tribute to the influential German band (aka Klaus Dinger and Michael Rother) that brings together a respectable selection of artists inspired by the Krautrock innovators. There are one note chugging guitars and hypnotic motorik grooves aplenty in this beguiling compilation, which doesn’t suffer too much from overly literal re-imagining of Krautrock due to some more liberal interpretations that mix things up a bit. There are old chestnuts like Primal Scream’s ‘Shoot Speed / Kill Light’, from their NEU! aping (and equally block capital happy) 2002 album XTRMNTR, and, um, younger chestnuts such as LCD Soundsystem’s ‘Watch the Tapes’. It begins with the Sonic Youth skit ‘Two Cool Rock Chicks Listening to Neu!’, which must have been a shoo-in for this compilation, and closes with a previously unreleased track called ‘Sketch 1_08′ by Dinger’s post-NEU! outfit La Düesseldorf (the last recording the drummer was involved in before his death in 2008), and finally a Michael Rother solo effort.

Surprisingly, there is a track by Oasis marked as ‘Rare’ (there are four categories here: already released, unreleased, rare, and exclusive to the compilation) which, while certainly a four square approach to the genre, is a visceral thrill of unrelenting Krautrock chug that hints at the Gallagher brothers’ early appeal. But for me the compilation is most interesting when it moves away from the template a bit: Foals’ amorphous, ominous ‘Titan Arum’ segues well into the mutant digital funk of Cornelius’ ‘Wataridori’. Holy Fuck’s ‘Super Inuit’ is a linear, but exhilirating Kraut rock-out replete with steadily intensifying crescendos, while School Of Seven Bells’ exclusive ‘Device fuer M’ is drowsier, dreamier, but still committed to a 4/4 orthodoxy - a mellow groove that bleeds near seamlessly into Fujiya and Miyagi’s fairly archetypal (for them) ‘Electro Karaoke’.

This compilation might lead you to believe that NEU! is very much the eclectic influence du jour, but I can’t help feel that the revival has already outstayed its welcome somewhat. The Krautrock aesthetic has been revisited rather extensively over the last 15 plus years or so, with musical trends such as shoegaze, electroclash and post rock all touching on elements laid down by the likes of NEU! While fairly insipid bands such as Baikonour continue to churn out fairly one-dimensional interpretations of the genre, fine recent albums by Caribou, Super Furry Animals and LCD Soundsystem suggest more imaginative ways the motorik conceit can be incorporated into a broader sonic palette. Oh, and yes, the cover art does say Kasabian - whose Radio 1 bothering ‘Stuntman’ is here - but don’t let that put you off.

Juno - Jason Reitman

For a long time I resisted watching Jason Reitman’s ‘Juno’. On paper it was the kind of film I avoided like a virus, yet reviewers kept telling me to see it. Even my most trusted blog buddy William Rycroft gave it the thumbs up, albeit with the helpful disclaimer “many will find the film to be relentlessly quirky” and that “elements of the film have a whiff of Wes Anderson” - two qualities I can’t say made me exactly impatient to see ‘Juno’, and both of which proved correct. Nonetheless I found myself, against my better judgement, selecting Juno from my local DVD vending machine (do these only exist in France?), having scrolled aimlessly through many titles, most of which translated, sometimes amusingly, into French: Le Secret de Brokeback Mountain, for example, but more on that here.

‘Juno’ instantly reminded me of ‘Little Miss Sunshine‘, another quirky film which enjoys an equally over-generous status (and that I’m also proud to dislike). I think my problem with both films is that they are sentimental and excessively cute but have somehow claimed indie credibility by dint of their mildly offbeat themes. While ‘Juno’ didn’t have me cringing as much as ‘Miss Sunshine’, to me the much-praised dialogue rang self-consciously arch: great on paper but painfully contrived on screen. While admirably put together and well-acted, Juno’s barbed ripostes sound transparently like the product of over-caffeinated, Starbucks-bothering thirty-something scriptwriters who want to show off their on-trend music taste: Iggy Pop, Sonic Youth and The Carpenters all get mentions. So cool! Except for the fact that the cute girl-boy indie soundtrack is like tweeness distilled to its raw essence. The Amazon DVD review concedes that the dialogue seems “forced at first, but soon creates a richly textured world”, which is frankly hyperbolic nonsense (but, yes, we’re all guilty of that sometimes). I am also serially immune to the type of dialogues punctuated by US lexical tics such as “like, totally!“, particularly when they are not employed to satirise the characters. The empathy simply drains out of my body faster than Juno’s breaking waters, that other movie and TV pregnancy cliché repeated in the film.

I feel that ultimately, for all the plaudits for Juno’s original handling of subject matter, the film still idealises teenage pregnancy. The character Juno herself is impossibly precocious and sharply witty to begin with, and most of her wisdom is learnt independently, and not from the often fallible, occasionally hypocritical adult world. For me this is as saccharine and simplistic as the average teen movie, just better marketed: by staying on the right side of the liberal-redneck divide, and throwing in some indie-approved cultural references, you’ll push all the right buttons at Sundance and “hey presto!”, Indie Smash Hit^TM.

Ah, that’s better! It’s been a while since I’ve really enjoyed slagging off a film. It seems that more often than not viewers disagree with me on this - except for this one and that one, for example - but ‘Juno’ really rubbed me up the wrong way.

Four Tet - Ringer EP

7.5/10

I was once quite seasonally adjusted when it came to music. Spring and summer inspired me to listen to more notionally natural textures - let’s say alt-country, Americana or folk - while the onset of winter used to find me needing something more machine-driven. In recent years I’ve been rather unfaithful to electronica, having flirted provocatively with other music forms. I may have even said somewhere on this site that electronica is dead. Well, fool me. Recent albums by Fever Ray and worriedaboutsatan have got me all excited about the possibilities of electronic music again, and completely out of season too. In order to catch up a bit, I’ve just ordered Boards of Canada’s ‘Campfire Headphase’ and now Four Tet’s 2008 EP ‘Ringer’, admittedly both happy compromises on my seasonal requirements given the preponderance of ‘organic’ textures in both.

‘Ringer’ was hyped as a trend-bucking statement of intent by Kieren Hebden, given that the eponymous eight-minute track has Orbital written all over it, making it less easily to categorise as folktronica, a term he is known to hate. But for all the propulsiveness and glimmering synths, there is a hint of Glastonbury ‘93 about ‘Ringer’ that gives it a whiff of the bucolic. If ‘Ringer’ is a homage to the Hartnoll brothers then the other three tracks that comprise the EP explore looser, jazzier territory: there is the suggestion of the semi-improvised grooves that Hebden has been utilising to increasingly impressive effect on his Steve Reid collaborations. If you like this, you certainly should check out 2008 collaboration ‘NYC’. I particularly enjoy listening to these unhurried mood pieces as an antidotal soundtrack to a trip to Carrefour, an Analgoue Bubblebath for the brain.

Walking Woman, Mindelo, Sao Vicente

Sorry for the extended absence from the blogosphere. My wife gave birth to a beautiful baby girl one week ago, so naturally I’ve been a bit preoccupied. In the meantime, some more photos, again from Cape Verde, but this time the riotous colours of Mindelo, Sao Vicente. A former portuguese colony, Cape Verde often feels more like the Carribbean or Latin America than Africa proper.