Dots and Loops

liner notes and doodles in pop
Mitt Romney not the only Mormon doubling down… and losing Back in 2006 Brandon Flowers (hopefully) half-jokingly mentioned the Killers were recording “the best album of the last 20 years,” and it was to be called Sam’s Town, so-named after a born-to-lose dive bar in Vegas, and let’s just say it wasn’t on the strip. Sam’s Town wasn’t even the best album of 2006, not by a long shot.  But it did mark a turning point for the band that, for better and worse, appears to have been permanent on the evidence of Battle Born, their fourth release. Flowers has always been drawn to kitsch as a bear is to honey, but here he leaves no Meat Loaf cliche uncovered.  ”Not sure how this natural selection picked me out to be a dark horse running in a fantasy,” he sings beautifully on “Flesh and Bone” with the innocent conviction of someone who doesn’t know any better. The problem is they’ve already mined this territory with more novel results.  Battle Born sounds like the offspring of Sam’s Town and Day and Age without the soaring heights of “Dustland Fairytale,” “Read My Mind” or the self-awareness of “Losing Touch.”  Instead, we get closing-credits fodder like “Miss Atomic Bomb” and “Here with Me,” replete with synthesizers that probably should’ve stayed in 1986. And yet, there’s something compelling about their stubborn resolve to exist outside of any contemporary context and continue mining their glitter-in-the-gutter ethos.  They’re precisely the kind of lost cause Werner Herzog would take a shining to.  Maybe next time they’ll transcend empty pastiche.

Mitt Romney not the only Mormon doubling down… and losing

Back in 2006 Brandon Flowers (hopefully) half-jokingly mentioned the Killers were recording “the best album of the last 20 years,” and it was to be called Sam’s Town, so-named after a born-to-lose dive bar in Vegas, and let’s just say it wasn’t on the strip.

Sam’s Town wasn’t even the best album of 2006, not by a long shot.  But it did mark a turning point for the band that, for better and worse, appears to have been permanent on the evidence of Battle Born, their fourth release.

Flowers has always been drawn to kitsch as a bear is to honey, but here he leaves no Meat Loaf cliche uncovered.  ”Not sure how this natural selection picked me out to be a dark horse running in a fantasy,” he sings beautifully on “Flesh and Bone” with the innocent conviction of someone who doesn’t know any better.

The problem is they’ve already mined this territory with more novel results.  Battle Born sounds like the offspring of Sam’s Town and Day and Age without the soaring heights of “Dustland Fairytale,” “Read My Mind” or the self-awareness of “Losing Touch.”  Instead, we get closing-credits fodder like “Miss Atomic Bomb” and “Here with Me,” replete with synthesizers that probably should’ve stayed in 1986.

And yet, there’s something compelling about their stubborn resolve to exist outside of any contemporary context and continue mining their glitter-in-the-gutter ethos.  They’re precisely the kind of lost cause Werner Herzog would take a shining to.  Maybe next time they’ll transcend empty pastiche.

Richard Gere loses his cool in ‘Arbitrage’ “I’m under a lot of pressure,” Robert Miller (Richard Gere) repeats throughout Arbitrage, Nicholas Jarecki’s rather deft examination of a billionaire businessman trying to outrun his lies.  “I have responsibilities… people are relying on me.” Among those relying on Miller are his wife (Susan Sarandon), daughter Brooke (Brit Marling), mistress (Laetitia Casta), and his investors.  This last group is the most meaningful to Miller, naturally, as they have made him the man he is. So what kind of man is he?  Jarecki sets out to answer this question in subtly perverse fashion, never deigning to judge him as much as coolly observe him. Miller has business troubles.  A billionaire with a beautiful family, a (seemingly) flourishing business, and a newly minted Forbes cover, there is in fact a $400 million hole in his balance sheet he’s plugging with a loan from an impatient colleague so he can clear the audit standing between him and the sale his business.  No one, least of all his CFO – who also happens to be his daughter Brooke – knows about it. To make matters worse, Julie, his mistress, goes all crazy on him.  He offers to drive them upstate to spend some time together, but a car accident delays them indefinitely, and in fact, the accident is a neat little metaphor for what is perhaps Miller’s greatest skill: survival.  We get the sense he’s been able to walk away from wreckage his entire life when no one else is spared.  Will he get away this time? To his credit, Jarecki’s doesn’t condescend us with the mechanics of the ensuing investigation.  Detective Bryer (Tim Roth) has only one – albeit highly engaging – scene with Miller early on, and in a genre where the detective is supposed to appear and reappear like the suspect’s nagging conscience, it’s a remarkable thing that the brunt of Bryer’s investigation is more practically reserved for Jimmy (Nate Parker), Miller’s unwitting accomplice and part-time beneficiary. And therein lies Arbitrage’s strength: despite familiar plot points, Jarecki’s screenplay inverts enough of the pieces to inspire equal parts intrigue, disgust, and a sort of wry pleasure in whether or not Miller gets away with it. As we watch his high-wire act unfold, Miller covertly enlists our — dare I say — sympathies.  Credit Gere’s finely calibrated performance.  With a face like a fox, he weaves in and out of ruthlessness and remorse, ego and insecurity convincingly enough to add surprising accents to a man whose livelihood relies on the projection of confidence, even if there’s nothing back there.

Richard Gere loses his cool in ‘Arbitrage’

“I’m under a lot of pressure,” Robert Miller (Richard Gere) repeats throughout Arbitrage, Nicholas Jarecki’s rather deft examination of a billionaire businessman trying to outrun his lies.  “I have responsibilities… people are relying on me.”

Among those relying on Miller are his wife (Susan Sarandon), daughter Brooke (Brit Marling), mistress (Laetitia Casta), and his investors.  This last group is the most meaningful to Miller, naturally, as they have made him the man he is.

So what kind of man is he?  Jarecki sets out to answer this question in subtly perverse fashion, never deigning to judge him as much as coolly observe him.

Miller has business troubles.  A billionaire with a beautiful family, a (seemingly) flourishing business, and a newly minted Forbes cover, there is in fact a $400 million hole in his balance sheet he’s plugging with a loan from an impatient colleague so he can clear the audit standing between him and the sale his business.  No one, least of all his CFO – who also happens to be his daughter Brooke – knows about it.

To make matters worse, Julie, his mistress, goes all crazy on him.  He offers to drive them upstate to spend some time together, but a car accident delays them indefinitely, and in fact, the accident is a neat little metaphor for what is perhaps Miller’s greatest skill: survival.  We get the sense he’s been able to walk away from wreckage his entire life when no one else is spared.  Will he get away this time?

To his credit, Jarecki’s doesn’t condescend us with the mechanics of the ensuing investigation.  Detective Bryer (Tim Roth) has only one – albeit highly engaging – scene with Miller early on, and in a genre where the detective is supposed to appear and reappear like the suspect’s nagging conscience, it’s a remarkable thing that the brunt of Bryer’s investigation is more practically reserved for Jimmy (Nate Parker), Miller’s unwitting accomplice and part-time beneficiary.

And therein lies Arbitrage’s strength: despite familiar plot points, Jarecki’s screenplay inverts enough of the pieces to inspire equal parts intrigue, disgust, and a sort of wry pleasure in whether or not Miller gets away with it.

As we watch his high-wire act unfold, Miller covertly enlists our — dare I say — sympathies.  Credit Gere’s finely calibrated performance.  With a face like a fox, he weaves in and out of ruthlessness and remorse, ego and insecurity convincingly enough to add surprising accents to a man whose livelihood relies on the projection of confidence, even if there’s nothing back there.

An (un)welcome return?

Ah, it’s been too long.  Time clean out the Fall closet in preparation for winter, which is clearly upon us.

New demo from our friends British Sea Power “Hail Holy Queen.”  Brings a tear to the eye.  Sort of perfect for the new Marie Antoinette project…

Smashing Pumpkins ticket in hand for Halloween at the Barclay Center show!  Frankly, I’m tickled.

I know, I know: they’re not the same Pumpkins.  Call me naive, but that’s a good thing.  Corgan, like the best of narcissists, could use some underdog status, and right now he’s got it.

The current line-up, which includes wunderkind Mikey Byrne, the very nice Nicole Fiorentino on bass, and Jeff “Shredder” Schroeder, can flat out play.  It feels like a band, unlike the 2007-2008 iteration that spawned the rightfully-panned Zeitgeist, which saw Corgan coming to terms with his failures in the ugliest of fashions.

But since announcing his absurd 44 song-cycle Teargarden by Kaleidescope project, Corgan  appears to have regained his Occult mojo.  The Songs for a Sailor EP, Vol I (of XI?) of the Teargarden cycle, was a pleasant surprise, with the title track and “Astral Planes” retaining the spirit of the band that recorded Mellon Collie while exploring new territory.  Even the cover design looks like something out of “Magic: The Gathering.”

The momentum’s continued with the excellent Oceania, the first LP since Corgan’s 2008 announcement the band would no longer record any such thing.

Against all odds, Corgan & company seem to be in a fertile creative period.  The Halloween show (and I can’t think of anyone I’d rather see on Halloween) should be a celebration, then, of the true resurrection of the band, not as nostalgia reunion shtick, but an actual creative force worth paying attention to.  I plan to enjoy while it lasts and keep my fingers crossed they bring the pain on non-album tracks As Rome Burns.

Any music lovers/writers out there?

We are looking for a few voices to contribute occasional music reviews to our new blog.  Pop and hip-hop voices needed in particular.  These are not paid posts, but if you’re already writing about music here, good opportunity to reach a new audience and drive traffic to your own site as well.

Shoot us a note here if interested, thanks!

The Vaccines Comes of Age Oh the Brits and their provocative album covers.  Kind of looks like the War cover, no?  And where did they find these androgynous girls?

The Vaccines Comes of Age

Oh the Brits and their provocative album covers.  Kind of looks like the War cover, no?  And where did they find these androgynous girls?

crookedindifference: Rest in Peace, Neil Armstrong Buzz Aldrin took this picture of Neil Armstrong in the cabin after the completion of the first EVA. This is the face of the first man to set foot on the Moon, just hours earlier, on July 20th, 1969. Neil Armstrong was a quiet self-described nerdy engineer who became a global hero when as a steely-nerved pilot he made “one giant leap for mankind” with a small step on to the moon. The modest man who had people on Earth entranced and awed from almost a quarter million miles away has died. He was 82. Looks like Yan from British Sea Power a bit, no?

crookedindifference:

Rest in Peace, Neil Armstrong

Buzz Aldrin took this picture of Neil Armstrong in the cabin after the completion of the first EVA. This is the face of the first man to set foot on the Moon, just hours earlier, on July 20th, 1969.

Neil Armstrong was a quiet self-described nerdy engineer who became a global hero when as a steely-nerved pilot he made “one giant leap for mankind” with a small step on to the moon. The modest man who had people on Earth entranced and awed from almost a quarter million miles away has died. He was 82.

Looks like Yan from British Sea Power a bit, no?

Lost in all the eagerness to call Bloc Party’s bluff on Four — “revisionist history,” “band propaganda,” according to Pitchfork — or hail it as a “return to form” is a very simple facet of the album that makes it unique among their discography:  Four is the the first Bloc Party album that sounds spontaneous. Self-conscious tape hiss and studio banter aside, Bloc Party is playing in a fashion they simply haven’t before.  Much has been made of the blunt grunge-metal riffing of songs like “Kettling” and “So He Begins to Lie,” songs that rock in a very different fashion from the band’s early “angular” days on Silent Alarm or even the glitchy, post-millennial riffs of A Weekend in the City highlight “Hunting for Witches,” and whether or not they belong on a Bloc Party album. Whether or not we like our Bloc Party in flannel, credit the band for finally daring to let go of the legacy imposed by their zeitgeist-y debut and subsequent attempts at this generation’s answer to Radiohead and just play what they’ve been listening to lately:  That would be Nirvana, according to Kele Okereke, as well as Smashing Pumpkins and Deep Purple, by the sound of it.  Neither should it be lost that guitarist Russell Lissack did do a touring stint with Ash — no strangers to metal — while Bloc Party was on hiatus.  The result is the sound of a band rediscovering their teenage guitars and getting on with it.  Speaking of Radiohead, “3x3” is the kind of serrated knife attack the world’s still patiently waiting for from Thom Yorke and company.  Subsequently, “Real Talk,” with it’s banjo flourishes and major-minor groove, would have sounded right at home on Hail to the Thief and The Invisible Band. Kele Okereke, whose voices was starting to grate considerably by Intimacy, proves to be a nimble guide through the 90s alt rock homage as it settles toward the back of the mix or else silkily hovers over the prettier material like “Truth” and “The Healing.” Four may lack the focus of previous records, but it’s also the first Bloc Party to sprinkle the quality evenly throughout (it seems fair to say previous efforts were heavily front-loaded, with most of their best songs residing within the first four album tracks), precisely because it wishes to prove no point other than its sheer existence.  Whether it proves to be a sign of things to come or simply a necessary excursion, Four finds a band still capable of surprising itself, even as Silent Alarm continues to recede in the rearview.

Lost in all the eagerness to call Bloc Party’s bluff on Four — “revisionist history,” “band propaganda,” according to Pitchfork — or hail it as a “return to form” is a very simple facet of the album that makes it unique among their discography:  Four is the the first Bloc Party album that sounds spontaneous.

Self-conscious tape hiss and studio banter aside, Bloc Party is playing in a fashion they simply haven’t before.  Much has been made of the blunt grunge-metal riffing of songs like “Kettling” and “So He Begins to Lie,” songs that rock in a very different fashion from the band’s early “angular” days on Silent Alarm or even the glitchy, post-millennial riffs of A Weekend in the City highlight “Hunting for Witches,” and whether or not they belong on a Bloc Party album.

Whether or not we like our Bloc Party in flannel, credit the band for finally daring to let go of the legacy imposed by their zeitgeist-y debut and subsequent attempts at this generation’s answer to Radiohead and just play what they’ve been listening to lately:  That would be Nirvana, according to Kele Okereke, as well as Smashing Pumpkins and Deep Purple, by the sound of it.  Neither should it be lost that guitarist Russell Lissack did do a touring stint with Ash — no strangers to metal — while Bloc Party was on hiatus.  The result is the sound of a band rediscovering their teenage guitars and getting on with it. 

Speaking of Radiohead, “3x3” is the kind of serrated knife attack the world’s still patiently waiting for from Thom Yorke and company.  Subsequently, “Real Talk,” with it’s banjo flourishes and major-minor groove, would have sounded right at home on Hail to the Thief and The Invisible Band.

Kele Okereke, whose voices was starting to grate considerably by Intimacy, proves to be a nimble guide through the 90s alt rock homage as it settles toward the back of the mix or else silkily hovers over the prettier material like “Truth” and “The Healing.”

Four may lack the focus of previous records, but it’s also the first Bloc Party to sprinkle the quality evenly throughout (it seems fair to say previous efforts were heavily front-loaded, with most of their best songs residing within the first four album tracks), precisely because it wishes to prove no point other than its sheer existence.  Whether it proves to be a sign of things to come or simply a necessary excursion, Four finds a band still capable of surprising itself, even as Silent Alarm continues to recede in the rearview.

Fireworks in Poughkeepsie

I started to sense that Wilco was a band I should be into somewhere in college because I noticed their fans seemed smarter than the average music fan (similar to how my Radiohead journey began too).  They were older than I was, and they were white and bearded and understood the various effects of all the line-up changes throughout the years, particularly Jay Bennett leaving and the addition of Glenn Kotche on drums.  They talked of “important” recordsand Dinosaur Jr. shows. I remember going to see Rufus Wainwright in Guilford, NH — don’t ask me where that is — and there appeared to be a lot of Wilco fans; I deduced from the Wilco shirts they were wearing.  And I had one too!  From the Ghost is Born tour.  It said “Staff” on the back like I was some kind of badass.  Coincidentally, Rufus couldn’t be bothered that night and forgot the lyrics to three songs, including his cover of “Hallelujah.” Anyway, the point is The Whole Love is a really good album, like a more assured version of Summerteeth and best since their masterpiece (that would be A Ghost is Born in case you’re wondering).  Its release constituted the first time I thought of Wilco as a relevant force in music in at least seven years.

I started to sense that Wilco was a band I should be into somewhere in college because I noticed their fans seemed smarter than the average music fan (similar to how my Radiohead journey began too).  They were older than I was, and they were white and bearded and understood the various effects of all the line-up changes throughout the years, particularly Jay Bennett leaving and the addition of Glenn Kotche on drums.  They talked of “important” recordsand Dinosaur Jr. shows.

I remember going to see Rufus Wainwright in Guilford, NH — don’t ask me where that is — and there appeared to be a lot of Wilco fans; I deduced from the Wilco shirts they were wearing.  And I had one too!  From the Ghost is Born tour.  It said “Staff” on the back like I was some kind of badass.  Coincidentally, Rufus couldn’t be bothered that night and forgot the lyrics to three songs, including his cover of “Hallelujah.”

Anyway, the point is The Whole Love is a really good album, like a more assured version of Summerteeth and best since their masterpiece (that would be A Ghost is Born in case you’re wondering).  Its release constituted the first time I thought of Wilco as a relevant force in music in at least seven years.

You know you’re a collector once you start ordering rare made-rarer j-pop vinyl on ebay.  You think to yourself, “one day I’ll have a girl over and she’ll be so impressed with my obscure Japanese collection,” which really only consists of Pink Lady and Pizzicato Five records ( sounds incredible, btw).  But alas it never happens.  These girls don’t exist.  And if they do, they ain’t comin’ to your place.

You know you’re a collector once you start ordering rare made-rarer j-pop vinyl on ebay.  You think to yourself, “one day I’ll have a girl over and she’ll be so impressed with my obscure Japanese collection,” which really only consists of Pink Lady and Pizzicato Five records ( sounds incredible, btw).  But alas it never happens.  These girls don’t exist.  And if they do, they ain’t comin’ to your place.