1. You Can’t Hurry Love — Diana Ross and the Supremes
2. Fistful of Love — Antony and the Johnsons with Lou Reed
3. Lovers Rock — The Clash
4. Find Love — Clem Snide
5. I Love You — Beat Happening
6. Big Love — Broken Social Scene
7. Some Kinda Love — The Velvet Underground
8. Let’s Make Love and Listen to Death from Above — CSS
9. Bullets and Love — The Coup
10. Soul Love — David Bowie
11. Tuff Love — The Gossip
12. Pirate Love — Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers
13. Of Love and Colors — Lisa Germano
14. Drive Is that I Love You– MV & EE with the Bummer Road
15. ‘Cause I Love Her — The Brian Jonestown Massacre
16. I Let Love In — Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
17. The Desperate Kingdom of Love — PJ Harvey
18. A True Story of a True Story of Love — The Books
19. Love in Vain — The Rolling Stones
20. Loved Despite Great Faults — Blonde Redhead
21. A Lover Loves — Scott Walker
22. Ringo, I Love You — Stereo Total
23. Love, Love, Love 2 (Reprise) — Akron/Family
I’m a sucker for a good cover, and the past few weeks have produced two of the best I’ve heard in a while.
Xiu Xiu featuring Michael Gira - Under Pressure
Under pressure indeed. Xiu Xiu have released a brilliant, dangerous, and sometimes ugly album that is receiving lukewarm, confused reviews. I have a feeling that Women as Lovers will look better to most people in five years than it does now. Meanwhile, listeners should at least be ready to get on board with this subtly dark cover of David Bowie and Queen’s “Under Pressure.” Jamie Stewart and Michael Gira (of Swans and Angels of Light) do self-conscious impressions of Bowie and Freddy Mercury against a background of anxious brass and and muted synth. Caralee McElroy’s voice is a refreshing surprise. And the instruments get carried away with themselves.
Jeffrey Lewis–Do They Owe Us a Living?
By releasing a full album of Crass covers, called simply 12 Crass Songs, Jeffrey Lewis is doing the ’80s crust-punk band’s fans a great service. For the first time, we can make out the lyrics. This raucous, boy-girl, call-and-response folk version is just what this classic of sorts needed.
Johnny’s Greenwood’s score for PT Anderson’s auteur-tastic There Will Be Blood was just about perfect. I don’t even want to talk about the way he got screwed over in Oscar nominations. But there is another album that would ALSO work fantastically as the movie’s score: The Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible. Sure, it would make the whole thing a little more postmodern and self-aware and distractingly filmic than Greenwood’s score, but I kind of dig that anyway. Though it was far from my favorite album of the year, this seems like the perfect use for it. Alternate DVD soundtrack, anyone? Perhaps muting the soundtrack and synching the movie with the record, Dark Side of the Moon-style?
Just imagine “Intervention” over the closing credits.
Vampire Weekend’s new, self-titled album, out today on XL, is getting the rave reviews everyone expected it would get. Every publication out there is falling all over itself to celebrate the soukous and the references. Imagine, songs that sound vaguely like Afro-pop, created by the whitest band in the history of music! Even better, throw in the most obscure cultural references possible–here’s Lil Jon! here are kefirs and keffiyehs! look at me, I know what Dharamsala is!
Here’s the thing: I sort of like Vampire Weekend. I don’t mind bopping around to “Oxford Comma.” It’s just the kind of lively song that I might play to wake myself up in the morning. But guess what? Vampire Weekend is a pretty decent pop band. They aren’t a revelation. They’re not doing much new with the form. Even the snatches of African music have been incorporated into the same format with more skill (see Paul Simon, which every reviewer seems to reference, though none seem to care that he already wrung everything that was ever innovative out of the fusion).
What I think may be happening here is what happened with film critics and the movie Sideways. It was fine, sure, but they just couldn’t stop heaping praise on it, as though its director, Alexander Payne, was as good as Fellini, Bergman, and Kurosawa all rolled into one. Finally, the madness needed to stop, and A.O. Scott decided to call everyone on their shit. He wisely pointed out that film critics liked Sideways so much because they identified too strongly with its protagonist, whose obsession with wine echoed their own critical fixations. As far as Vampire Weekend is concerned, let’s think about who most music critics are. They are overeducated and, frankly, geeky, have wide-ranging tastes in music, and cultural references are, for them, kind of like candy. So when a band comes along that incorporates eclecticism (in the form of Afro-pop), collegiate nerdiness (they’re all Columbia grads and for heaven’s sake, look at what they’re wearing), and a limitless supply of knowledge about rooves and commas, every goddamn motherfucker is all over it.
I love One Story. It’s a fantastic literary magazine that appears about once every three weeks and contains–you guessed it–only one story. While a larger lit mag might be weighed down with sub-par filler material, there’s nothing extra dragging One Story down. I look forward to every issue. Each one only takes about one subway ride to read.
The most recent issue, which I received in the mail on Saturday, is the best yet. It contains the first published story by Amelia Kahaney. Called “Fire Season,” it truly heralds the arrival of a powerful, new talent. In the story, a thirteen-year-old girl name Marni realizes that she has grown out of her awkward stage and is now, suddenly, beautiful. Dressing in clothing from her mother’s singles-bar days, she pursues a cruel and distant boy named Pablo and shakily inflicts her burgeoning sexuality on Roger, her most recent surrogate father. All of the action occurs amidst the backdrop of a California subdivision threatened by an advancing wildfire.
What makes Kahaney’s writing so viscerally real is its depiction of a young teenage girl who hasn’t yet grown into her sexual power. Marni and Pablo are vicious, attacking each other in the pool and hurling rocks with the express purpose of bruising one another. Kahaney renders the masochism of early adolescent love and lust unflinchingly. This piece is everything that the contemporary short story is not: the characters are not refined, New York intellectuals, and it’s never self-consciously quirky. Tom Wolfe once wrote that all New Yorker stories are about “inchoate longing.” This was, of course, hyperbole, but this sort of genteel story is just as common today as it was in the ’60s. “Fire Season” is not about inchoate longing; it’s about the kind of longing so consuming that it induces violence and incites destruction.
It isn’t often that an album excites me this much upon first listen, but The Magnetic Fields’Distortion, out tomorrow via Nonesuch, is the first hype-worthy album of 2008. I started listening to it earlier today, and I just can’t stop. Holy fuck is it good. At the risk of sounding reductive, I’m going to say it combines the stronger elements of 1999’s 69 Love Songs (Stephin Merritt’s deep, echo-chamber voice, general bounciness, lyrical cleverness and humor) with Beach Boys-style pop and then drenches it all in a bath of Jesus and Mary Chain-inspired distortion (get it?).
Some initial highlights:
“California Girls”: A bubbly diatribe against the sunkissed (or tanned-orange), towheaded (bottle blonde) bitches of the Sunshine State. “I hate California girls,” sings co-lead vocalist Shirley Simms. I do, too. Most of them, anyway.
“Mr. Mistletoe”: A bit late for the holiday season, but the fuzzed-out jingle bells beat anything in Santa’s sleigh.
“The Nun’s Litany”: The best irreligious sing-song track since Belle and Sebastian’s “If You’re Feeling Sinister.”
I tend to hate stoner comedies. Half Baked put me to sleep. How High? How lame. I walked out of Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. I just can’t abide the same dumb jokes over and over again. But there’s something different about Gregg Araki’s Smiley Face. Sure, the movie is all about someone’s stoned adventures, but the writing, acting, and directing are so sharp that it never felt trite. I have always adored Araki–he is so delightfully strange–and his last film, Mysterious Skin, proved that there was more to him than stylized tales of drugged-out teenagers. Smiley Face is another new direction, though it does involve one seriously stoned post-adolescent.
Anna Faris is brilliant as Jane, an out-of-work actress who devours an entire plate of her evil roommate’s cupcakes after her daily wake and bake. The action begins when Jane enters the weed haze to end all others and realizes that said cupcakes were of the “special” variety. From there, she embarks on a quixotic quest to buy more pot, bake new cupcakes, and make it to an audition. Of course, her efforts end in one disaster after another. The supporting cast is absurd and hilarious, featuring Danny Masterson fucking a skull, Adam Brody as a dreadlocked dealer, and John Krasinski as a total dweeb.
Whenever a film receives as much good press as Persepolis has, I start to get nervous. Though it may be perfectly enjoyable, it will rarely live up to the hype. Thankfully, this is the rare movie that surpassed my already heightened expectations.
Though I’ve always wanted to read the Persepolis graphic novels, I still haven’t, so I didn’t quite know what to expect. A friend who has read and re-read the books confirmed that the adaptation was faithful: she only counted six missing scenes.
Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical story of her childhood after the fall of the Shah is graceful and engaging. As the new regime becomes ever more oppressive, Satrapi is forced to wear the veil, and her Marxist relatives are jailed or executed. Eventually, fearing for her safety, her parents arrange for her to attend high school in Austria, where she learns that life in the West comes with its own set of problems. Humor mitigates tragedy without trivializing it, as in the clip I’ve included above, which shows Marjane overcoming her depression through what must be the all-time funniest rendition of “Eye of the Tiger.” The black-and-white animation, ripped directly from the pages of the comic books, is beautiful and subtle. Transitions between scenes are thoughtful and artfully done.
Persepolis is not only a gorgeous and meaningful film, but it can also educate the American public about the modern history of Iran–something we all sorely need. But information always makes a stronger impact when relayed on a personal level. In that sense, Persepolis succeeds both politically and artistically.
You can see a full list of my favorite albums of 2007 at Tiny Mix Tapes, but here are my ten favorites of the year, and why. I’ve written about a lot of these bands before, but hopefully I won’t be completely repeating myself.
10. Pink Reason - Cleaning the Mirror
Essential tracks: Storming Heaven, Thrush
In a sentence: Metallic, angular, cold, and slow, but also emotionally convincing, without becoming trite or navel-gazing.
09. Ponytail - Kamehameha
Essential tracks: Dear God Plz Make My2Eyes N2 One, Lion Down
In a sentence: An energetic explosion of an album that will keep you gyrating like a speed freak, that also manages to incorporate some mind-bending references to Classical music.
08. Akron/Family - Love Is Simple
Essential tracks: There’s So Many Colors, Phenomena, Of All the Things
In a sentence: Angel-folk that makes me want to float into a cloud and stay there, without enough intense guitar riffage to keep me from drifting off to sleep.
07. Double Dagger - Ragged Rubble
Essential tracks: The Psychic, Camera Chimera, Luxury Condos for the Poor
In a sentence: Finally, someone makes a good, hardcore album that matches sheer sonic impact with lyrical depth, in the old Dischord model but updated for the 21st century.
06. Dirty Projectors - Rise Above
Essential tracks: Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie, Rise Above, Depression
In a sentence: Eclectic, African-inspired instrumentals and gospel singing transform a Black Flag album into something universal.
05. Gowns - Red State
Essential tracks: White Like Heaven, Fake July, Clawless
In a sentence: A minimalist soundtrack to rural desperation, with flashes of spiritual clarity.
04. Times New Viking - Presents the Paisley Reich
Essential tracks: Teenage Lust!, Let Your Hair Grow Long, Love Your Daughters
In a sentence: Lo-fi basement punk makes a triumphant showing, fusing irresistible pop melodies with the controlled chaos of amplifier fuzz.
03. Panda Bear - Person Pitch
Essential tracks: Take Pills, Bros, I’m Not
In a sentence: Can’t do it. See my blurb at Tiny Mix Tapes.
02. Marnie Stern - In Advance of the Broken Arm
Essential tracks: Every Line Means Something, Grapefruit, This American Life
In a sentence: A girl with the most impressive, self-taught guitar skills explores philosophy and inner space.
01. Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?
Essential tracks: Heimsdalegate Like a Promethian Curse, Suffer for Fashion, She’s a Rejector, Gronlandic Edit
In a sentence: Kevin Barnes sublimates a painful breakup into a personal transformation, using pop and funk as his guides and revolutionizing both genres in the process.
I know I haven’t posted in, oh, four months. Chalk it up to grad school. But now that I’m done with the semester, it’s time for me to count down my favorite movies of the year. More top 10 lists to come, maybe.
10. Superbad
I am not a Judd Apatow fan. I wasn’t even interested enough to see Knocked Up. But Superbad is just so believable. It’s a sophomoric guy-comedy with some humanism to it. Michael Cera is endlessly endearing. And it goes without saying that the movie is hilarious from beginning to end.
9. Hannah Takes the Stairs
It was impossible to read about Joe Swanberg’s third film without getting some sort of mangled, old-guy-film-critic diatribe on “mumblecore.” I prefer to think of guys like Swanberg and Andrew Bujaski as the budding Woody Allens of my generation. Sure, there’s a lot of navel-gazing in their movies, but there’s also a lot of insight into mid-20s urban existence. And Hannah Takes the Stairs plays like a documentary, zeroing in on what it’s like to work a creative but still boring job and try to find meaning through doomed relationships.
8. Control
Anton Corbijn handled Joy Divison singer Ian Curtis’s life in the only way possible: starkly, with as little sentimentality and hero worship as possible. Because Curtis was not, in fact, a hero. He was troubled, mentally ill, and destructive to himself, his friends, and his family. But he also happened to be one of the greatest musicians of the past 30 years. Corbijn captures the good with the bad, but keeps it all at a critical distance.
7. Ratatouille
Leave it to Pixar. I saw Ratatouille on a really bad day, and it made me feel 20 times better. It is all of those kids’ movie cliches–heartwarming, sweet, cute, etc.–but also genuinely funny with real, old-fashioned storytelling. And I guess it didn’t hurt that it was all about food.
6. Scott Walker: 30th Century Man
I guess this film still doesn’t have distribution. But it’s my favorite documentary of the year. It illuminates the career of one of popular (and not-so-popular) music’s most enigmatic, talented, and media-shy artists. And it sticks to the work itself, focusing on interviews with Walker and other musicians, completely avoiding the gossipy and the sensational.
5. Romance and Cigarettes
Some critics loved this film and some hated it. Indeed, it’s not for everyone. But if you have a soft spot for John Waters, it just might be for you. See Susan Sarandon in her trashiest (and most musical) role since Rocky Horror, along with James Gandolfini (as her unfaithful husband), Mary-Louise Parker (as her intentionally-implausible teenage daughter), and Kate Winslet (as a big slut). What’s really surprising about this film is that when the camp starts to subside, you realize that you actually did care about the characters and their plight.
4. Tears of the Black Tiger
This Technicolor Thai masterpiece may not have been made this year, but it never reached the US until 2007. With hand-painted scenery, over-the-top acting, and a timeless, fairy tale storyline, Tears of the Black Tiger surpassed almost every Hollywood western I’ve ever seen.
3. Brand Upon the Brain!
I may be a bit biased because I did happen to see this with a live orchestra and narration by Lou Reed. But Guy Maddin’s black-and-white fantasy film about girl detectives and mad scientist fathers is steeped in family-based sexual anxiety. Brand Upon the Brain is haunting and gorgeous, both referencing the retro and embracing the postmodern.
2. Waitress
Adrienne Shelley’s last film is everything classic, Hollywood movies were: warm, uplifting, but somehow unexpected. Subtly challenging social norms while indulging in ’50s diner nostalgia, Waitress deserves to be taken seriously. Performances by the late Shelley, Cheryl Hines, Kerry Russell, Jeremy Sisto, and even Andy Griffith, are nuanced and memorable. And the art direction is just gorgeous.
1. I’m Not There
I love Todd Haynes, and here he proves that he can even take on a personality as complex as Bob Dylan. Rather than playing it straight, he splits what is a truly fragmented public image among several actors. Cate Blanchett was a standout as Don’t Look Back-era Dylan, and the influence of Rimbaud and Woody Guthrie also ring true. I flinched at Richard Gere’s inclusion, but thankfully he hardly had to act at all. And the Greil Marcus notion of the “old, weird America” that crops up in the Gere section is essential in even beginning to understand the mystery that is Dylan.
Honorable mentions: The Darjeeling Limited, Zoo, Death Proof
Movies I didn’t see but probably should have: Eastern Promises, No Country for Old Men, Juno
Xiu Xiu
