Earn This

I have no right to review Slippery When Wet.  I can’t break down Born to Run.  To me, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Pet Sounds are beyond approach.  I lack the bona fides to critique such eternal landmarks, not least of all because I wasn’t there to experience them.  Awareness of the musical zeitgeist of a decade is no substitute for being a part of a movement.  I want to be there when the next album that defines its time drops.  Maybe, I thought, maybe Ursa Major will be that album.

This was wishful thinking from the start.  Third Eye Blind already had their breakout.  The self-titled debut sent fully a third of its tracks coasting into the Top 20, including Semi-Charmed Life, the No. 1 hit famous for the shock it creates when your sing-along is shattered by the realization of what the verses are describing.  Still, the six-year hiatus that followed their third release (throughout which there were no signs of a break-up) served to infuse the band with mystery and hype.  Maybe, I thought, maybe Ursa Major will be that album.

Available only by digital download, the Red Star EP heralded a return to the band’s true form.  Then a new website appeared, 3eb.com, that put community interaction at the forefront.  The fan-centric aesthetic and an “Assembly” full of blogs, along with claims from frontman Stephan Jenkins that the upcoming album would be their most political yet, steered the hype away from melody.  Why would a band whose cornerstone was a song with overlooked lyrics and a hook for the ages predicate their overdue return to the limelight on opinion and activism?  New grounds trembled in anticipation of breaking.  Maybe…

“I want a riot, yeah!”

The rallying cry of the lead-off track has my fist in the air!  The guitars are surging back with familiar energy.  The pitch is rising, so I crank the volume and get caught up in the rasp of passion in Stephan’s voice:

“Yes I am dying to be freaked!”

Yes, I am d– wait, what?

Instantly I’m back in 1997 reliving the shock.  So, what kind of riot was he talking about?  A quick check of the lyric liner tells me the whole song is open to at least two interpretations: grassroots firepower or a plea for sex.  Alright, Stephan Jenkins, you got me.

But the music goes on.  Brand-new hooks revive with full confidence the old Third Eye Blind swagger.  Rolling snares and bam-bam rhythms lead you in and carry you like a wave from verse to verse.  The slurred lilt of the vocals are so instantaneously familiar that I had little trouble singing along not just on the first listen, but even at the first iteration of a chorus.  Then again, I was a pretty big fan.

Weren’t we all?  Who among us, born on the far side of the great divide that is the year 1990, wouldn’t hop on board at the first chord of Jumper?  Thank your lucky red stars, because fully a third of Ursa Major could have coasted into the Top 20 at the end of the last millenium.  Not to delude you; without the full promotional force of a major label (they recorded on their own as Mega Collider Records), these singles won’t see multi-platinum sales.  Besides, kids today are much more taken by their angry Seethers and their dreamy Jason Mrazs.

But the punchline is missing.  The melodies are what we all want, but this was supposed to be an intellectual firestarter!  Members of the Assembly may dissent, but what I heard was less a call to action and more what I’ll label “forward-dating.”

Through lyrics that remain as fluid and deft as ever, Stephan Jenkins has attempted to emphasize that he is here and now.  Explicit references to online dating, flat screen tv, and mp3 players appear distinctly unromantic amidst the surrounding metaphors and emotional outpours.  An entire song about “trying to flip butch chicks” and (elsewhere) an isolated mention of “Africa where life is cheap” might equally elicit groans from apathetics who find vocal activists oppressive.  Opening the cd case, you run into an advertisement for Third Eye Blind ringtones before you find the cd itself.  But all of these prove to the listener when Ursa Major was written.  Right now.

The Assembly – in fact, the overall intent and form of 3eb.com – now makes perfect sense.  Third Eye Blind is not retrieving the roots of political rock and roll by emerging from their hiatus reborn as Bob Dylan in three persons.  Instead, they’re eschewing the traditional way in which musicians relate to the public.  This record wants to kick off a new era; not of what music is, but of how it is communicated.

Thoroughly modern issues feature alongside buzzwords that are neutral but strictly contemporary in order to engage the listener.  We are meant to feel that Ursa Major is our album.  And to leave posterity with no doubt as to the exact date of its release, Jenkins sings: “Wanna be hustler school M.I.A. / Make a paper plane and then you fly away,” a shout out to last year’s multi-platinum single.  He even slips in “I’m your mega collider” which, as I mentioned, is the band’s invented label.

Finally, notice that the website tries to use open membership and encourage blogging and forum posts in order to hand over the reins of Third Eye Blind’s web presence to the fans.  This is our album, because the focal points of our daily lives make guest appearances in the songs.  This is our website, because we provide 95% of the content, unedited.  This is our time, defined.

Maybe, I thought.

To commemorate the return of “Gossip Girl” tonight, let’s revisit a well-known but flawed 1999 movie that should be required watching for anyone who likes Josh Schwartz’s show…

Rating: two stars (out of four)

Watching Cruel Intentionstoday, in 2009, it was almost impossible not to think of “Gossip Girl,” the popular TV show that relishes the lascivious, mischievous, and devious exploits of uber-rich, uber-preppy high school students living on the Upper East Side of New York City.  The teenagers in this movie, backed with the both comforting and numbing knowledge that their careers and financial situations lack any semblance of uncertainty, introduce excitement into their lives with beguiling games to lure members of the opposite sex, snarling plots to humiliate enemies, and discreetly mentioned but explicitly realized sexual exploration.  Sound familiar?

Indeed, now I won’t be able to watch this movie again without seeing Chuck as Sebastian and Blair as Kathryn.  And my moderate knowledge of contemporary teenage dramas makes it easy for me to buy the capacity of these individuals to engage in such elaborate schemes, most of which are underpinned by the goal of enhancing their popularity.  Cruel Intentionsis based off Choderlos de Laclos’ novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses (which has been translated into film an astonishing four times), and some reviewers couldn’t buy the shift of the characters’ situations.  James Berardinelli wrote that, “What works with mature individuals in 1782 France seems false when applied to high school kids in 1999 America.”

Perhaps because of “Gossip Girl” and “The O.C.,” not to mention films like Thirteenpresenting young people growing old quite fast, and a sprinkling of my own experience thrown in, I wholeheartedly disagree with the above statement—it now seems more natural than ever for this kind of plot to be attributed to teenagers rather than old-fashioned Frenchmen.  That said…there wasn’t much more about the film that I could throw myself into.  This particular nefarious plot allows Sebastian (Ryan Phillipe), his school’s reigning Don Juan, and his stepsister Kathryn (Sarah Michelle Gellar, from TV’s “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and most teenage boys’ fantasies) to work for and against each other at the same time (these things get complicated).

Kathryn, irritated that her ex-boyfriend preferred the nubile and naïve young Cecile (Selma Blair), solicits Sebastian to work his magic on her and help ruin her reputation.  He complies, but he’s more interested in a greater challenge—deflowering (the back cover of the DVD actually uses that word) Annette (Reese Witherspoon).  Annette, who conveniently happens to be the daughter of the school’s new headmaster and is thus moving to town, wrote an article for a teen magazine extolling the virtues of virginity before marriage; this, combined with her looks, makes her irresistible to Sebastian.

Kathryn wants his car if he can’t seduce her; if he can, he gets Kathryn herself.  So there’s a bit of Clueless (with half-sibling relationships seemingly avoiding the stigma of incest) sprinkled over the “Gossip Girl” undertones. (The GG episode wherein Blair asks Chuck to seduce Vanessa with the promise of herself later bears a particularly uncanny resemblance.) Unfortunately, Cruel Intentions has little of the charm and zest of Clueless or the damn-the-stiffs embrace of decadence of “Gossip Girl.”  It’s too somber, too watered-down and safe, and, ultimately, too bland.

This is the kind of movie that should be described as a “doozy,” that should be full of delicious lines and lively acting and come-on-that’s-impossible-but-really-fun-to-watch plot twists.  But unlike “Gossip Girl,” Cruel Intentions doesn’t really seem to cherish its characters, faults and all—it makes noise about embracing them, but it’s really just disguising a morality play, and that’s no good here.  The heart of the matter is revealed by director Roger Kumble in the DVD’s special features, where he explains that he wanted to show nudity around Sebastian to illustrate his nature but cut the scene for fear of us not buying Sebastian’s eventual transformation into a PG-acceptable sweetheart—a direction that, I think, misses the heart of the story.

Elsewhere, we don’t see enough evidence of Sebastian and Annette melting away each other’s icy exteriors, and thus the central romance, vital to the film’s success, doesn’t resonate.  When Sebastian is fretting over his possible missed opportunity, or Annette is flashing back towards previous cutesy scenes, we aren’t emotionally engaged.  That’s not necessarily a knock on the actors, but rather on the script, which tries to fit too much into a 95-minute movie (would another few scenes have killed us?) and doesn’t allow for much character development.  There’s nothing embarrassing, but no dialogue, characters, or scenes really convince us that they’re worthy of our attention.

Brotherly love in New York City.

Phillippe is alright as Sebastian, although I got the feeling that, as the charming playboy, he was too dour—like the film, he doesn’t seem exhilarated by his character’s nature (compare with the wonderfully slimy Ed Westwick as “Gossip Girl’s” Chuck, who oozes an irrational fascination with both himself and his lifestyle).  Gellar too is relatively acceptable as Kathryn (though, again, she lacks Leighton Meester’s zest for bitchiness), as is Witherspoon (who looks more attractive than in anything else I can recall).  But too much credibility is lost with the insipid script, not to mention the ending, wherein both the moral lesson and the death are unnecessary.

One of the film’s best scenes features Kathryn lying on top of Sebastian and shamelessly teasing him, with no intentions of following through, to encourage him to keep his end of the bargain up (in more ways than one)—just the kind of devilishly entertaining moments we needed more of.  There’s another moment where Kathryn teaches Cecile how to French kiss, and by the end, the latter looks like she desperately wants more…and so do we.

I didn’t like the sixth Harry Potter movie. I really expected to; I’m an apologist for the series, and David Yates’ effort before this was my favorite yet. Unfortunately, Half Blood Prince let me down. I’m here to tell you why it got way too much positive press from critics and viewers everywhere.

But before I start ripping into it, let me compliment the parts of the movie I loved:  its incredible – almost naturalistic – visual style, the best acting in the series yet, and a surprising amount of comedy. It’s easily the funniest Harry Potter yet. And the movie, at its core, is an interesting story that I’m very attached to. Overall, though, there’s just too little payoff to make this a rewarding film.

On to the complaints…

Like Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, it took a second viewing for me to really decide how I felt about this Harry Potter movie. This time, though, the result was less favorable.

Most of my complaints stem from two major problems: The film doesn’t take the time to 1) understand evil or 2) give us much meaningful romantic payoff. I’ll discuss these two complaints separately.

Side note: Notice how I work hard to separate my feelings from the book and the movie; I’m attempting to avoid an error often made by those evaluating adaptations. I expect the film to be “different” from the book, I just hope it will turn into a compelling film.

Major complaint 1: The movie doesn’t care about its bad guys.

One reason I like the fifth movie so much is we really get a sense of what makes the two bad guys (Umbridge, Voldy) tick, and we can compare this to our heroes. Voldemort is attempting to take over Harry’s mind, Umbridge is villifying everything Harry loves, and it forces Harry to question what the line between a good guy and a bad guy is.

But in the sixth movie, we’re not given much insight into the villains, even with a few revelations at the end. Why is Draco skulking around and plotting bad things? Why are the Death Eaters flying around blowing stuff up? What are their goals and their motivations? Nothing gave me a good grasp on the danger the characters were in.

There was ripe potential for the film to dig deep into the mind of Voldmort for the heroes (and viewers). The writers could easily have developed great insight into Voldemort’s descent and compared it to the decisions the  Hogwarts kids had to make, but there’s really not much of it shown. The professors just keep saying “he was a kid here like you and me, but he turned EVIL.” Fine, then. Show us how or why, make us care and compare it to the characters we know and love after 14 hrs of movies.

What bothers me is how much emphasis was placed on the love triangles. It’s not that the characters’ raging hormones and love triangles aren’t compelling. It’s just that they’re not nearly as compelling as the over-riding saga. Love is a big part of these characters’ lives, but what makes this series special is its balance between the conflict in the characters’ relationships and the conflict in the overall saga, good vs. evil.

Major complaint 2: The romances are pathetic and overcooked.

The Harry-Ginny romance doesn’t seem to happen for much of a reason. Sure, Harry lists some of the things he likes about her at one point, but we’re never given a reason to feel their pull together. You never feel them really growing towards each other except for a few nice moments. Nothing substantial.

Compare that to how excellently Order of the Phoenix portrayed the rise and fall of the Harry-Cho romance, and it makes this one feel a bit empty. I’m hoping the seventh/eighth films dig into it a bit more and really makes me care about the two as a couple. Because, for now, I feel like the filmmakers are telling me to want them together without really giving me a reason.

The Ron and Hermione situation is treated more organically, but the execution is bungled. There’s just too much, with not enough payoff. The bickering drags on and on. You’d think with all of the setup this movie and the last, there’d be a big payoff scene or something, especially after the last two movie had so much build up to it. I guess this is a Han-Leia style romantic cliffhanger and we’ll get a good moment later. I still wish it was in this movie.

Here’s hoping Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is rights these wrongs.

Rating: 2 1/2 stars (out of five)

Having successfully entered their third decade together with 2000’s acclaimed All That You Can’t Leave Behind, U2 may have been forgiven for thinking they didn’t have any challenges left.  Having already changed up their sound enough times to stay relevant and popular for over 20 years, they’d silenced the Pop naysayers and once more inserted themselves into the national consciousness.

Such contentment, indeed, may be responsible for the limpness of How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb.  Despite arriving after what was to date the longest layoff of the band’s career, Bomb represents the most uninspired, superficial, and, quite frankly, boring record they’ve ever made.  They’ve lost both the interesting sound of their past and the songs themselves (ATYCLB at least had the latter).  The unfair reaction to Pop has apparently compelled U2 to distance themselves from their experimental 90s as much as possible, but in the process they’ve forgotten what made them great.  AllMusic Guide hit the nail on the head in saying, “They’ve overcorrected for their perceived sins, scaling back their sound so far that they have shed the murky sense of mystery that gave The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree an otherworldly allure.”   

The sound on Bomb, thus, invokes generic, meat-and-potatoes rock that has never, ever been U2’s specialty.  Producer Steve Lillywhite was behind the boards for the taut and fierce War, but now that they don’t write songs with the passion of “Sunday Bloody Sunday” or “Like a Song…” the straight-ahead production doesn’t serve them well.  The songs need the post-punk influences evident on Boy, the wintry atmospherics of The Unforgettable Fire, the wide-open desert feel of The Joshua Tree, or the danceable but dark stylings of Achtung Baby, Zooropa, and Pop.  They don’t do meat-and-potatoes well, at least not anymore.  The Edge isn’t captivating enough, nor is Bono, who’s voice has never sounded worse and yet is placed too far forward in the mix.

Meanwhile, the rhythm section is relegated to the distant back, as Lillywhite and the band have apparently forgotten that most of U2’s best songs feature memorable contributions from bassist Adam Clayton and/or drummer Larry Mullen Jr.  At the end of the first verse of “Miracle Drug,” you can feel the rhythm section trying to kick in, but they’re buried too deeply in the mix that you can hardly hear them over Bono’s cries.

Yet, as ATYCLB proved, sonic innovation is not a pre-requisite for a successful album, but this collection of tracks is without question the weakest U2 has ever put forth.  The songs lack heart and energy, relying on recycled sounds and those repetitive bridge solos.  “A Man and a Woman” informs us—in case anyone was still straddling that fence—that U2 should never attempt an R&B crossover.  Everyone sloughs his way through the turgid “Love and Peace”; and “One Step Closer” and “Yahweh” have neither the lyrics nor the melody to justify their instrumental minimalism.  

Our esteemed frontman, for his part, does little to quell concern (at least in myself) that his ever-increasing amounts of public activism have degraded the band’s music.  The band has acknowledged that Bono’s studio time has decreased over the past few years; and although they claim that his absence isn’t a problem, he—not the Edge or anyone else—is the band’s heart and soul.  Without him in top form, little else matters.      

None of this is to say that Bomb is unlistenable.  Indeed, the feeling provoked by a casual listen easily supersedes the lingering, unpleasant aftertaste.  “City of Blinding Lights” is so far and away the standout that it feels as though it belongs on different album, a gorgeous, elegiac song the likes of which they’ve never written before.  “Miracle,” about a paraplegic former high school classmate of the band who was able to write poems with the help of drugs, features similarly pretty chiming guitars and an ecstatic-sounding bridge.  Yet, besides “City,” all the pleasures here are moderate—“Vertigo” may get your toe tapping, but its best environment remains that fantastic 30-second iPod commercial; “Crumbs From Your Table” pleasantly meanders; and “Original of the Species” has the album’s prettiest melody but suffers from its words. 

Indeed, though I would take stronger melodies for a start, Bono’s lyrics unquestionably dampen the album, as he spits out lines that make you want to tear your hair out.  The subtlety and genuine emotion from earlier in his career have been completely wiped away.  Nonsense lyrics are fine on “Vertigo,” but by the time you’ve heard “Freedom has a scent / Like the top of a newborn baby’s head,” or “Some things you shouldn’t get too good at / Like smiling, crying, or celebrity,” or found Bono trying to rhyme choice and tortoise, romance and distance, you’ll want out.  (What, exactly, would be wrong with being too good at smiling?)  13 years ago, he wrote on “So Cruel,” “I gave you everything you wanted / It wasn’t what you wanted.”  Now, he writes “I’ll give you everything you want / Except the thing that you want.”  The first is poignant; the second, faux profound and merely contradictory.
 
The most surprising misfire, however, is “Sometimes You Can’t Make it On Your Own,” the ballad written in memorial of Bono’s late father that took up the most studio time and garnered the most hype.  For Bono, and some fans, it was the heart of the album, but it’s remarkably uninviting.  Their love songs now all sound too calculated and safe, lacking the quality lyrics and/or musical elements necessary to ensnare the listener.  It’s hard to say whether U2 will ever find that part of themselves again.  One can only hope they haven’t completely lost the desire to be different—an ambition that took them to the top in the first place.

Rating: 2 1/2 stars (out of five)

You can’t read eight words on Allmusic’s biography of Muse without reaching the word Radiohead; and given lead singer Matthew Bellamy’s obvious love for Thom Yorke, that’s not a surprise.  Musically, though, Absolution, the band’s third album, doesn’t really resemble any Radiohead discs.  There are hints of The Bends here, but with its dark stylings and heavy dose of drama, Absolution reminded me more of Placebo.  The problem, though, is that Muse, a relatively unknown band quickly gaining in prominence, sounds like Radiohead- and Placebo-lite, without the skill to transcend their influences. 

Absolution is filled with Bellamy’s paranoid and stark observations about the future of the world lined up next to the band’s oppressive sound.  The two forces fit each other, there’s no doubt about that, but the combination just doesn’t work.  This is largely because the music, and the production, sounds horribly claustrophobic.  The songs are not allowed to breathe whatsoever, and by mid-way through the album, the listener craves a break.  More talented bands and producers have created albums that are depressive and/or haunting, to be sure, but here Muse miss that target and end up sounding swampy and muddled.  The production further becomes a problem because there is very little melody anywhere to be found here; these two facts leave Muse playing intense but indistinctive and sludgy rock.

Fans of alternative rock may find enough to like here, especially on “Time is Running Out” and “Falling Away With You,” but repeated listens reveal too many imperfections in the songs and the lyrics.  Tracks like “Stockholm Syndrome” arrest attention on first listens, but after a while they don’t seem to hold together, simply fading away into irrelevance in the listener’s mind.  “Blackout” sounds appealing at first, but by the end of the song, Bellamy’s words starts to grate.  He moans uber-pessimistic lines like “This love’s too good to last” without ever really telling us why.  “I’m too old to change”—really?

Elsewhere, he rants that “This is the end of the world!” and “The end is all I can see,” which represent the tone of the entire album, but none of it registers much of an emotional impact.  As “Blackout” makes clear, Bellamy doesn’t take the next step of telling us why he’s so paranoid, what makes him so pessimistic, what perspective he can offer us besides apocalyptic visions.  He also slips up lyrically on “Falling Away,” where a multitude of absolutist clichés (“I’ll love whatever you become”; “I know I won’t forget a thing”; “All of the hopes we cherished fade”) de-mystify an otherwise stately song.

“Time is Running Out” deserves keeping around, possessing both a melody and a skillful build of tension.  The mischievous lyrics—easily the album’s best—express that undeniable but often unexplainable interest in unstable relationships (“You’re something beautiful, a contradiction / I wanna play the game, I want the friction”). They’re less successful at relating to the album’s overall theme (as expressed in the song’s chorus and title) that we’re all doomed, as Bellamy likely wanted them to, but they work in the four engrossing minutes of the song.

But ultimately, Absolution, despite being just 12 earnest songs (two brief Morning Glory-style instrumentals not included), feels overwhelmingly long, a fact traceable to the oppressive sound and unmemorable songs.  Rolling Stone’s Album Guide describes an album by Scott Walker as “top-heavy with pretentious abstraction, self-consciously difficult and often actively unpleasant,” which sums up my feelings on Absolution pretty much to a T.  In small doses, Muse’s music works better, but they have a long way to go before an entire album is worth listening to.

It’s easy to write Yes Man off as “Liar Liar 2″ as so many critics have. But Yes Man, a zany Jim Carrey movie about a man who can’t say no, has a more true and powerful center. Moreso than other high-concept Carrey comedies — Liar Liar, Me Myself and Irene, The Mask, Bruce Almighty — Yes Man contains a relevant, powerful moral. Life isn’t best experienced coasting through it. Life is best spent doing things. Experiencing the world, going on adventures, trying new things.

That’s why I wanted to like Yes Man as I was watching it. Certainly, Yes Man is probably a notch or two above the disaster that most newspapers and magazines have it pegged as. But it misses out on greatness, and even goodness, because the film is so poorly executed.

The biggest flaw is that there’s not much to Carrey’s character. I felt no connection with him. I didn’t believe his despair at the beginning, didn’t feel his newfound passion in the middle, and didn’t taste any redemption in the end. Why are he and Bradley Cooper’s character best friends? I see no reason for that relationship other than every main character of a romantic comedy needs a best friend.

As he said yes to anything and everything, I felt like I was watching him read a script, not act. It’s partially his fault, partially the script’s fault. It’s frustrating because I believe this movie could have been so good if the film-makers had just let us feel Carrey’s journey a bit more. Even if Carrey had put a bit more thought into his words and a bit more hurt on his face, I might have been sucked in more.

Another big problem is that the movie doesn’t trust its viewer to think at all. It seems forced to point out everything. Right, we know Carrey would never have met Zooey Deschanel if he hadn’t started saying yes. You already made that pretty obvious, Yes Man, you don’t need to make that the crux of one of the dramatic/romantic speeches of the movie.

A few of the jokes are really lame, too. The terribly uncomfortable dentures scene should never have been filmed, let alone made it past the editing room. There’s way too much of Rhys Derby’s boss/dorky friend character, who gets old fast.

Easily the best character in the movie is Zooey Deschanel’s. We know from an early encounter that she’s destined to be Carrey’s romantic foil, and the predictability does not disappoint. The spontaneity and adventure-driven life this movie endorses is so much better embodied by her than Carrey, even after Carrey’s transformation.

All in all, I tolerated Yes Man. I didn’t love it, only barely liked it, and recognize that it’s far from a great movie. But at times, it’s a fun ride. The best portion is the frenzied second act when we get one set up and payoff after another. It’s the funniest and richest part of the movie. Carrey and Deschanel play off each other pretty well for the better portion of the movie even though Carrey’s character is weirdly inconsistent and underwritten. It’s an uplifting, fun romantic comedy.

So – alright, stop me if you’ve heard this one – a German, an Israeli, a Chilean, an American, and a Japanese guy walk into the Royal Conservatory of the Hague in Holland. They all pull out experimental, one-of-a-kind electronic instruments and start jamming. Then after four years of touring and recording they come to Williamsburg, VA to play a badass show at my college.

The band’s name is NiCad. They bill themselves as a power rock band with homemade electronica instrumentation. They’re visiting my school for a three-day stay, culminating in a true concert. Tonight they presented a live demonstration of some of their toys.  Normally I would consider a review of an isolated live performance to be unfair or poorly informed, but in light of my recent exposition on the borders of music and the nature of this group, I couldn’t resist.

You see, the boys of NiCad didn’t play a single “song” tonight in the traditional sense. A brief introduction set the stage for Lyset Fra Nedenunder, a “tape piece” – a term they use to specify that it was pre-recorded and not interactive in nature.  Pause to process that.

The entire room was left dark and no musicians stood on stage while it played.  For fifteen minutes, we were treated to (in the artist’s words) “a thoroughly planned walk through the garden” of “sound materials originally generated for another of the composer’s electronic pieces.”  To my ear, it began with a robot breathing heavily, proceeded to electronic slurps and ribbits, then some harsh winds, a city-destroying robot laser battle, and continued with various other non-rhythmic, pitchless, otherworldly ambiences.  Listen to it here.

Several of the other pieces followed suit. In fact, the immediate follow-up was a one-man Study on Feedback. Here, and often elsewhere, interactivity was the heart and spirit of the work. Two microphones were pointed directly at the two speakers in the auditorium. The artist sat on stage at his computer – did I mention that most of the pieces tonight were presented by the individuals who made them rather than the band en masse?

The composer – or inventor – was Roberto Garreton, who used one hand to input occasional bips and whirrs via one of two handheld iPod-like devices and the other hand to control stereo volume knobs on a nearby hard electronics box. This, again, went on for what might have been 10 or 15 minutes. The variety of sounds produced in that time went beyond what your imagination is likely to conjure from my sketch.

Let me give one more example. There is a museum in The Hague that houses an exhibit of glowing neon tubes, installed there by Gilad Woltsovitch of NiCad. Each tube is damaged in some way: a wire may be frayed, a transformer may be malfunctioning, etc. The erratic electric signals due to the imperfections make noise, but that noise is far too faint for a person to ever hear, even if you held the source to your ear.

Gilad designed a device to pick up these “microsounds” and amplify them to an audible level. One of the pieces performed tonight was Hunting for Fireflies, a “tape piece” that was simply a 10-or-15-minute recording of sounds made by malfunctioning neon tubes in Holland.

To all the avant garde loonies out there (and I mean that lovingly) whose eyes are growing wide with thrills: I must now apologize.  There was a severe downside to this show.  Many of the pieces performed were concepted as both aurally and visually interactive, but the visual components were simply not available.  Hunting for Fireflies begs for the sensory stimulus of the crackling neon tubes themselves!

Watch Satoshi Shiraishi’s Hystere, featuring his invention, the e-Clambone, at work.  It’s “an aerophone supplied with haptic sensors and digital signal processing algorithms,” complemented in this piece by real-time video processing that “seeks moments of convergence and divergence.”  The entire visual component was absent at NiCad’s demonstration.

In short, this was a tragically incomplete presentation of novel and exploratory art.

See, NiCad makes albums filled with music that people can appreciate as such. But tonight was a demonstration of their deep personal interests, the sonic experiments they pursue voraciously in their free time. Clicks and bloops and buzzes and every manner of distortion came out tonight. These don’t add up to “music” by themselves the way we’re used to thinking about it. That’s not their point.

The guys don’t imagine a sound – or tune – and go try to make it; they imagine a source and go find out what sound it makes.

What they find leads, in turn, to inspiration. They take the sounds they discover and use them in their construction of (slightly) more traditional music.

I will add that, to end tonight’s demonstrations, three of the five guys got up on stage to play an improvised jam. One of them had a mic, one a drum set, and one a guitar, but goodness knows there was more to it.

The mic had a keypad on its stand and operated essentially as an advanced Yakkity Yak, the old toy voice recorder. The German would gasp, click his tongue, stutter frustrated growls, and so forth, using his mic to record and play back loops of a few seconds or so, perhaps with volume, tempo, or distortion effects added.

The guitar had pads and pedals and extra buttons (oh my!) and rarely made the sorts of noises you would expect, sticking mainly to pick scrapes across strings, warm string synths, clicks, etc. The drum set was played very quickly and in no consistent time signature.

The German would sometimes lean his mic over to the drums to start looping their sounds instead of his own. It was equally likely that the mic would be used to crash a cymbal or that a drumstick would be used to play the mic.

This all was so out of the ordinary that I can’t possibly describe all the action on stage or all the sounds that were achieved.  If this rough outline of the show intrigues you, seek more information at NiCad.org.

This is part four of a six part retrospective on the recently-split band Oasis. Today’s post is a set of brief reviews of Standing on the Shoulder of Giants and Heathen Chemistry

Standing on the Shoulder of Giants – 2000
2 stars (out of 5)

It hurts me to to call Standing on the Shoulder of Giants a failure of an album, but I have to be fair. It’s one step beyond disappointing, it’s the moment Oasis crashes and burns and begins learning the hard way just how lucky they were. Though it’s largely a solo album, with Noel penning most of the songs and playing many of the instruments in the recording, it’s a resounding disappointment for the whole band with only a few strong moments.

Standing on the Shoulder of Giants lacks a truly great song and produces with rarity songs that are even close to average. Fortunately, the band retains the slightest bit of its earlier grandeur, so the album ends up a few notches below average instead of in the gutter. The sound and glory of the album are there, but they’re hidden under a mess of electronica and mediocre melodies.

It’s hard to say whether the biggest misstep on the album is the grating Put Yer Money Where Yer Mouth or the flat Who Feels Love. Both songs inject subpar tunes into an ugly haze of synthesized noise.

The first Liam-written song, Little James, is an inane catastrophe and makes it clear why Noel should be the band’s primary songwriter. However, it’s the only song here sparsley produced, and it has a nice jangle to it, so it ends up one of the more memorable songs on the album.

Another redeeming moment is glowing, spacey Sunday Morning Call which grows more satisfying and resonant with each listen. Its closest cousin is the timeless Beatles number Across the Universe; the songs share similar melodies and timbres that evoke a hazy, floating dream world.

The best song here, though, is the rollicking Go Let It Out — which is still about as good as a below-average track on The Masterplan and the worst song on Definitely Maybe. It’s hard not to view Standing on the Shoulder of Giants as a massive disappointment.

Heathen Chemistry – 2002
2.5 stars

Heathen Chemistry tends to get the shaft from fans and critics alike. Most people don’t see it what I see it as: a significant step up from Standing on the Shoulder of Giants and a necessary purge of all the psychedelia left in the band’s system. I think we hear traces of Oasis’s incredible melodies and powerful stomp returning the recording. While far from the best Oasis album, I think the Merseybeat-rooted Heathen Chemistry is also not the worst.

Ultimately, the album has a markedly improved melodicism from Standing on the Shoulder of Giants across the board. None of the tracks are disasters and the majority of them are quite good: This time, the Liam writing effort, Songbird, isn’t laughable; The Hindu Times is probably the best song, easily better than any song on Standing on the Shoulder of Giants; Stop Crying Your Heart Out is a fan-favorite weeper. The songs in between aren’t bad either.

It’s tough to look over the fact that the album lacks the kick of Definitely Maybe and the tenderness of Morning Glory. In their place are ambience. Heathen Chemistry is a refined but empty listen; if only there was a powerful thrust and energy to accompany the decent tunes, it could have been a near-great album.

Although Heathen Chemistry is on the lower tier of the band’s albums and certainly nowhere near Oasis’s early grandeur, it is a comforting step in the right direction with 11 tracks of decent psychedelic pop that feature classic Oasis craftmanship.

Oasis Retrospective: Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 – Part 5 – Part 6

This is part three of a six part retrospective on the recently-split band Oasis. Today’s post is a set of brief reviews of Be Here Now and The Masterplan

Be Here Now – 1997
4 stars (out of 5)

The third Oasis album is a Herculean and frustrating effort; Be Here Now is excessive in every aspect, at times infuriating, at times sublime, and at times both.

The opening minute of the leadoff track of Be Here Now, D’You Know What I Mean indicates right away that Oasis has changed their gameplan a little bit. Fiddling around in flourishes of electronica and industrial, D’You Know What I Mean takes nearly sixty seconds to get the actual song part.

Oasis would flesh these two themes out — running excessively long and exploring new synthesized sounds — over the course of the album. While the bits of electronica are diversions that don’t significantly alter the value of the album, the length and structure of the songs are far more striking and, ultimately, crippling.

Four tracks run over seven minutes, with a fifth clocking at 6:53. Only one song, a reprise of the nine-minute All Around the World, runs under four minutes. This jarring length is as excessive as it sounds; Be Here Now would be a considerably stronger album if the album had trimmed back. Close to seventy minutes is too long for a 12-song album.

What redeems the album are the audacious and brilliant hooks buried within the dizzying scope of the album. Stand By Me is head and shoulders above the rest, a heavenly ballad with a resonance to match the best moments of previous albums. It’s one of few tracks on the album to actually earn its length.

Several other moments shine. If you have the patience, listen to All Around the World, and you’ll hear a song that builds to a crescendo that surpasses even Champagne Supernova. The Girl in the Dirty Shirt is among the catchiest songs on the album but is perennially underrated by fans. Magic Pie is the spritual successor to Don’t Look Back in Anger, showcasing a mind-reeling vocal refrain from Noel.

Ultimately, Be Here Now is too much of a good thing; but if you visit these songs in moderation, you’ll here some of the best music Oasis ever recorded. It’s too bad that it’s stretched to a mind-numbing scope. Instead of launching Oasis beyond the stratosphere into the pantheon of rock gods as it could have, Be Here Now sent the band zooming back toward Earth, destined to crash with Standing on the Shoulders of Giants.

The Masterplan – 1998
5 stars

The other Oasis album I can recommend without hesitation isn’t even a proper album. It’s a collection of B-sides. Thus, The Masterplan is a motley selection. There’s no thematic or sonic element tying the songs together.

But to call this secondary or non-essential Oasis is to do a terrible injustice to the material. The first track of this album, Acquiesce, is probably better than all of Standing on the Shoulders of Giants combined. It blows the A-side it accompanied, Roll With It, completely out of the water.

With an opening track as good as Acquiesce — an incredible anthem that reads as the Gallagher brothers’ statement of loyalty to each other — it’d be easy for the album to go downhill, but it doesn’t. Only the subpar guitar instrumental piece The Swamp Song disappoints. All of the other songs range from very good to paradisiacal.

The biggest winners on this hall-of-fame roster of an album are Talk Tonight, Acquiesce, Half the World Away, Fade Away, Headshrinker, Rocking Chair, and, best of all, the dazzling title track. That I had to settle for picking seven songs as the very best on the album should give you a hint just how consistent The Masterplan is.

The most common quibbles with The Masterplan among fans are the absences of a few stone-cold stunners. Cum on Feel the Noize, Step Out, and Whatever certainly would have fit in. But it’s unfair to criticize an album for what it isn’t, especially since some snooping on the Internet makes it easy to find the missing songs. Accept that Oasis chose these great songs instead of other great songs, and you’d be hard pressed to find a flaw in The Masterplan.

Oasis Retrospective: Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 – Part 5 – Part 6

Rating: two 1/2 stars (out of four)

John Hughes’s The Breakfast Clubhas become something of a cult classic in the decades since its 1985 release, equaling or surpassing other pictures from this talented writer, at least in the public’s eye.  In it, five high school students, who conveniently represent a few of their student body’s cliques, have been forced to spend one precious Saturday in detention.  There’s the jock, Andrew (Emilio Estevez); the princess, Claire (Molly Ringwald); the brain, Brian (Anthony Michael Hall); the weirdo, Allison (Ally Sheedy); and the criminal, Bender (Judd Nelson).

As a film, The Breakfast Cluboccupies a critical point in movie history.  The actors were all “Brat Pack” regulars—for Hughes favorite Ringwald, this bracketed Sixteen Candles and Pretty in Pink, and Sheedy, Nelson, and Estevez would star, with others, in the awful St. Elmo’s Fire later the same year.  As Roger Ebert pointed out, it’s an “all-star cast” of younger actors, and the film is worth watching for anyone about to enter high school, but not as much as, say, Mean Girls.  Ultimately, it’s a frustrating, contradictory movie, not nearly as consistent as other Hughes works Sixteen Candles and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off or as heartwarming as Planes, Trains, and Automobiles.   

The stereotypical classifications of the main characters are meant to represent both the way the school principal Richard Vernon (Paul Gleason) and their fellow inmates view them.  The entire movie takes place at school during the day, almost all of that inside the library, where these five challenge each other’s misconceptions of themselves.  Learning tolerance, Hughes tells us, is a lot easier when you want others to view you more sympathetically. 

The de facto leader of the group is Bender, the obnoxious, loud, arrogant, and generally rebellious student who manages to infuriate everyone within about 15 minutes.  Bender, though not uninteresting, is a bit of a contrived character.  Judd Nelson does what he can with the character, and it’s not unrealistic for a high school detention to feature someone like him, but some of his antics feel forced, thrown in by Hughes to keep the plot moving.  

Though I’ll give the movie credit for not going the route of The Graduateby refusing to anoint the adults with first names, it’s difficult to deny that the principal is a hopeless caricature.  I suppose that’s the point, but it makes for quite a one-sided viewpoint.  Some of the things Vernon says to Bender have merit—in particular “You ought to spend a little more time trying to do something with yourself and a little less time trying to impress people.”—but it’s tough to take them seriously when he follows them with a promise to start “cracking skulls” the next time they misbehave.  Likewise, his fighting words to Bender later on in the film feel as out of place as the fight between Richard Gere and Lou Gossett at the end of An Officer and a Gentleman.  Andrew fighting Bender makes sense; the principal taunting him doesn’t.

A more balanced perspective is shown towards the faceless parents of the students.  Though everyone, naturally, professes to not get along with his or hers—If I said that I did, says Andrew, “you’d think I was an idiot.”—they’re not necessarily the problems in the kids’ lives.  Brian, we can infer, has supportive, loving parents; they may be overly concerned about grades, or he may just think they’re overly concerned about grades.  Likewise, Claire doesn’t like her parents, but it becomes clear that she has bigger issues with her friends and her school. 

A little less credible, though, are the personas of Andrew’s father, who demands athletic success from him, or Bender’s, who abuses him.  Those stock types could be believable if the film did something with them, but they’re just slipped in towards the end to try to make us view each person a little more sympathetically.

Hughes adds a few nice touches along the way to keep things interesting.  I admire his willingness to keep the entire film moderately paced, in one setting, with no special effects whatsoever.  I also like the use of music, as the students dance, whistle, or air guitar to the songs playing in the background.  Credit is also due to his inclusion of one of my favorite characters in movies, period, the “weirdo” played by Ally Sheedy.  The film’s most satisfying moments almost all involve her—when she empties her bag onto a couch and explains its contents, when she reveals why she’s in detention (a truly fantastic moment), and when Claire transforms her appearance to uncover physical beauty that had lain dormant.

Unfortunately, the film doesn’t manage to quite transform anyone emotionally quite as much.  Because of its lack of special effects and series of conversations between people attempting to get under the other’s skin, it reminded me in some ways of Closer, but it manages to convey neither that film’s great sense of atmosphere and mood nor its heart.  Closer revealed the emotional breaking points of all of its characters, but nothing in The Breakfast Club strikes that deeply.  My love for Ally notwithstanding, I can’t deny that we don’t really get to know anyone that well. 

And Hughes, though he makes some good choices, adds too many distractions to the story.  In my opinion, the film never should have left the library once the principal put them in there.  By giving us Bender running around the school and needless conversations with the principal and janitor, Hughes ruins the atmosphere of the film.  I liken this to Cast Away, which would have crashed and burned if Robert Zemeckis had ever cut away from Tom Hanks while he was on the island to go back to Memphis.  Hughes spends about 90% of the time in the library and suddenly decides to roam to the principal’s office, the gymnasium, and Bender’s locker; a bolder move would have been to keep the students in one place the whole time.

The Breakfast Club also falters because its writing is not perfectly sharp.  When Claire is berating Bender for his refusal to get involved in the school, she expresses scorn for the academic clubs of which Brian is a member, and Hughes misses the opportunity for Bender to point out the hypocrisy in Claire’s viewpoint.  This is microcosmic of the film’s problems: a few of the conversations that take place are substantive—addressing sex, cliques, popularity, authority—but the movie never really goes anywhere with them.  I never got the impression that the students have learned anything or changed in any meaningful way from their day.  When Claire eventually falls for Bender, for example, it doesn’t feel like something stemming from a change in her attitude towards him; it just feels like a sudden and unexplained plot twist.  There has been little previously to indicate that her feelings for him have softened.    

It may seem as though I dislike this film, but the truth is that I point out its flaws only because it intrigues me so much.  I think it could have been a great film, but instead it’s merely decent.  I love the set-up, and I laugh out loud numerous times in it.  I can relate, at least partially, to Brian, Andrew, and Ally, and Nelson’s Bender eventually turns around from being a mere simpleton to the character least afraid of telling the truth.  His comeback to Claire about supposedly not having any purpose at the school has real bite, and even if his parents represent a bit of a stereotype, Nelson just about makes it work, thanks to his spot-on acting in scenes such as the one when he describes his last Christmas: “It was a banner fucking year at the old Bender family.  I got a carton of cigarettes–the old man grabbed me and said, ‘Hey, smoke up, Johnny.’” 

Such scenes have edginess and power.  Unfortunately, the resolutions are somewhat pat and underdeveloped, which is why The Breakfast Club is best enjoyed with low expectations; otherwise you won’t be able to shake its tentativeness and unwillingness to make a strong statement.  There is a moment when the five students discuss whether they’ll view each other differently come Monday—but I’m not so sure they will.  The likelihood that Hughes is making a statement with that fact is all but impossible.