Dirty Projectors – Bitte Orca (Domino) 9/8/09

30 Monday Nov 2009

Posted by in Music, Pop/Rock

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Some landmark records document a giant transformational leap in a band’s development, marking that moment when good artists become great ones.

Bitte Orca is such a record. That it’s also a strange and wayward affair is no surprise coming from a band whose last album, 2007′s Rise Above, was an attempt by frontman Dave Longstreth to remember and reinterpret the entire Black Flag album Damaged after not hearing it for 15 years.  But what makes Bitte Orca special is the way it manages to combine disorientating, mind-flanging weirdness with a joyous, entirely instinctive pop sensibility.

Instantly, listening to opener ‘Cannibal Resource’, it’s as if Dirty Projectors have rearranged rock’s DNA and installed a new songwriting logic. At once strange and familiar, the song offsets its swaggering rock bass and hand-clap percussion with odd time signatures, tangential guitar riffs and vertiginous modulations in pitch. Like the rest of this record, it pulsates with a supreme sense of freedom and confidence.

Things get better still with the gorgeous ‘Temecula Sunrise’, which soars along on the dovetailing Eastern-flavoured harmonies of singers Amber Coffman and Angel Deradoorian, providing the perfect foil to Longstreth’s caustic warble.  Their girl-group vocals see-saw away in the background as dissonant 12-string finger picking meets flurries of fuzzy, amped-up guitar.  This is pop freed of – or rather reconstructing – cliché, throwing us curve balls while simultaneously riffing off classic motifs from rock’s institutional memory.

In fact, tracing the influences in Bitte Orca is like writing tasting notes for a complex wine; every time you delve into it you’ll pick up a hint of something else. ‘The Bride’ has a lilting, water-borne quality that recalls Starsailor-era Tim Buckley. Elsewhere Longstreth, a music composition graduate, drops in jazz, classical, Middle Eastern and African influences, even a touch of 50’s doo-wop.  There are shades of Devendra Banhart, bluesy Led Zep/White Stripes power riffs, the circular grooves of Steely Dan and the voodoo boogie of vintage Captain Beefheart.  But above all this album rings with the influence of Talking Heads, whose David Byrne is a recent Projectors collaborator.

Then, as if to underline their ability to defy categorisation, the Projectors launch into the avant-R’n’B of ‘Stillness Is The Move’, a procession of booty-jiggling pop hooks filtered through something thrillingly alien. With a lyric paraphrasing Peter Handke’s poem from the Wim Wenders film Wings of Desire, Coffman and Deradoorian’s helium-high vocals ride a Middlle Eastern guitar loop over a glitchy staccato rythmn.  Yearning strings enter the mix as the track builds to a plateau of blissed-out, mystic euphoria. It’s the coolest record Destiny’s Child never made.

This is an album about the longing for transcendence, the state of grace music promises but only delivers in rare glimpses. It’s indie music let off the leash, in which bookish white college kids attain heights of rapture of a kind normally reserved for black soul artists.

More ecstatic word painting follows in ‘Two Doves’, which plays on poetic imagery from the Old Testament text Song of Solomon. Its picked guitar and breathy violin stabs pay loving tribute to Nico’s cover of Jackson Browne’s ‘These Days’ from her album Chelsea Girl, even going so far as to lift a line (“Don’t confront me with my failures…”).  Deradoorian’s vibrato-laden vocal is vulnerable and deeply moving, all the more so for being placed in music that seems to have been mysteriously deconstructed and reassembled.

But it’s on the wildly segueing medley ‘Useful Chamber’ that the Projectors’ sheer reckless verve is at its most jaw-dropping.  A backdrop of morphing synths and chiming, spun-glass guitar is sprayed with sporadic blues riffs; this switches abruptly into a spoken passage, then bursts into a romping chorus plastered in blistering fretwork, before leaping into unearthly vocal modulations that sound like something from another culture, if not another planet. It’s like Ligeti crossed with the Beach Boys.

Old punks might dismiss all this as so much suspect prog-rockery.  But this record is on a relentless quest to transcend its own self-conciousness. The formal experimentation never distracts the music from its main purpose – to communicate urgent, spontaneous joy.

Bitte Orca gloriously reaffirms your faith in pop music’s protean and inexhaustible abilty to reinvent itself, be reborn and live again – even if it has to turn itself inside out to do it.

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (Fourth Estate, 2001)

18 Wednesday Nov 2009

Posted by in Books, Fiction

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To read Jonathan Franzen is to know – like a Star Trek crew member facing off against some alien mind-entity – that you have encountered an intelligence indubitably greater than your own. In The Corrections there are times when Franzen’s voracious, omniscient imagination seems to have inventoried and articulated the multiplicity of the world in full.

In this he resembles other super-eclectic brainboxes of postwar American fiction – his obvious forbears Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon, as well as contemporaries such as the late David Foster Wallace. But what marks Franzen out and gives this book its deep richness is his commitment to storytelling on a very human scale. Franzen uses his gifts to excavate human truths not only with unflinching clarity, but also with a touching and tender pathos. Time and again, his insights feel thrillingly, deliciously right.

The book tracks the trials and disappointments of the Lamberts, a middle class, midwestern family whose home town of St Jude is named after the patron saint of lost causes.  Alfred is the family’s crumbling patriarch – an austere, emotionally frozen disciplinarian from a backwards prairie town, who dedicates a life of service to the railroad only to see it gobbled up and asset-stripped by a firm of aggressive venture capitalists. In retirement, his dignity and self-reliance are similarly devoured by Parkinson’s, and his obsolescence underlined against the backdrop of a hi-tech, consumptive America that no longer has a use for his kind.

His youngest son Chip is a Foucaultian cultural studies lecturer who (in an episode reminiscent of Philip Roth’s The Human Stain) loses his job after an affair with a precocious student.  He finds his antithesis in his elder brother Gary, a senior portfolio manager in affluent midlife, depressed, paranoid and alienated from his wife and children. Meanwhile, middle chjld Denise is a bisexual workaholic control freak whose wild side erupts in a string of kamikaze love affairs.

Over these wayward children frets their hen-like mother, Enid – neurotic, status-anxious and self-deluding in her emotional need to believe in her family as a paradigm of success and respectability. As it becomes apparent that Alfred’s condition is deteriorating, she begs her children to return home for ‘one last Christmas’ in St Jude, thus providing the dénouement toward which the book’s multiple narrative threads inexorably move.

Franzen exposes the follies, vanities and neuroses of each Lambert with such insight and compassion you get the feeling that, rather as Dostoyevsky did in The Brothers Karamazov, the author has split himself into three to bring this trio of siblings to life. Each of the Lambert children’s lives are shaped, consciously or subconsciously, by a series of reactions to their overbearing parents. Franzen brilliantly captures the sticky toxicity of family relationships, of how vainly we struggle, like flies in a web, to free ourselves from the threads that tie us to our past.

But perhaps the book’s greatest achievement is its heart-rendingly powerful and lucidly observed study of Alfred and the corrosive onset of Parkinson’s. Franzen drills into the deepest recesses of this proud, complex and initially unsympathetic figure, peeling away layer after layer until we see the vast, aching sadness at his centre.

Out of such pain Franzen fashions some of the blackest and most brilliantly sustained comic writing in contemporary literature.  The early chapters in particular vibrate with savage farce, and show that Franzen is at his most laugh-out-loud funny when he writes about men and masculinity.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the picaresque exploits of the hapless Chip Lambert. As the novel opens, we find the recently sacked academic in manic-depressive freefall, writing an ill-conceived attempt at a commercial Hollywood screenplay which opens with a six-page lecture on the anxieties of the phallus in Tudor drama. Worse, having dispatched the manuscript to his agent Eden Procuro, he realizes that he has subconsciously littered the text with scores of repetitious and highly inappropriate references to his female protagonist’s breasts. In the first of many allusions to the book’s title, Chip is seized by the conviction that he can salvage both his career and his relationship with his girlfriend if only he can chase the document down and make the necessary corrections before Procuro reads it.

The novel’s title serves as an inexhaustible metaphor that weaves through the fabric of the story: it is referenced in the miracle Parkinsons drug Correcktall, to which the Lamberts are fighting to get Alfred access; it is a stockbroking term for the catastrophic plunge in the value of Gary’s shares in said drug; it is the political correctness that costs Chip his job, as well as the correctional facility being built on his college campus – and so on. But above all it alludes to a generalised sense of the desperate need to put things right – whether morally, spiritually, clinically or pharmaceutically – in a society obsessed with unattainable normalcy and terrified by the prospect of failure or dysfunction.

This is beautifully realized in the character of Gary, who having attained all the trappings of suburban comfort, begins to experience his home as a kind of panopticon, in which the concerned gazes of his family members become surveillance cameras. In a fit of paranoia he resorts to elaborate shows of positivity in order to disprove his wife Caroline’s accusation that he is clinically depressed, culminating in a blackly hilarious episode involving a deadly combination of vodka and hedge clippers.

Sadly, Franzen cannot sustain this level of inspiration. After producing prose of seemingly effortless fluency and verve for 300 of its 650 pages, The Corrections goes soft in the middle.  Part of the problem is that Franzen can’t resist expanding his canvas to take in the widescreen vistas of ‘meta-novelists’ like Robert Coover and William Gaddis. With varying degrees of success, he riffs off themes from the late 90s zeitgeist, including the economic and cultural appropriation of failing Eastern European states, the ascendancy of cultural theory in academe, the long boom of US economic growth and the accompanying banalities of postmodern mass consumption.

But having spent the first half of the novel constructing a compelling family saga, Franzen’s story ranges into places it does not need to visit. Arid plains of narrative open up as Franzen throws in sub-plots and back-stories involving inconsequential characters we never meet. In a series of sprawling information dumps, his prose style shifts from rich first-person detail to broad-brush exposition. A cartoon-like quality creeps in, as the author falls prey to the bad habits of some of his contemporaries, including a touch of satirical excess and some overly knowing hipster symbolism.

Happily, in due course Franzen finds his way back to the story he has so expertly made us care about, and the pay-off – the long anticipated Christmas reunion – is more than worth the readers’ perseverance.

Its flabby midsection notwithstanding, at its note-perfect best The Corrections beautifully balances its satirical elements with movingly observed human drama, evoking an utterly three-dimensional world.  An extraordinary feat of empathy and compassion, The Corrections can be ranked among the finest American novels of the past 30 years.

The Comedians by Trevor Griffiths @ The Lyric Theatre, London

12 Thursday Nov 2009

Posted by in Theatre

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David-Dawson as Gethin Price

It was a bold move for the Lyric to resurrect this old warhorse which, though electrifying in its day, now risks being dismissed as a period piece.  When Trevor Griffiths wrote The Comedians in 1975, the ideological battle lines were clearly drawn: while notorious bigots like Jim Davidson and Bernard Manning prowled prime time TV, British theatre was the stomping ground of the left-wing firebrand – the likes of Edward Bond, Howard Brenton, Howard Barker, and of course Griffiths himself.  This was a Britain arriving at the fag-end of the postwar consensus, on the cusp of Thatcherism and punk. Yet while society may have changed unrecognizably, the climate in which the play was written – recession, strikes, far-right groups on the rise – feels chillingly familiar some 30 years on.

The action unfolds on one long, rain-sodden evening in a Manchester night school, where six amateur comics are gathering for a chance at the big time.  Burt Challoner, an influential London talent spotter, is coming north, and the wannabe stand-ups, desperate to escape from dead-end menial jobs, hope to impress him.

Keith Allen as Burt Challoner

Their teacher Eddie Waters (Matthew Kelly), himself a once-great music-hall turn, clings to an idealistic notion of the comedian as truth-teller –  “A real comedian dares to see what his listeners shy away from, “ he tells his protoges.  But when Challoner (Keith Allen) makes it clear his tastes are strictly lowbrow, most of the group begin wheeling out every racist, misogynist stereotype in the book. We witness their routines in the play’s second act, when the school room is transformed into the stage of a working men’s club and we, the audience, become the punters whose worst instincts are being pandered to.

Then Waters’ favorite pupil, shaven-headed proto-punk Gethin Price (David Dawson), sabotages the show with a disturbing act pitched somewhere between agit prop protest and Dadaist art terrorism.  As well as seething with class hatred and social and cultural alienation, this savage parody points up the cruelty of the routines that have gone before.

David Dawson as Price fizzes with a barely-contained nervous intensity. It’s an impressive, sometimes brilliant, performance of immense commitment, but it would benefit from a touch more subtlety. He has a tendency to over-act, and his wired realization of the character too often exhibits itself as a collection of tics and mannerisms. Dawson heavily signposts Price’s otherness from the other standups, which detracts from the shock value of his explosive second act routine. Dawsons’ portrayal is one-dimensional compared to Jonathan Pryce’s unforced but compelling performance in the 1979 BBC Play for Today production that made that actor’s name (see video below).

Director Sean Holmes keeps the ensemble powering along nicely, the expertly drilled cast totally at home with the fast-paced dynamics of Griffith’s knockabout script.  Billy Carter and Michael Dylan are excellent as the two Irish comics, while Reece Shearsmith, Mark Benton and Keith Allen are all good value, and in most respects Matthew Kelly is perfect as the world-weary Waters.

Matthew Kelly as Eddie Wells

But in Act 3 the cast were stretched by both the strengths and the weaknesses of Griffiths’ script. By the time we arrive at the confrontation between Price and his teacher, the play is no longer simply about comedy but the role and relevance of art in society.  It’s in these more didactic moments, when Griffiths’ own voice occasionally speaks through his characters as if they were ventriloquists’ dummies, that The Comedians begins to show its age. Yet these scenes also include some of the play’s most powerful writing, not least Waters’ haunting confession of his response to a visit to a Nazi concentration camp (“Something in me loved it”).  This is heavyweight stuff, requiring actors who can carry it with absolute conviction. Though they tackle it bravely, Kelly and Davis don’t quite have the range and authority to realize the full power of the scene.

Ultimately, The Comedians eschews soapbox dogma. Like the play’s patient teacher Eddie Waters, Griffiths may not approve of his characters actions, but he does not condemn them. His script is full of dialectical cut and thrust, and a sympathy that acknowledges the gulf between principles and material necessity. Griffiths seems to accept that the function of art is to ask difficult questions and to be honest when it cannot answer them.  Underneath the rhetoric, it is The Comedians’ probing, questing spirit that has kept it young.

Warpaint – ‘Stars’

24 Saturday Oct 2009

Posted by in Music

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This music video, shot by Adam Harding in the ashes of the Angeles National Forest, is a thing of beauty. The fact that it combines girls kissing with ethereal light-painting and reverse slow-motion fireworks does it no harm at all.

Said girls, LA trio Warpaint, have a distinct ‘shoegazer’ vibe,  flavoured with a hint of the sexy menace and mania of Throwing Muses and the tribal aesthetic of UK post-punk group The Slits.

Possession (Andrzej Zulawski, 1981)

23 Friday Oct 2009

Posted by in Film

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possession_locThere are films that are bad. There are films that are so bad they’re good. And then there is Possession.

Maverick Polish director Andrzej Zulawski’s 1981 arthouse horror flick is like no other experience in cinema.  This celluloid cataclysm is amateurish, demented, incoherent, ludicrous, and jaw-droppingly self-important – yet somehow you cannot take your eyes off it for a moment of its two hour running time.

Mark (Sam Neill) returns from a lengthy business trip to find that his wife, Anna (Isabelle Adjani), has been having an affair and wants a divorce.  Scenes of increasingly hysterical marital meltdown follow as the couple wage a war of emotional attrition over the head of their young son in a claustrophobic Berlin flat.  It’s like Kramer vs Kramer on mind-twisting psychotropics.

Yet both Mark and his wife’s lover must contend with a third, secret love interest: gradually they discover that Anna has spawned and nurtured a diabolical creature in a derelict flat on the other side of the city. Worse still, it’s much better in bed than either of them, and she is prepared to kill in order to protect it. possessionsa1ng0

Possession offers a unique cocktail of elements in collision. To his general directorial ineptitude, Zulawski adds poker-faced pretentiousness, one of the most incomprehensible scripts ever written, and risible dialogue riddled with quasi-philosophical balderdash.  The acting, with the exception of the astonishing Isabelle Adjani, is execrable and unintentionally hilarious.  The young Sam Neill – never the most towering of talents – is here criminally mis-directed, pushed so far beyond his limits he virtually exits the stratosphere.

And Possession is funny. Gut-creasingly funny. Witness the scene where Mark tracks down and confronts his wife’s lover, Heinrich, an outrageously camp Steven Berkoff type played with delirious pansexual loucheness by German actor Heinz Bennent. The following is typical of their exchanges as they careen around one another like a pair of loons:

Heinrich: There is nothing to fear except God, whatever that means to you.
Mark: For me God is a disease.
Heinrich: That’s why through a disease we can reach God.

Its deeply suspect gender politics notwithstanding, at the heart of Possession is a great concept – a film about sexual possessiveness and marital trauma set against a backdrop of demoniacal madness and body horror.   Alas, Zulawski seems to have made it while absorbed entirely in a private world of opaque meaning.  The film seems to be a cathartic outpouring of his feelings about his own divorce  coupled with a comment on his ill-treatment at the hands of the Polish authorities, washed down with half-baked Cold War metaphors and lashings of sixth-form existentialism.

But what single-handedly entitles Possession to its status as a lost classic is an extended scene in the Berlin subway, when the evil that has taken seed in Anna finally erupts (see YouTube clip below).  What follow are three of the most intense and harrowing minutes in all of cinema.  The physical and emotional commitment shown by Adjani is remarkable.

possession

Almost as unforgettable is a scene in which we finally witness the creature, brilliantly designed by E.T. creator Carlo Rambaldi. The disturbing sight of Adjani locked in coitus with her demon lover is one of the great horror movie images.

These scenes, as well as the sheer unrelenting pitch of hysteria that permeates the film, invite comparison with the likes of The Exorcist, the Polanski of Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby, early Cronenberg, and even Lars von Trier’s recent Antichrist.

Combining moments of unhinged genius with some of the most woefully misconceived and self-indulgent film making ever, Possession is mandatory viewing. Just don’t forget to look out for the man in the pink socks.

Grant Lee Phillips – Little Moon (Yep Roc Records) Released 12/10/09

25 Friday Sep 2009

Posted by in Music, Pop/Rock

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If he’s not careful, Grant Lee Phillips could become the Paul Weller of alt-Americana

Grant Lee Phillips’ long career to date has been bookended by brilliance. <i>Fuzzy</i>, his debut album with Grant Lee Buffalo, was one of the rock landmarks of the early 90s.  Fourteen years and a string of solo records later, his sublime 2006 cover album <i>Nineteeneighties</i> paid tribute to classic acts from New Order to Pixies, proving Phillips was an artist with a musical voice so singular he could take on almost anything and make it his own.
Yet Phillips’ emotive, widescreen songwriting has always walked a thin line, at times becoming overblown and occasionally lapsing into stodgy blue collar rock. Sadly, while <i>Little Moon</i> offers glimpses of GLP at his best, more often than not it gives this side free reign.
Upbeat stomper “Good Morning Happiness” starts the show with a banality and leadenness that will likely leave you cold. The air-punching MOR of “Strangest Thing” could be late Springsteen, with some of the soft-focus upholstery of a David Gray track.  Its reliance on clichéd lines like ‘You gotta believe in something’ certainly do it no favours.
The title track is much more likeable, as Phillips returns to the multi-layered, filigree realm he’s made his own. There’s a swooning, salon-like air to the song, with its languid piano, brushed percussion, intricate picking and lilting strings, and while not exactly a work of searing originality, it’s beautifully performed and produced.
“It Ain’t the Same Old Cold War, Harry” is even better: a smartly-penned appeal to an anachronistic cold warrior – Truman? – to adapt to an ambivalent new world. With its marching-band swagger and trumping brass, it’s full of jazzy showtune insouciance.
“Seal With A Kiss” is a rushing, loved-up rocker cushioned on layers of springy organ. It’s middle brow, pool-hall rock, and it smells of flannel shirts and workman’s benches. Ryan Adams does this sort of thing far better.
Trying a little too hard to be luscious, “Nightbirds” strays the wrong side of obvious and struggles under the weight of its own contrivances.  ”Violet” is better – a sweet, delicate ballad built on deft little guitar touches and snowdrop piano, as Phillips’ burnished voice curls like smoke between the notes.
As ever, it’s the textures of Grant Lee Phillips’ music that ultimately seduce. His sensibility is essentially baroque, his sound world full of tenebrous, labyrinthine emotional states. Even when the songwriting is less than brilliant, listening to a GLP song is like sinking into soft crimson fabric. A good example of this is “Buried Treasure”, which is no great shakes as a song but manages to win you over with its moody, intoxicating instrumentation. And if all else fails there’s always that languorous, lagoon-deep voice, so rich it could lend a modicum of grace and majesty to the recital of a shopping list.
But even all of this can’t save the cloying “Blind Tom”, a stab at Randy Newman-style musical storytelling that’s sticky with faux-emotionalism. Meanwhile “One Morning” is stuffed full of hokum about sunrises, rolling trucks and crying roosters. Musically and lyrically, it dusts off every country-folk cliché in the book.
Things get no better with “Older Now”, a maudlin affair drenched in soporific strings. You want to go with Grant on this one, but he insists on underlining everything in such heavy pencil you have to stifle a groan. When an artist starts croaking on about ‘angels in white’, it’s time to book that refresher course at the Gram Parsons School of Wasted Beauty.
Then he pulls a gem out of the bag. Closer “The Sun Shines on Jupiter” is a piece of archly playful dixie jazz that swings by in a ticker tape parade of deliciously droll lyrcis: ‘I dare say it’s sweater weather every single day,’ croons Phillips, suddenly transformed into a kind of butch Rufus Wainwright.
<i>Little Moon</i> sees a lack of imagination and an over-reliance on hackneyed musical and lyrical phrases threatening to eclipse Grant Lee Phillips’ indubitable talent. It also reminds us that on form, few can touch him. But throughout this album words like ‘worthy’, ‘crafted’, and ‘earnest’ spring to mind – and in pop music they never should.

LIttle Moon

Grant Lee Phillips’ long career to date has been bookended by brilliance. Fuzzy, his debut album with Grant Lee Buffalo, was one of the rock landmarks of the early 90s. Fourteen years and a string of solo records later, his sublime 2006 cover album Nineteeneighties paid tribute to classic acts from New Order to Pixies, proving Phillips was an artist with a musical voice so singular he could take on almost anything and make it his own.

Yet Phillips’ emotive, widescreen songwriting has always walked a thin line, at times becoming overblown and occasionally lapsing into stodgy blue collar rock. Sadly, while Little Moon offers glimpses of GLP at his best, more often than not it gives this side free reign.

Upbeat stomper “Good Morning Happiness” starts the show with a banality and leadenness that will likely leave you cold. The air-punching MOR of “Strangest Thing” could be late Springsteen, with some of the soft-focus upholstery of a David Gray track. Its reliance on clichéd lines like ‘You gotta believe in something’ certainly do it no favours.

The title track is much more likeable, as Phillips returns to the multi-layered, filigree realm he’s made his own. There’s a swooning, salon-like air to the song, with its languid piano, brushed percussion, intricate picking and lilting strings. While not exactly a work of searing originality, it’s beautifully performed and produced.

“It Ain’t the Same Old Cold War, Harry” is even better: a smartly-penned appeal to an anachronistic cold warrior – Truman? – to adapt to an ambivalent new world. With its marching-band swagger and trumping brass, it’s full of jazzy showtune insouciance.

“Seal With A Kiss” is a rushing, loved-up rocker cushioned on layers of springy organ. It’s middle brow, pool-hall rock, and it smells of flannel shirts and workman’s benches. Ryan Adams does this sort of thing far better. Trying a little too hard to be luscious, “Nightbirds” struggles under the weight of its own contrivances. “Violet” is better – a sweet, delicate ballad built on deft little guitar touches and snowdrop piano, as Phillips’ burnished voice curls like smoke between the notes.

As ever, it’s the textures of Grant Lee Phillips’ music that ultimately seduce. His sensibility is essentially baroque, his sound world full of tenebrous, labyrinthine emotional states. Even when the songwriting is less than brilliant, listening to a GLP song is like sinking into soft crimson fabric. A good example of this is “Buried Treasure”, which is no great shakes as a song but manages to win you over with its moody, intoxicating instrumentation. And if all else fails there’s always that languorous, lagoon-deep voice, so rich it could lend a modicum of grace and majesty to the recital of a shopping list.

But even all of this can’t save the cloying “Blind Tom”, a stab at Randy Newman-style musical storytelling that’s sticky with faux-emotionalism. Meanwhile “One Morning” is stuffed full of hokum about sunrises, rolling trucks and crying roosters. Musically and lyrically, it dusts off every country-folk cliché in the book.

Things get no better with “Older Now”, a maudlin affair drenched in soporific strings. You want to go with Grant on this one, but he insists on underlining everything in such heavy pencil you have to stifle a groan. When an artist starts croaking on about ‘angels in white’, it’s time to book that refresher course at the Gram Parsons School of Wasted Beauty.

Then he pulls a gem out of the bag. Closer “The Sun Shines on Jupiter” is a piece of archly playful dixie jazz that swings by in a ticker tape parade of deliciously droll lyrcis: ‘I dare say it’s sweater weather every single day,’ croons Phillips, suddenly transformed into a kind of butch Rufus Wainwright.

Little Moon sees a lack of imagination and an over-reliance on hackneyed musical and lyrical phrases threatening to eclipse Grant Lee Phillips’ indubitable talent. It also reminds us that on form, few can touch him. But throughout this album words like “worthy’, ‘crafted’ and ‘earnest’ spring to mind – and in pop music they never should.

James Yorkston – Folk Songs (Domino) Released 10/8/09

19 Saturday Sep 2009

Posted by in Music

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The folk music of Great Britain and Ireland is a marvelous thing, but those that love it best haven’t always been its greatest ambassadors. Perhaps inevitably in a genre that’s all about continuity with the past, folk artists have sometimes been weighed down by an excessive reverence for the source material, or stylistically straightjacketed by blind fidelity to a performng tradition.
Not James Yorkston. On this album of folk songs stretching back to the 16th century, his arrangements are authentic and historically informed without making a fetish of it, combining a sense of tradition with his own distinctive musical voice.
For this record Yorkston has temporarily replaced his usual running mates The Athletes with The Big Eye Family Players, a move that’s had little discernable effect on the gorgeous textures of his music. Boasting the same lovely instrumental detail as his previous albums, <i>Folk Songs</i> is an object lesson in balance and understatement, the exquisite instrumentation bathing the ears in a sound as fresh and clear as spring water.
Much of the material looks back to the 1960s folk revival, in particular the work of Ann Briggs, who covered a number of the songs included here on her seminal albums of the period.  Pivoting on themes of class and property, these songs are reminders that folk music functioned as a form of popular cultural resistance. Most celebrate acts of social transgression. They’re tales populated by poachers, or chancers who sleep with the nobleman’s wife, or feisty heroines who cross-dress to show men their mettle. They also tell of the grim retribution the poor could suffer when they crossed the line.
Yorkston lets the voices that haunt this music speak through him beautifully.  He transparently articulates each musical and lyrical line, and every nuance of the songs’ wonderfully vivid and poetic Olde English. The imagery is positively cinematic: in “Hills of Greenmoor”, an evocation of a hare-hunting expedition, we feel we’re riding alongside the narrator as his horse gallops down the hills into a glen flecked with ‘dogs black and yellow, dogs black and white.’ And after the stripped down, guitar-picked introduction of “Martinmas Time”, we’re suddeny enveloped in a lovely rush of woodwind and violins that sounds like sunlight flooding a valley.
Unsurprisingly, a strong vein of melancholy runs through the record. The lovely “Just as the Tide Was Flowing” describes the daily vigil of a young sailor’s wife as she waits for the tide to bring her lover back. “Little Musgrave”, a haunting tale of forbidden love between a nobleman’s lady and a young commoner, is gorgeously atmospheric, a masterclass in episodic narrative.
But it’s not all lyricism and longing. “Thorneymoor Woods” and “Rufford Park Poachers” both document rough lives lived in defiance of the law, while the upbeat “I Went To Visit The Roses” with its brisk, string-picked rythmns punctuated by ripples of harmonium and piano, could have been penned by Yorkston himself.
James Yorkston has as much a purchase on this music as does a Martin Carthy, a Paul Brady or a Dick Gaughan.  His unique way with it may help these songs to receive a hearing among new audiences. <i>Folk Songs</i> is a joy from beginning to end.

Beards are strictly optional for this collection of traditional folk songs with a fresh, contemporary edge

jamesyorkston_folksongs

The folk music of Great Britain and Ireland is a marvelous thing, but those that love it best haven’t always been its greatest ambassadors. Perhaps inevitably in a genre that’s all about continuity with the past, folk artists have sometimes been weighed down by excessive reverence for the source material, or straightjacketed by blind fidelity to a performing tradition.

Not James Yorkston. On this album of folk songs stretching back to the 16th century, his arrangements are authentic and historically informed without making a fetish of it.  Folk Songs is an object lesson in balance and understatement, the music emerging as fresh and clear as spring water.

Much of the material looks back to the 1960s folk revival, in particular the work of Ann Briggs, who covered a number of the songs included here. Pivoting on themes of class and property, this is folk music as a form of popular cultural resistance. The songs celebrate acts of social transgression, whether by poachers, or chancers who sleep with the nobleman’s wife, or feisty heroines who cross-dress to show men their mettle. They also tell of the grim retribution the poor could suffer when they crossed the line.

Yorkston lets the voices that haunt this music speak through him beautifuly, articulating every nuance of the songs’ vivid and poetic Olde English. The imagery is positively cinematic: in “Hills of Greenmoor”, an evocation of a hare-hunting expedition, we feel we’re riding alongside the narrator as his horse gallops down the hillside into a glen flecked with ‘dogs black and yellow, dogs black and white.’  After the guitar-picked introduction of “Martinmas Time”, we’re suddeny enveloped in a lovely rush of woodwind and violins that sounds like sunlight flooding a valley.

Unsurprisingly, a strong vein of melancholy runs through the record. The lovely “Just as the Tide Was Flowing” describes the daily vigil of a young sailor’s wife as she waits for the tide to bring her lover back. “Little Musgrave”, a haunting tale of forbidden love between a nobleman’s lady and a young commoner, is a masterclass in episodic narrative.

James Yorkston has every bit as much a purchase on this music as does a Martin Carthy, a Paul Brady or a Dick Gaughan, but his unique way with the songs may help them receive a hearing among new audiences. Never mind Alt-Folk –  the real stuff is here, and it’s never sounded better.

Futurism @ Tate Modern, London

17 Thursday Sep 2009

Posted by in Art

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Futurism’s first wave lived fast and died young – but has it left a good-looking corpse?

One hundred years ago, in February 1909, the Italian poet and dilletante FT Marinetti hijacked the front page of Le Figaro to promulgate the white-hot gospel of a provocative new art movement. As just one among a rash of aesthetic ‘-isms’ profilferating at the turn of the century, Futurism needed to make itself heard above the din of other people’s rhetoric. Declaring a total break with the past, Marinetti called on his contemporaries to “destroy the museums, the libraries, every type of academy,” and embrace the thrilling new world of flux brought about by mass mechanisation.

Above all, Futurism was about speed: instead of the curves of bathing ladies, the new art would celebrate the sleek lines of roaring racing cars; in place of haystacks and water lilies, the landscape painting of the future would describe the kinetic, jutting rythmns of urban space as seen blurring by in the windows of a railway carriage.  The leap from gas lamp to street lamp meant painters saw society, quite literally, in a new light. “Let’s murder the moonlight!” urged Marinetti, determined to jettison the soft-focus impressionisms of the late 19th century in favour of modernity’s electric pulse.

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Marinetti was soon joined by a clutch of Italian artists that would make up Futurism’s inner circle:  Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni and Gino Severini.  Marinetti’s sloganeering made them come across as a boorishly macho bunch – a kind of bohemian version of the Top Gear team, and they allowed him to take them into some distinctly dodgy ideological territory.  The Futurist Manifesto combined an unpleasant streak of misogyny with a dose of nationalistic militarism, washed down with some quasi-Nietzschean posturing:  “We want to glorify war – the world’s only hygiene – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman… Art, in fact, can be nothing but violence, cruelty and injustice.”

But for all their visionary ardour, the Futurists’ ambition far outstripped their artistic and technical resources.  Were it not for a handful of iconic images, it would be tempting to dismiss the movement as little more than a backwater tributary of Cubism. For a movement that prized clarity and energy, the Italian Futurists’ painting could be surprisingly turgid and over-wrought; their choice of colours gauche and dismal, almost kitsch. No wonder Apollinaire warned that the Futurists were in danger of becoming “mere illustrators.”   As if in recognition of these weaknesses, the Tate has bolstered the show with more heavyweight fare bearing a tangential relationship to Futurism, including Picasso’s Head of a Woman (Fernande) of 1909, as well as works by artists such as Braque, Malevich and Duchamp.

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Yet the best of the Italians’ work is truly memorable, some of it brilliantly so. Boccioni’s sculpture Unique Forms of Certainty in Space (1913) is a muscular, striding figure that looks like some new breed of soilder-citizen on the march, and manages to be both beautiful and disturbing.  Russolo’s The Rebellion (1911) is still a deeply arresting image, with its scarlet spearhead of anarchistic rioters surging as one body into the geometric grid of the streets. Similarly, Carlo Carra’s stunning The Funeral of the Anarchist Galli from the same year also documents the movement’s early identification with anarchism, thrillingly re-imagining the battle scenes of classical painting through the swirling vectors of the new art. Carra also responded to the augmented realities of the nocturnal city: Leaving The Theatre (1909) captures opera goers bursting out of La Scala into the night air, transformed by the street lights into abstracted jellysfish, the whole canvas ablaze with ghostly motion smears.

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The exhibition does well in exploring the cross-pollination between different national expressions of the movement. Its forays into Russian Futurism are fascinating, particularly the work of one of the few women represented, the brilliant Natalia Goncharova.  We also get to see examples of Futurism’s Parisian equivalent, Orphism, which was altogether more lyrical and transparent, more French – two highlights here are Leger’s The Wedding and Picabia’s Dancers At The Spring.

Next we are in England, where the movement influenced Vorticists like Windham Lewis and the superbly gifted sculptor Jacob Epstein, a frangment of whose masterpiece The Rock Drill  (1913-16) features here. This sleek, black dystopian man-machine, with its humanoid progeny seeded in its ribbed belly, is disturbing and prophetic; its visored torso could serve as the prototype for virtually every automaton in popular culture since, from The Terminator to Attack of The Clones.

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This exhibition teeters on the brink of Wolrd War I.  The final room includes a few examples of Futurism’s wartime utterances, including CRW Nevison’s Bursting Shell (1915).  As a member of an ambulance unit in the conflict, Nevison’s affiliation with the war-mongering Futurists died in the trenches – he disassociated himself from the movement from then on.

It is Balla’s Patriotic Demonstration of 1915, a piece of interventionist agitation against Italy’s wartime neutrality, that hints at the movement’s future trajectory. But here the trail ends. There is no reference to the course Futurism took next, which was, inevitably, to align itself with Fascism. Marinetti saw Mussolini as the political corollary to his super-austere aesthetic. In 1924 he issued his pamphlet Futurismo e Fascismo, enrolled in the fascists’ party, and eventually joined Mussolini in his rump Fascist Republic at Salò, dying in northern Italy in December 1944.

That the Tate makes no mention of this, nor includes a single one of the artworks that issued from this second phase of Futurism, seems bizarre, especially given that its Fascistic leanings are made conspicuously evident at the entrance to the exhibition, where Marinetti’s demagogic Manifesto is blown up in wall-sized text.  This is a kind of vanilla-isation of Futurism, an unforgivable omission for a show about a movement in which the fizz of ideas was every bit as powerful as the lure of its images – sometimes more so.

Futurism runs until 20 September.

Verdi’s ‘Don Carlo’, Royal Opera House, 15 September 2009 (opening night)

16 Wednesday Sep 2009

Posted by in Opera

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There are two love stories in Don Carlo. The first is the thwarted passion between Don Carlo, Infante of Spain and his mother-in-law, Elizabeth Valois. The second, the intense, almost homoerotic devotion between Don Carlo and Rodrigo, Marquis of Posa, is the most moving depiction of male bonding in all opera. It’s the sparks that fly between the men that are the more convincing tonight.

The pair’s great, rousing duet to liberty ‘Dio che nell’alma infondere’ at the end of Act II touchingly establishes the depth of their to-the-death friendship. Its refrain echoes through the score whenever their loyalty to one another is tested, returning poignantly in Posa’s prolonged death scene, so difficult to carry off, but here handled with great dignity by Simon Keenlyside.

Keenlyside, one of today’s greatest singing actors, turns in a deeply felt performance fully worthy of the character Don Carlo’s father, King Philip II, calls ‘the only true man in this swarm of humanity.’  His baritone is the perfect foil to Jonas Kaufman’s velvet tenor, and his physicality, as much as his passionate singing, touchingly communicates the tenderness between the two men.

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Far less persuasive is the doomed love between the Infante and his reluctant Queen, who is forced into a politically expedient marriage to King Philip designed to bring peace between France and Spain.  Jonas Kaufman as Don Carlo has plenty of the requisite Italianate lyricism, but is a rather wan, tepid presence, lacking the gravitas for this Hamlet-like role.  His Elizabeth, Marina Poplaskaya, is also somewhat generic and colourless up until the last two acts, when she conjures up real passion and some fine singing.  It’s difficult to credit this dislocated relationship at the best of times, a dramatic weakness for which Verdi must take the blame, but with lovers like these, the task is made harder still.

Elsewhere too, the singing falls short of Verdi’s very considerable demands.  Marianne Cornetti as Princess Eboli, while steady, lacks the agility and subtlety for the role. She is leaden and approximate when handling the gorgeous filigree coloratura of the ‘Veil Song’ in Act II, and happier by far when bringing her heavy chest register to bear in a big-hitting aria like ‘O don fatale’.

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It’s when exploring the political dimension of Verdi’s masterpiece that Nicolas Hyntner’s production really comes into its own.  Don Carlo is a study in the loneliness of corrupt power, a preoccupation Verdi first explored 20 years earlier with his dark, austere opera Simon Boccanegra.  Picking up the theme in Don Carlo, he realised one of his finest psychological creations in the miserable, despotic King Phillip, behind whom hulks the shadow of the blind Grand Inquisitor, the terrifying embodiment of the religious tyranny of 16th century Catholic Spain.

Ferruccio Furlanetto delivers a gripping portrayal of Philip, vacillating between regal monumentality and anguished self-recrimination.  His tortured soliloquy at the opening of Act IV, as he broods over his loveless marriage, is compellingly acted and sensitively sung in his rich, nuanced bass.

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Even greater is the ensuing scene with the Grand Inquisitor, sung chillingly by the brilliant John Tomlinson, a snow-haired vision in theocratic red.  Philip asks him whether he will absolve his sin if he murders his own son. The Inquisitor replies that this is a sacrifice worth making for Spain, and compares it to the one God made on Calvary. Opera doesn’t get much better than this.

It was at this stage that the sounds coming from the pit finally began to do real justice to Verdi’s magnificent score. The early part of the opera, particularly Act II, boasts some of the most consistently inspired and beautiful music Verdi ever wrote.  But for much of the first three acts, conductor Semyon Bychkov presided over an oddly muted rendering,  missing some of the music’s dark, baroque majesty and pungent rhythms.

But by Act IV Bychkov was in his element, showing real affinity for these Boris Godunov-like scenes.  Cast and orchestra alike had loosened up, and by the Act V finale the strings were richly textured, Poplaskaya began to show real class and Kaufman pumped out some glorious tone.

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Bob Crowley’s production design is hit and miss. Effective use is made throughout of black prison walls pierced by intersecting shafts of light – reminiscent of a panopticon – that fit well with the claustrophobic, repressed society the opera describes.   But the auto da fe scene, in which Protestant heretics are led out to be burned at the stake, is kitschy and ill-conceived.  The stage was dominated by what looked like an enormous shower curtain, daubed with a crude and lurid picture of Christ’s face.

This was the first revival of a production led last year by Convent Garden’s music director Antonio Pappano, and at times it was tempting to wish him back at the helm.  But it seems likely that the slightly subdued performances were down to first night nerves.  There’s plenty to suggest that once it hits its stride, this production of one of the greatest of all operas could become something special.

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