In his review of Get Behind Me Satan, the 2005 album by the Detroit blues-rock duo The White Stripes, the music critic Chuck Klosterman, in typically itemized fashion, quips that the band “has spent five years (a) fabricating characters who were supposed to be authentic, and (b) lying about everything that’s integral to their iconography.” Jack and Meg White pretend to be brother and sister—whether they really are or not is up for discussion—and their stage tableau comprises only three colours: red, white and black—in everything from their clothes (Meg, black-and-white; Jack, usually all red) to the amps, the candy-striper mic stands and all their other equipment.

But, perhaps paradoxically, The White Stripes are also one of the most authentic rock acts of the past ten years: like an increasing number of bands in what was dubbed ‘The New Rock Revolution,’ they play real, live instruments in the studio and on stage—there’s nothing electronically modulated about the band’s sound. This allows them—as it does Akron, oh duo the Black Keys—the room to concentrate on wringing an almost impossibly gigantic sound out of only two pieces of musical machinery.

It is both these sides—the highly performative ‘fake,’ and the sweat-soaked ‘real’—that are displayed, often simultaneously, in a new film by Emmett Malloy, a music-video director who has worked with Ben Harper and bands like Wolfmother and Oasis. In 2007, The White Stripes decided to tour Canada, a country they had previously only glossed over, hopping from city to city.

Instead of playing just major centres, they chose to extensively visit small towns and out-of-the-way locales in provinces that are usually left off most bands’ itineraries—and almost always overlooked by bands as big as The White Stripes.

The documentary—which comes with a 16-track CD of the songs featured in the film—records both explosive performances on stage and intimate moments offstage. This is all ensconced in a rough-hewn, mostly black-and-white visual construction that deliberately recalls the nouvelle vague-inspired cinéma vérité style D.A. Pennebaker used in Dont Look Back, his film about Bob Dylan’s 1965 tour of England. Over the course of an hour and a half, Under Great White Northern Lights mixes interview and touristic footage with a catalogue of the major shows the band played—as well as the impromptu, off-the-cuff daytime sideshows they decided to work into the tour schedule.

Giving fans sometimes only half an hour’s notice, and taking place in cafés, a bowling alley and on a bus, these are interesting and often intimate performances that showcase Jack’s formidable musical ability and Meg’s grounded, often self-effacing sense of humour. As well as splicing together live performances, the film highlights the band’s tenth anniversary show in Nova Scotia in a segment which doubles as a brief retrospective of their first decade on stage.

If nothing else, the film should have even non-fans entranced by the mysterious relationship at the core of the band: the final scene, depending on which way it’s viewed, both poses and answers questions about Jack and Meg’s sometimes awkward, unknowable dynamic.

It remains to be seen whether The White Stripes will re-form—Icky Thump is the duo’s most recent record, and they stopped touring in September of 2007 due to Meg’s anxiety issues; Jack, meanwhile, has since taken a trip down super-group avenue, forming two highly successful groups: The Raconteurs, with members of The Greenhornes, and, more recently, The Dead Weather with Allison Mossheart of The Kills.

If Under Great White Northern Lights proves to be their swan song, the band has certainly gone out in style: for capturing and being propelled by the ferocious talent of two of the most interesting musicians of our generation, this truly deserves to be canonised alongside such other great concert films as Scorsese’s The Last Waltz and Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense.

A CD/DVD set of Under Great White Northern Lights is out now through Rhythmethod. A deluxe edition—with an exclusive silkscreen print, a hardcover book of photography, an LP of the soundtrack, a 7” single and a bonus DVD, Under Great Nova Scotian Lights, which captures the band’s 10th anniversary concert—can be ordered from whitestripes.com

David Byrne & Fatboy Slim—Here Lies Love
Nonesuch

Reviewed by Hugh Lilly

Former Talking Heads front man David Byrne is a master collaborator: his work with Brian Eno—most recently 2008’s Everything That Happens Will Happen Today—has been continually inventive, and “Knotty Pine,” his contribution (with Dirty Projectors) to last year’s Red Hot aids-awareness compilation, Dark Was the Night, was one of the highlights of that album. Unfortunately, his new concept album—a song cycle about Imelda Marcos—is lyrically, musically, and conceptually abysmal. It’s a collaboration with Norman Cook (a.k.a. Fatboy Slim), though his presence is so faint that if his name hadn’t appeared in the credits, it would be impossible to tell he was anywhere near the project.

Like a character out of Sex and the City, Marcos—the widow of the corrupt, kleptocratic former President of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos—was known mostly for her collection of expensive shoes (reportedly some 3,000 pairs) and her extravagant club-hopping lifestyle. Following an idea of exposing “the theatricality of the bubble worlds of the rich and powerful,” Byrne aimed to tell Marcos’ life story alongside the “tragic” tale of the woman who raised her as a child, Estrella Cumpas—subject matter that is fairly esoteric, to say the least. It could have been interesting, but the resulting project is little more than a jammed-together collection of disco-pop songs: musically it is incoherent, and lyrically it is a complete mess.

After completing the lyrics, which involved more than a year’s worth of research, Byrne set about assembling a roster of (mostly female) guest artists that includes Sharon Jones, Florence Welch, Tori Amos, Martha Wainwright and Róisín Murphy. Mostly in disco and proto-house styles, the songs range from the “meh, this is OK”-ness of “When She Passed By,” which features Allison Moorer, to the “kill-me-now-this-is-painful”-ness of “Eleven Days,” which employs the grating vocal talents of Cindi Lauper, whose nasal, one-hit-wonder voice has always been unpleasant.

Someone called Charmaine Clamor—an L.A.-based Filipina jazz singer, and therefore the only vocalist with even a tenuous connection to the subject matter at hand—appears on a track called “Walk Like a Woman,” which sounds revoltingly like something that Annie Crummer would have rejected while making one of her albums in the early ’90s. Byrne somehow cajoled country music singer Steve Earle into singing “A Perfect Hand,” whose lyrics include the Kenny-Rogers-like phrases “Who’s holding aces? / And who’s gonna fold and / Who’s got a secret? / And who’s feeling bold?”

The album’s bright spots are few and far between, and exist only by virtue of the featured singers: Natalie Merchant, Sia, Nicole Atkins and Santigold render awful lyrics bearable, and even Byrne’s own presence near the end—on “Seven Years,” a duet with Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond—feels welcome after the indecent aural assault committed in preceding tracks. The show has twice been performed live—in Australia in 2006 and at Carnegie Hall in 2007—and, as the liner notes reveal, the ‘minimal,’ disco-like staging was designed to be toured around clubs and set up in “less than a day.” Byrne asks “Could one, as if by osmosis, absorb an emotional story—a narrative even—in the course of a night out dancing?” Well, yes, that would be pretty great, but it’s a tall order—especially in the form of a musical!

With such grand intentions and a roster of superlative talent at his disposal, it’s incredibly disappointing that Byrne’s project wound up being so gratingly unlistenable. It doesn’t work on disc, and it’s hard to see any of these songs working on the stage. Here Lies Love is the musical equivalent of an horrific slow-motion train crash painfully stretched out to 90 minutes.

The Album Leaf—A Chorus of Storytellers
SubPop

Review by Hugh Lilly

Post-rock is a fluid genre that’s hard to define, but it’s widely agreed that bands like Japan’s mono and the Toronto octet Do Make Say Think (dmst) are currently the movement’s flag-bearers. Characterised by chord progressions, melodies and harmonies, unusual instrumentation and rhythms not usually found in most rock music, post-rock is the bastard love-child of a cross-generational musical orgy; its parentage is as difficult to work out as it is varied. Influences from Krautrock, shoegaze, (classical) minimalism, prog-rock, electronic and ambient blend together to create some of the best—and certainly some of the most formally interesting—music being made today.

Typical notions of song-writing are thrown out the window as found sounds and classical techniques combine with piano, noodly guitars and bass, jazz-inflected percussion and horns on tracks that can be five-minute sketches, or, more often, a raucous, jam-filled quarter-hour. In the best post-rock (mono & dmst) vocals are used only to embellish instrumentation—throat-clearing footnotes to the main event. At the more pop-oriented—though no less enjoyable—mainstream end of the post-rock spectrum are bands like Epic45, the Danish band Efterklang and The Slip, from Boston, MA. The experimental, rule-defying aspect of the genre is what makes this music so enticing, which is why it’s unfortunate that with their latest record, The Album Leaf—who have admittedly always occupied a place at the poppy fringe of the genre—have fallen off the precipice into radio-friendly pop-rock blandness.

This weak, melodramatic album would leave any music fan—let alone someone who enjoyed their previous, vaguely experimental work—wanting. It lacks the slow-burning, entrancing atmosphere of You Are There by mono, whose epic show earlier this year at the bunker-like Bacco Room left my ears ringing for a solid 12 hours. No track compares to the meteoric aural fireworks and percussion of anything by dmst—or the lyrical prowess and muscular instrumentation on display in The Slip’s Alivelectric. Although The Album Leaf are to be commended for attempting to bring an ambiance to post-rock (literally—certain tracks on this new album sound like stuff by Boards of Canada) for the most part A Chorus of Storytellers is dull—unbelievably and disappointingly dull.

Aiming for some sort of ‘rustic’ folk vibe, the band has incorporated violins and other strings more prominently than in the past; unfortunately, they don’t quite have the musicianship needed to pull off the feat. In contrast, the arrangements on albums by, for example, Efterklang—who often work with contemporary composers like Nico Muhly—are far more polished, and showcase influences that range from minimalism to new wave and beyond.

Revisiting The Album Leaf’s enjoyable 2006 album Into the Blue Once Again shows the band once had some skill in crafting enjoyable melodies; now—especially in tracks like “We Are,” which rips off the emotional ‘one-two’ punch of Death Cab For Cutie but whose songwriters lack Ben Gibbard’s knack for compact lyricism, and in the record’s anaemic, uninteresting and seemingly half-formed instrumental opening and closing—they’ve begun to openly display a lack of any sense of shape of discernible structure in many of their songs. Perhaps this uninspired lack of attention to style explains why shows like The O.C., Grey’s Anatomy and CSI have so frequently defaulted to their songs for background music…

The 82^nd Annual Academy Awards

By Hugh Lilly

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences held its 82^nd annual awards ceremony on Sunday March 8^th. After opening with a song-and-dance number from TV actor Neil Patrick Harris—part of the night’s “Old Hollywood” theme—hosts Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin got down to the business end of things: making unfunny jokes. The Oscar hosts aren’t usually particularly humorous—it’s difficult given the scripted nature of the role—but it’s made worse when not one but two natural-born comedians are made to read unusually bland one-liners from a teleprompter written, seemingly, without their individual comic timing and other idiosyncrasies in mind. Ben Stiller livened things up a bit later on though: he presented the Best Makeup award—which went, deservedly, to Star Trek—dressed as a Na’vi, one of the blue creatures from James Cameron’s Avatar. He was able to get in a few gibes at the director, and the spot seemed better-executed and funnier than Sacha Baron Cohen’s proposed stunt might have been. In a similar vein to the time he sat, pantless, on Eminem’s face (in character as Brüno) at the MTV Awards, Baron Cohen had planned to come out dressed as Neytiri, the character from Avatar played by Zoë Saldaña, and announce that s/he was carrying Cameron’s love-child—but the bit was pulled in rehearsal, most likely because the director heard about it and insisted it be taken out.

The jokes that evening weren’t all at the expense of James Cameron’s gargantuan blue space monkey “Pocahontas”-re-enactment-cum-computer-demo (sorry, “‘game-changing’ cinematic experience”), though. Avatar was the recipient of three awards, the most egregiously undeserving of which was Cinematography. Instead of giving the statuette to Christian Berger for his work on Michael Hanneke’s The White Ribbon, or to Robert Richardson for Inglourious Basterds—never mind that Roger Deakins wasn’t even nominated for A Serious Man—the Academy chose to honour Mauro Fiore. While he has amassed a considerable body of work and is clearly talented at imbuing films with a brand of glossiness and style beloved by a certain kind of audience—he shot The Island, Smokin’ Aces and Peter Berg’s Iraq war film The Kingdom—he did not deserve the award for Avatar. While the film is undeniably visually mind-blowing, much of what appears in the film is not the work of the art of cinematography, which is, by definition, the manipulation of light through a lens. More than 90 per cent of what appears on screen in the film wasn’t even in front of the camera when the actors were being photographed or motion-captured—it was generated in post-production. In addition to that award, Avatar picked up Best Visual Effects, perhaps the only one it deserved—and Best Art Direction. Unlike, for example, the fabulously-decorated sets of fellow category nominees The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Nine, and Sherlock Holmes, Avatar didn’t actually have sets to design—its ‘look’ resided in a series of computers; this is not to say that it should not have been praised, but rather that it should have won only technical awards.

Speaking of praising animation, though: Pete Docter’s UP won Best Animated Feature—in lieu of Best Picture, a category it would never have won—and Michael Giacchino picked up Best Original Score, although his work for Star Trek is equally deserving of praise. Carter Burwell’s score for A Serious Man was sadly overlooked, and, while it is more than deserving of praise on its own, Marco Beltrami and Buck Sanders’ music for The Hurt Locker is so intricately bound with the rest of that film’s aural landscape that it did not need to be nominated. Best Documentary went to The Cove, an excellent, thrilling exposé which combats dolphin slaughter, and, by extension, whaling—topics made freshly relevant by John Key’s recent decision to consider a proposal in favour of allowing Japan, Norway and Iceland to resume commercial whaling with quotas. Moving on, though: Jason Reitman’s dull recession-era dramedy Up in the Air went home empty-handed, even though it was nominated for six awards. Best Costume Design went, somewhat predictably, to The Young Victoria, and, in her gracious acceptance speech, Sandy Powell—dressed, wonderfully, like a young Edith Head—asked that the Academy and moviegoers in general recognise the efforts of designers not working on full-blown period dramas—those, in other words, making contemporary films, whose work is so often overlooked.

Sandra Bullock was awarded Best Actress for The Blind Side, a film which has yet to be slated for release in New Zealand. In the same weekend, Bullock won the Worst Actress Razzie for her performance, if it can be called that, in All About Steve. Best Supporting Actor and Actress went to the expected recipients: Christoph Waltz, repeating his BAFTA and Golden Globe triumphs, won for his portrayal of Colonel Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds, and the stand-up-comedienne-turned-actress Mo’Nique for her role in Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire. That film also scored some little golden men for its script, winning Best Adapted Screenplay over Armando Iannucci, Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell and Tony Roche’s wonderfully profane dialogue in In The Loop. Jeff Bridges deservedly won Best Actor in a Leading Role—an award a long time coming given that his first major role was in Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show in 1971—for his performance as Bad Blake in the otherwise terrible, cliché-ridden Crazy Heart. That film also won Ryan Bingham and T-Bone Burnett the Best Original Song award for “The Weary Kind.” The song performances, traditionally a staple of the broadcast, were cut in favour of two questionable interludes—but the montage of the recently deceased (accompanied by James Taylor singing a cover of “In My Life”) remained, and was preceded by a bizarre interpretive dance segment set to a survey of the nominated film music for Best Original Score—a segment more insulting to the composers than it was artistically relevant. While Sacha Baron Cohen’s aforementioned stunt would have seemed a little too juvenile to include in the ceremony, the producers didn’t throw out the idea of running an homage to horror movies—a genre, Kristen Stewart mumbled in her introduction amid nervous twitches and a cough, that is “often overlooked.” Another tribute, and one more in line with the “Old Hollywood” image the producers were apparently aiming for, was the one made to John Hughes, the late writer, director and producer who made Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Home Alone, among others. The collection of actors known he bought together, known as The Brat Pack, appeared on stage, some looking a little worse for wear, along with Macaulay Culkin, during the touching but overlong tribute, which unnecessarily included a cutaway to Hughes’ family, who were in attendance.

But of course the big news of the night was that a film that has so far grossed only US$14.7m domestically beat the most financially successful film in history to win Best Picture. Interestingly, at the very first Oscars, there were two categories at the top: “Most Outstanding Production” and “Most Artistic Picture.” The wonderfully-named William Wellman won the former award for Wings, about World War I, while F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise won the latter. The following year, the two awards were folded into one—Best Picture—and Wings was retroactively given the top prize. Had the distinction between cinematic art and mere entertainment remained, James Cameron could have once again crowned himself King of the World.

The Hurt Locker, not released in New Zealand until April 1—380-some days after it premièred at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas—also won Best Editing, Best Original Screenplay (former journalist Mark Boal, against many predictions, beating Quentin Tarantino), and both awards for sound design. Beating Avatar—which is, by commercial standards at least, The Most Entertaining Film of All Time—with a film, like so many before it, that takes a left-wing approach to an unpopular war, is quite a feat. The film is directed by a woman who has steadily amassed a solid body of work in the years since her criminally under-seen 1987 début, a vampire film called Near Dark. Completing a season that has so far seen her film win some 70-plus awards, Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman in Oscar history to win Best Director. She deserved the award not simply because she is a woman making terrific films—although in this particular awards season her gender was undeniably a benefit, along with the fact that she was in direct competition with her ex-husband—but because she made the best film of the year. She’s not a “great female director”—she’s a great director, period.

As the critic Dana Stevens wrote in Slate:

“It’s unbelievably gratifying to see a woman who does fine, small-scale work triumph over a man who erects monuments to his own vanity.”

Efterklang—Magic Chairs
(4ad, January 2009)

Review by Hugh Lilly

The fourth full-length LP from this Danish four-piece—best described as The Postal Service meets The Polyphonic Spree—ditches the dark atmosphere of their previous albums in favour of a much lighter, more poppier sound but thankfully retains the classical and avant-garde influences for which they are known, if only on a few tracks. The band has worked with and opened for 4ad label mates Grizzly Bear and The National, and Magic Chairs is frequently reminiscent of recent albums by both those bands, but, overall, the record tends toward a plastic, defiantly radio-friendly sound. The opener “Modern Drift” builds from a fluttering, Philip Glass-esque piano melody to full-blown art-pop in five concise minutes.

“Harmonics” and the closer “National Tune,” which respectively blend smooth horns and lilting piano with quiet, lush string arrangements and steady, understated percussion, are reminiscent of local electronic musician/singer-songwriter SJD, while “The Soft Beating” has a solid, Coldplay-esque feel to it—all cascading piano and repeated chorus line accompanied replied to by two or three backing harmonies. “Scandinavian Love” features inventive use of strings accompanied by neat electro glitches, and “Mirror, Mirror” is inspired—both in name and underlying melody—by Arvo Pärt. Despite the pop appeal of its lyrics, Magic Chairs is a magnificently-furnished piece of work, as ornate and precise in its sound as the beautiful artwork adorning its cover.

Charlotte Gainsbourg—IRM
(Because Music, December 2009)

Review by Hugh Lilly

The title of Charlotte Gainsbourg’s third album in as many decades was inspired by the sound (and French initialisation) of an MRI machine, and the title track, second in the running order, feels like it was recorded inside of one, which is just as horrendous as it probably sounds—if not moreso. Gainsbourg is primarily an actress—she appeared most recently last year in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist and Patrice Chereau’s Persecution—and, of course, she’s the daughter of Jane Birkin and notoriously smarmy Frenchman Serge Gainsbourg, with whom she performed the rightly controversial song “Lemon Incest” in 1985, aged only 12. Where her 2006 album was an enjoyable collaboration with the French electro duo Air, IRM was produced by Beck Hansen, who appears to be the only member of the Church of Scientology who’s anywhere near normal.

While Beck’s production skills and backing instrumentation are superlative, Gainsbourg’s vocals are anything but: she seems almost entirely incapable of holding a tune, and is slightly flat nearly all of the time—a handicap that is particularly evident when she has whole verses alone on tracks like the lead single “Heaven Can Wait,” and “Me and Jane Doe”—the latter of which actually contains the lyric “Me and Jane Doe and Rousseau.”. “Time of the Assassins,” a ’60s-inspired folk tune, is pleasant if utterly dull, and the slightly grungy Shirley Manson-esque track “Trick Pony” is probably the most interesting and aurally arresting on the whole album. “Greenwich Mean Time” should have been thrown out before the album was mastered, and “Dandelion,” a silly little countrified ditty, was, hopefully, recorded only at Gainsbourg’s insistence. Elsewhere, “Le Chat du Café des Artistes” and “Voyage” both sound like they borrowed their string and percussion sections from one of composer David Arnold’s ostentatious James Bond scores. While “Master’s Hands” opens the album on a strong, bold note, “La Collectioneuse,” the record’s ‘arty’ parting shot, is pretentious in the way only someone like Gainsbourg could be: she quotes Apollinaire.

Bach in Time

The Cello Suites by Eric Siblin (Atlantic Monthly Press)
Review by Hugh Lilly

Johann Sebastian Bach’s Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello are among the most beautiful pieces ever composed for the instrument. The arpeggiated chords in the opening bars of the first suite are the best-known measures of all the suites, and are, along with the similarly beautifully-cascading melodies of Bach’s Partita for Solo Violin nr. 3, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, some of the most instantly-recognised classical pieces in the world.

But they had a strange life en route to the concert hall: for many years they were considered to be nothing more than perfunctory, technical exercises written for an instrument that was then seen as inferior—and at one point, they were almost lost to history forever: Bach’s original manuscript vanished, and the suites survive only through a copy written out by his second wife, Anna Magdalena Bach. Thus it is impossible to know whether the suites as they now exist are a reliable duplication of Bach’s music as it was written—or, interestingly, even for what instrument the suites were intended.

It took Catalan cellist Pablo Casals to popularise them, and it was almost by accident that he discovered a manuscript as a young man in a second-hand store in Barcelona, its “tobacco-coloured cover page inscribed with fanciful black lettering: Six Sonatas or Suites for Solo Violoncello by Johann Sebastian Bach,” as Eric Siblin, a former pop music critic for the Montréal Gazette, describes in his wonderfully-written new book The Cello Suites: J.S. Bach, Pablo Casals and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece.

Casals would practice the suites every day for twelve years before playing them in public for the first time. Cellists like Mstlislav Rostropovich, János Starker, and, more recently, Yo-Yo Ma have recorded them, each adding their own touches along the way. (Jacqueline du Pré recorded only the first and second suites before her tragic death, at 28, of multiple sclerosis.) It was Casals, however, who propelled the suites to the position they enjoy today.

Each of the suites contains six movements, opening with a prélude and concluding with a gigue, a mid-17^th century dance. In between are other dances: an allemande, a courante, a sarabande, and then either a minuet, a bourrée, or a gavotte. It is along these lines that Siblin divides his book into sections that examine the nuances of each movement while at the same time recounting three stories. The first two or three movements of each suite are accompanied by a condensed life of Bach and the story of the suites’ composition.

The next few movements are allocated a biography of Casals, his discovery of the suites, and his hand in popularising them for a general audience. A discussion of the last movements of each suite is complemented by an account of Siblin’s own discovery of the suites, the composer and the cellists who made the music famous. The Cello Suites is both lively and accessible, and although Siblin’s wild enthusiasm for the suites—caused by his decision to leave behind the Top 40 and plunge headlong into baroque territory—can at times be overpowering, it is more often delightfully infectious.

Here’s Yo-Yo Ma playing the prélude of the first suite:

Thanks to The Morning News’ Robert Birnbaum for posting his review,
from which I first learned of the book.

Sean O’Neal at the Onion A.V. Club, on one of my favourite records of the year, Bitte Orca, and the decade that was:

There’s no better yardstick for measuring the artistic leaps and bounds of the past decade than with an evolutionary chart of “New York buzz bands” spanning The Strokes to Dirty Projectors. We kicked off the decade stoked on purist, backward-looking rock ’n’ roll; we ended it debating 3/2 time signatures and throwing around heretofore-alien terms like “kwassa kwassa picking” and “vocal hocketing.” And even though the current obsession with over-intellectualizing pop music will inevitably give way to another minimalist revolt, Bitte Orca proves that just because an album is slightly pretentious in its construction doesn’t mean it has to be joyless. Sometimes it can be a ragged, fascinating mess even when it’s planned to an inhuman degree, and sometimes genre mash-ups that resemble the Icarus-like overreaching of music-comp majors (“We’ll start with West African-inspired guitar patterns, Timbaland beats, and cut-up harmonies that sound like live Steve Reich remixes, then make them into an R&B song!”) become visceral, throw-your-hands-in-the-air moments on record. Apparently we’ve learned a lot this decade.

• The Best Music of the Decade – The Onion A.V. Club

Karen O. & The Kids—Where The Wild Things Are
(DCG/Interscope Records, 2009)

Earlier this decade, Karen Orzolek, the front woman of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs better known with her last name initialised, recorded a series of acoustic demos at her home and burned them to a CD as a gift for the producer and TV On The Radio guitarist Dave Sitek. K.O. At Home, now bootlegged and floating in the digital ether, is a collection of 14 incredibly glum home-spun tunes. A world away from the punky, raucous art-rock of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the songs pair the timid side of O’s voice with a variety of charmingly out-of-tune guitars, a mouth organ, a scattering of light percussion, and even a French horn.

O returns to a similarly playful territory in her music for Spike Jonze’s forthcoming Where The Wild Things Are, a film based on Maurice Sendak’s much-loved children’s book of the same name. Working with Deerhunter’s Bradford Cox, members of the Raconteurs, The Dead Weather and Yeah Yeah Yeahs—including former bandmate Imaad Wasif—and Jonze’s regular composer Carter Burwell, O’s soundtrack resonates a childlike wonder and perfectly captures the spirit of Sendak’s nine-year-old protagonist Max, King of the Wild Things.

O is backed by an untrained children’s choir—“The Kids”—for most of the album, and the soundtrack incorporates a few dialogue selections from the film, opening with Catherine Keener saying to Max, “I could use a story…” This leads into “Igloo,” a simple melody hummed by the awesomely-named Max Records, the star of the film, before “All Is Love,” the soundtrack’s single, jubilantly bursts forth. Hand claps and jangle-pop guitars imbue the record with a sense of joyousness, and this even extends to “Lost Fur,” the only track taken directly from the score. Here Burwell’s music—normally more in sync with the labyrinthine psychological screenplays of Charlie Kaufman, another of Jonze’s frequent collaborators—is given a levity and grace by O, while at the same time retaining Burwell’s trademark introspectiveness.

“Capsize” and “Cliffs,” two tracks not included in the film, are alternately boisterous and delicate, and a cover of Daniel Johnston’s “Worried Shoes” is absolutely enchanting. “Heads Up,” perhaps the best track on the album, borrows from Britt Daniel’s songbook, riffing on Spoon’s rollicking jazzy pop style, and the brief closer “Sailing Home” brings the record full circle, combining Max’s plaintive hummed melody with the upbeat, rhythmic attitude on display throughout the record. While it probably won’t stand up well outside the context of the film, it’s clear that O and her collaborators have successfully created a self-contained aural landscape that superbly reflects Sendak and Jonze’s vision.

Diane Birch—Bible Belt (S-Curve Records, 2009)
Review by Hugh Lilly

Diane Birch moved around a lot when she was growing up—her father, a pastor, was born in South Africa, and the family moved from Michigan to Zimbabwe, and then Australia, when Birch was still in elementary school. At age 10, the family moved back to the US and settled in Portland, Oregon. They were deeply religious—to the point of not interacting with their secular neighbours; thus Birch grew up with little knowledge of pop culture or music outside of the classical repertoire—she learnt to play the piano by ear from age 7—save for church hymns and gospel songs.

It’s not in the least surprising, then, that her début album would be drenched in a gospel sound—Mahalia Jackson and Joan Armatrading loom over the record like spiritual aural Godmothers—but there are numerous other influences as well. Her first foray into popular culture—what she described as losing her “musical virginity”—was seeing the music video for “Bad” by Michael Jackson, which ignited in her “a sort of primal mystery” that cast its spell over her “like never before or since.”

“I stood there watching in complete disbelief,” she recalls. “I remember the feeling so vividly: ‘Was this a real human? What was he wearing? Was he the devil?’” She soon branched out and discovered The Carpenters, Fleetwood Mac, The Beatles and, judging from the influences stamped on the record, soul music and the mid-’70s singer-songwriter Laurel Canyon sound—Joni Mitchell, James Taylor et al.

But perhaps one of her biggest influences would come from the opposite coast: Brooklyn-born songstress Carole King released her ground-breaking masterpiece Tapestry in March of 1971, after almost a decade of success writing for The Drifters, The Crystals and Dusty Springfield, among others, in the Brill Building. The rock critic Robert Christgau says about the landmark record that it “liberated [the female voice] from technical decorum”.

On Tapestry, King re-tooled a song she had co-written for The Shirelles, “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” and made a massive impact with the soulful, era-defining “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” and “Too Late”. King’s influence on Birch is evident on nearly every track, from the opener “Fire Escape”—which builds from a basic, Dusty Springfield-esque vocal to a pleading, rhapsodic waltz soaked in Rhodes piano and lavish strings—to the closer, “Magic View,” a quiet piano ballad that sees Birch also incorporate the vocal stylings of Sia Furler, the Australian singer who rose to prominence through her work with Zero 7—and, to top it off, there’s a hint of the raspy curl of Beth Gibbons, the lead singer of Portishead.

Another white girl with bangs, and someone the blog Brooklyn Vegan once called an “indie sexpot,” Jenny Lewis took a break from her band Rilo Kiley in 2006 and joined up with The Watson Twins to make one of the best albums of the decade, Rabbit Fur Coat. Replete with a multi-tracked call-and-response gospel choir sound, and brushed with a touch of country, the record alternates between sad songs and songs that are genuinely—but beautifully—depressing. While Bible Belt doesn’t share the same morbid fascination lyrically, there are occasional echoes of Lewis’ style in Birch’s voice, and there are similar themes: Lewis’ religious upbringing figures prominently in songs such as “Born Secular” and “Rise Up With Fists!!”

“Ariel,” the standout track on Bible Belt, echoes early Elton John both superficially in its single-word-man’s-name title—à la “Daniel” and “Levon”—and more tangibly in Birch’s double-tracked vocal delivery, which imitates John’s nuances—particularly at the end of phrases and in the bridge passage. But while it might be melodically reminiscent of early-’70s classics like “Tiny Dancer” and “My Father’s Gun,” the song’s lyrics have obviously been written with our digital age of instant, always-on social networking in mind: “I got news today that you’re go see the Great Wall of China / I guess I’ll see all the pictures on your page… / Does it hurt more to lose you or to love you baby / Or does it hurt more to look at you on my screen?”

Not every track is flawless, though: the Michelle Branch-esque “Mirror, Mirror” has an awful easy-listening commercial gloss to it, and will probably enter regular rotation on The Breeze radio station about a year from now. Elsewhere, “Photograph” is largely forgettable, but is redeemed by a brilliant gospel-inspired coda; “Valentino,” “Choo Choo” and the lead single “Rise Up” are all jaunty, brassy hymns that unfortunately lack a solid core but are enjoyable nonetheless. Birch’s gospel penchant is again indulged on the rambunctious “Don’t Wait Up,” and “Forgiveness” is a sublime horn-filled odyssey with a superb, pulsing bass line and jubilant backing chorus.

A number of critics have erroneously compared Birch to Stevie Nicks; while the Fleetwood Mac lead singer is arguably an aesthetic influence on Birch—not least her imitation of Nicks’ mid-’70s Charlie’s Angel’s-like hairdo—there’s no basis for a musical comparison. Birch has a significantly warmer, more rounded, soulful and upbeat tone to her voice; the only possible point of comparison would be Nicks circa 1973/74 on the album Buckingham Nicks—but even then, before she all but destroyed it with copious cocaine consumption, Nicks’ voice was enveloped in a pronounced Arizona twang.

Birch wrote every track on the album, and the production—by the R ‘n’ B singer Betty Wright and the same engineer who propelled Joss Stone toward stardom—is second-to-none. This is particularly obvious on “Nothing But a Miracle” and “Fools”; in the background of the latter, the session musicians, including Patti Smith’s guitarist Lenny Kaye, tool about splendidly.

Bible Belt encompasses a wide range of influences and sounds—and, perhaps most remarkably for a début, showcases just as wide a range of soulful vocal styles. The record is an auspicious, praiseworthy first album from a massively talented young artist who deserves to be thrust head-on into the spotlight, however reluctantly she might greet it.

Postscript: Birch’s stunning cover of “What is Love?”—the song which served as one of the theme tunes to the magnificent Will Ferrell vehicle A Night at the Roxbury—is well worth watching.

Amy Millan—Masters of the Burial (Arts & Crafts, 2009)

Review by Hugh Lilly

Amy Millan is a Canadian singer-songwriter who has been in the indie super group Broken Social Scene and the band Stars, as well as contributing to albums by Kevin Drew and Jason Collett; most recently she appeared on Gomez’s A New Tide. This is her second solo album after 2006’s Honey from the Tombs, and marks a departure toward a more rustic, country tone. Its sound is especially distinct from Stars’ modulated jangles—my iTunes has one of their albums classified as “chamber pop”—and the varied sounds of Broken Social Scene, who flit between quiet, baroque experimental tracks and a sort of rough, explosive—but exciting and danceable—aural bombardment.

While most of the tracks on Tombs could quite easily be called folk-pop, Burial, with its more pronounced banjo and steel guitars, is both more considered and relaxed—ultimately, more fragile. Unlike Tombs, which had Millan double-tracking or with at least one backup singer on nearly every track, the new album sees her mostly alone at the mic, accompanied only on a few tracks—and at least once by Leslie Feist, a fellow Broken Social Scene alumnus.

“Day to Day,” a cover of a song by fellow Canadian Jenny Whiteley, is here given a hollow, odd cadence: Millan’s vocals are backed only by fuzzy, coldly electronic percussion. “Towers,” a spare acoustic track with banjo and mandolin, is reminiscent of Bic Runga circa Drive, only not as emphatically emotional. A country-fied cover version of Death Cab for Cutie’s “I Will Follow You into the Dark,” almost drowned in sumptuous pedal steel, is initially a bit out of step with the other tracks but reveals a gentle sweetness upon multiple listens—in fact, it stands out as one of the best tracks on the album.

“Broken,” the record’s closer, is, like the opener “Bruised Ghosts,” a slow, fiddle-driven country song in the vein of Norah Jones and some of Gillian Welch’s more handsome, less folksy songs. The record’s maudlin title telegraphs the fact that, like its 2006 predecessor, Millan’s second solo outing isn’t lyrically upbeat—but that doesn’t preclude it from being endlessly entertaining.

“X Saves The World” by Jeff Gordinier

“Charlie Kaufman and Hollywood’s Merry Band of Pranksters, Fabulists and Dreamers” by Derek Hill

A few years ago Jeff Gordinier, a writer at Details and Entertainment Weekly magazines, was asked by his editor to look into what had become of his generation. The resulting book, subtitled “How Generation X Got The Shaft But Can Still Keep Everything From Sucking,” is a rambling, discursive examination of the high and lows Generation X has experienced.

Born between 1964 and 1977, the children of baby boomers were finally given a title when, in 1991, Canadian author Douglas Coupland wrote the (superb) novel “Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture”. This was also the year that Nirvana released “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” a song that would become anthemic and meaningful to the flannel-clad slacker generation that never had much use for concrete meaning, nor much desire to discover it. They had a healthy disdain for cliché, and a taste for irony, however, and Richard Linklater’s seminal film Slacker, which also came out that year, would help them discover that. It is around these three pop culture artefacts that Gordinier structures his book.

“X Saves The World” is broken into three chunks: “In Bloom,” “Idiots Rule” and “I Will Dare”. The first section looks at what the author sees as the golden age of his generation: 1991-1999. He goes to Woodstock II in 1994, where he sees Sheryl Crow and Joe Cocker onstage, and discovers that the festival had “very little to do with the ethos of Gen X, but a lot to do with boomers reasserting their market dominance in a world that had replaced ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ with ‘I Want to Fuck You Like an Animal’.” He argues a solid case for Gen X being the driving force behind the mid-nineties dot-com boom in Silicon Valley, and visits Darren Aronofsky on the set of Requiem for a Dream, where he finds the director recounting his youth growing up “in the shadow of Coney Island”.

The book opens with a note warning the reader to expect unsubstantiated generalisations, and it’s easy to see why when reading “Idiots Rule,” the middle section of the book. Here, Gordinier makes clear his utter distaste for the “easily amused” millennial generation, a group now more commonly (lazily) given the nomenclature “Generation Y”. Unrepentantly narcissistic, this generation apparently loves nothing more than the sound of their own voice, and spends much of their time slavishly tinkering with various online profiles in between mindlessly consuming yet another episode of American Idol, which he hilariously labels “totalitarian kitsch”. Gordinier concludes the section by catching a Las Vegas performance of Cirque du Soleil’s god-awful Beatles: LOVE acrobatic show. It is a cringe-worthy cultural travesty and a visual (and sonic) nightmare, and he ultimately draws the conclusion of, to (mis)quote The Simpsons: “Can’t sleep, George Martin’ll eat me”.

The final section, “I Will Dare,” is more or less structured around two ideas: firstly, that Xers are inventing social web phenomena like YouTube and Wikipedia, and that these are saving the world; keeping it from “sucking”. Secondly, that newspapers like The Onion, TV shows like Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s South Park, and Comedy Central’s “dyspeptic duo” of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are stopping the 24-hour news cycle from suffocating on its own tail. Gen-X comedians are saving the world through biting satire, proposes the author.

Gordinier is Chuck Klosterman lite: he has the same savvy with pop culture references, but not the underlying, continual strain of humour that persists under the surface of Klosterman’s writing. Still, the snippets of humour here and there, and the globe-trotting pace with which the book proceeds make it greatly enjoyable.

Toward the middle of the first section of “X Saves The World,” Gordinier says:

“Everywhere you looked in 1999, young movie directors and screenwriters were firing a big, swervy slug into the cinematic rule book. Spike Jonze, Charlie Kaufman, Kimberly Peirce, Sofia Coppola, Kevin Smith, David Fincher, David O. Russell, Wes Anderson, Alexander Payne, Richard Linklater, Paul Thomas Anderson—they’d been shaking things up for a decade, but this was their annus mirabilis. Their weird-science visions didn’t just dot the landscape. They dominated it.”

It is this group of filmmakers, plus a few related outliers, that Derek Hill explores in his new book about young trendsetting, game-changing filmmakers. Subtitled “An Excursion into the American New Wave,” this slender, esoteric examination of current innovations in modern American cinema begins by looking at previous movements such as the French New Wave and Hollywood’s second Golden Age (a.k.a. The New Hollywood) in the seventies, which included such influential directors as Hal Ashby, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg. Back then, films like The Graduate and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? blew the lid off the establishment. Dennis Hopper’s seminal 1969 film Easy Rider, in Hill’s words “a financial and cultural juggernaut,” paved the way for future explorers of the cinematic avant garde.

Richard Linklater’s first full-length film Slacker, which appeared at the apex of grunge, did the same thing for his generation, argues Hill. Steven Soderbergh’s intoxicating sex, lies and videotape opened at Sundance in 1989 to rave reviews, and filmmakers like Paul Thomas Anderson (Magnolia, Boogie Nights) and Quentin Tarantino, influenced by ’60s counterculture and ’70s rawness, made films that were not only oblivious to mainstream cinema, but occasionally downright derisive of it.

Hill devotes more space to some films than others—for example, David O. Russell and his idiosyncratic existential comedy I ♥ Huckabees receives more space than Richard Kelly’s momentous cult hit Donnie Darko. Alongside extensive analyses of the work of Spike Jonze, Sofia Coppola and particularly insightful commentary on the films of Wes Anderson, there are explorations of David Gordon Green’s underappreciated art films and Michel Gondry’s fabulous, whimsical creations. Underlying it all and tying together most of the strands of the book is an appreciation of Charlie Kaufman, the “wizard of id,” in Hill’s words. Kaufman is the extraordinarily gifted screenwriter of Being John Malkovich, Adaptation., Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. His most recent film, Synecdoche, New York, is his first as director, and is mentioned in passing toward the book’s end.

Also mentioned, briefly, is Roman Coppola’s under-seen and unjustly maligned 2001 film CQ, about a young man who moves to Paris to make sci-fi films. The film is not without its faults, but, as one incisive IMDb reviewer puts it, CQ is “A likable love letter to 1960s Eurocinema”.

Hill’s pensive analysis may at first seem impenetrable, but as the book progresses his train of thought is simple enough to follow. Perhaps the best thing about Hill’s book is that it is one of the first thorough essay collections outside of academia to group together these restless young cineastes and give them proper billing, front and centre on a marquee of their own design.

RiP!: A Remix Manifesto

(dir. Brett Gaylor | Canada | 2009 | 86 mins)

A thought-provoking and vibrant new film looks at the future of art and culture in the digital age, writes Hugh Lilly

Brett Gaylor’s documentary about copyright and the place of fair use in remix culture is an exciting and thoroughly entertaining presentation of an important argument crucial to the survival of culture. The documentary investigates the current state of copyright law—a grey area when it comes to the contemporary use of digital content—and shows why it must be changed. The law as it is thwarts creativity and the free exchange of ideas and information. In an age when anything and everything can be freely accessed and remixed with the click of a mouse and a few keystrokes, such oblique litigation only halts cultural progress. In a media-literate generation that has grown up online, consumers have become creators—making, in Gaylor’s words, “the folk art of the future.” The film, made over a period of six years, is about “a war of ideas—and the battleground is the Internet.”

(source)

Under the law as it currently exists, taking bits from Back to the Future and Brokeback Mountain to insinuate that Doc Brown and Marty McFly were more than just friends makes you a criminal. Gaylor’s film argues for the relaxation of laws surrounding sampling and digital art so that borrowing elements from pre-existing material to create a wholly new work would become legal. Unfortunately, the corporations who own the rights to the ‘properties’ being ‘violated’ didn’t see things the same way. They needed to find a way—to use corporate parlance—to ‘monetize’ the information superhighway, and so they began suing the very people who bought their products.

The film’s protagonist is Gregg Gillis, a.k.a. Girl Talk, the poster boy for the remix movement. Gaylor centres his argument on Gillis’ music—his four albums have been phenomenal critical and commercial successes—using it in throughout the film both for entertainment purposes and to prove the point that mash-ups such as Gillis’ should be legal. Stanford Law professor, Creative Commons founder and free culture activist Lawrence Lessig is the film’s other touchstone; interviews with him and segments of his lectures appear throughout, as with Girl Talk, to back up and expand upon points Gaylor makes in his voiceover. The director is so enamoured, in fact, with Girl Talk (constantly referring to him as “my favourite musician”) and with Lessig (imitating the professor’s minimalist presentation style, with single-word slides changing at speaking pace) that it brings into question the depth of his research—did he rely only on a few sources that he knew wouldn’t challenge the validity of his insights?

The film is structured around the titular manifesto, penned by Lessig, which is a set of rules that can be summarised, basically, as “Limit control of the past”—because free societies depend on culture that builds upon past efforts, and restricting access to the past results in a society that cannot evolve. Lessig argues that digital natives have adopted ‘remix’ as their lingua franca, and that the mash-up is to the twenty-first century what the novel was to the nineteenth. Remix—particularly as it was used in the 2008 US Presidential election—is the ‘conversation’ of modern culture: YouTube has become a sort of global water-cooler around which we all discuss the issues of the day, responding to each other with videos the way past generations would have written letters or held court in a town square. RiP! is itself the product of remix: the film was put online—through an initiative called OpenSource Cinema—in an embryonic state in 2008 for remixers and mash-up artists to do with it what they wished; several sequences in the final cut are the work of those artists.

Copyright law, which came into existence around the mid-fifteenth century—contemporaneous with the invention of the printing press—was intended to balance the rights of author with the public’s right to benefit from that author’s works for the greater good. With media ownership now completely skewed—90% of US media is controlled by six conglomerates: GE, BMG, TimeWarner, Newscorp, Viacom and Disney—the scales used to measure that balance have been tipped upside down and thrown out the window. Now it is neither the author nor the public who benefit from copyright law; instead, it is the corporations, litigated for by two bodies: The Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America. Gaylor examines Disney’s hypocritical stance, revealing that Steamboat Willie, which marks the first appearance of Mickey Mouse, was taken wholesale from the 1926 Buster Keaton film Steamboat Bill—in fact, CEO Walt Disney gave explicit instructions to that effect. Alice In Wonderland, Snow White and countless other Disney pictures also borrowed elements from existing culture. Gaylor also interviews Dan O’Neill, an underground cartoonist and founder of the Air Pirates, a group which was famously sued by The Walt Disney Company for copyright infringement.

In the late-’90s, with the advent of Napster and other file-sharing software, the music industry, in Gaylor’s words, “refused to evolve, parted with history, and started suing.” RiP! examines the reactions on both sides, interviewing bodies such as the Register of Copyrights as well as ‘copyfighters’ such as Cory Doctorow and people who were sued by the RIAA—some of whom never even downloaded a single song. Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich, already lampooned on South Park for his Napster-hating ways, gets another ribbing here as footage of him goofily repeating the word “control” on the Charlie Rose Show is shown next to fear-mongering news reports telling people not to download music. But Ulrich, on the side of a money-hungry industry stuck in old ways, was getting it wrong. As Chuck D of Public Enemy put it in the same episode of Charlie Rose: “for the longest time people were subservient to industry controlled technology; now that Napster and other peer-to-peer technologies gave people control of the means of production and distribution, the power is back in the hands of the people.” It is important to note that Gaylor’s film does not advocate the illegal downloading or sharing of copyrighted material, but rather for an overhaul of copyright and fair use laws.

The film briefly touches on Digital Rights Management, and looks at the consequences from Radiohead’s “pay-what-you-like” experiment for In Rainbows. The writer, poet and spoken word performer William S. Burroughs also gets a mention, as does the San Francisco band Negativland, who invented the term “culture jamming” on their radio series Over The Edge. It’s a pity, given the influence of the past on the present, that Gaylor didn’t further examine the art world and its involvement with the mash-up movement; it would be interesting to look at the influence on contemporary artists of Andy Warhol, pop art and the artists The Economist recently called “the original pasticheurs.”

While Gaylor’s film might be sleeker presentation-wise than its predecessors—the Danish film Good Copy Bad Copy and the 2006 Pirate Bay documentary Steal This Film, which focussed more academically on similar subjects—it nonetheless has its weak points. The penultimate segment attempts to make an analogy between Girl Talk’s music and his day job as a lab technician; this segues into a discussion of medical patents and intellectual property, which was realised by corporations as a field more profitable than oil or gold. The corporatization of ideas is a discussion too big for this film, though, so the segment seems incongruous.

Finally, there is a sequence set in Rio de Janeiro which features musician Gilberto Gil and Lawrence Lessig showing how Brazil broke US IP law and international patents on HIV medication, producing generic equivalents for a fraction of the cost. This supposedly shows how the country’s government leads the world in IP law reform, but it suffers by relying too heavily on the emotional impact of the deliberately-chosen music in the background, and a little girl in makeup spouting a poem about freedom, togetherness and equality. Overall, though, RiP! is a highly enjoyable and provocative film that pits copyright against the copyleft, and looks at the doctrine of fair use in an age of so-called misuse. It’s a definite must-see for anyone interested in the future of the Internet, copyright and culture.

RiP!: A Remix Manifesto will screen at the Auckland Film Festival in July. See Wikipedia and ripremix.com for more.

“If New York City were to slide back into the crumbling anarchy of the 1970s, as some fear, would that be so bad? The author recalls a time when artists’ lofts were inhabited by actual artists, every subway car held potential drama, and legends–Lennon, Warhol, Garbo–walked the streets.”

“Splendor in the Grit” by James Wolcott, in the June issue of Vanity Fair.

M Ward—Hold Time (Merge Records/4AD Records)

Review by Hugh Lilly

Hold Time, Matt Ward’s sixth studio release under the initialised moniker M Ward, is a lucid assortment of country-folk songs that features members of Grandaddy and DeVotchKa, among others.

Ward, a folk singer based in Portland, Oregon, is no stranger to collaboration, having worked with indie ‘it’ girl Jenny Lewis, Bright Eyes, My Morning Jacket, and, most recently, the actress and singer Zooey Deschanel. Ward met Deschanel on the set of indie flick The Go-Getter and went on to record the ’60s-inspired country-folk album Volume One under the name She & Him.

Jangly guitars and dynamic pedal steel pepper the record, and Ward has honed his ornate acoustic style to a T on Hold Time. The opener “For Beginners” builds up to a flourish of hand-claps and gives way to “Never Had Nobody Like You,” a lively near-duet with Deschanel that wouldn’t be out of place on a She & Him record.

Deschanel also appears on a spritely, reverb-soaked version of “Rave On!,” a song made popular by Buddy Holly. Also covered is Don Gibson’s “Oh Lonesome Me,” done by Neil Young on After the Gold Rush. Ward’s version—a duet with Lucinda Williams—is equally as spare and melancholy as Young’s, and Williams’ characteristic vocals bring warmth to the somber lyrics.

The atmospheric title track sets Ward’s raspy voice against swelling strings, and “To Save Me” is a bouncy pop song similar in tone to “Vincent O’Brien” from Transfiguration of Vincent. Side two opens with “Stars Of Leo,” a keyboard-driven jaunt, and “Epistemology,” is doubtless the record’s stand out track, pairing upbeat strumming with lively, open percussion. “Blake’s View” sees Ward consider the poet’s ruminations on life and death, and the instrumental outro “I’m a Fool To Want You” elegantly rounds out this singer-songwriter’s most accessible effort to date.

Yusuf—Roadsinger (A&M Records)

Review by Hugh Lilly

Roadsinger (To Warm You Through The Night) is Cat Stevens’ second pop record since his conversion to Islam in 1978. Asked a few years ago by Jools Holland why he left the glamorous pop world, he answered “You come to a point where you have sung…your whole repertoire and you want to get down to the job of living.”

This feeling of being fed up with the spotlight—with the garish superficiality of the record business—was telegraphed early by songs like “Pop Star,” from his 1970 masterpiece Mona Bone Jakon. While that album saw the emergence of an artist wholly different to the pop singer previously known only for commercially-oriented songs like “Matthew and Son,” Roadsinger sees Yusuf Islam, as he’s now known, combine his signature finger-picking style and rich, peaceful voice to proffer his ideas, hopes and dreams for the world.

The first two tracks, “Welcome Home” and “Thinkin’ ’Bout You,” are returns to form, traditional Cat Stevens-style tunes for a new era. Laments like “World O’ Darkness” and “The Rain” colour the record and distinguish it from An Other Cup, his 2006 studio album. Whereas that record was consciously pop-oriented, nearly every track on Roadsinger covers issues of humanitarian concern—this is a troubadour promoting his particular brand of political balladry.

“Be What You Must” features a children’s choir—Islam founded the Islamia Primary School in North London—and is the tamest of all the tracks, melodically similar to “Peace Train.” The brief “In This Glass World,” with its hint of percussion and electric guitar, is the heaviest track—elsewhere Roadsinger is acoustic guitar and sweet lap steel atop eastern-influenced percussion and light string arrangements. “Shamsia,” a Persian word meaning ‘light’ is the title of the lilting closing track—a short, delicate lullaby in a minor key.

Bob Dylan—Together Through Life (Columbia Records)

Review by Hugh Lilly

Together Through Life is Dylan’s 33^rd studio album, and the first to reach #1 in the UK charts since New Morning in 1970. David Hidalgo of Los Lobos and Mike Campbell of Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers join Dylan’s regular backers for ten tracks of languid accordion-heavy blues.

The commanding opener, “Beyond Here Lies Nothin’,” is a brassy, audacious paean to the end of the world, moving through “boulevards of broken cars” beyond which there’s “nothin’ but the moon and the stars.” The dusky “I Feel A Change Comin’ On” is reminiscent of “Lay Lady Lay,” and the whole record is gorgeously laid back—on “Life is Hard” ukulele and Hawaiian guitar sit effortlessly alongside gently-picked mandolin. There’s an interpretation of Willie Dixon’s “My Wife’s Home Town,” and “If You Ever Go To Houston” borrows a line from “Midnight Special,” a folk song popularised by Creedence Clearwater Revival.

Together Through Life sees Dylan age gracefully—unlike, say, Mick and Keef. The new record won’t impress Dylanologists looking for a fix, but that hasn’t stopped them decoding it. The cover photograph also graces Larry Brown’s short story collection “Big Bad Love”—“I’ve read every word the man’s ever written,” Dylan declares in a lengthy, interesting conversation with critic Bill Flanagan which begins at bobdylan.com. It seems Dylan’s been reading a lot else, too: the title may be from a Walt Whitman poem, and lyrics are drawn from sources as diverse as Ovid and Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales”. It’s worth getting the deluxe edition which includes an episode of Theme Time Radio Hour, his fantastic satellite radio show.

This is an unabashedly simple, romantic record; although there are no moments of stellar lyricism like “the ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face,” Together Through Life showcases an unguarded eccentric reminiscing.

Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts

(dir. Scott Hicks | Australia/USA | 2007)

Review by Hugh Lilly

Philip Glass is arguably one of the most influential and important classical musicians of his generation. He is certainly one of the most prolific, having composed eight symphonies, eight concertos, twenty operas and numerous works for the theatre, as well as many film scores, string quartets, single-instrument works and other pieces in a career now spanning five decades. His music is often labelled ‘minimalist,’ but he prefers to describe it as music in concentric circles, “music with repetitive structures.” His position in popular culture is such that he’s been lampooned on South Park and mashed-up with the Beastie Boys. There is a vast array of literature about Glass and minimalism, and there have been several films made about the composer. He has collaborated with artists, actors, painters, directors and musicians as varied as David Byrne, Woody Allen, Arthur Russell, Paul Simon, Jasper Johns, Lou Reed and Aphex Twin. Glass is to contemporary classical music what Noam Chomsky is to liberal intellectualism.

Born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1937, Glass grew up surrounded by music: his father Benjamin owned a record store, and would bring home unsold records to give to his son. Consequently, Glass discovered composers like Bartók, Schoenberg and Shostakovich and developed a love of classical music. Shortly after turning 15, Glass went to the Julliard School of Music in New York City, where he attended classes alongside future fellow ‘minimalist’ composer Steve Reich. In 1964, after receiving a Master’s degree from Julliard, Glass went to Paris and studied under the esteemed composer, conductor and music professor Nadia Boulanger, who also taught Aaron Copland and Quincy Jones. Boulanger’s strict teaching left an impression on Glass that has resonated to this day. While in Paris, Glass attended concerts by Pierre Boulez and the experimental musician John Cage, whom he would later collaborate with. He revelled in the films of the nouvelle vague, including pictures by François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, and attended experimental theatre pieces, even scoring a production of Samuel Beckett’s “Play,” in 1965.

In the mid-sixties, Glass worked on a film score with sitar master Ravi Shankar, and travelled to India where he came into contact with Buddhism and other kinds of eastern spiritualism. This pre-Sergeant Pepper’s exposure to eastern culture and musical forms influenced his sense of time, and upon returning to New York he began experimenting with different time structures and signatures. By way of demonstrating this, Glass says that eastern music works with different parameters, with a different harmonic. “Indian music,” for example, “balances rhythm and melody, whereas western music attempts a balance between harmony and melody,” he says. By the early ’70s, Glass had become a fixture of the New York experimental art landscape that had grown out of Andy Warhol’s Factory scene in the ’60s, working alongside such luminaries as John Cage, Steve Reich, Laurie Anderson, Brian Eno and David Bowie. At the same time he discovered eastern spirituality-”body/mind consciousness” as he calls it-and became friends with Allan Ginsberg, and a supporter of the Dalai Lama. From 1971-74, Glass composed the seminal four-hour piece “Music in Twelve Parts,” from which Australian Scott Hicks’ new documentary takes its name.

Created to mark the composer’s 70^th birthday, Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts is a celebration of the life and work of this extraordinary musician that examines every facet of his working life, and tries to figure out what makes him tick. Hicks followed Glass across three continents for more than a year in 2005, and spent over 12 months in post-production in Australia editing down more than 120 hours of footage to a 120-minute feature. While this is not the first film about Philip Glass, it’s certainly the most accessible-this stems probably from Hicks’ firm belief that he didn’t want to make the definitive ‘academic’ film about Glass; that he wasn’t making a reverential career retrospective. “Cinema is not about facts,” states Hicks, “it’s about emotion.” While it’s certainly nowhere near as clinical and aloof as Éric Darmon’s fiercely Gallic narration and academic tone in Looking Glass (2005), or as structurally dissonant as Peter Greenaway’s Four American Composers: Philip Glass (1982), Portrait is nonetheless traditional, adhering to established documentary structures and conventions. Interestingly, despite Hicks’ statements about reverence and emotion, the film is massively adulatory – the New York Times said it comes dangerously close to hagiography – and there is only one point in the film-near the end-where true, unabashed emotion seeps through the fame.

Portrait packs a lot into its 120 minutes, travelling from Glass’ holiday home in Nova Scotia, to New York, where he visits the artist Chuck Close, and checks on the progress of three films scores he’s working on at the time-one of which is Woody Allen’s Cassandra’s Dream. Next he travels to Australia, where he performs a solo piano recital and débuts a new work with a didgeridoo virtuoso. The film ends in Germany, where he’s staging the first performance of a new play with the Berlin Philharmonic called “Waiting for the Barbarians,” based on J. M. Coetzee’s novel. The novel, Glass states, didn’t seem like it was relevant when he first read it, but “it became relevant; it’s about an empire starting a prëemptive war, detaining prisoners offshore without regard for international law.” The intricate set design, by Glass’ long-time collaborator and friend Robert Wilson, moves with the music as if the stage itself were an instrument-a metaphor, perhaps, for the way Glass’ collaborators work with him, around him, through him as he moves through life.

Portrait shows how Glass juggles so many commitments, and how the different disciplines influence one another-working with writers, filmmakers, artists, choreographers and other composers keeps him on his toes. “Music always has something to say in all these forms,” he says. “Going from one to the other is never boring.” Much of the first part of the film concentrates on Glass’ formative years in New York, and the struggle he endured to have his style recognised. He didn’t make a living from his compositions until he was 41, instead having to do regular jobs. He was a plumber, and he and Steve Reich were in a moving company together. A single-page comic framed on the wall in Looking Glass studios depicts “The Day Jobs of Philip Glass”: “Glass drove a cab in New York City, even after his production ‘Einstein on the Beach’ sold out the Metropolitan Opera House.” He found it basically impossible to have his work accepted in the stifling, conservative world of the music hall, so instead performed in lofts, galleries, parks and other public spaces. His “rigorous music” stood up to bad press, and his concerts were well attended. It probably helped, though, that nearly everyone at the performances-except Glass-was high as a kite.

Glass goes to great lengths to explain that his pleasure in music is derived from performance and composition, not teaching and academic music theory. “I’m not interested in theories of music, that’d be about thinking-I wanted to listen.” For Glass, in the same way that “drawing is about seeing, dancing about moving, poetry about speaking,” writing music is about listening. “It’s already there,” he says, “it just needs to be written down.” A big part of his work, increasingly since the late-’70s, has been his collaborations with filmmakers. His work with Godfrey Reggio began with Koyaanisqatsi in 1977, and his compositions have been paired with countless images on cinema screens over the years. Documentarian (and Julliard cellist) Errol Morris, interviewed for Portrait, says that Philip “does existential dread better than anybody,” and Reggio credits Glass with creating “a musical language that is the acoustic door to the unknown.” Among his notable film works are scores for Paul Schrader’s Mishima: a Life in Four Chapters, Neil Burger’s The Illusionist, Richard Eyre’s Notes on a Scandal, and his beautifully-accented, award-winning score for Stephen Daldry’s The Hours. “Music has a powerful ability to tell us what we’re seeing,” says Glass; this is no more true than in the Qatsi trilogy, a series of films that examines the world we live in through mediated images paired with Glass’ cyclical score-without dialogue or commentary of any kind, it lets the film speak for itself.

The film is lively and animated where it needs to be-conversations with the brilliant contemporary composer Nico Muhly, and artist Chuck Close-and similarly intimate and emotionally powerful, such as when Glass discusses his spirituality and late ex-wife Candi who died of cancer at age 39, and when his current wife, Holly, talks about problems caused by the age difference between her and her husband. Although some of the quotidian scenes in “Part Nine: The Spirit Within” could have been shorter, the intimate “home movie” quality of the film means that it never drags or seems overlong. A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts is an in-depth, vibrant study of one of our most important living composers; an engaging mosaic of an incredibly interesting life well-lived.

Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts screens Tuesday April 21^st at 1.45pm and Monday April 27^th at 11.15am

The 81^st Annual Academy Awards were held at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood on Sunday, February 22^nd and, for about the fifth consecutive year, were not telecast live by any free-to-air New Zealand broadcaster. Never mind though, that’s what the Internet’s for, right? Although that too could be in jeopardy depending on what happens with the “Guilt Upon Accusation” law, section 92A of the Copyright Amendment Act, at the end of March.

Anyway, on to the results: Danny Boyle’s rags-to-riches fairytale Slumdog Millionaire dominated the evening, taking home the statues for Best Picture, Director, Music – score and song – Editing, Sound Mixing, Cinematography and Best Adapted Screenplay. In some of those cases it was up against impressive competition: Gus Van Sant’s Milk was a strong contender for Best Picture – Sean Penn won Best Actor for his titular role – and there was a lot of speculation that Forrest Gump II: Gump and Gumpier – a.k.a. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – might take out the top accolade. Academy members saw the light however, choosing not to give the laboriously-told story of a backwards-aging Brad Pitt et al. anything but mise-en-scène awards: Button won for Makeup, Art Direction and Visual Effects.

Thomas Newman’s terrific score for WALL-E deserved to win over the M.I.A.-heavy soundtrack for Millionaire and Alexandre Desplat’s affected, gilded compositions for Button. It is worth pointing out also that WALL-E‘s sound designer – and the man who gave voice to C-3PO and R2-D2 – Ben Burtt, was swiftly and unjustly robbed by the caped crusader. The best use of music in any of the films in contention, however, belongs to the winner of the Best Documentary category, Man On Wire. Although ineligible for the music categories – the film exclusively uses preëxisting pieces by Erik Satie and cues from Michael Nyman’s scores for Peter Greenaway films – the heightened tension achieved by combining truly breathtaking images of wire-walking Frenchman Philip Petit putting on a show in mid-air between the North and South World Trade Center towers in the mid-’70s shows the magnificent power cinema can wield.

Kate Winslet won Best Actress, as expected, although it was for the wrong film – her energetic dynamism opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road was far superior to the blank stare she adopts for most of the duration of Stephen Daldry’s basically unwatchable Nazi-sympathizing The Reader. Although Winslet helped make Road brilliant, Anne Hathaway and Melissa Leo are equally as deserving of the award for their superb performances in the independent films Rachel Getting Married and Frozen River respectively. At least Angelina Jolie wasn’t called to the stage for her overwrought turn as a distraught mother in Clint Eastwood’s highly-stylized but lengthy drama Changeling.

Dustin Lance Black’s lifeless script for Milk won Best Original Screenplay. Full of plain dialogue and occasional awkward silences, it pulled Gus Van Sant’s potentially-spectacular film down from lofty heights and turned what could have been an inspirational biopic into a lengthy exposition of the doomed life of its central figure, gay-rights crusader Harvey Milk. Critic Hilton Als argues in a recent New York Review of Books essay that this kind of bogged-down story-telling is necessarily inherent in  a biopic, however, stating that the constrictions of the genre mean that “there’s no room for invention [for Van Sant]-not with his actors, or even his cinematographer.”

It remains a mystery though why members didn’t pick In Bruges in this category; the profanity-laden black comedy starring Colin Farrell includes such great lines as “You can’t sell horse tranquilizers to a midget!”

Penélope Cruz justifiably won Best Actress in a Supporting Role for her portrayal of an embittered, disruptive ex-wife in Woody Allen’s otherwise forgettable ménage-a-trois romantic-comedy Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Again the competition was strong, with Marisa Tomei nominated for The Wrestler and Viola Davis for her small but crucial scene opposite Meryl Streep in Doubt, a film which otherwise deserved little in the way of accolades (its screenplay was adapted verbatim, stage directions included, from the source play, and even Roger Deakins’ superb cinematography failed to make it the least bit vibrant.)

As expected, the Academy posthumously awarded Heath Ledger with Best Supporting Actor for his role in Christopher Nolan’s now billion-dollar-grossing Batman film The Dark Knight. Perhaps if Robert Downey Jr.’s “dude playin’ a dude disguised as another dude” in Tropic Thunder had gone “full-retard” after all, he might’ve had a chance at beating Ledger’s growling, maniacal Joker.

Michael Shannon’s minor but critical part in Revolutionary Road is also worth mentioning here, as is Philip Seymour Hoffman’s portrayal of a possibly deviant priest in Doubt. Finally,, in the Foreign Language category, the superlative but contentious animated Israeli film Waltz with Bashir lost, unsurprisingly, to the safer option, the Japanese film Departures. For all the missteps this year, though, at least Baz Lurhman’s latest epic-length, outsized abomination, the criminally bad Australia, wasn’t given a single award.

Ryan Adams and his band return with a disappointing follow-up to Easy Tiger that is chock full of weak lyrics and watered-down accompaniment, writes Hugh Lilly.

Recorded in Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland studios in NYC, with their equipment set-up exactly has they have it on-stage, Ryan Adams & The Cardinals, having shortened their name to just ‘Cardinals,’ have laid down a set of live studio recordings that are lyrically watered-down and musically weak. Many of the tracks have been played live recently – fans have permission to record the shows, and almost every show is available at either ryanadamsarchive.com or archive.org – and the live versions are infinitesimally superior to these recordings, largely because the band has room to stretch and breathe, expanding the jams in the middle of tracks that are the heart of their live performances.

By far the record’s stand-out tracks are “Fix It” and “Magick”. The former – the record’s lead single, previewed on cardinology.com last month – is a funk-filled odyssey, the mood of which was possibly inspired by the studio they were in, and those crazy murals on the walls. “Magick” is a mould for the kind of song around which they should base an entire album, partly recalling tracks like Gold‘s “Enemy Fire” and almost the entirety of Rock ‘n’ Roll – an album which Cardinology looks likely to supersede as Adams’ least critically favoured.

“Born Into A Light,” the opener, sounds like an outtake from the mediocre Follow the Lights EP – something written, it would seem, to be featured in a future episode of Grey’s Anatomy or maybe at a particularly poignant moment in House. “Evergreen” acoustically re-tools the melody from Easy Tiger‘s explosive opening track “Goodnight Rose” to create something that sounds almost like a pair of aged crooners in rocking chairs reflecting on their lives – particularly with the line “Help me into these jeans / my love.” “Cobwebs,” while not lyrically solid, is musically brilliant – the Cards import a taste of the vaguely psychedelic zany ‘Egyptology’ jams they’ve been perfecting on tour for the past year.

“Natural Ghost,” whose first lyrics are “I was waiting around for somebody to die / no one did but a part of me did / I suppose from all that waiting”, possibly the worst way to open a song, ever – and will turn off even hardcore fans such as this reviewer. “Stop,” the record’s closing track, sees Adams alone at the piano, with sparse accompaniment, mournfully singing, “I know a place where the future is tonight.” This would’ve worked on an album like 29, where the rest of the material was thematically cohesive, but here, tacked on to the end of a record that can’t decide if it’s upbeat or upbeat-but-sad, it feels like an abrupt, sad end to a strange carnival ride.

If last year’s Easy Tiger represented the work of someone who had stopped drinking and learned how to craft powerful songs without the aid of drugs, then Cardinology is a document of someone who’s fallen head-over-heels in love one too many times. Instead of settling on the unrequited side of that equation – as is Adams’ usual position, with albums like Love Is Hell – he’s decided to turn all mushy and wussy and sing in a feathery, breathy tone about being in love in the changing seasons – instead of harsh heartbreak in “the pouring Carolina rain” we get Adams & co. pleading with us to “let [them] down easy, Lord…” and complaining that “Manhattan looks like someplace else”. A weak effort over all, it has to be said. If this is your first encounter with Ryan Adams, don’t judge solely on the basis of this mushy effort: go out and listen to Cold Roses and Heartbreaker.

Review by Hugh Lilly

Grade: A

“Fleetwood Mac front-man’s long-expected gift finally arrives, packaged perfectly”

Lindsey Buckingham’s career has, much like that of an elevator attendant, had its ups and downs. After shacking up with blonde belle Stevie Nicks, the duo recorded the under-heard Buckingham/Nicks in 1973, and joined former British blues heavyweights Fleetwood Mac two years later. The rise and fall – and rise, again – of that band, from stadium-rock super-stardom in the ’70s to an ‘adult contemporary’ low point in the mid-’90s, to the still brilliant reunion concert, 1997′s The Dance, seemed to coincide with Buckingham’s mood swings – he left the band in 1987 and came back ten years later, bringing about a renewed sense that the band could once again be as big as they had been when Rumours was recorded in 1977.

Since the early ’90s he’s been steadily writing new music, and not-so-steadily releasing it; some of the songs he wrote as far back as 1995 – when he and Fleetwood Mac members Mick Fleetwood and John McVie returned to the studio to get back in sync creatively – are only now seeing the light of day. A few tracks intended for Gift of Screws – the title is derived from an Emily Dickinson poem – appeared on Fleetwood Mac’s most recent studio album, Say You Will, in 2003. Since then, Buckingham has toured the US extensively, performed for the PBS Soundstage concert series and, earlier this year, released a live album and accompanying DVD recorded at the Bass Performance Hall in February last year.

2006 saw the release of his best album since his 1992 masterwork Out of the Cradle. Under The Skin was an introspective, peaceful meditation on growing old – Buckingham is now 58 – starting a family, and the challenges he’s faced in a life in the music business; it was, he said at the time, the first half in a series of two records: one soft, one loud. While Gift of Screws isn’t that loud record – it’s not meant to be, that’s presumably still in the works – it is, however, a reflection on the past ten or so years of his life, and it’s an album that, necessarily, complements, comments and riffs on songs released since ’95, including lyrical allusions to other songs, some written as far back as the early ’70s, when he and Stevie were a country-influenced singer-songwriter duo touring the southern US.

Jangly steel acoustic guitars and the persistent click of a metronome – an effect Buckingham employs to create a more ‘raw’ sound – appear on many of the less outwardly boistrous tracks here, just as they did on Under The Skin; on the others, Fleetwood and McVie provide a solid, clean and reliable rhythm section against which Buckingham’s characteristically cyclical guitar work wails. When, on one of the darker tracks, ‘Bel Air Rain’, Buckingham sings “I changed my name / I went insane [...] Standing in the Bel Air Rain,” he’s referencing both an old album (1984′s Go Insane) and his current situation – many of the tracks were recorded in his home studio in Bel Air, California.

The opener, ‘Great Day,’ sounds very much like some tracks on Out Of The Cradle, only with a slightly more ’80s vibe; ‘Time Precious Time’ expertly reveals Buckingham’s near-genius finger-picking skills – it’s really quite astounding to hear him create such a rich, layered sound with what amounts to very little in the way of actual instrumentation. The first single from the record, ‘Did You Miss Me,’ is essentially a Fleetwood Mac track sans Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks; you can almost hear Stevie humming along quietly in the background, harmonizing with Lindsey as she has done so perfectly on previous albums.

The title track is a brief (2:55) yet raucous number, that sounds more like he just went a bit nuts and threw random household appliances at the drum kit at regular intervals to see how it’d turn out, and then laid vocal and guitar tracks — as well as a few animalistic yelps, something Buckingham is fond of – on top. ‘Wait For You’ is a blues shuffle accompanied by lyrics that comment on Buckingham’s on-again-off-again relationship to his band and the way he feels about the music business in general; ‘Love Runs Deeper’ is, while not terrible, not exactly innovative either: it’s just another guitar-driven upbeat rock song about love and (arguably) his relationship with Stevie that, after all these years, he’s still coming to terms with. By far the best track on the new record though is ‘The Right Place To Fade,’ made all the more powerful by Buckingham’s double and triple-tracking and looping of his own voice, a technique he first began to explore on Fleetwood Mac’s experimental double-album opus Tusk in 1979. (Tusk is to Rumours as The Beatles’ White Album was to their Sgt. Pepper’s.) In fact, ‘The Right Place To Fade,’ like a number of songs on Gift of Screws, sounds like a modern outtake from those late ’70s studio sessions, with its repetitious chorus and thunderous guitar-heavy coda.

It is the combination of the experimental and more traditional techniques that makes Gift of Screws so enjoyable; if you don’t like the experimental side of the album you can look to it to provide more of the bared-down acoustic fare Buckingham has made his modus operandi in recent years. Perhaps astoundingly, in mixing the two disparate types of music, Buckingham has delivered a cohesive record capable of reaching great emotional depths as well as noisy, anthemic heights.

Review by Hugh Lilly

Grade: A+

“A soulful, hallucinatory whiskey-soaked hoedown.”

Fiery southern redhead and former Mickey Mouse Club member Jenny Lewis, whose Myspace informs visitors that she now resides in Van Nuys, California (where the new tracks were laid down) returns with a solo album which packs quite a punch. Joining her once again – although they’re more in the background this time – are the Watson Twins, with whom she recorded the nearly flawless Rabbit Fur Coat in 2006, and whose excellent sophomore record Fire Songs was released earlier this year to much acclaim, Acid Tongue sees Lewis adopting moving away – thankfully – from the gaudy bright lights that provided fodder for Rilo Kiley’s Under The Blacklight last year.

That album, while not entirely without merit, was patchy and tried to apply mainstream tactics to a voice not quite up to the job; Lewis’ vocals seem more at home when she’s accompanying herself on piano or guitar, or when she’s rocking out with her friends, barn-dance-style, as in the album’s superlative standout track, ‘The Next Messiah’. Clocking in at nearly nine minutes, this seems almost to be four different songs in one, combining Modest Mouse-esque dirty, funky swamp-rock with a ceaseless, pounding backbeat before crossing back to M Ward who repeatedly intones “I’m gonna give my love to you / one day you gotta bring it back” atop a raucous section of exasperated female backup singers who reply “I want to / tell you I love you”. Check it out at youtube.com/JennyLewis

The beautiful title track harkens back to the simplistic mode employed on Rabbit Fur Coat and the first few Rilo Kiley records; it’s a largely bare acoustic track that sounds like it was recorded by a bunch of close friends strumming guitars and harmonizing while sitting around a campfire somewhere in Laurel Canyon in the mid-‘70s. Even when she’s ripping off Tom Petty – the curiously-titled ‘Carpetbagger’ is basically identical to his ‘Apartment Song’ from his first solo record, Full Moon Fever – it’s done in such a harmless, light-hearted way that it becomes more an upbeat homage than anything else. The Motown-esque ‘Trying My Best to Love You’ and piano-driven romp ‘Jack Killed Mom’ add a nice dose of toe-tapping frivolity to the record, as does the possibly Abba-inspired rocking little Western number ‘See Fernando’. The closer, ‘Sing a Song for Them,’ is, again, a welcome return to the style Lewis’ perfected early on with Rilo Kiley: a lush, string-heavy piano ballad driven by her rich, soulful voice.

But in between all the brilliant tracks are sandwiched a few duds: ‘Black Sand’ provides a bland cold open, and not in a good Tina-Fey-as-Sarah-Palin-on-SNL-the-other-week kinda way; the soulful, reverb-filled piano ballad ‘Bad Man’s World’ aims a little too high: Lewis’ voice falters slightly in the upper registers and there’s not enough backing here to fill the space between. Likewise, ‘Godspeed’ is a bit too under-developed and open-sounding to be at the same level, sonically speaking, as the rest of the album.

Regardless of its faults, with vocals by friend and frequent collaborator M Ward, and guest appearances by indie darling Zooey Deschanel, Elvis Costello, Death Cab For Cutie’s Ben Gibbard, Jonathan Rice, and Chris Robinson of The Black Crowes, Acid Tongue is a strong second ‘solo’ record for Lewis, full of tight, elegantly-crafted tunes sure to delight and entertain in equal measure. Forget ‘Sex on Fire,’ this is ‘Sex on Acid.’

This week’s To The Best of Our Knowledge programme discusses remix culture.

Paul D. Miller, a.k.a. DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid, author of “Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture” talks about life “in our era of rip, mix and burn”. ‘The World Famous Audio Hacker‘ teaches us how a mash-up works. Lawrence Lessig talks about why current copyright law is absurd” and Jason Bittner demonstrates ‘old-school’ cassette mix tapes.

» NPR direct .mp3 link (53:02)

Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture

By Paul D. Miller (a.k.a. DJ Spooky ‘That Subliminal Kid’)

Review by Hugh Lilly

With a foreword by sci-fi writer, anti-censorship crusader and blogger extraordinaire Cory Doctorow, and an introduction by minimalist composer Steve Reich, this esoteric collection of essays and other writing on digital culture, sampling, music and everything else in between is a book that explains, above all else, how technology has influenced art and our lives at large. Aside from essays on such things as the sampler and the Moog synthesiser, the book collects other kinds of essays, including ‘The Future of Language’ by slam poet and musician Saul Williams, and Jonathan Lethem’s brilliant piece ‘The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism Mosaic‘ – an essay concocted entirely from bits and pieces of other writings taken out of context and re-constructed to create something brand new. Naeem Mohaiemen’s essay on Islam in America and ‘hip-hop’s hidden history’, and Ken Jordan’s thoughts on the interaction between sound an image, are both eye-opening, enjoyable reads. Other contributors include cultural critic and Philip K. Dick scholar Erik Davis, author Bruce Sterling, and musicians Chuck D and Brian Eno.

The wicked mix CD by DJ Spooky which perfectly accompanies the book brings together Allen Ginsberg, Sun Ra, James Joyce, Erik Satie, Marcel Duchamp, William S. Burroughs, Iggy Pop, John Cage, Philip Glass and Sonic Youth, among many others. Probably the best way to approach the book is to selectively dip in and out, skipping over some of the more dense academic pieces. If you like it, check out Paul Morely’s narrative book Words and Music: A History of Pop in the Shape of a City, and the DJ Food’s somewhat related awesomely expansive, insane mashup ‘Raiding the 20^th Century‘, which opens and closes at the same point: Alvin Lucier’s experimental 1969 sound poem “I Am Sitting In A Room”.

NPR’s To The Best of Our Knowledge episode entitled “Weekend” talked with author Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief) about her book “Saturday Night”; Canadian SNL writer Anne Beatts* is also interviewed. Craig Harline “describes the changing evolution of Sundays,” and David Sterritt discusses Godard’s Weekend.

» NPR .mp3 link (53:17, ~20MB)

*Beatts is referenced a number of times in Benjamin Nugent’s fantastic book American Nerd.

Bob Dylan’s Theme Time Radio Hour is a weekly XM radio show that has been going since around the middle of 2006 and has just finished its second season. From Wikipedia:

Each episode is an eclectic brew of blues, rockabilly, soul music, bebop, rock-and-roll and pop music, centered around a “theme,” with songs from artists as diverse as Patti Page to LL Cool J. Interspersed between the music segments are email readings (scripted rather than mail from actual listeners); phone calls (also scripted); old radio station i.d.’s, promos, and jingles; “def poet” poetry recitations; taped commentary from a variety of musicians and comedians; and thoughts from Dylan on the music and musicians, as well as food and drink recipes and other miscellanea related to the themes.

A blog of the same name, Theme Time Radio Hour, has graciously put hard work into compiling every single show thus far. Having never listened to the show before, this’ll be interesting, and possibly time-consuming…

Also relevant: Vanity Fair magazine has in its current issue a two-page spread using key-words from an episode; click the below thumbnail to read the whole thing — be sure to check out the full-sized layout as well!

Universal Music: it’s illegal to throw away the promo CD we sent you without your permission
The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Fred von Lohmann sez, “In a brief filed in federal court yesterday, Universal Music Group (UMG) states that, when it comes to the millions of promotional CDs (‘promo CDs’) that it has sent out to music reviewers, radio stations, DJs, and other music industry insiders, throwing them away is ‘an unauthorized distribution’ that violates copyright law. Yes, you read that right — if you’ve ever received a promo CD from UMG, and you don’t still have it, UMG thinks you’re a pirate.”

Pretty ridiculous, really.

Review by Hugh Lilly.

Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There is a pseudo-biopic of Bob Dylan that combines the talents of a number of actors to create a patchwork representation of the iconic singer-songwriter’s life. In the same vein, the soundtrack perfectly complements the film by assembling a wide variety of contemporary musicians to re-interpret Dylan’s music and poetry in myriad ways. Disc one opens with an energetic take on “All Along The Watchtower” by Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder and the ‘Million Dollar Bashers,’ a supergroup of musicians formed to back up solo artists. Combining the talents of Steve Shelley and Lee Ronaldo of Sonic Youth, Nels Cline of Wilco, Tom Verlaine of the band Television, long-time Dylan bassist Tony Garnier, keyboardist John Medski and legendary guitarist Smokey Hormel, the group appears on many of the tracks, enhancing the overall sound of the album significantly.

Sonic Youth’s take on the title track is dark and moody; bits of it appear throughout the film to add an aural layer to complement the complex visual landscape Haynes has crafted. Other highlights include Jim James’ & Calexico’s solemn, funereal version of “Goin’ to Acapulco”; Stephen Malkmus’ interpretation of “Ballad of a Thin Man”; Cat Power’s spirited, lively “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again,” and Jeff Tweedy’s “Simple Twist of Fate” – and that’s just the first disc. Over 34 tracks, numerous different styles and many different interpretations of Dylan’s music emerge. The musical companion to I’m Not There. has set a new standard for compilation soundtracks; if it had been envisioned as a separate project with no attachment to the film, it would have been just as brilliant. Even if you have no interest in the film itself, this deserves a listen – it won’t disappoint.

Portishead – Third (Island, 2008)

Bristol trip-hop outfit Portishead‘s first studio album in eleven years, and their Third overall, is a bit of a mixed bag, with intimate acoustic guitar work and relaxed vocals partially marking a transition away from the heavy, dark world of their previous work.

Tracks like ‘The Rip’ and, in part, ‘Small’ bask in a sparse, warm environment and more closely resemble Gibbons’ recent solo work with Rustin Man – former Talk Talk frontman Paul Webb. ‘Plastic’, however, – especially as it appears in the running order, juxtaposed with ‘The Rip’ – dumps you straight back into the scruffy trip-hop world from which the group emerged in the mid-nineties. ‘Deep Water’ finds vocalist Beth Gibbons alone and plaintive, accompanied only by a ukulele and a moody, rich collective of backing vocalists. ‘Machine Gun’, the album’s lead single, has much in common with recent work by The Prodigy, a group which found popularity in the UK music scene around the same time as Portishead. The mass of electronic effects, including an extensively mined drum machine, is mismatched with the vocal track and hamper it so much that they become obtrusive and irritating in their repetitiveness. ‘Magic Doors’ is perhaps the most enjoyable track on the album, featuring Gibbons’ trademark vocals over a haunting string section and overwrought saxophones. The closer, ‘Threads’, takes on a lounge vibe at the outset, but soon returns to that familiar resonant Portishead sound, rounding out on a dirty repeating note that leaves a bad taste in your mouth -albeit a nice one, like having eaten too many sour lollies.

» Third at The Pirate Bay

Amazing Journey: The Story of The Who (dir. Murray Lerner, 2008)

By Hugh Lilly

Director Murray Lerner is no stranger to the rock documentary, having made documentary films about a variety of musicians including “Message to Love”, about the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival, and “Festival”, about the Newport Folk Festival in the 1960s – a spinoff of which was last year’s brilliant “The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival”. His most recent endeavour is a feature-length documentary about The Who, a band whose style would come to define the messy, loud and destructive fringe of the British Invasion and also lead to the death of one of its most vivacious members.

A treasure trove of archival footage – dating back to the band’s very first performances (as The High Numbers) in 1964 – exists because a duo of musically-inclined filmmakers needed to find a band to follow around for a project they were planning. Combining their material with contemporary interviews with the surviving members of the band and the people close to them including producers and managers, Lerner recounts the complete story of The Who’s meteoric rise to stardom and their dramatic decline and fall, culminating in the death not one, but two of the original line-up. In what has become standard for the contemporary music documentary, the first chapter examines each of the main members’ upbringings in the post-war period, and then looks at the formation of the band and its early years under various titles and with various different members. Later sections follow their chart successes on both sides of the Atlantic, and the ups and downs they experienced personally and critically. It does all of this without much voice-over narration, allowing the interviewees – such as lead singer Roger Daltrey and guitarist Pete Townshend – to tell the tale themselves. The sections dealing with the deaths of drummer Keith Moon in 1978 and, more recently, visionary bassist John Entwistle, are told without unnecessary sentimentality or hyperbole. There are detailed examinations of the group’s efforts to stage rock operas, the most notable of which was 1969′s Tommy. Townshend’s passion for combining the opera genre with rock music is given almost too much attention, but is interesting nonetheless.

Spanning four decades, the film comes right to the present with a look at their most recent work, Endless Wire, an album which reached number 7 on the Billboard chart in the US, and number 9 in the UK. A neat aesthetic technique is employed throughout: the start of the film features a vinyl record on a turntable, and the film begins as the record starts; each chapter is a separate track, and at the halfway point the record is turned over so that the second half of the film can begin. The nicely-packaged DVD set contains a booklet of detailed liner notes and a second disc featuring another film, Six Quick Ones, which examines the work of each band member through rare historical footage.

Wisconsin Public Radio’s “To The Best Of Our Knowledge” show this week looks at pop music and the art of the mix tape:

Rob Sheffield is the author of Love is A Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time. He talks with Anne Strainchamps about his relationship with his late wife and how they communicated by exchanging mix tapes of their favorite music. Sheffield also reads from the book, and we hear some of the songs from their tapes.

Gayle F. Wald is the author of Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe. She tells Jim Fleming about the gospel history of this rock pioneer and her impact on the performers who succeeded her. And we hear clips of Sister Rosetta.

Will Burch is the author of No Sleep Till Canvey Island: The Great Pub Rock Revolution. He talks with TTBOOK producer Doug Gordon about the musical movement in Britain that set the stage for punk rock. And we hear lots of the music.

Novelist Jonathan Lethem‘s new book is called You Don’t Love Me Yet. It’s the story of an alternative rock band in Los Angeles trying to find success and themselves. Lethem talks with Steve Paulson, and reads from the novel.

» Pop Music on Public Radio International / Wisconsin Public Radio
[direct NPR podcast mp3 link; 24.4MB, 53:14]

Image found with flickrCC.

Esquire magazine has a list of questions that it hopes will kick-start a discussion about the cultural relevance of the music industry in this day and age of illegal downloading and such. Here’s my favourite:

“7. Given that they are composed and arranged by some of our most brilliant musicians, should movie scores be considered the classical music of our age?”

In Slate magazine, William Weir asks “Are excessive lyrics ruining pop music?”

The year-end top 10 songs from 1960 to 1969 have an average word count of 176. For the 1970s, the figure jumps to 244. In 2007, the average climbed to 436. The top 10 for the week of Feb. 2, 2008, features six songs over the 500-word mark. Chris Brown and T-Pain use 742 words in their “Kiss Kiss.” While music can express what words cannot, music rarely gets a chance in contemporary pop, and certainly not in “Kiss Kiss.” Except for the first two seconds, vocals fill the song’s every moment. Entirely absent are instrumental phrasings that allow a song (and singers) to breathe. Guys, take a break.

» Keep reading “Words Words Words”…

Image: 'Solo de fagot,' a CC-licensed image found with flickrCC

On 95bFM yesterday Mikey Havoc interviewed Okkervil River‘s Will Sheff about what ‘indie’ means in the modern digital era, and how illegal downloading is affecting record sales. Essentially, Will comes to the conclusion that he feels OK aobut people downloading the band’s albums for free, because any publicity is good publicity; people who download songs by a band they end up really liking are much more likely to go to their gigs and buy merchandise, and so on. Will also plays a few songs from The Stage Names, the band’s most recent release.

» Okkervil River!! | 95bFM

The latest episode (direct mp3 link) of the Public Radio International show Screen Shots has interviews with director and Stranger Than Fiction screenwriter Zach Helm, Simon Callow on Orson Welles and Citizen Kane, and Jack Sullivan on the partnership between Alfred Hitchcock and composer Bernard Hermann.

[image: "Jazz Hands" found using flickrCC, a search engine for CC-licensed images on flickr.]

Before the Music Dies is a 2006 film by independent directors Andrew Shapter and Joel Rasmussen which casts a critical eye over the current state of the record industry.

From the website:

“Never have so few companies controlled so much of the music played on the radio and for sale at retail stores. At the same time, there are more bands and more ways to discover their music than ever. Music seems to have split in two – the homogenous corporate product that is spoonfed to consumers and the diverse independent music that finds devoted fans online and at clubs across the country.

Before the Music Dies tells the story of American music at this precarious moment.”

The film features interviews with Branford Marsalis, Elvis Costello, Eric Clapton, Les Paul, Dave Matthews, Erykah Badu, Calexico and My Morning Jacket, among others.

The forty-minute documentary looks in-depth at the writing and recording process for The Empire Strikes Back, as well as some of his earlier scored, such as How To Steal a Million, which, even in 1966, showcased his eminently recognisable style.

Embedded below, a selection from his very first feature film score to Daddy-0, from 1958, which is somewhat reminiscent of his jazzy score for Steven Spielberg’s 2002 film Catch Me if You Can.

Reverse-spoiler alert: if you’ve never seen Star Wars, first of all what’s wrong with you, and second of all, the title of this post may have kinda ruined the whole experience for you.

Helvetica is a documentary that is as much about the evolution of the world’s most ubiquitous typeface as it is about the evolution of modern graphic design. Propelled to the forefront of popular culture in the late sixties, Helvetica became a massive part of quotidian life due to its use in almost everything, from soft drink advertisements to “DO NOT WALK” street signs to record covers. Gary Hustwit’s film features interviews with a wide range of typographers and graphic designers, and is an superbly well-made exploration of something almost everyone looks at every day without even thinking about how it came to be. Topping it off is an excellent soundtrack featuring, among others, The Album Leaf and Battles.

A related article, from the absurdly cool Ironic Sans, kerming, a new typographical term:

Shelby Lynne – Just A Little Lovin’ (Lost Highway Records, 2008)

Dusty Springfield’s critically acclaimed 1969 album Dusty In Memphis is widely regarded as one of the greatest soul records ever made (by a white woman). To cover tracks from it – and come out with something better than the original – would be extremely difficult, if not outright impossible. Country singer Shelby Lynne, born and raised in Alabma, has taken on this daunting task and emerged with Just A Little Lovin’, an album which pays homage to Dusty and her signature style while at the same time stripping down the originals to, in some cases, just their bass lines. This is Lynne’s first album on Lost Highway Records, home to such greats as Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson, among others. In making this covers record she has strayed slightly from her country roots, crossing over into soul and the music of Motown, Detroit’s most famous city.

The original versions of Bacharach/David compositions such as “Anyone Who Had a Heart”, “I Only Want to be with You” and “The Look of Love” were heavily laden with lush string and horn arrangements and gospel-like backing harmonies, as well as, in the case of the latter, a saxophone part so well known it would be identifiable outside the context of the original song. All of these accoutrements has here been retired in favour of intimate acoustic guitars and rich double bass. While Lynne attempts to approximate Springfield’s style, going even as far as to imitate her signature abundance of black eyeliner and pose on the cover of Dusty in Memphis, she lends these covers a certain amount of country flair. This is none more evident than in the standout track “Willie and Lauramae Jones,” which uses steel guitar to great effect to create a dark, rustic blues vibe.

The album was recorded on two-inch tape at Capitol Records’ studio A in Los Angeles, in the same room (and into the same microphone) used by Frank Sinatra. The analogue techniques used give the record a slightly antiquated sound which perfectly complements the tone and mood of Lynne’s soulful intonation. The lyrics of “I Don’t Want to Hear It Anymore” almost channel the ghost of Mary O’Brien, and Lynne has done well with the title track, making it darker and more intimate than the original.

The only track which doesn’t fit with the rest is, unsurprisingly, the sole original composition: a track entitled ‘Pretend’, a languid ballad that is noticeably out of step with the well-written originals which make up the rest of the album.

The title of this post is a pretentious, wry allusion to a well-known Simpsons quote.

Image: 'Sonata Music' [found using flickrCC]

Alex Ross writes this week in the New Yorker about Jonny Greenwood‘s score for P.T. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, explaining that the Radiohead guitarist is “a composer who has crossed over into rock”, rather than a big name rock musician trying his hand at film score composition.

Greenwood was inspired in part, apparently, by avant-garde composer Krzysztof Penderecki, and his “Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima,” a harrowing piece which depicts the destruction of the city by atom bomb in 1945, and the effects thereof. Greenwood’s score works in a similar fashion, it would appear:

Greenwood, too, writes the music of an injured Earth; if the smeared string glissandos on the soundtrack suggest liquid welling up from underground, the accompanying dissonances communicate a kind of interior, inanimate pain. The cellos cry out most wrenchingly when Plainview [the film's protagonist] scratches his name on a claim, preparing to bleed the land.

Read the full article, “Welling Up“, at newyorker.com.

Image: "Podcast Wallpaper" by OllyHart @flickr, a CC-licensed work.

First Monday‘s first podcast of the year is part one in their “Music 2.0″ series investigating the existence and viability of the music industry in the digital age. In this episode, “University of Michigan professor Robert Frost discusses the artistic and financial advantages of eliminating record companies.”

• First Monday Podcast

“I’m getting there, though. I saw ‘I’m Not There’ over the holidays, the best film about a musician, or indeed any artist, that I can think of.”

[...]

“As I get older, I appreciate the greatness of Bob Dylan more and more. (This, perhaps, proves that Dylan is, after all, God.)”

The Greens in Europe and worldwide has been opposing these laws. We believe that consumers are willing to pay if offered good quality at a fair price. We also believe that sharing is expanding culture – not killing it.

To protest against the faulty propaganda from the industry, we made our own film. The difference is – you can choose whether you want to watch this one.

Chan Marshall, who records under the moniker Cat Power, sings in a lush, ethereal tone that sits somewhere between Beth Orton and Beth Gibbons. Her live shows are distinguished by smoky vocals and a loose, unscripted feeling which comes to the fore when she blends songs into one another. On her latest album, Jukebox, she adds a backing section – Dirty Delta Blues – and refines her vocal technique to somewhere between Leslie Feist and Dusty Springfield.

Comprised almost exclusively of covers –à la the 2000 release The Covers Record – the new record opens with a slimmed-down, bluesy riff on Frank Sinatra’s classic “New York, New York”. This segues nicely into Marshall’s take on Hank Williams’ “Ramblin’ (Wo)man”, a track that sounds like it would be equally at home as background music in a café and a blues festival. “Metal Heart”, a track originally released on Cat Power’s 1998 album Moon Pix, sees Marshall exhibit her lower register to great effect, especially when combined with .the great blues ensemble she has assembled.

“Silver Stallion” and “Lord Help the Poor and Needy” both switch focus and musical style to a more intimate, folk-influenced sound, with only a few acoustic and slide guitars backing those lucid airy vocals. “Aretha, Sing One For Me” is a soulful gospel number, and “Lost Someone” is similar in its sound, but the latter is slower and more lush-sounding; it’s also one of the most beautiful and heartfelt tracks on the record. “Song For Bobby,” one of only two original tracks on the record, is a loving tribute to one of the folk movement’s most masterful and prolific singer-songwriters, Bob Dylan. “I’ve always wanted to tell you / But I never had the chance…” sings Marshall, as she approximates Dylan’s whispy vocal style — a musical equivalent, I suppose, to Cate Blanchett’s stellar on-screen performance in Todd Haynes’ forthcoming pseudo-biopic I’m Not There, suppositions on the myriad personae of Dylan. “I Believe In You”, originally from Dylan’s 1979 masterpiece Slow Train Coming, is here faithfully reproduced and has new life breathed into it by a backing of jazzy keys and a groovy percussion section.

“Don’t Explain” and “A Woman Left Lonely”, originally by Billie Holiday and Janis Joplin respectively, are somewhat dark, introspective meditations on life and love executed perfectly by Marshall and her backing band. “Blue,” the final track on the record, is ever darker sounding, and perfect as a closing track with its underlying undulating organ tracks fading into the dark of night as Marshall whispers lyrics originally recorded by Joni Mitchell on her 1971 album of the same name.

Throughout all these subtle changes in style and sound, the album remains cohesive and each track links nicely into the next. There’s a highly recommended double-disc edition of the album which features a cover of Nick Cave’s Breathless, along with four other bonus tracks.

Look out for Chan Marshall’s big screen début later in the year in Wong Kar Wei’s foray into English-language filmmaking, My Blueberry Nights, opposite Jude Law, Rachael Weisz, Natalie Portman and Norah Jones. Cat Power plays the Powerstation on March 4; tickets from Real Groovy and Ticketmaster. Jukebox is out now on CD and double LP through Matador Records.