Posts

Posted on

366 Songs 191: The Real Thing

And here’s to reworking/detourning advertising jingles. DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist’s Product Placement is a really enjoyable album, fucking around with found material created to sell you things and turning it into something that’s as much commentary on that as it is music in its own right. From that, “The Real Thing” is likely my favorite track; it’s actually one of the more straightforward mash-ups on the album, just two different versions of “It’s The Real Thing,” the most famous one by the New Seekers and the genuinely amazing Ivor Raymonde Orchestra one from the early 1970s. For the most part, the Raymonde Orchestra version carries the whole thing, and you can understand why when you listen to the original:

Seriously, how great is that? Cheesy, yes, but just awesome. Listen to that drum break at 2:16!

For completeness, here’re the New Seekers:

That has a charm in itself, doesn’t it…? With those ingredients, how could any musical cake fail to be delicious? Much tastier than Coke, that’s for sure.

Posted on

Reading The Tea Leaves For Real

I’ve recently decided that I should look into reading tea leaves. This isn’t a joke, as much as a passing thought; I’ve been drinking loose-leaf tea for months, and always have leaves left at the bottom of the cup, so I figure maybe the fates are trying to tell me something that I’ve been missing out on all this time. The Internet tells me that it’s called “tasseography,” or even more excitingly “tasseomancy,” and that seems like something I would happily claim as a part-time career. “What do you do for a living?” “Oh, I’m a writer, but on the side I dabble in tasseomancy.”

Posted on

366 Songs 190: The Number Song

For some reason, I remember this being the soundtrack of the year of my Masters degree, or at the least the end thereof. I’m not sure if history actually agrees with me on that; I suspect it may have been released after that year of weirdness and discomfort was over, but I don’t want to ruin things with reality by checking. DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing… was a frustrating album for me, in large part because it didn’t have the ADD kineticism and intensity of this song all the way through – Although part of me wonders how listenable an album it would’ve been if it had – but this remains the one DJ Shadow track that will forever justify his entire career for me. I adore this track, with its single-minded purpose to make you want to shake your butt and the off-kilter way it goes around making sure that happens.

Also spectacular: Cut Chemist’s remix, which adds more old-school R&B (especially those horns):

Posted on

366 Songs 189: Once Around The Block

There’s something so appealing about the way that this song sounds so dated in every way aside from the lead vocal: The multi-tracked guitars sound like something from the 1970s, and the backing vocals sound like a Swingle Singers recording that never got released, but they work so well together it’s all forgiven. Add Damon Gough’s warm, lackadaisical vocal over the top, and what you have left is a sweet, somewhat sloppy, song that sounds like something you can’t quite remember, which is pretty much its best selling point.

Posted on

366 Songs 187/188: I Was Wrong/You Were Right

These are, officially, two songs despite the fact that they’re obviously meant to be listened to together (Note that the first line of “You Were Right” starts “And you…” as the continuation of the last sentence from “I Was Wrong”). Damon Gough’s musical career has been filled with more than enough missteps and wrong turns than most, and the album that these songs come from (Have You Fed The Fish?) feels like it was the start of that tendency; even in these two songs – specifically “You Were Right,” which is the more substantial of the two – there’s a meandering quality and aimlessness to everything here, underneath the lush strings and excitement of the performance. The song is the musical equivalent of someone telling a story, adding “And then!” after every event, giving the thing a breathlessness and monotony that it doesn’t really deserve. Despite that, though, there’s a nice goodwill to this song, as with most Badly Drawn Boy songs. You want to like it, because it’s nice and you get the idea that Gough is a good guy, under everything.

(Worth pointing out: Gough lifted lines from this song and spun them out into a completely different song on the same album, which is either genius or a sign of creative exhaustion. That other song, “Tickets to What You Need” is also a lot of fun, another of the good songs from Have You Fed The Fish?:

How genuine, I wonder, were the repeated “What’s wrong with me?”s in this song, at the time…?)

Posted on

“Unnoticed – or at least Unheeded”

He saw quickly that the indifferent gaze of the Street View camera randomly recorded what he called (in one of the series resulting from this discovery) Unfortunate Events: altercations and accidents, pissings and pukings, fights and fatalities. The Street View cars usually go about their business unnoticed – or at least unheeded – but occasionally people respond to their all-seeing presence by giving them the finger (hence the title of another of Wolf’s series, FY). And so Wolf combed through mile after uneventful mile of boring footage in search of moments that might or might not prove decisive

– Geoff Dyer, writing about the Google Street View-excerpting work of artist Michael Wolf.

Posted on

366 Songs 186: I Guess The Lord Must Be In New York City

If you’re thinking “This song sounds really familiar…” then that’s no accident; Harry Nilsson wrote and recorded it as something close to a rip-off of his cover version of Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin'”, pretty much. There was a particular reason why, of course: In the early ’70s, the makers of the movie Midnight Cowboy had, apparently, issued something resembling an open call for submissions for its theme song during its post-production phase to replace Nilsson’s version of “Everybody’s Talkin'” – used as musical stand-in during editing – for Academy Award purposes before final release. Hoping to land a lucrative deal with a song he’d actually written, Nilsson created this song to be an as-close-as-dammit contender. For whatever reason, it didn’t take – Also created for this reason, and also discarded, was Bob Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay,” fact fans – and the moviemakers stuck with “Everybody’s Talkin'” for the final release. From my point of view, it was the wrong choice: I’ve always had this odd relationship with the song “Everybody’s Talkin'” – I’ve kind of liked it, but there’s always been something about it that never quite sat right with me. Thankfully, there’s this song to swoop in and save the day, providing everything I like about the Nilsson version but adding a melody and lyric that I appreciate more. I think it’s the wonderful fall during “Well, here I am Lord, knocking at your back door…” (I can’t hear that part without mentally singing along “bum bum bum BUM”).

Posted on

366 Songs 185: Your Reverie

I suspect that the phrase “lo fi” would/should be used in connection with Kelley Stoltz’ music; there’s something charmingly simple and shambolic about it, retro – that riff, for some reason, feels like it could be something from a Beatles song before the days of Rubber Soul – but there’s also a touch of early Elvis Costello in there, especially with the organ in the mix. Originality isn’t the buzzword here; that seems to be “earworm,” like so many of Stoltz’ songs. He’s more of a magpie than a creator, but his thievery is done in such a way that it feels disarming and worthy, in some way.

Posted on

Unfinished Writing #23

Here’s something unusual; an unfinished review that was intended for the Savage Critics; it’s been sitting on my laptop for the last few weeks, untouched because I couldn’t find enough time to complete it – I don’t know why I didn’t finish it, it stops midthought, suggesting that something distracted me as I was writing – and, now that the subsequent issue is also a few weeks old, it seemed so untimely that I decided to leave it alone. Instead of just dumping it altogether, though, I thought I’d throw it up here.

It feels as if there’s now some sort of belief, or suspicion, perhaps, amongst comic professionals that in order to get readers and retailers on board with your new series, you essentially have to tell them enough of what the story is that you spoil whatever plot twists may be in the first issue. That’s certainly true of SPIDER-MEN #1, which – in terms of plot – doesn’t get any farther in its first 20 pages that getting Peter Parker and Miles Morales face to face. And yet… that that climactic moment doesn’t have any punch can’t be blamed on spoilers or PR or anything else; the title of the comic, after all, is Spider-Men, the cover features both Peter and Miles swinging together with their masks off (which would happen further on in the story than what’s actually in this first issue), and the recap page at the start introduces both Peter and Miles. The comic itself spoils that final page without breaking a sweat.

And that last page feels like a fudge even beyond that; it’s a full-page splash of Peter and Miles coming face to face, with both figures in the air, Miles quietly saying “No way.” On the one hand, that’s a nice moment – Miles is literally verbalizing what Peter’s inner-monologue had just said twice (But I’ll get back to the problems with repetition later), making the Miles-echoing-Peter-in-choice-of-superhero-identity more explicit – but on the other… Outside of the fact that we as readers and writers have the meta-textual knowledge that this is one Spider-Man meeting another Spider-Man, this shouldn’t actually be a big moment for Peter. After all, he’s met clones before, he’s met fake Spider-Men before… Why would running into someone who’s not even wearing the same costume as he does, who is shorter and has a different body type be anything more than a “Kid, why’re you biting my style?” moment, exactly…? The only way that final page works as a dramatic moment is with the added knowledge of this is the moment you’ve all been waiting for… but that same added knowledge also robs the moment of any power, because this is the moment you’ve all been waiting for, if that makes sense.

Because there’s no “Who’re you?” “I’m Spider-Man!” “No, I’m Spider-Man!” exchange, it means that #2 is forced to carry that scene, which… I don’t know; I find myself feeling as if that we don’t need two issues of a five issue story to get to the “We’re both Spider-Man, oh, I get it” point, you know? If you consider that, thanks to the page count of comics these days, this is going to be a 100 page story (5 issues of 20 pages), then the “first act” of the classic three act structure should be totally done with by page 34 – yet, by page 20, we’ve only really been introduced to Peter Parker and had hints of the two other core characters in the story. That leaves 13 pages or so to (a) introduce Miles Morales, (b) explain that Peter is now in an alternate universe – Something, that, again, shouldn’t phase him that much considering everything else he’s even done, but I suspect will because otherwise how will the readers know that this story is supposed to be important? – and (c ) presumably allow both heroes to put together that Mysterio has something to do with all of this. Somehow, I don’t really see all of that happening, do you…?

The feeling that this first issue is poorly paced isn’t helped by the fact that Bendis’ Peter Parker is so frustrating, offering schtick instead of characterization. Bendis’ monologue for Parker is horrifically written; unsubtle (It’s full of things like “I am including the part where my life seems to be in constant danger by elaborately themed costumed crazies. And the part where, no matter what I do, I’m hated by just about everybody this side of the Verrazano Bridge,” because, I guess, telling is much faster than showing when you only have 20 pages), almost entirely expositionary, and just plain clumsily constructed. Here’s the opening to the issue:

I love this city.

Love it!!

And, really, the best part about being Spider-Man is getting to swing around up here and just… take it all in.

The best part!

Why the dual repetition? You got me; emphasis, I guess? A sneaky shout-out to the “two Spider-Men” concept? I have no idea, but as inner monologue – or, even, narration, which’d make more sense, unless we’re supposed to believe that Peter Parker spends his evenings reintroducing himself to himself and justifying his life choices – it’s extremely awkward and takes Peter from “quippy” to something akin to “over-caffinated preteen with limited attention span trying to explain why they love Justin Beiber so much.” Maybe I’m way too old-fashioned with my Spider-Man, but for me, his inner monologue would be slightly more ordered and less “OMG!!!” than this; it’s not that it just reads poorly, it also “sounds” wrong for the character.

(Also: Am I wrong in my read on the character that Spider-Man’s quips aren’t necessarily the way he thinks, as such, but an attempt to hide nervousness/anxiety/guilt behind what he considers bravado? Bendis’ narration reads as an excitable version of Spider-Man’s personality, whereas the set-up of the character suggests it should be the opposite.)

Oddly enough, there was a really easy fix to so many of these problems: Use the other Spider-Man. Not only would Bendis have a better handle on Miles’ narration – Being the sole writer of Miles to date, there was almost no way that he could get that voice “wrong” – but Miles, being the newer and less explored character, not only needs the space of the lengthy introduction more (Despite the high sales of Ultimate Fallout #4 and Ultimate Spider-Man #1, there’s no way that the character is as well-known as Peter Parker) but works better as a point-of-view character for the series: He hasn’t dealt with Spider-impostors before, he has an emotional connection with (a version of) Peter Parker that Peter doesn’t have with him, and he’s new to all of the super-science that’s necessary to get through a story about parallel universes and crossing over and the like, allowing him to need the exposition that the audience also needs.

More importantly, using Miles as the main character for the first issue would have validated him as Spider-Man. As it is, this first issue does the one thing the character didn’t need: it underscores his position as the “alternative” Spider-Man, the other one. As far as this first issue is concerned, Miles’ character is so unimportant that his part could be filled by Spider-Man 2099, Spider-Man India or even Ben Reilly; he’s literally a non-character who plays more part on the cover (where at least

Posted on

366 Songs 184: Full Of It

This one turned out to be a grower; it’s from Netherfriends’ free EP of songs built around Harry Nilsson samples, which meant that I was almost guaranteed to dig it, but for some reason this one left me flat until the other night, when that riff just got stuck in my head, looped around and sounding wonderful. I love that it sounds simultaneously like a Nilsson song from the ’70s and something from this year, as if the distance between the two wasn’t over three decades.