I need to make a sound
The spherical beat of You is a provider of limited solace. It’s the drudge and sheer faithlessness of a trapped mind, the shredded skin of love’s coil, the vibrant drown of senseless compulsion. “You! You! You! You! You! You! You! Me! Me! Me! Me! Me! Me! Me!” The consistent elation of stolen and kept delirium. On an unapologetic loop, sped-voices puncture as many holes into the sphere as the accompanying electronic drums, with a distant circling of hazy three-note melody washing the backdrop. It is the single moment of uncorrupted obsession, dragged out into an underground dance anthem of lights and stolen senses. [Buy, please.]
Step out of your toga and into the fog
Sandy swung heavily and missed. The other man stuck his hands in his trench coat pockets. “Sadly,” he said, “I cannot support your continued existence.” Then he strolled away into the night’s fog, shoulders broad.
Sandy stood there huffing in the cold, his fists still in balls, confused.
[Seriously, why haven’t you pre-ordered Kaputt yet?]
Maybe you shouldn’t be entertained
Okkervil River – Our Life Is Not A Movie Or Maybe
In “Our Life Is Not A Movie Or Maybe,” Will Robinson Sheff’s lyrics saunter aimlessly around the absurd. It’s wordplay for the sole sake of wordplay, acoustically pleasing phrases devoid of any meaning. “Where the lock that you locked in the suite says there’s no prying / When the breath that you breathed in the street screams there’s no science.” Lovely. Empty.
During the four-minute and 26 second song, Sheff sings 216 words. Only nine of them matter.
The line “It’s just a life story, so there’s no climax” enters right before the minute mark and disappears before sixty seconds end. It is, fittingly, not the pinnacle of the song or even the verse. It’s not the climax of anything, really; more a vital observation masquerading in the place where a throwaway remark should go. A wandering mind will miss Sheff’s best insight. (The following line, “No more new territory, so pull away the IMAX,” returns immediately to light, airy, ridiculous tricks with rhyme schemes.)
“Our Life” eventually peaks, hitting its highest note as pounded chords and a cacophony of noise explode behind Sheff’s silly simile: “Like a pro at his editing suite takes two weeks stitching / up some bad movie.”
The man in question is bored, but he’ll be fine; we don’t live movies. Nor should we. How simultaneously tiring and overwhelming would that get, spending our days trapped along a plot-line that’s crescendo-ing and descending rapidly enough to keep an audience happy? [Buy.]
Carey Mercer tweets the new Destroyer album
@careymercer: On a musical note: It wasn’t nice of Reg to call the new Destroyer “Space needle music.”
@careymercer: Especially when it is so devastatingly good
@careymercer: Is it one of the saddest records ever made?
@careymercer: You must listen to it at 3am in the back of the van while driving through North Dakota. The weather conditions must be clear.
@careymercer: There should be a full moon.
@careymercer: What does “Space Needle Music” mean? Could it be anything other than a pejorative?
@careymercer: As a genre, I would rather listen to something called “Space Needle Music” than something called “Chillwave”.
@careymercer: I wonder if the rise of the laptop-samples record could be interpreted in a Marxist sense.
@careymercer: I bet it could.
@careymercer: Everyone piles scorn on music writers. It seems to be the thing to do.
@careymercer: But in the end they will be redeemed: their life pursuit is the contemplation of someone else’s art. This seems unerringly noble to me.
@careymercer: Like St. Julian the Hospitaller, throwing his nude body upon the leper. Yes, that is what a music critic is like.
@careymercer: I thank those music writers who wrestled with Paul’s Tomb this year.
@careymercer: The exact quote “It sounds like music that should be played in the lobby of the Space Needle.” This isn’t positive.
@careymercer: Hopefully there will be many positive, thoughtful reviews to counter-balance this initial critique.
@careymercer: Because it is so good, and also because it itself is a brutal critique.
@careymercer: Of capitalism.
[Pre-order Kaputt. Then buy Frog Eyes‘ Paul’s Tomb: A Triumph because it, too, is so devastatingly good.]
11
Yesterday the city was filled with lights made of confetti and tofu. People walking in clusters of eleven; no less, no more. Everybody awoke that morning with tangled vines instead of their auburn/jet-black/ginger/aqua/golden/grass-green (!) hair. Tangled vines with dead cherubs at the ends, strangled. Planes fell from the sky.
Tezcatlipoca checked his foundation in the mirror, the watery lines of mascara running down his cheeks and staining his lips, staining the cigarette between his teeth casting grey fumes over his troubled expression.
Pre-teens fucked in alleyways. The elderly played Scrabble and snorted cocaine. The middle-aged died in a factory line throwing themselves mindlessly over the edge of the San Francisco bridge. Everybody was suffering.
The cats and rats and Christmas beetles were happy. Cross-legged in lawn chairs out the front of suburban households, sipping on Mai Tais. Phones were ringing in every block; cordless phones in apartment stretches, pay phones out front of Dino’s pizzeria, every iPhone and Blackberry in abandoned suit-pants. Nobody answered. [Buy.]
Carrot seeds
The Dust Brothers – Corporate World
About five to six years ago I sent Chuck Palahniuk a letter. In it, as directed by him, I discussed resolutions for the forthcoming year. Somewhat of a blur to my mind, they pertained to learning languages, memorising the faces of loved ones, and writing something (anything) every day. There was a sprinkling of the formal/everyday resolutions, too – the better eating, the better attitude, bettering the better. And a note to an invasive procedure I had undertaken some months previous. An appeal to his senses, I might have thought.
Without flinch, I will admit to not having started, never mind realising the fruition of, any of those resolutions. That brings sadness. To enhance the bitterness of these failures is to also admit that a sizeable portion of my letter read as a miniature review of all his work to that date. “Book A was better than Book D, but Book C? Wow. Book C was great! Book B was a tough read, though.” I still can’t quite fathom my thought process at the time. Why did that seem like a reasonable idea?
So to my surprise, a package! And inside, a letter, too. A letter divulging the secret to his work. The real meaning. The sacrifice of the one for the greater. The Jesus-factor. Beneath the propped letter, a copy of his debut novel (it’s the film poster cover; a pet peeve if ever there was one) – autographed inside, “Daniel, let the dogs and rocks work for you. Chuck Palahniuk/Chucky P.” My power animal as chosen by Chuck? A dog. The rocks? A hand made necklace of stones that would bring me luck, and my named etched across fourteen of them. The remaining package consisted of fake vomit, carrot seeds (“Guts”), chocolate sweets, confetti, fake cheques, and other joke items – and maybe some bouncy balls, too.
This is why I will never leave Chuck Palahniuk behind like I have done to many others of my late teenage years. Firstly, his work alone means he’ll travel and age well, but such gestures are hard to dismiss. Getting over the kindness of a stranger is a task. A pointless one, but a task nonetheless. Gestures, of the good kind, is my New Year’s resolution. More numerous, more intentional. [You are not your fucking CD collection.]
Snow angels
The Rural Alberta Advantage – Stamp
On Monday, a blizzard debilitated New York. Three-foot drifts cover the street outside my window; a desolate area of Brooklyn scheduled to be plowed eventually, days after commerce resumes elsewhere in this great city. Some kind soul shoveled a path to the next street over, one deemed important enough to merit a halfhearted pass from an overworked plow.
Last night, we stumbled through the snow banks to a normally packed restaurant where we were seated immediately. The waiter apologized for the lack of specials, saying the delivery trucks never arrived that morning. For that matter, neither did my mail. Not that I can blame the postman. “Neither snow nor rain nor heat…” never was the official motto, anyway.
The MTA, citing the “unprecedented severity of this storm,” feels it cannot be blamed for service interruptions. Which is fine, except that Monday’s affair was only the sixth-worst in history. In February 2006, we walked through tunnels to work after 27 inches fell from the sky. Neither the storm nor the MTA’s incompetence is unprecedented; one, however, is predictable.
In Alberta, they worry about Chinook winds, a warm breeze that blows off the Rocky Mountains. The temperature once rose from -2 to 38 in an hour at Pincher Creek. First Nations people called Chinook “Snow Eater.” We sure could use one of those right about now.
[MySpace / Departing releases on the third of January]