I Saw a Movie (Sundance Film Festival Edition): Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (2009)

Illustration from A selection of 150 Plates from Sowerby's Thesaurus Conchyliorum or Genera of Shells, by G.B. Sowerby, 1840

For our first anniversary, my wife and I went on a romantic weekend trip up into the mountains where we did as most romantically minded couples do - we went to a surplus bookstore at an outlet mall. I bought a copy of a book that I was planning to use to woo my wife into a belated consumation of our marriage relationship - I'm not sure why I picked a book called Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. If I thought that reading a book aloud would be romantic, this book by David Foster Wallace was a poor choice for several reasons. First, there's the matter of the book's content. Second, there's Wallace's writing style, which does not accommodate being read out loud, using devices like run-on sentences, footnotes, and text in nested brackets. I think I ended up reading "Adult World" to her, a short story about a woman's discovery of her husband's pornography addiction. It doesn't get much more romantic than that!

When I heard that Jim from The Office (or "John Krasinski" as some people call him) was making a movie adaptation of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, I thought that it sounded like a terrible idea. And I know a little something about terrible ideas (see above). First of all, making a movie of an anthology seems like an odd choice. Second, the prose of David Foster Wallace is not "cinematic" because of some of the devices he uses. In short, I thought the movie would be about as successful as my attempt to read the book aloud to my wife. But it's not bad, actually. It's not the best movie I saw at Sundance this year, but it's pretty close.

Krasinski wrote the screenplay himself, directed the adaptation, and plays a small role as one of the titular hideous men. His effort to turn the anthology into a filmable script is a pretty impressive accomplishment itself. Kransinski sees Wallace's work as a treatise on Feminism - a set of stories showing the reaction of modern men to the ideas of Feminism. So he uses this as the setup for the movie - Sara (Julianne Nicholson) is a grad student writing a thesis about the effects of Feminism on modern men. This research project requires that she interview a serious of men, but it also colors her interactions with her friends, her colleagues, and her ex, Ryan (Krasinski).

Sara isn't much of a character - she represents the audience and moves the story along. The meat of the movie is in the series of monologues delivered by various actors, including Will Forte, Ben Shenkman, Josh Charles, Bobby Cannavale, and (for some reason) Ben Gibbard of Death Cab For Cutie. Maybe he was in a contest with his fiancee Zooey Deschanel to see who could get a part in the better movie at Sundance this year. Gibbard wins. Some of the monologues are delivered in a straightforward manner at an interview table, while others are staged elaborately or in a more disjointed fashion. Some of these devices, like jumping between scenes of Josh Charles giving the same rehearsed breakup speech to a dozen different women, are successful and evoke some of Wallace's writing style. Some are less successful, but the movie stays interesting without getting too gimmicky. And the prose really shines through, which is what Kransinski is really trying to accomplish here. The actors do a good job of not getting in the way of the voices of the original stories.

I think that John Krasinski succeeded in doing what he set out to do with Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, but that's not to say that it's a movie with any kind of broad appeal. But he did make a movie that is loyal to Wallace's work, and his love of the source material really comes through. At the very least, I would recommend this to fans of Wallace's writing. Wallace passed away too soon (less than a year ago) and it's nice to see a loving tribute like this to a writer who meant a lot to a lot of people.

"Women Help to Create the Kind of Men They Despise" by Lambchop

I Saw a Movie (Sundance Film Festival Edition): Dare (2009)

Illustration from Almas inquietas, a collection of short stories by Guillermo Jimenez, 1916

I was so sure that 500 Days of Summer was the worst thing I saw at Sundance. If that's true, though, why am I so disinclined to write anything about Dare, a movie that is ostensibly much less likely to cause the outright destruction of all mankind? I think it's because Dare evokes no strong feelings in me at all - it's just kind of there. I wasn't bored or distracted while watching it, and I enjoyed the question-and-answer period with the director and writer afterward, and then all memory of the film evaporated from my mind. That's something that happens to me a lot, but I don't think I'd experienced such a sudden mind-wipe since law school. In fact, it's hard to capture the real-time composition of this review, but I am only getting about five words at a time before I get distracted by something shiny on my desk or a noise in the hall.

The problem with Dare (or, more accurately, ONE of the problems with Dare) is that it's another movie about teen angst that makes no effort to be of any interest to actual teenagers. You'd think that maybe this would work to it's advantage, but I'd rather be watching Mean Girls, in all honesty, than some movie that is supposed to make twenty-somethings rub their chins and say, "Yes - being a teenager was JUST like that." Here's the setup: Alexa (from the movie adaptations of Phantom of the Opera and the forthcoming Dragonball Evolution) is a senior in high school who wants to be an actress. Basically, she's a good-girl drama-nerd whose social status is propped up by having a cool best friend Courtney (played well by Rooney Mara but underused). Her other friend is Ben (Ashley Springer), an AV-club nerd and obvious closet case that she's known since childhood.

Ben and Alexa are in a production of A Streetcar Named Desire (a purposefully odd choice for a high school play) with the reclusive Johnny Drake (Friday Night Lights' Zach Gilford), who has a reputation as a bad boy and throws rowdy parties at his mansion. Now is as good a time as any to mention that all the characters live in mansions, and their high school campus is, in at least in the outdoor scenes, Bryn Mawr, so this is definitely upper-class teen drama. When Grant Matson (Alan Cumming), a somewhat successful actor and alumnus of the school returns to meet with the Drama Club, Alexa asks for advice on becoming a successful actor. He just tells her that she's no good at all - she has no life experience and therefore has nothing to draw on in her acting. Alexa takes this advice to heart and decides to seduce Johnny as a way of improving her acting prowess. This sets off a chain of events that creates a tangled web of intimacy between Alexa, Ben, and Johnny. Several emo-riffic sequences lead up to a climax played for maximum awkwardness, followed by a very open-ended final scene set months later, showing how the three teens were affected by what they went through.

The leads in the film were all quite good - I admit to liking Rossum more than I expected to, and Zach Gilford was definitely right for the withdrawn, disconnected Johnny Drake. Solid performances from Cumming, Sandra Bernhard and Cady Huffman added a lot even though the adults in the movie get little screen time. Dare's considerable problems are mostly related to the mood and story - it's hard to muster much empathy for rich white teenagers who are still trying to figure out the basics of human sexuality in their final semester of high school. And the narrative structure, which dedicates a third of the movie to the point of view of each of the teens (Alexa, then Ben, then Johnny), dulls the impact of the story's big moments rather than sharpening it. And I think it's safe to say that the ending doesn't do what it needs to - I happen to know what the ending needs to do because Dare's screenwriter David Brind spent about five minutes trying to explain the final scene to us. He had a very specific idea of where Alexa, Ben, and Johnny end up, but it's just not communicated well. So, to me, Dare fails by being unmemorable. I may not be the movie's target audience, though, if it is really intended for older audiences because my high school experience was sorely lacking in spacious mansions, illicit sex acts, and Alan Cumming cameos.

"I Will Dare" by the Replacements

I Saw a Movie (Sundance Film Festival Edition): 500 Days of Summer (2009)

Image from poster for the Royal Lilliputians, c. 1900

I'm genuinely afraid, because I think the invasion has begun. That's right - the invasion of the Manic Pixie Dreamgirls. Movie critic Nathan Rabin warned us that it was coming. He and his friends at the AV Club even gave us a list of the top suspects - but did we listen? No! And now it's too late. I've seen the horror of the Manic Pixie Dreamgirl invasion, and it's not pretty. Well, it is actually very pretty - that's part of the problem!

Let me start again. 500 Days of Summer is the first feature of music-video director Marc Webb, a romantic comedy starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel. Gordon-Levitt plays Tom, a hopeless romantic and aspiring architect who is heavily influenced by mopey British pop music and works at a greeting card company. Deschanel plays Summer (get it?), a... well, a Manic Pixie Dreamgirl with all the weirdness and baggage and impulsiveness that comes with being one of those. She doesn't believe in true love and likes to be fun and casual. When Summer comes to work at Tom's card company, he immediately falls in love with her, and they begin a bumpy affair rife with passion and angst. Tom learns a lot of lessons from Summer along the way - why? Because Manic Pixie Dreamgirls exist to help brooding sensitive-type guys learn to be fun and easy-going and live in the now and reach for the stars, etc.

500 Days of Summer doesn't sound like that bad of a movie when you just describe it like that. And Deschanel and Gordon-Levitt are talented and capable of making the most of the material they have to work with, right? I admit that their performances were just fine, but this movie just has too many other strikes against it. First, it is "The Movie of a Thousand Gimmicks". It tries to use all the cliches that you see in quirky romantic comedies: non-linear storytelling, an intrusive narrator, animated interstitial sequences, an out-of-nowhere musical production number, a little sister who talks like an adult and gives sage advice, a foreign film parody sequence, a monologue about the meaninglessness of greeting cards, interview segments with the characters talking to the camera, a split-screen sequence showing two different ways a scene could play out, etc. It must be tempting to use so many gimmicks when you're making a retread of prior Manic Pixie Dreamgirl rom-coms, but it just draws attention away from the leads' solid performances. And the culture references are so intrusive that my eye-rolling knew no bounds. Tom and Summer love to go to IKEA. They like to talk about the Smiths. They sing Pixies songs at karaoke. They hang out at a cafe with '80s video game tables. 500 Days of Summer has at least six moments as gag-inducing as the "this band will change you life" scene with the Shins in Garden State. It was ALL SO TWEE. I have a high tolerance for twee, but this movie gave me a twee seizure (or "tweezure").

I like the leads well enough and they definitely make 500 Days of Summer much more watchable than it would be with, say, Jason Biggs and Lindsay Lohan. But I had trouble sympathizing with Deschanel's character at all, mostly because the Manic Pixie Dreamgirl doesn't believe in long-term consequences of any kind. And the narrative style of the movie is a disjointed, insubstantial mess. It was disappointing to hear that Zooey Deschanel said at Sundance that she felt a strong connection with the script, making me think that she may be the worst kind of Manic Pixie Dreamgirl in real life. I still like Joseph Gordon-Levitt a lot, though - he's the standout in this movie, and I hope he gets some better projects (like Brick or The Lookout) in the near future.

"Here Comes Your Man" by the Pixies

I Saw a Movie (Sundance Film Festival Edition): An Education (2009)

Illustration from The Cat's Elegy by Gelett Burgess and Burges Johnson, 1913

I went into An Education without having done my homework. I knew the movie was a romance written by Nick Hornby and directed by newcomer Lone Scherfig. Beyond that, all I knew was that the cast included some of my favorites: Alfred Molina, Peter Sarsgaard, Olivia Williams, and Emma Thompson, and that the lead of the film, 23-year-old Carey Mulligan, might give a big breakthrough performance. I wish I'd known more than that, though. For instance, I wish I'd known that Hornby had adapted the story from an autobiographical article by British journalist Lynn Barber. And I wish I'd known a little more about the storyline, as well. I enjoyed the movie quite a bit, but I was thrown off a little by my own expectations.

Set in 1961, An Education is all about Jenny (Mulligan), a bookish 17-year-old planning on going to Oxford. Jenny has a close relationship with her parents, and this closeness is tested when Jenny becomes involved with David (Sarsgaard), a man twice Jenny's age who wants to introduce her to the world of art, music, and adulthood. It is also quickly apparent that his mentoring has a romantic aspect as well. Jenny travels with David and his friends Danny and Helen (the latter played wonderfully by Rosamund Pike, who, like Mulligan, played one of the sisters in the recent Pride & Prejudice movie), seeing new places and trying new things and falling in love in the process. As some of the mysteries about David and his background reveal themselves, Jenny is forced to make difficult choices related to her life plans and her feelings. A trusted teacher (Williams) and school headmaster (Thompson) play a larger role in the movie's second half, as they try to dissuade Jenny from her new pursuits.

Without giving too much away, it's safe to say that Jenny's maturation over the course of the film is the real focus, and Carey Mulligan pulls it off brilliantly. As Jenny, she embodies the teenage girl who is wise beyond her years, without falling into the trap of many actresses playing teens and just looking beyond her years. Her relationship with David develops delicately and organically, especially in the first act, which is crucial to the story working - anything too sudden would make David a creepy child-molester. I was expecting something a little more offbeat or unique from Hornby, so I was a little disappointed that the storyline never really deviated from convention, but the dialogue is quite good and, together with the excellent performances, raises the movie above others of the type. Jenny's relationship with her father (Molina) provides some of the funniest and most touching moments and is particularly well executed.

Because I was expecting something with more of Hornby's stamp on it, and because there were audio issues that made the dialogue hard to follow in our screening, I think I didn't enjoy An Education as much as I would have under optimal circumstances. I'd like to see it again when it gets a general release - the characters and setting are charming enough that I'd like to visit them again.

"Expectations" by Belle & Sebastian

I Saw a Movie (Sundance Film Festival Edition): Manure (2009)

Poster for the Sandow Trocadero Vaudevilles by Strobridge Lith. Co., c. 1894

I went to six shows at the Sundance Film Festival this year, and I plan on writing reviews of all six movies. So that's a week worth of posts. We'll be back to normal random posting next week. I'm writing about Manure today - a comedy by the Polish Brothers, the identical twins who wrote and directed The Astronaut Farmer, Northfork, and Twin Falls Idaho. I've only seen the last movie on that list (the first movie they made) and I liked it well enough. But it was the cast of Manure and its synopsis that sold me on getting tickets to see it at Sundance - a comedy about a failing manure company starring Billy Bob Thornton, Tea Leoni, and Kyle MacLachlan, with Ed Helms, Pruitt Taylor Vince, and Frances Conroy in supporting roles.

I went in to the movie without much in the way of expectations - my only thought being that the cast would deliver good performances - but I was still utterly baffled by the film. The plot revolves around Patrick, a veteran manure salesman (Thornton) who is left in a predicament when the founder and president of Rose Manure dies, leaving the business to his perfume-counter-working daughter Rosemary (Leoni). Patrick and Rosemary reluctantly band together to get Rose Manure out of debt, only to be confronted by a new rival, Milagro Fertilizer Co., with an army of salesmen headed by Jimmy St. James (MacLachlan). It's a fairly basic story, but the Polish Brothers use it as the framework for an uncharacteristically wacky and low-brow stream of surreal humor. First, the film's dogged dedication to the "poop" joke is impressive, if also disappointing - every pun using "shit" and "crap" you can imagine is worked into the script. Thornton gets most of these lines - Leoni's funny bits are mostly pratfalls, which I admit that she does very well. I know what you're thinking, though - "You went to a comedy about manure and you were surprised that it had 'poop' jokes in it?" Well, kinda.

The other part of the story here is that the visuals were so completely at odds with the tone of the humor. Director Michael Polish creates a surprisingly singular look to the film by limiting the palette almost exclusively to shades of brown (haha, poop!), and using carefully rendered CGI backdrops of expansive fields of dead-looking crops. The scenes at Rose Manure headquarters are cool-looking as well, with a vast topiary garden and live animals stalking the halls of the buildings. The truly surreal touches are fun as well: manure boxes suspended from parachutes filling the crap-colored sky, salesmen in their underwear dancing through rows of blackened sunflowers, children wearing masks depicting sassy vegetables. I don't think I'm being elitist in saying that these visuals didn't match the zany comedy of the script - I've just never seen "low-brow" comedy matched with a very specific visual style. Most crass comedy is set against a very generic backdrop, and I'm beginning to think that it's done that way for a reason, because seeing the contrast in Manure is quite jarring.

It's not that I didn't enjoy the movie. I like the style of humor well enough, and the actors were fun to watch (and it looked like they were having fun with the material). As I've said, though, I was never at ease while watching it and the contrasting approaches in the script and visuals didn't work well all the time. Also, as you find with many zany comedies, the final third sagged pretty badly, and the ending was sudden and cursory. I was left wondering, "Who was this movie made for?" I don't know that it has a target audience, although I may be pretty close to what it would be if it existed. I'm glad I saw Manure because I've never really seen a movie like it, and it's genuinely entertaining. But the Polish Brothers may find that there are few buyers for their lovingly crafted oil painting of a turd.

"At the Farms" by Guided By Voices

I Saw a Movie (Sundance Film Festival Edition): We Live in Public (2009)

Stereograph of the California poppy, Eschocholtzia californica, by George Stone, 1925

So I'm a little young to remember Internet pioneer Josh Harris, but I do remember the "Dot-Com Kids" and the hysteria of the late '90s tech boom that surrounded them. When I read about the new documentary We Live in Public about Josh Harris, my interest in the subject matter was minimal. When I saw that it was an Ondi Timoner project, though, my interest level shot way up. Being a music guy, Timoner's Dig! is one of my favorite documentaries, in spite of the fact that, before seeing the film, I had an aversion to its subject, the Brian Jonestown Massacre, who I had previously dismissed as unfocused nu-psych poseur-provocateurs. If anything, Dig! affirmed this view of the band but showed that there was something interesting going on in their music as well.

My view on documentaries has always been that the quality of the final project is almost always directly related to the amount of raw footage available. With both Dig! and We Live in Public, Timoner has had huge amounts of footage to work with, and she has a talent for crafting a narrative arc by finding the definitive moments captured on tape and sequencing them to create an engaging story and an emotional connection. I marveled at the footage Timoner had of Brian Jonestown Massacre's Anton Newcombe kicking a fan in the face from the stage during a gig, but that moment pales in comparison to some of the best moments of Josh Harris's bizarre life found in We Live in Public.

Here's a shortish summary of the career arc of Josh Harris and why anyone would make a movie about him. Growing up in a home with an absentee father and emotionally absent mother, Josh was raised by his TV and was intensely interested in human relationships filtered by technology at an early age. He studied networking and the development of the Internet starting in the 1980s, and by the '90s he was running Jupiter Communications, supposedly the first Internet-focused marketing group. He started Pseudo.com, an Internet TV network that streamed video and had interactive chat features long before bandwidths and connection speeds made such a thing feasible, and by 1999 he was worth 80 million dollars. He was at the epicenter of the New York dot-com kids scene with the other twenty-something Asberger's-Syndrome millionaires.

In 1999, Harris decided to use his millions to conduct a social experiment on the subject of filtered relationships that he called "Quiet". He invited one hundred artists to come live in an underground bunker in NYC where food and lodging would be free. Participants just had to agree to being filmed 24/7. The bunker was structured like a cult compound, with a "chapel" where announcements were made from a pulpit by Josh Harris, huge dorms with metal bunks containing video cameras and close-circuit monitors, a firing range with hundreds of weapons, and communal showers (with video cameras, of course). After one month, the situation in "Quiet" started to deteriorate rapidly and the police shut it down on January 1, 2000.

At this point, Harris decided to start a second project called "We Live in Public", where he and his girlfriend Tanya would live in an apartment with cameras in every room so that they could be watched on the Internet at any time. Surprisingly, this didn't work out well - being watched at all times turned out to be unhealthy for Josh and Tanya's relationship and she moved out after a month. After this, Josh had a nervous breakdown (at the same time as a financial breakdown that happened as he lost all his money in the dot-com bubble burst) and left NYC for good. He bought an apple farm and lived in isolation for a time. When technology finally caught up with his ideas and online social networking started to become a legitimate business (c. 2007), Harris took another run at getting a tech company going, but the big players (Facebook, Myspace, Google) were not interested in working with him and he suffered another financial collapse. At this point, Harris decided to get away from it all ("it" being his creditors) by moving to Ethiopia where he lives now.

That's where the film ends. I admit that I felt emotionally ravaged at the end of it, having watched some pretty difficult footage (the raw footage of "Quiet" is particularly rough to watch), and I felt enough of an affinity for Josh Harris that it hurt to watch his life disintegrate on screen. But, as a weird surprise, Ondi Timoner brought Josh Harris up on stage with her after the film to do a Q&A, where he happily answered questions about his life in Ethiopia and his plan to start a project with Microsoft in the near future. He hopes to make some money that will allow him to work on new large-scale installation art projects. Timoner obviously didn't make We Live in Public to help Josh Harris, though - his life as presented in the film raises a lot of interesting questions about social networking, the Internet, and the filtering of social interactions that is swiftly becoming the norm in how we deal with each other. She's made another heart-wrenching, thought-provoking documentary about a damaged dreamer, and I think it's an unqualified success. I just hope she has enough footage (or the ability to get her hands on some) to make another documentary of this kind.

Here's "Head On" by the Jesus & Mary Chain, which is used to great effect in We Live in Public. In her Q&A, Timoner said that some songs will be pulled from the film after the Festival because it will cost too much to get the rights once the movie's getting wider distribution, so the version of the film we saw is likely to differ from what others will see.

"Head On" by the Jesus & Mary Chain

"I would choose the darkest horse, that's the horse I'd ride"

Bishū fujimigahara by Katsushika Hokusai, c. 1890

Through a strange series of circumstances, I found myself in possession of a copy of Grrr..., the new album from Bishop Allen. Bishop Allen will always be a favorite of mine for their EP-a-month project of 2006, where they released the equivalent of three top-notch albums over the course of the year in the form of monthly mail-order EPs. A project like that is demanding on a band, but it can gain you a lot of fans. Unfortunately, you're also training those fans to expect instant gratification. Since the EP project, Bishop Allen's only release has been Bishop Allen & the Broken String, which was, for the most part, a repackaging and update of some of the songs from the EP project. I'm glad I had a chance to hear Grrr... now, because I'm not sure I would have been able to wait until its release date on March 10th to hear it. For the most part, it doesn't disappoint.

Bishop Allen got some constructive criticism for The Broken String - many people thought that dressing up the demo-esque songs from the EP project didn't work well, as Bishop Allen didn't know how to apply their new resources with a light touch. They learned their lesson, I think - they have dialed everything back a couple notches on Grrr.... In fact, you could say that the album is almost too low-key and stripped down. The band's leaders, Justin Rice and Christian Rudder, have stated that the album is at least a partial return to the simple indie-pop of their first album, Charm School, and I think this is accurate. Grrr... is not a step backward, though - the confidence, concision, and subtlety on display in the songwriting and arrangements point to a new maturity in Bishop Allen's approach.

Grrr... starts with two Charm Schoolish songs, "Dimmer" and "The Lion & the Teacup" that indicate where the band is going with this album. The two songs that follow, though, bring back some of the epic bombast of The Broken String, and it doesn't work as well in the context of these songs - they don't really stand up to the last album's "Flight 180". Starting with the fifth song, though, Bishop Allen really hits their stride, delivering seven great songs in a row, emphasizing pop hooks and bouncy rhythms. "The Ancient Commonsense of Things" delivers the album's most memorable chorus, but "True or False" is the highlight for me. I admit that I didn't think that Darbie Nowatka's vocals on The Broken String blended well with the band's sound, but her vocal on "True or False" is a real delight, backed up by handclaps and a woozy brass section. The album loses a little momentum with the last two songs, but at a running time of 36 minutes and none of the songs lasting more than three minutes, nothing on Grrr... overstays its welcome.

Bishop Allen have made an album that delivers on the promise of their early work, which should delight fans who have wanted to hear Clementines, the aborted follow-up to Charm School that evolved into the EP project. One of my favorite Bishop Allen songs, "Last Chance America", was supposed to be a highlight of Clementines but ended up never getting on an album. I think that Grrr... captures a lot of that same energy, and it may end up being one of my most-listened-to records of 2009. Look for it on March 10th from Dead Oceans Records.

"Last Chance America" by Bishop Allen

"Hear my knock on your front door nevermore"

Leaflet advertisement for a replica of the mechanical clock of the Gothic cathedral of Strasbourg, France, c. 1900

I talked a little about the reissue label called Numero Group in my entry on Titan: It's All Pop, but I don't think I mentioned the label's biggest project to date, a series of releases known as Eccentric Soul. This series collects the tracks recorded for forgotten soul and R'n'B labels in the '60s and '70s, finding underappreciated soul scenes in places like Phoenix, East St. Louis, and Columbus. My favorite release of the series has been Twinight's Lunar Rotation, a two-disc set highlighting the forgotten artists of Chicago's Twinight Records. This release has been a big hit with collectors, and the Numero Group has put together a reunion show to celebrate the success. Some of the Twinight musicians will be performing for the first time in thirty years! Check it out:

That cool-lookin' cat in the upper-right of the poster is Renaldo Domino, one of my favorites from the Twinight collection (the album also features his picture on the cover, wearing an AWESOME royal blue velvet suit!) Renaldo Domino (named after Domino sugar because of his sweet voice) came to Twinight in 1969 after having modest success on smaller labels, but he never really got the push he deserved. His four songs are the highlight of the collection for me because of his great voice and daring arrangements. Check out "Nevermore" from 1969, the b-side to his shoulda-been-a-hit single "Not Too Cool to Cry". The spooky backing vocals on the intro set the mood, and they come back to chant "nevermorenevermore" in the chorus. The vocal melody is lovely, and Domino's sweet high voice really brings it to life. The strings add a delicate sadness to the arrangement, but Domino is not in the mood for subtlety. He's pretty upset and he's letting us know that he's not coming around anymore. Or nevermore. Or something.

"Nevermore" by Renaldo Domino

"When I see you in this low-lying dreamy western town"

Poster entitled "National Loan 1920" by Francisque Poulbot, 1920

It's not a common trick, but I like it when bands write a title song for an album and then leave the song off the album (or name an album after a pre-existing song that they are not planning to include). It's a trick that Guided By Voices has used numerous times ("Bee Thousand", "Alien Lanes", "Isolation Drills"), but it's also been done by Superchunk ("On the Mouth", "Foolish") and the Teardrop Explodes ("Kilimanjaro") and probably others I can't think of right now. But one of my favorite "lost" title tracks is "Dreamy" by Beat Happening.

Not included on the 1991 album of that name, the song was a b-side on the "Nancy Sin" 7" single in 1990. It's almost a template of Beat Happening's style, highlighting Calvin Johnson's flat baritone over pounding drums, guitar, and tambourine. The lyrics are the usual mix of naivety and raunchiness that was an important part of the Beat Happening aesthetic as well - the first verse pulls no punches with, "Wear a pearl necklace if you think of it / I'll run the red river but not drink of it."

"Dreamy" by Beat Happening

It's New To Me: Fear of Music by the Talking Heads (1979)

Photo entitled "Curve Baseball" by Gjon Mili, published in LIFE Magazine, 1953

So, apparently the name of the band is the Talking Heads. A $4 price tag was enough to make Fear of Music an impulse buy I felt pretty good about a couple weeks ago. I probably should have made Remain in Light or Speaking in Tongues my first Talking Heads purchase, but my "10 Song Rule" has caused me to balk at those two records on more than one occasion. I don't know why I need a record to have ten songs - I know it's weird. In this case, the result was that I decided to begin exploring the Talking Heads' work with the dark post-punk of Fear of Music, produced by Brian Eno (and featuring Gene Wilder on congas - no joke!)

I was a little disappointed, to be honest. I had particularly high hopes for "I Zimbra", a song co-written by Brian Eno that had been the album's most successful single. But there's no hook to it. I've know that the grooves and the polyrhythms are a big part of what the Talking Heads did, but their best songs also incorporated pop hooks and memorable melodic bits in the vocals and guitar leads. The last three songs on the record ("Animals", "Electric Guitar", "Drugs") do nothing for me at all, and there are only five songs on the record that I can really get into. One of these is "Paper", which won me over with its chiming guitar intro and fun chorus. So it's a mixed bag that I'll keep listening to - I think I'll appreciate some of the songs more over time. And I'll probably track down More Songs About Buildings and Food next - it has eleven songs on it and one of them is "Thank You For Sending Me an Angel", which I'm very fond of.

"Paper" by the Talking Heads

"The mirror's soft silver tain reflects our last and birthing hour"

Image by J. Augustus Knapp, from John Uri Lloyd's fantasy novel Etidorpha, 1895

So the Decemberists have a new record coming out, and it apparently is - BAFFLINGLY - an overblown rock opera. Actually, that should come as a surprise to no one, unless you happen to think that they had maxed out their "theatricality meter" with 2006's The Crane Wife. But I'm not here to apologize for liking the Decemberists (not that an apology is not deserved - it will be delivered at a later date). Here's the deal - I was, once upon a time, a Humanities student, and I stumbled across a band that was designed specifically to cater to the proclivities of Humanities students. The songs are catchy, and the lyrics can be fun if you don't take them too seriously. So I'm okay with the Decemberists.

Some might argue that the Decemberists can't make a rock opera because they simply DO NOT ROCK. They are first and foremost a pop band - that's true. But listen to the promo track for their new album, The Hazards of Love - it kinda rocks. Also, they've already composed and released a hard-rocking rock-opera-type thing back in 2004 called The Tain, a 20-minute single-song EP about Cúchulainn, an epic hero of early Irish literature. I saw the Decemberists perform the entirety of The Tain live when they toured in 2004, and it was a fairly impressive display of sung storytelling and mid-song instrument-switching. Of the EP's five musical sections, the second probably rocks the hardest, but my favorite part is the third section, in which a dying soldier is lulled into oblivion by a "chorus of waifs". It's pretty epic.

"The Tain Pt. 3" by the Decemberists

It's New To Me: Wattle & Daub by Strapping FIeldhands (1996)

Sketch entitled "Work" by James McNeill Whistler, c. 1901

I feel like I was sold a bill of goods on Strapping Fieldhands. "It's like Guided By Voices singing sea shanties!" they said. Well, they lied. I don't know why all the eccentric '90s bands of the American Midwest get lumped together - I would hesitate to compare Strapping Fieldhands to anything else I've heard before. Although I admit that I like the comparison someone made that likened them to a clan of inbred hillbillies who have formed a musical cult around Pink Floyd's Meddle. I picked up the out-of-print Wattle & Daub album on the ol' Interwebs with pretty low expectations, but I still initially felt misled somehow.

But I like that Bob Malloy and his Phillie-based ensemble were doing their own thing, and Wattle & Daub has really opened up on repeated listens. A fascination with history and mythos is found in a lot of Strapping Fieldhands' songs, and the imagery of "Song of Mourning Dove" and "Chronicle of a Tortoise" hearkens back to early British folk music. Did I mention that Malloy sings everything in a thick faux-Brit accent? The backwoods psychedelia and scholarly rusticity mix throughout Wattle & Daub with varying effectiveness, but I like how it comes together on songs like the buried-in-the-tracklist gem "Rose Seed", with its layers of treated guitar, burbling drums, and off-kilter melody line.

"Rose Seed" by Strapping Fieldhands

It's New To Me: Positively George Street by Sneaky Feelings (1999)

Photo of Pablo Picasso from LIFE Magazine by Gjon Mili, 1949

When I watched Heavenly Pop Hits, the documentary on the Flying Nun/Dunedin music scene of New Zealand in the '80s, I realized there was a major player in the scene that I'd never heard of. I've been a fan of the Flying Nun scene for a while, and I really enjoy the Clean, the Chills, the Bats, Bailter Space, and the Tall Dwarfs. I'd buy the Verlaines albums if they were in print. But who are Sneaky Feelings? The description and snippets in the documentary pressed all the right buttons - wussy, jangly, lyrical, overlooked. I went out and tracked down the only CD the band has in print, Positively George Street, an expansive best-of disc that covers the three albums and assorted singles they released between 1982 and 1988.

They turned out to be a harder sell than I thought. For one thing, I was not prepared for the blue-eyed soul approach that is a big part of their songwriting - it's not exactly Rick Astley or Hall & Oates, but it reminds me of bad '80s radio a little more than I'm used to. Also, I find that it's hard to get a handle on the Sneakys because there were four songwriters in the band. All of them had noteworthy entries in the band's oeuvre, but Matthew Bannister and David Pine wrote the lion's share of the band's songs. Bannister wrote the band's catchiest songs, including their sole charting single, "Husband House", but he wasn't really a natural frontman. Pine, apparently, was the charismatic natural leader of the group but shied away from the role, possibly because he perceived Bannister as the superior talent. The result of this situation is a set of songs that are a little tentative and not terribly cohesive.

But Sneaky Feelings (a reference to the Elvis Costello song) is a good choice of name for this band because the songs did sneak up on me. And it really is all about the feelings communicated in the songs with these guys. NZ musician Graeme Downes, who worked with the Sneakys, famously said, "To like the Sneakys you had to appreciate the songs first and foremost, and had to be prepared to forego all the other aspects that are usually the hallmark of the successful rock and roll package." They were concerned with mundane relationships in a decidedly non-rock-n-roll way - three of their best songs deal with the feelings surrounding getting married ("Hard Love", "Better Than Before", and their hit "Husband House".) "Better Than Before" is a good example of the Sneakys approach to lyric-oriented pop, creating a sketch of a couple with mundane problems and commitment issues. He describes the moment of new awareness of a relationship's problems as waking up from a dream, but it's his decision of what to do in that moment that is interesting. "I looked around, went back to sleep. Now I don't know why, but it's better than it was before."

"Better Than Before" by Sneaky Feelings

"I'm seventeen and that's the reason why"

Advertisement for Cognac Gautier Frères by Leonetto Capiello, 1907

To the extent that they ever really existed, I feel bad for the Crystals. They signed with Phil Spector shortly after they formed as a group in 1961, and he is equally responsible for their modest success as well as their ultimate consignment to ignominy. He wrote their big hits "Da Doo Ron Ron" and "Then He Kissed Me", and his unmistakable sound brought those songs to life. But he also let other artists record under their name (Darlene Love, the Blossoms, and even himself on the infamous "Dance the Screw") and ended up abandoning them altogether to promote his new project, the Ronettes. But their singles were enough to secure them some soft of legacy - their music has received recent attention because of a renewed interest in the controversial themes of their "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)".

One of my favorite Crystals songs, "All Grown Up", is a bit of a mystery. Written by Spector (with Barry/Greenwich) and sung by the actual Crystals, it was the group's last real single and only reached #98 on the pop charts. Fairly clean-sounding for a Spector production, the song featured honky-tonk piano and a nice brass section. However, the version of the song I love comes from the Phil Spector box set, and I can't find much information about its origins. It is a bit longer than the original, and it features a much harsher sound. A noisy surf guitar is central in the non-single version's arrangement, and the Crystals' sprightly vocals struggle to rise above. This sound fits the song nicely, though. The Crystals sing about a seventeen-year-old who stands on the precipice of adulthood, but her focus is on some dubious aspects of being a grown-up. She talks about having her hair piled high, filling the dance floor on Saturday nights, and kissing guys with impunity. "No more ponytails!"

"All Grown Up" by the Crystals

"You should make your own time - you're welcome in mine"

Cartoon entitled "I wonder what those two can see in each other" by Charles Dana Gibson, 1925

I recently acquired "the second best shoegaze album ever made". That's kind of a sad way to describe the achievement that is Nowhere by Ride, but it's what they're stuck with thanks to My Bloody Valentine. Released in 1990, Nowhere came a year before Loveless, but it wasn't the defining statement of shoegaze's new wall of sound that the latter album was. For me, though, that works in Nowhere's favor - I can enjoy the album on it's own merits, and I have to admit that I really enjoy it.

The album's openers "Seagull" and "Kaleidoscope", and its closer, the string-laden juggernaut "Vapour Trail", are amazing singles that frame a famously impenetrable middle section of five songs. Although I agree that it is appropriate to group the middle songs together, I enjoy this stretch of the album the most. The songs are, for the most part, leisurely mid-tempo numbers that focus on different approaches to the swirling noise of shoegaze. "Dreams Burn Down" makes use of chiming arpeggios and "Decay" uses pounding drums to create a propulsive rumble, while "Paralysed" throws some harpsichord into the mix because - well, why not? The best of them, though, is "Polar Bear", a song that seems to be about a girl, not a bear (a she-bear?), who thinks she can fly. The title is key, though, in creating the image of arctic winds washing over you that is reinforced throughout the album and by the its bleak cover art and title. The song has a crystalline beauty in the layering of the vocals and the panned and phased guitar. The best bit comes after the three-minute mark when the tom rolls drop away suddenly and a clean acoustic guitar strum takes the lyric back to its opening lines one more time.

"Polar Bear" by Ride

"I tried to think of something new, something good that I could do"

Recruiting poster for the Czechoslovak Recruiting Office by Vojtech Preissig, 1918

Little Death by Pete & the Pirates hasn't received an official release in the US, so I didn't put it in my Best of 2008 list. I'd been waiting to see if it would come out over here, but I eventually just downloaded it from Amazon. The first album by the Reading-based band, Little Death is British pop in the tradition of early XTC, which is probably why they keep getting compared to Franz Ferdinand. The band's vocalist Tom Sanders had a similar-sounding solo project called Tap Tap that got some attention over here - the Lanzaframe album, released on Catbird Records, got some good reviews and blog mentions and was one of my favorite albums of 2006. But Pete & the Pirates have released a great record that has gotten little attention outside the UK as far as I can tell.

Tom Sanders has that voice that was popular a couple years ago - the Clap-Your-Hands-Wolf-Parade croak-yelp that the kids were so into. If you like that kind of singing, that will probably be the most immediate appeal to be found in Little Death. Well, that and the jerky new-wave guitar leads. But the album has more treats that reveal themselves as you listen - the bouncy hand-claps of "Come On Feet", the call-and-response vocals in "Dry Wings", and the buzzing solo that comes out of nowhere in "Bears" are all pleasant surprises. I'll admit that Tom Sanders' lyrics are hit-and-miss at best - the song "Dry Wings" starts with the lyric "Time for bed/Find a girl and go to bed" - but the subject matter matches the youthful energy of the songs, and the arrangements are surprisingly mature and well-though-out by comparison. Pete & the Pirates are playing SXSW this year, so check them out if you happen to be in Austin. Maybe they'll get some of the attention they deserve.

"Dry Wings" by Pete & the Pirates

"Je rêve toujours de me trouver seule avec toi"

Illustration a detail from a theater poster, ca. 1935

Françoise Hardy was twenty when she released the Pourtant Tu M'Aimes EP in 1964, one of many EP releases she put out in the early '60s for the Vogue label. Unlike most of the other material she was recording at the time, Françoise only wrote one of the songs on the EP, "Jaloux". The title track was a translation of a Jimmie Cross/Johnny Cole song originally called "I Still Love Him", translated into French by Hardy herself.

Even if it's somewhat inferior to the best of Hardy's own compositions, "Pourtant Tu M'Aimes" is artfully arranged and excellently executed. Starting with a drum flourish and a burst of blurting horns, the song incorporates castanets, warbling strings, and chirpy backing vocalists. It's a playful but more mature sound than found in Hardy's earliest ye-ye singles like "Tous Les Garçons", and she sings the title line in the chorus (which translates as "yet you love me and I can't live without you") in a strangely blank way over and over as the song fades out, making me wonder what secrets a twenty-year-old could possibly have to hide behind such a delivery.

"Pourtant Tu M'Aimes" by Francoise Hardy

In Stores Now: Alpinisms by School of Seven Bells

Cartoon entitled "Following the Fashion" by James Gillray, 1794

School of Seven Bells exists because of two break-ups. When nu-shoegaze band On!Air!Library called it quits in 2005, that freed up Alley Deheza to work on projects with her special guy friend, Benjamin Curtis. When Curtis's main gig with nu-prog band Secret Machines kind of fell apart, School of Seven Bells was suddenly a higher priority. At some point, Alley's twin Claudia (who was also in On!Air!Library) joined the School. The band's name comes from a legendary (apocryphal?) pickpocket-training institution in South America, and Alpinisms is written as a set of fictional letters written between the seven members of the secret School.

I'm not sure what it is about Alpinisms that draws me in where other nu-shoegaze bands like Asobi Seksu have left me cold, but it would have been high on my top albums list of 2008 if I'd discovered it sooner. The glitchy electronic rhythms lay the foundation for very organic arrangements of guitar and keyboard. And the vocals of Alley and Claudia are definitely compelling, particularly when they sing in unison for a line or two before diverging into close harmony parts.

Also, the album is sequenced in an interesting way, with a first half built around one of their best songs, "Half Asleep", with the other songs emphasizing the band's varied approaches and "exotic" influences. Alpinism's second half showcases the 11-minute drone of "Sempiternal/Amaranth", which makes for a somewhat arduous listen, made worthwhile because it is followed by the album's three best songs, hidden right at the end of the album. Or, y'know, you could push the "skip" button and go straight to "Chain", probably my favorite song on the record, in spite of its use of the infamous "autotune" technology. The melody is haunting, and the song's chorus line, "I can't seem to remember my dreams lately," will stay with you in a way you might not expect from such a gauzy concoction.

"Chain" by School of Seven Bells

It's New To Me: Tusk by Fleetwood Mac (1979)

Image of Rin Tin Tin from Rin Tin Tin #29, 1959

I know I'm coming a little late to the Tusk party. When some old record comes up in the rotation for rediscovery every few years, I make a note of it, but I don't always rush out and buy the record being talked about. (Sorry, Vashti Bunyan, Georgio Moroder, and whoever else has had a recent resurgence in popularity!) To tell the truth, I've been looking for a used copy of Tusk for ages - I decided I didn't need the 2-CD deluxe version, and I figured lots of people would be unloading the old single-disc version. It was a longer wait than I anticipated, but this record was worth the wait.

Tusk is a "big" record, in several senses of the word. Each of the songwriters in the band (Stevie Nicks, Christine McVie, Lindsey Buckingham) wrote at least five songs on the record - Buckingham has nine! And it's the Lindsey Buckingham songs that really make this album great to me - there is a compelling nervous energy to his writing from this era (hello, cocaine!) and his production style is very forward-thinking. I am starting to see why people say that REM's Murmur borrows a lot from the Buckingham sound. The mystery to me is how the title track is the only well-known song from this record - it's arguably the only throwaway song on the whole disc. "I Know I'm Not Wrong" should have been huge - take a listen and tell me I'm wrong. I know I'm not.

"I Know I'm Not Wrong" by Fleetwood Mac

In Stores Now: Movement (2 Disc Factory Edition) by New Order

Illustration of an elementary school fallout shelter from National School Fallout Shelter Design Competition Awards, 1963

I missed my chance to be a big Joy Division fan, I think. When I heard Unknown Pleasures for the first time, I was 19. I think a high-school friend of my little sister put it on and I immediately thought, "Wow, this is music for high schoolers." I appreciate Joy Division now, particularly the later singles collected on Substance, but New Order has always been an easier pill to swallow. Someone described New Order as a band attempting to create artificial-sounding music with traditional rock-band instruments, and I like that about them. I'm not a huge New Order fan, but I love Power Corruption & Lies and the songs from that period. I've always wondered about Movement, the first New Order album - the one that was made immediately after the death of Ian Curtis and the disbanding of Joy Division.

So I picked up the recent 2-CD reissue of Movement. My plan was to put off buying any New Order reissues until the controversy over them and their sound-quality problems got resolved once and for all. But I found the album for a dollar - a DOLLAR! - brand new at this creepy surplus store out by the airport and decided to give it a try. The verdict? I like it. It has the dry, brittle quality of Joy Division, with the rattling percussion and scratchy guitar, but with new synth sounds and some great melodica. The production is more daring in places as well, creating interesting textures with dry reverb and stereo panning. What I hadn't expected was how terrible the vocals are. Bernard Butler and Peter Hook both try lead vocals on the album, but the hesitance in their delivery really puts me on edge for some reason and dampens my enjoyment of the record.

I have to admit, though, that the second disc is more enjoyable to listen to, containing New Order's early non-album singles. I was familiar with "Ceremony" and "Everything's Gone Green", of course, but all eight songs are great and make a great album-like listen. Best of all, the songs have confident vocals not found on Movement itself - Bernard Butler never really learned to sing, but he found a vocal style that works for him. One of my favorite b-sides on the second disc is "Mesh", originally an "Everything's Gone Green" b-side - I read somewhere that this is the first time the track has appeared on CD. Moral of the story? This release is definitely a worthwhile purchase for a dollar. For what it's worth, I couldn't hear any of the sound quality issues that people have been griping about.

"Mesh" by New Order

In Stores Now: The Crawling Distance by Robert Pollard

Illustration of the Chingo Chee from St. Nicholas magazine, 1873

Two days into 2009 and I'm already getting the year's new releases in the mail. The Crawling Distance is the first of six currently announced full-length releases that Robert Pollard has planned for release this year. The Planets Are Blasted, from his pop-oriented project Boston Spaceships, is coming in February, and another Boston Spaceships release called Zero to 99 is coming later in the year. Another Pollard solo album, Elephant Jokes is coming in the summer. And perhaps most interestingly, the Circus Devils, Pollard's experimental hard-rock project, is releasing an "inviting, breezy" album called Gringo. And then there's Cosmos, Pollard's collaborative project from Richard Davies, the Australian songwriter behind the Moles and Cardinal. This may be the first year when Pollard has all his releases lined up in January, but I'm guessing we're going to see some releases added to this list as the year goes on. How does he do it?

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. The Crawling Distance is release #1, and I think it may be a harbinger of good things to come in 2009. As with all of Pollard's solo releases, this project is largely in the hands of producer Todd Tobias, who arranged the songs Pollard wrote and played almost all the instruments on the record. But he creates a more dynamic sound here than on 2007's poppy but samey Coast to Coast Carpet of Love, and the songs are just a lot stronger than the diverse but meandering Off to Business record from last year.

It has its mini-epics ("Red Cross Vegas Night" and the excellent "No Island"), its sensitive power-pop ("The Butler Stands for All of Us", "Imaginary Queen Anne"), and hard-edged rockers ("Faking My Harlequin", "By Silence Be Destroyed"). The only tracks that nag me a little are the punkish numbers "Cave Zone" and closer "Too Much Fun (Is Too Much Fun)", but even they have nice sonic touches from Tobias that make them interesting. I can almost see Tobias listening to a rough demo of Pollard banging out "Cave Zone", thinking "What am I supposed to do with THIS?" The embellishments are nice overall, like the pulsing sound in the second half of the opening track and the cello on "On Shortwave". I just wish Tobias would abandon the sighing synths that he tends to smear over the ballady numbers.

"It's Easy" is one of two songs on the record that are fleshed-out versions of demos Pollard released in the Suitcase box set. It takes a single-verse sketch and makes a nice Syd-Barrett-style pastoral psych number out of it. Those sighing synths are there, but the arrangement is tasteful overall, with a nice buildup and release. You can preorder The Crawling Distance from Amazon HERE, and you can check out a couple preview tracks from Pollard's other 2009 releases at MAGNET.

"It's Easy" by Robert Pollard

In Stores Now: Strum and Drum! by Sex Clark Five

Illustration from Widows, Grave and Otherwise by Cora Willmarth, c. 1903

Sex Clark Five may have been last in line the day God handed out band names, but they make up for it in other ways. Actually, the fact that they named their highly-regarded debut album Strum and Drum! (a play on the term "sturm and drang") says something about their fondness for corny puns. Nevertheless, "strum and drum" says most of what you need to know about Sex Clark Five. The Alabama band started recording the '80s, writing short snippet-songs built on a backbone of rhythm guitar and propulsive drumming. They topped their lo-fi concoctions with Beatlesy vocals to complete their formula. It's a sound that became common in the mid-90s indie scene, but Sex Clark Five were very much doing their own thing when they released Strum and Drum! in 1987.

The album is legendary in some circles - Carl Newman of the New Pornographers called it one of his very favorite records - which makes it a mystery why it's been out of print for years. I bought a vinyl copy on eBay a couple years ago, expecting that to be the only way I'd every obtain it. But now, out of nowhere, it has been reissued on CD by Maryatt Music Group, who I've never heard of. Regardless, these guys deserve a medal of some kind for releasing Strum and Drum! in an expanded reissue with two of the band's essential EPs and a couple random singles and unreleased tracks. The album sounds as good as ever, with at least a dozen pop classics clocking in a less than two minutes each. One of the best is "Modern Fix" which contains the classic line, "Let's take all our gimmicks and put them in one box, and trade it for a bag of tube socks!" Buy Strum and Drum (plus Rarities) at Maryatt Music.

"Modern Fix" by Sex Clark Five