Phoning It In: "Here's the Telephone" by Page France

Photo from University of North Carolina women's annual Pine Needles, 1920

Maryland indie-pop band Page France set off a lot of "Twee Alert" alarm bells - Strike 1: adenoidal vocals! Strike 2: nursery rhyme lyrics about cute animals! Strike 3: glockenspiel everywhere! And yet, I'll tolerate a lot of tweeness if the hooks are good. And Page France knew their way around a good pop melody (before they went on extended hiatus in 2007, anyway.) The almost-title-track from 2007's ...and the Family Telephone couldn't be simpler (or more glockenspectacular!) but I find it surprisingly ingratiating. "Here's the Telephone"'s second section, where frontman gives his nasal passages a rest so that Whitney McGraw can sing a slower, more whistful outro, is particularly nice.

I'll be back Monday, so tune in then for longer but just as poorly written write-ups (I can't call them reviews with a straight face) of albums that everyone has already bought.

"Here's the Telephone" by Page France

Phoning It In: "New York Telephone Conversation" by Lou Reed

Illustration for Pepsi World promotional materials by Chermayeff & Geismar, 1961

If you live in the Big Apple, you may not be able to afford the charges associated with yesterday's "Transatlantic Telephone Conversation", so maybe Lou Reed can help you place a local call. How's that for a segue? The slightest song on Transformer, narrowly beating the almost-equally-baffling "Andy's Chest", I've never really gotten much out of "New York Telephone Conversation". The only way this song even makes any sense to me is if I imagine Moe Tucker singing it (surprisingly, this trick also works with Snow's "Informer!) The song is a goofy little sketch about gossipy New Yorkers that takes an odd turn in its third verse, where the titular conversation suddenly turns into a booty call. "I am calling, yes I’m calling just to speak to you/For I know this night will kill me, if I can’t be with you." How romantic is that?

"New York Telephone Conversation" by Lou Reed

Phoning It In: "Transatlantic Telephone Conversation" by the Mad Scene

Cover illustration of mystery novel Yellow Violet by Frances Crane, 1942

I'm out of town for a couple days, so I'm resurrecting my lame "Phoning It In" feature.

Last year, when Merge Records was celebrating its 20th anniversary with its SCORE CD series, I got a chance to hear a lot of the early Merge bands I'd never heard. The peppy kiwi-pop of the Mad Scene was one sound that stood out, so I picked up a copy of their Merge full-length Sealight. I was a little disappointed that more than half of the album had a moody, overcast feel to it that pops up a surprising amount in New Zealand indie music, but "Transatlantic Telephone Conversation" was one track that was just what I'd been hoping to hear. With its Clean guitar sound (get it? the Mad Scene's Hamish Kilgour is also in the band the Clean!), handclaps, and simple melody, it gave me flashbacks to the mid-'90s and the simple pop that was so popular with the CMJ crowd at the time. Good stuff.

"Transatlantic Telephone Conversation" by the Mad Scene

It's New to Me: Alias Pink Puzz by Paul Revere & the Raiders (1969)

Illustration from The Redemption of Marie Gordon: The Tragic Story of Wronged Womanhood #2 by Cora Lane Sherman, 1926

By the late '60s, Paul Revere & the Raiders were one of the biggest-selling rock groups in America. They had a decent string of hits, and they were well-known for their regular appearances on Dick Clark's shows to perform in their goofy Revolution-era uniforms. But, as singer Mark Lindsay and Paul Revere took more control of the band in an attempt to take the Raiders in a more serious direction, three of the band's core members got fed up and left. By '69, FM radio was the new place for rock music, and, wanting to be seen as a more "serious" rock band, Lindsay wanted an FM radio hit. The Raiders couldn't get any airplay on FM radio because they were a "Top 40" band, so Lindsay sent the stations the band's new harder-edged single "Let Me!" in a sleeve saying it was from a new band called Pink Puzz.

"Let Me!" was a hot single until the DJs found out who was really behind the song - then they dropped it like a hot potato. Paul Revere & the Raiders then put out Alias Pink Puzz, a new album including "Let Me!" with a set of Lindsay-penned and -produced songs. A lot of the songs on the record are about the Raiders' experiences on the road, particularly their tour of Europe, and these songs are among the strongest on the record. The album also has straight-forward pop songs ("Thank You" and "I Need You") and a dreamy ballad ("I Don't Know"). There are some nice psych tinges to the songs, and much of the album has an easy-going, rambling feel like Creedence Clearwater Revival. Most people prefer the early R&B-flavored records the Raiders did, but I think this album shows that their late-'60s albums were pretty strong as well.

"Frankfort Side Street" is one of those songs Lindsay wrote after their tour of Europe, and it's one of my favorites on the album. It has a folky feel that would have been out of place on an earlier Raiders record, and the wistful "sitting in my hotel" lyrics don't come across as corny as most songs of this genre. It has some great guitar work by Freddy Weller, and the tinkling electric piano is a nice touch as well.

"Frankfort Side Street" by Paul Revere & the Raiders

In Stores Now: Astro Coast by Surfer Blood

Panel from Dark Mysteries comic book issue #9 by drawn by John D'Agostino, October 1952

Sometimes, comparing a new band to a more familiar, established artist can be a good thing. Sure, sometimes it's just laziness to make comparisons instead of actually trying to describe what the music is like, but unless you're really good at writing about music, a straight-forward description can be just as useless. Take Surfer Blood, for instance. The initial stuff I read about this new Florida band made them sound like another in a long line of generic indie-schmindie Pitchfork-approved bands. But I'll admit that the comparisons to early Weezer made me sit up and pay attention a little more, and I'm not even a huge Weezer fan. I'd heard the Surfer Blood single, "Swim", and I hadn't really heard any Weezerness in it. Ultimately, I think that this comparison is a red herring, but it got me to dig a little deeper.

Of course, this is all a set-up for me making my own lazy comparison. I know that this is not an en vogue reference point, but Astro Coast sounds a lot to me like the first Shins record, Oh Inverted World, but recorded in an apartment with slightly less intolerant neighbors. It has that same "we recorded this at a pretty low volume and then added a lot of reverb" feel to it. It also has the same Kinks-by-way-of-the-Cure guitar sound. And it has hooks. That's really the thing that elevates this record above bog-standard blog-hype indie - the hooks are better. The first four songs on the album are about as good as you could ask for, unless kinda-generic guitar pop makes you break out in hives. It's not a perfect record - "Twin Peaks", arguably the album's most Weezer-influenced track, is a lyrical low point of juvenilia, and putting the album's two longest (and slowest) songs as the penultimate tracks is a questionable choice. Both songs ("Slow Jabroni" and "Anchorage") build to nice crescendos but they kind of follow the same template.

Surfer Blood is at their best when they stick to poppy, reverbed-out ditties like "Swim" and the album's excellent closing song, "Catholic Pagans". That song even has a Beach-Boys vocal breakdown that wins automatic brownie points from me. You might be able to tell that I'm still trying to convince myself that this album isn't just a "flavor of the month" thing for whatever reason, but I'm pretty sure at this point that I like this a lot. I just hope their career arc goes better than similar bands that got Pitchfork attention in the past.

"Swim" by Surfer Blood

It's New to Me: Argybargy by Squeeze (1980)

Illustration from the cover of Popular Mechanics magazine, April 1931

UK pop band Squeeze has always been a frustrating proposition - their excellent early albums have long been out of print in the US, and I've known better to pick up the omnipresent collection 45's and Under - it would just make me want to hear the proper albums more. I've been casually familiar with their well-known songs, but I finally decided to make an effort to get their early albums. I picked up 1981's East Side Story last year, but it apparently didn't make enough of an impression to get a write-up here at the time. I still listen to it often, but finding a copy of the recent 2-CD deluxe Argybargy was more exciting - I'd heard great things about this one.

I'm a fan of pop songwriting, and Squeeze distills most of the things I love about '60s and '70s UK lyricism and composition into neat little vignettes of melody - Robert Christgau called them a band "obsessed with the telling detail", and I like this about them. Argybargy is a set of well-crafted pop songs, and the b-sides and outtakes included in this re-release show that they were working with a real excess of good ideas at the time. I was very familiar, of course, with "Pulling Mussels (From the Shell)", so it's good that it comes first - I can get it out of the way and enjoy the less familiar material like the equally excellent singles "Another Nail in My Heart" and "If I Didn't Love You". Argybargy also has some Elvis-Costello-style jerky pop ("Misadventure", "Farfisa Beat"), and a couple of Chris Difford's great story-oriented songs a la "Up the Junction".

Two moody tracks ("I Think I'm Go Go" and "Here Comes That Feeling") are unremarkable but useful for contrast purposes, and Jools Holland's big number "Wrong Side of the Moon" is a bit of a sore thumb, but this is a really solid album. It's weird that the band agreed to cut three songs from the album at the record company's behest - "Someone Else's Heart" ended up on their next album, and "What the Butler Saw" got a b-side release, but "Funny How It Goes", the source of the album's original title, It's a Funny Old World, never saw the light of day until the late '90s. And it's too bad - it's a great song with a memorable verse melody (the chorus is a little lightweight), some nice piano from Holland, and a cool synth outro. Having these songs reattached to the end of the album is nice, giving Argybargy a more fleshed-out feel.

My next move is to go back further in the Squeeze discography and get Cool for Cats. I've never liked the title track for some reason, but I need to get past that because the other songs I know from that album ("Up the Junction" and "Goodbye Girl") are as good as anything on Argybargy.

"Funny How It Goes" by Squeeze

We Love the Beach Boys: "In the City" by the Who

Photo of singer Michi Aoyama by Co Rentmeester from LIFE magazine, 1969

Keith Moon loved the Beach Boys. A lot. He started out playing in a surf-pop band, and his love of Brian Wilson, Jan & Dean, etc. is well documented. In an interview last year, Roger Daltrey said, "He would have left the Who at the drop of a hat to join the Beach Boys." The rest of the Who never really liked the Beach Boys much, apparently, and it shows the strength of Moon's personality and his role in the band that Beach Boys touches show up in so many Who songs. This is especially true of the stuff they released in the wake of ...Sings My Generation (i.e. the Ready Steady Who EP and A Quick One), where the harmonies, surf-rock drumming, and select covers ("Bucket T" and "Barbara Ann") revealed an admiration of the brothers Wilson and Co.

The most "Beach Boys" thing Moon ever did with the Who was, in my opinion, "In the City", the b-side to the "I'm a Boy" single. Before that single's release in August of '66, Moon and John Entwhistle went into the studio without the other half of the band and recorded this odd Beach Boys pastiche - Pete Townsend apparently added some guitar to the song ex post facto, but the whole composition is a rare Moon/Entwhistle collaboration. I'm guessing that the French horn was Entwhistle's idea because it's the only thing about the song that doesn't scream, "Beach Boys!" This is my favorite era of Who music (up through my favorite Who album Sell Out), combining the raw energy of their first album with very poppy, harmony-heavy vocal arrangements. It also has fun with urbanizing a lot of the standard surf-music lyrical themes - "Well you can surf in the sea/You can swim in the pools/Do anything you wanna/Because there ain't no rules!"

"In the City" by the Who

In Stores Now: We All Got Out of the Army by Robert Pollard

Illustration from the Mongolian children's book Baby Sheep by Dashdorj Natsagdorj, 1957

Robert Pollard, the endlessly prolific and consistently excellent songwriter from Dayton, Ohio (and former frontman of the BEST BAND EVER, Guided by Voices), has released his first of five or six full-lengths he has slated for 2010. It's called We All Got Out of the Army, and it's a set of songs that show a logical progression of the songwriting style he's been developing over the last couple years. It's not a move in the direction I like best in Pollard's music (i.e. the pop/psych axis of Pollard's "Four Ps") - his solo albums have been lately been leaning more toward the prog/(post)punk direction, with the possible addition of a fifth P, "plodding hard rock". But I've resigned myself to the fact that there are Pollard fans whose tastes are radically different from mine (i.e. they don't think that "In Stitches" and "Zoo Pie" are the worst songs on Do the Collapse), and this new one is probably just the album for them.

Having said that, I'm actually kind of grooving on the more rocking sound of We All Got Out of the Army. A couple of the songs are just dumb, thumping "rawk" - I'm looking at you "Rice Train" and "On Top of the Vertigo" - but the harder rock sound works well when mixed with other elements, as on the single/opening-track greatness of "Silk Rotor", where a gooey chorus hook repeats as the song builds up to a thick instrumental jam. A couple other songs have this "hard pop" sound, like the hooky "Your Rate Will Never Go Up" and "Cameo of a Smile", with short interludes like the breezy "Talking Dogs" and lo-fi acoustic "Wild Girl" provide brief respites from the riffage onslaught.

Producer Todd Tobias contributes his usual sounds (hello again, cheapy fake-Mellotron synths), but Pollard's recent inclination to provide more the album's guitar leads is much appreciated. There's some great guitarwork on this record. And Pollard's varied vocal approaches on We All Got Out of the Army, including an unexpected amount of talk-singing, work better here than the weird-voice antics he's been playing with on recent albums. The most unfortunate thing is that these songs would really come to life in a live setting - I can't tell you how many times I've heard people say, "I never really liked that one song from the album (e.g. "I'll Replace You With Machines") until I heard him do it live." I've got to wonder why Pollard would write an album full of songs like that, now that he's pretty much given up performing live altogether.

"Talking Dogs" by Robert Pollard

I Saw a Movie: Crazy Heart (2009)

Panel from Rin Tin Tin comic book #15, September 1956

A small but affecting movie deserves a small, affecting review. I'll stick with "small", though - the other is beyond my grasp. As a longtime Jeff Bridges fan (my favorite movies include The Big Lebowski, Fearless, The Fisher King, and TRON), I'd feel bad not seeing the movie that will bring him his "this guy is overdo" Best Actor Oscar. And Crazy Heart didn't disappoint. It's got a nice little story bolstered by great performances from Bridges, Gyllenhaal, and a small supporting cast, and the music is top notch.

I think I would have been disappointed by the lack of chemistry between the leads except that I kind of expected it, and it actually worked for me in the context of the story. It would be weird is there was an immediate crackling sexual energy between a 57-year-old alcoholic country singer and the young reporter doing a story on him. The characters, Bad Blake and Jean Craddock, have their own reasons for falling in love, and in a performance-focused film like this, I'm glad that the characters showed a lot about their respective lives without being obvious about it.

The music is the other aspect of Crazy Heart worth mentioning - I really liked it, and it had the pre-nu-country sound that you'd expect from a country singer that peaked in the '70s. Blake uses local musicians on his little tour of the Southwest, so you get to see him backed by young garage rockers, a honkytonk band with a piano and accordion, and the professional musicians that back him when he opens for his super-famous former protégé. The music has a lot of personality without overwhelming Crazy Heart's other little charms, making for a nice music-oriented movie about a very realistic aging musician and the life he's made for himself.

"Crazy Horses" by the Osmonds

In Stores Now: Heartland by Owen Pallett

Illustration by A. Calbet from a French-language edition of Homer's Odyssey, 1897

Owen Pallett (né Final Fantasy) has an impressive new record, Heartland, and I've been listening to it for a couple weeks, waiting for that moment when I feel ready to write about it. But that moment just isn't coming. I've only been familiar with Pallett's first record, Has a Good Home (someday I'll get over its terrible title and buy his second record, He Poos Clouds), but I really wasn't prepared for the complex melodicism and labyrinthine lyrics of this record. It's a compelling listen if not an immediately rewarding one, and I'm drawn back to it again and again, but for now I don't have much in the way of intelligent commentary to share.

Pallett doesn't really ease the listener into Heartland, and that was the first issue I had to deal with in getting to know the album. Heartland begins with "Midnight Directives", an appropriately dramatic number with a jumpy pizzicato-strings and persistent percussion arrangement. Following this song with the Arcade-Fire-quoting "Keep the Dog Quiet" (which also has the over-the-top emotiveness of Pallett's old band) is not a good move, though. And the third track, the brief "Mount Alpentine", is also huge-sounding and opaque.

After this slow start, though, Heartland picks up quickly with a run of great songs that pretty much carries through to the album's understated finale, "What Do You Think Will Happen Now?" The two songs referencing the concept album's main character are the best - "Lewis Takes Action?" has a classic pop song featuring a "Be My Baby" drum intro, and "Lewis Takes Off His Shirt" has the album's only big chorus hook. Although these big pop songs do a good job of anchoring the album in a pop sound, they are not the album's only catchy moments by any stretch. The other songs just have a less "usual" kind of catchiness that sinks in bit by bit after a couple listens.

What doesn't really come through after repeated listens (for me, anyway) is the meaning of Heartland's lyrics. Few things are more frustrating than albums that say, "I'm clearly a concept album, but I'm only going to tell you just enough of the story to know there is one." Certain phrases really stick in the mind: "I'll bludgeon 'til the body's cold", "Scissors of fate or the fire of Surtur", "I know it, I do affirm it with overzealous obscurantism." But I find myself focusing on the lyrics without any real rewards for the attention - it's frustrating because Pallett's got a great poetic sense. A little mystery is a good, thing, though, and Heartland probably has the highest level of craftsmanship of any album I've heard this year. And it's easier to take Pallett seriously, now that he no longer refers to himself by the name of a Japanese video game franchise.

"Lewis Takes Action" by Owen Pallett

Why Does This Exist?: "Love Is Like a Bullet" by Shoes

Photo of Frankie Venom and Eyepatch at a Ramones concert from the Pig Paper fanzine #8, April 1978

I was trying to think of a good "Valentiney" song to talk about for "Why Does This Exist?" today, but I kinda choked. The best I could come up with was "Love Is Like a Bullet" by Shoes from their underrated 1989 album, Stolen Wishes. The simile of love being like a bullet isn't too terrible on its own, but the way it is employed by Shoes' Jeff Murphy in this song is questionable. The first verse is about having been "shot" by love, with some appropriately emotive power-pop lyrics: "She shot me down in cold blood, and dropped me to my knees." Things get a little creepier in the subsequent verses, though, when Jeff appears to be warning someone (a girl?) about being shot by the bullets of his "love gun". Things get explicit with lines like, "In a hot flash you feel the pain/You thought you were immune but feelings still remain/It could be just a flesh wound, easy to survive/But if it hits your heart, you'll fight to stay alive." That may be taking the metaphor a little too far.

Listening to Stolen Wishes just now, though, I remembered that the album has an even more WTF love song called "Inside of You", which features the chorus lyric, "I wanna fill the empty part inside of you." Ewww.

"Love Is Like a Bullet" by Shoes

We Love the Beach Boys: "California Jam" by Klaatu

Illustration from Simplicissimus magazine, November 1943

I tend to think of people in the '70s as having been naive, drug-addled, and/or hopelessly deluded, and I base this opinion (justifiably, I think) on the Klaatu media frenzy of 1976. I love the first Klaatu album, 3:47 EST (retitled Klaatu in US markets), but I have no idea how you could believe that one or more Beatles was involved in its creation. The album's opening track, the fairly well-known single "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft", has some Beatlesy bits in it, but you don't have to go any further than the album's second song to thoroughly debunk the conspiracy theories.

That track, "California Jam", is such a shameless Beach Boys pastiche that it is obvious that Klaatu is a group of guys who loved '60s pop-rock, not a secret reunion of John, Paul, and Ringo (even the staunchest conspiracy-theorizer couldn't believe that George would participate in this project). The song is about drinking Coke and California sun, and it even has one of those Brian-Wilson vocal breakdowns I love - I'm not a fan of the phrasing on "cold cola!" in the opening stanza, and the fake audience noise at the end doesn't really work for me, but otherwise it's a solid summery pop song. And it's particularly impressive that it (and the rest of this ambitious album) was assembled by a trio of unknown Canadian musicians. It's just too bad that the album only got any attention by way of a Carpenters cover (which is excellent, BTW!) and one of the weirdest pop-music rumors ever. And if you get to track three of 3:47 EST, the funky "Anus of Uranus", and you still think you're listening to an album that one of the Beatles was involved with, you're definitely naive, drug-addled, and/or hopelessly deluded.

"California Jam" by Klaatu

It's New to Me: The Buddy Holly Collection by Buddy Holly (1954-1959)

Photo of Peery's Egyptian Theater by F. Jennings, 2010

The second half of my experiment with late '50s pop comes in the form of The Buddy Holly Collection, and I fid this set just about as enjoyable as the early Everly Brothers collection I picked up at the same time. I chose The Buddy Holly Collection because it seemed like the most comprehensive collection of Holly's stuff available, short of getting the exhaustive box set. The problem with the latter option is that such sets always include the four existing takes of each song set back to back, making the CDs unuseable for casual listening (unless you want to hear three nearly-identical "That'll Be the Day"s in a row).

As it turns out, I already have some buyer's remorse about the The Buddy Holly Collection, as much as I like it - it's not as comprehensive as I'd hoped (Holly recorded a lot more music during his short career than I'd guessed), and it dedicates too much space to his early, pre-fame work. But I think that most sets of this kind do that, trying to capture Holly's full career arc (arguably, I should have gotten the recent 3-CD Memorial Collection, which does a better job of this). What this all means, though, is that the first disc of The Buddy Holly Collection takes a while to get going - the first eight tracks are pretty much throwaways. Around the middle of the disc, though, the songs swing to the opposite extreme as you get to Holly's first string of hit singles, "That'll Be the Day", "Not Fade Away", "Everyday", etc. These songs are great, of course, but it's jarring to hear them all in a row after twenty minutes of Holly playing pretty anonymous-sounding rockabilly numbers like "Baby, Won't You Come Around Tonight".

The second disc is a much better listen, even if it doesn't have as many of his big hits. Holly had two recording contracts, one as a solo artist and one with the Crickets, so there's a good variety to the songs from this period, and I don't even mind the last few songs, which are demos that Holly's producer Norman Petty dressed up with full arrangements by the Fireballs after Holly's death. The songs on the second disc also have more impact because I'm less familiar with them. It's unfortunate that the set gets off to a slow start, but The Buddy Holly Collection does a pretty good job of showing off Holly's impressive skills as a vocalist, songwriter, and guitarist. One of my favorites from the set is "Wishing" - recorded in '58, it was part of Holly's reunion with Bob Montgomery, his original songwriting collaborator from his high school days. Holly's double-tracked vocals are very nice, and the song has a sweet melody - one of the quirks of Holly's suddenly-cut-off career is that the song wasn't released as a single until '63, four full years after his death.

"Wishing" by Buddy Holly

It's New to Me: The Complete Cadence Recordings by the Everly Brothers (1957 - 1960)

Illustration by Felix Lorioux from Le Buffon des Enfants II: Les Insectes de chez Nous, 1946

I've been listening to the early Beatles albums lately (in glorious mono!), and something occurred to me. A lot of what I like in the early Beatles sound is the poppy melodicism that comes directly from two acts of the late '50s, Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers. I've had trouble really getting into any '50s music up to this point (the early Motown singles turned out to be more of a mixed bag than I expected), but maybe Buddy Holly and the Everlys' stuff (I've only been familiar with the well-known singles) would be my gateway to an earlier era of pop music. So I went out and got decent collections of the work of Buddy Holly and the early Everly Brothers. Both 2-disc sets turned out to be quite good, with a disc and a half of really great music each, but I think the Complete Cadence Recordings of the Everly Brothers may be my favorite of the two.

Don and Phil Everly were still teens when they came to Nashville to get a record deal. After a run of bad luck, the boys got signed by Cadence Recordings - their luck turned around pretty quick when they were given the song "Bye Bye Love" for their very first single. The writers of that song, husband and wife team Boudleaux and Felice Bryant, wrote a string of great songs for the Everlys over the next three years, including "Wake Up Little Susie", "Bird Dog", "Devoted to You", and "Take a Message to Mary". Because they had such strong singles from day one, this collection contains an amazing run of great songs from the start. The brothers were writing their own material during this time as well, and I was really surprised how great some of their previously-unreleased rough demos are (Don's "Give Me a Future" and Phil's "Sally Sunshine" are among my favorites in this collection).

The second disc of Complete Cadence Recordings suffers a bit, though, from having the Everlys' second Cadence LP on it. Titled Songs Our Daddy Taught Us, the album was (unsurprisingly) a collection of traditional songs from their childhood. The songs are primarily maudlin ballads about dying children and murderers - they drag on too long (each song runs about twice as long as the Everlys' big singles from this period) and become really monotonous. I don't know what the Everlys were thinking, releasing this at the peak of their big pop success. The second half of the second disc comes back strong with the brothers' last singles for Cadence, one of the best being "('Til) I Kissed You"/"Oh What a Feeling" - this single featured two love songs Don Everly wrote about a girl he fell for on tour in Australia. When Don and Phil left Cadence in 1960, the label predicted that they'd never make it on their own. The Everlys proved them wrong pretty quick, releasing "Cathy's Clown" for Warner Bros. later that year - it sold eight million copies and became their biggest hit.

"Oh, What a Feeling" by the Everly Brothers

In Stores Now: Realism by the Magnetic Fields

Image from an advertisement for Smirnoff Vodka, 1972

The Magnetic Fields' "no-synths" trilogy ends with Realism, and this would come as a relief to some old-school fans of the band, except that Stephin Merritt didn't even bother to tell anyone that this was a trilogy he was working on until it was done. Beginning with 2004's i album, Merritt has worked with narrowly-defined concepts and structures in reaction to the everything-in-one-go 69 Love Songs that came before. Merritt has said that his career-defining triple album was him doing everything he knows how to do, so it's no surprise to see him using self-imposed strictures to deliver something different. Realism was supposed to be Merritt's "folk" album, a contrast to the JAMC-mimicking noisefest of of 2008's Distortion, but that label and a few other issues kind of make this album one that is hard to get into.

First, the "folk" tag is a red herring - the clean acoustic sound of Realism sounds less folky than other things Merritt has done (e.g. 69LS's "The One You Really Love") - it's closer to the "AM Gold" sound from the Merritt songs on the Pieces of April soundtrack. So that threw me off on my first listen, as did the much-commented-upon similarity between the opening track of Realism and "I Don't Believe You" from i. The number of showtunes-style songs also caught me off-guard (I was expecting folk songs!) - the songs with female lead vocals are the main offenders. I loved Shirley Simms' contributions to previous albums, but her singing sounds weird and stilted on "Interlude" and "Painted Flower". The album's other jokey songs are those that feature gang vocals - "We Are Having a Hootenanny", "Everything Is One Big Christmas Tree", and "The Dada Polka" can easily be written off as novelty songs. I was ready to write Realism off because I couldn't get past these issues, but then I ran across a few insightful comments about the album that made me go back and give it another listen.

I don't usually look for hidden themes in Merritt's albums, but there's an interesting depth and unstated theme to Realism that makes it a much more interesting album to me. Merritt has said that he originally considered calling his last two albums True and False, but he wasn't sure which label to give to which. How could the clean, unadorned songs of Realism be "false"? Perhaps it's because it's a set of songs dealing with distortions of reality (a theme not found to the same degree on Distortion). The delusion of the opening track, "You Must Be Out of Your Mind", is right there in the title, but there are subtler distortions throughout the album. There is no real hootenanny going on, the dolls' tea party is not what it seems, and the painted flower is ... well, it's a painted flower. The key song that brings it all together is "Better Things", the album's strongest song and a statement of purpose that would serve the album better if it wasn't buried in the album's second half. In this song, three fanciful creatures (a mermaid, a ghost princess, and a wolfboy) are set in contrast to "real birds" in a way that raises the question, "What parts of Realism are really real?"

I may never embrace the trifles of Realism on the same level that I've loved other songs that Merritt has written, but I appreciate the trompe l'oeil he's created. And now that I find it interesting, I'm listening to Realism a lot more often and enjoying it more.

"We Are Having a Hootenanny" by the Magnetic Fields

Probabilistic Jukebox: "Bubblegum World" by 1910 Fruitgum Company

Color woodcut titled The Daruma Branch by Helen Hyde, 1910

I think 1910 Fruitgum Company is largely responsible for the creation of bubblegum pop in the mid-1960s. There were plenty of other bands honing the bubblegum sound at the time (e.g. Ohio Express, Music Explosion), but a confluence of events brought the whole package together with 1910 Fruitgum Company's first hit. The group was contacted by the production team of Kasenetz and Katz, the real brains behind the creation of bubblegum pop, with a single they wanted recorded called "Simon Says". The band didn't really like the song, so they retooled it to give it a more insistent "Wooly Bully"-style rhythm and sound. The song was a big hit, and the archetype for bubblegum pop really gelled for the first time: a bouncy upbeat sound, childhood-inspire subject matter, and immediate vocal arrangements with lots of backing vocals.

1910 Fruitgum Company stuck with that formula through several hit singles, as is easy to see from titles like "May I Take a Giant Step (Into Your Heart)", "1, 2, 3 Red Light", :Goody Goody Gumdrops", and "Pop Goes the Weasel". By 1968, the original lineup of 1910 Fruitgum Company was coming apart, but it didn't matter because Kasenetz and Katz owned the band name and could replace the vocalists and musicians at will. The band ceased to exist the minute the producers decided there was no money to be made with the band name.

One of my favorite 1910 Fruitgum Company songs, "Bubblegum World", was actually never a single - it was a track on the band's first LP. The song is perfect late-'60s bubblegum pop, though - the rhythm is exuberant and the layered backing vocals are as sickly sweet as the song's subject matter (no surprise that the band opened for the Beach Boys on tour around this time). The song uses a childhood object as a metaphor for relationship issues, as many 1910 Fruitgum Company songs did, and there's an underlying creepiness in some of the song's content as well - the weird, condescending dynamic of a man using little-kid stuff to describe a relationship issue to a girl, and particularly the way vocalist Mark Gutkowski sings the last line of the verse, "You're going a little insane!" It skeeves me out just a little every time. That little cheek-popping sound effect throughout the song is cool, though, particularly the last one right at the end of the song.

"Bubblegum World" by 1910 Fruitgum Company

I Saw a Movie (Sundance Film Festival Edition): The Romantics

Photograph titled "Untitled (TV room), from the Portfolio Graceland" by William Eggleston, 1983

The Romantics had several strikes against it from the start. First, I was not feeling too well when I saw it. Second, it was a movie about rich, entitled, young white people with lame problems - not my favorite movie genre. And third, most importantly, the print of the film we saw had seriously problems with its audio track, rendering about five seconds of every minute of the movie inaudible. As a result, not only did I get pretty frustrated with the movie, I was in a large theater full of people who were upset about the situation. Since none of these problems are the fault of the filmmaker and cast, is it fair for me to talk about how terrible the movie is? I think so - I think I could see past the situational problems affecting my viewing experience and say that few people I know would enjoy The Romantics under the best of circumstances.

It's too bad that The Romantics is a bad movie because there are some things about it that are quite good. The story is nothing special - Laura (Katie Holmes) goes to the wedding of her best friend Lila (Anna Paquin) and her ex-lover Tom (Josh Duhamel) that turns out to be a reunion of sorts for the college clique the three belonged to (the titular "Romantics"). Laura's relationships with Lila and Tom have understandably become complicated by the impending marriage, particularly as she has not achieved any sort of closure on her own relationship with Tom. This is the core conflict in the movie and Holmes (who also produced the movie) delivers a quite-good performance. The other players do fairly well, including underused but capable supporting players like Malin Akerman, Elijah Wood, and Adam Brody - the only one who doesn't really deliver is Duhamel, who just isn't right for this kind of role or this kind of movie. A key scene in the movie centers on him quoting Keats, and it just doesn't really work.

Which brings me to the main problem with The Romantics - the script just isn't that good. And that's a sad thing to have to say about a movie adapted by author Galt Niederhoffer from his own novel and directed by her as well. The story moves too fast, never giving the viewer time to get to know any of the characters other than Laura, and much of the dialogue is just the wrong combination of stilted and clumsy. Some problems with the pacing may still be fixable as the version shown at Sundance is still a work in progress (the terrible and too-loud musical cues may also be improved dramatically in the final version) but I don't really think there is a really good movie to be found here. As I said, Holmes is very good here, but she can't make up for The Romantics' deficiencies, especially when it so clearly invites comparisons to much better movies (Rachel Getting Married springs to mind). I'm almost glad I didn't see The Romantics under better circumstances - I probably would just have been THAT much more disappointed.

"This Is How You Spell 'HAHAHA, We Destroyed the Hopes and Dreams of a Generation of Faux-Romantics'" by Los Campesinos

I Saw a Movie (Sundance Film Festival Edition): Get Low

Illustration from Butterick dress pattern 5902, c. 1970

I'm starting to experience some review-writing fatigue when it comes to the shows I saw at Sundance this year, particularly now that the Festival's over and the winners have been announced (by the way, hooray for Red Chapel winning the Best Foreign Documentary award!). But I'm going to write about the last two shows I saw, even though I don't have much to say about them. Also, I was not feeling well the night I watched them back-to-back, which couldn't have helped. Anyway, Get Low is not a hip-hop epic about just trying to survive day to day in the inner city - well, that's the initial impression I got from the title, anyway. And it's kind of too bad, because who wouldn't want to see a hip-hop epic starring Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek, and Bill Murray?

Get Low is about a hermit living in a back-woods part of Tennessee in the '30s. Feared and hated by the people of the nearby town, the man decides for reasons unknown to throw himself a big funeral party prior to his own death. Everyone's invited. Duvall is great as Felix, the grizzly enigma at the center of the story, and Bill Murray delivers another solid performance as Quinn the undertaker, an opportunistic businessman willing to cash in on Felix's weird idea. The film takes a very leisurely pace, unwinding its mystery slowly while allowing the era and the locale to act as important characters in the story in their own right.

The only issue I had with Get Low is that the mystery at the center of the plot is not equal to the narrative and acting that surround it. When Felix's motivations are finally revealed, my thought was, "Really? That's all there is to it?" A little disappointing. But maybe it was my mistake to expect a melodramatic reveal at the end of such a conspicuously "small" movie. Or maybe it's because I fell asleep for about five minutes toward the end of the film because I was achy and feverish. I think I'll give Get Low another viewing at some point - the performances from the leads are among the best of their respective careers, and few movies in my recent memory have had such an excess of easy-going charm.

Tune in tomorrow to read about the one disastrous failure I saw at Sundance this year!

"Hermit Stew" by Tobin Sprout

I Saw a Movie (Sundance Film Festival Edition): Four Lions

Illustration titled "India rubber balls of the manufactories of Albert Cohen, Vaillant & Co." from the Illustrated Catalogue of the Industrial Department, 1862

Chris Morris isn't really a household name in the US - shows like Brass Eye and Nathan Barley haven't aired in the US - but his penchant for controversial "issue" comedy is well-known and well-liked in the UK. Four Lions is Morris's first feature film as writer and director, and it's no surprise that its main characters are a cell of Jihadi terrorists living in northern England. Morris strikes a good balance with Four Lions between funny, sympathetic characters and uncomfortable subject matter, but the movie is only not a disaster because the jokes are consistently good.

It helps that the terrorist-wannabe fivesome are lovably incompetent. Omar is smart and really cares about his friends, but his dedication to the cause (including his supportive wife and son!) is the most unnerving aspect of the movie. Waj and Fessel are idiots (to a degree that threatens to derail the movie at some points), but they are trying to do good. And Barry and Hassan are attention-seeking jerks with dubious reasons for being involved in terrorism. As their casual involvement in the Jihad movement gradually escalates, the dynamic of the group shifts and the movie's discomfort level ratchets up considerably. But the humor keeps coming until the wild conclusion, even though Morris never shies away from confronting the core issue of the movie while having fun with it.

I had some logistical issues with Four Lions that many US viewers will likely share - the fast-moving, heavily accented dialogue can be hard to follow, particularly as it often switches into Urdu (?) without warning. Also, some of the cultural references are going to be unfamiliar to a lot of Americans. Oh, and also IT'S A COMEDY ABOUT JIHADI TERRORISTS. People may have some issues with that. If you've enjoyed the recent edgy, "discomfort" comedies coming out of the UK, though, Four Lions might be something you'd enjoy.

"Terror" by the Stockholm Monsters

I Saw a Movie (Sundance Film Festival Edition): Louis C.K. "Hilarious"

Detail from an Orville Hurt cover illustration from Ebony Jr. magazine, April 1977

In his new two-hour performance movie, stand-up comedian Louis C.K. describes his mental process thusly: 1) Have a stupid thought; 2) Berate self for having a stupid thought; and 3) Further analysis. This declaration isn't particularly surprising from one of the sad-sackest of sad-sack comedians, but it also gives some insight into where his comedy comes from. In a Q&A session after the movie, Louis revealed to the audience that the "further analysis" is where his entire stand-up approach comes from. If he finds himself having an experience or thought that could become a "comedy bit", he consciously avoids thinking about it until he has a chance to do the his "further analysis" live on-stage. When he starts to develop new material, he literally gets on stage with a few bare-bones stories to tell and starts to flesh them out extemporaneously. I would be a little dubious about this process of developing comedy material - never writing anything down and just developing jokes in a live setting from a few "seed" stories - but Louis C.K. has spent twenty-five years figuring out how to make it work.

His new movie Louis C.K.: "Hilarious" is a two-hour live stage performance (actually pieced together from two different back-to-back performances, one for taking long shots and one for close-ups), and the whole performance is based on this approach to comedy. Armed with some of his best material ever, Louis explores divorce, parenthood, and modern entitlement. The last bit is one that people know from his appearance on Conan O'Brien that became a popular viral video a while ago. The material is more fleshed out in "Hilarious" and makes up a third of the whole show - this isn't a problem, though, because it's an almost-inexhaustible source of indignation and jokes, as Louis goes after people for complaining about flying, using the ATM, and cell phones.

Like most stand-up movies, the production values aren't that much different from a stand-up special on HBO or Comedy Central - it's just a guy standing on a stage - so it's valid to ask why the Sundance Film Festival accepted "Hilarious", the first stand-up movie that has ever screened at the Festival. Simply put, it's the writing. Like many of the movies at Sundance, Louis C.K.: "Hilarious" has a great script - it's one of the most consistently funny performances I've seen from anyone, and the audience I saw it with laughed from start to finish. After the show was over, one audience-member told Louis that she was achy all over from laughter - his response was, "Thank you. It's a great compliment to me that I was able to cause you pain."

"Not Funny, Ha-Ha" by Lois