Typical weekend music reviews...

Coldplay was on Austin City Limits, and while I'll admit that I'd heard of and about them in the past, I didn't have the foggiest idea what they sang or what they sounded like before that night. But their performance was impressive - very playful stuff from their lead singer, nice choice of covers with a pretty acoustic "Ring of Fire" and a Michael Stipe-sung "Nightswimming" - and I thought I should give some of their music a try.

So I started with X&Y which didn't grab me - I'll give it another try - and moved on to Parachutes - their debut album. It's a knockout. Good from start to finish with very tuneful cuts throughout. Certainly one to put into heavy rotation - especially the tune that you probably know already "Yellow". Good stuff...certainly worth going through at least once.

The week before Coldplay, Cafe Tecuba were on Austin City Limits, as well. Playing entirely in Spanish, they rocked the place like few other bands have. Their lead singer was dressed in capri pants and Chucks - singing in a somewhat high-pitched scratchy voice, but he bounced like a punk/pop maniac. The rest of the band was spot on with their musical accompaniement. This double album Reves/Yosoy has a single of acoustic/instrumental music and a second disc of rockin' pop/punk tunes entirely in Spanish. It's a high quality release and one that I'm sure isn't getting the airplay north of the border that it deserves.

Give 'em a chance, boyos...

Another Kingly performance...

Ah, unbeknownst to me, I stepped back into the lands of the Dark Tower.

I'm a bit of a tramp for Stephen King books on tape. I'll pick up and listen to just about any of them, especially if they're read by either Frank Mueller or George Guidall - who combined to read the entire Dark Tower series, and Mueller took the duties on this audio book.

The basics - Black House is the sequel to The Talisman cowritten by Stephen King and Peter Straub about twenty years ago now, and it's been at least a dozen years since I read that volume. I vaguelly remembered the story there being about a boy named Jack who had to go to some other world to save somebody. No matter, though, Black House does enough to catch us up on that story that I feel that a reader wouldn't have to have read the first volume in order to understand and enjoy this one. I would think, however, that only the folks who've been following along with the Dark Tower series are really going to enjoy the majority of this book, as much of the story relies on minnions of the Crimson King and trips into Endworld or worlds just beside it.

In spite of the connection to King's magnum opus of the Tower, the feel of this book is vastly different in feel from most of King's books. The narrator speaks directly to us for much of the book, informing us that we are floating in and out of scenes through keyholes, open windows, cracks below doors - observing from power lines over the action or riding in on the backs of pickup trucks with the characters. King and Straub's descriptions move like movie cinematography, drifting over the countryside and seeing the town of French Landing from above, coming down into each scene but rarely just appearing there. We drift from one scene to the next on the wings on birds and breezes. True, King's typically omniscient narrator is there, mentioning here and there that the character we are leaving is one that we will never see again or who won't see his family again - a trait that can be at times a bit too cute.

All in all, this is an excellent read/listen. King and Straub have brought back Jack Sawyer, a fascination character who has enough foibles to be interesting but who is able enough to play the hero successfully. They have also introduced a number of other characters - the eruidite biker bunch, in particular - who are among the better support that King, at least, has provided. Here and there the details given are superfluous - as when at the very end of the book, the description wanders to another world lying just beside the main two of the story and we hear a little too much about a despot falling - breaking the pacing of the story's denouement.

In case you'd like to check out a few other opinions... BookReporter.com... SFGate.com

Down from the Mountain...

'Round about nine days ago, when we headed down to the Esquire to check out Brokeback Mountain, the film was only viewable there and had just been expanded onto two screens. Even at that, the theater was absolutely packed at the 7:15 Friday night showing.

The biggest problem that I had with the film was the odd cinematography - everyone's heads appeared to be really tiny while their feet were unnaturally large, almost as though the filmmakers had shot the entire movie with the camera on the ground, shooting upward at the actors. Initially in the showing, I found this off-putting and it took a long while to get used to the look.

True, this might all have been because I was sitting in the front row darn-near lying down in my chair to look up at the film, but it could've been the filmmakers intent. How am I to know?

Let me open by saying that all the spectacular reviews that the film has been getting are richly deserved. The film is phenomenal and easily one of the finest to have been made in the last half dozen years.

The plotline is simple - Ennis and Jack meet on the titular Mountain, fall in love, and go their separate ways once they come down from the Mountain, and see each other haltingly over the next twenty or so years while leading lives that are much more socially acceptable. Were the two leads a man and a woman, the film would be a simple enough story of a love denied, two people doing everything they can to lead lives that don't involve each other but finiding themselves unable to give up the increasingly limited visits together. As the leads are two men, however, the film moves toward grounbreaking territory, as this is far and away the most mainstream movie to feature a not-at-all-veiled romance between two men. And I will admit that the physical aspects of the romance are not avoided. Neither are they, however, dwelt upon. The two men fall into bed together for the first time, and we are shown the rough initiation of their affair as well as their first more tender kiss the following night. The moments are intentionally akward and a bit carnal, but no more so than they would be between two reluctant lovers who find themselves falling together.

The movie uses space and silence beautifully, showing the distance that the two men try to keep between each other and the reluctance that they both show toward exploring their feelings, feelings that they have been taught never to even consider. They both try their hand - with limited success - at a more conventional life and try to maintain their relationship in stolen weekends and weeks of fishing and horse riding, sometimes broaching the subject of a life lived together but never allowing themselves the chance.

The movie is a tale of love denied, and lives broken by that love. It is truly a conventional story filmed and acted marvelously, but with the simple Twist of making the love a homo- rather than heterosexual one.

The film is outstanding and gorgoues, powerful and moving, and wonderfully adapted from a very short (25 pages) story that my wife swears is an excellent read. It does take a leap of faith - a smaller and smaller one thanks to the growing acceptance within our society - to see the movie as such, and I am happy to say that it's now playing at my local multiplex instead of just down at the arthouse in the most liberal part of Cincinnati.

Little richer tastes...

Ah, pop and punk. Thirty years ago it would've seemed anathema to cross these two, but as The Clash showed us, they're perfect together. On this one - A Hangover You Don't Deserve by Bowling for Soup - we get a continuing exploration of that intersection, musical land that Blink 182 and Sum 41 have mined pretty thoroughly 'round here. Luckily, Bowling for Soup do a nice job of bringing a heavy dose of fun to this album, because it's familiar territory at this point. The cd is long, juvenile, vulgar, and fun. It won't be making the rotation at school, but after a couple of listens, I'm enjoying the songs - particularly "Almost", "Ohio", and "Smoothie King".

The Best of Bluegrass is a sampler that I picked up to get a good copy of "The Wabash Cannonball" for my recent train compilation which leaves me in an odd place because the concept of making a mix tape seems to be going away as does even the idea of a compilation cd of songs of a genre. Now it's a playlist, an empemerial, mutable thing if ever there was one - but that's a topic for another blog. This disc is a single-disc snapshot - by its nature too short - of an entire genre. Imagine trying to put a single-disc collection of the Best of Rock or Best of Country or any other genre that's been around for fifty or a hundred years. It's almost not possible, and yet this cd does a good job of skimming the surface, throwing in variety from Alison Krauss, Harry McLintock, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Ricky Skaggs. The only weak tune is the Hot Tuna selection which seems a little more a poor jam band noodle than a bluegrass to me, but if you've been intrigued by the soundtrack to O Brother, I'd point you in this direction next so you could get a taste of the variety of the genre.

Clearly I didn't get Oh, Inverted World. I'd heard the Garden State soundtrack and dug their songs on there - even getting some of the references in their video for "New Slang" - and that song is admittedly really nice, but the rest of the album just leaves me cold. It's pleasant enough music, but it didn't grab me. Good background music for hanging out on an afternoon, sure. Great album, not on my first couple of listens. It faded away to me into nothingness.

I just can't get past Del McCoury's voice. I know it's the perfect high, lonesome sound, but it grates on me. So, too, do a lot of Bill Monroe's songs. I love the music. I love the words. I love the sentiments and purity and gospel crossings, but the voices drive me nuts. It's true on Del and the Boys by the Del McCoury Band, and it's still a good album to me. The cover of "1952 Vincent Black Lightning" is a knockout, and the rest of the album is a modern bluegrass classic, but it's a little sharp, so if you're of my mind and don't like it when the male lead voice sounds higher than the highest female voice you can think of, you might want to avoid this entire genre.

Taking the same band - the Del McCoury Band - from the previous album and adding in a deeper voice that I find a lot more pleasant, we get Steve Earle's The Mountain. The high lonesome sound is replaced with Earle's rich voice. The politics of Earle's typical album are set aside, and he aims straight for the heart of bluegrass. The album is different enough from most bluegrass albums that staunch purists probably won't like it, and it's got the same problem when compared to most Steve Earle albums - there's no fire and brimstone as with many of his other rebelious discs, but this is a quality disc. It's the sound of a great writer and artist paying tribute to one of his strong influences that isn't always at the forefront of most of his music.

But I Feel Alright is a purer Steve Earle album. He'd gotten clean, and he'd cleaned out some of the rockin' guitars that he'd thrown on the couple of albums just before this one. And here Earle makes one of his best albums with an incredible streak of songs including "CCKMP", "Valentine's Day", "South Nashville Blues", "More Than I Can Do", and "Hard-Core Troubadour". This one's a knockout of an album crossing the streams of folk and country with enough variety to keep interest throughout.

The perpetual catching up...

Yeah, no major posts in like two weeks...so I'll drop two or three catch up posts this time...

MTv Unplugged by 10,000 Maniacs captures a time period - 'round about my freshman year in college as my sometime roommate and now Wabash professor had a serious thing for the band. It's a pretty enough album and one that captures the band's music very well. But it's a period piece. It's not aged well. The music sounds dated and not too fresh. Luckily, it does include the excellent cover of "Because the Night"...

As I often do, I heard a single song by the next band on WLHS and went out to hunt the band down. Turns out the album I found - Blueberry Boat - didn't have that song on it, but what I got was a heck of a musical experience. Blueberry Boat is a whimsical, experimental album that switches tempos and moods at the drop of a hat yet still manages to present a cohesive whole. It's like nothing else I've heard in the musical landscape for a long while, and I'm gonna give it a whole-hearted thumbs up.

More catching up to come...

Mama tomato, papa tomato...

...and I'm gonna ketchup...

Finishing up the work from during break - it's now a week back to school. Between the holidays, we took a second look through Kung Fu Hustle. We'd enjoyed the heck out of it in the theater - subtitled there - a year or so ago. This time we couldn't get the subtitles to work just right, so we went with the dubbing which, in this case, really changed the feeling and style of the movie. Instead of being the semi-spiritual comedy romp we remembered it being, Kung Fu Hustle ends up a fair bit crasser. The language in the dubbing is way coarser. The comedy's still there, just a little less obvious, we thought.

There was also Spider-Man: Countdown. Decent enough story - Doc Oc kidnaps the Prime Minister of Israel and holds him hostage 'til Spidey takes off his mask in front of the world news. There's the usual angst from Petey Boy about "ooh...maybe the world would be better if I quit..." - pansy. If the collection wasn't drawn in the most ridiculously cartoonish artwork, the semi-serious tone of the story (psych analysis of why Oc's a bad guy) might've worked well. As it is, however, it directly flies in the face of the storyline. Blech...

There was some music around...I gave the Shin's Oh, Inverted World because I'd heard the soundtrack of Garden State and enjoyed their contributions there. I don't know that I gave it a full, undivided listen, but it didn't exactly come out and grab me. Felt kinda boring to me, honestly. The two songs from that soundtrack were good, but the rest left me cold. Nothing too thrilling.

I'm currently almost finished with Silent Bob Speaks from the tubby bugger himself. The book bounces back and forth among fawning articles, broad humor, and thorough vulgarity. It's not the kind of thing that anybody who isn't a fanboy of Smith would enjoy. It's kind of neat to hear some of the backstage stories from before the movies came out, but the rest is fawning interviews and portraits of his acting friends. It's pretty gross all in all, and it's not a thrilling read along the way.