Music Review: Gnarls Barkley, “The Odd Couple” (***1/2)
With 2006’s St. Elsewhere, Cee-Lo Green and Danger Mouse built one sonic nation under many grooves, a place where pop music’s factional forces could go “Crazy” and find a little bit of themselves reflected in the warped and wondrous visage of Gnarls Barkley. But even as it blended hip-hop, classic R&B, psych-rock, disco and anything else within shouting distance, multiple listens revealed its flaw: St. Elsewhere had so many colors in its coat that it often became too frenetic for regular consumption.
Gnarls Barkley’s new disc, The Odd Couple, corrects course by accentuating soul and balancing the production flourishes with concrete melodies. True hip-hop is almost out to pasture on this collection, traded in for the Farfisa-style ’60s pop of “Whatever” and the chopped-up nod to Association/Rascals-style vocal groups on “No Time Soon.” Green still sings like a man on fire, but he isn’t just vamping over grooves: the bubblegum melody of “Blind Mary” is the sugar that sells a song about loving a girl who cannot tell that her suitor is ugly.
But while rave-ups such as the Motown-loving “Run” will always be the go-to singles for this band, the truly killer tracks bang the drum machine slowly. “Neighbors” serves up a superb funk-soul suburban paranoia screed, “A Little Better” is a backhanded thank you as the disc draws to a close, and they creep like good, dark soul ballads should. The Odd Couple might lack a paradigm shifter such as “Crazy,” but it proves that Gnarls Barkley’s musical monster is alive and evolving.
Music Review: Ghostland Observatory, “Robotique” Majestique” (**)
“Why a cape?” — George Costanza
Total enjoyment of Ghostland Observatory’s third disc, Robotique Majestique, hinges on the listener’s tolerance of cheapo film scores for 1980s Chuck Norris flicks, and whether same listener believes that mashing those sound tracks with Queen’s Hot Space is a capital idea. No question about it, Robotique Majestique is speckled with beautiful trash, but this Austin, Texas electro-glam duo pads out the remainder with nearly enough art-damaged Casiotone glitches and robo-coasting exercises to cancel out the sweet spots.
When lead bellower Aaron Behrens and caped keyboard crusader Thomas Ross Turner strike synthesizer-comedy gold, all the pleasure sensors light up. “Dancing On My Grave” is a fine distillation of Klymaxx’ electro-soul and Freddie Mercury-style vocal hysterics, and the title song gets its doom-disco groove on while Behrens welcomes listeners to his plastic-fantastic jungle.
But Ghostland Observatory needs an editor. “HFM” suffers from bludgeoning, bargain-basement beat boxes and Behrens’ fried-out caterwauling, and Turner’s sub-Daft Punk instrumentals test nearly all levels of patience. Robotique Majestique has potential hits but twice as many outright misses —good judgment and fewer time-wasters could save Ghostland Observatory’s future from being “robotique pathetique.”
Anthony Minghella Dies at 54
Anthony Minghella, the British director who won an Oscar for “The English Patient,” has died, according to the BBC. He was 54, and details of his death have yet to be released. In addition to “The English Patient,” Minghella directed “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” “Cold Mountain” and “Breaking and Entering,” and according to the always superbly reliable IMDb, had just completed “The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency.”
Creative Marketing Dept.: Raconteurs Announce New Collection One Week Before Release
We knew it was coming, but not like a happy sucker punch: Jack White announced last night that the second release by The Raconteurs, Consolers of the Lonely, will be released in exactly seven days. This is roughly the same advance notice we got for In Rainbows.
There’s something slightly nostalgic about short-notice releases — it’s like growing up in the pre-Internet world before you discovered trade papers or rock mags, when you found out about a new album by hearing the lead track on the radio. Kind of nice, that. Sometimes it’s refreshing not knowing how sausage is made.
Here is the press release, courtesy of the band’s extremely entertaining, if slightly buggy, TRS-80/Commodore 64-loving new Web site:
The Raconteurs are happy to announce that in one week’s time their second album, entitled Consolers of the Lonely, will be available EVERYWHERE Tuesday, March 25th.
‘Album’ meaning: full length vinyl, CD and digital formats; and ‘everywhere’ meaning: local mom and pop Indie retailers, corporate superstores, supermarkets, iTunes, Amazon, the band’s own website and any other location that could get the record up and going this quickly (some places couldn’t move this fast, so they will join in as soon as they can).
It contains 14 new recordings and is being released globally on Third Man Records in conjunction with our marketing/distribution partners, XL Recordings and Warner Bros. Records.
The album was mastered and completed in the first week of March. It was then taken immediately to a vinyl pressing plant. Then to a CD pressing plant. Then preparations to sell it digitally began. March 25th became the soonest date to have it available in EVERY FORMAT AT ONCE. The band have done no interviews or advertisements for this record before this announcement.
The purpose: to get the album to the fans as soon as possible and as we promised. We wanted to get this record to fans, the press, radio, etc., all at the EXACT SAME TIME so that no one has an upper hand on anyone else regarding its availability, reception or perception.
With this release, The Raconteurs are forgoing the usual months of lead time for press and radio set up, as well as forgoing the all important ‘first week sales’. We wanted to explore the idea of releasing an album everywhere at once and THEN marketing and promoting it thereafter. The Raconteurs would rather this release not be defined by its first weeks sales, pre-release promotion, or by someone defining it FOR YOU before you get to hear it.
Another purpose was to also allow people to have their own choice as to exactly which format they would like to hear the album in IMMEDIATELY, rather than having to wait for their favorite format to become available. The band are also not releasing any version of this record that contains bonus tracks. Musically this album will be the same as the band created it no matter what format it is purchased in. (The sound quality of each format however, is a different story. The Raconteurs recommend hearing it on vinyl, but the choice is of course up to the listener).
The band also prefer that fans buy the album as a whole instead of breaking up the tracks, but until iTunes and other digital services allows bands to release their albums with the option of NOT breaking it up, it will be sold in that fashion on those particular sites. On the band’s website however, the album will be sold in its entirety as an mp3 at 320kb bit rate. Also in Japan, fans will be able to download the record via their mobile phones, as that is how a majority of recorded music is consumed there.
The reason we are announcing this release one week ahead of time is because of retail pre-ordering and stocking, information about this album’s imminent release was bound to come to light and could be confusing to fans. Also in the event that the record leaks, we didn’t want this method of release to be seen as a REACTION to such a leak. It’s not. The actual worst thing about a leak is the usual poor sound quality, akin to watching a movie on a wristwatch instead of in a theater. Which for the album’s creators is a bit of a letdown, but again, it is completely up to the listener.
There will be a video up on the internet for the first single, ‘Salute Your Solution’, on the 25th as well, provided it gets edited in time. We just filmed it the other day!
We hope not to confuse anyone with too many options, or deny them the formats that they like best. The Raconteurs feel very strongly that music has worth and should be treated as such. Thank you to all those who respect music in this fashion, and thank you to our label partners for working with us to get this album to fans in as many formats as possible all at once.
Thank you, and we hope that you enjoy Consolers of the Lonely.
Sincerely,
The Raconteurs
DVD Review: “Life After People”
An amusement park ride in Prypiat, Ukraine, abandoned 20 years ago following the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl.
Following the success of Alan Wiseman’s 2007 book, “The World Without Us,” both the History Channel and National Geographic Channel televised documentaries positing the same question: what would happen if humanity completely disappeared from Earth? The History Channel’s “Life After People” was the first, an engrossing look at how mankind’s environment and infrastructure would respond, both in the short term and the long view, to spontaneous abandonment.
“Life After People” never bothers to say what happened to humans. But we are gone, and after the electricity goes out, creeping, untrimmed vegetation takes its toll on streets and buildings; animals run wild in formerly bustling cities; and skylines eventually crumble, transformed into verdant archipelagos. The seas brim with life, and the impact of humanity’s multiple millennia of dominion over Earth becomes negligible.
Bolstered by interviews with structural engineers and scientists and a look at what happened to Prypiat, Ukraine after it was abandoned in Chernobyl’s wake, “Life After People” uses dramatic computer animation to depict what might happen to major cities and landmarks: London and Amsterdam sink, and cockroaches finally take over Manhattan. But while this documentary could be seen as an ecological freak show, it painstakingly illustrates that after we’re not part of the equation, Earth wins.
Film Review: “City of Men” (***)
Filmed with the same future-shock rhythms that pulsate through Rio de Janeiro’s favelas, “City of Men” follows two childhood friends as they face down the past and the looming responsibilities of the future. An heir of sorts to Fernando Meirelles’ 2002 epic “City of God,” it lacks that film’s kinetic brilliance, but this story of early onset adulthood in Brazil’s crime-strewn slums still carries undeniable emotional weight.
Some background: “City of Men” was a series that ran for six seasons on Brazilian television. It was designed by executive producer Meirelles as a lighter companion piece to “City of God” and featured two young stars of that film, Douglas Silva and Darlan Cunha as Acerola and Laranjinha, teenagers growing up on Dead End Hill near Rio.
The series followed them from ages 13 to 17. Now, this feature-length film covers Laranjinha’s 18th birthday and reunion with his father, Acerola’s difficulty adjusting to the rigors of fatherhood, and a gang war that threatens what little stability they have. The friends also must face down a secret about their fathers that could destroy their relationship.
Director Paolo Morelli captures the claustrophobia and uncertainty of life on Dead End Hill — a concrete-and-corrugated metal shantytown controlled by gangs and subjected to the constant hum of crime. But this is a much more modest film than Meirelles’ “City of God,” which dramatized with crackling visual acuity the spiral of violence in a favela over the course of three decades.
But while it might suffer by comparison, “City of Men” delivers a thoughtful look at characters beating the odds just by reaching adulthood. Also, it will likely spark curiosity in the series, which is out on DVD and shows Acerola and Laranjinha when they were younger but still facing a real and unforgiving world.
Film Review: “Funny Games” (zero stars)
Pitt of despair
German director Michael Haneke’s English-language remake of his 1997 film “Funny Games” purports to be a rebuke of the American public’s complicity in transforming torture-porn splatterfests into bankable franchises. But it commits a high sin of didactic social commentary by becoming more fetid and indefensible than any of the “Saw” or “Hostel” films it allegedly has in its sights.
When the genteel classical music of Ann and George’s SUV gets blotted out by John Zorn and Yamantaka Eye’s chaotic avant-garde punk-metal explosions and the film’s title hits the screen in blocky red letters, Haneke sets the film’s unsubtle nihilism in motion. Ann (Naomi Watts) and George (Tim Roth) have brought their young son Georgie (Devon Gearhart) to their vacation home on Long Island, but upon arriving, their neighbors seem unusually aloof. The presence of a preppy, sunken-eyed sociopath (Michael Pitt) lurking near the neighbors does not bode well for things.
Meanwhile, another preppy, sunken-eyed sociopath (Brady Corbet) accosts Ann and asks to borrow some eggs. His oily, solicitous demeanor ratchets up the discomfort until the eggs are broken, and soon the two murderers, calling themselves either “Peter and Paul” or “Beavis and Butt-Head,” force their quarry into a series of emotional and physical torture positions.
Haneke’s camera lingers on these acts, as if to dare audiences to stay in their seats, and Pitt addresses the camera repeatedly, cajoling the viewer to ask for more and more gore. This act of “breaking down the fourth wall” and an absurd technological twist late in “Funny Games” feel less like artful provocation than they do dirt-cheap surrealism — the kind of dumb “gotcha” moments that should be out of a decent director’s system before graduating film school.
As it plays out, “Funny Games” steadily abdicates its moral high ground, culminating in the film’s final scene, a close shot of Pitt’s grinning, demonic face as he turns his gaze to a new victim. The freeze frame serves only to romanticize his character’s malignant evil — like a shot of Freddy Krueger clicking his blades together. It’s really no better than that.
Watts, who executive produced “Funny Games,” is typically excellent in portraying Ann’s intractable peril, but it really does not matter. This film does not deserve good acting. Haneke might be attempting to let the stinking air out of torture porn, but in the process, he has made a film that might just be the nadir of the genre.
In “Funny Games,” an innocent family is treated like horsemeat. The audience is given no better treatment, and while not every film should leave viewers with warm, fuzzy feelings, “Funny Games” will make them feel violated.
Staticblog Rejects and Denounces Eliot Spitzer
Spit take
Keeping your nose and other appendages clean is a good, standard rule by which to live — especially if your day job involves crusading for truth, justice and record companies not paying radio stations to play Jennifer Lopez songs.
After New York Governor Eliot Spitzer got busted this week for spending stacks of cash on luxury hookers, I checked my archive and saw that I wrote about Spitzer six times between July 2005 and May 2006. It was all about the then-New York attorney general’s investigation of the record industry’s relationship with radio and television, which revealed a massive gravy train of cash and other incentives to play music that, in many cases, was unfit for human ears. Over the course of that year, Spitzer levied about $31 million in penalties against the major labels.
I have no shame in having trumpeted what Spitzer accomplished as New York’s AG — payola is and always has been a hugely destructive force in radio. If you hear a song on the radio once an hour that cannot be judged as tolerable by any reasonable standard, someone with string-pulling power probably got a 52-inch plasma television and a compensated weekend in Las Vegas for their trouble. Fredric Dannen’s classic 1990 book “Hit Men” tells the long and sordid story of how payola shaped the pop landscape for decades, and it’s a phenomenon that never really dies — it’s the “Terminator” of music industry scandals.
By the time the now-disgraced Spitzer charged after the music industry, the process of greasing the media had evolved into a multi-level scheme involving major bribes of radio company employees and the hiring of “request companies.” This involved banks of compensated fake “fans” barraging the 800 numbers at MTV, all to get a worthless single such as Lindsay Lohan’s “First” on MTV’s “Total Request Live” the same week that Lohan’s “Herbie: Fully Loaded” hit theaters, thereby synergizing the non-singing bad actress across the media spectrum.
But now that Spitzer is revealed as a man who could not walk the walk, and his career in public service ended with his Wednesday resignation, there will always be an asterisk next to this chapter in music business history. The music industry is not above indulging in massive, Caligula-choking levels of sleaze, but when Spitzer imploded in an almost cartoonishly clichéd manner, the reaction in record label offices probably made the uproarious cheers at the New York Stock Exchange sound like meek sniffles.
The integrity of the music industry hardly rests with one person, but before he was revealed as a weak-willed fraud, Spitzer was the first person in years to take on payola as a crusade. We can only hope that the next person to lift the curtains on pay-to-play malfeasance in the music industry can keep from partying like a rock star.
Music Review: Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks, “Real Emotional Trash” * * * *
It’s probable that Stephen Malkmus will never escape the long shadow of his old band, Pavement — such are the wages of rock ‘n’ roll immortality — but his latest move to put the past to bed, “Real Emotional Trash,” is the first of his solo discs to reach par with Pavement’s catalog. Consider it Malkmus’ “Band on the Run”: the only real commonalities “Real Emotional Trash” shares with “Wowee Zowee” or “Slanted and Enchanted” are Malkmus’ voice, the fuzz of his amplifier and his half-crocked schoolboy wordplay, but it achieves excellence on its own terms. “Trash” luxuriates in long solos and exhilarating, stadium-sized spectacle, expressing true and refreshing love for ‘70s rock excess.
Credited to Malkmus and the Jicks, his longtime backing band that now features former Sleater-Kinney drummer Janet Weiss, “Real Emotional Trash” is anything but refuse. Beginning with the Sabbath-like chords of “Dragonfly Pie,” Malkmus rolls out big melodies and oblique songs about Richard Avedon, a “nympho stuck in a cloister” and people “cursed to be named after jazz songs.” “Cold Son” and “Gardenia” serve up deliciously compact pop melodies, but each is festooned with hilarious non sequiturs that lay down challenges to their accessibility.
But the more prevalent mood in “Real Emotional Trash” is captured in the title song, a 10-minute epic that requires an open road and an equally open roof — this is huge, progressive jam music custom-built for Bonnaroo. The beauty of it is that it never sounds extraneous or self-indulgent — every note counts. That cannot always be said of Malkmus’ un-Paved career (“Pig Lib,” anyone?), but if the balance of his solo journey were spent making music with as much shimmer, majesty and whacked-out intelligence as “Real Emotional Trash,” the calls for reunions might fall to a whisper.
Random 10 for March 11, 2008
1. Charlotte Gainsbourg, “The Songs That We Sing.” Recorded with Air, this is a beautifully timeless pop song from last year’s 5:55. Gainsbourg is the daughter of one of pop music’s most brilliant dirty old men, the late Serge Gainsbourg, and an accomplished actress who gave a great but largely overlooked performance in I’m Not There.
2. Sufjan Stevens, “Opie’s Funeral Song.”
3. The Clientele, “E.M.P.T.Y.”
4. Klaxons, “It’s Not Over Yet.”
5. The Besnard Lakes, “For Agent 13.”
6. Antibalas, “War Hero.” Brooklyn’s 12-piece Antibalas was modeled stylistically and structurally after Fela Kuti’s Africa 70, and has been around for a decade but finally gained prominence with its 2007 disc, Security.
7. Ghostface Killah, “Be Easy.”
8. Crowded House, “People Are Like Suns.”
9. The National, “Mr. November.”
10. The Postal Service, “Grow Old With Me.” A John Lennon song that was originally intended for Double Fantasy, but Lennon and Yoko Ono postponed the recording until 1981, when it would be included on Milk and Honey. That disc became a posthumous release of rough demos, and “Grow Old With Me” was one of the roughest. The song was going to be part of The Beatles’ set of “reunion” songs for Anthology, but the quality of the simple cassette recording was deemed by George Martin and the surviving Fabs to be too muddy. Martin did revisit it in 1998 for the John Lennon Anthology, giving the song a string arrangement. This 2005 version by The Postal Service, while nice, obviously cannot have the emotional impact of the original, which was given ironic weight by Lennon’s assassination and will make tears well up in even the most callous among us.
