Sunday 29 December 2013

Albums of the Year! Honourable Mentions!


Swiftly on to the top albums of the year!  First the bridesmaids...

Daft Punk - Random Access Memories.  The first dozen or so plays through this album were such a joy!  Just misses out on my top 10 due to the fact that it's not as edgy or eccentric as moments on Homework or Discovery.

Fuck Buttons - Slow Focus.  No let up from this duo.  Textures a-plenty.  Again not quite in the top 10 as it didn't move me as much as Tarot Sport (and other albums in my top 10).


Julia Holter - Loud City Song.  If 'Ekstasis' was a wonderful eccentricity, part Laurel Halo part Joni Mitchell.  Then 'Loud City Song' is part Fiona Apple part PJ Harvey.  Beautifully fragmented but set to the heartbeat of the world outside.  Love it.


Run The Jewels - Run The Jewels.  El-P and Killer Mike released pretty awesome LPs back in 2012.  Their collaborative nous came through on both of those albums, however 'Run The Jewels' wears the crown.  Limitless energy and fantastically interesting flows makes this one of the hip hop records of the year.


Forest Swords - Engravings/ The Haxan Cloak - Excavation.  I've put these together because it's difficult to leave either out. Indulgence.  I came across Excavation several months before I actually lisetened to it, managing to pick up a German copy eventually.  It was a great decision (pat on back).  A very intimate dubstep/electronic listen and mememorable in it's audacity.  If I had listened to it a few more times definitely a top 10 shoe in.  With 'Engravings' I recall picking it up and being lost in this one man world.  Then  'Loud City Song' and Janelle Monae' 'Electric Lady' were released and my attention was diverted.  Coming back to it over the last few weeks reminds me what an electronic delight it is.  Forest Swords and The Haxan Cloak released opposing electronic pieces but together they form a reminder of how much depth this genre continues to show.









Friday 27 December 2013

Best Songs of the Year 2013! 10-1!




There's something fundamentally wrong with me writing this on Christmas Day whilst everyone else is taking Chaucer to heart. The show must go on;

10.  Justin Timberlake - Mirrors

There were a few candidates for best JT song of the year.  But this is the one that does it for me.  It's the quintessential Timberlake/Timbaland production really.  Starting at a pressing pace and then a change up into something a little more comfortable.  It's just the hookiest of his songs in 2013 and with the prettiest syrup laden falsettos



9. The National - I Need My Girl

It's difficult to pick out a particular favourite from 'Trouble Will Find Me'.  Unlike 'High Violet', which had Bloodbuzz Ohio and Conversation 16 amongst others, TWFM finds the band at it's most at ease.  Without the weightiness and themes of the familiarial, a diversion has been made from dealing with life as thirty-somethings.  It hasn't completely evaporated however.  I Need My Girl reminds me of the wordplay of much of 'Boxer'.  Tight, personal and yet universally appreciable



8. Disclosure - Latch

LOVED what these boys did this year.  What's particularly great is that they straddled both critical raves and mainstream success. Why?  Confidence for one.  Two, an album filled with wall to wall golden bangers.  Yeah i'm picking Latch but could just as well picked 3-4 others.

  

7. Arcade Fire - Reflektor

The songs that really connect (with me) are those that deal with alienation and loneliness, from society, from ourselves, without dwelling in some mawkish sludge under the sewers.  Here we have our disco setting (see Afterlife), and on top of that a vigor that hasn't disappeared after 10 years.



6.  HAIM - The Wire

Este is back. Can't keep a good face down. Seriously though how awesome is the bass line here?  The pop charts should be grateful.



5.  Deafheaven - Dream House

This year, Sunbather, was my unexpected unearthed gem.  Dream House kicks thing off in a wistfully romantic mood.  Romantic? Well yes, this is the heaviest of rock metal (not black metal, mind) and yet the melodies are as gorgeous as anything released this year.  The lyrics blend in and out of the mix and work well as an additional rhythmic element to what is happening in the background (although when read in isolation also stand up to scrutiny).  Many will simply press play and switch off after 15 seconds.  It's a shame because Dream House is just the start of the most loving odyssey created in 2013.



4. Burial - Come Down To Us

The latest release of my top 20, Come Down To Us frustrated and downright angered Burialites.  But what Mr Bevan did here feels like the most IMPORTANT track of 2013.  It's two halves contain the most saccharine uplifiting samples he's ever put out.  Gone is the isolation and underbelly of a gluttonous city swapped for hope and glorious resurrection.  Burial announced tracks 2 and 3 were a riposte to bullying, a candle to those who feel like they have nowhere to turn.  It succeeds magically (director Lana Wachowski's speech a fitting ending).



3. Vampire Weekend - Step

I love everything these guys have done this year.  It's so exciting to see a band mature the way they have.  I enjoyed Contra but it held my attention in spurts.  What a wonderful representation of Koenig and co 'Step' proves to be.  The stage is set with a nostalgic reverb piano riff but what makes this so GREAT?  The lyrics.  Essentially a balance sheet on age vs youth, it acheives a sweet spot with balance and poetic beauty.


2. The Knife - Full Of Fire

The first time I saw the short video for this track it was difficult to comprehend in one sitting.  What is this song even about?  Class struggles?  The internet age? Gender inequalities and the 21st century fight for sexual equality?   The ever diluting of valuable ideals and truths? Even if this is a tickle on social change what matters to listener A is the verve and tenacity of what the Dreijer' acheive here.  It's a song that makes you stand up, shock, shake you to your core, makes you dance and ends up leaving you wondering why more acts aren't so daring and provocative.


1. Phosphorescent - Song For Zula

A voice that sounds like stepping on shattered crystals (in the most respectful way), a transition chord template which has been heard a million times (U2 for one in almost all their tracks).  Song for Zula hit home as soon as I first heard it.  Being grabbed straight away with a line that not only references a great Johnny Cash track but calls it out as folly.  It's bitter but also heartbreaking just as the rest of the song, which adds swelling orchestration to its armoury but ends with a graceful denouement which exits at the back of the stage but leaves the lasting impression as the crowd leave the hall.

It's my favourite song of the year.


Tuesday 24 December 2013

Best Songs of the Year 2013! 20-11



Days off, rarer than fool's gold.  A delay a mosey on the beak of a songbird etc etc.

Let's hit the road!

20.  Sigur Ros - Isjaki

It's been something of a comeback year for the Ros, which is a strange thing to say considering the volume of their output hasn't exactly waned.  The issue i've had with the last few LPs is that many of the band's songs have been a sole idea stretched out to some hollow end point.  While there have been positives, momentum has often been curtailed due to a certain insouciant meandering.  So a return to form.  Check out the transition from Chorus 1 to 2 for evidence.  Reminds me of the 'Gong' days.



19.  Kanye West - Blood On The Leaves

This shouldn't work.  A relationship tale on a political backdrop? It's bracingly honest which helps no end but that it fits between the lyrically smash-mouth 'I'm In It' and half-sister 'Guilt Trip' allows 'BOTL' to rise to the podium as the emotive fulcrum of 'Yeezus'.  No mean feat for such an abrasive, confrontational merry-go-round.



18. Youth Lagoon - Mute

There's an almost agnostic sparkle to this ambitious tune by Youth Lagoon.  It's an interesting turn of musical trends that the best songs on the search for some sort of spiritual synchronization have avoided the altruistic sermons of yesteryear and now aim for a middle ground, the no man's land we dwell in for joyless swathes of time.  Not many of us are able to portray such a reverential juxtaposition.



17. M.I.A - Bring The Noise

M.I.A (Mark III) has covered a lot of bases in her relatively short spanned career (LP wise).  Since Galang, I've always found her most enjoyable when she brings a pop sensibility to her songwriting toolbox.  She brings it here, just as with last year's bumper single 'Bad Girls'.  Fab video to boot.



16. Arcade Fire - Afterlife

The African shuffle is undeniable after a few listens here.  Really the patented Arcade Fire trick now.  Take an upbeat build up ahead of steam rhythm section layer with synths/syncopated percussive elements and then layer with Win/Regine narratives on something heartbreaking.  A triumph.



15. Haim - Falling

Can't wait to see this threesome live in March.  Those Fleetwood Mac/ Stevie Nicks comparisons were a little distracting when 'Don't Save Me' was released.  But the energy and vivality of everything these girls do is undeniable, and this is just one of many pop pearls on their debut album 'Days Are Gone'.  I'll take Este's bass face over 100's of listless NME indie types any day of the week.



14.  My Bloody Valentine - wonder 2

The best song of the year with '2' on the end of it.  (editor note: stop with the tongue in cheek comments).  It's seems we've had this new album 'mbv' for years and thats a testament to its quality.  When it came out though, fresh download and all, 'wonder 2' was the polemic track which went against the comfort of what came before it.  Part cacophony, part 21st century shoegaze.  It's the song that still jolts as much as any else released this year.



13.  James Blake - Retrograde

I wouldn't say I was indifferent to the new James Blake album but this was so clearly the highest of highs, all other tracks seem subservient to this small wonder.  It's not as mysterious or offsetting as anything on 'James Blake' but it rivals 'Limit to Your Love' in that it holds its soul sensibility very much on its sleeve as wild flowers bloom amongst and beyond its hymnal motifs.



12.  Daft Punk - Giorgio by Moroder

9 minutes and 5 seconds of showing off, pyrotechnics, autiobiography and uncontrollable release.  Dance!



11.  Janelle Monae - Primetime

Absolutely love Janelle.  She's one of those narratively speaking innovative artists out there hand in hand with Erykah Badu who rather neatly appears on Monae's new LP in the jammin' 'Q.U.E.E.N.'.  This is my favourite of her singles though.  One of the ballads of the year and my pick simply because while before she had the songs and the words she now has the emotion also.  Hopefully B.I.G. sales will follow soon enough.


Friday 29 November 2013

La Vie d'Adele (Blue Is The Warmest Colour) Review

 

In The Mood For Love, Venus, Chico & Rita & Let The Right One In.  

Each of those films are examples that aren't cut from the kind of cloth that 'Blue Is The Warmest Colour' comes from.  At its base is an arc of the journey from spiritual fatalism and young love as a sequitur for emotional trauma.  

Melodrama is not a new idea, clearly, but neither has it been a flagbearer for a type of cinema verité that allows the viewer to go beyond the tragic and dwell amongst some unfortunate realism.

'BITWC' tells a simple narrative of a young girl (high school age) who meets a woman several years older and experiences for the first time a connection which films are always trying to sell to us.  What the best films in this type of genre are able to do is to display the ecstatic giving, physical bind and most boldly of all the consequences of first love that go beyond initial tragedy.

The film, clocking in at almost 3 hours in length, painstakingly depicts individual moments as moving portraits balancing on the weight of a cloud that over time fill themselves with the burden of self doubt and jealousy.  From the outset each scene glides from close up to wide angle shots and its one of the strengths of the project that the actors thrive under such scrutiny.  The minutiae of such contrasting and elegant frames allows for a one-in-a-million performance by Adele Exarchopoulos who conveys, in soft monotones, a beauty and riveting mysteriousness to the role of a young lady experiencing a new layer to her being.  It has to be noted that the relationship between Adele and Emma (a delicately poignant Lea Seydoux) is for this viewer at least the most stunningly realized pair of performances maybe since the turn of the century.



I have to refer to the sex scenes in this film.  Around the time of Cannes, a bubbling controversy belched from under the red carpet of the opening attempting to attest to the deemed overly gratuitous nature of the relationship depicted on screen.  Undoubtedly this will put off many viewers from the outset and that would be understandable.  However, my reading into these few scenes (one of which runs at least 5 minutes) is that the physicality becomes a tour de force between two individuals between whom boundless intimacy has been building in a life-altering way.  Perhaps the length of those scenes could have been shortened but the energy of those early passages between the two and their sheer joie-de-vivre make them as vital as what comes before and after.

Ultimately, what I will come away with from this astounding portrayal of love and loss is the rawness that director Abdellatif Kechiche is able to squeeze out from this most bittersweet of rinds.  You will be able to predict the journey but once its over you will have been exhilarated and emotionally satisfied in equal manner dreaming of where the characters lives take them next...

Rating 9.5/10 (A/A+)


Saturday 9 November 2013

Gravity Travesty (Majesty) - Review



In space no one can hear you.  A quotable phrase, no doubt.  A cliche, but as true as day turning to night.

Another truism is that of the relationship between the critic and the reader.  As a reviewer it's easy to get tangled in to the web of my own ideas and importance.  Clearly there's a historian angle that provides a certain leverage to what I do, what we do.  If my knowledge was (theoretically) encyclopedic would I find it a lot easier to rank films in the IMDB Top 50 of my mind? 

Harder to place is HOW DOES ALL THIS MAKE YOU FEEL.

Of course what anyone wants out of reading this review can be divided into two camps.  An over-effusive praise marathon or an entertaining jaw-buster.  But really what I write, and more likely what your favourite journal/ magazine/ website scribe writes, is there to validate what YOU the reader expects of us.  If you love a film, you want to hear that others do too.  Likewise if you hate it.

I digress.

The problem with a film like Gravity even before the first frame takes centre stage is one of expectations.  When a modern piece of art builds up a head of steam, loved or loathed, the internet takes reins and builds up a fortress around it.  It's what sites like Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes help to make the noise stick.
In that regard Alfonso Cuaron' latest is unbreakable.  Its fanbase is ever swelling, the oscar buzz deafening (although a few months early). 

And much of it is understandable.   The film is presented in three formats.  2D, 3D and IMAX 3D.  It is not hyperbolic to call it one of the most visually outstanding pictures you're ever likely to see, especially on a technical level.  DoP, Emmanuel Lubezki lights each shot so beautifully (also a feature of his work with Terrence Malick) and brightly that the 3D of this film is perhaps the most vital since Hugo and maybe even back to Avatar.  Cuaron deserves immense credit also for miraculous craftsmanship of an opening 15-20 min shot which looks to me at least to be seamless.

The Avatar comparisons don't stop there.  I remember coming out of that particular 3D experience for the first time being pretty bowled over by it.  Especially so on an IMAX screen.  It's a giddy feeling to swept away by beauty on a heightened plane, gliding above the tropopause of all the mere mortals beneath it. 

So why is there a 7/10 at the bottom of the review?

Well for all the visual majesty, the pen has been left at home.

This is not Y Tu Mama Tambien or in fact Children of Men.  The issue here is that Cuaron leaves emotional markers as goal posts visible on the horizon and then takes you around full circle to the same landscape.  Its as if all conflicts and dilemnas that were set up in the film's first third were laid down solely to force the audience into a response based upon an underdevolped mother-daughter loss/rebirth narrative.




Another issue here is Clooney.  There has been an entire spectrum of responses to his performance.  To me its essentially Clooney on 'Up In The Air/ Ocean's 11' form which would be fine if he wasn't stuck in impending doom however many miles away from Earth.  His happy-go-lucky suavity started of as a useful counterbalance to Sandra Bullock's pensive monotones however as the film hit it's meat-spot I felt it became a distraction which began to remove me from the building tension.  Bullock herself does well with what little she has been given to work,  but again her rally to her daughter before the final descent, the actor's moment, was somewhat ruined by an auto-pilot script (as opposed to Hank's final moments in Captain Phillips which i'll come to soon enough).

Don't get me wrong, Gravity is intended as popcorn entertainment (this isn't Tarkovsky-lite) and is always enjoyable and at times quite literally breathtaking.  Maybe on multiple viewings the issues will iron themselves out for me.  However I can't help shake the feeling that the immensity of the EVENT, of the 3D, of the technical splendour would dissipate on multiple viewings, when the visuals have become embedded within my memory and all is left is story.

Will it hold up?  At the moment what i'm left with is a Great leap for visual-kind, but not quite the Great film I hoped it would be.
  
Rating: 7/10 (B-/B)







Monday 7 October 2013

An Introspective Sojourn – Blue Jasmine Review


 




 As a term of caution, mental fragility comes with a warning label that screams ‘baffle and intimidate’.  In art, we measure our own emotional responses in turns as to the state and outcome of the perpetrated.  It would seem that in our own inconclusiveness we seek definitive meaning... 

A HIGHER PLANE

Of course, in film this becomes a dilemma.  Film and celluloid, by their very nature suggest fluidity, the very antithesis of ambiguity.  Siegfried Kracauer (‘Theory of Film’) sets his stall out to present the medium as a three part act.  A beginning, a middle and an end.   As a visual art, an economy of words expressed become words suggested, which make heavily dialogued pieces that much more difficult to sell.  The way we consume our movies make this especially so.

And here, in most welcome fashion, is the point of this opening.   In my view this may be the first time in years that a Woody Allen picture has gone against the grain of filmic norms.   At his peak, Allen, like Ingmar Bergman (a major creative influence), understood how to use a Shakespearean framework as an inspiration but not necessarily a template with the use of Brechtian techniques to break down the fourth wall (see Annie Hall).  His recent output, even one as well balanced as ‘Midnight in Paris’, played as comedies in the strictest sense starting in the dark of meandering souls and ending in the hopeful, reflective lamps in caramel-woozy European dusk.

‘Blue Jasmine', a return to familiar US shores (albeit San Fran not New York), plays without the aforementioned three part act but instead is shipped by an overwhelming emotional arc anchored by a riveting central performance by Cate Blanchett.  



Plot is threadbare as the emotional spectrum of Jasmine takes main stage.  In essence the film chronicles the descent (often internal) of Jasmine from a position of wealth and security to one of paranoia and insecurity.  Supporting performances of note include a seedy turn by Alec Baldwin as well as a comically understated role by Louis CK, however the real standout is Sally Hawkins playing Jasmine’s sister, Ginger.  It’s a thankless task having to play what could be seen as a contrived moral counterpoint to Blanchett’ Jasmine but Hawkins carries it off with delicate aplomb.

As the film comes to its conclusion it returns to where we were at the beginning.  No great reveals or moments of saccharine melancholy.  Most importantly it doesn’t force redemption or understanding on its anti-heroine.  

It leaves her alone like all substantial art should, as a mirror to the human condition left to contemplate the meaning of her lost perspective; without hubris, a future laid out on rain stained pavement slabs.
Rating: 8.5/10 (A-)