Heartache With Hard Work

It looks like one of my longtime favorites, the Swedish-pop band Penny Century, have signed to a real record label and have released a full album. It’s called Between a Hundred Lies and they have generously made the first single available as a free download.

Nothing Burns Like Bridges – Penny Century

It kicks off with a bang and doesn’t let go – two minutes of perfect pop. I haven’t had a chance to hear the whole record yet – I’m not quite ready to pay international shipping rates – but if it’s anything like this song, and their earlier work, it will be chock-full of beautiful tunes perfect for a lazy Autumn afternoon.

While you’re enjoying that one, it never hurts to make another mention of one of my favorite songs of the last few years, made all the better by guest backing vocals from Julia Hanberg, of Penny Century:

Dancing Under the Influence – Bedroom Eyes

If you haven’t read my previous posts on Bedroom Eyes, you’re really missing out on something great.

Quick post today, keeping you updated on what’s new with a band I’ve talked about more than once already: the always enjoyable Beat Radio.

Plasticities – Andrew Bird

For me, Andrew Bird will always be something of a disappointment, not through any fault of his own but simply because I heard his magnificent “Fake Palindromes” first, and everything else after. And while his other songs are nice enough, they simply fall so far behind that one single achievement that I find it hard to be affected.

His followup album Armchair Apocrypha received many plaudits on its release earlier this year, most of which I agree with in principle if not in degree. It is certainly a very good album, finely crafted and richly textured, but I can’t say it’s really one of my favorites. I’ll put on my prediction hat for a second and guess that for all the fine press it received early in the year, a surprisingly small amount of people will actually find room for it on their year-end lists. It strikes me as precisely the sort of album that a dedicated few will listen to with ever-growing love, while the larger percentage will look back come December and think “hmmm, haven’t listened to that one in three months, have I?”

Perhaps I’m playing too much of the musical pyschologist here. After all, the man certainly can write some great lyrics, there is no doubt, and there certainly is something fascinating about music written for the violin – it creates depth that would simply be unimaginable for a traditional guitar-and-drums outfit. And as I noted back at the end of 2006, my tastes don’t really seem to run in tandem with the blog-consensus, so who am I to be making predictions or impugning a deep and complex record?

Nobody, that’s who. Which means there is a decent chance I’m selling it short. But I guess the long and short of it is that I keep expecting it to give me goosebumps and they never quite come. Make of that what you will.

All that said, “Plasticities” is a great song, and I absolutely love the whistling at the end of “Dark Matter.”

Two things I love are discovering a new band and discovering a new blog. It’s especially nice when the two coincide. I’ve been way behind on my blog-reading for the past month or two but in the last few days I finally caught back up (it’s a disturbingly satisfying feeling to see my unread posts number in Google Reader finally drop below 100) and so of course the first thing I did was to start trolling for some new blogs. My favorite discovery was The Glorious Hum – I knew for sure that it was a good fit when I heard this song:

Stuck for the Summer – Two Hours Traffic

I’m not sure I’ve heard a better song for this summer. It’s unadulterated sunshine, hair blowing in the wind. I don’t know anything about Two Hours Traffic except that they’re from Prince Edward Island (cool) and that they wrote this song (very cool), but they appear to have an album that just came out, so I’m inclined to explore.

Here’s to the State of Richard Nixon – Phil Ochs

Sorry for two consecutive short political posts, but I just could not let this one drift past without comment. Plenty of folks have pointed out the various vapidites of Rudy Giuliani’s recent Foreign Affairs piece on terrorists and the various other baddies out in the world, so I won’t belabor those points.

I just want to focus on one paragraph which is infuriating in its willful historical ignorance:

America must remember one of the lessons of the Vietnam War. Then, as now, we fought a war with the wrong strategy for several years. And then, as now, we corrected course and began to show real progress. Many historians today believe that by about 1972 we and our South Vietnamese partners had succeeded in defeating the Vietcong insurgency and in setting South Vietnam on a path to political self-sufficiency. But America then withdrew its support, allowing the communist North to conquer the South. The consequences were dire, and not only in Vietnam: numerous deaths in places such as the killing fields of Cambodia, a newly energized and expansionist Soviet Union, and a weaker America. The consequences of abandoning Iraq would be worse.

“Many historians”? Care to name a few?

“Succeeded in defeating the Vietcong insurgency”? Defeating? By 1970, the US had dropped more bombs in Vietnam than had been used in all of World War II, with almost no noticeable effect on the will to resist. In the Spring of 1972, the North launched a massive offensive designed to force the US to make concessions at the negotiating table. Does this sound like an insurgency suffering its “death throes”?

The phrase “our South Vietnamese partners…” requires an interesting definition of “partner.” Does he mean Ngo Dinh Diem, who engaged in violent crackdowns, declared martial law, and presided over mass public protests? Does he mean the generals we installed through a series of coups

Let’s also notice the fanciful assertion that the rise of the Khmer Rouge is tied to US withdrawal, rather than, say, Nixon’s unlawful escalation of the war via the secret bombing campaign in Cambodia. You’d also think he’d feel some responsibility for acknowledging that the “newly energized and expansionist Soviet Union” managed to up and collapse 15 years later and never had much of anything to do with Vietnam in the first place.

And to whatever extent it was energized by Vietnam, it was because we insisted for years and years that any withdrawal would be perceived as a retreat and a sign of weakness. If other nations chose to take us up on that claim and accepted the premise that Vietnam was somehow crucial to our national security, whose fault is that? Surely not those (like Church, Fulbright, and Kennan) who were insisting back in 65/66 that US presence in Vietnam was unnecessary and wrong.

In short, all I can draw from this is that one of the primary candidates for the GOP presidential nomination is either completely delusional or an outright liar. Neither proposition is particularly encouraging.

Did you ever have one of those days where your mind is drifting and then you remember that our country, the beacon of hope and democracy for the world, the most powerful nation in the history of the world, is bogged down in a pointless, horrific war in Iraq?

I had one of those moments earlier today.

I have nothing insightful to say about the war, no plans for getting out, no discussion of the political fights, nothing to say about the Petraeus report. Today I’m just a guy wondering how we ever ended up in such a stupid and ridiculous situation.

It’s depressing which is why I sometimes just avoid thinking about it, but pretending it’s not there doesn’t make it go away.

I Hate the War – The Ballet
Start a War – The National

You’re probably not doing anything tonight, right? Instead of spending another night gluing tiny pieces of macaroni onto posterboard or watching old Beta tapes of The Joy of Painting or reading music blogs or whatever it is y’all do, why not go see Stardust?

Now, The Princess Bride is pretty much my favorite movie (to the extent that someone not liking it verges on being a deal-breaker for me), so I’m not going to just willy-nilly compare some new film to The Princess Bride.

That said, Stardust is a lot like The Princess Bride.

Robert DeNiro as a gay sky-pirate (really), Ricky Gervais as a truly hilarious trader, Michelle Pfieffer as a witch, even a brief appearance from Peter O’Toole as the dying king, and this guy named Charlie Cox who I’d never heard of before but who managed to be everything that Orlando Bloom was supposed to be without any of the annoying (and who bore a weird resemblance to Roger Federer that I couldn’t quite shake). And Claire Danes, of course, looking as good as she has since that scene with the angel wings in Romeo and Juliet, blond hair notwithstanding.

Along with a great cast, there’s a nice dose of fairy-tale wonderment, just enough swashbuckling to keep you honest, and the classic message about the power and importance of True Love. It’s based on the story by Neil Gaiman (one of my favorite authors), though I’m ashamed to say I haven’t read it (a mistake I plan to remedy soon). Given that, it’s not really surprising that it manages to combine a bit of a tilt-a-whirl plot with some surprisingly complex characterization to create a fairy tale with its own very unique tone.

It might not be the absolute best movie I’ve ever seen, but it’s certainly one of the most fun.

Speaking of which, here’s an appropriately titled piece of perfect pop from Swedish band Irene. It lasts all of 76 seconds and isn’t the most complex thing in the world, but it sure packs a big punch.

Stardust – Irene

Update: the single worst movie review I’ve read in many moons. How could someone get this movie so completely wrong? And not only that, it also manages to completely miss the point of The Princess Bride too, just for good measure. I was willing to tolerate a lot of problems but lost my head at this line: “The film’s tendency to make her head glow with astral light comes awfully close to a straightforward admission that Danes just isn’t that radiant or enticing without FX assistance.”

What’s next: complaints about Breakfast at Tiffany’s because Audrey Hepburn just isn’t very appealing? I mean, good lord.

Continuing on the theme of records that came out several months ago, but which I never got around to discussing, today’s entry is the moderately underwhelming Cassadega from the precious emo-lab Conor Oberst, otherwise known as Bright Eyes.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not a bad record by any stretch – it simply lacks the force of some of his previous work (particularly the magnificent I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning), which makes it a mild disappointment. Where in previous years the main complaint I would file against Bright Eyes was the overwrought style, I think the opposite is true here. The biggest problem I have with Cassadega is simply that it’s a little boring. Too many songs that sound too similar.

Part of what makes Bright Eyes stand out from the crowd is Oberst’s unbalanced lyrics, his warbling voice. I’m not saying I’m itching for a return of the cracked psychosis of Fevers and Mirrors, but I do wish a little bit more of that was given space to shine through. Instead, his conceits here appear to rest mostly along far more traditional country-western lines. And to be sure, when it works well (such as the bluesy “Four Winds” or the gentle slide guitar on “If The Brakeman Turns My Way”) it produces very fine songs.

All complaints aside, Oberst has a very fine sense of the simplest human frailties, and that shines through in these songs. It is a window into the discomfort of our souls – a chance to see ourselves in all our absurdity – but he remains eternally compassionate. We all have our weaknesses, but it is responses to those weaknesses that give us vitality.

My final complaint is with the unfortunate decision to relegate “Reinvent the Wheel, without a doubt the best song he’s written in years (since 2002’s magical “From a Balance Beam”), to the Four Winds EP. Of course, thanks to the magic of the digital age, I am free to listen to music in whatever order I like, but it still disrupts my appreciation of the album’s completeness to know that a song which dwarfs the rest of its songs resides so near.

MP3s:
Four Winds – Bright Eyes (Cassadega)
If the Brakeman Turns My Way – Bright Eyes (Cassadega)
Reinvent the Wheel – Bright Eyes (Four Winds EP)

Fluorescent Adolescent – Arctic Monkeys

The busy part of my summer is finally over. I saw my visiting friends out of town (one to fly back to Boise, another hiking north on the Appalachian Trail), and now fully intend to settle into a routine of research for the upcoming year, punctuated by the occasional break for blogging and other entertainment essentials.

Speaking of which, tomorrow is the first day of the English Premier League. This year will be the first that I’ll be closely following the season from start to finish so I’m quite excited at the prospect of new matches to watch especially now that I’ve got a sweet Setanta setup right at the desk in my office.

My other big project is some serious summer cleaning. The house is a mess and needs a serious going through. Along those lines, I’ve decided to devote the next week or so here to some summer music-cleaning – going through all those records I meant to discuss months ago but never quite got around to.

First on the list is the new record from the Arctic Monkeys. Do these energetic, bizarrely-named Brits suffer from the sophomore slump on Favourite Worst Nightmare? Like many of the anticipated releases from this year (see: Arcade Fire, Bright Eyes, Shins, Stars, etc.), it’s difficult to say. I can say for sure that it doesn’t have the frenetic energy or the gritty sneer of Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, but that alone shouldn’t be a deciding factor.

If it’s less gripping, it may make up the difference in nuance. Certainly, a song like “Fluorescent Adolescent” would have felt out of place elsewhere, but it may be the single best song they’ve yet produced.

Still, it’s no surprise that I haven’t felt the manic urge to play this disc nearly as often as their first. It may be more melodic, but Sinatra it ain’t. These are still the same blokes who ground out the pulsing beats of “I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor” and while their adventurous efforts to expand their sound are admirable, I’m not sure they’ve quite got the chops to hold it all together quite yet.

The result is a record that I enjoy quite a bit, and one that holds out promise of a band capable of producing some great ones in the future, but which is not a classic in its own right.