2014 Music Rewind: They Want My Soul

Spoon – They Want My Soul

Right before They Want My Soul came out, I wasn’t really sure what to expect out of a new Spoon album in 2014.  In the four years since 2010’s Transference, Spoon weren’t really a band I returned to, like at all.  I’m not sure if this is because they seemed like such an inseparable part of the ’00s for indie-leaning music fans, and in turn felt like a band that might have little reason to exist outside of that decade.  Also, this felt especially true when considering that Transference was such an annoyed shrug of an album, and thus made it feel like the golden era of Spoon had perhaps run its course.  But as I spent a lot of the early Summer listening back to all those old Spoon albums, it became quite apparent that Spoon was (and is) a band that stands outside of any passing trends and thus have a tendency to sound pretty timeless.  Which makes it a bit easier to accept that They Want My Soul has already earned a place among my favorite Spoon albums if not my favorite at this point.  And I’m sure you could construct some sort of bullshit “return to form” narrative around this album, but I think Spoon defy this kind of nonsense because there’s no narrative necessary to explain Spoon’s greatness.  They’re just a very consistent band who’s very good at what they do, and They Want My Soul proves that they’ve still got room to get even better at it. Continue reading

2014 Music Rewind: Glass Boys

Fucked Up – Glass Boys

It took a while, but in early 2014 I finally got into Fucked Up’s 2011 cinematic punk rock opus David Comes To Life.  This belated immersion into an album I’ve known about for a while had to due with two things mainly: lead singer Damian Abraham’s voice can be a bit of a hurdle to get over if you don’t listen to a ton of hardcore punk (which I don’t really), and then there’s also the fact that what little hardcore I’ve listened to seems to work better in short, EP-sized bursts, rather than David‘s epic 70-minute running time.  But if you’re willing to embrace these things, David Comes To Life is just a non-stop, bonecrushingly awesome experience, plain and simple.  But enough about that album, what about this one, right?  Well, that’s the thing.  It’s hard for something as reeled-in as Glass Boys (it keeps to a tight 42 minutes) to escape comparisons to a previous work that was just so ambitious, and not feel a little unsatisfying almost by default.  Yet I wouldn’t write this album off, since songs like “Sun Glass” and “The Art Of Patrons” combine Fucked Up’s inherent loudness with their more melodic side in ways that are just as fist-pumplingly intense as anything on David Comes To Life.  And in the process prove that even though these lifelong punks are learning to scale things back at this point, the fire still burns harder and faster than ever. Continue reading

The Space Between Us

Interstellar

Since Interstellar came out, how has the world changed for you? It’s been about a month (sorry about that) and I don’t think anyone’s really talking about this movie anymore, having moved on to discussing all the teaser trailers that have debuted recently. Personally, I’ve had a draft of this review in the back of my head for pretty much that entire month, so Interstellar has never been far from my thoughts.

Immediately after I saw Interstellar on opening night, I was disappointed. Disappointed that a movie with so much ambition and scope succumbed to the same problems Chris Nolan movies tend to: plot contrivances that don’t stand up to scrutiny, clunky expositional dialogue, a third act that is designed to resolve everything somehow too neatly. Those problems stood out more to me because this wasn’t an action movie like everything else Nolan has done recently, this was a sci fi odyssey meant to illuminate the true nature of humanity. I knew what I wanted Interstellar to be and it didn’t live up to that.

It pisses me off that mankind, I’m talking about all of us in real life now, doesn’t seem more interested in space exploration. You know the big line from the movie, the one that feels kind of weird in the actual film but works great for all the marketing? “Mankind was born on Earth, it was never meant to die here.” That’s how I’ve felt my entire life, and it baffles me that 99.99% of our money doesn’t go straight to NASA. So I was real excited for a movie that shows the folly of our species’ current path, and hope for the future. I was ready for a movie that had people furious about global warming and unsustainable consumption. That’s what I wanted. Chris Nolan wanted to make a movie about love and gravity.

The second time I saw this movie, it was a few weeks later in an IMAX theater. I still hadn’t read any reviews – I am one of those people who tries not to read reviews of things I want to review myself until I actually write something – but I had talked to some people about their thoughts on the movie. Also, I heard from Neil DeGrasse Tyson that some of the science in the movie is pretty accurate, and a lot of it deals with concepts that we straight up don’t understand right now. All that helped me get out of my own head and enjoy Interstellar for what it is.

This is a movie obsessed with the theory of relativity, among other ideas at the limits of our understanding of astrophysics and even beyond that. Get ready for many, many discussions about wormholes, black holes, gravitational anomalies and other science facts. Interstellar‘s greatest achievement is how it marries real-life science with cinematic spectacle. Every trippy, jaw-dropping moment in this movie is made slightly better with the knowledge that this might actually be how something in our universe really works. This might actually be a thing out here in the place where we live.

And don’t let the epic length fool you, Interstellar is an exciting movie. There are a few scenes in this movie that I feel like jocks and geeks alike will remember fondly in the years to come: the trip through the wormhole, the first new world, the docking sequence. Nolan is a master of building tension and giving dramatic actions exactly as much weight as they deserve. And if you don’t think about it too much, it’s all awesome.

Yeah… I just can’t turn that part of me off, even after a month. There are parts of Interstellar that frankly seem dumb to me, and in a movie like this, that’s a problem. Inception kind of had this problem too, where if you pick at the plot threads a little bit it all unravels terribly, but it wasn’t a big deal because it was an action movie set in a dream world – that’s kind of the deal there. The end of Interstellar is just deeply unsatisfying to me, that’s about all I can say without writing a whole other post about that specific topic.

But a few bumps in the road doesn’t mean it’s not worth the drive. Especially when it’s something as ambitious as Interstellar, which is still in theaters and deserves to be seen on the big screen. Come on, what have you got to lose? The crowds are gone at this point. Get out there and see the stars.

2014 Music Rewind: Tomorrow’s Hits

The Men – Tomorrow’s Hits

The Men released one of my favorite albums 0f 2012, and since then they’ve released an album I liked just fine in 2013 and one in 2014 that’s so middle-of-the-road that I have a hard time getting through it without feeling the urge to listen to something else.  Which does create a bit of a dilemma with The Men for me, since I initially respected their fast-paced work ethic as well as their will to do something different each time.  Yet that idea of doing a new album each year, which seems like such a rare thing these days, seems a little pointless when it almost feels like The Men are devolving with each new release.  The sound on Tomorrow’s Hits leans towards some of the most straight-up, bar band-ish rock you could imagine, which seems like something I’d enjoy considering I’ll always rank Bruce Springsteen and The Hold Steady among my favorite artists.  Though for some reason, very little of Tomorrow’s Hits really hits anything with me.  Possibly it’s because I can’t help but be reminded of the not-too-distant memory of Open Your Heart, and yearn for something remotely as thrilling as “Turn It Around”, though “Different Days” gives it its best shot.  But again, I can’t really complain when the other artists that placed higher than The Men on my top 10 albums of 2012 still haven’t released another album, and probably won’t for a while (I’m looking at you, Fiona Apple).  So since I assume The Men already have another album waiting for us in 2015, I’ll just say better luck next year. Continue reading

2014 Music Rewind: The Both

The Both – The Both

Keeping with the theme of music that’s loosely connected to Tom Scharpling’s The Best Show, here’s a project I first became aware of on the second-to-last episode of The Best Show On WFMU last year, when Ted Leo and Aimee Mann gave the show a touching musical send-off.  Now, I could sit here and tell you about how this album-length collaboration meshes Ted Leo and Aimee Mann’s respective styles, but honestly I’ve had very little exposure to Aimee Mann’s solo career, though I’ve been a big Ted Leo fan for a while now.  What I can tell you is that The Both is a perfectly pleasant little slice of pop-rock, some of which can tend to blur together a bit, though the album certainly isn’t without its stand-outs like singles “Milwaukee” and “Volunteers Of America”.  Yet despite being just fine with this album, I do kind of wish I’d made an attempt to see them live, since from the KEXP session I heard them do at Bumbershoot, these two have some of the best onstage banter I’ve ever heard.  Which maybe shouldn’t come as a surprise, since they after all learned from one of the masters of wryly funny smalltalk (Come on, Tom.  Just bring back The Best Show already!) Continue reading

2014 Music Rewind: Beauty & Ruin

Bob Mould – Beauty & Ruin

Speaking of seeing Bob Mould earlier this year, here’s the album he was touring in support of when I saw him.  At this point, Bob Mould really has nothing to prove.  He’s one of the more respected and visible elder statesmen of indie rock, and from what I could tell from the WTF interview he did (also earlier this year), he seems like an all-around solid dude.  And I reckon that’s roughly the type of mindset Bob was in when he went in to the studio to record Beauty & Ruin with road-tested vets like Jason Narducy (of Split Single) and Jon Wurster (of being one of my favorite humans ever).  Much like 2012’s Silver Age, this album sees Mould continuing to refine the kind of hard-driving, melodic rock music that he’s always done so well, and doing it just as well as any of the gazillions of bands that he influenced with Husker Du and Sugar.  One particular stand-out track is “The War”, which sees him looking back on what I can only assume are the hard fought Punk Rock Wars of the ’80s, while displaying why Bob’s one of the select few still triumphantly fighting the fight.

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