Just because I liked it. Chip Taylor is better known for composing the song "Wild Thing."
Been listening to The Decemberists' new album, "The Hazards of Love," over the last couple of days.
Really interesting effort, and kind of a lovely concept. The band ended up writing a fairy tale - a real fairy tale, with edge and love and magic and horror and tragedy, all set to music. With a ton of hooks that pull you into repeat listening. It's one of those albums that may hit you funny the first time, but pulls you back to listen again, and becomes more rewarding each time.
The music in this album isn't like most concept albums. Rather than the usual concept album approach of songs and music as primary, with a story to try and tie that together, the story is prime and the music is subordinated. Its tone, underlying styles, and influences are all very much dictated by the point you're at in the story. They threw everything they had at that, from the quasi-medieval folk base to medieval, choir, hard rock, and multiple points in between, in order to get the emotional pitches they wanted. Some choices were pretty ballsy, starting with the opening Prelude and extending to the Faerie Queen's compelling, razor-edged sequences. The result is more "opera" than "rock," but to me it's faithful to the story they set out to tell. And very interesting.
So, is there a happy ending? Maybe it depends on your definition of "happy"...
Pale Fire is a Jack-in-the-box, a Faberge gem, a clockwork toy, a chess problem, an infernal machine, a trap to catch reviewers, a cat-and-mouse game, a do-it-yourself novel. It consists of a 999-line poem of four cantos in heroic couplets together with an editor's preface, notes, index, and proof-corrections. When the separate parts are assembled, according to the manufacturer's directions, and fitted together with the help of clues and cross-references, which must be hunted down as in a paper-chase, a novel on several levels is revealed, and these "levels" are not the customary "levels of meaning" of modernist criticism but planes in a fictive space, rather like those houses of memory in medieval mnemonic science, where words, facts, and numbers were stored till wanted in various rooms and attics, or like the Houses of astrology into which the heavens are divided....read the whole thing, and then go buy the book.
I suspect most of you have seen this already. If not, do yourselves a favor. Visit this YouTube page, and watch an unemployed, 47 year old spinster walk on a Britain's equivalent of American Idol... and just blow the effing house down.
Thanks to the Internet, this was the viral equivalent of a tsunami. Follow-on TV appearances have been frequent, she may be about to record a duet with her singing idol Elaine Page (who was impressed), and it seems like she won't have to be looking for a job any time, well, ever again. The only shame in all of this is that she's been singing in her village, recording local charity albums (listen to "Cry Me A River" from 1998), rather than being on stage in London's East End for the last 20 or more years. Where she belongs. The good news is, some of the people in her village think that what you just saw on "Britain's Got Talent" wasn't even her best singing. Um, wow.
It's a great story. I love the fact that she sang a stage tune to do it. And I love it that someone with that level of talent was able to walk on, demonstrate it, and let that trump everything else. She didn't win a sympathy vote. She's just that good, and she'll rise as high as her talent lets her. To me, that's what it's all about.
Incidentally, 2007's winner was a guy named Paul Potts, now a multi-millionaire who's touring the world. He was a 41-year old mobile phone salesman, who remembers being beaten up at school every day until he was 18. That was excellent training for his subsequent dissertation on the problem of evil and suffering in a God-created world - and for his life's ambition, which was to become an opera singer....
First Ray Charles. Then Ray and Jerry Lee Lewis. Then Ray and Jerry Lee with Fats Domino. Paul Schaeffer directs. The cameo guitar has been listed as Rod Stewart, but viewers' collaborative intelligence suggests Ron Woods, and also gives a more plausible setting of Storyville Jazz Hall in New Orleans, back in 1986.
With all that that of the way, get ready to have these 3 rock you out of your seat:
I've ridiculed the "pop punk" music set more than a few times - often with eminently good cause. These guys do an especially poor job trying to deal with larger themes, which makes them frequent targets for hilarious sendups by MuchMusic TV's Ed the Sock (for a treat, go to YouTube and enter "ed the sock" fromage).
The genre has produced some good music, however, and on the whole I'd have to say that its existence has left pop music better off. Not hard, I know, but every little bit helps.
Anyway, some of you who went to see Relient K's Christmas video yesterday may have noticed another Gotee Records vid called "In the Valley of the Dying Sun," by House of Heroes. I thought it was a nice exception to the "large themes/poor job" inverse rule. Perhaps not a surprise, in this case - you don't see may artists outside of the explicitly Christian genre explaining that biblical references helped contribute to their latest song.
This music video deserves to become a Christmas Classic. Giant rampaging snowmen! Jackin' Santa's sleigh! A love interest who really can go like a bunny (chicks dig the cool ride...)! And a classic song well executed.
Note that you can adjust the controls by mousing over the video area at any time. From the band Relient K...
Just hear those sleigh bells jing-a-ling, ring-ting-tingaling, too
Come on, it's lovely weather for a sleight ride together with you...
What more could you ask for this season? Well, maybe some friends like this guy's. If you have those, you are truly blessed.
Just met an interesting guy - tech executive and avant-garde guitarist. We've become 'Facebook friends' (and LinkedIn friends, etc. etc.) and he had an interesting post up on his Facebook page listing what he felt were the '50 essential' albums. I decided to do the same, focusing on somewhat less-known discs that I think people really ought to pay more attention to.
So after putting together a fast list, I realize that I'm missing two of them (*) and will go order them (used, since I don't buy new CD's - thank you for suing your consumers, RIAA!)
In 2007, Israelis chose Teapacks' (Tipex) English/ French/ Hebrew song “Push the Button” as their representative entry for the Eurovision song contest. [Story | MP3 | Lyrics ]. The band is from the town of Sderot in Israel, which may ring a bell as the town that the Palestinians love to hit with hundreds of lethal rockets. As an unsurprising adjunct, the humorous song also shines a light on Iran's panting fantasy of perpetrating the Second Holocaust.
Predictably, Eurovision organizers said they may ban the song and its "inappropriate political message." Wouldn't want to make fun of genocidal fascists or call attention to them, after all. But then, Europe used the exact same aproach in the 1930s with the last batch of genocidal fascists. In the end, however, they let the entry go forward and it finished 24th out of 28 [full contest results]. But the point had been made.
If Eurovision had chosen the path of appeasement, the second place song "Salaam Salami," also from Tipex. Its about salami tactics (what else?), where compromise with a fellow who wants a man's salami sandwich leads to the continuous slicing of the salami, and ends with the predator throwing him out the window and taking the sandwich.
If those are the top 2 voted entries in a national pop culture contest, I think it's safe to call them a window into the country's general state of mind.
[Correction to the above MP3 link, which is to "Salaam Salami": [Vid/Audio] --NM.]
OK, we've had the endless debate about the "Top Ten Bands" of all time. Let's toss some chum into the water and see what kind of a debate we can have.
Name the best ten musicians or bands that first recorded in 2000 or later. We'll settle this by going to Amazon and using their dates as the definitive release dates...
That Long Beach Opera is doing another performance this weekend - you can still go tonight at 8pm or tomorrow at 4 and see film star Michael York make everyone in the theater cry with his impassioned recital of Tennyson's Enoch Arden (accompanied on piano by Lisa Sylvester playing Strauss), and then make everyone in the audience laugh uncontrollably (yas, I remember my post from yesterday) playing in a multmedia piece with shadow puppets, a short film starring a Superman doll (and Robin!), real puppets, a small orchestra (with a blogger!) and amazing dancers from the Rogue Artist Ensemble. York even blows up and pops paper bags - that's not something you'll see a major star do every day!
Seriously, it's an amazing performance. LBO (disclosure: I'm on the board) fully did it again. If you're looking for something to do this weekend and you want to be moved, see something you've never seen before ... and get to shake a movie star's hand (I kept seeing him as the Gascon d'Artagnan in Richard Lester's great Musketeers movies).
Go buy tickets and have a great time.
