What I Find Works

This is In O To Infinity, the latest Acid Mothers release on Important Records. Over the years many of your more complicated AMT releases have come from Important, and this one doesn’t really strike me as a good one for beginners either. It follows in a tradition first established with AMT’s cover of Terry Reilly’s In C, one of the more focussed experiments the band has undertaken. They play away on one chord, each instrument moving forward when it suits until the whole thing resolves itself somehow. All this is usually over a strong, motorik beat which propels us along. They’ve done variants on the theme over the years but here is a concentrated version of their take. Four tracks, each nearly 19 minutes long.

1. In O: Droney, building to a heavy beat which gets more aggressive as the piece goes on. Some of this reminds me of ‘Future Days’ but when the cacophonous crescendo at the end crashes in with an ancient pipe organ sound redolent of ‘Watcher Of The Skies’’ mellotron, all descending, boomy notes, it’s more like Godspeed from the ‘Lift Your Skinny Fists…’ era. None of these points of reference make this any less effective: au contraire. Good stuff.
2. In A: A much more challenging listen, this one has three dominant features over a shuffling backbeat which at times is so indistinct you only notice when it stops. The first is a low, slightly nasal drone, a little grating like a vuvuzela at a game your team is losing. The second will split the fans as it’s the return of Cotton Casino. Cotton was a member of the band for the first few years who seemed to specialise in howling in tune to the tuneless oscillator she made howl, all while sitting on a stool in the middle of the stage chain smoking and drinking a can of beer. Funny thing is here that it suits the music excellently. Not since some of the really early albums has Cotton been used as an instrument and it’s nice to see her playing a part in the song rather than what always seemed to me as commenting on it. Finally there is a low frequency burble banging around in the background, straight out of Merzbow’s scary toolbox. Much more noise than psychedelia, but compelling stuff.
3. In Z: A jazzy guitar noodle on a loop with a bunch of analog noises and drones messing around over it for ten minutes until a squall begins and threatens to lose the run of itself about two minutes from the end. Not that terribly essential and would probably get you killed if you tried to listen to it on headphones in a built-up area.
4. In Infinity: A 4/4 jam, taken at quite a lick, building layer on layer until there seem to be twenty competing solos over the simple bass motif. It begins and ends sounding sort of like bagpipes, or something from ‘Live/Evil’. Then at 12 minutes there’s a recorso to the finale of the first track (ignore the silly high-pitched drone at the end). It’s like a train in a tunnel, miked and fed through a flanger. It’s about as nuanced as the climax of a Flaming Lips show on New Year’s Eve during a solar eclipse. It’s very good.

Not, then, a point at which all of Acid Mothers Temple’s mysterious ways reveal themselves, but for some a glorious racket. Approach with trepidation and play it nice and loud.

Talk about zeitgeisty. Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) fires people for a living. He goes around the country at the behest of his heartless and hirsute boss (played by the ever-a-cinema-bridesmaid Jason Bateman), doing the dirty work for bosses he describes as ‘pussies’ for not doing the firing themselves. A transient in most senses of the word, he lives out of a meticulously-ordered suitcase full of conservative ties and a wallet full of loyalty cards. He carries his life as he packs his carryon—to facilitate the minimum of delay. From the opening credits’ interchangeable arial shots of interchangeable cities to the airport concourses and business conferences, the anonymity of Bingham’s life is reinforced. Asked about this lonely situation, he responds with his character note: “Isolated? I’m surrounded”.

Told that he is to be grounded by a new centralised computer interface being beta tested by Cornell gal Natalie (the astounding Anna Kendrick, acts everyone else off the screen), he reacts in a predicable belligerent way that results in his being sent back on the road with the young pretender, as every old hack in a buddy picture or road movie must dread. His character is fleshed out by the love interest, (a succession of one night stands played out  with another serial traveller named Alex (Vera Farmiga) when travel schedules overlap), and by the impending marriage of his sister. We suppose we can predict where this may go: if it was a romcom he’d help with the kid’s career and then settle down with the older bird; Woody Allen would have him screw the youngling; if it was Sofia Coppola they’d make fun of people and be alienated and shallow and then it would end.

What Ivan Reitman, the director and co-screenwriter, does with the material is far more creative than that. By having Clooney play an inexplicably sympathetic, hollow man he makes the film much more of an everyman story. I’m not saying we have a new Willy Loman on our hands, but the metaphor of constant flight (the Japanese title—‘Mileage, My Life’—is great) extends to his relationships and family. Just what Bingham is avoiding is made fairly clear from the eventual revelation of his East Bumblefuck, Wisconsin roots, but it’s equally clear why a man who foreshortens careers for a living has himself a conscious fear of permanence. The tone here reminded me of the satire, if not the science fiction, of Fight Club: it’s as if the Ed Norton character there drugged Tyler Durden into oblivion with Xanax at the end of his twenties.

In a central, hilarious scene, a recently-dumped Natalie describes how she has her life plotted out while Alex and Ryan sit there, bemused at her naivete. What’s wonderful here is that Natalie’s hopes and dreams seem to mock directly the lifestyles of the older people on whose shoulders she’s meant to be crying: “I don’t want to say anything that is anti feminist. I really appreciate everything that your generation did for me”. No amount of ‘no offence’ can render the bemused look from Ryan’s face, here. Alex, though, is much less scrutible. (I met someone like Natalie in college who had his life planned out in a similar way to Natailie’s: I don’t think a month has gone by where I didn’t think of him and hope he failed).

Of course the impermanence of this holding pattern hits Bingham at some stage, and we’d be overestimating Hollywood if it didn’t. Reitman again excels, though, by allowing a bit more darkness in than we might have predicted. Shit Hollywood ends with the star realising what a twat he’s been. Better Hollywood begins there and does better to investigate why being the twat was probably an advisable course of action. Therein lies the satire.

With the economy in the toilet, the self-satisfaction of Bingham’s flight is not enough to keep the currency of this film. Ingenious use of footage from the actual victims of the downturn, the sort of shot seen in the interview footage from When Harry Met Sally, humanises those victims who could have been left on the margins, and in two pivotal scenes the nature of the work perpetrated by Bingham and his protégé hits home, both to the characters and the audience. It’s not especially courageous to have them get a bit of comeuppance, but it is a feat to see it done in a way that doesn’t patronise or moralise.

The first is a scene where Natalie fires a man through what she thinks is her wonderful new Internet engine, only to realise he’s in the adjacent room and his sobs can be heard through the wall. Natalie has turned the job from that of the personable self-help interviewer Bingham has refined into a smarmy artform into what Natalie calls ‘a termination facilitator’ (she wanted to call them ‘terminators’ but Legal put the kybosh on that). Natalie gets it done, but balks at the realisation that this is only the first of a long list of terminations that day. The second is best left for the viewer, but is equally stark. Placing this in a comedic context—and this is a very funny film—is a delicate matter and Reitman does a splendid job.

Up In The Air combines two stunning acting performances from Clooney and Kendrick with a hugely entertaining script and an absence of schmaltz. Even the parochial family scenes are awkward rather than especially fond. The plot unfolds at a patient, intelligent pace and the final third of the film is courageous and indicts rather than judges. For all of these reasons the film comes highly recommended.

I’ve been musing for a while now about how it’s possible to review a book without necessarily relating it to another author but considerably more of a challenge to review an album or film without comparing it to established forms. In order to communicate the common ground has to be that which is recognisable, almost like islands of certainty on which to rest for a minute before diving in again.

Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti Before Today is not an album one can even listen to without hearing other things. We live in a postmodern age, blah blah blah, and every artist is a cannibal, etc, but when influence comes as thick, fast and creative as this then it becomes a parlour game. Ariel Pink is apparently this bloke from LA who has been releasing bits and pieces, most famously on Animal Collective’s label. I got it on foot of a very positive rating from Pitchfork and a need to listen to something new, aged as I am to the vintage of a Mojo reissues junkie.

From the cover and initial inspection I thought it would be a Ramones, garagey, Nuggets sort of thing, and elements of it are. But on listening no one label works except that of someone with a very wide palate. Beginning with the Neu-ish instrumental Hot Body Rub we are taken through a vast array of styles, many decidedly seventies in tone.  There are pretty much dozens of touchstones here.

It’s not like one of those bands like LCD Soundsystem, though, where every time you shuffle into a song you don’t recognise that’s vaguely catchy and you turn on the display to see who it is it’s always them (I had that with Brian Jonestown Massacre for a while until I got pissed off and deleted them). Instead there’s enough of a melody there, enough creative use of the influence to make the stuff sound distinctive. Jim O’Rouke or Sean O’Hagan spring to mind—the stuff sounds like someone’s been listening to a great deal of music for a mighty long time.

On standout tracks like Butt-House Blondies we might be listening to a MaryChain-derived bang about, until the flanged, falsetto counterpoint lightens the tone and gives the pastiche some depth, even if it does end up a little like something from Rocky Horror. It happens with analogue synths elsewhere—the sound on Beverly Kills might have been lifted from Culture Club. Fright Night is a wonderful Monster Mash and Menopause Man takes the delicacy of O’Hagan’s High Llamas or Microdisney and gives voice to lyrics which reminded me of some of Kurt’s more cynical stuff circa In Utero. “Break me/castrate me/make me gay”, indeed. The seventies thing may be taken a little too far on Can’t Hear My Eyes—one reviewer invoking Alan Parsons—but even that’s a pretty distraction.

I’m sure it’s all a bit arch but it’s a lot of fun and quite remarkable that, through all the old and new noises, a distinctive voice emerges. Recommended.

Quick one today to keep this thing ticking over. Rereading 1599, a book which puts into historical context a whole bunch of things nobody really knows. That sounds like a criticism, bu the remarkable thing about this book is its use of extensive research into London’s workings, weather and whatnot at the end of the sixteenth century in a year when Shakespeare, in all probability, wrote or completed four plays: Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It and Hamlet.

Yes. Four. Think about what you’ve done in any given year. If I get to cut the grass more than twelve times it’s remarkable. In a good year I read four Shakespeare plays. And while I know there was no telly or Internet then that can be countered with the fact that we can function without such distractions as bear baiting and Black Death.

By taking the political context of the time Shapiro refocuses Shakespeare’s work, especially the two more political plays, offering a close reading of how the audience of the time would have understood it. Running Hamlet as autobiography is more established ground, but Shapiro infuses his observation with a huge amount of detail, gleaned from the sources we have. A freezing winter, a torrential early summer, war in Ireland, all illuminate the world of these plays in an eminently readable way.

The plays offer a wonderful frame to this narrative: the politicking of Henry and Julius Caesar, through the pastoral Forest of Arden to the more melancholy autumn and winter, are mapped by the author to a discussion of Shakespeare’s life. What’s intriguing is that the book essentially locates a man whose life is uncertain and undocumented in any authoritative way in events and facts we can prove. A picture may emerge but it’s the picture of the landscape, the buildings and the events around this most haggled about of lives. His face, it seems, will always be in shadow.

A major player in this book is the Earl of Essex, a man whose ego and paranoia looms large over the plays. War in Ireland has taken Essex and Elizabeth’s interest, and the popularity (or lack thereof) of this engagement is used well in Shapiro’s observation of the history play. More local is the story of the relocation of the theatre as it becomes the Globe—it was apparently stolen: dismantled and relocated overnight—and the battles, both legal and pitched, between cries of players. The oft quoted lines from Hamlet about ‘children [now being] the fashion’ in theatres around Elsinore have long been taken as a reference to trends in the Elizabethan theatre, but Shapiro explores this context further as he explores the theatre in Blackfriars’, the plays reopened in St. Paul’s, the smaller houses outside the remit of the City and the rivalry between the Admiral’s Men and the Chamberlain’s Men. A right shower of bitches they all were, and no mistake.

Shapiro manages to make this dense and interlocked set of circumstances fit together with ease and this is one of the most readable history books I’ve read. The subject matter is exhaustively researched and Shapiro seems to be able to turn his hand to anything: when discussing the weather he reports with metrological precision; when discussing Tacitus he’s a Classical scholar (he points out that the idea for Henry visiting his soldiers under a cloak of anonymity comes from the story of Germanicus) and when outlining the construction of the Globe he’s a meticulous carpenter (“Each one of the towering back-posts… was fitted to twenty-six other timbers on three of its four sides”). Come to think of it, Shapiro seems to know a little too much. Can we honesty be asked to believe that 1599 is the work of just one man?

Short one today. Autechre are a group I’ve been listening to for about ten years without really understanding. Just as it’s quite difficult to pronounce their name let alone yell out a song title, their music is indefinable. I mentioned on the Merzbow post last month how it’s difficult to do anything while music like this is playing, but on this release, a companion to Oversteps, they seem to be a lot more accessible.

Still present is the glitchy twiddling and twiddly glitchiness, but rooting it this time is a definite beat, a rhythm that’s there to stay rather than to lure the listener into a false sense of security before whipping it away when you realised it was actually a speeded up sample of a blender or something. Instead the music plods along happily, almost prettily (‘nth Dafuseder.nb’ has a little pattern which could be a flute or Pan pipes, for God’s sake), allowing the listener a graph to chart how the other elements develop. Purists will say that much of their music has exactly this only harder to find and they’d be right, but what’s wrong with a little easier listening?

It’s not a throwback to their earlier stuff, which is a lot warmer (Amber) or more dated (Incunabula); rather a straight, unfuckedaboutwith version of the Autechre we’ve come to know. Hell, ‘Iris was a pupil’ not only sounds like Boards of Canada, its title is even in English. I like it a great deal. It’s nice to compromise once in a while. It’s not like it’s going to storm the charts, but I can type this while listening and that’s a definite advantage.

If there was some sort of Golden Boot for productivity it might go to Acid Mothers Temple, the accumulation of whose output resembles some kind of worldwide scavenger hunt. Although their initial output is the domain of Japanese label PSF, the band has licensed albums far and wide. This time the band’s own AMT imprint is the label on which this impressive double live set has been released (in, of course, a limited edition of 1000, we’re told).

And it’s a doozy. Billed, with deference, to Yamamoto Seiichi and AMT it’s a sprawling beast of a thing, moving effortlessly through four 25 minute movements recorded in Nagoya in December 2007. Seiichi is the guitarist from Boredoms, a band not adverse to a bit of noise themselves.

There are two essential problems when approaching Acid Mothers on record. Happily neither applies here. The first was a tendency for Kawabata, the group’s leader/guitarist/guru, to mix all the low frequencies out. Like an inverse Sunn 0))) the tinniest of guitar frequencies are preferred in the mix to the bass and drums, which is a pity as the band’s bassist Tsuyama is both a masterful player in the style of Phil Lesh and a throat singer. So on many of the early releases their sound can be abrasive. The second is that for much of their output the squalling presence of Cotton Casino, their keyboard player, was very annoying. Since her departure, and with the exception of the 2008 tour with Pikachu from Aframpo, the band has been much more muscular.

I picked up through the excellent blog Nice Pooper Zine a recording of Kawabata doing ‘Dark Star‘ with the Leningrad Psychedelic Blues Machine, and it’s the closest I’ve heard to Giant Psychedelia. Throughout the music lies the epic Dead track, and although I’ve never really been one to see this band as channelling much more than the druggy philosophy of 1968ish Dead, the Garcia influence on Kawabata’s guitar is clear here.

It’s with the meandering, echo and reverb-laden guitar we begin, picking up to midtempo before another meltdown at 12:59; you’re almost expecting the ‘Dark Star’ motif, until a jazzier, peppy riff is taken up and we’re off again, with Tsuyama audibly enjoying himself.  Seiichi wails and Kawabata noodles until 20 mins in and there’s definitely a ‘Dark Star’ reference there as the band picks up an insistent beat behind. Then another meltdown into the recognisable ‘Pink Lady Lemonade‘ riff (AMT’s own signature) borrowing originally from PiL’s cyclical ‘Poptones‘ motif, filtered through every effects pedal Dave Gilmour ever used. Six mins of buildup at a faster rate than we’re used to, before it slows down to the more conventional pace and a cleaner sound emerges. Those of us who’ve seen them before are prepared for this to go on for some time, but about a minute and a half later the rest of the band kick in an it’s straight into a wigged-out expanse, double timing the riff and beginning a very noisy but still melodic development of the theme. From here it’s at its most recognisably Acid Mothers, coming gently back down to land.

The band then takes a while to find their feet a la Jazz Odyssey and it’s the least interesting thing here. We’re now at the third track, ‘Third Stone In’, and waiting in joyful hope for them to find where it is they’re going. They’re going back into ‘Pink Lady Lemonade’, so often the place they land when they’ve gone far from home, but here it takes a five minute meltdown (again) before now we’re back in the riff, this time double speed and held for about half a minute before things explode. At this stage Kawabata’s usually a blur of hands and hair but on this it sounds like he’s initially the more grounded one, Seiichi giving it tons of metal speed until the inevitable shift when Kawabata abandons the arching work and goes a bit mental himself. Eventually all that’s left are a couple of notes held on guitar and about a hundred stoned Japs cheering. End of Part One.

The second disc begins in a rather pedestrian jam.  ‘French Kitty Sunshine’ goes on for 15 mins, pretty but not terribly interesting. ‘Elecrric Hawks Blues’ picks up the pace but we’re on fairly safe ground here. Reminds me of ‘Ocean Size’ by Jane’s Addiction in parts. The final part, ‘LSD or No Love No Peace’  begins with a strum and then gets yelly, very garagey.  As it moves it becomes almost Who-like, except with two leads heading in separate directions, before a very ‘Hallogallo’ rhythm guitar chugs along in time for Kawabata’s final wigout. We’re in ‘Speed Guru’ mode now, and we don’t stop soloing (probably using the ceiling) right to the end.

It’s not the perfect document of Acid Mothers live; the second half may lack a little of the experimental wonder of the first disc, making up in intensity what it perhaps lacks in originality, but that’s always been the experience of seeing this band. This set is well-enough recorded to do the music justice and is well worth seeking out.

This Michael Mann-directed film, starring Johnny Depp and Christian Bale, purports to be historically accurate and I think that’s the biggest problem with it. Not that I think it would have been improved by a lightsabre battle or an hip-hop soundtrack; that’s a given. I think that directors like Mann and James Cameron let attention to detail sometimes get in the way of the story. Put Christian Bale in the mix and you’ve got big problems.

So it’s the story of serial escaper and womanizer John Dillinger (Depp, unsurprisingly pouty and reflective) and, to a lesser extent, of his pursuit by Melvin Purvis (Bale, unsurprisingly intense) during the 1930’s. It looks all art deco polish and Bugsy Malone Tommy gun, but it’s no fun. We get some set pieces and gunplay, some unnecessary roughness from the more psychotic of the bad guys (is there a sliding scale of honour among picaresques?) and the more gung-ho of G-men (Bale heroically rescues Johnny’s moll Billie (the divine Mme Cotillard) from an ass-whooping so she can cut a deal) and some chases. It’s based on a factual account of the birth of the FBI but I don’t care. This should be the stuff of legend. Nothing here is any more than a recreation of one or other headline from the papers of the day.

Two problems with this: The first is that it’s all been done: if you want heat then watch Heat and doing it again in period costume is not the same as coming up with something new; if you want the honour vs. turpitude thing I give you dePalma’s infinitely superior Untouchables. Mann has obvious loyalty to his subject matter and is a superbly kinetic director, but what happens when you turn to history is not necessarily great scripting. There are inevitable psychological motivations to guess at, events and characters to conflate. And the more you hide behind what actually happened, the more you’re passing up the opportunity to make this stuff even better than the real thing.

Look at the Coen Bros’ Miller’s Crossing. Public Enemies clearly owes a debt to this masterpiece, in atmosphere and even colour scheme, and Barry Sonnenfeld has every bit the attention to detail in the cinematography that Dante Spinotti has in Public Enemies. But the missing ingredient is absurdity. Constrained by these historically-derived characters when making what’s essentially a cops and robbers film, Mann can’t lend proceedings the sense of fun the Coens do so effortlessly by using fictionalised characters.  Millers’ Crossing has all the humour anyone would need to remove the dour, ponderous tone which besets most of this movie. As a result there is an oppressive tone to much of Public Enemies, a moral sword hanging over the plot and a resultant single dimension to the characterisation. I mean Jesus. Look at the title. How predictable and clichéd is that?

It fails the historical significance test passed by using Al Capone and Elliot Ness (but then making all sorts of shit up) in The Untouchables; it fails as a shooty film because all the gunfights take place in forests and dark streets. It even fails as drama: when anything significant is about to happen Eliot Goldenthal’s soundtrack (another debt to Miller’s Crossing) surges in a Significant way and—get this—we go to slow motion. Again and again. Telegraphing every key moment in this way has the effect of saying “You all watching? The next historically-significant flashpoint is coming”. Are we supposed to recognise, rather than be surprised? Should we now not bother with plot twists? Everybody dies, right? I mean, it was eighty years ago.

The end bit, where an intertitle (that’s how old fashioned this technique is: we don’t have a more modern term for it except ‘shit exposition’) tells us that Billie lived on but that Christian Bale’s character killed himself, or as put in the text “died by his own hand” (how’s that for ponderous?) in1960 points out the final flaw in this disappointing film. We never get anything other than moral certainty from Bale, anything more than a straight-laced man played by an actor who in all probability went around in 1930’s underwear for the duration of the set and made his own Trilby from found remnants in an abandoned Chicago haberdashery. His conflict was surely worth investigating: Dillinger lies dead, as anyone who knows anything about this stuff knows. And by the time Dillinger lies dead, then like Bagpuss, all his friends have died too. We knew that. But the story of the lawmaker who couldn’t live past the events of his life? Now there’s a story. We’d have to watch Christian Bale at his most borderline-postal to get it, but that’s a price I might be more willing to pay than having to sit through yet another version of 1930’s Prohibition-era gangster genre work.