Archive for March, 2008
Chapter 4 of “City of Pillars” is now live!
March 31st, 2008
For those of you who follow this blog but may not be aware of my grand fictional exercise in blatantly ripping off H. P. Lovecraft, Footnotes to the Human Species, please hop on over there and check out my novella “City of Pillars,” the fourth chapter of which has just gone live! If you enjoy my nonfiction writing, there’s every chance you might dig my fiction as well—but do be aware, however, that my fiction is relentlessly depressing, frequently so violent it would make dear little Alex of A Clockwork Orange shrink in fear, and always, and I do mean always, very vicious and despairing. Here’s a little sample to try out before jumping in headfirst:
The only way I knew we’d made it out onto the 107th floor was that there was noise all around me again and the heat and smoke were a little less horrible. I opened my eyes and Raj was there, asking me, “Where’s Ray? What happened to Ray?”
“He let go,” I choked, “But he was right behind me. Hasn’t he come up yet?”
There were three men pushing the stairwell door shut but Raj threw himself into the gap shouting, “No, not yet—there’s still someone in there!” and the guys started arguing with him, telling him they had to shut the door or they’d all suffocate and they were pulling him, trying to get pull him back in so they could shut the door when Raj said, “Stop it, stop it—I got him!”
And then Raj just…vanished. It was like he was yanked into the stairwell.
[Cressida pauses again to take a bottle of pills out of her purse. She takes two of them—Klonopin, to help control her anxiety—then resumes with a feverish urgency, clearly desperate to tell the rest of the story and be done with it.]
One of the doormen went in after him. I heard the man scream, but it was cut off almost instantly. The last two guys on the door were calling him—“Bob! Bob, what happened?! BOB!”—and then the worms came through the door.
[“Worms?” I ask.]
They looked like worms—that’s how I keep seeing them. Like earthworms, but big and purple, big as firehoses. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing: two of the things whipped out of the smoke and wrapped around the man closest to the doorway and he didn’t even have time to say a single thing—he was gone. They’d pulled him into the smoke. “Close the goddamned door!” somebody shrieked and then I was throwing myself at the door with a bunch of terrified people—people who must’ve seen the same thing I did—and the heavy emergency exit door slammed shut. I had my hands on the door and felt something hammering against the other side. Hammering. The door was jumping beneath our hands and everyone was saying, “Block the door, block the door.” I was shoved aside and two boys in black-and-white waiters’ uniforms came through the smoke carrying a metal desk. They threw it up against the door but the…the worms on the other side were still pounding—pounding so hard it sounded like someone was throwing bricks at the door. People were standing on each side of the desk holding the door shut while the waiters and some others went back and forth dragging dining tables and chairs behind them, heaping them up in front of the door. “Get out of here if you ain’t helping,” someone said to me, so I just…wandered away into the crowd.
So there you go! Intrigued? You know what to do.
WordPress 2.5
March 31st, 2008
I just updated all of my blogs to WordPress 2.5 today, and I must say that I am very impressed with the new functionality and the “backstage controls’” new look.
WordPress 2.5, much like Renoise 1.9, does not look or act like merely an incremental upgrade. The administrative functions have a whole new theme and have been completely redesigned and reordered. I’ve already come across several examples of people online bitching that the WordPress developers moved too many things around and made it difficult for some users to find certain functions…but I completely familiarized with the new Dashboard layout in less than two minutes. I find the new interface remarkably intuitive, more powerful, and elegant.
Upgrading was simple enough, if a bit time-consuming (removing files and uploading new versions took about ten minutes per blog), but I’ve dealt with worse. A number of plugins had to be updated in order to ensure that they work the same with the new version of WordPress, but awesomely enough, WordPress now has built-in plugin upgrading: just click “Install new version” and BING! WP downloads and installs the revised plugin entirely on its own. Once the plugins were updated, however, they all worked just as well as they did in previous versions.
All in all, WordPress 2.5 is a much more significant upgrade than its .5 version number would indicate. Much of the processes remain the same, but so much new functionality and design options have been added that it feels as though I’m writing this on WordPress 3.0.
Unlike the many smaller past incremental upgrades (which were released primarily to fix security problems in WordPress’ PHP coding), 2.5 really is an upgrade: a fresh new Testarossa with a familiar, but supercharged, engine underneath the hood. And, as always, it’s a free sports car that costs less than pennies a day to fuel. Your mileage may vary, but so far I’ve been speeding along very happily here.
Waiting to Exhale: Taja Sevelle, Toys of Vanity
March 21st, 2008
Even though I’ve been a major Prince fan since I first heard 1999 when I was but wee, and despite the fact that I have been a major funk/disco/dance-music fan forever, I never heard of Taja Sevelle until I first saw the video for “I & I,” the lead single from her 1997 album, Toys of Vanity.
The video for “I & I” was a strange, frequently eerie mixture of paranoid, schizophrenic imagery that nonetheless had a soft and very sensual aspect that matched not only the sound of the song it was meant to illustrate but also the sound of the entire Toys of Vanity album. In the video, Taja Sevelle looks like a sexy little waif version of Suzanne Vega, and the lyrics to “I & I” have a certain Vega-esque poetry and introspective quality as well—but Taja Sevelle’s songwriting is a good bit…weirder than Vega, and her sound is entirely her own: a mixture of trip-hop and straightforward R&B that fits her lyrical content very well.
So who would’ve ever thought that she was discovered by Prince in the late ’80s and became known for the major danceclub hit “Love Is Contagious”?
“Love is Contagious” is a great dance song, with a very obvious Prince/Sheila-E kind of feel to it—but, honestly, it’s quite generic: it sounds like virtually every other dance hit of the late ’80s (anything and everything by Expose comes immediately to mind), and in the video, Taja Sevelle looks almost exactly like Jennifer Beals in Flashdance (a painfully obvious allusion). Sevelle’s first and second albums contained music all of this nature: good, very listenable, but ultimately unexceptional ’80s dance and early-’90s funk/R&B (very much in the style of Bel Biv DeVoe and Cameo) that never really give her a chance to really use her voice to its fullest potential.
Sevelle really hits her stride with Toys of Vanity in 1997, however. Ten years after her big breakthrough hit, Sevelle finally puts forth an album that is entirely hers, in which the music and the lyrics and her soulful voice all come together into a seamless whole. The album is usually described as R&B and appears in that section of the record stores, but this is 100% a trip-hop album, full of slinky downtempo beats, booming basslines, cold silky synths, and fuzzy guitars. It sounds a lot like a combination of Morcheeba and Suzanne Vega.
I keep bringing up Suzanne Vega’s name because it’s very obvious that the songs on Toys of Vanity—indeed, the entire concept of the album—clearly takes its inspiration from Suzanne Vega’s songwriting and, to a certain degree, to the slightly-industrialized sound of Vega’s 99.9F°. Sevelle isn’t just ripping off Suzanne Vega, though: she’s taken the lyrical approach of Vega and aptly adapted it to her own style, which is a good thing, because after the light sugary confections of Taja Sevelle and Fountains Free, this more serious side of Taja Sevelle serves her much better.
The songs are almost universally awesome—starting with “I & I”, which sets the tone for most of the album. The second track, “Us” turns from self-criticism to criticism of everyone, including Sevelle herself, and features a beat straight out of Massive Attack and phased-out, echoey guitars that would’ve made Portishead proud (back when they were actually good). Sevelle really stretches her voice on this track, too, swinging across three whole octaves, but not in a self-indulgent, Mariah-Carey-esque fashion: the verses are delivered in her usual light, airy tone but for the choruses she drops to a lower register and really lets the full strength of her voice come forth.
My favorite track on the album is the fourth, “A Lot Like You”, which opens sounding like it’s going to be a throw-back to her earlier albums, until the buttery strings and the thumping, hip-hop beat kicks in and carries the track to greater heights. This is a straightforward R&B song, but there’s a certain darkness to the lyrics that really comes through the lush instrumentation to raise your hackles. There is a certain darkness to all of the tracks on this album which stains even the more R&B-inflected songs with a very trip-hopping chilliness.
The only song on the album that doesn’t fit is the sappy ballad “Fleet of Angels”, which really does sound like it should’ve been on one of Sevelle’s earlier albums. It’s very saccharine, sounding almost like a bad attempt at capturing the Carpenters’ sweetness. Not even the rather interesting beat programming can save the song from sounding like schmaltz—but that’s OK: the rest of the album is more than good enough, especially considering that the track following “Fleet of Angels” is the title track, “Toys of Vanity”, which begins with the rather spooky line, “Don’t you remember being born? I thought everyone remembered being born….”
The song is a clear indictment of materialism, with Sevelle decrying her need for the “toys of vanity” that we surround ourselves with to give our lives a shallow sense of meaning. However, the song is not a one-sided refutation of materialism: Sevelle admits that “sometimes I need my toys of vanity / that’s when I’m holding back my pain” because they provide a buffer of protection from the real world, even though that insulation isn’t always a good thing.
All in all, this is a tragically overlooked album that few seem to be familiar with. It was released with very little fanfare, and no doubt came as a shock to fans of Sevelle’s earlier work—if any of those fans still remembered her. Pop-R&B and dance fans, after all, have an extremely short attention span, and Sevelle’s first two albums are both short-term albums: effervescent snacks that barely leave an aftertaste on the palate after they’ve faded from memory. Not so with Toys of Vanity. When I first heard the album back in the late 1990s, I was firmly ensconced in my “only industrial music is worth listening to” phase because so much ’90s music sucked beyond belief. Toys of Vanity was like a splash of cold water in the face. It woke me up and has remained in my mind for over ten years now because it’s just so memorable.
Taja Sevelle’s very mature, very interesting and thoughtful Toys of Vanity is not a pop doughnut, easily eaten and forgotten, but a feast of strange flavors that linger and linger. I highly recommend this album to all trip-hop fans and fans of good, soulful R&B: It’s the real deal, and doesn’t deserve to be languishing in the .99¢ bins at the Record Exchange.
ADDENDUM: Also look for Sevelle’s bizarre little house cover of “Sympathy for the Devil”. It’s a total booty-shakin’ number.
Technorati Tags: taja sevelle,toys of vanity,music,music review
The Contented Atheist
March 19th, 2008
Does believing in a god, or in any supernatural system of belief (that is, a “religion”), lead to a more contented, happier life? BBC News recently reported that, according to a study conducted by Professor Andrew Clark from the Paris School of Economics and Dr. Orsolya Lelkes from the European Centre for Social Welfare Policy and Research—pause for breath—yes, “Religious people are better able to cope with shocks such as losing a job or divorce,” and that “religion could offer a ‘buffer’ which protected from life’s disappointments.”
As noted in the BBC article, this is not the first study linking religion with happiness or contentment, and that many psychologists recognize “some factor in either belief, or its observance, offering benefits.”
Professor Clark qualifies his conclusions, however, by nothing that “the nature of the surveys used [to collect the data for the study] meant that undetected factors, perhaps in the lifestyle or upbringing of religious people, such as stable family life and relationships, could be the cause of this increased satisfaction” (emphasis added).
Later in the article, Terry Sanderson of the National Secular Society describes Clark’s and Lelkes’ conclusions as “meaningless,” stating that
Non-believers can’t just turn on a faith in order to be happy. If you find religious claims incredible, then you won’t believe them, whatever the supposed rewards in terms of personal fulfilment.
Happiness is an elusive concept, anyway - I find listening to classical music blissful and watching football repulsive.
Other people feel exactly the opposite. In the end, it comes down to the individual and, to an extent, their genetic predispositions.
I quote Sanderson at length because, oddly enough, considering my own hardcore atheist stance, I find his denunciation of the study’s content as being rather ineffective—or, at least, not very thorough.
As Clark has noted, it’s possible that the supposed “greater contentment” of religious believers could stem from lifestyle and upbringing rather than belief itself, and this I believe to be the core truth of his surveys’ data.
Amongst friends and acquaintances, I’ve observed a wide range of belief, from atheists such as myself to Buddhists*, Catholics, and even a few fundamentalist Christians (though I tend not to associate with them very much for obvious reasons)—and I’ve asked these folks a number of times how important their beliefs are to their lives: that is, how much those beliefs impact their daily activities, happiness, and so forth. I’ve received an equally wide range of answers, from “Since becoming Buddhist I’ve found myself more at peace with the ups and downs of life than ever before” to “I grew up miserable in a staunch Catholic family and now that I’m an atheist I feel much less neurotic.” One thing I have noticed in every case, however, is that a person’s beliefs only impact certain qualities of their lives, and it is these measurable, perfectly secular lifestyle choices that affect an individual’s happiness more than the beliefs that inspire them. Belief in a religion may well be the justification for certain life choices, but ultimately it’s the choices which have the greatest effect, not the beliefs.
For example, consider a family of typical American “born-again” (fundamentalist) Christians. The belief system of this family is far from what I would consider comforting, what with its everpresent threat of Satanic evil, apocalyptic future prophecies, and regressive cultural prohibitions. However, believers in this particular form of Christianity tend to be very family-oriented, as the family is, indeed, central to their beliefs. They are also very community-oriented, their churches serving as a meeting place and means for fellowship amongst folks with similar beliefs. Plus, fundamentalist churches provide clear, visible social structure for their adherents.
As social apes, human beings are happiest in group situations. We are biologically predisposed to be close to our parents and to our children. Furthermore, we like congregating in groups with other likeminded people—especially when one or more of those people are “in charge,” and can be trusted to do the lion’s share of thinking and take on the responsibility thereof in the group. We are, after all, hierarchical creatures: every family has a “family head” (be it Mom or Dad), every group of friends a sort of “leader,” and every company a “boss” or directorship. Most humans find themselves more comfortable in these kinds of situations, surrounded by their fellows, and given direction.
I grew up Catholic, and to this day I have fond memories of going to church on Sunday to hang out with the other parishioners and their kids. I liked the sense of community St. Procopius Roman Catholic Church provided. To this day, I occasionally go to Mass there, simply to feel like I’m part of a sort-of “extended family.” Metaphors comparing Christian churches of all denominations to families or social structures are very common and very apropos.
Even as a child of ten years, I had begun to question the existence of the “god” that Father McCullough and my CCD teachers talked about—and by the time I was fourteen, I’d made the breakthrough that such a god did not, indeed could not, exist. But did this realization make me suddenly miserable? Did I feel as though the rug were pulled out from under me?
No. Not one bit.
I still had my family. None of us ever talked about religion very much, so when I “came out” it wasn’t a big deal at all. It certainly didn’t mean that my mother no longer drove me to school everyday, or that my grandfather stopped telling me stories of his old mining days.
Today, I have very little family left—but I have many friends. Friends of all religious and non-religious orientations. My disbelief in the existence of a god has nothing at all to do with my friendships. When I acknowledged the inexistence of god as a teenager, my family life did not change.** My school life did not change.
Only when a person’s lifestyle is entirely predicated upon a certain set of beliefs can the loss of those beliefs cause upset and disharmony. This certainly does happen, but it’s nowhere near as common as theists would like the world to believe. Every year, many people become atheists without finding any reason to change their morality, family lives, or any such social structures—because that’s what these structures ultimately are: social interactions that can be inspired or originally based upon a certain belief, but can survive without the belief’s support.
Religion is no more likely to make a person happy as atheism is to make a person miserable. Why? Because though our beliefs may drive or encourage/discourage certain aspects of our lives, other aspects of our lives—those which make our lives happy or miserable—have nothing at all to do with our beliefs. For example, how many of us are miserable at our jobs because of our religious beliefs? Unless you’re a fundamentalist Christian working in an abortion clinic, I don’t think many will answer that question affirmatively. How many of us are happier at our jobs because of our beliefs? Probably more than are unhappy, simply because it makes more sense for one to work a job complementary to, or at least not antagonistic to, one’s beliefs. No fundamentalist Christian would ever work at an abortion clinic, after all, but they probably would work for a non-profit social outreach organization that assists young mothers with medical aid.
Thus, Terry Sanderson’s above remarks do make sense, but not in a particularly definitive way. In the end, happiness does come down to the individual, yes, but also to the persons that surround that individual.
As an atheist utterly alone in the world, I would be miserable. But I’m circled by a vast number of people who support me and whom I, in turn, support. Some of us share the same beliefs, some of us don’t. But we do share that common human need for companionship and fellowship. And no religion (or non-religion) can claim a monopoly on that.
Footnotes:
*Personally, I do not believe Buddhism to be a religion at all, but more a philosophy of living, since worship or acknowledgement of a god or gods is not a central tenet to Buddhism. However, Buddhism is similar enough in certain fashions to actual supernatural religions for me to include it in this essay without fear of contradiction.
**Sadly, though, for some people, coming out as an atheist (or as a member of any religion other than the one “established” in one’s family or circle of friends) can have disastrous consequences. But these disastrous consequences have less to do with the beliefs involved than it does with the all-too-human urge that many still feel to ostracize those who do not agree with them. Religious belief or non-belief is not the only source of ostracism after all: race and ethnicity are probably more popular than even religion.
Technorati Tags: atheism,religion,bbc,health,happiness,sociology,science,opinion
Book Review: Jonathan Barnes’ The Somnambulist
March 13th, 2008
Steampunk is The New Big Thing. But, like most literary subgenres (this one a subgenre of fantasy, science-fiction, and historical fiction), it’s not that easy to define. Or, rather, its definition is very open to interpretation. Certainly William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine is an obvious example of steampunk; the novel is, in fact, one of the founding documents of the form. Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age counts as well…yet, so does China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station—and those two novels couldn’t possibly be more different. In fact, the term “steampunk” is being applied rather willy-nilly these days to any literary work that has a Victorian or mock-Victorian influence/style/setting, or some form of anachronistic technology in it.
Jonathan
Barnes’ The Somnambulist matches this loose definition well, but only in one single aspect: its conclusion—of which I shan’t say any more than that it definitely contains a very steampunky sort of anachronistic technological element. The remainder of the novel, however, is something that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and H. P. Lovecraft could’ve written together (had they actually known one another, as in Thomas Wheeler’s The Arcanum) and falls more into the “Victorian fantasy” or “Neo-Victorian” novel classification. Nonetheless, it’s a smashing good read and an excellent example of how effectively an author can combine both first-person and third-person narration to “[t]ell all the Truth but tell it slant.”
The novel may be named The Somnambulist, but the Somnambulist himself is but a secondary character, a sort of mysterious, mute shadow to true protagonist Edward Moon, a stage magician-cum-investigator now, in 1901, fallen on rather hard times. The popularity of Moon’s magical performances (in which his sidekick, the Somnambulist, a golem-like figure whose origins and nature are completely mysterious, features prominently) at his own Theatre of Marvels has been waning for years, and since his disastrous involvement in “that dreadful business in Clapham,” he hasn’t been getting many calls for assistance from the Yard. Yet he eventually finds himself called in to investigate the strange murder of one Cyril Honeyman, a ham actor….
Needless to say, the seemingly random—and very weird—murder of Honeyman eventually leads Moon and his various compatriots into a labyrinthine mystery involving mutated Human Flies, specialist brothels full of sideshow freak prostitutes (most especially a bearded lady named Mina with a vestigial third arm dangling between her breasts), a company called Love, Love, Love, and Love, a strange subterranean world, and the legacy of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
As in any typical Victorian-esque novel (and The Somnambulist has a very distinctly Dickensian cast to it), along the way, the reader is introduced to a variety of eccentric characters, such as:
- the albino Mr. Skimpole and the hideously scarred Dedlock, administrators and agents for the mysterious (yes, that word is bandied about a lot in this review, because this novel is absolutely saturated in their inexplicable and strange) Directorate, a governmental “black project” designed to stop “eccentric” threats to the city of London;
- a certain ugly Mr. Thomas Cribb, who apparently lives backwards in time like Merlin and is, in some fashion, the genius loci of the City of London;
- the irrepressibly good-natured Detective Merryweather, the counter to gloomy Mr. Moon;
- Barabbas, a loathsome, but wise, toad-like murderer—once connected with Moon and his theatrical act—awaiting execution in the filthy, lightless depths of Newgate Prison;
- Mr. Moon’s dedicated busybody housekeeper Miss Grossmith and her odd, jug-eared beaux Arthur Barge;
- Moon’s sister Charlotte, who goes from busting fraudulent psychics for the city’s Committee of Vigilance to penetrating an organization a thousand times more dangerous than shystering table-tappers;
- the horrifying duo of Boon and Hawker, unstoppable, bloodthirsty supernatural assassins who dress in schoolboy uniforms;
- a gaggle of false Chinamen;
- and the ancient Archivist, a wizened old witch who manages the Stacks, a limitless source of information for the handful of initiates permitted access.
Most mysterious of all is the identity of the narrator, the person telling the story of all these disparate characters and how they are all eventually drawn together to stop a terrifying menace from beneath the streets of London. Is it The Somnambulist? Is it someone completely unknown? A great part of the mystery revolves around Our Humble Narrator’s identity, and author Barnes does a spectacular job of weaving that mystery into all the many other mysteries swirling around London like a plague of psychic nightmares a la Mieville’s slake-moth-borne plague of nightmares in Perdido Street Station.
Many readers may find this novel sloppy and overly indeterminate. Though the Big Mystery of what is threatening Mother London is, of course, resolved, very little else is. Who or what is The Somnambulist? Who or what are the Proctors, Boon and Hawker? What happened at Clapham in Moon’s past, and how was Barabbas and Charlotte involved? Who, indeed, are the Directorate and what are their function in protecting the city? Well…none of this is ever revealed.
Could it be because the narrator is more than just your average unreliable narrator, but a complete lunatic?
Could it be that Barnes is planning a sequel that will address these loose ends?
Or could it be that Barnes is simply playing the Lovecraftian game of atmospherics: leaving certain things unexplained in order to maximize the unsettling, unknowable nature of certain events and characters? I believe that he is both setting himself up for a sequel but also playing against popular conceptions of Victorian mysteries, in which the valiant Investigator (be in Edward Moon or Sherlock Holmes) solves everything with aplomb and diamond-hard deductive logic.
It often seems that Barnes is reveling in all the many forms of “low” fiction popular amongst everyday readers in the first decade of the 20th Century. There are elements of detective fiction, yes, but also elements of cheap, sensational penny dreadfuls, weird fiction, and ghost stories. All of this swirled together produces an engaging, quickly-escalating narrative in which everyone is, at some point another, suspect or revealed to be yet another strange and inexplicable figure. The Somnambulist is a neo-Victorian, pseudo-steampunk frappe made by blending elements from a wide range of genres, subgenres, and subsubgenres together into a tasty, twisted whole that will keep many readers chained to the pages while others stumble away in righteous indignation and confusion as they find their expectations torn to shred and left scattered, meaninglessly, on the cobblestones.
I highly recommend this novel to readers with a taste for the weird and the outre. This is an example of that kind of steampunk/New Weird Fiction (another new subgenre that’s as elusive to pin down as steampunk) that will greatly appeal to readers of China Mieville, Steph Swainston, and even Neil Gaiman—though Gaiman fans, do be warned: there is none of Gaiman’s cliched plot standards or pre-determined conclusions here. Gaiman aficionados looking for a good story with a guaranteed ending* will be severely muddled by the end of The Somnambulist…but those of us who like our fiction atmospheric, allusive, elusive, and beyond the middling strange will find The Somnambulist a wonderful, surprising blast from the past.
Footnotes:
*I’ve always found Gaiman’s fiction to be more about the telling than the story: his plots are always very cliched, constructed from well-known bits of old fairytales, folktales, and assorted other archetypal tropes, and their conclusions are telegraphed from Page One—you always know how a Neil Gaiman piece is going to end from the conclusion of its first chapter. However, Gaiman’s skill lies in making the journey to that foregone conclusion so very enjoyable by employing narrative tricks and storytelling skills that manage to hold onto the reader’s attention despite the tried-and-true subjects of his stories.
Technorati Tags: jonathan barnes,the somnambulist,review,steampunk,new weird,literary review,literary analysis,neo-victorian,victorian,london,england,mystery
Portishead’s Third Album = Uneven, Rather Mediocre
March 9th, 2008
Portishead’s third studio album, unimaginatively titled Third, has been a long time coming. Ten years have passed since their last studio album, and most folks assumed the trio of Geoff Barrow, Beth Gibbons, and Adrian Utley were defunct, having released two massively popular and extremely influential albums and a very impressive live album featuring a 35-piece orchestra. I for one assumed they were kaput, especially when Beth Gibbons released her stunningly mediocre (and mostly ignored) solo album in 2002.
Rumors began circulating last year, though, that Portishead were back in the studio recording new material…and I was certainly excited. The promise of new music featuring the band’s trademark reverbed spy-thriller guitars, monstrous beats, and Beth Gibbons’ thin, wasted vocals was practically enough to make me twitch with excitement. So when I had the chanced to come across a pre-release copy of the album this week, I pounced on the opportunity and fairly jammed it into my CD player, ready to drown myself in their deep, shivery depths.
But…ummm, that didn’t exactly happen.
The album’s first track, “Silence,” opens with a very lo-fi sample of somebody babbling in what might be Portuguese, followed by a surprisingly fast, and again, very lo-fi, beat loop that honestly sounds like it was taken from an old mixtape Barrow found under the seat of his car one day. I had a sudden bad feeling. Although I really liked their second, self-titled album, I felt that the vinyl-crackle that saturated the entire album was, at times, annoying—but it did not in any way harm the quality of the songwriting or the melodies and beats. There was something too lo-fi about the beat that begins “Silence,” and I immediately began hoping that this would prove to be just an introduction and that the real beats would kick in soon. Well, they don’t. Some thin, reedy strings and soft, almost muddied guitar washes creep in eventually, sounding far too My Bloody Valentine-ish for my tastes, and then—it all stops, and the vocals begin. Beth Gibbons sounds like she’s practically falling asleep at the mic.
This is what Portishead’s have been waiting ten years for? Ummmm. Okay.
Fortunately, the second track, “Hunter,” brings back the bass-heavy beats and a more recognizable, interesting song structure, with a melody just as strong as any “Wandering Star” or “All Mine”—but just as the song begins to really pick up steam…it fades out, to be followed by the utterly tedious “Nylon Smile” with another muffled, almost featureless tribal beat and some backwards guitar that sounds like it was recorded in closet.
And this is how the entire album is: a strange mishmash of familiar Portishead brilliance mixed with moments of absolutely abysmal production. Gibbons’ vocals, other than on the first song, are uniformly strong, and when Utley’s guitar-work is allowed to surface, it really shines—though mostly gone are the ‘verbed-out James-Bond tones that made me so fond of the band’s sound. There are a number of very, very good songs on here, namely the extremely soft and mournful “The Rip,” “We Carry On,” and my favorite track, “Magic Doors.” But there are also gross wastes of recording time like “Deep Water,” which is nothing by Gibbons’ voice, some ukele strumming, and some of the absolute worst vocoding effects I have ever heard on an album. And, for some reason, all of the best songs have annoying fade-out endings…which just says to me, “We don’t know where else to go with this song so let’s just fade it out and call it done.”
All in all, Portishead’s Third is an extremely uneven album that is an obvious departure from their past stuff—which can be a good thing at times, yes…but definitely is not in this case. Portishead is known to be one of the founders of trip-hop…and there’s very little evidence of trip-hop on their album. It’s more experimental than any of their previous work, and for them, experimentalism just is not a Good Thing. It makes the album sound thrown-together, stitched up from various outtakes and extra tracks they’ve had lying around half-done for the past decade. Skinny Puppy put out The Greater Wrong of the Right after having been away for a decade, and they produced an album that was 100% tight, every single track meshing perfectly with the track before it, all tied together with a common production value and design sensibility. You don’t get that with this Portishead album. It really does sound like a collection of random old half-finished tracks that Gibbons’ dubbed some lyrics over.
I won’t say it’s a particularly bad album—the songs that are really good on it are really good—but the sheer unevenness of the album and the undone quality of it make it a rather mediocre comeback. After ten years, Third sounds more like a B-sides and demos retrospective than an actual album
Technorati Tags: portishead,third,music,review,trip-hop
Somewhat Haunted: Nine Inch Nails’ New Album, Ghosts I-IV
March 3rd, 2008
In a single year’s time, Trent Reznor went from being that guy who wrote all those goofy industrial rock songs about how miserable he was to being the prophet of the New Age of Musical Innovation. Not only did he remake his musical image entirely with the ice-cold political dystopianism of Year Zero (Amazon link), he also ditched his record company with a fond single-finger salute to the Industry, produced Saul Williams’ brilliant industrial hip-hop record The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust, opened up all tracks from Year Zero for remixing by fans and, on top of all that, began experimenting with alternate modes of delivering music to fans.
This week, Mr. Reznor delivered another independent album via the web: Ghosts I-IV (Amazon link, which I’d advise you use for now, as nin.com’s server is taking a beating now). The album is a collection of 36—yes, thirty-six—short instrumentals and is available in a wiiiiiiiiide spectrum of formats from NIN.com. For instance, for $5 you can download all 36 tracks in a variety of digital formats (even FLAC and Apple’s lossless format, for the fifteen-or-so people in the world who care) plus a 40-page PDF, for $10 you get the same plus a wide variety of digital extras as well as the two-CD set that will be released on April 8. There are even greater options, too, including a $300 limited edition signed by Trent Reznor himzelf!
I purchased the album last night from Amazon.com, as NIN’s server was being battered something fiercely by people queuing up by the tens of thousands to grab the new stuff. I have yet to see the 40-page PDF document or any of the extras, so please be aware, this may have colored my review somewhat, as all I’ve heard so far are the 36 tracks; if there is any visual or ancillary material that complements it, I don’t have that so far. I’ve just ordered the $10 option, so hopefully I’ll have all that soon. But right now, this is just a review of the music and only the music.
As a writer of all-instrumental music myself, I am very familiar with a special problem inherent in any all-instrumental album: how do you keep the album from becoming boring? After all, most people are used to music with voices and lyrics these days—and even aficionados of classical music desire to hear a human voice raised up in praiseful tune every now and again, as well. The easiest, and most commonly-accepted means of keeping instrumental albums lively (outside of ambient music productions) is to vary the songs. Either feature songs with lots of internal dynamics (a la many a prog-rock masterpiece) or feature numerous shorter works. Ghosts I-IV follows the latter strategy, providing listeners with a large selection of tracks, the longest of which is a few seconds shy of six minutes, with the remainder falling in the two- to three-minute rage.
And the songs do vary. The first few tracks (all of which are simply named “1 Ghosts I”, “18 Ghosts II”, and such) are extremely minimalistic piano-and-feedback ambient compositions, whereas the last few tracks are propulsive rock-and-roll spasms or industrial/techno devices. Even the latter tracks, however, are fairly minimalistic—something I’ve noticed about Trent’s new music starting with Year Zero. And that’s where the problem lies.
This is background music, folks. This is incidental music for silent mind-movies. None of the tracks feature particularly catchy hooks that will snag your attention and drag the music from the back to the foreground. You may occasionally find yourself bopping along to a throbbing beat and caught offguard by a sudden, squealing guitar solo…but for the most part, the music is understated and unobtrusive. In this fashion, it is a fine example of ambient music in the vein of Brian Eno’s Music for Airports. You can easily put this music on and zone out to it while writing or snoozing.
The tracks are all impeccably recorded. The low end booms beautifully (if sporadically), the mids are strong but not overly heavy, and the highs are crisp and gritty. There are some moments of funkiness, but for the most part, the album is either nearly-naked ambience or grimy industrial.
And therein lies the problem. There isn’t any real texture to the tracks. The album begins almost exclusively ambient and slowly builds, track by track, toward the harder, industrialized conclusion. The ascent is so gradual it’s unnoticeable. The lack of melodic hooks, lyrics, or other such “keynote” qualities that usually attract a person’s mind when listening to music aren’t there, either. In the end, despite the fact that many of the tracks are exquisite little gems, the album is…rather dull.
As I’ve been writing this, nineteen tracks have played, spanning the tracks marked “Ghosts III” and “Ghosts IV”, and I did not notice any sort of transition whatsoever. In fact, I don’t even remember what I’ve just heard. It all just sailed along in the background like…like a ghost—are barely-felt chill brushing across my neck, flowing in one ear and out the other while barely twanging a neuron anywhere in between. None of the four “Ghosts” movements have any unique character to them: “Ghosts I” is mostly ambient, but has some gritty moments as well that just don’t fit; “Ghosts IV” sounds like a bunch of vocal-less NIN outtakes, but doesn’t have any cohesive sonic, instrumental, melodic, or sample-based unity.
I could imagine a number of these songs with vocals. Then they would no doubt prove very interesting! But lacking any sort of real connection to one another, the album sounds like a slowly-building collection of unfinished tracks from Year Zero or pieces assembled from throw-away basslines, beats, and piano tracks that should’ve been openers to real songs, bridges in real songs, and codas to real songs.
Simply put, as a collection of instrumentals, this is a rather dull collection. If you listen to the individual tracks sparingly, then you’ll be able to appreciate them a little better…but as a seamless whole? They blur together into a hazy gray line between dark and bright. In other words, they turn into the audial equivalent of the album cover.
I couldn’t imagine Trent following up Year Zero with another masterpiece, but he’s trying something totally different with Ghosts I-IV, and I really appreciate that. I also appreciate his gusto to explore the distribution possibilities of the Internet, and I highly applaud him for licensing Ghosts under Creative Commons. Something tells me you’ll find a Ghost or two slipping through the backgrounds of a couple Nyarlathotep tracks soon. Unfortunately, the music as a whole is just a little too instrumental—it becomes a nigh-featureless wash of sound with nary a surprising crackle or a sample or any kind of major tempo change or…hell, anything to really engage the listener.
That said, it is a very good album to fall asleep to!
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