Kylie Minogue

Aphrodite

Capitol, July 2010

Buy it from Amazon.com

“Nice. Nice. Not thrilling…but nice.”–Emperor Nero, History of the World Part I

Right around the turn of the millennium, I learned to love pop. David Bowie started it: If there’s one thing I learned from my sudden fixation on his chameleonic career, with its endless cycle of absorbing influences, incorporating them into his work, and confidently putting them aside for the latest thing that fascinates him, it’s never to feel guilty about pleasure. Electroclash continued it: Now I was learning that the New Wave sounds my Bowie fandom eventually led me to reevaluate and love could still be explored, exploited, and expanded upon by contemporary acts. And when I picked up my copy of Kylie’s breakthrough record Fever–the first full-fledged, no-bull pop record I’d gotten since middle school, after years spent reflexively defining myself against the mainstream–my journey was complete.

To be fair, Kylie made it very, very easy. The music she was making on that album really wasn’t a world away from either the electroclash that was its contemporary or the “electronica” I’d spent the previous half-decade-plus immersed in. But now all those icy electro elements and thumpy beats were being funneled into pure sexy joyful hookmongering of the most irresistible sort. To call Fever‘s two astonishing singles “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” and “Love at First Sight” Kylie’s “One More Time” and “Digital Love” is to pay Daft Punk a compliment as much as the other way around. Perhaps the greatest testament to the strength of Kylie and her collaborators’ songcraft on that record is that the two most ubiquitous pop songs of 2010, Ke$ha’s “TiK ToK” and Katy Perry’s “California Gurls,” both crib the pre-chorus melody from “Love at First Sight” for their choruses. Strategically singing “And everything went from wrong to right…” etc. etc. at the appropriate moments in each song is probably the only thing that’s kept me from tearing my car radio out with my bare hands over the past couple months.

Since then Kylie’s reign as the queen of the sexy, tiny blonde pop princesses to whom rock nerds like me turn when they wanna get down has gone on more or less uninterrupted, cancer, double-live/remix albums, and Robyn notwithstanding. It certainly helped that Fever‘s follow-up, 2003’s Body Language, was arguably even better. A little bit slower, a little bit funkier, a lot more textured, and at times downright odd–I still don’t know how to describe the weird, wonderful in-and-out hook of “Still Standing,” while I’m reasonably sure “Sweet Music” is a love song about Michael Hutchence’s ghost–it shimmered and twitched its way across a variety of pop subgenres but still felt like the unified product of an artist determined to make everything sound interesting. 2007’s X wasn’t as much of a knockout as its predecessors: You could blame maybe its opening track/lead single, the lackluster Goldfrapp cabaret pastiche “Two Hearts,” or maybe the flagrant diminished return to the “Love at First Sight” well that was “Wow,” or maybe even the weird sequencing that threw things off toward the end of the record with the Britneyish “Nu-Di-Ty.” But even so, there’s some real balls-to-the-wall electro-disco going down on there, from the roller-rink glide of “Speakerphone” to the Moroderisms of “The One,” and it certainly works as an anthology of ear-catching individual songs.

So what does it say that I had to listen to Aphrodite three, four, five times before it made enough of an impression on me for me to feel up to writing about it at all? Once again you can blame a below-par opening track/lead single, in this case the blandly four-on-the-floor anthem-by-numbers “All the Lovers.” The difference here is that that’s pretty much the vein the rest of the album proceeds in, even on the level of song titles alone–like, if someone every made a Spinal Tap-style mockumentary about a pop star, you could slip “Put Your Hands Up (If You Feel Love)” into the “Tonight I’m Gonna Rock You Tonight” slot pretty neatly. The beats just sort of plod, rather than bend and twist and bounce, the lyrics are paeans to dancing and loving and loving to dance that feel not universal but merely cliched, the hooks are “Gentleman’s C”-level material instead of the A-plus-plus stuff that made past Kylie records an ongoing process of discovery and delight upon first listen. Gone is what always felt to me like a desire to surprise–what you get here, you can see coming. It feels placid in a way that perhaps befits the love-goddess conceit of the title, but which runs counter to the Kylie who used to take the lead even within the confines and constraints of good-time dance music.

Of course, Minogue has too much taste and talent to produce something completely undistinguished. Every once in a while something interesting will shimmer to the surface–the kinkily Bowie-esque line “You see me with him and it’s turning you on” in the refreshingly manic “Get Outta My Way”; brief flashes of “Since U Been Gone”-style guitar strumming and a sudden, epic onslaught of floor-to-ceiling afternoon-sun synths in “Cupid Boy”; the “sounds like they’re having a good party down the block” quality to the central keyboard hook in “Can’t Beat the Feeling.” And overall, y’know, it’s a Kylie Minogue album–like pizza, sex, and Shakespeare, even when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good. But for the first time in a long time…well, I’ll leave the “the music she was playin’ didn’t blow my mind”/”it’s not love at first listen”/”I can get her out of my head” business to you. I’m too bummed to pun.

* Tom Spurgeon enjoyed the San Diego Comic-Con as a comics show after all. “[T]he comics programming was solid to superb, [and there] was a ton of publishing news to report if you actually reported that news instead of writing another article about lack of coverage.” Hahahaha!

* Today on Robot 6: Tom Brevoort shittalks Robert Kirkman.

* Every page of Ron Rege Jr.’s masterpiece Skibber Bee-Bye is now available for purchase. (Via Jordan Crane.)

* Here’s a fine piece on Harold Ramis’s Groundhog Day by Timothy Sun at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

* No one wants to pay for art anymore.

* Marvel characters as Mega Man characters? Sure, I’ll eat it. Click here for full size. (Via Ryan Penagos.)

* You win this round, Cuomo.

* I’m saving this for last because that’s how much I love it: You ever read a sentence where you can actually feel it opening a door of perception in your head once you hit the final punctuation mark? Like, you involuntarily picture a door swinging open inside your brain and everything? That’s what the final sentence of this Zak Smith post on Bronze Age comics and fantastical fiction did for me. On the way to that sentence there are plenty of gems like this one:

If you are a good person, you, too, hate the following thing:



There’s Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland or At The Mountains of Madness or some other piece of inspired mania. And then there’s some fuck. This fuck is an academic–and the fuck takes it and explains what it is about and that it is not really about shrinking mushrooms or secrets beyond human ken buried in the Antarctic but is actually about sexism, racism, classism, where the author’s mom touched him/her, the political situation in the english-speaking world when the thing was written, et cetera.



Now readers of this blog will know I have no problem with a little deconstruction here and there between friends–what I mean here is the wholesale reduction of everything in the work to just a mask for some other and more easily understood drama that sets what one of my teachers used to call the “demon of allegory” loose to drain it all of its enigma and poetry and lunatic majesty.

I think I speak on behalf of everyone who’s ever read a complimentary review of a horror movie by a mainstream-media movie critic when I say, “Afuckingmen.” But I promise you don’t know where the post is going from that quote alone.

In college, some friends introduced me, under circumstances you can probably imagine, to the concept of “the Cosmic Groove”–the funk into which all bands seek to tap, but which aside from a few fleeing moments remains elusive. It wasn’t until I heard Phelps “Catfish” Collins’s guitar solo on “Very Yes” with Bootsy’s Rubber Band live in Lousiville 1978 that I understood what they meant. That guitar is like the Ghostbusters crossing the streams, and when the horns come back in, that’s the dimensional crossrip. This is the sound of the cosmic groove–it’s like My Bloody Valentine’s “Soon” in that I’ve wanted so badly to find another song that does what this does as well as it does it but have never found it and probably never will. Rest in peace, Catfish.

* Dunno how the heck I missed this, but Mike Mignola will be drawing Hellboy again following the conclusion of the current six-part-total arc with Duncan Fegredo.

* Ben Jones has a blog at PictureBox’s site now? When did this happen? (Via Flog.)

* Good golly Miss Molly, look at this drawing of Galactus by James Stokoe. Click here to make it bigger than your brain can handle.

* Gabrielle Bell is now on Jordan Crane’s webcomics site What Things Do, with maybe the first of her strips I feel like I’ve “gotten.”

* Real Life Horror: Here’s a fascinating, if scantly supported, article on the prevalence of serial killers in Africa, enabled by the combination of weak law enforcement and ritual traditions that countenance violence. (Via CRwM.)

Wild Beasts

Two Dancers

Domino, September 2009

Buy it from Domino

Buy it from Amazon.com

Co-lead singers Hayden Thorpe and Tom Fleming represent the meticulously struck balance of Wild Beasts’ second album of sumptuous, occasionally shocking art-rock Two Dancers as well as anything else. Like Bryan Ferry subjected to some sort of Silver Age DC Comics bifurcation beam, Thorpe sings in a foppish falsetto, Fleming in a rich mahogany baritone. Each vocal approach enhances different aspects of the band’s music: Thorpe’s swoops and screeches twirl effortlessly atop and around the keening guitar of Ben Little, while Fleming’s warmth and fullness echoes the rock-solid foundation laid down by his basslines and Chris Talbot’s surefooted drumming.

Yet at the same time, each undercuts and complicates the lyrics they sing, lyrics that treat male desire and anger with often alarming openness. Thorpe can deliver kiss-offs to a former lover like “This is a booty call–my boot up your asshole” (“The Fun Powder Plot”) or proclaim his penchant for hooliganism by announcing “We’re just brutes, looking for shops to loot” (“Hooting & Howling”) and get away with it, his dandyish, defiantly artificial voice stripping the words of tough-guy posturing and exposing the awkwardly animalistic sentiments beneath. For his part, Fleming can flat-out sing about his id, as he does in “All the King’s Men”–“Baby, turns out I’m evil / In all my dreams, girls who’ll clothe me, girls who’ll feed me, girls who want me, girls who need me”–but the Guinness-like depth and complexity of his tone conveys far more self-awareness and self-effacement than self-congratulation. The lyrics’ repeated references to the body parts involved in sundry acts of rage and lust and gluttony further emphasize the degree to which these men, for all their erudition, are at the mercy of meatspace. I count fully 46 mentions of everything from bones and teeth to hearts and lungs to ankles and assholes in the lyric sheet; tellingly, the eyes, the window to the soul, are only mentioned once.

Given this, it’s no surprise that the group assigns the album’s sexiest song–the churning “When I’m Sleepy…,” its lyrics consisting solely of the phrase “When I’m sleepy, needing supper, you’re the lips for me to pucker”–to the more feminine vocalist, while the baritone is responsible for the harrowing semi-title track “Two Dancers (i)” and its seemingly and sympathetically feminine perspective on sexual assault and the death of and abandonment by children. Simply the phrases selected to convey these ideas–“His hairy hands, his falling fists, his dancing cock down by his knees”; “Our son was dying and we could hardly eat”–form a devastating j’accuse when issued from the bass clef.

The music seems similarly obsessed with the possibilities of duality represented by both singers and album title. The title track is split in two, for one thing, with “Two Dancers (ii)” representing a quieter, colder response to the fiery demands of its immediate predecessor; the pair is itself prefigured by the introduction of its central melodic hook at the very end of “Hooting & Howling” several songs earlier. The album features two short interlude-type songs: The first is the aforementioned sizzler “When I’m Sleepy…”, while the second, the far quieter “Underbelly,” is as much about lifelong consequences for the seven deadlies as the earlier song is about their immediate gratification. But my favorite pairing is the opening track, “The Fun Powder Plot,” with the late-album centerpiece “This Is Our Lot.” To take things back to the Silver Age, they’re each the Bizarro version of the other. With the same gently twirling mechanical beat and even the same key, “This Is Our Lot” inverts the earlier song, allowing the bass to provide the melody and the guitar to provide the rhythm–a switch paralleled by Thorpe, who here sings toward the bottom of his register. The overall shift is one from hysterical outrage to wry resignation, “The mock” and “the shock” of “The Fun Powder Plot” replaced by the shrugged-shoulder admission “This is our lot: We hold each other up heavy with hops.”

The end result? Masculinity without machismo. Sexuality without sexism. Elegance without arrogance. Wild Beasts set a very tricky lyrical and stylistic course for themselves here, but their rare combination of ambition and sophistication sees them arrive not just safely but spectacularly.

I would like to move my blog to a new, dedicated site. I need someone to help me do this–namely to design the new site and port my Movable Type archives into it. I have some other more ambitious wishlist items too, but those are the main things. I will pay this hypothetical person for doing this. Are you this person? Please email me (the address is in the left-hand sidebar of this blog) and let me know.

* Your quote of the day comes from Tom Spurgeon:

Mostly, though, I’m kind of baffled why retailers meet anything I write that’s critical of any facet of the Direct Market with such forceful, blanket and frankly not always very convincing rebuttals….what’s up with the defensive crouch? How on earth is a critical article tantamount to taking a position of “all doom and gloom?” Do you have a self-critical apparatus? Is ComicsPRO simply a booster organization that does things like impugn others’ motives and make empty proclamations that things are “rock solid”? If asked, could you name five specific areas at which the Direct Market should improve, things at which you and your fellow retailers have outright failed, not somebody else? I could do that for this site specifically and comics journalism generally, and have talked about those factors here at the site on multiple occasions. Why can’t you guys? It’s one thing that outright confuses me about comics 16 years in, retail and elsewhere. What is it about comics people that we’re afraid to release real sales or (when it’s appropriate) income figures, where publishing moves that seem to under-perform disastrously by the estimates we do have are met with a “that’s right what we expected/you don’t know anything about the business” harangues, where it’s the comics event itself that conspires to keep the journalists from covering it with greater vigor? Why can’t we be self-critical?

Read the whole thing, including the jaw-dropping letter to which he’s responding.

* Mike Baehr notes in the comments downblog and on the Fantagraphics blog that Fanta/Eros isn’t republishing Hans Rickheit’s Chloe, just distributing it to the Direct Market for, amazingly, the first time. Really can’t say enough good things about that book, though I’ve got a funny feeling I’ll be trying to over the next week or so.

* Jeet Heer’s piece on Harvey Pekar for Comics Comics contains a pretty egregious misreading of the Lee/Kirby working relationship, of all things, but is well worth your time anyway for its emphasis on the salutary impact Pekar had on Crumb rather than the other way around, and how Pekar’s preference for realistic writing may have skewed his taste in artists in an unfortunate way.

* Somehow the RSS feed for Sammy Harkham’s Family store blog disappeared from my Google Reader or something, but thanks to Spurge I’m tuned back in in time to catch Sammy’s salute to Richard McGuire, perhaps the only person of whom it can be said that they created one of the greatest comics and greatest basslines of all time.

* Harkham also posted some more pics of the ice cream truck Ben Jones designed for Adult Swim’s San Diego presence. Would you let your kids get a froggy pop from this truck?

* John Lingan’s piece on Christian Nyby/Howard Hawks’s The Thing from Another World and John Carpenter’s remake The Thing is odd in that it posits a world in which the former has the better critical reputation, a world I’m pretty sure the rest of us don’t live in, but hey, I’m always up to read about The Thing. Nice analysis of the purpose of the spectacular gore, for example.

* Frank Santoro sez don’t forget that your comics page needs a center. This came up in his Inkstuds roundtable from the other day as well. I’m still processing it.

* Filing this away for future reference: Chris Mautner reviews Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.

* Speaking of Scott Pilgrim, here’s a fun, frivolous report on an in-store appearance by Edgar Wright, Michael Cera, Anna Kendrick, and Jason Schwartzman by my chum Jason Adams.

* And speaking of Jason, he says that this is what Lamberto Bava’s Demons 2 looks like, which probably means I need to see Lamberto Bava’s Demons 2.

* Clive Barker Halloween costumes! Yep, that’s about right. How I love this raspy-voiced loon. (Via Monster Brains.)

* Real Life Horror: The Journal of American Medicine on the damage done by CIA doctors and psychiatrists who tortured people for the Bush Administration.

* So epic. When my teenage self first saw this image, a rip in the spacetime continuum opened up and John Williams’s “Duel of the Fates” started playing.

Spoon

“Who Makes Your Money”

from Transference

Merge, January 2010

Buy it from Amazon.com

Restraint can be so sexy! Listen to the minimalist groove of this song: It’s mostly a tight pencil sketch of a drumbeat and a three-note keyboard hook that sounds like fingertips just barely grazing the keys. The bass comes in not much more often than every other measure, just enough to keep the low end a presence in your mind. There’s a rhythm-guitar…undercurrent, is the best word for it. Every once in a while there’s a little textural sizzle that fades in and out. Even the vocals are deployed with the minimal sufficient force: The titular refrain is so underpronounced that I spent my first listen to the song thinking it was called “Who Makes You Mine.” And perhaps with that in mind I thought this was a song about dark, possessive sexuality–a misconception that did not change one iota when I found out the real title, by the way. It was only when I made a point of seeking out the lyrics that I discovered it’s actually a song about being a slave to the wage, not a slave to love. But with an arrangement this exquisitely perched on the precipice between sensuous and ominous, it works either way.

* I interviewed Grant Morrison and Adam Egypt Mortimer about their upcoming film Sinatoro for Comic Book Resources. Because it’s so early in the game they are in large part limited to enthusiasm and hyperbole, but they’re pretty self-aware about that. I liked this bit:

We wanted to do something that took the language of movies and brings it into the 21st century. One of the things I was saying over the weekend was this idea that most of us have been playing video games and grew up watching MTV and music videos. The art that we’ve absorbed has changed. The way we look at things and the way we tell stories is a little bit different than how it used to be. I like the idea of introducing that back into the basic Hollywood narrative. Taking some of that, and all the building blocks we’re familiar with – the boy-meets-girl, the revenge story, the thriller, the murder mystery, the crime story – and combine all that together. It”s a little like what I did with Batman and Superman: take all the things we love about cinema and then put them together again in a slightly new way which still fulfills all the [original] functions. It still makes you laugh and cry and sing and dance.

* Clive Barker says Volume III of his Abarat young-adult fantasy series will come out in September 2011. Given that what would have been the ending in most YA fantasy series took place at the end of Volume 2, I suppose it’s no shock it’s taking this long to ramp up to the next installment.

* Since I am increasingly pessimistic about the economy in general and the long-term structural changes being made that will adversely effect the creation of art in particular, I’m always game for discussions Tom Spurgeon’s thoughts on the future of comics retail in a piece on five comics news stories to watch:

It’s take your pick of portents: the absence of a vital retailer selling new comics at Comic-Con the way Comic Relief used to underlines the notion that owner of the majority of comics’ best shops are getting older, there’s never a guarantee that these businesses change hands without causing major differences in what they’re able to do, and I’m not sure there are enough up and coming retailers to play the same role as the generation of retailers now in that 55 and over club. Price increases, continued horrific scheduling strategies, a ridiculous and inflexible start-up model, over-publishing and the slight discombobulation that is likely to arrive with an upswing in attention to digital comics strategies are making things more difficult for the system just at the time when everything should be done to make things easier. As second downswing in the economy will likely drive lot of folks to reconsider what they do, and comics seems less likely to escape a second generally fallow period coming so quickly on the heels of the first.

* I am enjoying Robin McConnell’s Inkstuds roundtable on “fusion comics,” aka the New Action plus some other mixed-genre/style stuff, with Frank Santoro, Brandon Graham, and Michael DeForge as we speak. Here are Frank’s notes for the interview. Obviously a lot of this material excites me as well, and I love all these artists bringing non-traditional influences to the table. It makes for exciting art, and exciting discussions between artists. As for criticism…Honestly? I do worry a bit, from a look around the blogosphere on any given day, that rise of fusion/New Action gives people the critical cover they’ve long secretly craved to talk only about genre, to the exclusion of non-genre work. (I oughta know!) Oh, I dunno, I’m a scold these days. Maybe it’s just that I’ve always proceeded from the notion that this stuff is legit to talk about, and so it doesn’t fire me up, like, eight years into talking about comics professionally and semiprofessionally. I’ve got my own issues, like.

* CRwM waxes eloquent on John McTiernan’s Predator and Die Hard, two films that undercut the Action Hero, examining the varying degrees to which they do so. Check the comments for TroyZ’s take on the matter as well.

* The Ten Video Games Roger Ebert Should Play. I’ve never been heavily invested in what Ebert thinks and this has not changed with his recent renaissance, but a) It’d be interesting if the collective Green Lantern power of the Internet wills him into liking video games after a prolonged period of philistinism, and b) this list doubles well as a Ten Video Games Sean T. Collins Should Play list.

* I’d forgotten how good the cover for Chester Brown’s Yummy Fur #29 was; Ruaraidh Bruce reminds us with a cover version at Covered.

* I love Rickey Purdin “What I Got at [Comic Convention X]” posts, because Rickey Purdin loves getting comics.

* I briefly want to draw your attention to a couple of other Internet ventures for which I am responsible: Fuck Yeah, T-Shirts, consisting of cool pictures of people wearing t-shirts;

* and Bowie Loves Beyonce, consisting of cool pictures of David Bowie and Beyonce.

* It’s been a while, for medical reasons, but I would like Serge Gainsbourg’s “Cannabis” (via Nate Patrin) to provide the soundtrack for all my future usages of the titular substance. I suspect it would be impossible not to feel like a cool dude with all the right moves under such circumstances.

* An LCD Soundsystem/Hot Chip/Sleigh Bells tour? Oh, indeed.

* It’s Eddie & the Cruisers’ world–we just live in it.

BACKDATED FOR EASE OF BROWSING

I enjoyed Pitchfork’s list of the Top 200 Tracks of the 1990s. The decision to limit the list to one song per artist opened things up to tons of songs, probably even whole genres, that would have been excluded if folks like Bjork and Beck and Radiohead each had five songs a piece or what have you; moreover it started a whole different set of discussions than “‘Let Down’ should have been ranked higher than ‘Creep,'” which is probably what you’d have gotten otherwise. Still, as with any exercise of this sort, there are bound to be lacunae, oversights, goofs, choices you’d have made differently, artists you’d have better represented, and of course outright crimes against all that is holy. LOL srsly the closest thing I have to a substantive philosophical criticism of the list is that in the end, the voters admittedly went with comfort for their #1; given that the list has frequently been positioned as a statement about indie music today, read into that what you will. In my case, seeing the #1 vote-getter (no spoilers here!) simply reminded me that my 1990s were different from those of a lot of other critics–less “indie rock,” more “alternative,” electronic, heavy, and industrial.

So in the interest of showing my ’90s off a bit, here, in alphabetical order by artist, are 80 wonderful songs from that wonderful decade for music that didn’t make Pitchfork’s cut. I applied three rules in making this list:

1) Like Pitchfork, I limited myself to one song per artist.

2) If an artist made Pitchfork’s Top 200 list, I couldn’t use them–in other words, I wasn’t adjudicating whether “Donkey Rhubarb” would have been a better pick than “Windowlicker.” (Although it is.)

3) Pitchfork very helpfully and very smartly included two or three “see also” suggestions with every entry, in order to give relevant sounds/scenes/artists that much more props. I didn’t let this rule out artists who were thus listed, but I did let it rule out the individual songs that were cited. As a practical matter this meant that several songs which all things being equal I’d have included on any Top Whatever List didn’t end up making it in, because the song Pitchfork had suggested as a “see also” was so clearly the right choice–“Stars” by Hum, “Gett Off” by Prince, “Woo-Hah!! Got You All in Check” by Busta Rhymes, “Jump Around” by House of Pain, and “Unsung” by Helmet all come to mind. But more often than not I had the leeway I wanted.

So there you have it. There was a lot of great music made in the days of my youth; here’s some of it, in convenient video form. I hope you enjoy!

1. 1000 Homo DJs – Supernaut

2. Christina Aguilera – What a Girl Wants

3. Alabama 3 – Woke Up This Morning

4. Tori Amos – Silent All These Years

5. Fiona Apple – I Know

6. Archive – So Few Words

7. Backstreet Boys – Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)

8. Ben Folds Five – Army

9. Bizarre Inc. – I’m Gonna Get You

10. Blahzay Blahzay – Danger

11. David Bowie – I’m Deranged

12. Butthole Surfers – Who Was in My Room Last Night?

13. Cake – The Distance

14. Mariah Carey feat. Ol’ Dirty Bastard – Fantasy

15. Johnny Cash – Delia’s Gone

16. Cypress Hill feat. Erick Sermon, Redman, and MC Eiht – Throw Your Hands in the Air

17. The Dandy Warhols – Not If You Were the Last Junkie on Earth

18. Deftones – Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away)

19. DJ Kool – Let Me Clear My Throat

20. DNA feat, Suzanne Vega – Tom’s Diner

21. Erasure – Always

22. Everything But the Girl & Deep Dish – The Future of the Future (Stay Gold)

23. Faith No More – Mid-Life Crisis

24. Fishbone – Unyielding Conditioning

25. Folk Implosion – Natural One

26. Peter Gabriel – Digging in the Dirt

27. Garbage – Vow

28. Genius/GZA – Duel of the Iron Mic

29. GusGus – Believe

30. Sophie B. Hawkins – Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover

31. Michael Jackson – Remember the Time

32. Junior M.A.F.I.A. – Player’s Anthem

33. King Missile – Detachable Penis

34. KMDFM – Juke Joint Jezebel

35. Kool Keith – Sex Style

36. Korn – Blind

37. Lenny Kravitz – It Ain’t Over ’til It’s Over

38. LL Cool J – 6 Minutes of Pleasure

39. Lords of Acid – The Crablouse

40. Nick Lowe – The Beast in Me

41. Madonna – Vogue

42. Manic Street Preachers – Faster

43. Marilyn Manson – The Beautiful People

44. Ricky Martin – Livin’ La Vida Loca

45. Meat Beat Manifesto – Asbestos Lead Asbestos

46. Metallica – The Unforgiven

47. Ministry – N.W.O.

48. Ned’s Atomic Dustbin – Grey Cell Green

49. Pantera – This Love

50. CeCe Peniston – Finally

51. Photek – K.J.Z.

52. Pigface – Chikasaw

53. Placebo – Pure Morning

54. The Presidents of the United States of America – Lump

55. Primitive Radio Gods – Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in My Hand

56. Primus – Jerry Was a Race Car Driver

57. The Prodigy – Poison

58. Rage Against the Machine – Freedom

59. Red Hot Chili Peppers – Give It Away

60. The Rentals – Friends of P

61. Rollins Band – Liar

62. Roni Size/Reprazent – Share the Fall

63. Ruby – Salt Water Fish

64. Sade – No Ordinary Love

65. Salt-n-Pepa feat. En Vogue – “Whatta Man”

66. Seal – Killer

67. Sloan – Money City Maniacs

68. Snap! – The Power

69. Soul II Soul – Back to Life (However Do You Want Me)

70. Soundgarden – Rusty Cage

71. Sparkle feat. R. Kelly – Be Careful

72. Britney Spears – Baby One More Time

73. Sugarcubes – Hit

74. Sunscreem – Love U More

75. Teenage Fanclub – Is This Music?

76. Temple of the Dog – Hunger Strike

77. Tool – Aenema

78. U2 – The Fly

79. Whale – Hobo Humpin’ Slobo Babe

80. White Zombie – More Human Than Human

* The first paragraph of Douglas Wolk’s Comic-Con column contains a pretty good summary of the difference between us, I think. Contemporary nerd culture’s enthusiasm is a bug, not a feature, and being a nerd sure as hell was oppositional in my day. Damn you and your well-adjustedness, Douglas!

* Rick Trembles reviews The Human Centipede in his inimitable cartoon style, making the strongest case for it I’ve read so far.

* Would you like to spend your Friday afternoon reading a long David Bordwell essay about Herge and the clear line? You bet you would.

Foals

Total Life Forever

Sub Pop, June 2010

Buy it from Sub Pop

Buy it from Amazon.com

Now here’s a weird one. Foals’ debut album serves a very specific purpose for me: Its standout tracks echo and enhance restless, caffeinated creativity. A breakneck pace provided by tight, crisp drumming; yelped vocals from singer Yannis Philippakis; repeated, high-pitched, distortionless eighth-note guitar riffs played with such precision you feel like the band’s multiple guitarists are hitting the strings with tiny glockenspiel mallets; unexpected saxophone bleats and blasts, strategically deployed…it’s the perfect accompaniment to when you’ve got so much energy your leg is twitching and it’s all you can do to to actually type instead of simply pounding on the keyboard, hoping to get your point across through sheer force of will. For me it’s that nervous urgency that separates Foals from the army of angular-guitar also-rans who’ve occupied UK indie for the past however many years. Songs like “Cassius,” “Red Socks Pugie,” “Olympic Airways,” and particularly “Balloons” have an originality of tone and force of execution that, for me anyway, makes them a lot more worth returning to than your average I Can’t Believe It’s Not Gang of Four product.

So what to make of a follow-up record where there’s pretty much none of that? I suppose that given the flack the band received for a) being late to the post-punk revival party, and b) earning, through simple instrumental proficiency and clarity, the “math-rock” sobriquet and all the approbation that comes with it despite being uniformly four-four, a change in direction was all but inevitable. And I suppose that since the band’s previous slow jams were more to be endured than enjoyed, there’s no way I’m going to connect with this less kinetic, more groove-oriented album the way I did with its predecessor.

But here’s the thing: What they’re doing here is less immediately useful to me, but it’s still interesting, simply because it’s so weird! Do you want to hear what post-punk Go-Go might sound like? Check out “Miami”! Do you want to hear skinny Englishmen funnel lyrics cribbed from the Lemonheads’ “Into Your Arms” into some weird Morris Day swing? Check out “Total Life Forever”! Do you want to hear a Discipline-era King Crimson take on Fleet Foxes? Check out “Blue Blood”! Most of the album is a fairly unremarkable attempt to create a sound as panoramic and pretty as Antidotes was mostly inward and aggressive–cf. lead single “Spanish Sahara”–but sprinkled throughout all that is such a strange set of vocal and musical approaches that I’m a bit dumbfounded. It left me feeling enough critical goodwill toward the band that they could throw in their most nakedly crowd-pleasing Bloc Party-type jam yet, “This Orient” (a big soaring chorus invoking “this Western feeling” and everything) and I end up really, really digging it instead of cringing.

I’d probably have preferred the band tighten up even further, damn the critical torpedoes and full speed ahead, emphasis on speed. And indeed this thing really could stand tightening up even if they are gonna move away from “Balloons.” But there’s a groovy weirdness in here I can get behind on the relatively rare occasions when it pops up, and I hope they double down on it next time around.

* Frank “The Tank” Miller talks Holy Terror, his now-Batman-free vigilante vs. al-Qaeda graphic novel, which he says he should be finishing next month. (Via Kevin Melrose.)

* Today on Robot 6: Tom Brevoort on Marvel’s latest “tie-ins for variant” swap.

* Today the five-minute trailer for Kenneth Branagh’s Thor that Marvel debuted at the San Diego Comic-Con leaked onto the Internet for a few hours. (It used to be here but is no longer.) It was pretty good. Firmly in the spirit of the 21st-century Marvel approach to any and all of its properties to be sure, i.e. filtering them through military-industrial-espionage-action tropes, but it’s not like I was expecting Asgard and its denizens to be done in Speed Racer style. Ang Lee scared the experimentation right out of Marvel movies, at least somewhat justifiably so. Asgard looked big and unearthly, at least, and the Destroyer–one of the all-time great villain designs, like Jack Kirby presaging the Cenobites–was great, and I look forward to seeing fight choreography that revolves around the use of a war hammer.

* Yet all that being said, I still find myself far more entertained by an entirely different comic-book movie trailer, one for a book I’ve never even read: Stephen Frears’s adaptation of Posy Simmond’s Tamara Drewe. What on earth could be drawing me to this movie? What could it possibly, possibly be?

* Guillermo Del Toro will indeed direct a 3-D adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness with James Cameron now producing, which seems to mean that yes, it’ll get made. Shrug.

* A great way to get a sense of fanboy conventional wisdom on any given topic is to read what the big horror sites say about it. In the process of reporting that They may hire Damon Lindelof to rewrite Ridley Scott’s Alien prequel, Dread Central shits alllllll over Lindelof and the Lost finale–like, to an M. Night Shyamalan degree. So I guess that’s where Nerd Culture comes down on that. NEEDS MOAR NANOTECHNOLOGY!!!

* Sean P. Belcher wasn’t nuts about Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour. The way he talks about it makes me think he had a hard time with aspects of it in the same way I did, namely not connecting with the supposedly knockout emotional content. And like me he feels obligated to couch this caveat in as complimentary language as possible, because the overall project was so innovative, entertaining, and endearing.

* Suddenly I’m a lot more sympathetic to Con Flounce: Tom Spurgeon and Tom Neely have both written rather soul-crushing con reports that give credence to the notion that the Hollywood contingent really, truly is crushing the the comics out of Comic-Con.

* Here’s your requisite on-the-other-hand: Peggy Burns’s upbeat report can be summed up thusly: Drawn & Quarterly sold through all but one measly boxful of comics, and the report contains the phrase “COMIC-CON LIKES COMICS” in all caps. So, y’know, it’s entirely possible for an event involving 130,000 people to result in different experiences for different people, even people keenly interested in precisely the same aspect of the show.

* But the Toms have me concerned over a couple of things. First, I’m concerned about the future of the show’s comics content. Not the comics-that-are-also-movies stuff, I don’t think Marvel’s going anywhere and nor are all the little outfits who are happy to serve as IP farms, but the comics-that-are-comics stuff, from self-publishers like Neely to retailers whose presence used to be my favorite single section of the show. The news that in the absence of Comic Relief and with a smaller Bud Plant booth there basically wasn’t a go-to comics retail area is the most disturbing single thing I’ve heard about the show ever. If you can’t maintain a place where people at the show can go to buy pretty much any of the comics they might be interested in buying, which is how that area used to function, then that’s a major structural failure for the show. And needless to say, a comics show without a vibrant small-press and alternative comics presence isn’t a comics show I’m interested in.

* But that leads me to the second thing I’m concerned about, which is that due to the kind of person I am, I never paid enough attention to this all along. See, I am an all-purpose nerd. I love going to Comic-Con to talk to Jordan Crane and load up on all the Fanta and D&Q debuts and get Bowie sketches from Jaime Hernandez and all that wonderful stuff. But in all honesty, if all that were gone, I’d still enjoy the show, because I also love superheroes and hearing announcements about the future of the Batman books and catching previews of big action-fantasy blockbusters and seeing people in costume and geeking out over Lord of the Rings replicas and on and on and on. I’m not like either of the Toms in that I don’t find any of that stuff infuriating and that it is, in part at least, something that excites me about art and culture.

* So I guess what I’m saying is that in retrospect, I should have stuck a big fat caveat lector atop my dismissal of the post-show pique that flares up after each year’s Con. Don’t get me wrong, I do think a lot of that stuff really is just pique (and pandering for hits). And in fairness to myself, whenever I talk to people who haven’t been to the show, I warn them that there are lots of people who are just not constitutionally suited to that level of crowd and media and visual overload, so it’s not like I’m totally head-in-the-clouds about the inhospitability of the show for some people. But I’ve been far too willing to ignore the fact that there are people with perfectly reasonable and even noble expectations for the show for whom those expectations are now going unmet.

* In other Con news:

* Sean Belcher caught a bunch of Grant Morrison newsiness I missed or forgot: He’s still planning a Wonder Woman story, he’s still working on Multiversity which will include a Frank Quitely issue that Sean says will be the Charlton/Watchmen riff though I don’t know the source for that, he’s planning a big joint project with Geoff Johns.

* Here’s everything Kiel Phegley did at the show.

* Guillermo Del Toro says inter-studio politics between MGM, New Line, and Warner Bros. are responsible for delays to The Hobbit and his subsequent departure, not just MGM’s financial problems.

* They’re making another Battlestar Galactica prequel series called Blood & Chrome, a webisode-type affair set during the early days of Bill Adama’s military career in the First Cylon War. I still haven’t bothered finishing the first season of Caprica so it’s tough for me to get too excited about this.

* Man, Frank Santoro’s Silver Surfer strip for Strange Tales II is gonna be something else.

* So say we all, Cameron Stewart.