Beyoncé – I Care

4 is the first Beyoncé album whose slow, serious songs I don’t automatically skip. Good thing, too, because it’s mostly slow-ish, serious-ish songs, as opposed to Dangerously in Love, which dumped them at the back end of album; I Am…Sasha Fierce, which gave them their own disc; and her best record, B’Day, which nearly excised them altogether. The up-tempo “Countdown” is getting a lot of attention right now, with its Franken-pop construction and inspired gibberish like “ME and my BOOF and my BOOF BOOF ridin'” (thus joining “Ra-ra ah-ah-ah, roma ro-ma-ma, gaga ooh-la-la” and “Mama say, mama sa, mama ma coo sa” in the annals of great pop nonsense), but the album’s undisputed highlights for me are the aforeblogged lovesexy scorcher of a ballad “1+1” and this song, in which Beyoncé addresses a lover’s indifference by attacking it with the nearest weapon to hand, her voice. Listen to the way she shouts “IIIII CARE!” in the chorus, or just plain screams at the end of it — it’s like Chris Cornell wailing into the abyss of Andrew Wood’s heroin overdose in “Times of Trouble” by Temple of the Dog. Sonically the two songs aren’t even all that dissimilar: state-of-the-art production that creates a nice melancholy purple cushion of air around the instrumentation, in “I Care”‘s case the tumbling drums in particular. Hell, in a world where Bey’s mashing up Prince and Kings of Leon and having freaking Tricky do the Sean Paul part in “Baby Boy” at Glastonbury, I wouldn’t be surprised if I woke up tomorrow to find out she’d covered it. It’d be a fine outlet for the sort of skill and conviction she displays here (like the way her voice warbles when she says she’s been “deserted” or the way she sings along to the guitar solo like she can’t bear to stop pouring out the emotion she’s feeling), and for her ever-sharpening taste for interesting arrangements (“I Care” and “I Miss You” are mostly synth tones and spare percussion; the latter just sort of disappears rather than ends the way proper commercial pop songs do; even the Diane Warren-penned “I Was Here” has some weird spectral Interpol guitar stretching out from the end of the chorus). She’s taking the sort of stuff that usually made for turgid one-listen mom-radio bait and making it lively and engrossing. Frankly there’s not much she can’t do at this point.

* DC pitched Grant Morrison on writing a Watchmen sequel; he declined. That tidbit comes from the Mindless Ones’ very fun interview with Morrison.

* Rob Clough examines the oeuvre of Dave Kiersh, perhaps the most underappreciated cartoonist of the last decade-plus given how present his nostalgia-tinged tone poems about the teenage wasteland are in the zeitgeist. And what a dreamy picture of him, too!

* People are organizing protests of the DC relaunch at the San Diego Comic-Con and of Odd Future at the Pitchfork Festival. Why not, says I. As silly as that pairing makes it all seem, the comment thread at the link is a surprisingly thoughtful conversation about the uses and limits of protest.

* Matt Zoller Seitz has launched a new group blog called PressPlay, dedicated primarily to video essays. That’s something to get excited about.

* 300: Battle of Artemisia — wow, that really rolls off the tongue.

* J. Caleb Mozzocco joins Robot 6 with a post on Ralph Cosentino’s Wonder Woman children’s book. Cosentino has done similar books on Superman, which I haven’t seen, and Batman, which is one of the best Batman anythings I’ve ever read. If he can distill WW’s milieu and appeal as beautifully as he did Batman’s, his book should be issued to DC executives.

* Thrilled to see What Things Do posting more Abner Dean.

* Finally, a couple of quotes that have been resonating with me since I read them.

Clarence’s ability to enjoy Clarence was incredible.

–from Bruce Springsteen’s eulogy for Clarence Clemons (via Pitchfork)

RUDICK: Did the Surrealism exhibition that you saw in 1968 have a similar effect on you?

WOODRING: That hit me harder and lasted longer than anything else I’ve ever seen.

RUDICK: What was it about that body of work that had such an impact on you?

WOODRING: I was still in high school. I didn’t know Surrealism existed. I just went with some people I knew down to the L.A. County Museum of Art to see this huge Surrealism and dada retrospective. I had no expectations. The first thing that I saw when I walked in the door was The Song of Love by Giorgio de Chirico, with the plaster cast and the red rubber glove. I saw that and my mind just started racing, trying to understand it because it had such a mood of such intensity, and I was thinking, A red rubber glove? Why is that affecting me like this? What is going on here? It’s like magic.

It was really an all-star show, and they had the crème de la crème: Dalí’s best paintings, Max Ernst’s best paintings, Victor Brauner, Magritte, Hans Bellmer. I didn’t really understand it at the time, but I went back to see it a second time and realized, God, this stuff is just bristling with sex energy. These guys must’ve thought about sex all the time. Dalí’s Great Masturbator was there, and various libidinous Magrittes, Max Ernsts, and especially the Hans Bellmer stuff. It was just so heavily erotic that I, virgin that I was, thought, Sex is magic. It’s where all this hallucinatory power comes from.

My parents were very conservative, and all their friends were conservative—it was a very unresponsive, unnurturing environment for me. I learned from that show for the first time that there were adults who worked hard at unraveling those mysteries and capturing and putting them down. I had no idea. I just thought that I was stuck off in a corner of the universe by myself, and I’d never find a tribe of people to relate to or people to confirm what I was believing. It was like being reborn, seeing that this world of possibilities existed, to say nothing of the work itself, which was so heavy and intense and enjoyable. The pleasure I felt from seeing that stuff lasted for weeks afterward—years, really. I still get a frisson thinking about it.

–from Nicole Rudick’s interview with Jim Woodring in The Comics Journal

WU LYF – “Heavy Pop”

Played from start to finish, WU LYF’s debut album Go Tell Fire to the Mountain comes across like a music-nerd Mark Millar Idea: “What if there was the most uplifting anthemic indie rock album ever…but the lyrics were GIBBERISH?” And like most Mark Millar Ideas, real and imagined, the joke gets old quickly. The formula is simple and adhered to with minimal variation: Cavernous production (the album was apparently recorded in a church; the ever-present pipe organ’s a tipoff too) plus chiming guitar plus glossolalia screamed at the top of lead singer Ellery Roberts’s lungs. Slow songs, fast songs, quiet songs, loud songs, every song on the album gets the same treatment. By the time you reach track nine or so, the initially bracing effect of the approach, this sense that you’re witnessing something that’s half-hymn, half-howl at the moon, is diluted through repetition and general lack of imagination. No amount of Captain Caveman hollering is going to distinguish the umpteenth life-is-beautiful, we’re-all-in-this-together Joshua Tree legacy-character record.

But everything that makes WU LYF a lousy place to live makes it a terrific place to visit for the five minute, thirty-five second duration of the album’s concluding track, “Heavy Pop.” An admirably lengthy, virtually ambient organ introduction sounds like the world is slowly waking up, and when those first guitar notes hit, it’s like rays of morning sun, and Roberts is like a man screaming right back into the sky, greeting the dawn with defiance. It’s another answer to a goofy unasked question, in this case “What if the problem with Bruce’s vocals at the end of ‘Jungleland’ was that they sounded insufficiently committed?” At album length this doesn’t work at all, but for a single song it’s epic, genuinely so — it’s huge, it sprawls, it conjures images of great vistas and lone heroes and everything. There’s no need to press your luck with the other nine tracks. Unless you’re an Arcade Fire fan, I suppose, in which case go with God.

(Buy the album from Amazon.com)

* Nicole Rudick interviews Jim Woodring at glorious length for The Comics Journal:

RUDICK: Are [the apparitions you’ve seen] usually the same thing or similar things?

WOODRING: No, they’re always different. The last thing I saw was a guy standing upstairs in my hallway, standing bolt upright, with a leather harness on his face.

RUDICK: Does it frighten you to see those things?

WOODRING: That one was extremely frightening. At first, I thought it was my reflection in the mirror. Then I thought, There’s no mirror there. I saw this guy, just standing, wearing black pants and a white shirt, with his face in a leather harness with the number nine on leather tabs at every junction of the straps, and his mouth was open in a rictus. I could see his teeth, and his eyes were staring at me in this beseeching way. He left after a couple of seconds, but it was very vivid while it occurred.

Then a couple of years before that, I saw the Thompson Twins, Thomson and Thompson from Tintin. They were in black and white and were walking down the street with a full-color nine-foot streetwalker in fuchsia hot pants. That resolved into a woman and her two small children. Then the time before that, I was at the mall and my neighbor lady saw me and came up behind me and spoke my name, and when I turned around and looked at her, where her head should have been there was this eggshell of lint, which had the front pushed in, and there was a big gob of chewing gum or something sitting at the base of it. That was a frightening experience. I screamed when I saw that. That just scared the shit out of me.

The thing these all have in common is that they’re not at all vague, they’re very crisp, and I retain memories of them with extraordinary vividness. I’ve drawn all these things out. They’re very sharp, almost more sharp than real life, in the same way that when people meditate and they see the white light—it’s obviously not light, it’s not photons, it’s something else, more vivid than light. Because you’re not seeing with your eyes, you’re seeing with your mind when these things happen, they have sharpness and an intensity that regular visual things don’t.

That’s the juiciest part, but there’s stuff in there about the Surrealists, and horror as the sacred, and symmetry, and struggling with the presence of evil in a world that also contains wonderful things, and all manner of other stuff that hit me right in the gut. You must read this.

* Hey, it’s a new Emily Carroll comic! This contains one of her creepiest images yet.

* Fight Club screenwriter Jim Uhls will be adapting the Nine Inch Nails dystopian-future concept album Year Zero for Trent Reznor’s long-gestating HBO/BBC miniseries. That sounds fine.

* Too Much Coffee Man‘s Shannon Wheeler, of all people, nails the problem with Chester Brown’s Paying For It, as succinctly as anyone I’ve seen make the attempt. I think calling for a heavier editorial hand is a nonstarter, though, and for good reason. A heavier editorial hand would likely have preempted Chester Brown’s entire career.

* Curt Purcell salutes the proud wearer of Comics’ Greatest Jacket, Death Note‘s Naomi Misora.

* Paging Frank Santoro: Marcos Martin is really approaching page layout differently than anyone else in superhero comics, if this preview page from his and Mark Waid’s Daredevil #1 is any indication.

* I’m really not sure what Darryl Ayo’s comics call to arms is about — the problems, and the people, he’s addressing are described in terms too general to be useful. Mostly I find my enjoyment of comics increasing the less I worry about the state of comics, or more specifically the less I expose myself to the daily scrum of jawjaw about same. That said, he put together a gallery of lovely images to support the post, including these pieces by Al Columbia and Frank Quitely that I’d never seen before.

* Aeron Alfrey of Monster Brains has posted a couple of killer galleries lately. First up is the cosmic horror of Anatoly Fomenko, with its wondrous and oppressive sense of scale:

* And next is the scabrous, texture-heavy creature portraiture of Hasama (warning: the image below is fine, but the rest are not for anyone who’s squeamish about facial disfiguration):

* Aled Lewis’s “Video Games vs. Real Life” is similar to a Star Wars-based photography project that made the rounds a while back, but even though I was familiar with the basic idea at play, I still found this Donkey Kong image kind of unnerving. Looking through the foliage and seeing something looking back at you is the great cryptozoological dream/nightmare image.

* If you can’t trust them to straighten their belts, how can you trust them to save us all from Despero???

* I’m pretty excited to discover a Broadway revival of Godspell is in the works for this October. Stephen Schwartz, the show’s creator, is involved, so that leaves me optimistic that they won’t just slap a coat of Rent paint on the thing. It’s my favorite show.

I admire how few concessions this song makes. I figured that after a few introductory measures they’d clean up and smooth out that guitar triplet, but nope, it stays fragile-sounding and rough around the edges the whole time. The expected “TICK two three TOCK two three” 6/8 slow-jam drum never really materializes, requiring you to lean into those rich-sounding chords, which are themselves constructed largely from a subtle interplay between piano and bass. Synth strings and a watery organ sound and a snippet of piano played backwards are sketched in here and there, but you really have to wait for them. Beyoncé’s vocals, to paraphrase her lyrics, pull you in close and won’t let you go — there’s simply no ignoring those big whooping “OO!” sounds at the end of each line, nor a chorus structured around the simple phrase “make love to me,” nor a final verse that sets this lovemaking up as an alternative to a world at war. And when the climax finally comes, all that pent-up energy isn’t diffused into a dully loud full-band finale with a full-fledged beat or whatever, but poured into a reach-for-the-sky guitar solo. Everything surrounding it stays relatively restrained; the guitar does the shouting. Then it all just kinda disappears. “1+1” is, fittingly, more than the sum of its parts, all of which are astutely selected and intelligently, unapologetically deployed to transport you to a more beautiful place for four minutes and thirty-five seconds at a time.

* My final Game of Thrones chat with Megan Morse is now up at The Cool Kids Table. I’d say this one’s most interesting for our talk of different approaches to season finales, and what was expected here versus what was delivered.

* Brian Chippendale is back writing about Marvel comics! Nobody does it better. He’s absolutely right that Uncanny X-Force is a really good book, by the way. Also, Brian Chippendale is on Twitter.

* Kim Thompson interviews himself about the new Jacques Tardi/Jean-Patrick Manchette book Like a Sniper Lining Up His Shot. I really don’t like the sound of what he says about cat lovers beware.

* Over at Topless Robot, my pal Rob Bricken has some fun at Green Lantern‘s expense. As he and I have both said before, you can put up with almost any number of plot holes of whatever width provided the stuff those holes were poked in was worthwhile to begin with.

* John Porcellino’s King-Cat #69 is now up on What Things Do. I liked that issue.

* New Ben Katchor is always a delight.

* Uno Moralez is great update: Uno Moralez is great.

* I haven’t been following Hans Rickheit’s Ectopiary; this page tells me I ought to get on that toot sweet.

* And how about that Moebius?

* Finally, I will miss Clarence Clemons, who helped make this.

King Missile – Happy Hour

The other day my wife told me how glad she was to have come of age, culturally speaking, in the early to mid ’90s. We’ve had this discussion several times, because every time it becomes apparent how easy it was to have really terrific music placed right in front of you by the paltry-by-today’s-standards number of outlets geared toward putting music in front of teenagers, by god, it’s worth talking about. A case in point for me is this, the concluding and title track to the album that “Detachable Penis” came from. I still think “Detachable Penis” is very funny (“He wanted twenty bucks, but I talked him down to seventeen”). But what I couldn’t have known when I brought home the CD in its giant cardboard longbox from Tower Records was that the album that surrounded that novelty classic was stuffed with really first-rate alternative-rock musicianship. Some of it was pastiche of genres I really didn’t have any experience with yet (“VulvaVoid” is shoegaze! “Trapped” is mid-period time-to-rock-happily R.E.M.!), some of it was spoken-word weirdness and wordplay draped atop roiling hard rock I had no problem appreciating (“Sink,” “Ed”), and a lot of it is just crushingly morose songs about complete failure. “I’m Sorry” and “Heaven,” the third-to-last and penultimate tracks, contain lots of imagery of crushed birds and breaking things that can’t be repaired, all delivered with John S. Hall’s twerpy speak-singing to undercut the heaviness. No such undercutting takes place in “Happy Hour,” a dirge I put on to this day when I want to feel unremittingly awful. Funereal organ, some kind of electronic reverse-tape effect that sounds like something shuffling into a grave, lyrics that conclude with the lines “While the flesh fell off our bodies and we lost our limbs,” so fuzzy and distorted you can’t make it out without the lyric sheet, and on top of it all a melancholy, briefly beautiful piano chords and, finally, a guitar that sounds like it’s bleeding to death. Back then you could stumble bass-ackwards into shit like this all day long. You had it so easy you weren’t prepared for a time when you’d need a song like this.

Gang Gang Dance – Sacer

Because we absolutely, positively need more art-pop that sounds like T’Pau’s “Heart and Soul.” It took me forever to place what I was hearing in this standout track from Gang Gang Dance’s engrossing, energetic new album Eye Contact but even before I struck upon what I think is the most direct influence, this song’s project of rehabilitating big sky’s-the-limit mostly English alternative pop sounds from the ’80s had my full support. Everything about it makes me feel like I’m sitting in some teenage bedroom I never had, playing it at full volume and sharing some secret delirious joy with myself. That stop-start beat, with its synth stabs and big flat reverbbing drums, is just made to dance to in your mirror, awkward and uncaring, while Lizzi Bougatsos’ vocals run the impenenetrability of Liz Fraser (another icon of rhapsodic interiority) through a strange Bollywood filter. Which works perfectly, because to me the appeal of all the Big ’80s bands was just how far away their world felt from mine, like these were transmissions of heartache and happiness and emotions too intense to filter down to me as anything but pure excitement, in a secret language of adult glamour I was lucky enough to understand for three or four minutes at a time.

Prison for Bitches
Ryan Sands, Hellen Jo, Calivn Wong, Anthony Ha, Makkinoso, Gea, Sophia Foster-Dimino, Chris Kuzma, Johnny Ryan, Sophie Yanow, Chris “Elio” Eliopoulos, Michael Kupperman, Adam Bronson, An Nguyen, Mickey Zacchilli, Lisa Hanawalt, Anthony Wu, Evan Hadyen, Leslie Predy, Monika Uchiyama, y16o, Ryan Germick, Saicoink, Angie Wang, Tony Tulathimutte, Andre Syzmanowicz, Raymond Sohn, Michael DeForge, Mia Shwartz, Patrick Kyle, Derek Yu, Jordyn Bochon, Seibei, Ginette Lapalme, Nick Gazin, Harvey James, Zejian Shen, Robert Dayton, Aaron Mew, writers/artists
Ryan Sands and Michael DeForge, editors
self-published, 2010
64 pages
$12
Buy it and see an extensive preview at PrisonForBitches.com

The wonderful thing about recruiting a galaxy of underground comics and illustration stars to make a Lady Gaga fanzine is that no matter what kind of extravagant weirdness they concoct, there’s a better-than-even chance that at any moment the Lady herself could come along and comfortably out-weird them all. Nearly to a piece, the art, comics, photography, interviews, and essays assembled here by the Thickness team of Ryan Sands and Michael DeForge appear to have been created with a healthy appreciation for their own potential obsolescence in mind, and admiration and awe for the relentlessly and exuberantly creative young woman who’d make it happen. How else to explain the number of contributions that portray Gaga as godlike? In the hands of the Prison for Bitches team, Gaga is a queen seated on a giant telephone throwing trinkets to the huddled masses (Foster-Dimino); a vision appearing in dreams to espouse Anarcho-Gagaism to her supplicants (Yanow); a Big Brother-style disembodied head whose kohl-rimmed eyes stare at the viewer with a totalitarian sex-death gaze like something out of Metropolis (Kupperman); a She-Ra/ELA-esque figure riding through space atop a crystalline Battle-cat (Hayden); a Ray-Ban-wearing Baphomet (Predy); a giant sea goddess towering over the bodies of the drowned (Wang); an empress who lives to be 110 years old (DeForge); a severed head whose tongue, hair, and blood vessels are Cthulhoid tentacles (Aaron Mew). She is seen as supernatural, both a Delphic oracle of fabulousness and a Ring-claiming Galadriel proclaiming “All shall love me and despair.”

On the “love me” point, only a handful of the contributors work with the fact that she’s a very attractive person, but they’re among my favorites: André Syzmanowicz lovingly depicts the curves of her stomach, her breasts, her armpits, even as a werewolf creature gropes her from behind; a strip from Robert Dayton sees an ostensible fan complain about her mediocre music and ripped-off style, finally responding to the question “What do you like about her then?” with “Her navel—I want to lick her navel”; and right between the staples in the centerfold spread that anchors the book’s central full-color section, Mickey Zacchilli sticks the singer’s famously fit rear end.

Still other contributors take advantage of Gaga’s graphic potential for maximum maximalist imagemaking — artist after artist (Jo, Wang, Gazin, Yu, Bochon, Foster-Dimino) have a ton of fun with her hair, culminating in a spectacular caricature of her Coke-can curlers from the “Telephone” video by Harvey James. An Nguyen and the team of Hellen Jo & Calvin Wong provide concert reportage, the former with photos of her cosplaying fans, the latter with comics about the on- and off-stage spectacle of the concert experience.

A trio of prose pieces appear in what seems like ascending order of skepticism; in descending order, Adam Bronson has a funny piece that uses Deleuze and Hegel to analyze the relative potential of Gaga’s “Let’s Dance” and Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” to provoke violence in Filipino karaoke bars; Anthony Ha interviews Vanessa Grigoriadis, author of New York magazine’s seminal profile of Gaga’s origins and rise to fame, that’s best summed up by its title – “I’m a Total Fan of Hers, I Just Am Not a Huge Fan of Her Music”; editor Sands kicks the whole thing off with an utterly sincere and descriptively, persuasively argued “UNDISPUTED TOP 5 LADY GAGA SONGS,” featuring genuine gems like “[‘Alejandro’] sounds like ABBA’s ‘Fernando’ rubbing lotion all over Ace of Base’s ‘Don’t Turn Around’ while bathing nude on ‘La Isla Bonita'” and “[‘So Happy I Could Die’ is] really just a simple song about being convinced you are the hottest and most desirable person on the earth, and that this can be the best of all possible worlds if we allow ourselves the pleasure.” Taken in tandem, they’re like a debate between different modes of Gaga fandom, from arch irony to measured respect for a pop-culture needle-mover to downright love for someone who makes awesome songs to dance to.

The whole zine works like this, basically. Whatever it is you get out of Gaga — a pop-art deity, a gorgeous girl, an eye-inspiring spectacle, a thinkpiece generator, a hitmaker — by all means share that fun with a world that doesn’t have enough of it. This book is a snapshot of the Gaga conversation, post-“Telephone” video 2010; it’s a testament to the contributors and their subject alike that even now that the specifics of that conversation have now been rendered moot by an album full of pinball music and Clarence Clemons sax solos with a cover that reads “BORN THIS WAY” over a picture of the artist as a motorcycle with a human head, I’d love to hear them have it all over again. Prison for Bitches is a Little Monster must-have for any Gaga fan.

King Crimson- Lark's Tongues in Aspic Part !!

I’m a sucker for supervillain team-ups, but I’m particular about them as well. Conventional wisdom holds that supervillains’ villainy will always undermine their collaboration in the end: Megalomaniacal master-planner types will spend as much time maneuvering against one another as against their mutual enemies, the more dignified types will clash with the real wild ones, and before long the team-up’s either in pieces or at each other’s throats. Fie, I say. Reality is little more than a constant stream of examples of horrible people working together quite effectively to advance their agendas, and I see no reason to believe that evil men and women of sufficient means and motivation couldn’t pool their resources and crush the resistance of their do-gooding rivals, scattering broken Avengers across the Eastern seaboard and erecting enormous matching statues of Doctor Doom in New York Harbor and Magneto in the San Francisco Bay.

This is the feeling I get when I listen to this live version of a ’70s King Crimson instrumental, performed by the band’s “double trio” incarnation twenty-odd years later. Robert Fripp’s the mad scientist in this model, bespectacled and seated quietly on a stool as he makes his guitar sound like it’s actually capable of biting your head off with those first few notes. His fellow avant-guitar legend and collaborator-with-everyone-interesting Adrian Belew is a jaunty Joker-like presence by comparison, bouncing around as he draws out soaring, piercing sounds from his instrument. Two drummers pound away, laying down a suppressing fire of time-signature changes, percussive miscellany, and ear-smacking loudness; they include math-rock monster Bill Bruford (late of Yes) and session guy Pat Mastelotto (late of everyone from Mr. Mister to …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead – he’s kind of like the jobber who gets tapped by one of the big boys and surpasses everyone’s expectations) . Every good supervillain team needs a bald guy, so there’s Tony Levin, supplying the low end for one of the band’s bass-heaviest compositions, and teaming up with Trey Gunn, who compliments Fripp’s already science-fictional-sounding Frippertronics by playing instruments with names like the Warr Guitar and the Chapman Stick. The song itself is like an assault — impossibly loud from the start, like many King Crimson tracks it relies on repetition, crescendo, and melodic lines that rise ever higher in pitch to create the impression that it’s somehow getting louder and more urgent still. The constant rhythmical shifts, nearly impossible to predict unless you’ve heard the song a million times, make the riffs feel like they’re jumping out of the grooves to try to get to you as fast as they can. It’s just a sinister, angry-sounding song, and it ends with the band basically burning it to the ground, the sonic ashes a monument to their triumph. Everyone worked together to make something awful and awe-ful.

“THERE IS A FREEDOM IN VIOLENCE THAT I DON’T UNDERSTAND! AND LIKE I’VE NEVER FELT BEFOOOOOOORRRRRRRREE!!!!!” And with that top-of-her-lungs chant from singer/songwriter Merrill Garbus…it’s samba time! For all of about twenty seconds, that is, before “Riotriot” resumes the twitchy, nervous-sounding, quiet minor key groove it occupies for the bulk of its duration. I don’t want to give the impression that the song isn’t interesting up until that dramatic point — not at all. Something about its timid swing and Garbus’s hushed vocals suggests that it’s being delivered on tiptoes, looking over her shoulder to see if anyone’s listening. And that’s fitting given that Garbus is singing about seeing a riot cop in action from her window and having a sexual fantasy about him. But deep into the song things start getting a little buzzier, a little crackier and more urgent, and Garbus’s vocals start crescendoing, and then BLAM! this huge, huge moment hidden like an Easter egg at the 2:47 mark. Garbus does this sort of thing on all three of the highlight tracks from Tune-Yards’ excellent second album Whokill: there’s also the ecstatic horn section that comes from out of nowhere in “Bizness,” and the sections that involves shouting “MY MAN LIKES ME FROM BEHIND!” (every word delivered like a punch) and gorgeous woo-ooh-ooh high notes respectively in “Powa,” I feel rewarded by songs like that — it feels like their creators did something extra to make each part interesting and unpredictable, and gave me a payoff for sticking around that a traditional verse-chorus-repeat structure just wouldn’t deliver. I suppose it’s the same sort of thing I like about “Liar”‘s genuinely dangerous-sounding transitions between rest and aggression, “End Come Too Soon”‘s magnificently miserable ending, “Long Distance Runaround”‘s flipped switch between jaunty piano piece and forward-leaning math-funk. And though I hate to be the guy who takes something he likes and then says “unlike all that other shit,” fuck it: Surely Garbus’s attention to things like dynamics and song structure are what help put Tune-Yards head and shoulders above so much of indie rock’s unimaginative, amorphously strummed same-iness, where within fifteen seconds you’ve heard every trick up a given song’s sleeve, while her ability to take a sentiment as disturbing as finding freedom in violence and slam convincingly it into a “Fool in the Rain”-style party interlude is roughly twelve bajillion times more interesting, entertaining, insightful, and listenable a treatment of violence in art than some trollish shithead putting out two albums’ worth of rape jokes and daring you not to get them.

Wonderful though the trimmed-down video version may be, I’m posting the full-length album version of this song instead. It’s in this version, with its leisurely intro and extra lines and lacerating instrumental section before the third verse, that you get the full effect. It’s a different feeling than the usual “quite verse/LOUD CHORUS/quiet verse” altrock model, mind you; it’s not so binary, so on/off. Each time the loping groove nears the end of a verse, it kind of shakes out and tightens up and only then turns up the volume — it grows into the loud chorus, and you feel that potential contained within the rest of the song. Overall it radiates a sense of lazy coiled menace, like a big dangerous animal dozing in warm weather that suddenly opens its eye when you get too close. I like a song that can surprise you like that, a song that does its thing for a while but eventually says “alright, fuck it” and rears up and punches you right in the face.

Wild Beasts – “End Come Too Soon”

The lyrics to this song really couldn’t be simpler. With haiku-like precision, Hayden Thorpe’s falsetto sketches a succession of rapturous nights with a lover, all of which head inexorably to the same conclusion: the end, come too soon. That premature end — the ends of things we wish would never end are always premature — ends up overshadowing all that came before, so that where Thorpe started by singing of “blessed” and “divine” nights, he ends by saying “your skin looked waxen in the fading light.” Loss, whether through death or separation, colors everything in the same dreary gray. Once that point is reached, the music’s gently pulsing beat and cooing backing vocals take a break, as do the high plucked guitar notes and endlessly cycling piano, giving way to ambiguous electronic tones. It’s as if the band collectively pauses, draws a breath, and then lets it all out in an enormous wave of grief embodied by Thorpe’s wordless, repetitive cry, the highest and loudest notes he hits in the whole song, sung over and over again. He ends by repeating the title phrase over and over and over as well, eventually just shortening it to “too soon, too soon, too soon,” like it’s all he can think to say. As the finale of the band’s astonishingly cerebral, subtle, sensual, and controlled new album Smother, it’s an overwhelming moment of anti-catharsis, and it gets my vote for song of the year so far.

* The rumors (which weren’t so much rumors as they were lots of people knowing exactly what was going to happen and talking about it privately but not being able to say so publicly just yet) are true: DC is scrapping, re-numbering, and relaunching its entire superhero line, launching fully 50 different #1 issues in September. What’s more, the entire line will go day-and-date digital, with digital versions of the books going on sale the same day as their print counterparts. Much more on this anon.

* The two Hobbit movies, subtitled An Unexpected Journey and There and Back Again, will be released in December 14, 2012 and December 13, 2013 respectively. See you there opening night.

* Ed Brubaker on superheroes, violence, and closure — one of the most interesting things I’ve read about superhero comics in a long time, from Tom Spurgeon’s very interesting interview with the writer.

* Bruce Baugh on John Carpenter’s The Thing:

Third, there’s a useful lesson in plotting in this story. You absolutely don’t have to nail down everything for it to feel like a tight, connected whole if you give the audience—or players—enough solid points for them to stand on while speculating about the rest. In the case of the Thing’s subversion of the various station members, we can tell with great confidence when some happened, and even get to see some right on screen. Others we can only wonder about. And that’s fine. Players often like to chew over the unresolved questions, if it doesn’t all just feel like an exercise in futility.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this sort of thing, about questions left unanswered by various genre fictions, and how sometimes those un-answers remain a huge part of the work’s appeal years later while other times they’re the reason we rarely return to it, all in the context of how Twin Peaks seems to be a case of the former while it’s still unknown what side Lost will eventually fall on. I think it has to do with…I guess I’d call it a matter of “full absences” versus “empty absences”? You want a given absence of information to feel like it’s full of information that for whatever reason you can’t see, rather than just a gaping hole where information should be, but I’m not sure if I can nail down what the difference would be other than “I know it when I (don’t) see it.” I need to hash that out some more.

* This is exactly why I keep Corey Blake in my RSS reader: Here he’s collected links to all of my Robot 6 colleague Chris Mautner’s “Comics College” columns, which offer advice to newcomers on where to begin with the work of the great cartoonists.

* I wish there were an apostrophe after the author’s last name–that would make the title of Michael Kupperman’s next book even funnier.

* Ta-Nehisi Coates was in fine form today. First he coined the phrase “the fiscally fantastic” to describe fiction about the extravagantly carefree wealthy. My wife and I were talking about this just this past weekend, in reference to how Frasier, despite being more consistent over the course of its however-many seasons than its predecessor Cheers and the similarly ubiquitous-in-syndication sitcom Roseanne, really doesn’t hold a candle to either one. In the end, stories about Roseanne‘s nuclear family of working poor and Cheers‘ adopted family of three-time losers feel more inherently…I dunno, worth telling than the travails of the Brothers Crane as they try to balance failed romances with getting time on the squash court, drinking aged scotch and fine wines, and snagging season tickets for Seattle’s most expensive cultural attractions. I know I’ve also gotten kind of tired of movies about billionaire vigilantes and rich young beautiful urban professionals who learn something about life and laughs and love.

* Then there’s this piece on why male readers should read women writers. Basically, Rooney Ruling yourself to account for gender opens you up to the output of over half of the human population, which can only redound to your benefit compared to sticking just to the Y-chromosome set:

This is not a favor to feminists. This is not about how to pick up chicks. This is about hunger, greed and acquisition. Do not read books by women to murder your inner sexist pig. Do it because Edith Wharton can fucking write. It’s that simple.

I think it’s worth murdering your inner sexist pig, but yes. One thing that the “eat your vegetables” metaphor for doing less-than-immediately-easy things undervalues is that when you eat your vegetables it’s not that the only benefit is that you’ve satisfied your mom and dad, you’re also getting vital nutrients necessary to stay alive. Plus, broccoli is delicious. You know?

* It’s been great to see Brian Hibbs, Graeme McMillan, and Jeff Lester — the Big Three of the fractured Justice League that is The Savage Critic(s) — return to regular capsule-review writing. You should go and browse through the past several weeks of entries, but for now let me direct you to Jeff’s most recent contribution, which contains this beautiful bit of writing on Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy:

By [the ’50s], it feels like every character has turned grotesque, and every object requires an arrowed caption to label it, a paranoid’s world where nothing can be dismissed.

Ooftah, that last bit is good.

* Though I think Nitsuh Abebe is being too hard on Lady Gaga, who’s a better pop star than we deserve, and that he ultimately stops short of where he could have gone with his argument that provocation and “being yourself” are value-neutral concepts — that’s as may be, but surely we could look at the actual form these things have taken with, say, Odd Future and Lady Gaga and evaluate their respective value, no? — the rest of his column on the message of Born This Way is so stuffed with great ideas, expertly delivered, that I hardly know where to begin excerpting it. But here’s a start: “Aren’t ‘be yourself’ and ‘be what you want to be’ totally different instructions?” That’s an underexplored aspect of Gaga’s persona. “Born This Way” — what if you weren’t? Her embrace of artifice is so complete that it’s odd to think of how she’s simultaneously arguing for the primacy of personal authenticity.

* Some sweet, He-Man-cartoon-reffing fanart for Johnny Ryan’s Prison Pit by Marc Palm.

* This looks like sketches for a new Uno Moralez comic.

* Always good to see a new Ben Katchor strip.

* Is Green Lantern the psychedelic superhero movie we’ve been waiting for?

* Dave McKean’s new sex comic Celluloid looks lovely,

* I thought this was kind of neat: There are so many Marvel writers located in Portland that for the company’s latest creative summit, the New York-based editorial staff flew there instead of the other way around.

* Here’s an excellent critique of Chester Brown’s Paying For It by Douglas Wolk that echoes many of the thoughts and complaints I had about it. Douglas is harder than I am on Brown’s cartooning here, though, which is as beautiful as ever.

* Buy some Zach Hazard Vaupen originals and prints and comics and help him pay his rent!

* TJ Dietsch on Grant Morrison’s JLA and its lessons for superhero team books:

Morrison didn’t put the team together by having our heroes looking at pictures and weighing their options or all meeting up by happenstance and deciding to join forces, THEY WERE JUST THERE! I’d like those potential super hero team writers to take note of this too. We don’t need to see how the team is put together. It’s boring. Just put them together and if questions arise (or better yet, if mysteries abound) answer them as you go. I don’t want to see how next season’s Steelers come together, I want to see them play football!

* Trent Reznor and Karen O. covering Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song”? Oh, indeed. Actually, who cares about Karen O., it’s Trent Reznor covering Led Zeppelin, a prospect that would thrill me equally at any time between now and about 1992.

* Missed it somehow, but Dan Nadel catches that Fantagraphics is publishing some Guy Peellaert graphic novels. Peellaert is best known (to me anyway) as the guy who painted the cover for David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs.

* Ben Morse and Kiel Phegley dig into the series finale of Smallville. I watched the last 20 minutes or so, making that the first 20 minutes of Smallville I ever watched; Darkseid possessed John Glover and was killed by a montage, and the part of 10 years of audience expectations vis a vis Tom Welling in a Superman suit was played by a tiny CGI man in the sky.

* Real Life Horror: Jared Loughner, the man who killed six and injured 12 during an attempted assassination of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, was found legally insane. I wanted to point that out since the day it happened I jumped to the conclusion that the shooting was politically motivated, and I was wrong.

* Bruce Baugh on Victor Frankenstein and genius youth.

Friendly Fires
“Hawaiian Air”
from Pala
XL, May 2011
Download it from Amazon.com

I’m not a lyrics person, not up front anyway — my initial experiences with a song are almost always going to be solely music-based, perhaps with an assist from the song title. So when I arrived at this standout track off the second album from the shiny-sounding English dance/rock group Friendly Fires, saw the title, heard the galloping beat and the soaring synth wash during the chorus and that little birdlike noise that keeps repeating, I figured “Okay, cool, it’s a song about being in Hawaii and being awed and amazed by the beauty of it all.” Everyone loves a good “transformed by the beauty of my vacation destination” song (what’s up, “Tahitian Moon”?) especially one with as openly hedonistic a beat as this one, so hey, no problems here. Then I finally listened to the record enough to pay attention to those lyrics, and lo and behold, singer Ed McFarlane never gets off the plane. He’s not singing about the water and the volcanos and the trees and the hula and such, he’s singing about feeling someone’s knees in his back and getting stuck in his seat due to turbulence and “watching a film with at talking dog.” The “Hawaiian Air” of the title isn’t the oxygen, it’s the airline. The realization made me chuckle, but beyond the lulz, what a warm, humble, relatable thing to write a big, soaring, epic-sounding dance track about. McFarlane’s voice already manages to pull off the trick of being simultaneously ultra-(R/r)omantic and also really intimate and friendly-sounding; this song doubles down on his preexisting appeal. A real treat.

Prog rock is lambasted for its bombast and excess, but at its best restraint is its true hallmark, along with an ability to lock into a groove and do it to death as much as any of the funk bands that were the monsters of prog’s contemporaries during their mutual heyday. One of my all-time favorite classic-rock radio jams — it counts as one, since like “Sgt. Pepper’s (Reprise)/A Day in the Life” or “Time/Breathe (Reprise)” or what have you its two halves segue together and are never played separately — the combo better known simply as “Long Distance Runaround” puts both qualities on ample display. The first half is all about holding back: After faking us out with a squiggly guitar filigree and rhythm-section churn, the song settles down into a main section characterized by a softly jaunty keyboard part, complemented by the broken-up phrases and clipped delivery of Jon Anderson’s vocals and a joint guitar/bass line from Steve Howe and Chris Squire that drops in a few notes every so often and then cuts off almost as soon as it begins. It’s a restrained approach well suited to Anderson’s lyrics, which sing of the frustration of opportunities squandered and expectations never met, and it creates a refreshing amount of space around each instrument, if that makes sense — you feel present in a room with various musicians contributing every so often, then holding back, content to let things linger in the air. Lyrically, the second half of the song may consist only of nonsense — the taxonomic name of a fish chanted as though it contained the secrets of the universe — but the instrumentation seems to house all the angst lurking beneath the pinched and placid surface of the first half. Essentially a drum and bass duet with Squire overdubbing a rather extraordinary range of approaches to his instrument and future King Crimson behemoth Bill Bruford providing a tight percussion backdrop, it seizes a 7/4 rhythm and exploits it, introducing new and increasingly menacing bass elements every few turns of the screw. It’s difficult for me to hear it and not nod my head along, leaning into the music as it barrels forward.

I’ve probably listened to this song more often after catching it by chance while flipping around my car radio presets than on my iPod, and in that context it shines even brighter, I’d say. Music on the radio often comes through as a wall of noise, filling every available sonic space, sounding emitted rather than performed and recorded. “Long Distance Runaround”‘s dynamics give my ears empty spaces to dart into, and I can “see” the rest of the music from that vantage point as it plays, instead of merely sitting there and letting it blast over me.

* Saving this for when I can really sink my teeth into it: Ken Parille compares the creation stories of Jack Kirby and Chris Ware, the two best cartoonists, for the Comics Journal.

* Speaking of the King and the Journal, TCJ.com has posted the infamous Gary Groth/Jack Kirby interview in which Kirby claims sole credit for most of the great Marvel comics; as I say over at Robot 6, the claims are dubious, the emotion behind them understandable.

* Also at Robot 6, a few brief thoughts on the importance of Kramers Ergot.

* Winter Is Coming rounds up the latest batch of Game of Thrones reviews and recaps. This feature is great one-stop shopping for GoT crit, if you’re looking for such.

* Curt Purcell returns to the topic of religion’s role in Battlestar Galactica. He’s harder on the show than I am, certainly, but he wields his criticism with far more precision than “OMG NO JEEBUS IN MY SF!!!”, which was as far as many reviewers got.

* Great Renee French drawing, or greatest Renee French drawing?

* Hans Rickheit gets his Mutter Museum on and draws medical deformities.

* Is this a new Kevin Huizenga strip, or is it an old one I missed someplace? Either way it expresses a sentiment I’m sure anyone who’s ever freelanced has felt.

* The Rapture reunites with DFA? Sure, I’ll eat it.

* A 33 1/3 book about prog? Sure, I’ll eat that too.

* I was really sad to hear of the death of Macho Man Randy Savage. The man was like an entertainment elemental: Everything about how he looked, sounded, and acted was a delight. Ben Morse reflects on his unique gifts as a pro wrestler, a gig in which he combined mic skills, stage presence, and technical prowess in a way few have before or since.

* Stop your grinnin’ and drop your linen: Kramers Ergot 8! Now from PictureBox, the latest issue of Sammy Harkham’s seminal artcomix anthology will be a tighter, smaller affair, with comics of 16-24 pages each by about a dozen creators: Gary Panter, Gabrielle Bell, C.F., Kevin Huizenga, Ben Jones, Jason T. Miles, Sammy Harkham, Leon Sadler, Johnny Ryan, Frank Santoro & Dash Shaw, Anya Davidson, Ron Rege Jr., Ron Embleton & Frederic Mullally. Watch the video for more.

Kramers Ergot #8: The Trailer from Dan Nadel on Vimeo.

* Speaking of Harkham, he recently sounded off on Chester Brown’s Paying For It in a fashion that was equal parts colorful and insightful. I agree with him about the ending.

* So this is kinda neat: Over at The Cool Kids Table, my friend Megan Morse and I will be talking about Game of Thrones every week — her from the perspective of a newcomer to the material via the show, me from the perspective of a grizzled veteran with a tedious obsession. This week’s opening installment may betray its roots as an informal email exchange, but now that we know what we’re doing, I think it’ll be a real pip.

* Speaking of GoT, George R.R. Martin talks about the development and completion of A Dance with Dragons in fascinating and exhaustive detail. He gives you ample warning if you wanna bail out halfway through the post, just so you know, but he does reveal three of the viewpoint characters and all but reveals a fourth. Very much worth a read if you’d like some behind-the-scenes information about the making of the most infamously delayed SFF book since The Last Dangerous Visions.

* Nick Gazin talks to Dan Nadel about Yuichi Yokoyama and Garden. Nick’s questions get Nadel to flesh out Yokoyama’s personal history and personality a bit, which is welcome.

* Geoff Grogan serves up a process post on his excellent comic Fandancer.

* Michael DeForge joins the crew at What Things Do with a new strip.

* True American Dog is a treasure.

* Matthew Perpetua is right: This footage of Tune-Yards performing “Powa” in April 2010 is absolutely remarkable and riveting. The album this song was on wouldn’t come out for another year, and Tune-Yards was an opening act at a show whose audience had largely never even heard of them…yet watch Merrill Garbus perform with such confidence that you can slowly feel her pinning down the audience, where by the end they’re screaming their approval. Now I understand what all the critical fuss was about last year.