I'm reading one right now, but I'm not finished with it...this post happened because I'm breezing through heavy listens so I can have some discographies finished or close to finished by the end of the year. This is probably just OCD crap on my part but I really want to be done with some of these bands. So the book will have to be included in the next one.
MOVIES:
The Andromeda Strain (1971): I basically hated Michael Crichton's novel, finding it to be a badly dated load of science/techno-babble with no interesting characters or dialogue and a lame ending that obliterated any chance of there being any real suspense (the destroyed town at the beginning is admittedly still an eerie opening, though.) I was therefore stunned to find out that lots of people are still watching the film (and writing really long essays about it as an important work of sci-fi art) as I was figuring it would have lots of the same problems, and it more or less does. It's super-cold, filled with medical/scientific yakking and has no well-known actors so as to not make the characters too unrealistic....miserably dated, right? Yes, yes, and yet a little voice kept whispering in the back of my brain to keep an open mind, so I did, and that voice was triggered by the appearance of Robert Wise's name in the opening credits. Robert Wise?!? Why would he want to direct an entire movie so cold and sterile and full of stainless corridors and technobabble that it makes 2001: A Space Odyssey look like Hair? Well...read all those essays (and yeah, I read a lot of 'em) and you'll find out that's exactly what people seem to like about this film: it's a science-fiction film that seemed to be going out of its way to not have any "fiction" in it--something you'd thus be required to take seriously. Something that isn't a dumb Hollywood movie. I could see that, but if that's really the case, then why did the movie have to end on a guy scrambling up a bunch of stairwells while laser guns narrowly miss him so he can defuse a bomb, while a computer voice does a countdown on the soundtrack?!? A total Hollywood ending? Oh right...because that's what Crichton did.
Gimme Shelter: Who is to blame for Altamont? Probably everybody. Naive/stupid/greedy promoters (Hi, Michael Lang, who I just saw in not one, but two nasty Woodstock 99 documentaries!) and attention #####s (Hi, Melvin Belli! Still eating blubber?) who poorly planned the event, the well-meaning but desperate-to-save-a-buck Rolling Stones themselves, the animalistic and stupid Hell's Angels who were no doubt all too happy to bust heads, and a crowd full of high, stupid kids, one of whom was sadly too loaded up on methamphetamines to realize he shouldn't have waved his gun around, even if it was unloaded. "Nobody looks good" seems to be the point of this. You get some decent Stones footage, starting in happier times before we hear Mick pathetically attempting to chill out the crowd while Meredith Hunter gets snuffed. The film pretty much forgets the other four Stones--Keith barely appears--to concentrate on blaming Mick, right down to a notorious freeze-frame. I'd recommend watching this if you haven't, it's a decent history lesson though there are probably books that are a more "definitive" take on Altamont.
8 1/2: Well, I'd rather sit through this again than La Dolce Vita, even though that movie seemed a lot more meaningful, this is less of a draining, painful chore to watch. I confess that I felt it took about an hour to get to any really strong scenes, and I wish it had a lot more of them. Obviously the best known scenes (the beach prostitute, the whip and the harem) are the best scenes, though I got distracted thinking about how the Mastroanni character/Fellini stand-in is a European auteur fresh off a big success directing...a sci-fi epic? That his heart isn't into? Didn't this happen to Truffaut three years later? I wish the dialogue were a little less secretive. I liked three Fellini movies but the rest not so much, and as far as "distorted dreamy memories" go I'd rather watch Amarcord. I think I'll stop with Fellini here, unless someone wants to point out to be how one of the ones I missed is a big fat masterpiece.
The Who: The Kids Are Alright: Documentary? What? This is just a friggin' compilation of movie scenes and TV appearances and TV interviews, not a "documentary." I didn't mind watching it at all--it's still the Who--but it certainly seems a little superfluous these days, and isn't it lame when the best part of your movie is just...footage from another movie? (Woodstock, obviously.) I was also well familiar with the Shepperton 1978 windmill-y footage and Keith Moon doing that Steve Martin SNL sketch and, well, a lot of the rest of it. It just jumps around haphazardly, and I feel like it could have been made by anybody.
ALBUMS:
Kate Bush, The Sensual World: LLLLUUUUUSSSSSHHHHHHHHHHH. Cripes. Wikipedia says she spent about 22 months in the studio working on this not-terribly-widely-discussed Hounds Of Love followup and GOD DOES IT EVER SHOW. Super hi-tech Fairlight synth syrup ladled over everything, fretless bass wizardly, mega-ethereal fairies-fluttering-in-the-woods vocal harmony arrangements, a small army of ethnic percussion and instrumentation, David Gilmour on a couple of tracks (oh well, he doesn't do anything distinctive, they're not the best songs on the album, and it's 80s David Gilmour anyway), not a spot on the damn thing--I guess Kate wanted to celebrate turning 30 by making an album so ethereally LLLLUUUUUUSSSHHHHHHHHHHH that it makes contemporary albums by Cocteau Twins sound like Husker Du's Land Speed Record by comparison. Don't worry that it's LLLUUSSHHHHHNNNESS from 1989, it's survived--but the approach worked best on the sensual indeed title track and the closing piano ballad "This Woman's Work" which was unfortunately written for a lesser John Hughes film; I'll also go to bat for the dark "Deeper Understanding" (lyrics predicting social media addiction!! sound the klaxon!), "Reaching Out" and "Rocket's Tail." I have to confess though, once the LLLLUUSSSSHHHH effect started to dissipate I realized that "Between A Man And A Woman," "Never Be Mine" and "The Fog" weren't doing that much for me, and "Love & Anger" (that one has Gilmour) is genuinely bad for her, an obvious rewrite of "The Big Sky." I'd still say it's more good than weak, even though what I'm going to remember is the production more than the songs, which is rare with me. But what production!!! (Most reviews I could find wanted to talk more about Kate's lyrics and personality, not spending much time talking about the production.)
The Who, Live At Leeds: I guess it boils down to this: I'm impressed enough with what two vocalists, one guitarist, one bassist and one drummer can do to recreate all these songs, even if some of them weren't much more than that on record anyway. But just impressed "enough": in general I'm not that wild about live albums, but I couldn't really ignore this one, due to all the rave reviews. Well, "Heaven And Hell" and "Young Man Blues" stuck out to me the best of the first half of the show, and of the second half--Tommy (I listened to the two-disc version with a little over 30 tracks, total)...well, I'm impressed that they could do Tommy, but I can't say "in its entirety" because it didn't take me long to realize that THE BEST FRIGGIN' SONG ON THE ALBUM--"COUSIN KEVIN"--IS F***ING MISSING!!!!!! WHYYYY?!?!?!? I mean, no "Underture" is nice, and I could live without "Welcome," but what was the point of leaving out "Kevin," to feud with Entwistle for writing it or something? Anyway, I don't much think any song on the live Tommy trounces the studio version, nor does anything on the first disc trounce its studio counterpart, IMO. So while I can generally respect this, I don't know that I'll return to it much.
The Rolling Stones, Metamorphosis: Hardcore fans only (and some of them don't like it anyway) but I didn't mind it--a few small gems to be found here. "Each And Every Day Of The Year" is a favorite--most reviews trashed this song, but I like it, and imagine people hearing it when it was recorded--1964, was it?!? People trash the orchestral "Out Of Time" too and I like it. Me so solly. I also go for "I'd Much Rather Be With The Boys" (ghey!!!), "Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind," "Try A Little Harder," "I Don't Know Why," and a couple others. I didn't love this and probably won't listen to it that much in the future, but you could definitely do worse for an odds-and-ends compilation.
Olivia Tremor Control, Black Foliage: This was good, but I'd have to rate it slightly lower than Dusk At Cubist Castle (like a 10.1 out of 15 to DACC's 10.7 out of 15) because, y'know, it's like, the exact same f***ing album. It's pretty much the same length (70 minutes) and it's a combination of twee updated 60s pop rock tunes with somewhat lo-fi production, and musique concrete noise sections of no value to me, like "The Bark And Below It," 11 minutes of "Moonchild"-y crap, to pad out that running time. What'd I like here? "A Peculiar Noise Called Train Director"? "A Sleepy Company"? "California Demise 3"? "I Have Been Floated"? "Hilltop Procession" at the end, there? I guess I liked listening to the album enough, but I'd have to listen to it again to remember which of these is which. The reason I listened to this is because DACC is so fresh in my mind. I have no idea what would have happened if it hadn't been--would I have liked this less or more?
Faust, Faust IV: Well, this verged on okay, because a couple songs predict shoegaze and dreampop--the cloud-drifting "Jennifer" is best, and I bet Brian Eno was a fan! Then there's the 12 minute "Krautrock," and you just know My Bloody Valentine drew from those loud blasts of guitar feedback, though MBV would have made it into something a lot prettier, which is why for all "Krautrock"'s huge historic importance, I'm not head over heels in love with it, because what it inspired was prettier. "The Sad Skinhead" has some of the most amusingly dopey, stupid-sounding vocals ever (and the song even more amusingly doesn't mesh with the rest of this s*** at all) and...uh, gawd, the tracklisting for the next four or five songs is a f***ing MESS, which song is which? Reading Wikipedia for the answers made it even more confusing. The last one sure was rude, blasting a nice pretty pastoral melody with a gawdawful synthesizer feedback belch. In spite of a few hugely historic ideas here, I think I'm gonna stop with Faust. They were trailblazing heroes in a sense, but I certainly found them more conceptual than listenable.
The Moody Blues, Sur La Mer: I was stunned that this was damn near worse than I'd already heard--every WRC review (and WRC reviews are about all you'll find for this album!) ripped it to shreds, and I'd have to concur, this combination of poor, half-assed songwriting, adult-contemporary vibe, bad 1980s synths and absent band members (no Ray Thomas at all, Patrick Moraz said he was programmed, and Graeme Edge certainly might as well have been) is actually, honestly, literally worse IMO than the Beach Boys' Summer In Paradise (though it still might be an inch better than The Beach Boys or M. I. U. Album.) The two biggest offenders are "Here Comes The Weekend" (Chris De Burgh's already ridiculous "Don't Pay The Ferryman" if it were uncatchy and retarded and full of bad synth-horn brapps) and "Miracle" (1988's a little late to be ripping off "Billie Jean," let alone with a Casio synth bass, isn't it guys?) Maybe one or two songs are salvageable but you don't care which ones, and the biggest insult of all? This was produced not by some synthesizer hack who tries to save dinosaur bands, but by TONY F***ING VISCONTI, who I'd never heard a badly produced album by prior to this. What gives, Tony?
Pavement, Demolition Plot J-7 EP: The second crappy early Pavement EP is slightly better than the first, Slay Tracks, but that's because its one good song, "Forklift"--which sounds like a kid's toy synth run through a $4 distortion pedal and spilled all over a hilariously basic melody--is better than "Box Elder," the one good one on Slay Tracks. The other five or six songs all sucked completely. Thank God this band would get better in the future.
Big Black, BulldozerEP: Six songs on this 1984 mini-platter, and I already knew the two best ones: the hilarious, redneck-bashing "Texas," and the white-supremacist-dog song "Seth," with its confusing line "I don't know why she's so secretive." "I'm A Mess" verged on okay, but God knows if I'll ever listen to it again. The other three songs were pretty dispensable. I wonder if I could clear more than an hour on a CD-R if I compiled every Big Black song I seriously cared about. It's possible that I couldn't!!
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