Finally, that Alvin and the Chipmunks / Manheim Steamroller collaboration we’ve all been waiting for! Basically sounding the same as a walk past the entrance of a Kay Bee Toys, try this album if you enjoy xylophones, talking robots, the demo button on that old synthesizer at Grandpa’s house, motion-activated cackling witches, xylophones, Max Headroom, battery-powered monkeys banging cymbals together, a dog barking “Jingle Bells,” video game soundtracks of the early 90s, and xylophones. This is crazed carnival clown music taken to a new sample-laden, frenetic frenzy. Full of blooping, looping, endless repetition, two-year-olds may really get into this. Unfortunately we may never know, since I don’t have children yet and I don’t feel good about subjecting my nieces and nephews to this, nor their parents, nor random children at a school playground, because that would just be creepy. Two stars; unless you are in the mood for something really obnoxious (I get that mood myself from time to time) or you want to send a stressed-out person into an actual nervous breakdown, in which case it goes up to four stars. Merry Christmas!
Dan Deacon: Bromst
Carpark Records
Released March 24, 2009
Try “Woof Woof” ( Track 8 ) right here right now for some fun, free, immediate gratification. It’s just as easy as pushing that button your parents really don’t want you to push. Go ahead, push the button. PUSH THE BUTTON!
Cameron is an aimless, sarcastic stoner who is alienated from his family and has no real friends of which to speak. When he starts having hallucinations and loses control of his body a couple of times, everyone assumes he must be using hallucinogenic drugs. Not true: after getting fired from Buddha Burger, getting suspended from school, being forced into therapy by his parents, and having a run-in with a flaming toaster oven, he is finally diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob (a.k.a. “Mad Cow”) disease. It will deteriorate his brain and kill him.
It is at this point when things get interesting. A pink-haired punker angel, complete with combat boots, torn fishnets, and actual feather wings spray-painted with graffiti, appears to Cameron in his hospital room. She urges Cameron to escape the hospital and undertake a quest to find the mysterious Dr. X, a traveler through dimensions who has inadvertently brought dark energy back with him to our universe. It is this dark energy that is attacking Cameron’s brain, not Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and if he can find Dr. X and get him to close up the wormhole, he will not only find a cure for himself but save the universe!
What follows is a kaleidoscopic adventure full of quirky characters and a million plot twists and details. The book is stuffed with a mess of references, touching on everything from Norse mythology to Star Wars, quantum mechanics to MTV Spring Break. Best of all, some of the hippest “references,” such as the legendary mystical free jazz trumpet player Junior Webster, are actually entirely made up by the author. While the book at times reads like both a Percy Jackson title for the 17+ crowd and Paper Towns on acid, Don Quixote looms large in the background and the idea of living out one’s life in a week’s time hearkens back to Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Hilarious, weird, life affirming, surreal and ironic, above all Going Bovine is just a whole lot of wacky fun. (four stars)
[Flags: this book depicts drug use, pervasive profanity, and an irresponsible and somewhat ridiculous teenage fantasy sex scene. I hate sex scenes in books in general, and this one specifically knocks a half-point off my rating and makes it a definite “high school only” title. But really, if a dying teenage boy actually is dreaming his way through the end of his life, among other things of course he is going to dream himself up some sex, so maybe it can be forgiven?]
Going Bovine
Written by Libba Bray
Delacorte Books for Young Readers
496 pages
ISBN: 978-0385733977
Release Date: 22 September 2009 GoingBovine.com Libba Bray – Official Website
Animal Collective: Merriweather Post Pavilion (Domino, 2009)
It should be good to share our favorite things
I’ll keep an open mind if you let me in
Don’t let your temper rise, don’t get a bitter face
Try not to judge me on my kind of taste
And don’t go changing clothes when they don’t like yours
This invitation and counsel comes from the closing verse of the song “Taste,” a squelching Beach Boys-meets-Main Street Electrical Light Parade stomp from Animal Collective’s latest opus, Merriweather Post Pavilion. If ever there was one album worth leaving your musical comfort zone for, an album worth spending some time getting acquainted with, allowing it to grow and reveal its many delights and rewards to you (even, and maybe especially, if you didn’t like it at first), this is the one.
Throughout their career as a band, Animal Collective has tapped into the joyful, scary sounds of childhood sonic exploration. By this I refer to the fun, meandering, genius songs that some four-year-olds make up on the spot, or the wild sounds you might hear an untrained five year old who has free reign at a piano pound out. In other words, these are the musical activities children feel free to do before they learn to do them the proper way, before they become self-conscious and embarrassed about such behavior, or before the keyboard cover is slammed down and they are dragged out of grandma’s living room to timeout. The members of Animal Collective either never moved past this stage or they found some magical way to revert to it. They are “playing” music, and as play it is imaginative, primal, experimental, fun, obnoxious, and, perhaps above all, mysterious.
I emphasize the mystery of their music because It is often nearly impossible to figure out what instruments, sounds, or playing methods you are hearing at any particular moment in an Animal Collective song. In past efforts their lyrics were sometimes difficult to correctly decipher and included words placed together as much or more for their sound as for their meaning. Again, this mystery and abstraction points back to that childlike propensity to “play,” their ignorance of many of the conventions of musicianship or their belligerent refusal to adhere to them. Over the course of their career they have developed their own idiosyncratic methods of creating music using their instruments, their computers and their voices, and this has made for several albums worthy of the listening ear of an open-minded music fan. However, with the songs on Merriweather they have clearly become masters of their self-made musical methods; this is their most accomplished and accessible album to date, in both songwriting and arrangement. Each song is fully formed, inhabiting its own lush and unique world.
Their instrumental mystery/mastery is in full play from the outset of the album with the song “In the Flowers.” Various abstract noises soon resolve themselves into a waltz rhythm featuring a triplet figure played on an instrument that, with each morphing note, sounds like it could be something different: Is it a harp? a harpsichord? a guitar? a treated piano? a synthesizer? After the second verse the song explodes into a beautiful cacophony of abstract sounds that give the effect of a full-on symphony orchestra: strings, brass, woodwinds, the whole package. I say “give the effect” because this “orchestration” is likewise of indeterminate instrumental origins. This wonderful noise blasts out over a thick electro-timpani beat and orchestral percussion. It simultaneously evokes a Tchaikovsky ballet movement and contemporary electronic dance music. Such musical references to dance make the lyrics and music entirely symbiotic, as the singer imagines dancing with the one he loves, from whom he is currently far removed.
Unabashed playfulness and lyrical mastery also abound in “Summertime Clothes,” which is at once a hugely weird summer jam, a perfectly written pop song, and a sort of “Good Vibrations” or “Singin’ in the Rain” for 2009. Sizzling, gurgling soda pop sounds and ambient street noise accompany euphoric singing that describes a hot summer nighttime walk through city streets:
It doesn’t really matter, I’ll go where you feel
Hunt for the breeze, get a midnight meal
I point in the windows, you point out the parks
Rip off your sleeves and I’ll ditch my socks
We’ll dance to the songs from the cars as they pass
Weave through the cardboard, smell that trash
Walking around in our summertime clothes,
Nowhere to go while our bodies glow
And we’ll greet the dawn in its morning blues
With purple yawn, you’ll be sleeping soon
And I want to walk around with you
And I want to walk around with you
To me, one of the most winning aspects of <em>Merriweather</em> is the fact that so much sonic playfulness and weirdness is coupled with lyrics firmly grounded in domestic life. These are not songs about random sex, drugs, violence, and rock n’ roll excess, nor are they political rants, trite love songs, or absurd fantasies, but rather songs about wanting to provide a decent home for your family (“My Girls”), songs about missing your spouse when traveling (“In the Flowers,” “Guys Eyes,”), songs about waking up early and getting your child ready for the day (‘Daily Routine”), and songs giving advice to a little brother (“Brother Sport”). In these songs the mundane becomes magical and the banal goes wild.
A fine example is “Daily Routine,” which, with its cut-up organ flourishes, vocal harmonies, and fat hip-hop beats sounds like a Timbaland remix of Yes’ “Close to the Edge.” However, in contrast to the mysticism of Yes songs and the vulgarity of much of hip-hop, “Daily Routine” lyrically depicts the pedestrian events the title implies, “Make sure my kid’s got a jacket / And coat and shoes and hat. / Strap a stroller to my back / Bouncing along every crack.” The true genius comes in the second part of the song, all slow, echoing, reverb-drenched drone over which the lines “Just a sec more…in my bed / Hope my machine’s working right” are sung repeatedly, musically re-creating the feeling of wanting to hit the snooze button in the morning.
Despite the many details and colors of the music, it is the simple exuberance of many of these songs that keeps me listening to them over and over again. I love the counter-intuitive brilliance of closing the album with a song as enthusiastic, infectious, and stadium-ready as “Brother Sport.” I smile and marvel at the audacity of filling the hand-clapping pop anthem chorus of “My Girls” with the so not rock-n-roll lines, “I don’t mean to seem like I care about material things / (like a social stance) / I just want four walls and adobe slats for my girls / (Woooooooh!)” Taken together, the songs of this album set forth a refreshing view of life in which the hottest party is at home with the family, and nothing is more exciting than spending time with the ones you love. In my opinion it’s a mature perspective to express with such wild and childish sounds. Due to this album’s sonic inventiveness, its musical hyperactivity, its total lack of cynicism and negativity, and it’s all-around positive energy and joyousness, I can’t really imagine an album coming out any time this year that I will like more than this one. Ultimately this is why I feel this is the one album among so many that is worth the time of the not-usually-patient listener: the more you listen to it, the more it may make you happy.
We met at an art exhibit. We met in the comment section of my blog. We met in a snowstorm in a cottage in the mountains. We met at a symphony concert, sitting next to each other. We met at Family Home Evening and commiserated because we both hated Family Home Evening. We met at the library and traded poems. We met in the Provo temple. We met in empty parking lots and Mexican restaurants and our parents’ houses. We met at a movie theater where we were both making fun of the movie. We met at IKEA, buying bookshelves. We met at an art supply store. We met at a little Chinese place by the hospital. We met on the yellow BART line between San Francisco and Lafayette. We met hiking on a trail in Millcreek Canyon on the last nice autumn day before winter. We met to shovel snow under the full moon. We met because we both liked a painting by Brian Kershisnik.
Cooking chili. As the water started to boil, the pinto beans rushed to the top and jostled each other, mosh pit/street fighting style. It was pretty fun to watch. Possibly the highlight of my day.
Wow. This has certainly been a week. This week I started writing a novel, voted and had part in the somewhat collective feeling of hopeful euphoria at the election of our new President, acquired two fun new toys, failed at continuing to write the novel that I began, stood on the sidelines of a weirdness and meltdown in my once happy fun office workplace that I still don’t quite understand, and cooked a couple of genuine dinners right here in our little home. This is a week that should be recorded, and yet all I have to show for it are several half-written blog entries and eight pages of nonsense that were supposed to be the start of a novel that was/is to be drafted entirely in the month of November. So, for lack of any other, more-fully-realized expressions of my thoughts and feelings of this week, I begin with this post, which is now almost at its end. Hopefully I will finish up those other fabled posts soon.
p.s. I’ve been trying to write about the San Rafael Swell for a month now, and I won’t let myself post pictures unless I’ve written about it first. Sorry. The apocryphal promises of posts continue.
I guess I’m going to try my hand at that NaNoWriMo thing this year. NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. It is a little organization that encourages people to plow through becoming a novelist by drafting an entire novel (50,000 words) within the 30 days of November. It is all about writing in quantity without editing or second guessing. The goal, or at least my goal, is mainly just to have some fun with writing and hopefully crank out some new ideas. It may not lead to anything. I may fail. It would be foolish to hope for an On the Road type of improvised writing success, although I have to admit I was fascinated with the idea of trying to write using Kerouac’s typewriter scroll method when I first learned of it and read On the Road as a teenager.
Now, ten or eleven years later, I think I’m going to give it a try. One thing we have up on Kerouac is that word processing does much to facilitate such a writing style. Now that I think of it, probably a big part of Kerouac’s success in writing a great novel in 3 weeks was that his narrative was largely autobiographical, so he was simply describing memories, and memories he was passionate about, rather than making up characters, events and settings. I realize that this is something that I should think upon as I begin. Then again, maybe I shouldn’t dwell upon it, because the point of the exercise is to have fun and be productive and ignore all the rules, I think. Maybe I should place no expectations on myself beyond those just mentioned.
Every day for the next month I need to spew out between 1600 to 2000 words to meet the quota for conquering NaNoWriMo. The words won’t be showing up on this blog, though. I want to put all of my writing energy into my hypernovelwriting project, so the Froz-T-Freez may need to close shop for the off-season. This makes me feel kind of bad because I built this new blog and I was about to hype it to everyone I know, but I already have failed at adding substantial content on a regular basis. (By the way, my idea of “hyping my blog” means to send out a single email to family and friends, letting them know that I have a blog. My method is not quite as extensive as the J.K. Rowling or Kanye West publicity models.) I’ve been debating whether to continue importing my little twitter updates, because I know they can be confusing or irritating in their brevity in a blog context. My original intent was that they serve as interludes to the regular posts. Minimalistic, improvised blog haiku, if you will. I also had the idea that I would use them as seeds for actual blog articles. So far, this post is the first time I have successfully used the twitter seed method; all the other seeds I scattered have not grown. Despite the minor frustration they may cause, I have decided to continue with the twitter updates. They may be the only action this blog sees for another month.
So, thanks for reading, and please wish me luck on my little November writing experiment. I have one request, in all seriousness: please don’t ask me at all what I am writing about. I’ll get nervous and frustrated and I won’t tell you if you do, anyway. As of right now, I don’t know what I’m writing about myself. I guess I’ll find out when I start tomorrow.
Happy November! (I’m kind of a humbug when it comes to that holiday that happens today.)
Years ago I had a musical pining (one among many; I should probably verbalize and codify all of these sometime) for guitar that sounded like neon. That is the simplest way I know to describe it. Vibrant, loud, pulsating, humming with a palpable electric energy, intensely clean and clear. It’s been in my head all this time, and although occasionally I have heard glimpses and allusions to my imaginary timbre, its full actualization has forever eluded my ears. At times I have entertained the possibility of trying to take up electric pedal or lap steel, for, among other reasons, I thought it might be the instrument best suited for me to eventually obtain my Disneyland electrical light parade fireworks star wars light saber hyperspace sound. Haven’t gotten very far on that one so far, but I’m not dead yet.
Last night I was on emusic.com and on a whim I downloaded an album by one Marnie Stern, after hearing a few seconds of clips. By all extraneous indications, this album does not appear very exciting. The cover art looks a lot like it could be a Joni Mitchell album. (Nothing against Joni, I love her music.) Marnie Stern isn’t exactly a name that screams out “Rock Goddess.” But all of this melts away in fervent heat when you press play, as I did when I got home from work today. No one else was here to confirm or deny, but I don’t think I’ve ever had a constant smile on my face while loading and unloading the dishwasher, as I did today, listening to the album two times straight through. Marnie pretty much stole my neon sound (well, at least one aspect of it), but I’m not mad because she’s done so well with it, adding layers of overdubbed joyous vocals to her songs and finding a totally kickass drummer that is in all ways equal to her enthusiasm and stratospheric shredding. In order to prove my unspoken sonic theories she has called forth a frenetic calculus of rock and roll exultation. I’m just proud to have been such an important influence upon her music.
Of course I make this post all about me and my overly baroque writing, but still you must hear a track. Her record label is offering a gratuitous mp3 of a great one, entitled “Transformer,” a line of which provided this post its title. Enjoy.
Walked down the river trail to Bridal Veil Falls with the Beutlers this morning. Fall was at the height of its powers. Thanks for coming; it was fun. Here are some pictures. I didn’t take many, though. I’m really sorry your camera was lost to the forests of Timpanogos.
Finally, that Alvin and the Chipmunks / Manheim Steamroller collaboration we’ve all been waiting for! Basically sounding the same as a walk past the entrance of a Kay Bee Toys, try this album if you enjoy xylophones, talking robots, the demo button on that old synthesizer at Grandpa’s house, motion-activated cackling witches, xylophones, Max Headroom, battery-powered monkeys banging cymbals together, a dog barking “Jingle Bells,” video game soundtracks of the early 90s, and xylophones. This is crazed carnival clown music taken to a new sample-laden, frenetic frenzy. Full of blooping, looping, endless repetition, two-year-olds may really get into this. Unfortunately we may never know, since I don’t have children yet and I don’t feel good about subjecting my nieces and nephews to this, nor their parents, nor random children at a school playground, because that would just be creepy. Two stars; unless you are in the mood for something really obnoxious (I get that mood myself from time to time) or you want to send a stressed-out person into an actual nervous breakdown, in which case it goes up to four stars. Merry Christmas!
Cameron is an aimless, sarcastic stoner who is alienated from his family and has no real friends of which to speak. When he starts having hallucinations and loses control of his body a couple of times, everyone assumes he must be using hallucinogenic drugs. Not true: after getting fired from Buddha Burger, getting suspended from school, being forced into therapy by his parents, and having a run-in with a flaming toaster oven, he is finally diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob (a.k.a. “Mad Cow”) disease. It will deteriorate his brain and kill him.
