At one point in my life I read voraciously (and wrote, too). This seems long ago; majoring in English lit did something to stomp the fascination with fiction out of me. There remain a stable of established, canonical works that I will always love (Ulysses, Sound and the Fury, Rainbow, yadda blah blah) of varying degrees of experimentalism, but there are also a number of books (of varying degrees of plain mentalism) that I read prior to college that I have a fondness for that didn't get the kind of critical attention I would have expected (well they probably did but you know).

I owe my discovery of most of these to library book sales and the Walden Books remainder tables.

Weird novels I read b/w the ages of 14 and 21 that I continue to harbour affection for:

1. The Wanting Seed: Anthony Burgess. I actually still own a large number of Burgess books, and I think I only ever finished this, M/F, and A Clockwork Orange, and Clockwork Orange is probably the least weird of the three. Burgess's fiction just seems so incredibly dense and odd to me now that I don't think any of this stuff would get published in this day and age.

2. Kleinzeit: Russel Hoban. I've tried to finish numerous other non-childrens' Hoban books since and none of them do as much for me as this one, which I loved when I was 13. With characters such as Hospital, Bed, and, er, other inanimate objects, dealing with a sick protagonist, this caused a lasting paranoia in me about pissing in two divergent streams. Tom Robbins always seemed like a sad copy of this book to me.

3. Crome Yellow: Aldus Huxley. I've read many other more famous Huxley books but none of them had dwarves in them like this did. Or did it? Honestly can't remember.

4. Fabrications: Adam Mars Jones. I see he has a new novel out. I haven't been interested in any of his other writings but the short stories in this are strange, or were to me when I was 13. Hoosh Mi. ? This was the type of Granta fiction which I devoured as a pretentious teenager. I think I had more patience then for this sort of thing, or maybe I just had more time.

5. Wearing Dad's Head: Barry Yourgrau. This was a moderately successful book of short stories and Yourgrau went on to do some stuff for NPR, maybe? He's probably still writing, I have no idea. I remember I read this around the same time as Girl with the Curious Hair and preferred this. Strange that DFW is now so established. (actually I now see that Yourgrau also has a blog that he just updated after two years of blank-ness!)

6. Conducting Bodies: Claude Simone. I read the english translation which was probably not very accurate. It was incredibly weird though and inspired an attempt to also write a piece where every sentence could be read three different ways. I made it two pages in. So that's probably why Simone won the Nobel Prize for Literature and I occasionally update a shitty blog.

Labels: books

Review: American Music Club, The Golden Age
From 1995 to 2003 the likelihood of a new AMC album seemed slim. When the band returned with Love Songs for Patriots in 2003, the album and the tours behind it were generally well received, but there was a sense of unease abut the whole proceedings. An AMC reunion could not have been staged for the money, because there was none; it had to be about the music. The music was good--great even, at times--but not always as transcendent as it had been in the past. Some of this due to the shine of hype being long past (it seems impossible now to think they were Rolling Stone Magazine's pick for "Hot New Band" in 1992 and had a four page spread), some of it due to the absence of Bruce Kaphan (even the '94 tour behind San Francisco without him had been a mess), some of it probably, frankly, due to the age of the band and it's fans.

So how does American Music Club return? Maybe they don't. Originally intended to be credited to "Macarthur Park Music Club" or "the Lost Anchors of the Pacific" until management and the label told Eitzel that it wouldn't sell under a different name, The Golden Age sees things shaken up. Tim Mooney and Danny Pearson (the only other member outside of Eitzel and Vudi to have been there since the beginning) are out as the rhythm section, replaced by LA musicians Steve Didelot and Sean Hoffman ('04 touring keyboardist Jason Border also played on the album sessions). The album was well-rehearsed and recorded in an LA studio with Dave Trumfio, without too much reliance on overdubs and post-production edits; the result is a professional album that flows more naturally than anything AMC have done since Everclear.

This is a kinder and gentler AMC to be sure. I was initially startled by the straighforward pop arrangements on songs like "Who You Are" and "All the Lost Souls Welcome You to San Francisco" until I remembered "Can You Help Me", "Aspirin", and "I Broke My Promise". It's easy to forget that not every second of AMC music was the howling misery of "Apology for an Accident" and "I've Been A Mess". There aren't really any moments of that kind of self-indulgence on The Golden Age; this is a more emotionally mature work. As expected some fans have revolted at this but Eitzel and Vudi aren't mental puppets for our amusement and I neither expect nor do I want to see Mark cry during a show these days. I've said before that The Invisible Man showed an artist moving out of a dark period and toward the light; The Golden Age shows him living in it.

Eitzel has been introducing the album opener "All My Love" as the most sappy song he's ever written but it's no more sentimental than "Only Love Will Set You Free", and it's a better song, recalling "Fearless". The album features at least two major Vudi sonic guitar assaults on "Windows on the World" and "On My Way". "The Sleeping Beauty" is the arrhythmic heart of the album; rescued from Eitzel's ignored Candy Ass release and rearranged for the band, it's the sighing, resigned descendant of "Western Sky". "Decibles and Little Pills" and "The Stars" are both paint surrealistic scenarios against strong and dark musical compositions. "I Know That's Not Really You" revisits the country stomp oompha of "Gary's Song." The album closes with the acoustic "Grand Dutchess of San Francisco", Eitzel's guitar against Vudi's accordion.

If there is a criticism of the album it's that -- mix and production-wise -- it doesn't take as many risks as it could have. Many of the songs on the album are more character-based than first person; this switch in focus results in an album that seems less immediate and confrontational than past work. But these same characteristics make the album live and breathe more than the claustrophobic Love Songs for Patriots, which sometimes seemed smothered under it's self-imposed expectations of performance. The Golden Age shrugs off whatever is left of expectations of the band and that attitude serves it well in the end.

Labels: american music club, mark eitzel, reviews

Review: Elbow, The Seldom Seen Kid
I have a special fondness for Elbow because, staying at a hotel that reeked of cigarettes in West LA about five years ago, I saw them in the lobby checking in very late, looking exhausted and kind of embarrassed. I picked up Asleep in the Back shortly after that and found a lovely blend of downbeat British indie with slight prog touches, something along the lines of a less-mannered Blue Nile or more subtle Catherine Wheel. Subsequent releases have been a mixed bag for me; I loved some songs, disliked others; "Switching Off" in particular seemed destined for a love scene in a Richard Curtis comedy if a comparable Coldplay song turned out to be too expensive; good, you know, just not very original.

The Seldom Seen Kid is a huge improvement over the last two albums. The songs just stick in memory better. "Mirrorball" rolls on a machinistic steady rhythm and delicate arpeggios. Guy Garvey used to have a slight self-conscious Peter Gabriel affectation to his voice, but it's smoothed out and his enunciation has improved; maybe it's just because they're so far into their career or I've just gotten used to him, but he finally sounds like himself. "The Fix Is In", a duet with Richard Hawley, waltzes onto the album out of some black and white noir-musical. The piano and tambourine riff that opens "Audience With the Pope" and the percussion on "Weather to Fly" recall the subtle touches that latter-era Talk Talk excelled at (Elbow have often garnered Talk Talk comparisons -- to their detriment, I think, because gravelly voice aside, they usually sound nothing alike; but these elements make good on those critically promised similarities).

Some mention has been made that this album was mixed and mastered with particular attention to dynamics in opposition to the loudness war, but the opening scrawl of static seems intended to make you turn your stereo down rather than up. That aside, there is a far amount of variation in volume on this album and it never sounds fatiguing. A song like "Some Riot" was carefully mixed for a nice stereo system or headphone listening, paying particular attention to the soundstage and levels on the instrumentation: muted piano, delicately picked guitar, and a distant, surging cello that rises and falls in volume behind Garvey's voice. "A Friend of Ours", the album's final track, in memory of departed Manchester musician Bryan Glancy, is a tribute of real beauty with a lovely, understated piano riff that takes the album out on a quiet note of restraint.

Labels: elbow, reviews

This blog is back. Apologies to anyone who found half of the old 250 posts illuminating or relevant, I'm deleting most of them because they aren't. I am going to leave the music posts though, and that is what this blog will focus on in the future. The old posts will crop up in the archives as I have time to clean them up. Like Axl Rose or Brian Wilson or some other mentalist, having access to my old content in a readily editable format doesn't do anything for my productivity on new material, but we'll see what happens.