3 Recent Albums I Feel You Should Listen To. (Not very current EDITION)

Deep:

The Reigning Sound Time Bomb High School

I've yet to make head or tails out of this one.  Recently I got a hold of this after Scion and The A.V. Club released The Reigning Sound's newest album.  From reviews that I read it was as bold as to imply that this was an album for those with severe White Stripes deficiencies; to which I reply "bullshit".  Time Bomb High School does indeed constitute garage rock, but this is where I feel that people try and reel it in.  Not all garage rock is The White Stripes, and not all of The White Stripes is garage rock.  TBHS has got a 50s pop kick to it (as the title would imply), and I feel it leans it closer to King Khan & the Shrines and BBQ.  But that's okay because in between it travels to places like classic rock and perhaps even country rock.

Deeper:

Radar Brothers The Singing Hachet

I suppose the best way to preface this is to say that this was suggested to me by a total stranger at a bar.  He was the kind of man who had years of devoted music love in his character, and he was also completely hammered.  Austin, Texas I suppose enables this in a lot people (mainly because everyone understands an elevated difference between an obscure reference and a piece of common knowledge).  Anyways, he struck me as the kind of man who had a copy of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea before his friends, and my assumption was it was a vinyl copy.  It was a man I could respect even through his slurred speech and confident speaking.  I'm straying toward ambiguity in describing The Singing Hachet because I too did not know what to expect when my girlfriend and I started listening to it later that night.
I will say that my interest in 90s lo-fi is close to zero, with the occasional grand exception, and this is one of those exception.

Too Deep:

Love Forever Changes

Recently I finally bought my first book in the 33 1/3 series, which happened to be a compilation of excerpts from many of the books, and this was the only album I had yet to ever hear of (mainly because in my parental reference as a child hovered between James Taylor, Pink Floyd, and Garth Brooks).  Hear the rainbow, taste the rainbow.  Firstly, this sound like Pet Sounds on acid.  But Nowak Attack,  Pet Sounds already sounds like it's on acid? True, but this is truly a hodgepodge of sounds.  Where it goes differently is that stays strictly melodic.  I could turn this album on and hear one genre, go get a cup of tea, come back, and then I would forget completely what album I was listening to.  Sometimes it's The Doors, and sometimes it sound like Dusty Springfield, yet it doesn't miss a beat.  If you stay with it for the hour-fifteen it streches, you won't veer off-track.  But it's like Sigur Ros that way.  Don't go anywhere, just shut up and listen.

Nowak-cember is around the corner

and by around the corner, I mean the end of this week.

I'll be heading back to the motherland (Washington, which in many ways feels like Soviet Russia during the wintertime).  I've spent so much time ingesting music this year that I feel compentent enough to dedicate the full month to year-end lists.

Mind you I won't start most until mid-December because, really, I won't make major assessments until the new Black Keys album is out.  No, I'm serious.

That means:

-The Foxes 2011 (maybe)

-Honorable mentions 2011

-Biggest Disappointments 2011

-The Nowies 2011

-ALSO:

• Best podcasts 2011
• Best reissues 2011
• Best EPs

The Questionable Defense of Fast Five and How it Relates to the Genre

Several months ago the internet told me that Fast Five, the fifth installment to the Fast and Furious franchise.  Since then, time has stewed.  The A.V. Club at the time of its release gave it an "B+", which was the overall dissent of the movie community.  The rationale behind this was simply that it was more self-indulgent than previous Fast and Furious creations.  This was positively true.  The film was by all means bombastic.  At one point Vin Diesel uses a bank safe as a mace to knock police cruisers off of the road.

Now I'm going to be a dick and compare it to Bullitt, perhaps the best domestic action film of the last century.  There's little difference on the surface of either of these films; both films contain the use of American manufactured cars chasing each other incessantly through crowded streets.  The patriarchal roles are fulfilled, and protagonists take place.  How is it then that both are minimalists and yet the simpler succeeds (Bullitt).

For one, Steve McQueen.

For two, the sincerity.  While Fast Five utilizes little dialogue, it's framing attempts to hold up a plot with little going.

The same reason Westerns and Samurai films integrates a emcompassing a huge storyline.   Since moving to Austin, I've spent a lot of time analyzing the structure of most of these films.  Whether it's Ocean's 11, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, or Star Wars, they consist of lost of things to happen to build up.  Yet, the elements are indulgent.  It allows for much to create substance, thus making a full picture to be painted, interweaving everyone so that the finish creates an even better conclusion.

Fast Five appears to throw out most of the other story lines from past installments (to be honest I've only seen all the first one once and the second one half way through), makes it easygoing from the start, and strips it down to the formulaic basics.

I remember a news story about a month ago about a woman who sued (I'm not exactly sure who the defendant would be in this case) because the advertising to the movie Drive made it appear to be too much like Fast Five.  This is confusing because both maintain the same integrity in story-structure (albeit, watered-down for easier consumption).

And perhaps this might just be me, but honestly over-the-top action sequences rarely hook me anymore.  The literal suspense is more exciting on an emotional level than what Fast Five threw at me.

The point I'm making here is that indulgence does not mix with emotion.  In fact, perhaps the opposite. Public dissent gave a lot of slack to this movie, but I still don't accept that when it remains indulgent.

This is a polarity that I wish was more prevalent.  Between pop music and music, between reality television and Mad Men.  I feel if we took the time to really separate the two, both could be held to different standards.  It seems instead that this facilitates the idea of pretentious.

My suggestion would be to separate the cream from the milk in a better fashion.  What that method would be, I'm not quite sure.  But it's the fact that we haven't created a category for indulgence properly, and thus it becomes a dick move to compare Fast Five and Bullitt in the same conversation (although admittedly one-sided).

Rock N Roll gave us the birth of a popular, modern, American music, but it also gave us Nickelback.

Analysis:

I finally finished The Grapes of Wrath for the first time.  Yet, not once in my public education was this suggested to me.  In a time with such strange dissent in this country, I felt it more applicable to modern day than ever before.  Perhaps not to such a scale as depicted in this book.  Regardless, by far my favorite except:

"The squatters nodded - they knew, God knew.  If they could only rotate the crops they might pump blood back into the land.
     Well, it's too late.  And the owner men explained the workings and the thinkings of the monster that was stronger than they were.  A man can hold land if he can just eat and pay taxes; he can do that.
     Yes, he can do that until his crops fail one day and he has to borrow money from the bank.
     But you see, a bank or a company can't do that, because those creatures don't breathe air, don't eat side-meat.  They breathe profits; they eat the interest on money.  If they don't get it, they die the way you die without air, without side-meat.  It is a sad thing, but it is so.  it is just so.
     The squatting men raised their eyes to understand.  Can't we just hang on?  Maybe the next year will be a good year.  God knows how much cotton next year.  And with all the wars -- God knows what price cotton will bring.  Don't they make explosives out of cotton?  And uniforms?  Get enough wars and cotton'll hit the ceiling.  Next year, maybe.  They looked up questioningly.
     We can't depend on it.  the bank--the monster has to have profits all the time.  It can't wait.  It'll die.  No, taxes go on.  When the monster stops growing, it dies.  It can't stay one size.
     Soft fingers began o tap the sill of the car window, and hard fingers tightened on the restless drawing sticks.  In the doorways of the sun-beaten tenant houses, women sighed and then shifted feet so that the one that had been down was now on top, and the toes working.  Dogs came sniffing near the owner cars and wetted on all four ties one after another.  And chickens lay in the sunny dust and fluffed their feathers to get the cleansing dust down to the skin.  In the little sties the pigs grunted inquiringly over the muddy remnants of the slops.
     The squatting men looked down again.  What do you want us to do?  We can't take less share of the crop--we're half starved  now.  The kids are hungry all the time.  We got no clothes, torn an'ragged.  If all the neighbors weren't the same, we'd be ashamed to go to meeting.
     And at last the owner men came to the point.  The tenants system won't work any more.  One man on a tractor can take the place of twelve or fourteen families.  Pay him a wage and take all the crop.  We have to do it.  We don't like to do it.  But the monster's sick.  Something's happened to the monster.
     But you'll kill the land with cotton.
     We know.  We've got to take cotton quick before the land dies.  Then we'll sell the land.  The plows'll go through the dooryard.
     And now the squatting men stood up angrily.  Grampa took up the land, and he to kill the Indians and drive them away.  And Pa was born here, and he killed weeds and snakes.  Then a bad year came and he had to borrow a little money.  An' we was born here.  There in the door--our children born here.  And Pa had to borrow money.  The bank owned the land then, but we stayed and we got a little bit of what we raised.
     We know that--all that.  It's not us, it's the bank.  A bank isn't like a man.  OR an owner with fifty thousand acres, he isn't like a man either.  That's the monster.
     Sure, cried the tenant men, but it's our land.  We measured it and broke it up.  We were born on it and we got killed on it.  Even if it's no good, it's still ours.  That's what makes it ours--being born on it, working it, dying on it. That makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it.
     We're sorry.  It's not us.  It's the monster.  The bank isn't like a man.
     Yes, but the bank is only made of men.
    No, you're wrong there.  The bank is something else than men.  It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it.  The bank is something more than men, I tell you.  It's the monster.  Men made it, but they can't control it.
     The tenant cried, Grampa killed Indians, Pa killed snakes for the land.  Maybe we can kill banks--they're worse than Indians and snakes.  Maybe we got to fight to keep our land, like Pa and Grampa did.
     And now the owner men grew angry.  You'll have to go.
     But it's our, the tenant men cried. We----
     No.  The bank, the monster owns it.  You'll have to go.
     We'll get our guns, like Grampa when the Indians came.  What then?
     Well--first the sheriff, and then the troops.  You'll be stealing if you try to stay, you'll be murderers if you kill to stay.  The monster isn't men, but it can make men do what it wants.
     But if we go, where'll we go?  How'll we go? we got no money.
     We're sorry, said the owner men.  The bank, the fifty-thousand-acre owner can't be responsible.  You're on land that isn't yours.  Once over the line maybe you can pick cotton in the fall.  Maybe you can go on relief.  Why don't you go on west to California?  There's work there, and it never gets gold.  Why, there's always some kind of crop to work in.  Why don't you go there?   And the owner men started their cars and rolled away."

-John Steinbeck; The Grapes of Wrath