27 December 2007

THE BEST MUSIC OF 2007

I figure I spent half my time listening to music on the ever seductive shuffle, and the other half attempting to take in full albums like we did when we was kids. Here's my faves regarding the latter:

TOP TEN ALBUMS:



1. Jens Lekman - NIGHT FALLS OVER KORTEDALA
His droopy baritone and lovably dorky demeanor always positioned this young Swede as the prospective heir apparent to Jonathan Richman, Morrissey and Stephin Merritt; the crucial advance he makes on his third album confirms it. At first, you notice the sometimes florid, often breathtaking arrangements (everything from lugubrious Scott Walker orchestration to crisp, sample-laden funk-folk). However, it's his words, subject matter and wholly original persona that set him apart. Who else would write about posing as a lesbian friend's paramour to her conservative father or accidentally cutting off your finger when your girlfriend sneaks up from behind for a hug? Who else would sing, "Most shy people I know are extremely boring / Either that or they are miserable from all the shit they're storing."? Could anyone else get away with it?



2. Nellie McKay - OBLIGATORY VILLAGERS
She hasn't made it easy for herself. By sticking to her guns, she's lost her major label and, to judge by this mostly ignored self-released record, much of her potential audience. Unwillingness to compromise usually results in either great art or self-indulgence, and her third album nearly overflows with both. Pared-down (for the first time, a single instead of a double!) but densely packed, it initially frustrates with its in-jokes, anachronisms and overly quirky guest stars (such as Bob Dorough of SCHOOLHOUSE ROCK! fame). Given time, though, it's not only a grower, but reveals itself as a stunning, truly subversive political song cycle. That's what ultimately makes it all cohere: the crazy musical numbers from hell ("Galleon", "Zombie"), the rock opera from heaven ("Testify"), and other intriguing, unclassifiable delights.



3. Suzanne Vega - BEAUTY AND CRIME
I nearly gave up on her after her last effort, 2001's dull, ironically colorless SONGS IN RED AND GRAY. Where was the inventive, quirky Vega of her much-derided (although I thought they were fabulous) Mitchell Froom-produced '90s albums? Well, she's back, along with the clear-eyed, folk-rock Vega of the '80s, in this utterly concise, solid effort. On these eleven introspective songs about New York City, Vega connects with us in a way she arguably hasn’t before, at least not in full. The entire set carries an older-and-wiser vibe, but she sounds fresh and deeply affecting, whether she's singing about a failed celebrity romance ("Frank and Ava"), a graffiti artist ("Zephyr and I"), her deceased brother ("Ludlow Street") or even 9/11 (“Anniversary”).



4. LCD Soundsystem - SOUND OF SILVER
The reason why James Murphy's second album has meant so much to so many could be that he cut out a lot of the first album’s clever snark, but left in its infectiously giddy sense of fun. It also helps that he ramped up the emotional content just a few notches without seeming too obvious about it. On "Someone Great" and "All My Friends" (perhaps the best New Order homage Murphy or anyone else will ever conceive), he gives the impression he's honestly singing about himself, and even if he isn't, it doesn't matter. Meanwhile, the title track and "Get Innocuous!" (the year’s best album opener) are dance grooves with actual tunes attached, and their sneakily building momentum is exhilarating.


5. Stars - IN OUR BEDROOM AFTER THE WAR
I thought I had found the Album of the Year when I first heard this Canadian outfit's fourth full-length; overlong by two or three tracks and with a somewhat patchy second half, it's not. Still, for at least six or seven songs, it courts perfection, melding anthemic alternative pop with theatrical but genuine passion. "Take Me to the Riot" and "The Night Starts Here" are playful U2/Smiths tributes without the self-serious/self-loathing pomp, "My Favourite Book" is an eloquently sweet, soulful but never sentimental love song, "Personal" is a wonderfully downbeat lament about disconnection and "The Ghost of Genova Heights" fluently soars like vocalist Torquil Campbell's unexpected but engaging shift into an elegant falsetto.



6. Charlotte Gainsbourg - 5:55
Like her titanic father, she doesn't possess a "good" voice, but she sure knows how to make use of it. Like Sarah Cracknell, she's an aural presence, another instrument that adds texture to a carefully orchestrated whole. As with her acting, her singing is never flashy, but always serviceable and memorable. She's lucky that the lush, subtly tart music here suits her well, whether she's bringing empathy to a Jarvis Cocker song ("The Songs That We Sing") or cosmetic surgery ("The Operation"). On the brilliantly ornate "Everything I Cannot See", you could say her performance is award-worthy, as she successfully enables us to empathize with her.



7. Pink Martini - HEY EUGENE!
Labeling this collective a "lounge orchestra" is like calling PJ Harvey a singer/songwriter. In both cases, it's accurate but it only skims the surface of what each artist does. On this breakthrough album (it actually charted in the top 40), Pink Martini continually shift gears from bubbly exotica to wrenching torch songs to gleefully wicked tangos to stuff beyond simple description (and that's not even mentioning a version of "Tea For Two" with freaky living legend Jimmy Scott). Enchanting vocalist China Forbes may be the glue that holds it all together—it’s hard to imagine how seductive the funky, Al Green-ish title track would be without her—but just as often the group breaks no sweat in transcending its influences.



8. Andrew Bird - ARMCHAIR APOCRYPHA
Bird's music straddles the line between gorgeously complex and infuriatingly incomprehensible so often that his latest almost didn't make my top ten. It's not radically different from his last (and best) album, which also made my list two years ago. Fortunately, it's just different enough to keep you guessing and on your toes. This is probably the closest he's ever come to making a "rock" album as it's front-loaded with his most accessible melodies. Then, it veers away towards strange but fascinating little puzzles with titles like "Static X" and "Spare-Ohs" and my favorite, "Scythian Empires", a weird little folk number with a catchy-as-can-be piano hook and a scathing, socio-political critique hidden underneath.



9. The Pipettes - WE ARE THE PIPETTES
Mix in classic girl groups like Martha and the Vandellas with neo-classic ones like Bananarama, add a smidgen of Cindy and Kate from The B-52's, and you have this British trio. Refreshingly unironic but just cheeky enough to make you think they're in on the joke, they won me over with "ABC", where they claim a guy is book smart but "he don't know about ecstasy" and for a second you think they might actually mean the band XTC. Clever wordplay also flourishes in songs like "Pull Shapes" and "Because It's Not Love (But It's Still a Feeling)"; the music's even better, both retro and newfangled and always thrilling.



10. The Bird & The Bee – THE BIRD & THE BEE
As usual, I thought of many contenders for this final slot, all of 'em listed below (with a few others that I admired but never dreamed of including here). I finally gravitated towards this beautiful, delicately acerbic slice of sophisticated pop. With both Ivy and Saint Etienne on hiatus, this duo of Inara George and Greg Kurstin provides a more-than-adequate substitute. Flawless, Brill Building pastiches like “Again and Again” and “La La La” bump heads with an ingĂ©nue’s playful but prickly diatribe against being photographed (“I Hate Camera”) and a cheerfully sardonic chorus that goes, “Would you ever be my / would you be my fucking boyfriend?”

TEN OTHER RECOMMENDATIONS:

Junior Senior - HEY HEY MY MY YO YO
Came this close to cracking the top ten. Let's the hope the upcoming B-52's reunion is half as glorious as Cindy and Kate's guest vocals on "Take My Time".

The New Pornographers – CHALLENGERS
This doesn’t reach out and grab you like TWIN CINEMA did, but it's strong enough that you nearly think AC Newman couldn’t make a truly mediocre album if he tried.

Feist - THE REMINDER
Lots of great stuff, iPod ad campaign, clever video and all, but LET IT DIE flows better from beginning to end.

Crowded House - TIME ON EARTH
Pretty darn good for a reunion album. If only they could've shaved three or four tracks off the end.

PJ Harvey - WHITE CHALK
I want so much to love this without reservation, but it's challenging and dark in a way even she hasn't been before. But I'm not done trying to decipher it.

Bebel Gilberto - MOMENTO
Another solid album that refines her wondrous shtick but doesn't add anything new to it.

Tracey Thorn - OUT OF THE WOODS
At times she sounds like she's still in the woods, but her appraisal of such ("Raise the Roof") is touching, and it's just great to have her back, especially on the sublime, groovy gender-bender "Get Around to It".

The Shins - WINCING THE NIGHT AWAY
They've lost that hard-to-put-a-finger-on essence that CHUTES TOO NARROW had in spades, but the best songs ("Australia" and "Phantom Limb") bottle it up and let it explode.

The Weakerthans – REUNION TOUR
Still loving/hating Winnipeg, which could give them material for ages if not different ways of expressing themselves.

Erin McKeown – SING YOU SINNERS
Her out-of-time voice was made for standards, and while these fun interpretations couldn’t possibly surpass the originals, they’re far from redundant.

18 December 2007

(ALREADY) LOOKING AHEAD TO 2008

I'll be posting my top ten albums of 2007 before the end of the month. I'm happy/relieved to report that this year was much stronger than the last one--and next year potentially looks even better. In the first three months alone, we'll see new albums from The Magnetic Fields, Sia, Goldfrapp, K.D. Lang (her first new LP of original material in eight years) and The B-52's (their first in *15* years). But what I'm looking forward to most is this:



Out Feb. 26. LOVE the cover--it's the first one her face has appeared on since 1996's thoroughly demented OMNIPOP. The two tracks streaming on her website are similar to the stuff on her last two records, but since they contain some of her best work (and have considerably grown on me since their initial releases), that can only be a good thing.

09 December 2007

25 FUNNIEST FILMS

It's December--time for another Chlotrudis poll. Here is my list of favorite funny films; the poll results will be published later in the month.



1. YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (dir: Mel Brooks, 1974)
As if anything else could be on top. A gifted cast (from Gene Wilder's virtuoso, operatic comic performance to Madeline Kahn's divine, sordid brilliance) and a hilarious, stoopid-cerebral screenplay (from "walk this way... no, this way" to "He... vas... my... BOYFRIEND!") come together in a service of an irreverent but strangely sympathetic genre tribute.

2. BRINGING UP BABY (Howard Hawks, 1938)
Anyone crafting a romantic comedy today should study this smart, breezy one and take note of Cary Grant's and Katharine Hepburn's giddy, contagious chemistry, which arguably no pair has topped since.

3. MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL (Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones, 1974)
I loved it for the laffs as a teenager. Now, I just can't get over how conceptually weird and unique it is--a crowd pleasing, sublimely silly avant garde comedy.

4. A CHRISTMAS STORY (Bob Clark, 1983)
This pitch-perfect adaptation of various essays from master humorist Jean Shepherd endures because of how easily recognizable he made his childhood without diluting its sting.

5. SLEEPER (Woody Allen, 1973)
Not his best film (that's coming up), but certainly the one with the most laughs-per-minute (or second?). Only Allen could get away with a throwaway line about getting beaten up by Quakers or something as wonderfully insane as the climatic cloning (croning?) sequence.

6. THIS IS SPINAL TAP (Rob Reiner, 1984)
Although ALL YOU NEED IS CASH preceded it, this is the grandaddy of most mockumentaries. It works because it gets inside its targets' skins all too well, and you'll never see more finely tuned deadpan delivery elsewhere.

7. AIRPLANE! (Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker, 1980)
Okay, this certainly beats SLEEPER on laughs-per-second: no other film even comes close. This throws every gag it can possibly think of up on the screen, and it's remarkable how many of 'em stick.

8. NINE TO FIVE (Colin Higgins, 1980)
A deliciously dark feminist office comedy, it briefly revived screwball in the irony deficient '80s, showed that Dolly Parton could hold her own as a comedienne with Lily Tomlin, and makes the top ten chiefly for its gleefully wicked fantasy sequences.

9. ANNIE HALL (Allen, 1977)
A perfect confluence of wacky comedy and bittersweet drama, Allen's best film is a reminder of how well he and Keaton worked together, wrapped up in a collage of how funny life and all of its neuroses can be.

10. ELECTION (Alexander Payne, 1999)
This sharp, nasty, Preston Sturges-worthy comic fable has aged extremely well, wringing laughs from the very painful realization that high school isn't all that different from adulthood. Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon have never been better.

11. WHAT ABOUT BOB (Frank Oz, 1991)
Vastly underrated psych-comedy that reminds one how funny Bill Murray could be--and how Richard Dreyfuss is at his best when chewing up the scenery with complete abandon.

12. WAITING FOR GUFFMAN (Christopher Guest, 1996)
Guest and his overqualified ensemble deconstruct middle American small towns and community theatre, but not without making us genuinely feel for them (if only a little).

13. HAIRSPRAY (John Waters, 1988)
Leave it to the risque Waters to nearly achieve household name status with this PG-rated satire, which features a star turn from a pre-tabloid talk show Ricki Lake, an odd, odd cast (Debbie Harry and Jerry Stiller!), and a sweet, if slightly warped sensibility.

14. THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS (Wes Anderson, 2001)
Perhaps more moving a "comedy" than any other film on this list, the comic stuff tempers but never obscures the tragic stuff in Anderson's endearingly quirky family portrait.

15. FLIRTING WITH DISASTER (David O. Russell, 1996)
The closest the '90s came to a true screwball comedy, it's a riot packed with armpit licking, baby naming, last name-mispronunciation, and a surprisingly, successfully acidic Mary Tyler Moore.

16. THE KING OF KONG: A FISTFUL OF QUARTERS (Seth Gordon, 2007)
Probing a curious subculture for both laughs and tears, this incisive but fair documentary about competitive video game players finds hilarity without having to coax too much from its participants (particularly the "Donkey Kong kill screen" guy.)

17. SOUTH PARK: BIGGER, LONGER AND UNCUT (Trey Parker, 1999)
Let's just say its one of the more successful TV to film adaptations, capturing every one of the show's good qualities and transporting them into an ambitious, go-for-broke, extraordinarily profane musical.

18. THE TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE (Sylvain Chomet, 2003)
This very French animated feature is heavily indebted to silent silver screen clowns from Chaplin and Keaton to Tati, yet it's one-of-a-kind: rarely has humor derived from the surreal or the grotesque seemed so charming.

19. THE SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD (Guy Maddin, 2003)
Speaking of the surreal, this one features a tiara'd Isabella Rosselini and clear glass prosthetic legs filled with beer.

20. HAROLD AND MAUDE (Hal Ashby, 1971)
"Has all the fun and gaiety of a burning orphanage" went one of the original reviews and while not always a laugh riot, the film's shaggy, disarming (and at times exceedingly black) humor never fails to make me smile.

21. OFFICE SPACE (Mike Judge, 1999)
Taping into the slacker-cum-office drone zeitgeist, this already cult classic would be only a wish fulfillment fantasy if it didn't hit so close to home for so many. Bonus points for flair!

22. TOOTSIE (Sydney Pollack, 1982)
An insightful comedy that transcends its concept, since it evokes a world of issues and ideas that encompasses more than the words, "Dustin Hoffman does drag".

23. DUCK SOUP (Leo McCarey, 1933)
For an act that came from the vaudeville tradition, The Marx Brothers must have seemed incredibly subversive in their cinematic heyday, and they still do today.

24. SOME LIKE IT HOT (Billy Wilder, 1959)
An undisputed classic, it's surely the best thing Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe ever did. Everyone praises the simple, graceful closing line of dialogue, as well they should.

25. WET HOT AMERICAN SUMMER (David Wain, 2001)
Possibly the silliest film on this list, but the ensemble cast rivals that of Guest's, and its satire of early '80s summer camp sex comedies is dead-on, even when it's fairly ridiculous.

And some others I considered:

ALL OF ME
BEING JOHN MALKOVICH
BEST IN SHOW
DELICATESSEN
DONKEY SKIN
DR. STRANGELOVE (OR, HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB)
ED WOOD
THE HAPPINESS OF THE KATIKURIS
ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW
PLAYTIME
SMILE
SONGS FROM THE SECOND FLOOR
WHAT TIME IS IT THERE
WHAT'S UP DOC