reviews

Krisis’s Recommended Releases of 2010:
Sharon Van Etten – Epic

Key Tracks: “Don’t Do It,” “Peace Signs,” “One Day”

Sharon Van Etten’s Epic is a slight, seven-song album that doesn’t have to rely on hip production or endless hooks to make an impact.

Why? Because Van Etten is a substantial songwriter, and her seven songs are damned good. She’s also a sure singer. Her voice is both weathered and pretty, a kissing cousin to Florence and the Machine (especially on closer “Love More”).

Van Etten has the gift of writing compact songs with distinct melodies and the imagination to be a singer-songwriter without always sounding the same. Opener “A Crime” is plain and acoustic, but “Peace Signs” is straight up indie-rock, recalling Emma Pollock. “Save Yourself” veers country with accents of slide guitar. “DsharpG” is dirge-like, vocals ebbing and flowing across humming organ. “One Day” starts Liz Phair plaintive, but accelerates to modern folk similar to the Watson Twins with its constant sigh of underneath harmony.

The best song in the strong septet may be “Don’t Do It.” It slithers around genres, a throbbing bass transforming an acoustic strummer into an anthem of songwriter-stadium-rock.

Epic might not feature the length or scope suggested by its title, but in a year filled with that sort of monolithic album Sharon Van Etten’s LP of finely-crafted songs is a welcome entry.

Krisis’s Recommended Releases of 2010:
Far – At Night We Live

Key Tracks: “Give Me a Reason,” “If You Care Enough,” “Are You Sure”

Far’s At Night We Live is an album that wears its rock on its sleeve, but an abundance of riffs and metal bombast are merely ornamenting an LP full of mercilessly catchy power-pop songs.

At the surface level, Far has a bracing sound slightly on the harder side of radio modern rockers – near neighbors seem to be Foo Fighters or 30 Seconds to Mars, and to a lesser extent more pop-oriented acts like All-American Rejects. But Far is differentiated from those bands not only by smart, layered arrangements, but by the handsome, tuneful baritone vocals from lead singer Jonah Matranga.

The titular melody on “Give Me a Reason” is almost too pretty to be a rock song, and even proto-typical screamery on “Fight Song #16,233,241” (biting hard on Eagles of Death Metal) turns into something shimmering on the chorus.

In that way, Far is like Eagles or a harder, less jocular OK Go – because both bands consistently display seductive, playful-but-mature vocals. Far even recalls, god help us, a less smarmy Rivers Cuomo, finally living up to the supposed love of hair metal that got him into music to begin with (check out “Are You Sure” and the super-Weezer “Burns,” each like a sticky wet dream of what post-Pinkerton Weezer could/should/would have been).

If the parade of hyper-popular comparisons sounds like a turnoff then this LP might not be for you. Almost every song has the immediacy of the best cuts on alternative radio in 2010, which marry metal influences with carefully crafted melodic work.

Again and again At Night We Live floats up and away from standard riffing to stadium-filling rock. On the whole it’s a strong, confident re-entry into the rock scene from a long-absent band.

Key Tracks: “Grenade,” “Just the Way You Are,” “Count on Me”

I don’t know any way to start this but to confess that I haven’t really liked mainstream R&B for years.

It’s not a deep-seated dislike. I loved R&B in the 80s and early 90s. I loved it when it was adjacent to pop but distinctly different, still wielding inescapable, soul-shredding melodies, sung soulfully over a bed of tangled guitars, synthesizers, and drums.

At a point it just got boring to me – a hollow parody devoid of melodic revelation, rotely programmed and immediately ready for remixing and rapper guest spots.

But this isn’t a history of or tirade against R&B. It’s just a frame for why I honestly like Bruno Mars and his Doo-Wops & Hooligans. It’s at once disarmingly simple and undoubtedly calculated, and altogether it’s a R&B/pop crossover smash.

I first listened to the album out of obligation – it was a record a friend pressed onto me at a party.

Well, “Grenade” blasted me out of that mindset in one play, walking across the Schuylkill towards 30th Street Station on a blustery day this fall.

“Grenade” is an incredibly shrewd opening track. It starts so minimally that you are helplessly focused on the vocals, so that even when the thrumming tom drums join the song at the chorus you are still transfixed by the singing like a beacon in darkness. To his credit, Bruno Mars attacks every “bullet straight through my brain” pinnacle with a rocker’s glee, as if it was the hook in an Aerosmith song.

The subtle genius of “Grenade” is not solely that it’s an amazing song (oh, and it surely is). It’s not just that it’s both an obsessive love song and a blunt kissoff.

No, the true smarts is that it’s so easily upstaged by what Bruno Mars has in store for the rest of the album. In the same way “Grenade” starts subtle with its naked vocal and then baits and switches, the album as a whole plays a game of peekaboo from song to song, stringing you along its compact 10 tracks before you realize you’re still listening.

Bruno Mars bobs and weaves between obstinate melodies and obnoxiously obvious hooks. He disguises textbook-worthy songwriting chops behind exuberant tenor vocals. He juggles production between R&B trope, glimmering pop, and Jason Mraz lighthearted guitar, never choosing a side. It all comes off as extremely calculated – a game of transporting a listener through the album without the slightest disturbance.

I love that drama and playfulness. It’s something I don’t always know where to find in popular music.

Yes, sometimes it gets a little too playful. “The Lazy Song” crosses the line to silly for me. It’s a charming-but-lackluster retread of the superior “Billionaire,” co-written by Mars. “Liquor Store Blues” seems to be similar one-note playfulness, but it winds up like a R&B cover of a secret Sublime track – you’re laughing with it instead of at it.

The upstaging moments are many. “Count On Me” is a Mraz-style slam dunk. It’s stupidly simple, with counting lyrics screaming for a Sesame Street cover and a deadly wordless jump into falsetto. “Runaway Baby” is a 60s go-go dancing smash that Cee Lo could have destroyed, but here it’s content in its less overt Austin Powers shagadelicness.

Both “Marry You” and “Just the Way You Are” are utter rainbows of pop magic – unbashed love songs so super-sweet that they should come with a toothbrush. Could anyone singer actually be so enamored with their subject? Or, are both songs the transparent come-on of a masterful player? To his credit, Mars delivers each unflinchingly straight, and why shouldn’t he – is there any compliment better than “I think I wanna marry you,” other than “you’re amazing, just the way you are?”

Billy Joel didn’t think so, and neither do I. Yet, however great “Way You Are” is, “Marry You” might be the slightly more impressive construct of the two. Its dead-simple melody harkens back to the doo-wop name-checked by the album title.

There is a also piano power-ballad (“Talking to the Moon”), a song with famous guests (“The Other Side”), and a standard bedroom croon on “Our First Time.” The latter seems a bit embarrassing, but embarrassing honesty is part of the selling point of this album. This is not a philandering “I’m Gonna Sex You Up” booty call. I mean, geeze, the prechorus “Is that alright? Is that okay?” Even with the “clothes are not required” verse it’s still a pretty oversensitive song about fucking.

There are so many subtle lines tread on this album. Is it R&B or pop? Is it too corn-syrup sweet or too disarmingly frank? Too dramatic or too laid back? Too emo or too horny?

I don’t care. Doo-Wops and Hooligans is a confection and a riddle, a lollipop and a musical Rubik’s cube of genres and influences. It will leave you sticky and befuddled, grinning and wanting more.

All this month Crushing Krisis will highlight my recommended albums of 2010.

(Only one of the albums pictured in this post is recommended by me; the others are the #1s from various other web outlets. Stay tuned to find out.)

I love listening to music, maybe more than I love playing it. I’ve been a music collector ever since I hoarded Madonna 45s and Jem cassette tapes as a child. Of my 20,000+ song iTunes collection, I rate over a quarter of it as four or five stars – meaning I could stream a 24/7 all-hits personal radio station for fifteen days with no repeated tracks.

As a huge music fan, when each year reaches its close I always want to issue a “Best Albums of the Year” list. Yet, I never feel like I’ve heard enough releases to offer a definitive retrospective.

For that matter, has anyone – or, any group of anyones – really heard enough albums in a single year to compile a “Best of” list? It seems improbable, because for all intents you can safely assume that an infinite number of records are released each year.

Don’t believe me? Check the 2010 top albums chart on Rate Your Music (RYM), an obsessively detailed music discography site I’ve used religiously since 2002 to track my collection. Even with all of the metal filtered out (RYM’s critical sentiment skews heavily to Scandinavian death-metal epics), the top LPs list extends beyond 1,000 albums without dipping below three stars. The no-metal Top 2010 EPs chart is similarly 1,000-deep.

For a single listener to make it through all of those 2,000 releases (optionally including the 500+ omitted metal releases, if they were so inclined) they would have to listen to over five new releases a day, every day, all year. To get that down to less than one album a day, you’d need an editorial team of at least six with no overlapping listens.

Neither equation takes into account re-listening for pleasure or, heaven forbid, listening to music from years prior.

Even using Amazon’s Best of 2010 center to review the 100 best LPs of 2010 and 50 albums you might have missed is a huge time commitment – and they’ve narrowed it down to a manageable rate of three albums a week! Also, those lists don’t emerge until December.

My point is, even leaving aside matters of subjective taste, there is no such thing as a definitive “Best of” list. Not in Rolling Stone. Not on Pitchfork. Hell, even RYM‘s obsessive charts compiled by a cast of thousands left off my top LPs of  both 2008 and 2010.

For 2010 I drew inspiration from one of my long-time blog heroes, Andre Torrez. Andre swore off all pre-2010 music starting in February, and spent the entire year listening solely to new releases and documenting his experience.

I could never commit to that regimen (Hello, an entire year with no Madonna? Not likely.), but I took his ambition to heart. The point of the exercise was to absorb new music constantly without solely relying on the filter of radio or critics. Would my 1:4 “I love it” ratio hold up if I listened far outside of my normal comfort zone?

By trolling Ameoba Music’s release calendar and keeping an eye on trends on Rate Your Music I wound up hearing nearly 200 albums in 2010. I can’t tell you what the best ones were – from the captions in this post you can see I don’t entirely agree with a lot of the critical sentiment.

However, I do know what I can unequivocally recommend through my personal filter of loving pop and valuing quality songwriting, and I’ll blog about those releases all this month.

Black Swan is a finely-made, multi-layered, genre-straddling smash with a few minor flaws in its finish. Centered on a stunning, controlled performance from Natalie Portman, the film is a character study, a performance documentary, an allegory, and also a credible horror movie.

Portman utterly inhabits Nina Sayers, a ballerina in her prime who is still very much a little girl. She unflinchingly bows to the pressures of her mother and her director while widely skirting the objects of her obsession – including a unstable prima ballerina and a transgressive new soloist, Lily.

Mila Kunis as Lily is magnetic, tearing through relatively few scenes with offhand sexuality that further amplifies the tour de force from Portman. Also, it must be said that the score and sound design is virtually a third lead character. Quotes of Tchaikovsky are set off by electronic throbs, and Nina’s movements are often accompanied by an unsettling fluttering of feathers.

While the movie is unquestionably strong, the dissonance between its competing genres renders the final product slightly unsatisfying. The character study of Nina is never entirely fulfilled as the movie transitions to sheer performance and terror. The allegory paints many of the secondary characters as simplistic cliches who never seem credible in the wake of Portman and Kunis. Barbara Hershey, in particular, seems clownish by comparison. Even as the movie turns into a literal ballet, the performance documentary aspect seems to fizzle, with relatively little actual dance as payoff to the attention paid to Portman’s preparation (though, what we do see of the ballet is as visceral as it is visually sumptuous).

All three of those genre labels could also be assigned to Aronofsky’s prior film, The Wrestler, a similarly flawed movie framed around a standout performance. However, Black Swan benefits from the addition of horror, because it’s the scary movie that wins out. After subtle background teases, the terror bares its teeth in a sequence of events that plays out like a sickening fever-dream.

It’s those frightening thrills that see the movie through to its resolution, even as threads dangle from the character piece, the allegory, and the performance. Thanks to the horror, the dangling is good dangling – talked about in the car on the way home loose ends, not the untread paths of an incomplete film.

These minor flaws – mere chinks – mount to prevent Black Swan from becoming a more grand, sweeping movie. Aronofsky is as much a part of the problem as he is the orchestrator of success. Too often he errs too gritty and too handheld, staying in the style of The Wrestler when Swan begged for the painterly beauty of The Fountain. And, though Portman and Kunis shine, the flatness of the supporting cast is only excusable if the film is read as purely allegorical. Winona Ryder, in particular, is wasted – all along it feels like we’ve missed a crucial scene with her.

The result is still thrilling, and still awards-caliber in direction, cinematography, and Natalie Portman’s performance. However, even as Aronofsky exerts yet more control over his end product, it falls just short of being a modern day classic on the order of Requiem for a Dream, and even the oft-maligned The Fountain.