Crushing Krisis

Live @ Rehearsal Thanksgiving Spectacular – November 24th, 2016

November 24, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]Coming to you just a few minutes past live on Thanksgiving!

Setlist: Something Real, Tangling, Real You, Unengaged, Saving Grace, Shake It Off, Naturally

Performance Notes:

I can feel so incredibly self-conscious when I’m playing slow songs. Maybe that’s why I tend to speed up so many tempos early in the life of my songs. Case and point – “Something Real” and “Tangling,” which felt impossibly sparse as I was playing them and on re-listen sound just find. “Tangling,” especially, almost never retains its tempo throughout, and most old CK recordings at it are nearly twice as fast as this one.

“Real You” is a unique one in almost every respect – the acoustic hard-rocking, the singing style, the half-open discordant barres. It’s one of my loudest songs straight-through, with the exception of the first line in the bridge. I’ve never seen myself play it before, nor have I played it through compression before. What a difference! I have some work to do to strengthen my chest to falsetto transition on the choruses.

You’re going to keep seeing more of “Saving Grace” and “Shake It Off,” the latter because I am going to keep playing it until I get it right, the former because it’s nearly in the same tuning and also one of EV’s favorites. I’m getting closer to remembering how to play “Saving Grace” in that original tuning.

I write crazy bridges. This is fact. I manage to cobble together something resembling the right thing in “Unengaged” by focusing on getting the roots right, but I’m totally lost for two whole minutes in “Naturally” before I find the roots again (although if you hang in there I kind of sort of get there eventually and manage to finish the song).

It’s a shame, since otherwise it was a solid first recording of an impossibly hard-to-play song I’ve been rehearsing for six years now. I suspect you’ll be seeing more of it in the near future.

But, seriously, how amazing is my hair in this video?

35-for-35: 2007 – Under the Blacklight by Rilo Kiley

November 24, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]Screw double jeopardy, it’s been almost ten years and I need to talk about this one again.

rilo-kiley-under-the-blacklight My obsession with Barsuk Records dates back to the early days of CK – I first posted about the label in January of 2001, but I had already been spinning Death Cab For Cutie’s Forbidden Love EP for weeks after being turned onto it by the owner of the old Spaceboy Records, who used to visit the coffee shop where I worked.

Barsuk was on top of the early internet game with a cool website and lots of MP3 samples, and over the course of the next year I came to know and love the label’s early roster of oddball rockers – Abigail Grush, This Busy Monster, Little Champions, and The Long Winters (though I was never a John Vanderslice fan).

One band, in particular, really captured my imagination. They were called Rilo Kiley, and featured a casual, squeaky-voiced women singing earnest, emo-ish, indie-rock tunes over glisteningly clean guitar tones.

I devoured song samples like “Bulletproof,” and when I bought their Sophomore effort The Execution of All Things on release day it completely took over my listening for a month. I remember laying in bed in E’s big shared house on Poweltown Avenue, listening to it on repeat on my CD Walkman while she slept.

I would have never imagined that an LP like 2007’s Under The Blacklight would emerge from that scrappy, squeaky, indie band, even after their sonically meandering More Adventurous in 2004. Where the first two Rilo Kiley LPs were filled with rough edges, Blacklight is wall-to-wall sheen. Where Jenny Lewis used to sound like an earnest alt-country crooner, now she is a rock powerhouse.

(Seriously: I saw them tour on this record, and I’ve never before seen a rock frontwoman in such good voice as Lewis, short of PJ Harvey.)

(It’s a complete coincidence that both Harvey and RK received full LP write-ups in a month of song-of-the-day.)

(Or maybe it isn’t.)

Opener “Silver Lining” begins the album with a complete reset of expectations. Handclaps, piano, and a gospel-tinged backup singers aren’t exactly the earmarks of Rilo Kiley’s prior sound, and there’s no doubt that Jenny Lewis’s 2006 acoustic soul effort Rabbit Fur Coat had an influence on the sound of the band’s return. Lewis’s voice streams and catches like honey, totally unlike any prior effort save for maybe the prior LP’s “I Never.”

And I was your silver lining, as the story goes.
I was your silver lining, but now I’m gold.

Hooray, hooray! I’m your silver lining.
Hooray, hooray! But now I’m gold.

The girl of “Silver Lining” is a trickle of quicksilver, something great in your life that you barely recognized before you lost your grip. It’s also about being defined by your partner and what you add to them, rather than who are are as an individual. Life isn’t like the movies – there aren’t any sidekicks or romantic interests, because everyone is a protagonist in their own minds. You might still be thinking of your silver lining as the one that got away, but she’s living her golden life in that getaway car.

That fleeting happiness is a theme of this bruised LP. Despite a lot of depression mixed in with its themes, Under The Blacklight doesn’t bear a single regret. It never hesitates to smile on the good times that came before the bruises started to show.

The other predominant theme of the album is sex. Blacklight sounds like the diary of a sex addict, filled with carnal obsessions and morning after regrets. It’s bracing to hear the disarmingly sweet Lewis lend her voice to these narratives, like seeing a favorite child actress tackle her first adult role. Or, as with Juliana Hatfield (a clear predecessor), would I even notice those innuendos from a male-led band?

It speaks to Lewis’s deft narrative touch that both of the following songs are about the monetary value of sex, yet this album never seems to be talking down at sex workers. Lewis’s lyrics obsess over sex, but she and her characters are never defined by it. [Read more…] about 35-for-35: 2007 – Under the Blacklight by Rilo Kiley

From The Beginning: WildStorm Universe – Wetworks #4-7

November 23, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]The opening arc of Wetworks masqueraded as a modern Team 7 with a supernatural bent, but this run of issues locks in the vampire underworld drama as the central plot of the book.

wetworks_v1_04 It feels like the team takes a backseat in these issues, although they do finally get some character development off the battle field. While I’ve finally got all of their names straight (Dane, Grail, Claymore, Jester, Pilgrim, and Dozer back at base), it’s hard to care about any of them aside from the team’s advance scout, Pilgrim. Coincidentally (or not?), Pilgrim gets two of the biggest scenes in the run that generate more questions than answers.

There’s also a lot of focus on the mystery of Mother One – who, let’s not forget, murdered two of the team in #3 just to gather telemetry. That was meant to be a surprise, but here she’s dropped all pretenses of being anything other eeky cyborg lady who freely reads everyone’s minds and is only 20% human to begin with. The team quickly grows as suspicious of her as we are as readers.

If it was hard to trust Mother One as a reader, it’s impossible to root for either side of the vampire conflict. Drakken is definitely written as more “evil,” but we’re talking about vampires here – they’re all evil. By contrast, his cousin the queen seems bored by her entire existence, barely deigning to make a semi-century appearance in front of her subjects and bristling at her inability to join in the fray of battle. Would it be so bad to depose her?

We learn that Wetworks is less an interloper and more a third wheel in the internecine vampire wars, thanks to their creepy benefactor Waering being a werewolf himself. Or, at least, the letters columns told me that – I had to go back to #5 and squint pretty hard to figure he was the human identity of the werewolf we meet.

Whilce Portacio isn’t delivering the same A-Game we saw in the first few issues. As with all of the Image founders within their first years, not being reigned in by editorial brings out both his best and his worst tendencies. The other founders had moved past that phase at this point (and, in Jim Lee’s case, off of his book) while Portacio is still figuring things out.

His panels are overly busy and too dark. It results in a lot of muddled, making characters hard to recognize (on top of them all being identical and gold). Plus, some key actions are indecipherable, as with a pivotal scene with Claymore and Jester that I can’t make heads or tails of. He seems to really cut loose when the WildCATs are briefly on panel (or maybe that’s Joe Chiodo enjoying their brighter palette) in a way that we don’t see again in this run. Francis Takenaga scripts Portacio’s plot with way too many words and far too little clarity; these issues are his first comic credits.

This run gives us a lot of information about the timing of other titles. Lynch is out at IO and Santini is reporting directly to Craven in #4, which places this after Gen13. Then, WildCATs appear in #4-5 sometime around WildCATs #14 (it’s prior to Voodoo’s injury in WildCATs #15) except they’re missing Warblade – so maybe that is after #19? Anyhow, it gives Grifter and Dane their first meeting. That throws a bit of a wrench into Deathblow #9-12 (where Lynch is with IO and Grifter and Dane work together), except maybe none of that actually happened, so we’re not going to get too worried about it.

Want the full details? Keep reading for a deeper breakdown of the plot. Here’s the schedule for the rest of this month’s WildStorm re-read. tomorrow we’ll work on three WildCATs tie-ins: Warblade: Endangered Species (1995) #1-4, Grifter: One Shot (1995), and a WildStorm Rarities Maul story. Then, it’s back to Stormwatch (1993) #17-21 & Special 02!!!

Need the issues? You’ll need to purchase single issues – try eBay (#4-7) or Amazon (#4, 5, 6, 7). Since further Wetworks series hit these same issue numbers, be careful to pick up issues from the 1994 series – an easy way to tell the difference is that Mike Carey is the writer on the later relaunch. [Read more…] about From The Beginning: WildStorm Universe – Wetworks #4-7

From The Beginning: Dr. Seuss – Horton Hatches the Egg (Book #4)

November 23, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]It’s the fourth installment of my “From The Beginning” read of Dr. Seuss’s entire bibliography. Last week I covered the surprisingly awesome The King’s Stilts.

After that lengthy prose story with a clear message, Dr. Seuss returned with the a rhyming book that both looks and feels like the Seuss we all know and love – Horton Hatches the Egg. Yes, it’s the same Horton who would later hear a whoo. Between the meter and the silly animals, it was liked well enough by the toddler but we were quickly back to The King’s Stilts afterwards … and I think I know why.

Horton Hatches the Egg (1940) – Dr. Seuss

CK Says: – Consider it

Reading Time: 8-12 minutes

Gender Diversity: Horton and the hunters are male; the lazy, shrill bird, Mayzie, is female. Animals are otherwise agender; there are women in a circus crowd.

Ethnic Diversity: None

Challenging Language: kinks, fluttered, tenderly, lightninged, anew

Themes to Discuss: parental responsibility, keeping your word, teasing and being different, hunting and animals used for entertainment, genetics, nature vs. nurture

You probably know Horton the elephant because he heard a Who fourteen years after this book was published, but this was his first appearance – and also Seuss’s first time anthropomorphizing an animal as a main character in one of his books.

Horton Hatches the Egg is a frivolous tale about responsibility and keeping your word that’s a fun read with little ones but lacks some of the narrative hooks that make other Seuss books great.

Horton isn’t the first animal we meet in this story. Instead, it’s Mayzie, a feckless bird who is bored with incubating her egg. While she isn’t quite ready to let it die of exposure, she’ll accept any substitute for her own tail feathers to keep it warm – including the massive hindquarters of Horton the Elephant. [Read more…] about From The Beginning: Dr. Seuss – Horton Hatches the Egg (Book #4)

35-for-35: 2006 – “She Doesn’t Get It” by The Format

November 23, 2016 by krisis

the-format-dog-problems [Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]My heart explodes every time I hear this song.

The Format was one of my favorite bands. You’ve probably never heard of them, yet they still so sound familiar to you. Why is that? Because The Format’s lead singer was Nate Ruess, the elastic-voiced lead singer of the band fun. and guest-vocalist on the Pink duet on “Just Give Me a Reason.”

I’m obsessed with Ruess’s extraordinary rubber band voice. Not only does he have a tremendously large range, not only does he have that androgynous mixed-voice tone I’m obsessed with, but his pitch is impeccable.

I always assumed they auto-tuned the heck out of him to get the perfectly round, ringing sound from his falsetto even as he swoops grandly from note to note. I’ve now seen enough live clips to think he’s the real deal (plus, I asked him about it one time on Twitter and he swore that it was without digital tuning).

The Format’s 2006 LP Dog Problems gives me butterflies in my stomach for the entirety of each listen thanks to the resonance of its lyrics and the peculiar sonic palette of indie dance pop with the occasional show tune influence, but if I had to choose one song from the album to leave on an endless loop it would be “She Doesn’t Get It.”

“She Doesn’t Get It” is a song built on surprisingly simple bones, with the intro and verse built on the barest sketch of an endlessly repeating e-g(/d#)-c#-g(/d#) figure. The band spins it up into something more intricate, with frantic hi-hat rides, chiming high guitar riffs, and ringing bells.

There are so many layers to unpeel in this narrative about being the odd one out, the oldest soul in a crowd. That’s the story on the surface, but underneath there’s something deeper about the nature of reality and how we choose to consume it. While his friends are all out to enjoy themselves, all Nate can see is the same dull trends rubber-stamped across the group.

All the girls pose the same for pictures
All the boys got the same girls’ hair
I am bored ’cause I feel much older
Look at me, as if I’ve got a reason to stare

He’s a sort of intellectually-elderly ugly duckling who can foresee the conclusion at each fumbling attempt at a relationship before they even begin, yet he keeps falling for the same types of girl because he knows exactly what type of guy they want. But, it’s not just any girl that he wants – it’s the one who’s about to go away.

She says she’s leaving on a Sunday
That leaves me one more night
Can I take you home?
I know it’s wrong
but I know your type

He can play the role for a night or two, but it never sticks. Maybe that’s why he’s waited until the last possible moment to make a move for this one girl – so it can be a perfect 24 hours without all the messy fallout that usually follows. [Read more…] about 35-for-35: 2006 – “She Doesn’t Get It” by The Format