Film Break: “Funny People”
I am, it seems, in the minority: I don’t think Judd Apatow’s new movie, Funny People, is an epoch-defining masterpiece, nor do I think it’s all that profound. It is an impressive film on many levels, and there is much to appreciate in the writing, the acting, and the direction. But, while its soul-searching is sincere and perhaps even moving, it doesn’t work as a film. Its problem, however, is overambition– which is a much better problem to have than too little ambition, even if this two-and-a-half-hour comedy epic falls apart halfway through.
Anyway. My full review is posted at CT Movies.
Maxwell: “BLACKsummer’s Night”
Plenty of young rockers cite Radiohead as an influence these days, but an R&B crooner like Maxwell? Hearing him namedrop Yorke and Co. raises an eyebrow, especially when it turns out that he’s not kidding. On his new album BLACKsummer’s Night, Maxwell constructs soulful swirls in much the same way Radiohead creates their music: With a composerly sense of dynamics, centering everything around a brief musical phrase that’s looped over and over again, various elements added and subtracted, subtle variations in texture, building gradually into some wonderful monument of inspired patience and slow-burning grandeur.
It’s not a new way to approach R&B; it’s a time-tested formula, employed by everyone from Marvin Gaye to D’Angelo. (A few fleeting moments on this album bear passing familiarity to a smoother cousin of D’Angelo’s Voodoo.) But if it isn’t new, it is unconventional; in the 2000s, R&B is constructed not around loops, but hooks, tailor-made for ringtones. Maxwell is too classy for that, his sense of history too thorough: He approaches his music with a jazzman’s sense of ebb and flow, a classicist bent that has much in common with vintage soul music, less with the ringtone jams of today.
BLACKsummer’s Night is the first Maxwell album in close to a decade, and supposedly the first in a series. The next two installments are reported to delve further into the artist’s gospel roots and various other forms of soul music. This one is a consolidation of his strengths, and that’s what it should be: Technically, given his long absence, this surely must be considered his comeback album. But it sounds as though he never went away; his art is doggedly untouched by trends and shifting interests in R&B. And at just nine songs– the final one is really just an instrumental coda– it’s startlingly compact. Maxwell doesn’t need to remind us of how great he is through some marathon showing of bombast or verbosity. These songs do the job just fine.
The reason for his extended absence, he says, is that he wanted to make a break from show business, to experience normal, everyday human life. I think he accomplished his goal. BLACKsummer’s Night is music made by a fully-formed, grown-up individual. It is neither a breakup album or a late-night seduction album, strictly speaking; rather, it’s a song cycle about the emotions involved with a relationship that doesn’t last. It begins with raw need and pleading desire in “Bad Habit,” moves into the stark anger and disappointment of “Cold,” then delves into both sorrow and spiritual awakening for the duration. There are numerous forms of expression along the way, from the biting humor in “Cold” to the bleeding-heart want of “Love You” to the chilling finality of “Playing Possum,” which is either about metaphorical or literal death.
By the way, I think there are two meanings to the emphasis on BLACK in the album’s title. It’s a dark album, to be sure, though there is joy and compassion along the way, and humanity in every note. But it’s also a reclamation of black music, just as D’Angelo’s album was meant to be nine years ago. This isn’t R&B for the clubs, but for late-night meditation. It’s spiritual and substantive, not materialistic or false. It finds its roots not in the present but in musical idioms that have proven themselves lasting, and it builds on their legacy rather than emulate their sound. The excellence involved here is so uniform, and so unpretentious, that it’s initially easy to miss. But the music sinks in, it works its magic, and it becomes clear that Maxwell is the guardian of an old flame, and it burns brightly even amidst the shadows of his BLACKsummer’s Night.
Joe Henry: The Producer
Joe Henry with Ramblin' Jack Elliott
My friend Andy Whitman recently wrote that Joe Henry just might be the Artist of the Decade. That’s no small compliment after a decade that’s given us landmark recordings from Radiohead, Outkast, and Tom Waits– to name just three– but who am I to disagree? As Andy notes, Henry’s released three albums over the past decade, with a fourth on the way, and out of those four, three are stone, five-star classics; 2001′s Scar, meanwhile, is merely a four-and-a-half-star near-masterpiece. If anyone else has a track record so sterling, I’m not familiar with them.
But even that formidible body of work is just part of what makes Joe Henry the champ. You see, he does a bit of producing work, as well. And in its own way, that work is just as essential as the albums he makes under his own name. So, in celebration of Joe and in honor of his upcoming Blood from Stars, here’s my countdown of the ten finest examples of his gifts as a producer– and make no mistake: He’s as gifted as any producer working today. For the purposes of this list, I’m not going to count his own records. That said, these are all thoroughly, crucially, Joe Henry albums– and all are excellent.
10. Aimee Mann
The Forgotten Arm
When Aimee Mann set to making her rock-and-roll concept album, she told Paste that she wanted a producer for whom The Beatles weren’t the sole reference point, the beginning and the end, of rock music. Who she got was Joe Henry, and their collaboration stands out as unique in both of their catalogs: Henry invited his band into the studio and they knocked these songs out live from the floor, and the result is vibrant, muscular rock that makes faint reference to various recordings from the 1970s but doesn’t sound particularly similar to any one artist. This one rocks harder than anything Henry’s been involved with, outside his own Tiny Voices and Blood from Stars, and if you think rock and roll this fluid and free is a minor achievement, just listen to how fussy Mann’s other albums tend to be and you’ll realize how liberating her work with Henry was at the time.
09. Susan Tedeschi
Hope and Desire
Susan Tedeschi is often pigeonholed as a blues singer, but in truth the lady can sing anything– something Joe Henry helped her to prove when he oversaw this fine album, helping her to select material that was varied and eclectic, and bringing to each the appropriate arrangements without distracting from the singer’s own voice, which remains the centerpiece. Henry is unparalleled when it comes to recording vocalists like Tedeschi, and this album’s the proof.
08. Mary Gauthier
Between Daylight and Dark
Henry’s approach as a producer has sometimes been described as “less as more”– and while that’s a bit reductionist, it’s generally fairly accurate. Working with Mary Gauthier, he helps the singer locate the deep, damaged heart of the blues, in the process proving that you don’t need a lot of glitz or polish to make the blues come alive; in fact, just the opposite is true, as Henry surrounds Gauthier with a sympathetic and understated band that highlights every nook and cranny in her voice, and underscores every painful word she writes.
07. Elvis Costello and Allen Toussaint
The River in Reverse
This record is a minor miracle: Vintage Allen Toussaint chesnuts and a handful of brand new compositions become a celebration of New Orleans, an angry protest of the response to Hurricane Katrina, a showcase for the unique gifts of both artists involved, and a collaboration in the truest sense. Henry comes into play with that last point– as the supervisor and facilitator of this ingenious pairing, he keeps everyone on equal footing, and the result is a brilliant balancing act. The music itself sounds great, crisp and alive, and it’s easily the best thing Costello‘s done in fifteen years or more. Henry even coaxes the reclusive Toussaint back to the microphone, itself fairly miraculous.
06. Bettye LaVette
I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise
A lot of times, veteran artists try to stage a comeback with an album full of star-studded cameos, gimmicky arrangements, and pandering song selections. Joe Henry knows better: In re-introducing the great soul singer Bettye LaVette to American listeners, he simply relied on great songs– classy material that showcases the singer’s power and versatility– and a stellar backing band. Beyond that, he simply sat back and let LaVette do the rest– and given what an incredible singer she is, that was precisely the right thing to do. This is how every comeback album should be approached.
05. Loudon Wainwright III
Recovery
LaVette’s wasn’t the only career Henry jumpstarted this decade; he also breathed new life into Loudon Wainwright. Wainwright had never been recorded particularly well before working with Henry, but Joe’s backing band and deft touch made for the two most full-sounding, spirited recordings of Wainwright’s career: 2007′s joyous Strange Weirdos, and this gem, which re-interprets many of Loudon’s classic songs, but instead of guy-and-guitar arrangements, Henry records Wainwright with his full band. He gets major kudos for the concept alone, and the execution is flawless– but then, I always thought Wainwright’s older work was a bit thin in the recording department. Regardless, there’s no denying that Henry’s guidance in the song selection is masterful, and for introducing Wainwright’s gifts to a whole new generation of fans, he earns our gratitute.
04. I’m Not There Original Soundtrack
Henry only produced a handful of the tracks on this sprawling, multi-artist celebration of Bob Dylan tunes, but it’s essential Henry for this reason: It shows his range and versatility as a producer, because it finds him working with several different artists and bringing to each one exactly what they need. He assembles his crack studio band to pick and sing their hearts out with Ramblin’ Jack Elliott; he keeps things simple and sparse for Marcus Carl Franklin, keeping the focus on the impact of the voice and the words; and he adds tasteful gospel thunder to John Doe’s take on “Pressing On,” as good as any track on the record.
03. I Believe to My Soul
Joe Henry is virtually single-handedly responsible for the resurgence of soul music in the 00s, for his shrewd nurturing and enthusiastic support of such legendary talents as Solomon Burke, Bettye LaVette, and Allen Toussaint. Indeed: Make a list of the eight or ten best soul albums of the decade, and at least three or four of them are bound to be Henry joints. Make this one of them; assembling five of the all-time greats of soul music, Henry creates a multi-artist soul compilation that’s full of soulful, elegant arrangements; vocal performances of tremendous power and nuance; and songs that are either newly-recorded or freshly interpreted. In other words: It’s pretty much perfect.
02. Allen Toussaint
The Bright Mississippi
Henry often says that he sees his role as producer simply as that of the casting director: He brings the right people together, offers them comfort and encouragement, and stays out of their way while they do their thing. That might sound like a detached approach to take, but it’s actually an inspired one, something that’s made clear by this magical recording. Henry recruits a group of ace musicians, puts them in a room together, and presses ‘record.’ And with that, he’s produced the most thrillingly alive and joyful instrumental album of the decade. It’s like bottled lightning.
01. Solomon Burke
Don’t Give Up on Me
A masterpiece of minimalism, a triumph of simple-but-soulful recording, a soul record of astonishing power and range, a comeback album that’s as tasteful and elegant as they come… everything Henry excels at seems to be present here, on this Grammy-winning masterpiece that sparked a whole new interest in soul music in the early part of the decade. The setup is just about as simple as it gets– Henry surrounds the veteran singer with just a rhythm section and Burke’s own church organist– but the results are varied and completely wonderful: Henry asked for songs from some of his famous friends and got terrific, brand new compositions from the likes of Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Tom Waits, and Brian Wilson. It’s material worthy of the King of Rock ‘n’ Soul, and Burke delivers on each song. Henry’s production keeps the focus where it sould be, and the result is so thoroughly a showcase for Burke, it isn’t until a few listens go by that you realize just how masterful Henry’s work really is.
Debating the Dead Weather
The staff of Stereo Subversion recently held an “internal debate” over The Dead Weather’s new record, Horehound, and I was happy to join in; turns out, I was one of the band’s most enthusiastic supporters. You can read the whole thing here, but if you just want my bit:
Jack White’s latest joint contains more references to the devil than any other rock record in recent memory — not too surprising, coming from the man who once gave us Get Behind Me Satan. But The Dead Weather’s music isn’t demonic; it’s just devilishly stylish, taking cues from swampy blues and the sleaziest, seediest rock the 1970s had to offer and transforming familiar sounds into bewitching gothic fairy tales and murder ballads, all sex and sleaze and boozy shoot-outs. The music’s scary-good, and the devil’s got nothing on Jack White.
Don’t forget tht my full review is posted here, as well.
Film Break: Five Favorites of 2009 (So Far)
With the blockbuster season ending and the Oscar race gearing up– and with a few of the year’s best pictures still in theaters, at least for another couple of weeks– this seems like a good time to offer a few quick, official recommendations: My five favorite movies of the year, chosen at the halfway point (give or take a month):
01. The Brothers Bloom
Dir. Rian Johnson
It’s hip, but it has heart; it’s witty, but it’s not ironic; and it plays with storytelling conventions, but it’s not postmodern. What it is is my kind of comedic caper: Charming, stylish, literate, and full of heart. I love this movie. Click here for a slightly-longer take.
02. The Hurt Locker
Dir. Kathryn Bigelow
A war film where the deadliest ticking time bombs are the ones inside the men themselves. This one’s scorchingly intense, edge-of-your-seat suspenseful, and utterly gripping in its psychological drama. Here’s my capsule review.
03. Up
Dir. Peter Docter
A fantasy that flies as high as the balloons that grace its frames, Pixar’s latest combines B-movie homage, Saturday morning cartoon silliness– and one of the most moving, genuinely profound meditations on marriage I’ve ever seen. Here’s my short take on it.
04. Summer Hours
Dir. Olivier Assayas
A film about separating the stuff from the stuff. Poetic and profound, Summer Hours is a rich and contemplative picture about art, family, and the passage of time. I reviewed it for CT Movies.
05. The Class
Dir. Laurent Cantet
Think Star Trek is the fastest-moving, most action-packed movie of the year? Well, maybe… but this one comes close. It’s a classroom drama with documentary-style realism, high stakes, and plenty of surprises. Here’s my blurb.
Joe Henry: The Blog
This is going to be fun: My friend David Kennedy has begun what is– to my knowledge– the world’s first Joe Henry blog. He’s just getting started, but there’s already some great content there, with much more sure to come.
By the way, starting next week, I’ll be beginning some serious Joe Henry coverge of my own, in preparation to the August 18 release of Blood from Stars, so it might start to feel like this is a Joe Henry blog…
Film Break: “The Brothers Bloom”
Some filmmakers are totally in love with words; for others, it’s the view from the camera. Rian Johnson seems particularly enamored with both, and I’m head-over-heels for his new picture, The Brothers Bloom. Johnson proved himself a masterful stylist and an auteur to keep an eye on with his savvy, endlessly inventive noir Brick, but his latest is something else altogether: A comedic caper, a con-men comedy that’s as lavishly stylish and giddily creative as Brick, but also so different that immediately moves Johnson to the upper rung of young cinematic storytellers. After a movie as striking and distinct as Brick, a lesser filmmakers might have written himself into a corner; instead, Johnson blows the door open and reveals that his horizons are endless, crating a unique style that borrows from the Marx Brothers, Wes Anderson, Woody Allen at his nuttiest and most out-there, and the great con-men classics of old, like Dirty Rotten Scoundrels– and finds in those influences a voice that’s almost preternaturally assured and one-of-a-kind. Chalk it up to inspiration: Brothers Bloom is a comedy with heart, a mad rush of invention and storytelling finesse that matches Wes Anderson’s visual flair but unearths a whole new level of emotion. The characters that Johnson develops are altogether fully-formed, surprising, and real– give some of the credit to a group of knockout performances, particularly the show-stealing Rachel Weisz and the very fine Adrian Brody, in his best work since The Pianist– and the whole movie is simply a joy: A wonderfully rich and heartfelt movie with a conscience and a keen wit, but, above all, a zeal for storytelling. Like Mark Ruffalo’s character in the movie, Johnson and his cast deserve a big “wow” for this one.
Major Lazer: “Guns Don’t Kill People… Lazers Do”
Dancehall is a musical idiom with its roots in Jamaica—a fact that you’d almost be forgiven for forgetting in 2009, after several years of British and American producers and DJs planting their own colonial flags on the genre’s turf, and importing much of it back to their own homelands. A simple form at heart, dancehall offers enough flexibility and room for creative interpretation and ornamentation that it’s become a favored style in US and UK dance music; according to MetaCritic, the top-rated album of 2008 was The Bug’s London Zoo, a distinctly British album by a distinctly British producer (albeit with some Jamaican vocalists in tow), which commandeered dancehall as a vessel for political outcry that was both universal and—yes—distinctly British.
Which is all simply to say that it shouldn’t be too surprising to find that 2009’s flagship dancehall release—at least stateside—is a collaborative affair between one Yank and one Brit. (Never mind that they’re both white.) Diplo and Switch christened themselves Major Lazer for their explosive and expansive debut, Guns Don’t Kill People… Lazers Do, a record that actually stands as a fairly complete primer on dancehall’s tropes and its dizzyingly creative spirit—again, no big surprise.
Read the rest at Stereo Subversion.
Ian Hunter: “Man Overboard”
“Well don’t try pulling me down to your level/ There ain’t nothin’ worse than a phony-ass rebel!” And there you have it: A few weeks after his 70th birthday and a few weeks before reuniting with his old band Mott the Hoople, Ian Hunter remains one of the crankiest, meanest hombres in rock and roll. He’s seen and been through a lot in his perennially underrated career, and he’s got the deep lines in his voice to prove it. Now a septuagenarian who can rock circles around the youngsters and deliver tongue-lashings worthy of a young Elvis Costello, Hunter sings in a voice that has aged into a gravelly rasp, all gristle and venom, and he shows no signs of going gently into complacency or even serenity, as his furious album Man Overboard makes abundantly clear.
Nothin’ funny about this rebel: Actually, this is his second knockout record in as many years, following 2007′s thumping, thundering Shrunken Heads, and he hasn’t run out of piss and vinegar just yet. The tempo has slowed down a bit here, but this is still bristling, folk- and country-tinged rock that sounds vibrant and lived in, a worthy (if mellower) successor to the tempestuous Shrunken Heads. If anything, Hunter sounds even more discontented– the title track is a devastating and bleakly witty song of desperation that he performs with acoustic guitar and harmonica, as if to tell his early critics, who accused him of aping Dylan, that he’s past the point of caring what everyone else thinks. He gives easy sentiment the heave-ho just a few songs later: “Sometimes flowers ain’t enough.”
But if you think Hunter’s just souring with age, well, you don’t know Ian Hunter: He’s always been a cantankerous misanthrope, penning some of the weariest, most cynical road songs of all time in the early days of Mott. But the thing about Hunter is, no matter how angry he gets, he remains a bit of a romantic at heart, and his albums– the good ones, anyway– are as complex and multi-dimensional as he is. And so it is on Man Overboard, a song that finds Hunter sounding older and wearier than ever before (“Man Overboard”) but also younger and more idealistic; the wonderful “Arms and Legs” is a love song written with the patience and compassion that comes from a lifetime of dedication and loyalty, but also a bewitched, gobsmacked affection that betrays a rush of youthfulness.
The opening song is called “The Great Escape,” and the way it sets the tone for the album is fascinating: It’s a funny tale that recounts an incident from the singer’s youth, but its treatment of the past is neither regretful nor overly romantic. Hunter simply seems to tell it like it is, less focused on indulgent introspection than he is on leading a sympathetic backing band through a loopy folk-rock arrangement and keeping the devilish half-smile on his face. He shows his 70-year-old colors mostly in the generally more subdued tempos, though that’s not such a bad thing given that he’s written some of his most winsome ballads, particularly the closing epic, “River of Tears.”
Much of the album’s appeal lies in the juxtoposition of songs like the title cut and “Babylon Blues,” wherein Hunter dissects modern malaise with caustic wit, and the love songs, including not only the surging “Arms and Legs” but also the gentle ballad “Way with Words,” a big-hearted paen to his wife. It’s this range of material that allows one to say that Man Overboard, like Shrunken Heads, is funny and touching, angry and sweet, always vintage Ian Hunter. But what does one make, exactly, of the odd music-hall ballad “Girl from the Office,” a vicious song that seemingly flirts with misanthropism? It’s probably a joke, but it’s a little sour either way.
A couple of other tracks– “These Feelings” and “Win it All”– are fairly lackluster, filler material that keep the album from reaching the same prick-kicking highs of Shrunken Heads, but the standouts, of which there are several, make Man Overboard essential Hunter. He’s growing older and yeah, he’s even slowing down a bit, but he’s still got it where it counts: This record is all heart and wit, a bubbling concoction of anger and sweetness that is, at times, downright explosive, and almost never anything less than classic Ian Hunter.
Film Break: “The Hurt Locker”
If you’ve yet to see an Iraq War film that you’ve really loved, or even liked– well, you’re not alone; politically-charged war movies have been notoriously disastrous in the 00s, perhaps because moviegoers get enough Middle Eastern conflict on the nightly news, but probably because most of the movies have sucked. Personally, I hadn’t seen a single Iraq movie that didn’t deserve its dismal fate– at least not until I saw The Hurt Locker. This one’s a bomb of a different kind– a cinematic smart bomb, explosive and precise. Taking a few cues from Dr. Strangelove, which linked violence to human nature by equating war with sex, Hurt Locker‘s central conceit is to compare war to addiction, a move that works astoundingly well: Though it tells the story of an American bomb squad stationed in war-torn Iraq, the real ticking time bombs are the men themselves. This is a psychologically deep, thematically rich, and utterly engrossing film that fuses edge-of-your-seat intensity with high-stakes suspense and startling philosophical sophistication. And the nuanced way it captures a particularly macho, masculine taste for violence? Well, let’s just say you’ll be floored to know that this one was directed by a woman, Kathryn Bigelow. The writing is first-rate, the performances are ace, and the cinematography makes you feel like you’re right there within the blast radius– but it’s the internal drama that will leave you rattled.
