Category: Classic Posts

Louis C.K.’s “Louie”

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Sometimes I have very old-mannish tastes in things. For example, I’ve been really enjoying Louis C.K.’s new FX show Louie a lot, and the target audience for the show is clearly middle-aged men. At the same time, it’s also really funny. I don’t watch Parks and Rec, and wasn’t previously aware of C.K.’s stand up, but I started listening to it after watching the show. The man is funny. His cynical and jaded, yet optimistic tone matches the way I feel most of the time better than the usual stand-up angle of scorn and ridicule. He has a way of despairing at the way that things turn out in life at the same time as he affirms the hopes and desires that cause the disappointment.

The show is very loose. Many TV writers have described the episodes as collections of short films interspersed with stand-up clips. That’s pretty accurate. The “short films” are basically a filmed version of what could be a story told on stage; “So, I signed up to chaperone my daughter’s field trip” becomes a 10 minute segment that shows what happens. The events and characters in the show are clearly products of C.K.’s mind and world, however the dialogue is pretty naturalistic. Every once in a while, the show abruptly breaks with the reality it has established, and that’s great too.

The whole series to date is up on Hulu. I recommend it.

Proper Discord on Renee Fleming’s Rock Album

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The unnamed author of the excellent classical music blog Proper Discord (added to blogroll) has a devastating critique of Renée Fleming’s new rock-covers album, Dark Hope up today. The punchlines:

In classical music, it’s the composer’s job to write the notes, the musician’s job to make a good sound, the engineer’s job to capture it and the producer’s job to let you know when everything is in the can.

In pop music, they all work together to create a sound. The notes themselves are simple, so the sound needs to be great. That hasn’t happened here, or, at least, it hasn’t been done well enough to make it work.

Covers like this are going to be compared to the originals, and the originals were all put together by people who knew how to make a band sound good.

It seems like everybody involved underestimated what it took to make a modern rock record, and it’s a shame, because the talent was there. It didn’t need to suck.

B.o.B. The Adventures of Bobby Ray

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  • B.o.B  B.o.B Presents: The Adventures of Bobby Ray Atlantic Records, April 27, 2010
  • This album is for: People who like the Kanye dominated style of pop/hip-hop/rap. People at a party looking to have a good time. People who want unobtrusive upbeat anthems for driving around with. Christian youth group leaders who want to show that they listen to cool music too (clean version only).
  • This album is not for: People who dislike rap and hip-hop’s assimilation into the pop machine. People looking for more challenging music than a feel-good sing-along. Anybody who hates any of the numerous guest stars on the album.
  • Key tracks: “Airplanes”  “The Kids”

Ignore the album cover, ignore the guest producers, ignore the guest artists. This is a big, shiny pop record. There’s still a big studio sound that marks big budget productions, and it’s here in abundance. This is an album built of hooks, and all of them are catchy as fuck.

I’m not saying any of this as if it’s a bad thing. There’s a place for these albums: upbeat, polished, and scientifically engineered to make you have a good time listening to it.

FX’s Justified

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I’m a big fan of FX’s new cop-drama/western Justified. It’s a seriously high-quality show, with really good regular actors and guest stars, great dialogue, and a kind of old-fashioned lawman + Southern Gothic nouveau vibe that I think is super cool.

It also stars Timothy Olyphant, who is one of those actors that is immediately the best part of a project. I first came across him in The Girl Next Door, which is generally a bad movie. Whenever  Olyphant and Emile Hirsch were on screen though, it became… cinema. Live Free or Die Hard gave him even less to work with, but he managed to be a plausible villain in roughly 12 minutes of screen time.*

It struck me the other day how atypical Justified is in my TV lineup (the things that I watch week-to-week). The first TV show that I got hooked on watching every week was LOST, and that gave me strong preference for serialized shows, or at least shows with a strong story arc. As my tastes have diversified, I’ve become a fan of stoner-comedy shows like Venture Brothers or Robot Chicken that don’t have anything near a serialized plot. But with the exception of some Law & Order comfort food, I can’t think of any dramas that I watch that don’t have a strong story arc.

But Justified is almost the definition of network television, just on a cable channel. There is no genre with such a connection to the rise of mass television audiences than the Western… Gunsmoke, Bonanza, The Lone Ranger. And while Harlan County, Tennessee is not the same as the West of 1950’s America, Raylan Givens is a classic American TV man. He’s handsome, can outshoot any gunman he meets, is kind to women, gets along with men, holds no racial, religious, or orientation biases, has casual fun in the bedroom,  and doesn’t worry too much about any of these things.

There’s not that many men that occupy that space on TV today.

*I won’t go on about Timothy Olyphant all day, but he has a couple of really entertaining early roles. One is as the clueless rookie sidekick to Delroy Lindo’s stolen car cop character in the awful Nicolas Cage/Angelina Jolie Gone in 60 Seconds. Another early Olyphant role was in a mediocre gay romantic comedy called The Broken Hearts Club. That one’s fun to watch both for Olyphant as a studly gay man (!) and for Zach Braff’s ridiculous performance as a horny gymrat.

Jónsi Go

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Most of the reviews of Go that I’ve seen in passing mention how different it is from Jónsi’s work with Sigur Ros. I thought that I would have fresh ears because I’ve only heard like one of their albums (()? Vekatimest?). Still, this album is a big contrast from the music journalist shorthand for Sigur Ros’ sound; atmospheric, etheral, post-rock.

I’ve always gotten an art rock vibe from Sigur Rós, in terms of marketing and their place in the indie rock pantheon. Go is much more upfront about being conventional pop, in terms of songwriting. One thing that is retained from SR is the epic ambition of the songs. There’s a tasteful amount of glitchy production that, coupled with Arcade Fire-esque tom-heavy propulsive drums, give the upbeat numbers a kind of apocalyptic, end-of-the-world-party energy.

Go is a fun album. It’s impossible to listen to it without getting caught up in its ambition and energy.

But. [Read more for the old sad bastard view on this album.] Continue reading “Jónsi Go“ →