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20 The Founder | Wednesday 23 February 2011 E X T R A Music Review: Hereafter Music News Johanna Svensson David Bowman Music Editor * The story sounded interesting and with Clint Eastwood in the director’s seat and Matt Damon as one of the main characters, my hopes were, if not high, then at least above rug-level. Hereafter has received good reviews and having seen all the good ones, I thought I might as well. We follow the three protagonists: Cécile de France as a French journalist who falls victim to the 2005 tsunami but survives; Frankie McLaren as a young boy who loses his twin brother in an accident; and finally Matt Damon, an ex-psychic who struggles to reconcile with his rare ability of communicating with the dead. In the first three quarters of the film, the audience is shown how the three characters all interact with death on some level and consequently their fight to deal with the inevitability of it. Hereafter is in essence built up by two hours of backstory and half an hour introduction to the plot. And then the film ends. As the lights came on I looked at my companion with a slight, no make that considerable, frown. I felt cheated, but was in all honesty quite happy to finally get out of there. Where was the story?! The only reason Hereafter gets one star rather than a minus with a huge exclamation mark following it is because of the believable special effects and excellent cinematography. Other than that, there is not much else to praise. With poor acting from all – even Damon (who seems to doing little else but stuffing himself with food throughout the film)! – and a huge lack of connecting story. Each character’s story could have provided enough material for an individual (and rather interesting) film, but when they are all crammed together into one they became superficial and insignificant. As a consequence, I quite frankly struggled to give a damn about any of them. If you’re making a film about depressed people, at least make sure they’re interesting enough. Hereafter is not only a waste of time, it is a waste of time you will regret. Eastwood’s work is possibly one of the most pointless films I, at least, have had the displeasure to watch. With huge potential for banging and heart-stirring plot, it never fires off, or even moves in any direction at all. Big news! By the time you read this, Radiohead will have bestowed their eighth album, The King of Limbs (which they have described as the world’s first ever newspaper album) upon the world. What that exactly means will become clear to those who shell out thirty pounds to get the very collectible physical copy of the album, which ships in May. Following LCD Soundsystem’s announcement that they will be disbanding, the band confirmed that they will be playing a farewell concert at Madison Square Garden. However, most of the tickets for the event were acquired by scalpers, prompting front man James Murphy to post a very angry rant on the band’s website that is well worth a read, before scheduling a further string of gigs at Manhattan’s Terminal 5. In other saddening news, The White Stripes have announced that they too will be breaking up following this message on their website: “The reason is not due to artistic differences or lack of wanting to continue, nor any health issues as both Meg and Jack are feeling fine and in good health. It is for a myriad of reasons, but mostly to preserve what is beautiful and special about the band and have it stay that way.” Jack White will, however, be appearing on Gnarls Barkley-producer Danger Mouse’s upcoming spaghetti western concept album Rome, which will also feature contributions from Norah Jones and some of the musicians that appeared on the original soundtracks to Once Upon a Time in the West and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The Strokes have released the first single from their upcoming album Angles, entitled ‘Under Cover of Darkness’ and have also unveiled the album art for the record. I will be taking bets as to whether the album will turn out to be even worse than the album art. More information has emerged about Spike Jonze’s film Scenes from the Suburbs, which is a companion piece to the Arcade Fire album The Suburbs. It will reportedly be a 30 minute film about a group of suburban teenagers whose town is controlled and torn apart by the military. Artsy. The excellent video for the album’s title track was described as being effectively a trailer for the film. This year’s Grammys illustrated how indie music is fast becoming accepted by the mainstream, with wins by The Black Keys, Danger Mouse, The White Stripes, The Roots and, most notably, Arcade Fire, winning the award for best album for The Suburbs, somehow beating competition from popgiants Eminem, Lady Gaga and Katy Perry. Immediately afterwards, Kanye West tweeted what we were all thinking: ‘#Arcade fire!!!!!!!!!! There is hope!!! I feel like we all won when something like this happens! FUCKING AWESOME!’
The Founder | Wednesday 23 February 2011 E X T R A 21 Music Review: James Blake, James Blake David Bowman I’ll confess that I was more than a little surprised when I heard that James Blake had placed second on the BBC’s Sound of 2011 poll, although based on his superb output last year (releasing no fewer than 3 excellent EP’s of material) it was in no way undeserved. The reason for my surprise is that Blake’s music only rarely flirts with accessibility, creating sparse electronic landscapes that are the logical progression from the kind of things that Burial was doing a few years ago before Dubstep was anywhere near to being a household name. But then, can James Blake even be considered Dubstep? The first half of the record largely consists of electronic tracks that shudder and twitch through a series of paranoid movements that create a remarkable sense of claustrophobia despite the amount of negative space dictated by the record’s inherent minimalism. The middle of the record contains the superb ‘Lindesfarne parts I&II’ which begins solely with Blake’s voice through a vocoder and is very reminiscent of Bon Iver’s autotuned track ‘Woods’ (the same track that is sampled at the conclusion of Kanye West’s latest album) and then in the second part adds an acoustic guitar and a touch of drums, transitioning the album into a much more relaxed and open space. Immediately following this comes the heavily circulated Feist cover ‘Limit to Your Love’, which starts as a standard piano ballad but then adds a speaker-damaging bass line which comes off as abrasive following the mellow track that precedes it. This is one of many subtle moments where the sequencing of the album is shown to be of the utmost importance, as Blake is able to maintain absolute control over the listener through his attention to dynamics. The latter section of the album is made up of piano ballads with minimal vocal or instrumental distortions that, although they initially come off as unremarkable, unveil themselves as deep and complex entities that are, in a sense, self-contained from the rest of the record. On the occasions when the vocals are manipulated, it is to raise the pitch of Blake’s voice, giving it an almost feminine quality and creating the illusion that Blake is singing call and response in a duet with himself. James Blake proves to be a truly remarkable and unique record that is the culmination of the work begun by Thom Yorke and The xx in the way it can make minimalism sound vast, but it is utterly original in the sense that the core of the album seems not to be based around electronica or Dubstep, rather than jazz as (pardon the cliché) the sounds that Blake doesn’t make are often more important than the ones he does. Thanks to the BBC, it’s almost inevitable that Blake will be critically lauded throughout the year and it would seem inconceivable that he wouldn’t receive a Mercury nomination at the very least. Artists You May Not Know #1 James Chance & The Contortions Sel Bulut I’m not sure when the words ‘experimental’ and ‘difficult’ became synonymous, but when James Chance & The Contortions released their debut LP Buy in 1979, ‘avant-garde’ was still a phrase with meaning. Buy is the first album that comes on after listening to the James Blake LP on iTunes and within the first ten seconds of its opening track ‘Design To Kill’, I’ve already forgotten how the previous forty minutes actually sounded. This isn’t to say anything particularly bad about Blake’s record, but on a personal level, it does none of the things that give me the most enjoyment from music. These things happen to be everything The Contortions encapsulate – rhythm, genuine experimentalism and most importantly fun – and at no point does it make for ‘difficult’ listening. The Contortions were key players in New York’s no wave movement, a ridiculously fertile period of musical history that spawned some of the most influential sounds of the modern age. Whereas punk was based on the notion of a musician knowing three chords, many no wave artists knew nothing, people that literally couldn’t play an instrument making stripped down, atonal jams driven by hypnotic repetition and texture rather than melody. A lot of no wave betrayed influence – it owed itself to no music before it and wouldn’t fit into any style or genre. Critics and musos will argue for hours over who was no wave and who wasn’t and it’s easier not to get involved in defining it too rigidly. What might be easier is to consider no wave as a movement that was part of a larger upsurge in experimental music in New York during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Whilst on paper this sounds like a bunch of pretentious kids making noisy, experimental drones (and, admittedly, some of it was) plenty of stuff from this period was as fun as it gets. The Contortions were amongst these. First formed in 1977, the group differed from many no wave acts insofar as that James Chance demanded some level of skill from its members. Originally known for their aggressive and confrontational live performances, it was after appearing on Brian Eno’s seminal No New York compilation in 1978 that they gained the most recognition. No New York was a compilation of four no wave artists operating in New York in the late 70s that, whilst a decent document in itself, has sadly meant that many other no wave artists have been forgotten about. Whilst this newfound recognition could have been the beginning of something excellent, it was sadly not to be, with The Contortions’ original lineup splitting by 1980. James Chance continued with his own funk project, James White & The Blacks, whilst founding member Pat Place formed the excellently groovy post-punk act Bush Tetras and the rest of the band became the now-forgotten Raybeats. What The Contortions left behind is unlike anything before or since. This is best summarised by their ‘hit’, the underground classic ‘Contort Yourself ’, a four-minute stomper based on a simple repetitious funk groove, discordant guitar work and free-jazz saxophones riding over the top whilst James Chance’s nutso James Brown impersonation commands us to ‘contort yourself one time! Contort yourself two times! Contort yourself three times!’ before descending into wolf-like howls. The song hangs together on a thread, powered by raw energetic rhythm. Whilst Buy was a discordant jazz trip, James Chance’s second album was a bizarre disco-funk odyssey. The album, called Off White and released under the James White & The Blacks moniker, actually came out on the same day as Buy and contained a disco reworking of ‘Contort Yourself ’ by pioneering pop producer August Darnell of Kid Creole & The Coconuts fame, a re-version complete with female backing vocals and a defined fourto-the-floor kickdrum beat. James Chance still releases music to this day, with his most recent release, ‘Incorrigible’, coming out as recently as last May on NY-based label Rong Music (as an aside, Liv Spencer and DJ Spun provided an acid-tinged remix of the song which, for what it’s worth, was probably the most fantastic piece of club music to have been released in 2010). He also performs live, sometimes in a jazz trio, sometimes with the reformed Contortions and, if it’s in Europe, with his backing band ‘Les Contortions’. And despite the fact that he must be about two hundred years old by now, he’s still got it – in an interview with Resident Advisor, tastemaking selector JG Wilkes described his performance at Glasgow’s legendary Optimoclubnight: “James Chance was searching around for his reed and his false teeth fell down his saxophone”.
Page 1 and 2: Nicholas Blazenby Erection Special
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