Room to Move: New Music from Scout Niblett, the Reserves, and Serial Thrillers

Scout Niblett,
The Calcination
of Scout Niblett,
Drag City

I once described the
spare sounds of Notting-
ham's Scout Niblett
(born Emma Louise) as
bare-boned blues. Five
years have passed since
then, but the sound re-
mains the same. It's her
biggest strength and...
her biggest weakness.

So many artists who emerge as architects of stark add more and
more details as the years go by, but The Calcination of Scout
Niblett trades embellishment for volume and control. There's
no collision between notes and words, but rather a lot of space,
a lot of air, a lot of room for the individual elements to move.

But there's isn't much movement going on, which means that if you
don't like the voice, the songs, or the instrumentation, this Steve
Albini-engineered album isn't for you. No multi-tracking or back-
ing vocals smooth the way, such that if you haven't heard Niblett
before, you might expect folk-rock, but her latest skews more
towards avant garde/experimental, upfront vocals aside.

I find the results more frustrating than satisfying. Comparisons
to Cat Power and P.J. Harvey still apply, but Niblett works few-
er pop elements into her playbook, and I wish she would. Pre-
vious efforts prove she can write a hook, but there aren't any
here. It's surely intentional, and helps to creates a cohesive
experience, but I'm a sucker for discreet songs—"singles,"
if you will—and this LP defies the bite-size approach.

So, I wanted to love her fifth full-length, and I do admire it,
but the melodies are too elusive, the vocals too drawn out for
me to embrace completely. Calcination isn't a failure by any
means, but nor is it the smashing success I was anticipating.

Click here for my review of Kidnapped by Neptune.



The Reserves, Life, self-released

"Likeable songs from likeable guys."
-- from the band biography

I put this disc on and promptly forgot all about it, since it inspir-
es neither irritation nor excitement. Like the Avett Brothers—
a comparison they'd probably appreciate—the Reserves craft
mid-tempo background music that would work just as well in a
casual office environment as a corporate coffee shop. If you heard
their second full-length playing in a Starbucks, it's unlikely you'd
run away in horror. You might even tap your toes, but I expect
more than inoffensive professionalism from alternative rock.



Serial Thrillers, F5, iMedia

With a name like Serial Thrillers, my expectations were
low at best, but this EP from Bostonians Paul Ortolano (vo-
cals, guitar, bass) and Stephen Clements (drums) with assis-
tance from producer Anthony J. Resta (programming, per-
cussion) is surprisingly listenable. Recommended to fans of
post-wave power-pop acts like Matthew Sweet and Atlantic-
era Redd Kross. Bright and tight with just a hint of menace.

Click here for "Ordinary Days."

Endnote: I'm tempted to ding the Reserves for giving
their album such a bland title, except the recent BBC/Dis-
covery Channel series shares the same name, and I enjoy-
ed that, so they get a free pass. For more information about
the band, please click here or here; and for Serial Thril-
lers, here or here. Scout Niblett image from Last.fm.

Fall Heads Roll (Again)

I first discovered the
Fall when I was in col-
lege. They'd already been
around for seven years,
but I'd never heard of
them. That said, I took
a seminar on Albert Cam-
us around the same time,
and that's when I also
discovered The Fall.

I enjoyed The Stranger
and The Plague, but The
Fall was where the Fren-
ch-Algerian absurdist
really kicked in for me. I ended up reading it twice, because I found the narrator so persuasive that I missed the fact that he was completely unreliable. I'd imagine that was also one of the attrac-
tions for Mark E. Smith, who took the band's name from the book.

I'm pretty sure goth-garage extravaganza "Lay of the Land,"
which kicks off 1984's The Wonderful and Frightening World
of..., was the first Fall song I heard. I remember thinking,
"Well, that's weird," but not in a way I found off-putting.

In fact, I was intrigued by all those strange voices whispering
and shouting, "What's the lay of the land! My song!" The more
I listened, the more captivated I became. The track contains
multitudes, and remains one of the most exciting entries in a
crazy-quilt career filled with epithets, fisticuffs, romantic
strife, stylistic zigs and zags, an endless array of players,
and enough drama to fuel a BBC series for years on end.

Naturally, quality control has gotten away from the mumbly
Mancunian on more than one occasion, but he's never really sold
out, however you choose to define that term. A television ad em-
erged five years ago that borrowed an instrumental intro from
Fall Heads Roll, but I wouldn't call it a sell-out move (the All Mu-
sic Guide also mentions the use of 1999's "Touch Sensitive" in an
automobile advert). Heads Roll is the last Fall album I bought.

Here's what I wrote, for KEXP, about 2007's lackluster follow-
up, Reformation Post T.L.C. , "The line-up continues to change,
but the sound remains much the same. Possibly more driving
than before, but also a little less distinctive. For an offbeat cov-
er, try their version of Merle Haggard's "White Line Fever."
Not a complete waste of time, but they've done better.

Which brings us to their 28th long-player, Your Future Our
Clutter, said to be one of their best (crap cover aside). I haven't
heard the whole thing, so I'm in no position to say, but the video
for "Bury Pts. 2 + 4," has me convinced I need to pick up a copy.

I've been describing it as "a buncha youngsters and one ol' geezer,"
and director ThirtyTwo's style really emphasizes Smith's increas-
ingly decrepit age in contrast with the youth and vigor of his rela-
tively new band mates (and also reminds me of Jonathan Glazer's
stately freeze-frame clip for Radiohead's "Karma Police"). And yet,
it doesn't seem exploitative; the eternally Hip Priest appears to
revel in his image as a cranky old man. Long may he kvetch.



Endnote: I'm also rather fond of Peter Whitehead's quasi-doc-
umentary The Fall, but haven't yet seen Tarsem's narrative fea-
ture of the same name. Thanks to Jason Gross for alerting me to
this video, which I've been posting everywhere I can (Facebook,
Twitter, etc.). The Fall poster image from unklerupert's knee.

May 2010 Reviews

These are the reviews and other pieces I'm working on this month.

 

 

 

 

 

Amazon DVDs: Malice in Wonderland (with Lost's Maggie Grace), The Red Baron (with Joseph Fiennes and Lena Headey), You Don't Know Jack (with Al Pacino and Susan Sarandon), and Don McKay (with Thomas Haden Church and Elisabeth Shue).

Amazon Theatricals: Casino Jack and the United States of Money (Alex Gibney takes on Jack Abramoff), Nowhere Boy (Sam Taylor-Wood takes on John Lennon), The Concert (with Mélanie Laurent), and Countdown to Zero (from Lucy Walker).

Still playing (or yet to open): Alice in Wonderland, Crazy Heart,
Diary of a Wimpy Kid, The Eclipse, Exit Through the Gift Shop, The
Ghost Writer, The Joneses, Me and Orson Welles, Mother and
Child, Oceans, Please Give, Remember Me, and The Runaways.

PopMatters: Contributed to Jason Gross's
upcoming piece on advice for young writers:

I spend more time writing reviews than anything else. Since I can't always
predict which CDs and DVDs editors will send my way, it helps to have an
open mind. Every genre has its merits; blanket dismissals serve no real
purpose. If you can't find anything nice to say about a metal record, you
probably shouldn't review metal. Try to find the good in everything that
comes your way, but by all means be honest. Be respectful. More than
anything else: be empathetic. What you think is important, but it's just
as important to figure out what the artist was trying to do and why.
Did they succeed? If so, you may still dislike it, but does that make
it a failure? Snark tends to attract attention, but the world could
always use more writers who seek to understand the world
better and to engage readers with their discoveries.

SIFF: 3Some, From Beginning to End, The Loners, The
Penitent Man, Violet Tendencies, and Visionaries - Jonas
Mekas and the (Mostly) American Avant-Garde Cinema.

Seattle Film Blog: Nowhere Boy and The Concert
and Roger Corman's Cult Classics: Suburbia.

Video Librarian: 35 Shots of Rum, The Girl on the Train,
Youssou N'Dour - I Bring What I Love, The Lost Coast, The
Runaways, Sex Galaxy, The Whale Warrior - Pirate for the
Sea (reviewed for SIFF '09), 45365, The Asperger's Differ-
ence, Curb Your Enthusiasm - The Complete Seventh
Season [two-disc set], From Silence to Sound, How
Weed Won the West, My Blood My Compromise,
The Quantum Tamers - Revealing Our Weird
and Wired Future, Reel Injun, The Science
of Sex Appeal, Taqwacore, Alice - A
Look into Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland, The End of
Poverty?, and Life.

Endnote: Nowhere Boy still (Aaron Johnson as
John Lennon) from The Sydney Morning Herald.

Favorite Song About Sleep: "Are You Sleeping?"

Chris Estey recently put out the following call for contributors. I've included my responses below. 

Hey! You are getting this because I am a fan of your work. I am putting together a thick, community fanzine about music and sleep and dreams for publication in June 2010 and was wondering if you could send me back a few words about this subject. I will cut and paste verbatim what you give me as long as it's good. Here are the questions. Feel free to answer any you want to and ignore any that you want to. 

What is your favorite song, or are your favorite songs, about sleep? 

Harry Nilsson's "Are You Sleeping?" from The Point, a favorite record as a kid, a favorite record as an adult. And I still haven't seen the animated film (in any of its iterations), but I had the gatefold LP with the illustrated booklet, so I'm familiar with the story. The lyric in the title is the kind of thing a parent might ask a child, but it works as pillow talk, too: "Are you sleeping?/Can you hear me?/Do you know if I am by your side?/Does it matter, if you hear me?/When the morning comes I'll be there by your side." (The tune combines one of Nilsson's music hall-style melodies with a multi-layered vocal atop a lilting samba rhythm.)  Every track, from "Everything's Got 'Em" to "Think About Your Troubles" offers several interpretations, which helps to explain The Point's enduring appeal. Depending on my mood, "Are You Sleeping?" is comforting, romantic--even macabre. I mean, you might also utter those words to someone in a coma or to a person who's just died. In other words: it's Nilsson at his best. Second choice: "Comfortably Numb." Even if Floyd weren't singing about sleep, the lyrics follow a sort of dream logic, i.e. "When I was a child I had a fever/my hands felt just like two balloons..." Roger Waters told Rolling Stone that an experience with tranquilizers for stomach cramps inspired the scenario, i.e. there's a fine line between songs about drugs and songs about dreams.

What is the most interesting or weirdest dream you've ever had about music?

It's always the same: the dreaded disc jockey dream. After two decades in the biz, it's part of my DNA. I've been semi-retired for a few years now, but still experience it every few months. Since I got my start in the 1980s, the dream always revolves around carts that won't play and records that are scratched, broken, or missing. In other words: it's more about silence ("dead air") than noise. 

Do you use music to sleep by? Have you ever? What was it and when, if not now? If now, what music do you listen to sleep by? 

As a kid I slept with a transistor radio under my pillow. I grew up in Alaska, so alternative radio wasn't an option. I don't think we even had AOR in the mid-1970s, so I listened to Top 40. I have no idea whatever happened to that little radio, but it served me well.  

The remaining questions: 1) Is there any music that puts you to sleep? 2) Do you ever dream about songs? If so, are they usually songs you've heard or made up ones in your head? 3) If you dream about songs frequently, do you maybe have a top five? 4) Do you dream about records? If so, any recurring ones that exist? 5) Do you dream about records that don't exist? Do you remember any of them? 6) Do you dream about record stores? If so, is there one dream about them you can tell me? 7) If you are a writer, have you ever written about music from your dreams? 8) If you are a (even kind of, sort of a) musician, have you ever written a song in your dreams, and actually created music from it? 9) If you are a writer, has writing about music affected your sleep and dreams? 10) If you are a (even kind of, sort of a) musician, how does performing music affect your sleeping? 11) What was your most noteworthy dream about a concert? 12) What was your most noteworthy dream after a concert, if you remember one?

Slightly edited from the original text. Images: The Saw Pit and Rate Your Music.

Movie of the Month, Part 17: The Missing Person

I recently reviewed the
following film for Video
Librarian, and thought the
results were worth sharing.

THE MISSING PERSON
(Noah Buschel, US,
2009, 95 mins.) [***1/2]

Top-lined by two Oscar
nominees and dipped in
dusky shades of gold and
brown, The Missing
Person delivers a styl-
ish take on the private-
eye genre. The efficient Miss Charley (Amy Ryan, Gone Baby Gone) sets the story in motion when she hires gin-soaked pri-
vate investigator John Rosow (Michael Shannon, Revolution-
ary Road) to trail Harold Fullmer (Frank Wood), a mystery
man traveling across the country with a Mexican boy.

On Rosow's assignment to return Harold to his wife, he tracks him
by train from Chicago to Los Angeles, both cities existing in a sort
of timeless space, neither past nor present (Rosow digs old-school
jazz, but lives in a world filled with cell phones and Segways). On
his journey to the West and back, he discovers that Fullmer went
missing after 9/11; Rosow turns out to have secrets of his own.

Like Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (or Robert Altman's The
Long Goodbye), writer/director Noah Buschel’s third feature
conjures up a tone so off-kilter, it sometimes slides into surreal-
ism, as when the dyspeptic detective dreams about a woman
who may not actually exist, but Rosow is no Mike Hammer
tough guy—he's smarter and more sensitive than that.

If the eventual explanation for his unusual behavior doesn't
completely satisfy, Margaret Colin (Gossip Girl) as a sly se-
ductress and John Ventimiglia (The Sopranos) as a Serpico-
obsessed cabbie help to make The Missing Person an en-
joyable outing for fans of noir and character pieces alike.

It also proves that Michael Shannon is ready for more star-
ring roles after a string of strong supporting parts in mov-
ies like Before the Devil Knows You're Dead and Bad Lieu-
tenant: Port of Call New Orleans. Highly recommended.

Click here for Movie of the Month, Part 16: The Beaches of Agnès

Endnote: Slightly revised from the original text.
For more Shannon reviews, click the links for Shot-
gun Stories, The Runaways, and My Son, My Son,
What Have Ye Done. Cinematographique image.

Tart and Sweet: Dum Dum Girls' I Will Be

Dum
Dum
Girls,
I
Will
Be,
Sub
Pop


Blissed out buzzsaw.
-- MySpace tagline

I usually try to avoid thoroughly retro releases, but a record that
sounds RIGHT NOW! with overt references to the past is more
than okay by me. In fact, I'd say it's ideal, and the Dum Dum
Girls navigate that tricky path with élan. L.A. singer/songwriter
Kristin Gundred, AKA Dee Dee, turned to producer Richard Got-
tehrer (Blondie) for her first album, which lends it a girl-group-
post-punk feel that never quite crosses the line into new wave.

Click here for "He Gets Me High."

Gundred also solicits licks from Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick
Zinner, which reinforces the NYC impression, and yet her quartet
doesn't sound exactly like any of the bands to emerge from that
area (then there's her alias, which recalls Dee Dee Ramone).

When I mentioned that I was looking forward to getting the
full-length, after hearing a few songs online and on the radio,
a friend quipped, "You're welcome to borrow my Shop Assis-
tants albums," and the Dum Dum Girls do recall the UK's
celebrated C86 era, but again, they aren't reproducing it.

As with the Vivian Girls, who once claimed drummer Frankie
Rose, they draw as much from the 1960s—the Shangri-Las, Nan-
cy Sinatra, etc.—as from the '70s and '80s. Then there are the Sub
Pop outfits of the '90s, like Velocity Girl. Or K Records acts, like
Lois. Or even the Aisler's Set. They echo those sounds, as well.

So, Gundred isn't reinventing the wheel. Then again, it isn't call-
ing out for reinvention. More importantly, she has the songs, the
voice, and the attitude. If you're gonna sing, "My baby's better
than you," you need to sell it, or you'll sound like you don't real-
ly mean it, but Gundred does (the credit, "Many thanks to my
anchor, my husband Brandon" adds weight to her claim).

I Will Be comes on with such
force and conviction, in fact,
that you'll know within the
first few seconds whether it's
for you or not, meaning that
the immediate attraction I felt
could translate into immedi-
ate dissatisfaction for a listen-
er of different sensibilities.

In any case, the more I listen, the more I hear: the way Gundred
channels Siouxsie's dusky tones on "It Only Takes One Night," ev-
en though the music never gives in to the gloom of goth, or the
way that "Bhang Bhang, I'm a Burnout—which sounds more
like "I'm a porno"—recalls Britain's Primitives (who only
released one record of note, but it sounded as much like
an instant classic in 1989 as I Will Be does now).

Click here for "Bhang Bhang, I'm a Burnout."

If the Dum Dum Girls have a clear leader, they're still a
band, and Jules and Bambi round out the line-up, giving Gun-
dred's songs the ballast they need. It's only April, so it's too soon
to proclaim I Will Be the year's best debut—although at 29 min-
utes, it's certainly one of the shortest—but it's doubtful I'll hear
a better one between now and and the end of December.

Endnote: Subject header from The New York Times, i.e. "Dum
Dum Girls, from Los Angeles, is the project of singer Kristin Gun-
dred, who here goes by Dee Dee, and who sings tart lyrics in a
sweet tone buried beneath layers of haze." ("Dum Dum Girl" is
the title of a Talk Talk song.) The band plays Neumos on 10/22,
opening for the Vaselines. For more information, please click
here or here. Images from Sub Pop and The L.A. Times.

Non-Brit Britpop: Spirit Kid, Blackmarket, and Makaras Pen

Spirit Kid, self-
titled, RPL Audio

Emeen Zarookian's Boston
combo serves up a particu-
larly persuasive brand of
power-pop, like Badfinger
on helium, while the piano-
filled "Wait a Minute" cap-
tures the charm of peak-era
Harry Nilsson or Paul Mc-
Cartney. His first full-length
plays like a more well scrub-
bed version of From Bubble-
gum to Sky (a good thing).

Click here for "My Imagination" and here for "You Lit Up for Me."

Blackmarket, St. Vincent Decor,
Mine and Yours Records [4/20/10]

This Lake Havasu, AZ trio plies a bright brand of pop-rock
that would provide a better fit for commercial than college
radio (so it's unfortunate that the former ignores most in-
dependent releases). It isn't slick, so much as smooth in
a Britpop way, like Los Hermanos Gallagher with a lit-
tle Franz Ferdinand on the side. St. Vincent De-
cor isn't the most original CD I've ever heard,
but it's a solid release that improves on their
last long-player and offers some nice acous-
tic interludes, such as "Catch and Release."

Click here for "Tongue Twister," here for "10 and 2,"
and here for my review of Elephant in the Room.

Makaras Pen, self-titled, Projekt Records [6/15/10]

A traditional creature in Hindu mythology.

--origin of the band's name

Born in Buffalo, this able four-piece combines the hard (the band)
with the soft (Emma Willis's vocals). See also: Lush, Curve, and
the Cranes. It's an old trick, and Makaras Pen sounds like a
throwback to a decade or so ago (the press materials des-
cribe them as "female-fronted shoegaze renaissancers").
The group's first album offers a competent interpreta-
tion, but this genre has never done much for me.


Endnote: For more information about Spirit Kid, please
click here or here; for Blackmarket, here or here; and
for Makaras Pen, here. Image from Planetary Group.