Volver (Sony Pictures Classics)
Volver, as seems to be director Pedro Almodovar’s fascination, is a story both hectic and humdrum which, while taut and compelling, is still only impressive window dressing (and that’s no put down) for what is most interesting to Almodovar: relationships between women. (Men are only here to serve as progenitors and/or creeps.) Amongst murder, ghosts, haircuts and dinner, the film’s grandmothers, mothers and daughters gossip, work, laugh about the dead’s flatulence, and so on. Death, in the world of Volver, has little power over the living’s consciousness and habits, and really not much over the dead’s. The film’s opening shot tracks through a cemetery, widows scrubbing their husbands headstones. Death is a chore in this place, and only a hindrance if one allows it to be.
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Tepid. Vapid. Navel-gazing. There’s plenty of time during Badly Drawn Boy’s Born in the U.K.’s 53 minutes to think of exactly how/why you dislike it. It’s an archetype for what rock fans hate about Elton John and Billy Joel. It’s like the kid in high school who wowed everyone in the Drama productions and now works in an office.
It’s surprising that for Buckner’s seven studio albums he has
There are moments in …Trail of the Dead’s fifth album, So Divided, wherein a cringe does not seem unwarranted. Moments which make us glad to be listening alone.
Ronnie Miller was in a ska band called Stranger Than Pete. They were news with the Syracuse, NY ska-elite, though I never saw them perform. At twenty-six I can still count the number of concerts I’ve seen, recollect them all like extensive road trips or weddings attended. Stranger Than Pete had got their name through a series of mishaps and misunderstood conversations far too intricate for anyone but Ronnie Miller to remember, and he tired of relating it shortly.
Not having purchased nor heard Air’s seminal album, Moon Safari, until 2001, three years after its release, it was a wonder when a friend, LOF, introduced it to me, especially being that it was June, and nothing welcomes this album like summer. Opener ‘La Femme D’Argent’ floats and burbles like a placcid and viscous river, and the bass used to ricochet all over LOF’s mom’s car, which was, at the time, one of those brand new Volkswagon bug’s, this one blue, and also making the car make those crackly, jittery sounds it does when the volume is maximized. With little in way of places to go in our hometown, LOF and I would stop, on the way back from Denny’s, our coffee and cigarette hot spot, at a pre-school LOF had gone to in the early 80’s, which had no residences within a gunshot. We’d park the bug on the half-circle driveway in front of the darkened school around 1:00 or 2:00 AM and listen to Moon Safari, chatting and smoking.
If there were something Little Earthquakes is not about it would be ‘fun.’ While her next two releases had smatterings of smiles or even chuckles (as deliberate as some guffaws on Boys for Pele), Tori Amos’ first LP, well crafted and executed, is a serious affair. This seriousness – or ‘preciousness’ I’ve heard it called – is rather like a line in the sand not everyone wants to cross. It’s in the way she holds a lyric’s last syllable until she absolutely just has to let it go; in the brittle delicacy of the piano production; or in how she sometimes could be accused of impersonating banshees. She makes no bones about the fact that the record is an intimate, oftentimes harrowing and haunting, account of herself and her personal pain.