Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins – Rabbit Fur Coat (Team Love)
A pleasant surprise, in how well Lewis takes the style of first-person pop-rock songwriting she displays in Rilo Kiley and translates it to a setting that’s gently framed by traditional country and western music. The Traveling Wilburys cover (“Handle With Care,” featuring M. Ward, Ben Gibbard, and Conor Oberst) is a lot of fun, too.
Ghost – Ghost (Drag City)
My alphabetical CD-listening journey has taken me to the Japanese psychedelic folk-rock group Ghost. Their debut album, recorded in 1990, is enchantingly trippy, at times intensely so. Magical, dreamy music that can also be quite unsettling.
Various Artists – Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai – The Album (Sony)
Another from the collection, the soundtrack to Ghost Dog is a solid collection of Wu-Tang Clan affiliates, with an overall late-night mood fitting for a film about an NYC hitman who aspires to be a samurai. The music’s even more spellbinding in the film itself, where more of The RZA’s instrumentals are present.
The Lucksmiths – First Tape (Candle)
Still back-tracking through the career of one of my favorite bands, I recently heard First Tape for the first time. It’s bare-bones, but a lot of fun: the songwriting is certainly more developed now, but their knack for melody and their playful yet sincere lyrical style were intact back in 1993 when they had just formed.
Yuichiro Fujimoto – Kinoe (Audio Dregs)
I’ve never done yoga, never meditated, and certainly wouldn’t consider myself ‘new age.’ But the Japanese electronic experimental musician Yuichiro Fujimoto’s music gives me some kind of centering feeling, some sort of zen. Don’t get me wrong; this isn’t hippie-dippie fluff, certainly nothing like Enya or that guy on TV who plays the pan-flute. It’s minimalist, edgy electronic music that in its sparseness possess a rare ability to heighten your sense of your surroundings.
Liz Durrett – The Mezzanine (Warm)
Liz Durrett is Vic Chesnutt’s niece, but more than that she’s a talented singer/songwriter with a unique voice and style of her own. Her second album The Mezzanine is slow and pretty, but also mysterious and haunting.
New Radiant Storm King – The Steady Hand (Darla)
New Radiant Storm King is still trekking forward with the guitar-soaked ‘90s ‘college rock’ sound that they’ve been playing since 1989. But that sound is more diverse than you might expect, and still quite potent. The Steady Hand is a complex work, an album that stretches out at times, and feels intimate and personal at others.
John Coltrane – Ballads (Impulse!)
The other day I accidentally listened to this record on the wrong speed (45 rpm instead of 33 1/3), and made it through the whole thing before I figured it out. The thing is, it sounded good!
The Girl From Monday (NR)
Hal Hartley’s newest movie barely even made it to theaters, but it’s available on DVD. He’s called this low-budget, shot-in-digital movie ‘fake science-fiction,’ but it certainly possesses all the strengths of the best science-fiction. It’s a movie about the future that’s really about today: about corporate influence on society, about repression, about a government keeping control over the people.
Hating Crash (R)
Don’t you love it when you keep hearing how great a film is, and then you finally get around to seeing it and it’s so awful that you can’t figure out why anyone would like it at all? Crash’s plot and characters are preposterous, its music and cinematography are over-dramatic and overbearing, the points it’s trying so hard to make about race are confusing and shallow. It was one of those movies I enjoyed because it made me laugh out loud at how ridiculous it was, and had me scratching my head about its sillier scenes for days after I watched it. Yet it’s won critics’ awards, and Roger Ebert called it a film that will change people’s lives. I’m so confused.
