Visionary, innovative, demanding, reckless, uncompromising: William Friedkin was, in many ways, the archetypical 70’s director. He may not have been the greatest filmmaker to emerge from the prodigal pantheon that shaped the New Hollywood of the 1970’s, but he remains, in all his glorious vices and virtues, my personal favorite.
A true enfant terrible, he had no qualms about assaulting his actors, endangering his crew, or contemptuously defying his studio bosses, if it meant getting what he needed on film. He spent the better part of the Hollywood Renaissance blazing trails and burning bridges with devil-may-care aplomb, becoming the poster-boy for what would be deemed “auteurist excess.” But he left in his wake a handful of films that will be eternally regarded as cinematic classics: The French Connection, The Exorcist, Sorcerer…
His career had actually started well before the 70’s, directing some well-regarded television episodes and acclaimed documentaries before delivering a string of uneven features in the mid to late 60’s. His early films range from the noteworthy (his particularly intense adaptation of Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band) to the negligible (Good Times aka “the Sonny and Cher movie”). But it was in the 70’s that his cinematic voice and vision found their fullest realization, beginning with 1971’s gritty, grimy, grim and gripping The French Connection.
Based on the true story of one the largest drug busts in law enforcement history, Friedkin brought the full force of his documentary experiences and cinematic influences (from the French New Wave to the German “street films” of the 1920’s) to The French Connection, and the result was something American audiences had never seen before: a boots-on-the-ground, matter-of-fact depiction of cops, criminals, and the worlds they inhabit.
The dingy alleyways, seedy dive bars, and decaying neighborhoods of New York City’s underbelly, the casual racism, brutality and disregard for procedure inherent in the urban American police force, and the criminal underworld’s ties to wealth, fame, and political power were virtually unseen onscreen up to that point. (It’s worth noting that Dragnet had only left the TV airwaves the previous year.) The fact that Friedkin portrayed it all without any kind of authorial moral judgement only served to intensify the impact.
But for all the power of its pull-no-punches realism, The French Connection was no mere exercise in cinema verité. The film is, first and foremost, a searing portrait of obsession.
Gene Hackman’s rough and reckless narcotics cop, “Popeye” Doyle, follows a casual late-night hunch, only to uncover a massive international drug smuggling operation masterminded by a suave, sophisticated French entrepreneur, Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey). Doyle’s dogged pursuit builds to a fever pitch, as Rey’s Prince of Darkness leads him in an infernal dance through the city’s streets, subways, and skyscrapers, driving him ever closer to the ragged edge.
Hackman’s Academy Award winning performance is now legendary, but it took a lot of poking, prodding, teasing and taunting from Friedkin to strip away the actor’s soft-spoken midwestern charm. It didn’t help that Hackman strongly disliked Doyle’s real-life counterpart, New York detective Eddie Egan, and would bristle every time Egan favorably compared Hackman’s performance to himself. Friedkin used Hackman’s discomfort to his (and the film’s) advantage, pushing him – much like Chernier’s taunts and evasions push Doyle – until there was nothing left on screen but a raw, exposed nerve. Hackman has delivered a career’s worth of brilliant performances since The French Connection, from the subtly restrained to the quietly intense to the cartoonishly over-the-top, but never again has he burned through the screen the way he does as Doyle.
Friedkin’s own reckless obsession perfectly mirrored his protagonist’s, often going to extraordinary lengths and taking extraordinary risks to realize his cinematic vision. Perhaps nowhere is this more dynamically and dramatically rendered than in the film’s celebrated chase. Following an attempt on his life, Doyle commandeers a civilian’s car in pursuit of the hitman who has escaped onto an elevated train. The sequence was not in the script, but dreamed up by Friedkin on the spot, and captured without any kind of permit or precautions. Camera in hand, he goaded stunt driver Bill Hickman from the back of a car, careening through New York City traffic at 160 miles per hour.
“I wouldn’t do that today,” Friedkin has said many times in the years following, always sounding more pragmatic than genuinely remorseful.
But this willful determination to push the limits – narratively, dramatically and, of course, cinematically – became one of the hallmarks of his directorial style. As a result, The French Connection, like all his best films, practically seethes on screen, its ostensible realism anchoring the audience’s suspension of disbelief as the film hurtles towards ever more excessive extremes with near demonic intensity.
I first came face-to-face with that intensity at the tender age of 8 or 9 years old, when I accidentally caught a short clip of Friedkin’s French Connection follow-up, The Exorcist…
I walked in on Kitty Wynn leading a small group of doctors up the stairs to where Ellen Burstyn’s distraught Chris MacNeil is helplessly watching her young daughter, Regan (Linda Blair), convulse wildly on her bed. Pitched back and forth like a ragdoll in the teeth of some invisible rabid animal, Regan is violently thrown back against the mattress. Her eyes roll back in her head and she emits an unnatural, tortured growl. The lead doctor – calm, collected, rational – steps forward to take control only to have Regan lurch forward and hit him hard enough to knock him to the floor. Whatever beast had her in its jaws is also inside her, in control, and it speaks through her: “Keep away! The sow is mine!” In an act of shocking perversity, the little girl hikes up her nightgown. “Fuck me!” the beast demands. “FUCK ME!” The doctors, dazed, simply stare, utterly at a loss. Her mother cries out in impotent anguish. All hell has literally broken loose in this child’s bedroom.
And that was it for me. I ran to my bedroom, hid under the covers, and spent the rest of the night shaking and sweating, trying to permanently banish it all from my brain. I had a loose idea of the film being about demonic possession, but it wasn’t the Devil that I was afraid of. It was the sensation the sequence evoked. Those few minutes were so relentless, they felt like an assault.
It was four or five years before I would watch the film in full. Even as an angry, angsty adolescent – by then obsessively well-versed in the horror genre – I still found it to be a pretty merciless experience. What surprised me was that rather than braving my way through two hours of relentless assault, I found myself enrapt in a tense, haunting drama, depicting a mother’s desperation and a young priest’s crisis of faith. What gives the film its particular intensity is the pervasive sense of dread that hangs over its character-driven narrative, threatening to erupt, at any moment, into infernal madness.
Friedkin makes the most of these tonal contrasts, shifting between extremes of light and sound, to keep us on-edge and off-balance, our senses constantly on alert. Dark shadows and dimly-lit rooms smash-cut to harsh hospital fluorescents and blazingly white walls. Diabolical cacophony collapses instantly into dead silence, only to quickly and overwhelmingly crescendo again. Documentary style camera-work spirals into frenzied quick cuts and whip-pans, only to be arrested by sudden stillness – the camera seemingly as stunned as the viewer.
More than mere visceral thrill, these jarring juxtapositions of light and dark, tumult and silence, turbulence and stillness also drive the film thematically, powerfully rendering the struggles between good and evil, faith and despair, known and unknown that fire its deeper conflicts and inquiries. If The French Connection’s verité style serves as a catapult for launching its lead character toward ever more obsessive extremes, The Exorcist’s headlong collision of character-driven drama and unflinching supernatural horror only serves to intensify the harrowing believability – and, by extension, the implications – of its most over-the-top scenes.
“I made the film as a believer,” Friedkin said. Despite being an avowed atheist during the film’s production, he knew the only way to deliver the desired effect was to treat the story with total respect and utter conviction.
The Exorcist’s cast and crew, as well as Friedkin, himself,[1] have often recounted the outrageous lengths he was willing to go to achieve that authenticity, from pushing the stunt work to dangerous limits (Burstyn suffered a permanent back injury), to erratically firing off shotguns on set to keep his actors looking rattled and scared. To get an acceptably distraught performance from non-actor Rev. William O’Malley, Friedkin slapped the priest hard across the face before calling action. And perhaps most infamously (though it’s, admittedly, a close race), to capture the distinctive guttural rasp of the demon possessing Regan, Friedkin tied actress (and recovering alcoholic), Mercedes McCambridge, to a chair, feeding her a steady diet of booze, cigarettes, and raw eggs, while recording her increasingly ragged and unhinged vocal performance.
Many today (including several of the film’s cast and crew) might denounce Friedkin for going too far, but there’s no denying that his efforts, no matter how extreme, ultimately paid off. At the time of The Exorcist’s release, news stories abounded with tales of audience members fleeing the theater in fright, vomiting in the aisles, and even suffering heart attacks during the film. While some of these stories were probably exaggerated by the media, the shock and awe only served to pique popular interest in the film and The Exorcist quickly secured its place in the horror pantheon. Even 50 years later, it retains much of its terrifying power.[2]
I would be in college before I managed to get my hands on a pitiful, pan-and-scan VHS copy of Sorcerer. A remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Wages of Fear, before Apocalypse Now, before Heaven’s Gate, it was Sorcerer that – thanks to its bedeviled runaway production and dismal box office failure – was branded as the film that killed the American New Wave. Expecting an embarrassingly overwrought disaster, I instead found myself utterly riveted. And when I was able to view the film in all its widescreen glory a couple of years later, courtesy of a screening at the American Cinematheque, I was blown away.
A pitilessly bleak and battering meditation on fate and endurance, Friedkin pulls out all the cinematic stops to tell the tale of four fugitive criminals hired by an unscrupulous oil company to transport two trucks freighted with unstable dynamite across even more volatile South American terrain. In his hands, Clouzot’s taut suspense thriller becomes a white-knuckle descent into Hell.
Like all of Friedkin’s films, Sorcerer is intensely physical. If French Connection’s wild chase left us with our hearts in our throats, if we could feel our stomachs tense and coil every time we climbed the stairs toward Regan MacNeil’s bedroom in The Exorcist, Sorcerer seems to subject us bodily to every trial and ordeal faced by our four fugitives in their Sisyphean struggle. From the suffocating jungle humidity, to the preternatural lashings of rain and mud, to the treacherously rough and ragged roads they must navigate, spurred on by some vain hope of deliverance or reprieve, we are made to feel every second of their journey, resulting in a harrowing ride.
As in Friedkin’s previous films, these blistering onslaughts find their poetry in stretches of stillness and silence that highlight theme and character, while also intensifying the film’s full-throttle attacks. A nearly wordless sequence in which our desperate drivers must find a way to navigate around a massive fallen tree is as enthralling – and as freighted – as their attempts to steer their payload across a rickety rope bridge in the middle of a savage storm.
Never one to sit in judgment, even of humanity’s darkest tendencies, Friedkin allows his protagonists genuine moments of courage, cooperation, and resourcefulness. But a specter of futility haunts even their most Herculean efforts. If they fail, they’re dead men. But if they succeed, it’s only as pawns of a powerful corporation even more ruthless and corrupt than they are, gaining a small sum and a momentary semblance of freedom they’ll likely squander. For all that they talk greedily of their promised reward, in the end, what really keeps them moving forward is that they have nowhere else to go. Their lives have been used up.
If Wages of Fear was an existential parable, Sorcerer’s relentless extremes push the story’s inherent fatalism further into hopelessness, positing failure and damnation as the unavoidable consequence of modern existence. “That’s one of the themes of Sorcerer: No matter how much you struggle, you get blown up,” Friedkin said, “Fate is waiting around the corner to kick you in the ass.”
Friedkin’s infamous on-set antics and excesses while making Sorcerer are chronicled with tabloid salaciousness in Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, and with matter-of-fact amusement by Friedkin, himself, in his memoir, The Freidkin Connection. A temperamental tyrant with his cast and crew, he would gleefully turn and play court jester to his studio bosses, using their photos to represent the fictional oil company’s corrupt board members, or getting falling down drunk in meetings and insisting that any changes they asked for, no matter how small, would require lengthy and expensive location shoots in the Dominican Republic.
Whether because of the stories surrounding the film’s out-of-control production, or Friedkin’s reckless ambition and erratic behavior, or just because Sorcerer, like its protagonists, was fate’s unwitting victim (Star Wars came out almost exactly a month prior), the film was ignored by audiences, almost universally disparaged by critics, and quickly buried by the studio following its release. The similar fates befalling Apocalypse Now and Heaven’s Gate in the following years only served to push it further into obscurity.
Thankfully, in the last couple of decades, Sorcerer’s reputation has been significantly rehabilitated. Given a long overdue remastered widescreen DVD and Blu-ray release in 2014, many today – myself, included – consider it to be Friedkin’s masterpiece.
Though he may never have reached the heights of The French Connection, The Exorcist, or Sorcerer in his post-70’s career, Friedkin nonetheless directed several brilliant films throughout the 80’s, 90’s, and into the new millennium, and while he also made his share of critical and popular flops, even his lesser efforts bear his indelible mark, making them worthwhile viewing for any fans of his unique take-no-prisoners style.
1985’s To Live and Die in L.A. transposes The French Connection’s themes of obsession and self-destruction to the west coast. Further bulldozing the boundary between cop and criminal in its depiction of a loose-cannon Secret Service agent’s rabid pursuit of an eccentric counterfeiter, the film paints Los Angeles as a desert hellscape in day-glo drag, turning Michael Mann’s Miami Vice aesthetic (which had debuted the previous year) inside out. A masterwork in its own right (if not quite as sublime as its forbear), critics initially decried To Live and Die in L.A.’s brutality and amorality, complaining that there were no characters to root for (a notable sea-change from the arty 70’s sensibilities that greeted French Connection), but later came to see that soullessness was part of the point.
Dismissed by many, The Hunted (2003) is actually a better-than-average action thriller that pits Tommy Lee Jones’ grizzled Special Forces vet against a renegade former student, played with parallel intensity by Benicio del Toro. Despite its unfocused script, the film delivers Friedkin’s trademark punishing action sequences, balancing the intimacy of mano a mano combat with almost apocalyptic motifs, as viewers are made to feel every slice and stab of our main characters’ dueling knives and the slippery, sticky warmth of each drop of blood shed between them.
Even 1995’s almost universally despised Jade – its screenplay as lurid, turgid, and sordid as anything to ever spurt from the priapic pen of Joe Eszterhas – is a stylistic tour-de-force, featuring some truly breathtaking sequences and flourishes. If not a good film, per se, it’s at least far more cinematically impressive and accomplished than either of Paul Verhoeven’s more popular – if excessively garish and campy – Eszterhas-scripted offerings from that same decade.
A brief artistic partnership with playwright Tracy Letts in the new century resulted in two controversial late-career classics: the claustrophobic, nerve-shattering Bug in 2006, and the pitch-black rodeo ride, Killer Joe, in 2007. Both films plumb the depths of the human psyche – albeit in very different ways – with Friedkin’s characteristic unflinching flair, and boast terrifyingly intense performances from their respective leads (Ashley Judd, Michael Shannon and Matthew McConaughey). It’s rare to find an artist in their 70’s delivering such unapologetically provocative fare, but entirely befitting a filmmaker with Friedkin’s trademark audacity.
His final film, a contemporary update of The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, released a few months after his passing in August of 2023, is a restrained and riveting courtroom drama that stands in stark contrast to the stylistic dynamism of much of his previous work, decisively answering any accusations of sensationalism lobbed at him throughout his career. Reminiscent of – and better than – his 1997 made-for-TV remake of 12 Angry Men, the film is anchored by Jason Clarke’s carefully modulated turn as the titular court-martial’s conflicted defense attorney, and features an unsettling, career-best performance from Keifer Sutherland as Queeg. Though some might balk at the film’s matter-of-fact minimalism, the story’s grubby, grey morality make it a perfect fit for Friedkin’s sensibilities, and it would be a mistake to discount his cinematic skill – his camera methodically capturing character and theme with a precision that mirrors his protagonist’s shrewd, juridical approach. As valedictions go, you could do a lot worse.
At his peak, Friedkin brought all the invention, immediacy and intensity that were the hallmarks of his generation of American filmmakers to his oeuvre, amped up by his own unique full-throttle fuel-injection of relentlessness, recklessness, and despair. As ruthless, obsessive and irreverent as any of his characters, his willingness to push his cast, his crew, and himself past all reasonable limits, while defiantly demanding total creative control from his bosses, often resulted in the reality of his sets reflecting the harsh realms he explored on film. (Not for nothing did they call him “Hurricane Billy.”)
Modern moviegoers might decry his tactics and approaches as everything that was once wrong with Hollywood (and maybe still is). But while I sympathize with those seeking a kinder, gentler, more responsible approach to filmmaking, I don’t know that I’d trade a French Connection, Exorcist, or Sorcerer for the sake of a safer, more secure and well-mannered cinema. It’s a personal preference, but I’d rather have great art than good behavior. Few filmmakers today feel as dark as Freidkin, none feel as dangerous.
At their best, Friedkin’s films burrow under your skin, squeeze the pit of your stomach, seize you by the throat, and knock the wind out of your lungs. It’s only when the credits roll that you realize his films have also burrowed into your mind, leaving you grappling with troubling questions as you struggle to catch your breath.
[1] In addition to being a superlative filmmaker, Friedkin was also a gifted raconteur, and his discussions and recollections of his work are often as energetic, entertaining and unflinching as his films.
[2] Ideally, in its original, theatrical version. The 2000 re-release, though some of its additions are not without interest, is ultimately a weaker film.
I guess a lot has happened since the toppling of Citizen Kane… Covid, Trump, the Game of Thrones finale…
But here we are again: The results of the latest Sight & Sound poll have been released. I confess to feeling a certain childish satisfaction upon seeing that Vertigo has already been dethroned, its brief reign at the top clocking in at a mere ten years (in stark contrast to Kane’s 50). And I think the ascendancy of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles reveals a lot, if not about the state of cinema, then at least about how we, as a society, have come to see cinema over the course of the last decade.
I guess the more things stay the same, the more they change…
I wasn’t going to bother writing about the Sight & Sound poll (in much the same way I haven’t bothered writing about anything lately), because I think its significance is only diminishing. But then I thought, maybe there’s something significant about its diminishing significance…
Though not entirely obsolete, the Sight & Sound poll seems increasingly like a relic from a bygone era. A fading tradition, like Wendy’s super value menu, or the British monarchy…
With every passing year, the cinephilia that permeated the Baby Boomer and X generations becomes an ever more antiquated pastime and the cineaste, a dying breed. The younger generations have no use for cinema because cinema, like all art, in the words of Oscar Wilde, is quite useless. And utility is the order the day.
As, perhaps, it should be.
Given the insurmountable problems the younger generations are facing as they enter into adulthood, it’s entirely reasonable for them to be more concerned with making a new world than with making their way in the current one. And, therefore, entirely reasonable that their perspective on art should be so ruthlessly utilitarian: Art is either a tool of the revolution, or an unseemly monument to the old order. (A perspective that can imbue the vandalizing of art galleries in the name of environmentalism with a particular moral clarity…)
It’s not that the younger generations have no care for aesthetics, any more than our generation had no care for improving the world. It’s just that the priority our culture gives to those values is being realigned.
Which brings us back to Jeanne Dielman…
A pioneering, powerful, innovative, and important film. But the greatest film ever made…?
Yes. If you believe that a film – or any work of art – is to be judged primarily on the basis of its socio-political intent and potential for driving societal improvement.
But as a cretaceous creature – and possibly a cretin – I remain enamored with uselessness, as unreasonable as ever. When it comes to art, poetry will always matter more to me than practicality, style will always supersede seemliness. Setting fire to the social order is but one of art’s many potencies, and moral instruction, its most inane and anemic pursuit.
Which is not to say that I think Jeanne Dielman, or Moonlight, or Portrait of a Lady on Fire, or any other of this year’s hotly debated inclusions have no place on the Sight & Sound list. Two are exquisite cinematic achievements that deserve to be celebrated, and… well… I confess I haven’t actually seen Moonlight yet, so who am I to judge?
But I am also delighted to see that Mulholland Drive is ascending the ranks, and that 2001: A Space Odyssey has topped the Director’s poll for the first time (long may it reign…). It is my hope to see Mulholland Drive’s evil twin, Inland Empire find its way onto the list, alongside Alfonso Cuaron’s breathtaking masterpiece Roma and/or Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, before either me or the poll breathe our last.
Which brings me to a more fundamental quarrel I always have with rankings like Sight & Sound’s: What are we talking about when we talk about great films?
The Sight & Sound poll is a democratic – or, at least, republican – enterprise. Our culture’s representative critics and filmmakers contribute their lists, their selections are tallied, and the film with the most votes rules the day. But, as with so many other allegedly democratic institutions, the criteria by which specific candidates are selected are increasingly obscure and confused.
How does one rank Citizen Kane against something like Jeanne Dielman? How does one measure a revolution in technique against a revolution in perspective? I’m not asking rhetorically. Perspective is as fundamental to cinema as any kind of technique or craftsmanship and its significance in shaping the art form should not be overlooked.
Similarly, how is it possible – or even sensible – to rank Citizen Kane against a movie Goodfellas, given that the films were made almost fifty years apart? Without Orson Welles there would be no Scorsese, after all. Or there would, at least, be a very different one. As such, Kane is an integral part of Goodfellas’ DNA.
And when a film looms as large as Citizen Kane – or Vertigo, for that matter – it becomes a sort of cinematic sine qua non, to which every film that comes afterward owes its existence in some way, even if only as a crushing monolith to take up arms against.
One could view John Cassavetes’ entire aesthetic – his sublime A Woman Under the Influence now ranking 19th in the Sight & Sound Director’s poll – as an active rebellion against the cinematic strategies of auteurs like Welles and Hitchcock. But in attempting such a daring aesthetic revolution, he is almost more their natural heir than those filmmakers who slavishly imitate, borrow, and steal from their established oeuvres.
There are, in fact, so many considerations and conflicting rules of measure when judging great films, the whole effort ultimately becomes, not merely impossible, but futile.
Reading the individual critic’s and director’s lists that have started to circulate over the last few days, there is enough consanguinity to suggest that even if we can’t always articulate our criteria, we at least know a truly great film when we see one. We may disagree about the degree of a particular film’s greatness, but for the most part, we do know shit from Shinola.
On the other hand, there is also enough variety and idiosyncrasy inherent to make clear that the great unspoken criterion in all of these types of rankings is, and has always been, personal affection.
And why not?
The good news is: there are a lot of really great films out there. So many, in fact, that not even the most avid cineaste can claim to have seen them all. (OK, maybe Scorsese, but…) Any individual list of the greatest films of all time will be unavoidably shaped by personal experience and personal taste.
I don’t think any of that that necessarily translates to a democratically amalgamated hodgepodge of personal experiences and tastes amounting to anything resembling a final or definitive word, but maybe we’re approaching this – perhaps we’ve always approached this – all wrong.
Maybe we need to stop looking at the Sight & Sound list (or the AFI list, or any such list…) as an authoritative ranking. Maybe we need to stop worrying about whether Kane is better than Vertigo is better than Jeanne Dielman. Not because we’re abandoning discernment in some frustrated act of post-modern nihilism, but because we’ve come to recognize that our collective criteria for judgement have become so complex, so multifaceted and so diverse, that they now have less to do with agreed upon objective standards (if, in fact, they ever did…) than with our own personal and sometimes private configurations of those standards as shaped by our own personal and sometimes private experiences and preferences, any resulting disagreements and debates really having less to do with the films, themselves, than the individual circumstances that shape our appreciation of them. As the man, himself, said…
A toast, Jedediah, to love on my terms. Those are the only terms anybody ever knows – his own.
If I still enjoy the Sight & Sound poll, it’s because, whatever cultural trends its cycling results may reflect, the institution, itself, remains one of the last bastions of a vanishing “art above all” attitude, that sees aesthetic achievement, regardless of its correctness or utility, as the highest human endeavor – a valuable attitude even, and perhaps especially, at a time where such a perspective seems so reckless and impractical.
But if it is to retain any hold on its slipping cultural significance, maybe we need to view it less as an authoritative hierarchical verdict on cinematic accomplishment than as a map of vital cinematic experiences offered by those whose life’s work is the study and practice of the art. No longer a checklist serving as a litmus test of aesthetic literacy, let us look upon it as a landscape to be explored and enjoyed by those with an interest – a path to walk until you feel inspired to find your own way.
***
As an addendum, I was NOT going to offer my own personal list. A) Because if you’re reading this, you could probably already guess what films would be on it, B) because even if you can’t guess, you probably don’t care, and C) because it would be too ludicrously inconsistent, even for me, to critique the relevance and validity of hierarchical Greatest Films lists, only to turn around and provide you with my own.
But writing that last paragraph – “a map of vital cinematic experiences… a landscape to be explored and enjoyed…” – I realized that I could offer something along those lines.
So, what follows is not a list of the Greatest Films of All Time, as ranked by me or anyone else. Nor is it a mere list of Favorite Films offered in the absence of any criteria beyond personal affection. (A great many personal favorites actually failed to make the list…)
What I’m offering, in chronological order, is a list of films I’ve found particularly stylish, powerful, and/or poetic, that hopefully present a range of possibilities and potentialities – aesthetic and otherwise, that deliver unique and memorable cinematic experiences.
As you might guess, my criteria also extend beyond mere historical importance, innovation and/or impressive technique. Some of the below would have the majority of Sight & Sound list-makers holding their noses. But, to me, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains offers as much a revolution in perspective as Jeanne Dielman, albeit in its own smaller, snottier way. Likewise, The Blues Brothers’ outrageous mix of exultant music and even more exultant absurdity provides a cinematic experience as potent as any more serious or supposedly respectable offering.
As no Top 10 can be distilled from an unranked list, you get the full 100, from 1920 to 2002.
In accordance with Paul Schrader’s (and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame’s) credo that sometimes time is needed for superficial fascinations to fade and true value to be recognized, my list of 100 films stops there.
But because I hate adhering to credos, it’s followed by a list of 15 films from the last 20 years that I hold in high enough esteem they may eventually supplant some of the others. Or I may just eventually extend the list to an even 115…
Can someone tell me why I am neurotically, insistently hacking my way through the thicket of aesthetic offerings that various critics and commentators have dubbed 2019’s Best? Compulsively – if not entirely joylessly – inhaling movies, TV shows, and record albums in advance of the New Year, as though they might spontaneously combust or turn into pumpkins at the stroke of midnight on January 1…?
I’m not on a deadline! Am I…?
Could it be the still-kicking prick of some long-suppressed critical impulse spurring me on? A never-entirely-purged obsession with scribbling my thoughts and having my say regarding the current state of arts and entertainment in a timely fashion? Am I still clinging to the illusion of my own intellectual relevance?
Why?
I have come to accept that my opinion is worth no more than anyone else’s. In some ways, it is worth less. (In some ways, it is worthless… Ha…) For starters, I long ago ceased consuming media in a way that would allow for any genuine discovery. When seeking out works, I rarely take a chance on something untried these days, preferring to take my guidance from the relative safety of lists and recommendations cooked up by critics (and other consumers) whom I trust (and some I don’t).
And then I complain about the uniformity of critical opinion…
Oh, I know: Critics are a notoriously contentious bunch, but not lately. They may disagree – even vehemently, even violently – about one film or series or album or other, but pull up any Top 10 or 20 or 50 list for the year and the majority of offerings you find there will be the same, maybe in a different order. When was the last time you saw a critic of note offer a full-throated, superlative defense of a work that few others found any value in? Or that few others even managed to find at all…?
It shouldn’t be that difficult. Sure, a critic’s job is to see or hear “everything,” but that usually just means “everything” in the mainstream. And, yes, the best critics will often stray from the beaten path of popularity and shine a light on something that might otherwise have gone unnoticed, but by the time you get to the end of the year, the buzz surrounding its brilliance has spread like a virus, and this small work now stands in a blazing spotlight, pushed center-stage by a chorus of conforming critical voices.
I wonder how many more delicate works have wilted under such a glare…?
Ah, you say, but if there is an objective yardstick for measuring artistic accomplishment – as, to your ongoing irritation, you have repeatedly heard me assert – isn’t this just the process by which the alleged cream rises to the top?
Perhaps.
But, in that case, I see no need to add my voice to the larger ensemble.
I did not become a critic in order to –
2.
Wait. Sorry. Sometimes I forget…
I did not become a critic.
For a good long time, though, I tried. I wrote criticism as compulsively as I consumed the works I scrutinized. I sent my work out. I published it in various amateur platforms, eventually retreating to my own blogs, and even now, I still incessantly compose critical analyses in my head that never even make it to the page. I can’t seem to stop myself…
There was a time where I believed I was doing it for Manohla. Just because I loved her and she believed in me, and I wanted to prove myself worthy of that. (Which, upon reflection, really translates as me doing it for myself, to prove something to myself…) But the impulse predated her. She just kindled a spark of confidence in me that I, in turn, fanned into a flame of zealous conviction.
Henry had, much earlier, equipped me with the intellectual paraphernalia, but the habit… It seems almost encoded in my genes.
I could never just look at the ocean. Or the sky. In my head, I was always trying to wrap my mind around the vast expanses, trace the tides and currents, map the geometry of the stars, differentiating the imposed patterns of constellations from the empirically observable systems of the heavens, envisioning life in the invisible depths or on the other side of the world.
Traveling was never just seeing new places, trying new things, but an attempt to pick up on a certain city’s rhythm and feel its flow, discover the true essence of a particular place and its people, explore what gave them their unique vitality.
A superficial experience was never enough for me. I always wanted to get to the heart of things…
(Which may be why I have such hair-trigger impatience for euphemism, sentimentality, bromides, and all other manner of bullshit. Not necessarily with strategies deployed to obscure something’s true meaning or nature, but always with those that are deployed to obscure their absence …)
Is this what a critic does…?
I suppose it depends on who you ask. But it’s what criticism meant to me.
The intellectual process was innate. The translation of that process into a piece of writing – and the potential expansion of that into a paid vocation – was so organic and obvious that I missed it entirely. Until Manohla drew my attention to it, anyway…
And then…
3.
I never wrote criticism in order to tell anyone what was good or bad, or what they should see, or read, or listen to, or what they shouldn’t. (Though it’s amazing how easily a young critic can fall into that trap just because it has become the inescapable convention. You almost feel like you’re doing it wrong unless you’re framing your writing in those terms…)
I wanted to guide people into a work of art’s invisible depths, tracing its patterns, revealing its rhythms, distilling its essence, bringing them along, like the aesthetic equivalent of a travel writer, on my journey into its beating heart. And, ideally, in the aftermath of their own experience with it, engage them in discussion and debate about how their journey differed from my own…Furthermore, in a belated attempt to rescue this from the mire of self-absorption and self-pity…
That’s not only the reason I wrote criticism. It’s also the reason I read it.
When I mine the yearly Best Of… lists in search of some worthy gem, I almost never bother reading the compact commentary that accompanies each entry. (If, in fact, there is any commentary at all…) You can’t capture that journey or get to the heart of a major work in a few sentences. (And, if you can, is it really because you’re that good a writer? Or is it, perhaps, that the work in question is not as profound or impressive as it might appear…?)
I read criticism because I want the critic to take me on their journey. To shine a light on any shadowy corners in a work that I might have missed, to reveal a stretch of connective tissue that escaped my analysis, and even to remind me that, like the universe itself, a work of art may have no center, but a variety of nexus points at which one’s explorations may begin or end. In short, I read criticism to experience a work of art through a different pair of sharp, penetrating eyes, and then bring those insights back to the work itself, to see in what ways my experience of it has grown or changed.
Is this what an audience does?
Again, I suppose it depends on who you ask. But I feel increasingly that it is not. And, perhaps, that it has never been…For a variety of reasons, critics are no longer viewed – if, in fact, they ever were – as trained professionals educated in a specialized sphere, or even as shamans with a gift for translating the unseen mechanics of artistic creation to the spectator. They are seen, instead, as a self-proclaimed elite authoritatively imposing their aesthetic judgments on the ignorant masses – a status few contemporary critics would either assert or embrace.
Popular audiences want their own unmediated experience of a work of art, which is fine. But they also want to be able to adjudicate its aesthetic quality with authority, despite being armed with little more than their own opinions, and having little or no ability to elucidate their experience of it beyond, “I liked it,” or, “I hated it.” Their sole reason for reading criticism, today, seems to be to infuriate themselves when some critic or other suggests that an independently-made foreign film might have more aesthetic value and thematic complexity than their current got-to popcorn blockbuster. To them, criticism is a zero-sum game in which their favorite works must be defended against some mythic final and unalterable critical judgment of their qualities.
(And that’s not even opening the festering can of hematophagic maggots that is today’s political climate, and the effect that it has had on criticism… Point being…)
To the heart of things seems to be the last place anyone wants to go.
4.
Is that why I stopped trying?
I don’t know. I think the truth is that I’m still trying to stop.
Here I am, on December 28th, gorging myself on what other critics say are the year’s best offerings, as though I were on some self-imposed deadline to deliver my thoughts on the subject. As though my thoughts were anything more than another unheard voice in an increasingly monotonous chorus, whose motives for conformity have grown increasingly suspect, and whose refrain seems destined to fall on deaf ears…
Don’t get me wrong.I still enjoy watching great films, and making my way through intriguing TV series, and discovering new music, and reading incredible books. But writing about them has become little more than an unwelcome compulsion delivering diminishing returns, a mechanical impulse in which there seems to be so little point, I wish I could just ignore it and get on with my life…
But I can’t. My brain does it what it does and, like an addict chasing that disappearing dragon, I keep coming back. So it may yet happen that, once again, I’m unable to stop myself from churning out some half-assed retrospective that, ultimately, amounts to little more than a weary subjective calculus, a self-assigned “How I Misspent My Aesthetic Vocation” essay. At least it won’t be a pathetic descent into maudlin self-pity…
My thoughts on Todd Phillips’ JOKER and the GAME OF THRONES finale are already congealing into compositional form against my will…
Halloween is not the only holiday I celebrate regularly, but it is the only one I celebrate religiously. And when it comes to celebrating Halloween, nothing’s more important than setting the right tone, evoking the right atmosphere, and raising just the right kind of hell. Which is why I have always had an evolving playlist dedicated exclusively to Halloween music. And I’m not talking about goofy haunted house music (though that’s fun, too…), but the kind of music that can cloak you in darkness, kindle bonfires, conjure demons, and threaten your sanity. It’s really something everyone ought to have. And to that end, I have compiled my 25 Favorite Halloween albums for your listening terror.
Why albums and not songs…?
Because any old band can whip a good spooky song or two, but you’ve got to be really dedicated to darkness (or a little bit demented) to commit to a whole album’s worth. (Some of the bands on this list have produced a whole career’s worth…) So turn the lights down low, fire up those jack-o-lanterns, and hold onto your heads…
25) Paul Hindemith – Viola Sonatas performed by Lawrence Power and Simon Crawford Phillips (2009)
My reflexive response the first time I heard the music of Paul Hindemith was laughter. And only in part because I thought, “He must be joking!” His approach to tonality and rhythm seemed so utterly unique to me, it was like someone cheerfully extending their middle finger to any and all classical convention. And perhaps, he was. But my laughter also came from the rush of liberation one feels whenever watching (or, in this case, hearing) someone so flagrantly defy accepted law. Once my fit of laughter had subsided, however, I was overcome by the haunting beauty flowing beneath the music’s jarring surface. These viola sonatas are not spooky or scary sounding. But they do effectively throw the listener off-balance, immersing them in a series of moody, mournful, melancholic compositions shaped by a gleeful sense of musical mischief and even, perhaps, a touch of madness…
YouTube doesn’t have the Power/Phillips version, but you get the idea…
24) The Doors – Strange Days (1967)
I often say that while Strange Days may not be the best Doors album (though it also might be), it is the Doors-iest Doors album. By which I mean, the dark, shamanic romance that surrounds Jim Morrison, et al. gets its most comprehensive showing here, both sonically and lyrically. From the eerie title track, with its hammering bass-and-organ-driven chorus, to phantasmic ballads like “You’re Lost Little Girl” or “I Can’t See Your Face in My Mind,” to the nightmarish “Horse Latitiudes,” to the much-covered but never-bettered alienation anthem, “People Are Strange,” at its most approachable, Strange Days evokes the feeling of a surreal drug trip, and at its most forbidding, a psychotic break. “When the music’s over, turn out the lights…”
This video, alone, will give you the creeps…
23) Black Moth Super Rainbow – Eating Us (2009)
This might seem like a weird inclusion. Does this seem like a weird inclusion…? I don’t know. Maybe it’s just me. All I can tell you is that this album (and, to a slightly lesser degree, BMSR’s output as a whole) is what my nightmares sound like. So much so, that only rarely can I play this record all the way through. “Your nightmares sound like that!?!” you say. “But it’s so swirly and sweet and dreamy!” It’s fucking disturbing is what it is. So dreamy you start to question your grip on reality. So sweet and swirly it makes you sick to your psyche. In a good way, of course… If that wasn’t clear… Or, again, maybe it’s just me…
“Sweet and swirly.” Riiiight…
22) The Budos Band – Burnt Offering (2014)
Who says Halloween can’t be funky…? With its note-perfect synthesis of soul and Sabbath-y doom-and-gloom metal, this is the perfect album to put on while you get decked out in your darkest and strut your Satanic stuff along gloomy, autumn streets…
Groovy!
21) Coven – Witchcraft Destroys Minds and Reaps Souls (1969)
Before there was Black Sabbath, there was Coven. Unlike Sabbath, though, Coven was made up of genuine occultists. (Little known fact: it was Coven – and not Ronnie James Dio, as is often reported – who popularized flashing the “sign of the horns” on stage…) Also unlike Sabbath, they really weren’t that great a band. They released three studio efforts in the late 60’s and early 70’s, and put out a fourth in 2013, having recently reformed. But the best of them – and the most blatantly occult-y – remains their 1969 debut, which was put out by Mercury Records only to be almost immediately recalled amid controversy. Just in its presentation, the album really set the template for all occult rock and metal acts to follow, but beyond that, tracks like “Pact With Lucifer,” “Choke. Thirst. Die” and “Dignitaries of Hell,” are actually pretty groovy, even if they’re not especially scary. Oh, and there is that 13-minute recording of an actual Black Mass that closes the album…
The bass player on the first track, “Black Sabbath” is named Oz Osborne… Coincidence!?!
20) I Am Ghost – Lover’s Requiem (2006)
Goth punk acts are dime-a-dozen, but every now and then, one comes along that stands out from the pack. Mixing Goth theatricality with punk fury, then adorning both with elements of emo, screamo, thrash metal, and classical, I Am Ghost were, all at once, unapologetically operatic, passionate, and primal. It didn’t hurt that they boasted a not-at-all gimmicky or obtrusive lead violin. It also didn’t hurt that their songs were as dynamic and well-crafted as they were darkly atmospheric. It didn’t help that, like so many Goths, they were high-strung prima donnas, and the band imploded after only two and a half albums. Lover’s Requiem finds the band at their best. A sort of vampire rock opera, it’s a little Twilight-y at its worst, but it also dwells in some delightfully dark shadows while soaring to some undeniably powerful musical and emotional heights.
Arise!
19) Flatlinerz – USA (1994)
No, USA does not stand for United States of America. One of the first “horrorcore” hip-hop acts, Flatlinerz titled their first (and only) album Under Satan’s Authority, but if the playful acronym makes it unclear whether all of America is in Satan’s service, or just the rappers, themselves, the content contained within clears that right up. Horrorcore basically takes the graphic violence of gangsta rap and exaggerates it into the realms of serial murder, satanic sacrifice, and damnation. But that’s not to say it’s all just caricature. If gangsta rap, at its best, served to remind American culture that there was a lot more to “American culture” than just middle class suburbs and private schools, horrorcore, at its best, could often satirize and even ruthlessly interrogate American middle class morality, while giving rappers the space to examine their own psychological and emotional struggles. That said, Flatlinerz are hardly horrorcore at its best. What they are is horrorcore at its most over-the-top and Halloween-y. Favoring an Onyx-style in-your-face attack, the trio praise the devil, kill pretty much everyone (including themselves), and paint the walls in blood. It’s pure schlock, but despite the dearth of deep cuts, it’s still good, gory fun…
Their passionate defense of Salman Rushdie…
18) Black Sabbath – Paranoid (1970)
Discovering that this merry band of drug-addled English boys started out as a hippie blues-rock band called Earth, then accidentally stumbled upon what would become their signature sound and cynically decided to cash in on it by radically restyling themselves as leather-clad warlocks, does nothing to diminish their impact, their influence, or what they accomplished on their first handful of albums. Vol. 4 or Sabbath Bloody Sabbath might arguably be their best, but Paranoid is the album that finds their malevolent mask most firmly set in place. There is nothing nice, soft, safe, or warm on this record. Just a series of doom-and-gloom dirges about war, death, addiction, alienation, and insanity so crushingly heavy it’s a wonder they don’t crash your computer every time you play them. OK, there’s also “Fairies Wear Boots,” but still…
That outfit, alone, is pretty scary…
17) Zeal & Ardor – Stranger Fruit (2018)
A fiery onslaught of demon-driven sonic attacks that also just plain fucking rocks, Zeal & Ardor’s nuclear fusion of black metal and negro spirituals is (sorry about this…) as black as it gets. One of the best – and darkest – albums of the last several years, Stranger Fruit is relentlessly searing and sinister, but also – dare I say? – soulful. I can’t think of any other album that manages to be so powerfully unnerving yet also strangely uplifting.
Watch yourself…
16) Angelo Badalamenti – Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me [Soundtrack] (1992)
It’s hard to imagine any other composer scoring a David Lynch film. And of all Angelo Badalamenti’s many Lynch soundtracks, none seems to capture the essence or experience of a Lynch film as perfectly as this one. Made up primarily of low-key jazz numbers, each track nonetheless seems to possess a haunted quality, evoking rain-slicked city streets shrouded in shadows and fog, but it’s the soundtrack’s jarring left-field punctuations, like “A Real Indication” or “The Black Dog Runs at Night” that make it genuinely unsettling.
The black dog runs at night…
15) Emperor – In the Nightside Eclipse (1994)
By the time Emperor released their superlative sophomore classic, Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk, in 1997, their sound had fully matured. Though still dark and aggressive, the band’s symphonic elements were given full expression, resulting in something much more majestic than the raw, lo-fi pummeling one typically found in most early black metal efforts. But on their 1994 debut, they were still finding their feet and many of the songs had been initially conceived in a more primitive style, with the more symphonic flourishes added as an inspired afterthought during the recording process. As a result, while In the Nightside Eclipse might be, on the whole, less musically complex than Anthems, its simplicity also gives it a preternatural quality that makes it somehow scarier. Songs like “Into the Infinity of Thoughts” and “Beyond the Great Vast Forest” are perfect atmospheric Halloween fare, and also serve as a reminder that, even at their least accomplished, these guys were still pretty damn astonishing…
Baby, it’s cold outside…
14) Chelsea Wolfe – Hiss Spun (2017)
Chelsea Wolfe is no stranger to darkness. Over the years, her heavy brand of doom folk and grim lyrical content have led to her embrace by the metal community (bands and audiences alike) as a kindred spirit. And on 2017’s Hiss Spun, she acknowledged that consanguinity to bloodcurdling effect. Rather than the spaced-out atmospherics and moody electronic instrumentation that marked her previous efforts, Hiss Spun finds her ghostly voice backed by thick walls of ominous distorted guitars and shrieking feedback. Not that Wolfe has dramatically changed her songwriting style. Hiss Spun is not a metal album. But by ornamenting her bleak meditations with the genre’s heavy musical force, she has created something both chillingly oppressive and hauntingly beautiful.
Platform shoes makes everything scarier…
13) The Misfits – Walk Among Us [The “Lost” Plan 9 Version] (1981)
1982’s Walk Among Us is an undisputed punk classic. But I’m talking about the original promo cassette that Glenn Danzig handed out in 1981, featuring a slightly tweaked track listing, and different versions and mixes of some of the songs. (It’s floating around out there as a bootleg…) Why that one…? Because while it lacks the 1982 version’s blunt-force hardcore ferocity, it’s altogether creepier. Glenn sings more than he shouts on these versions, his reverb-heavy croon hovering wraith-like above the machine-gun musical attacks. There’s some eerie keyboards added to a couple of songs, plus you get “Ghouls Night Out,” “Horror Hotel,” and “American Nightmare,” which no Halloween mix worth a damn could ever be without…
You can’t have body horror without organs…
12) Sigh – In Somniphobia (2012)
Ghosts, monsters, devils, and all other variety of nightmare fare have been central to Sigh’s output throughout their long career, but in the black metal arena, that’s nothing to write home about. What sets Sigh apart from the pack is their unbridled – bordering on unhinged – inventiveness. From the Zappa-esque psychedelic swirl of 2001’s Imaginary Sonicscape to the traditional Japanese inflections found on last year’s Heir to Despair, they have left few genres of music unviolated in their wake. (Calling them a “metal” band, in fact, has really become a bit reductive…) Any of their releases could serve as an admirable Halloween soundtrack, but 2012’s In Somniphobia lends itself best. After opening with two typically off-the-wall rockers, the album launches into the sprawling seven-part symphony, “Lucid Nightmares,” a deranged odyssey through metallic riffs, dark ambience, and bizarre genre experiments punctuated by static and electronic squeals. Songs seem to interrupt themselves or take dramatic off-kilter left turns or spiral entirely out of control. The whole experience is akin to listening to a possessed radio dial lurching between creepy, kooky, mysterious, and spooky, or maybe Abbey Road as reimagined by a horde of demented demons.
Whatever you do, don’t fall asleep…
11) Son of Sam – Songs From the Earth (2001)
Tribute bands aren’t supposed to be this good. Of course, tribute bands aren’t usually made up from the original band’s former members. But Son of Sam, an act of musical necromancy performed to invoke Samhain, Glenn Danzig’s eternally underappreciated sophomore outfit (which, incidentally, was named for the Celtic holiday that gave rise to Halloween), features two of that band’s original members, London May and Steve Zing, alongside Danzig guitarist Todd Youth, and Danzig disciple Davey Havok, of AFI fame, on vocals. Glenn even puts in an appearance, himself, playing keyboards and doing background vocals on a couple of tracks. So, for a tribute band, they can boast an unparalleled level of pedigree. Son of Sam is also an unusual tribute band in that their debut album, Songs From the Earth, doesn’t actually feature any Samhain songs. But its 10 tracks do manage to effectively capture the stark, unholy pagan-punk atmosphere of Samhain and marry it to down-and-dirty Danzig-style hard rock, while throwing in a few darkly romantic flourishes in the AFI vein for good measure. Son of Sam will never surpass the original, of course, but they’re surprisingly successful at channeling the spirit of their sinister father.
They’re no Mac Sabbath, but…
10) Alexander Scriabin/Alexander Nemtin – Preparation for the Final Mystery [Performed by Vladimir Askenazy and the Deutches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin] (1999)
In 1903, Russian composer Alexander Scriabin began work on a monumental musical composition designed to bring about the end of the world. It was to be performed (presumably only once) as part of a week-long festival in the foothills of the Himalayas and feature dancing, incense, visual lighting effects, and a fog machine. (Or maybe he just expected the fog to naturally occur…) There would be “not a single spectator.” Everyone in attendance was expected to participate. Sadly – or, perhaps, fortunately – he died before completing it. But that didn’t stop another Russian composer, Alexander Nemtin, from resculpting Scriabin’s various musical sketches into the nearly 3-hour Preparation for the Final Mystery. It might come as no surprise that Nemtin’s labors would not be recorded in their entirety until 1999 (what better year…?). But the music itself is exactly what you’d expect: dark, dramatic, often disturbingly dissonant and atonal, and, at times, seemingly possessed of an otherworldly power. You’ll have to provide your own incense, lighting effects, and fog (and dance like nobody’s watching), but really, it’s the perfect way to spend a Halloween when you’ve got three hours – and an entire planet – to kill.
You should hear what he had planned for the encore…
9) Burzum – Filosofem (1996)
I’m going to get shit for this one, but all other concerns aside, this is one of the creepiest albums ever recorded. Yes, Varg Vikernes is a fascist, nationalist, homicidal asshole. But Filosofem manages to be every bit as unnerving as its creator, despite a total absence of fascist, nationalist, and/or homicidal content. (Some of the lyrics are actually quite lovely…) One of Norwegian black metal’s milestones, the album is renowned for its minimalist compositions, creeping tempos, and lowest-of-the-lo-fi production, all of which serve to evoke a suffocating sense of dread. Pump it through speakers on your front porch on Halloween night, and I guarantee you any and all trick-or-treaters will give your house a wide berth, leaving you to ponder the ethical implications of your musical choices in peace…
Honestly, I have no idea what he’s saying, anyway…
8) 45 Grave – Sleep in Safety (1983)
The debate has long raged over which was the first American Goth rock band: Christian Death or 45 Grave…? Let me settle this once and for all: It doesn’t matter. Because regardless of who came first, 45 Grave had better songs, a better singer, and they’re a lot more fun to listen to. Their debut (and, until recently, only) album careens puckishly (or is that punkishly…?) through heavy metallic grinders like “Insurance from God” and “Procession,” slash-and-burn attacks like “Evil” and “Violent World,” and tongue-in-cheek bits of bedlam like their celebrated covers of “Riboflavin” and “School’s Out.” There are even a couple of Surf-style tracks to keep things off-kilter. Their deft combination of spooky ambience, manic energy, and a refusal to take themselves too seriously make them, if not the first American Goth rock band, then certainly the best…
If you’re ever invited to a Goth party…
7) Siouxsie and the Banshees – Join Hands (1979)
When it comes to picking the proper Siouxsie album for Halloween (because you have to pick at least one), most people would probably go with 1981’s Juju due to its overall Goth-y sound, and ghoulish numbers like “Head Cut,” “Night Shift,” and, yes, obviously, “Halloween.” And, hey, Juju is a great album. A beautiful album… A little too beautiful, actually… So, when it comes to Halloween, while it might not be the obvious choice, I personally prefer the harsh and forbidding avant-garde soundscape of Join Hands. With its hammering riffs, angular structures, and dissonant melodies, all commanded by the sorcery of Siouxsie’s voice as she dives from soaring banshee wails to deep, atonal incantations, Join Hands makes for a jarring, haunting listen. Though thematically inspired by the horrors of World War I, it often sounds like a modernist Satanic opera. And even if its morbidity and mournfulness are, in some ways, more down-to-earth than some of the other selections on this list, it does also include some genuine Halloween fare, like the Poe-inspired “Premature Burial” and the nightmarish “Playground Twist.”
Funereal dysfunction…?
6) Ministry – The Land of Rape and Honey (1988)
The album where Ministry really became Ministry, over 30 years later, remains their rawest, darkest, and most aurally assaultive. While Al Jourgensen, et al. would experiment with heavier sounds and thicker mixes on future albums, the starkness of Land of Rape and Honey’s primitive industrial metal attack only intensifies its brutality. There’s also an absence of the incongruous cover songs, pointed political commentary, and fun-filled flights of absurdity (I’m looking at you, “Jesus Built My Hotrod”) found on their later releases, making the lyrical focus uniformly dark and violent, often enigmatically – and sometimes troublingly – so. Liberally sampling from “Aliens,” Ken Russell’s “The Devils,” and recordings of Aleister Crowley (among other things), it’s like a ramshot of pitch-black adrenaline stabbed directly into the heart of your Halloween festivities…
I confess!
5) Lurker of Chalice – S/T (2005)
I know what you’re thinking: What the hell does Lurker of Chalice mean…? Well, I’ll tell you: Business. Lurker of Chalice means business. The solo side project of Leviathan’s Jef Whitehead aka Wrest (Leviathan, I guess, being his solo main project), Lurker of Chalice is a densely layered, sonically textured, artfully accomplished effort. It’s also as dark and desolate and disquieting as the deepest descent into hell. Though unquestionably a metal album in the most elementary sense of the word, Lurker of Chalice places the emphasis on ambience rather than aggression. There’s plenty of the usual grind and growl, but it comes at a corpse-dragging pace, ornamented with delicate guitars, male choirs, unsettling whispers, and creepy samples. Most of the tracks are almost entirely instrumental, all the better for dragging the listener down in its sulphurous undertow. But what really makes Lurker of Chalice a force of (preter)nature, is that, for all that it is unrelentingly bleak and inescapably oppressive, it is also, in its way, undeniably beautiful.
My cup lurketh over…
4) Gravediggaz – 6 Feet Deep (1994)
One of the most original and outstanding of the Wu-Tang Clan’s many offshoots and affiliates, the Gravediggaz were pioneers of horrorcore rap and they remain one of the genre’s best. Where Wu-Tang wielded the iconography of Kung-Fu films as metaphors for urban life, the Gravediggaz weaponized horror tropes to symbolically attack sociopolitical apathy and spiritual numbness, while also examining and exorcizing the existential crises resulting therefrom. The commentary would come less shrouded on their later releases, but on their debut, 6 Feet Deep (titled Niggamortis in Europe), they strike a perfect balance of sincere messaging and mischievous mayhem, all backed by Prince Paul’s playfully creepy production.
Vandalizing the Vandellas…
3) Shining – Blackjazz (2010)
Is this jazz…? Metal? Is it industrial…? Or is it the end of the fucking universe? Whatever apocalypse Alexander Scriabin attempted to bring about in 1903, the sonic experience of Shining’s Blackjazz will make you believe they succeeded where he failed and then some… Breathtaking, brutal, and blacker than dark matter, with its blend of churning industrial, extreme metal, and free jazz, Blackjazz sounds like nothing less than a full-throttle embrace of Armageddon. Which is not to say that it’s just assaultive noise. It’s as complex and artfully crafted as any dreary prog offering (it even closes with a deranged cover of King Crimson’s “21st Century Schizoid Man”), but its sophistication is deployed in service of psychic disturbance and deadly force. Turn the volume up and give your neighbors nightmares for weeks…
This is not white jazz…
2) Lingua Ignota – Caligula (2019)
I debated whether or not to include this album. Although truly terrifying, it is also a little too real… No, scratch that. It’s a lot too real. And it seems more than a little perverse listing it here, like naming a snuff film as one of your favorite horror movies. But at the end of the day, Kristin Hayter’s metal-meets-hymnal exorcism of survivor trauma ranks as the most harrowing and horrific listening experience I’ve ever had. I have a pretty strong constitution when it comes to dark art (as, perhaps, evidenced by this list), but I confess I find this album challenging, and it’s not because the music is relentlessly harsh (though, at times, it certainly is). Even in Caligula’s softer, more delicate moments – and there are many – Hayter’s classically-trained voice is palpably rent by notes of grief, guilt, and pain. And, in many ways, these quieter stretches only intensify the impact when the songs erupt into violent, screaming rage. Maybe it is perverse to list it here, but Hayter’s shrieks and howls are far more frightening than the blackest of black metal vocalists – and almost unbearably heart-rending to boot. It is the only album on this list that I am genuinely afraid to listen to. But it is also an astonishing, shattering work. One that demands to be heard. One that, at both its hardest and most beautiful moments, has the power to rip your soul apart.
You knew it was coming… It’s not just that Samhain has been my go-to Halloween soundtrack since my teen years. They are, in my lonely opinion, the best of Glenn Danzig’s many musical incarnations. Their 1984 debut, Initium, comes off like a leaner, meaner Misfits. Trading 50’s rock melodies and B-movie tropes for Celtic inflections and pagan/Satanic themes, most of the songs are high-energy and fast-paced, but driven by galloping, almost tribal percussion, and often punctuated by bells and chimes. Leaning a little more into the hardcore aesthetic, Glenn’s baritone takes on a growling, menacing edge. On the oppressive “Macabre” he practically rants and raves. Though the band hadn’t fully found itself yet, Initium nonetheless contains some essential Halloween listening, and it’s all murder, all guts, all fun all the way through.
But wait! There’s more…
Even better is their second full-length, November-Coming-Fire. All at once, more assured and more experimental, the album finds Samhain further developing Initium’s pagan punk aesthetic, adding elements of Goth rock and metal, toying with tone and tempo (there’s even a – gasp – ballad!), and tightening their musical attack to deliver a dark, yet somehow ecstatic series of infernal incantations guaranteed to set your All Hallows Eve ablaze.
Burn, baby, burn!
I guess that’s 26 albums, not 25…
Well, 26 is 13 times two, so that makes my list twice as spooky as Consequence
of Sound’s 13 Scariest Rock Songs…
You want lists, motherfuckers…? I’ll give you lists.
But here’s the thing…
I’m not a critic anymore. Not a professional one, anyway. Not that I really ever was. I guess what I’m saying is, I’m not trying to be a professional critic, anymore. I’m not even interested in trying to be. So here’s what this list isn’t: A Best of 2018. Some of the stuff on my list isn’t even from 2018. I don’t think ANY of the books on this list were published in 2018 (though I will get to FEEL FREE and CERTAIN AMERICAN STATES, eventually…), and film…? I think I’ve seen a grand total of 7 or 8 films this year, and my favorite among them was shot decades ago, so I don’t feel especially qualified to sound off on what was “Best.”
No, this list is more, How I Spent My 2018: Aesthetic High Points Edition. Me babbling about any art and entertainment related encounters I had this year that made an impact or left a significant impression on me. Obviously, I see a lot of value in the below-mentioned efforts, but I wouldn’t necessarily take them as recommendations. You’re not me, after all. Nor is there any implicit suggestion herein that they belong in any sort of pantheon other than my own personal one. I guess what I’m saying is, I’m not so much writing about movies, or television, or music, as I am writing about myself. Maybe that’s what I’ve always done…
Here’s the other thing…
You asked for it.
We’ll start with TELEVISION…
And what is it about British TV writers named Steven…? Did the UK pass some obscure parliamentary motion several years ago demanding that, heretofore, a certain percentage of all high-quality television scribes are required to bear that name (in the same vein as the law passed by Congress in the mid-to-late 90’s declaring that the majority of postmodern American authors should be named Jonathan)…? Does the BBC have a “Steven” quota…?
In any case, though no new episodes were broadcast in 2018, this year will go down in my personal history as the year I discovered Steven Knight’s PEAKY fucking BLINDERS. Imagine THE GODFATHER meshed with MILLER’S CROSSING, set in 1920’s Birmingham, with a haunting, harrowing modern soundtrack (more on that later…) and you’ll come pretty close to the mark. Cillian Murphy’s mastermind middle child, Tommy Shelby, leads the titular gang, a sharply dressed family of Irish gypsy émigrés carving (sometimes literally) a place for themselves in the English criminal underworld. Epic and intimate, seedy and beautiful, sophisticated and savage, it gets better and better with each season (four, with another on the way…). Knight has a gift for balancing gritty, realistic drama with sometimes absurd humor and a bewitching undercurrent of something dark, ethereal, and fatalistic. New favorite show…
PEAKY BLINDERS, by the way, also features the reliably brilliant (except in FURY ROAD) Tom Hardy in the scene-stealing role of mad genius Jewish gangster Alfie Solomons. Despite his not-as-frequent-as-you-want-them-to-be appearances, he nearly succeeds in upstaging the rest of the cast (who are exceptional) every time he appears on screen. Hardy and Knight had worked together previously in 2013’s LOCKE (which made my Best of… List that year), so I was excited to discover that they co-created a TV series together last year: TABOO. The dark, ethereal undercurrents of PEAKY BLINDERS rise to the surface in this down and dirty tale of dark secrets, pagan religions, crime, incest, international intrigue, corporate corruption, and the slave trade, as Hardy’s long lost/presumed dead James Delaney returns home to early 1800’s England following the death of his father. Though slow-moving, Knight and the cast give the characters the charisma and vitality to win you over for the duration of the show’s slow burn, while its bleaker, blacker elements bring it, at times, to the edge of horror.
Which brings me to SHARP OBJECTS and THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE. Both released this year, no two shows left me so shaken and unsettled (in a good way). HBO’s adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s debut novel, about small-town secrets, family dysfunction, and murder, slowly burrowed its way into my flesh and stayed there, thanks in large part to Jean-Marc Vallee’s sinister directing and editing, and Amy Adams’ layered, damaged performance. Though initially irked by the almost rimshot-style ending, I can’t deny that its final images have haunted me in the months since…
And speaking of haunted…
Mike Flanagan’s HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE is not an adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s novel, but a Frankenstein-esque creature stitched seamlessly together from various elements and tropes found therein. I expected something like Flanagan’s OCULUS: some good, scary fun, but nothing especially profound. And yet as I watched episode after episode, I found myself in the clutch of a creeping, cathartic despair. It wouldn’t be accurate to say that HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE is actually about child abuse, addiction, or mental illness, but in his tale of the damage wrought on the Crane family by their experiences in Hill House, Flanagan makes dramatic and affecting use of those recognizable patterns, channeling them into larger, existential musings about fear and loss.
Chan-wook Park’s adaptation of John Le Carre’s LITTLE DRUMMER GIRL is one of those 70’s nostalgia trips that leaves me wondering if it was “brilliantly directed” or just “directed in a particular style that I happen to like” (see also: SICARIO, DRIVE, TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY), but regardless, it’s less a 70’s style politically-minded spy thriller than a 70’s style meditation on the psychological toll of intelligence stagecraft, featuring top-notch performances from Florence Pugh, Alexander Skarsgard, and Michael Shannon.
DAREDEVIL’s third season may have been its best, featuring the full-fledged return of Vincent D’Onofrio’s Kingpin, and the introduction of Wilson Bethel’s troubled, sympathetic Bullseye. So, of course, Netflix cancelled it.
THE AFFAIR got back on track, for the most part, with its fourth season, and, really, any initial unsteadiness or not-entirely-earned dramatic reversals one could complain about matter very little when there’s Maura Tierney.
And I finally got around to watching THE CROWN, which was really pretty good, and not the glamorous commercial for monarchy I expected it to be… I should have known better when I saw it was Peter Morgan… I still stand by THE QUEEN as a great film… Very much in that vein…
Lastly, one of the great things about having children is that you get hip to a lot of shows you otherwise wouldn’t (though, with me, it’s hard to say, but…). One of the best discoveries I’ve made through my children this year has been STAR VS. THE FORCES OF EVIL. What starts out as an aggressively quirky fish-out-of-water fantasy evolves over its three seasons (so far) into the story of a generations-old epic battle, investigating the nature of good and evil and all the grey areas in between, tribalism, love, loyalty, the lengths we’re willing to go to when we’re certain we’re right, and the deals we’re willing to make when we’re desperate, and all without ever losing its manic sense of humor. Hands down, the best children’s show I’ve seen since PHINEAS & FERB (which wasn’t all that long ago, but still…).
All of that was more than enough to counterbalance the mild letdowns of WESTWORLD’s anti-dramatic data dump of a second season and the flat, cloying, Spielberg-y saintliness of Chris Chibnall’s DOCTOR WHO, which was enough to sap my enjoyment of Jodie Whittaker’s delightful take on the character…
I was going to do BOOKS last, since it’s section least likely to be read, anyway. But then, I thought, why not do books second since it’s the section least likely to be read…?
Not that I’m impugning anyone’s level of literacy. Books are just more of a time commitment than movies, TV, or music, and most people already know what they like, or what they’re looking to like, so they’re not as much in the market for recommendations, especially from someone with tastes like mine. (As a result, this section will also probably be the most unapologetically self-indulgent…)
But speaking of knowing what you like and tastes like mine…
Like most people, I made most of my formative literary discoveries in my teens and early twenties. But in the last several years, probably as a result of shifting my personal artistic focus to literary prose, I’ve found myself experiencing – if it’s not too pretentious a thing to say – a literary renaissance, of sorts. And I’ve made a number of discoveries and rediscoveries that have proven no less influential to me in my middle age.
So, maybe, less a literary renaissance than a literary reformation… Haha…
Not that I’ve rejected or renounced any of those early inspirations. (Sorry, Kinder Gentler Reader: Nietzsche and Henry Miller are still cornerstones. But they’re also still keeping company with Dostoevksy, Ralph Ellison, and Douglas Adams…) My foundations are still my foundations. It’s just that, these days, much to my surprise, I seem to be adding a second story. (So to speak… Haha…)
Some have been first-time encounters with writers, like Thomas Bernhard or Roberto Bolano, whose work swept me off my feet and took up immediate residence in my soul. Others have been revisitations with authors, like Borges or Melville, whose work I first encountered years or decades ago, but whose work has now opened itself up to me in new, astonishing ways. (Or, I guess, more accurately, time has opened me up to it…)
For the longest time, HEART OF DARKNESS was all I knew of JOSEPH CONRAD. I had read it in high school, and being both a cinephile and a philistine, I didn’t look upon it as much more than the literary inspiration for APOCALYPSE NOW. But one of the advantages of having your entire library (which, if you’re a reader worth your salt, contains a number of books you’ve not yet cracked) boxed up in a storage locker thousands of miles away, is that you find yourself looking to see what books Amazon offers as free downloads for your newly acquired Kindle. (Hint: They’re usually agreed upon classics…) So, back in 2013, having fully shaken off the shackles of cinematic ambition, I decided, on a whim, to return to HEART OF DARKNESS and give Conrad’s slim volume a chance to sink or swim on its own merits.
And Holy Shit.
One of my favorite books as a kid was William Golding’s LORD OF THE FLIES (still is one of my favorites, actually), and how I had been so blind to it before I don’t know, but HEART OF DARKNESS is basically LORD OF THE FLIES for grown-ups, digging deeper into many of the same themes, but with more subtlety and complexity. Conrad renders Marlowe’s journey in lush, evocative prose, giving it the impact of both a nightmare and an epic journey in just a few, short chapters. As an artistic accomplishment, it not only equals but surpasses APOCALYPSE NOW (and also has the edge in coming first). The point is, I made up my mind, then and there, to dive headlong into Conrad’s oeuvre.
Which I did. Starting this year.
(Yes, I am an erratic, unfaithful, deeply promiscuous reader…)
Having now completed THE SECRET AGENT and UNDER WESTERN EYES, with NOSTROMO and THE SHADOW LINE on deck, Conrad strikes me as nothing less than the English language (despite being Polish) heir to Dostoevsky. Which is somewhat ironic because Conrad hated Dostoevsky. But, like Dostoevsky, Conrad weaves the political, the philosophical, and the primal into grand, character-driven narratives, addressing the issues of his day by delving deep into the psychological frictions at their core. Both men were skeptical, if not condemnatory, of the revolutionary impulses taking hold in their homelands, but also gifted with a sympathetic authorial insight that prevented them from flattening their conflicts or their characters into something soothing or easily digestible. The people who inhabit their novels are vital, passionate, complex, and often tortured, yet utterly recognizable and relatable, despite their extremity. Everyone we encounter is unique and uniquely human. Where Conrad differs from Dostoevsky (and, perhaps, this was the root of his dislike) is his rejection of easy resolutions. An emigrant by circumstance, and a seafarer by trade, Conrad, perhaps, had seen too much of the world to see much hope in it. Dostoevsky’s spirituality is nowhere in Conrad, replaced by a bottomless skepticism and a near-tragic melancholy. Where Dostoevsky’s protagonists always seem to find some strained salvation in the end (though, whatever precedes it is always powerful and profound enough to offset any dissatisfaction I might feel with his forced finales), Conrad refuses all but the faintest glimmer of redemption for his own. You can just make it out in Kurtz’s horror, Verloc’s confession, Razumov’s penance. But it’s never enough to deliver them from their fate. As the man, himself, said, “We live in the flicker.”
And speaking of skepticism and hopelessness…
EMIL CIORAN might be ALBERT CAMUS’ evil twin, his shadowy reflection and philosophical foil, the nihilistic Joker to his idealistic Batman. (Yeah… I stand by that…) If you know me at all, you know I’ve lived with my distant cousin Albert and his work since my teen years. For a variety of curiously disconnected reasons, I’ve also been revisiting a lot of it recently, rereading THE STRANGER, THE FALL, EXILE AND THE KINGDOM, and THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS. And this year, finally, for the first time, I’ve been making my way through THE REBEL (almost done with it, in fact). Simultaneously, I have been reading Cioran’s ANATHEMAS AND ADMIRATIONS (just finished with it, in fact), a collection of essays on some of the significant thinkers and artists in Cioran’s life, interspersed with chapters of his own wry, incisive, often pessimistic and misanthropic aphorisms. Camus and Cioran both possessed a vast and penetrating insight into human nature, human history, and the human condition, which they expressed with remarkable clarity and potency. Camus was a lapsed communist who came to see how quickly rebellion corrupted into despotism (it is, in fact, one of THE REBEL’S central themes). Cioran was a former fascist who grew to reject fascism’s narrowness and repent his involvement with it. But coming from opposite sides of the spectrum, both arrived at a shared understanding of the absurdity inherent in trying to improve the world. (Both books are, in fact, extremely relevant in the current political climate. Cioran’s near-novella length essay on Joseph de Maistre is essential to anyone seeking to understand right-wing extremism, and THE REBEL ought to be required reading for the current crop of SJW’s, though, of course, it’s just another book by another old, white male…) The difference between them was that Camus, ever the Sisyphean, never ceased pushing his philosopher’s stone up a moral mountain, searching for some form of honorable, humanist existence, while Cioran embraced an antic – almost gleeful – nihilism and misanthropy, living in near isolation in Paris, lobbing literary grenades at humanity’s false hopes and futile ideals. They now reside as fenceless neighbors on my bookshelf, across the quad from Dostoevsky and Conrad.
Cioran, incidentally, was good friends with SAMUEL BECKETT in his later years. Like any apostate of the dramatic arts, I already knew Beckett from WAITING FOR GODOT, ENDGAME, etc., but Cioran’s essay on Beckett in ANATHEMAS AND ADMIRATIONS sent me scurrying for his prose. In my typically backwards fashion, I started with a collection of his last novellas: COMPANY, ILL SEEN ILL SAID, WORSTWARD HO, STIRRINGS STILL and a few shorter pieces. Written in a spare, angular, minimalist style I found revolutionary and revelatory, Beckett slowly grows his stories from one word or phrase to the next. Context develops at an almost agonizing pace, as possible interpretations narrow, details emerging organically, out of absolute necessity. Reading them was like watching the gradual formation of a crystalline structure. Or, to put it another way, if one posits James Joyce as a literary Charlie Parker, Beckett can be seen as Thelonious Monk. As a writer, I found it tremendously liberating, having attempted similarly minimalistic styles in my own writing projects in the past. Too often, though, I would lose confidence in my own method, and begin freighting my narratives with enough extraneous explanation to crush them utterly. In that regard, Beckett’s stories were a welcome reminder to trust my own voice. Their impact, however, was more than stylistic. Or, more accurately, Beckett’s narratives reflect his style, relating the internal monologues of impoverished characters groping for some knowledge or comprehension of their situations and surroundings, often using language as a cipher, in the hopes of arriving at some measure of resolution or peace. While their stylistic brilliance is immediate and astounding, the stories also conceal a poignancy that sneaks up on you, transforming admiration into awe. Having finished the later works, I’ve backed up to the early middle, and am now knee-deep in MOLLOY… And I’m sure I’ll continue from there, but Beckett has already taken his place in my personal pantheon…
And speaking of Irish writers…
I finally got around to Eimear McBride’s sophomore offering, THE LESSER BOHEMIANS, this year. Though not as challenging, stylistically or emotionally, as her debut, A GIRL IS A HALF-FORMED THING, it is nonetheless an impressive and affecting literary feat, proving she’s still one of the best writers currently out there. One could actually read LESSER BOHEMIANS as GIRL’S more approachable and optimistic sister novel, as both fearlessly depict a young girl’s sexual self-discovery opening a gateway to a deeper existential need. But where GIRL was grueling, grim, and grief-stricken, LESSER BOHEMIANS, for all its naked honesty and eccentricity, is, at heart, an old-fashioned love story. Though, let it be said, a thoughtful and thoroughly earned one…
An entirely different kind of love story – or perhaps, more accurately, detachment story – can be found in Catherine Lacey’s THE ANSWERS. An ill and isolated New Yorker auditions for a psychology experiment/celebrity reality show called “The Girlfriend Experiment,” and finds herself lost in a haze of uncertain feelings, attachments, and memories in this dreamy, diaphanous examination of the ways in which the personal is being increasingly stripped of its humanity in our increasingly impersonal world…
My recent, unofficial, and appropriately non-committal study of Taoism continued this year with THE BOOK OF CHUANG TZU (aka THE ZHUANGZI). Its thirty-three chapters provide a vivid cross-section of how inspired ideas corrupt into something prescribed and systemic. The first seven chapters, called the Inner Chapters, are believed to be genuinely authored by Chuang Tzu, and they overflow with unconventional wisdom, mischievous humor, and subversive insights. Intended as satires of Confucianism as much as meditations on the Tao, it’s amazing how modern and challenging to various norms they still seem. The Outer Chapters, 8 through 22, were probably written by Chuang Tzu’s followers, and, for the most part, do little more than flesh out or restate the ideas presented in the Inner Chapters, but with all the wit and flair you would expect from a committee of disciples. The Mixed Chapters, 23 to 33, are a mixed bag. Authored by who the fuck knows, some get close to the piercing parables of the first seven, but they still seem to be in service of an established set of ideas. Not that there’s anything especially doctrinaire about Taoism. It is, by definition, devoid of dogma. It’s just that parroted and paraphrased enlightenment can’t help but lose some of its lustre. Those first seven, though…
And speaking of challenging norms…
Sam Harris’ FREE WILL delivers a compact and concise demolition of its titular concept, while John Bargh’s BEFORE YOU KNOW IT entertainingly describes the scientific research and experimentation that support an embrace of neuropsychological determinism. Bargh’s not a determinist, himself, reserving a limited belief in human volition, but as he, himself, notes, if you refuse to acknowledge the ways in which your actions and decisions are influenced by external factors, you will forever be a slave to them. Or, to put it another way, maintaining a belief in free will might be the best way to ensure you don’t have any. In any case, if, after reading these, you don’t find yourself questioning your subjective experience of choice, you should probably, at the very least, question your intellectual integrity…
Lewis Hyde’s TRICKSTER MAKES THIS WORLD is a thorough and artful survey of the trickster archetype in all its various manifestations across human culture, past and present. Equal parts exploration and celebration, it’s essential for anyone who, like me, takes a particular interest in the topic. Hyde acts as anthropologist, historian, storyteller, critic, psychologist, and shaman, expounding eloquently on every facet of this complex and often troublesome trope. Some of his associations may occasionally seem to be stretches, but the patterns he observes and portraits he paints are, like the trickster archetype itself, indelible.
And, finally, Kenneth Burke’s PHILOSOPHY OF LITERARY FORM is a collection of essays that, taken as a whole, presage his conception of dramatism, which he would lay out fully in his following work, A GRAMMAR OF MOTIVES, but that are each equally mind-blowing taken on their own. More than just a linguist and literary critic, Burke was a philosopher, and he expounds enlighteningly on everything from aesthetics to warfare to Freudian psychology, dissecting the role played by language, and the shaping of it, in every facet of our lives.
MOVIES…
I used to care about MOVIES…
I was never one of those irritating cinemaniacs who “tries to see everything.” That way, madness lies. (Besides, I maintain that, once you’re fluent enough in the medium and its many movers and shakers, there are films you don’t need to see to know what you think of them…) But there used to be a large number of filmmakers whose work I would eagerly watch and wait for (or, perhaps, vice-versa). I’d keep my eyes on press and previews for anything new that looked potentially interesting or exciting. And I’d lap up the Year End Lists of various critics, on the lookout for anything that might have escaped my attention…
To a degree, my methods haven’t changed.
But the number of filmmakers whose work I’m eager to see has dwindled to a happy few. The new films described by today’s press and previews as, “interesting and exciting,” tend not to look that way to me. (And on those occasions when I have taken their word for it and made the effort to check something out, I have most often been met with, if not disappointment, then, at least, something that lived down to my expectations.) And when I consume the critics’ Year End Lists, these days, I’m usually desperately seeking something… ANYTHING… that sounds like it might rehabilitate my burnout or break my boredom with an art form that used to be endlessly fascinating to me…
No, it’s not the superhero movies. I actually really enjoy the Marvel Universe…
Anyway, it’s true that my standards for film have always been… OK, maybe not especially high, but… singular. Rustling up ten to twenty films that I thought merited inclusion on a Year End List was always something of a challenge. But, today, I’m lucky if I can come up with five… I’m lucky if, in a given year, I actually SEE five…
Makes you wonder why I’m bothering to do this, at all, doesn’t it…?
At the very least, I can say that 2018 brought one of the most exciting film releases of my life, from an all-time favorite filmmaker, one that I have been eagerly anticipating for, literally, decades. I’m talking, of course, about Orson Welles’ THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND, which, thanks to the dedicated efforts of Welles’ family, friends, and fans, was finally completed and released this year. (Now if only someone could dig up that long, lost cut of AMBERSONS…) Even if the film were no fucking good, it would be a milestone cinematic event. But not only is it good, it is – as you might expect – genius. Glorying in cinematic craft, while choking on loathing for Hollywood, the film takes place over a single night, depicting the birthday party of renowned studio filmmaker Jake Hannaford (John Huston). Shot in mockumentary style on multiple cameras using different stocks, the approach allows Welles to incorporate (and even further innovate) the rough and gritty shooting/editing styles that had become the hallmark of the young 1970’s upstarts who were bursting onto the scene, while also maintaining many of his own signature flourishes (overlapping dialogue, whiplash pans, expertly choreographed staging, etc.). We’re also given glimpses of Hannaford’s latest film, in which Welles wickedly satirizes the pretentions of self-consciously arty filmmakers, deflating their hollow grandeur with typically Welles-ian grandiosity. It’s never short of dazzling to watch, and invigorating to keep up with. But its greatest impact is in its tonality, which appropriately mirrors the arc of a Hollywood party: Buzzing with energy and wit at the beginning, then slowing as Welles peels back the protective poses and postures of his characters, revealing the festering frustrations and resentments underneath, before finally leaving them, at the end of the night, alone and wasted in the sour puddles of their ruined egos. It’s an unforgiving indictment of a culture that makes monsters that, in turn, make monstrosities, and it left me feeling sick and sad for days. But, like any Welles film, it’s one of the finest you’ll ever see. The sort of film that’s simultaneously ahead of its time, but that no one makes anymore.
Almost…
Alfonso Cuaron has long been one of the aforementioned happy few, whose work I have followed avidly for some years, but the empty exercise of 2013’s GRAVITY, I confess, left my faith a little dented. Thankfully, he has more than redeemed himself with ROMA, which is not only one of the best films of the last year, but of the last decade (that I’ve seen, anyway… Haha…). The title refers to the Colonia Roma neighborhood of Mexico City where the film takes place, but given the film’s black and white photography, proletarian sympathies, and Cuaron’s masterful ability to capture the rough rhythms of daily life, it might be tempting to see it additionally as an homage to Italian neorealist classics like Rosselini’s ROMA CITTA APERTA or Pasolini’s MAMA ROMA. The read would be misguided, however (and the association may be a playful, misleading wink on Cuaron’s part), because ROMA is less concerned with realism than reminiscence. Taking as its focus Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), the live-in maid and nanny to a wealthy local family, ROMA is a deeply personal act of reverence and remembrance, in which Cuaron’s camera, far from being an objective spectator, functions instead as his mind’s eye, moving intently through his characters’ lives, creating sensual, evocative, often breathtaking images that reveal his intimate, if temporally removed, involvement. But ROMA is also much more than mere nostalgia. Cuaron, in fact, sidesteps easy sentiment at every turn. Not content to create a simple character study or family drama, he has instead created a vital portrait of an entire neighborhood, a city – a world, in fact. One that continues to pulse and breathe, even when existing outside the frame. At times, small, personal events in Cleo’s life seem to ripple outward, echoing in the lives of others, or in the movements of the city, itself. Planes constantly fly overhead in the background of numerous scenes, reminding us that life is something larger than any single moment and that it is constantly in motion. And, conversely, that what seems small and simple from a distance can become weighty and significant when experienced up close. ROMA doesn’t make Cleo the most important person in the world. It just makes her a person in the world – an active participant, whose life affects and impacts other lives, and is affected and impacted by them – and that is enough to make her essential. Written, directed, shot, and edited by Cuaron, himself, and dedicated to “Libo,” (Cuaron’s own live-in maid and nanny from childhood), ROMA is a true labor of love. (It’s worth noting that the title is also “amor” backwards.) It’s the sort of film you can’t believe got made in today’s cinematic climate. And it may be Cuaron’s masterpiece.
Brad Bird always insisted he wouldn’t make sequel to THE INCREDIBLES unless he felt it was equal to, or better than, the original. And with INCREDIBLES 2, he made good on that promise. The film literally picks up where the first film left off, continuing to tweak superhero conventions, while further developing the Parr family dynamic in recognizable and relatable ways. As in the first film, the hero/villain conflict raises worthwhile questions (uncomfortable even for some adults), this time about our willingness to make ourselves reliant to the point of dependency on everything from technology, to corporations, to self-proclaimed heroes…
And speaking of superheroes…
I want to take a moment to commend the Russo Bros. and AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR for toying narratively and thematically with the notion of Thanos as the film’s protagonist, while also chastising them for lacking the courage of their conception and not following through on it. Also, for making an epic team-up that, thanks, in part, to their lack of resolve, was neither as epic, nor as entertaining as it should have been. (I’ll also just add, for those who are wondering, that, unlike everyone else, I found BLACK PANTHER to be a pretty average entry in the franchise, whose last real high-water mark remains last year’s THOR: RAGNAROK…)
But speaking of chastising…
Spike Lee and Paul Schrader are two more filmmakers I cherish among my happy few, so I was excited to see their two latest offerings – BLACKkKLANSMAN and FIRST REFORMED, respectively – roundly praised by critics and included on a significant number of year end lists. Imagine my disappointment…
(Because I know everyone’s favorite part of these Year End retrospectives is when I get all contrarian about widely celebrated films…)
It’s not that BLACKkKLANSMAN is a bad film. (Spike Lee has done far worse…) It’s just not especially good. (He’s also done far better…) My objections to it are not, like Boots Riley’s, political or historical, but aesthetic. (Though, in this case, the true story of Ron Stallworth may have had more dramatic potential than the – sorry about this – whitewash we’re presented with…) Its biggest problem is that it’s a flat, uninteresting film that can’t quite decide what it wants to be and, as a result, ends up being not much at all. Not funny enough to be a comedy, but not dramatic enough to be a drama, certainly not daring, provocative, or experimental enough to be a showcase for Lee’s singular talents, it’s almost impossible to engage with on any level. The performances are solid all around, but no one is really given much to work with. Possibilities for conflict or complexity are quickly glossed over, leaving a weak narrative about two earnest, capable cops infiltrating a racist secret society made up almost entirely of incompetent, monomaniacal buffoons. At one point, Adam Driver’s Flip questions whether the Klan poses enough of a threat to be worth their time. The way Lee presents them, it’s hard not to feel like he has a point…
FIRST REFORMED is basically a retread of TAXI DRIVER, in which, rather than a lonely, alienated war vet driven to the edge by the urban disease of vice and criminality he finds himself immersed in daily, we are given a lonely, alienated priest driven to the edge by an ecological anxiety that infects him in the aftermath of a parishioner’s suicide. (Oh… spoilers…) The film is not without its qualities. Ethan Hawke’s performance as the priest in question, Father Toller, is a career zenith, and there are aspects of emotional deterioration that no one captures quite as effectively as Schrader. The problem here is that Schrader is too close to the material and he lacks both the technique and the perspective that Scorsese brought to TAXI DRIVER, which kept it from descending into either self-parody or DEATH WISH-style hysteria (if, in fact, those are different things…). Scorsese allows us to identify with Travis Bickle, but also to laugh at him, and there are plenty of moments in the film when we find ourselves wanting to laugh and cry simultaneously. We feel his pain, while also recognizing the tragic absurdity of his situation. Schrader, by contrast, presents FIRST REFORMED with deadly seriousness, and the laughs – more than a few, I’m sorry to say – are entirely unintentional. The film’s final moments are enough to make you want to throw something at the screen…
So, why the widespread praise for these uneven mediocrities…? My theory is that Lee and Schrader, two filmmakers celebrated for their willingness to confront their audiences with uncomfortable and unpleasant truths, have finally delivered a pair of “feel good” movies.
“WHAT…!?!” I hear you saying, “Feel good movies…!?!”
OK. What they’ve really done is invented a new kind of “feel good” movie that is, perhaps, better described as a, “feel good about feeling bad,” movie. BLACKkKLANSMAN panders to the anti-Trump hysterics with its insinuation (if something so pedantic can be called an insinuation) that David Duke’s master plan was an unmitigated success, and he finally got one of his own into the White House. There are a ton of worthy (and even convincing) arguments asserting that, whatever formal history might say, the South was the true victor in the Civil War, and that the U.S. government is a white supremacist hothouse. But BLACKkKLANSMAN is not one of them. It’s just designed to reinforce the momentary self-righteous panic of its intended audience. Similarly, while climate change and environmentalism are not FIRST REFORMED’s focus, narratively or thematically, it does didactically rattle off a lot of relevant facts in an effort to sanctify its protagonist’s noble disintegration, sparing the audience any moral uncertainty. I’m not saying that the actual facts in the environmental case aren’t clear. I’m saying that moral Manichaeism makes for poor drama and shrill, self-serious melodrama. And that, rather than challenging or unsettling their audiences, as they so often have in the past, Lee and Schrader have contented themselves with comfortably affirming their trendy outrage and despair.
MUSIC is all we have left…
I love writing about music… Probably because I don’t know anything about it…
More than any other art form, music is my most consistent source of solace, catharsis, and inspiration, but, much to my dismay, I’ve never shown any aptitude for it. As a result, when I listen to something, I can give only superficial consideration to questions of craft or technique. Sometimes I kid myself that I can recognize talent or ability when I hear it, but years of trying (and failing) to play various instruments, write songs, etc. have proven to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that sometimes what sounds easy is actually extremely challenging and vice-versa. So, in the end, the only critical criteria I possess when it comes to evaluating music is what it sounds like and what it conjures up in me…
And some might say that’s the whole point. I don’t know…
But the whole point of this is just to say that this will probably the longest and least aesthetically literate section of this retrospective. (Did I say the BOOKS section would be the most self-indulgent…? Hmmm…)
Lucky you…
By far, the single record that has spent the most time on my turntable this year (or, it would be if I bought records and owned a turntable) – the album that I have gotten the most out of, let’s say – has been ZEAL & ARDOR’s “STRANGER FRUIT.” Manuel Gagneux conceived of ZEAL & ARDOR in 2014 in response to a flippant challenge he received on 4chan, and created the world’s first Black Metal/Negro Spiritual fusion outfit. ZEAL & ARDOR’s 2016 debut, “DEVIL IS FINE,” recorded entirely by Gagneux on his laptop, showed promise, but was really an EP in disguise: a handful of knockout songs counterweighted by unfocused instrumental filler. “STRANGER FRUIT” both makes good on the promise of its predecessor and corrects its errors, and the result is dynamite. Possessing all the infernal ferocity of any Black Metal band, but also driven by Gospel passions and Blues melodies, each song is, all at once, terrifying, infectious, cathartic, galvanizing, even – dare I say…? – soulful. (Added bonus: unlike MAYHEM, you can sing along!) Even the quieter instrumental tracks are imbued with purpose, adding to the, by turns, hellish and haunted ambiance. But it’s not just the music that’s irresistible. With “STRANGER FRUIT,” Gagneux has crafted an alt-universe narrative that asks a provocative question: What if African slaves had embraced Satanism rather than Christianity? The answer plays out in fire and blood over the course of the album’s 16 tracks (I can’t listen to “Ship on Fire” without thinking of the slave revolt spurred by Orlando Jones’ Anansi in the first season of AMERICAN GODS), but its implications – obvious to anyone familiar with the ways in which Christianity was used, for centuries, to justify slavery and repress revolt – are left hanging, unsettlingly, like strange fruit…
But speaking of liberation…
While the rest of world continues to have orgasms over Kamasi Washington (who is, let it be said, a damn fine sax player), I remain riveted to BINKER & MOSES and their unique brand of semi-free jazz. Where their 2015 debut “DEM ONES” was taut, tight, and spare, their 2017 follow-up, “JOURNEY TO THE MOUNTAIN OF FOREVER” saw them stretch out into near epic territory. And this year’s live recording, “ALIVE IN THE EAST?” captures the best of both worlds, keeping the expanded instrumentation (two saxes, two drum sets, trumpet, and harp(!)) and the elemental/mythic explorations of their sophomore effort, while delivering a focused, hypnotic set that, like their debut, pushes out to the free fringes while remaining rooted – thanks, in large part, to Boyd’s breathtaking rhythmic command – in searing, soulful grooves. If “DEM ONES,” in its sax-and-drums minimalism, recalled Coltrane’s “INTERSTELLAR SPACE,” here, the no-longer-really-a-duo’s ecstatic collaboration brings to mind nothing so much as a latter-day “ASCENSION.” The inventive interplay between the five musicians is never short of Promethean, which seems more than appropriate given that the track titles suggest “ALIVE IN THE EAST?” as a musical creation myth. If any jazz ensemble can conjure a universe from their sound, it’s these guys…
But speaking of Coltrane…
It’s been a good year for unearthing lost works of genius. (Two of my favorite geniuses, in fact…) In addition to getting Welles’ OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND, 2018 also saw the release of two “new” albums from JOHN COLTRANE, each capturing him at a different point of creative transformation…
BOTH DIRECTIONS AT ONCE is assembled from sessions recorded by the classic Quartet (Coltrane, pianist McCoy Tyner, drummer Elvin Jones, and bassist Jimmy Garrison) in March of 1963. The title – likely chosen by Impulse! this year – is an apt one, as it finds the Quartet trying to balance the unbounded explorations of their live shows (best captured, perhaps, on THE COMPLETE 1961 VILLAGE VANGUARD RECORDINGS) with the more approachable sound urged by Impulse! on their studio recordings from that period. The Quartet were a little over a year away from the creative burst that would result in CRESCENT, and then A LOVE SUPREME, and while the music here never reaches that pitch of brilliance, it’s fascinating and rewarding to listen to four such incredibly gifted musicians search and struggle (the often underappreciated Garrison, in particular, gets a fine showing). The two untitled tracks (Untitled Originals 11383 and 11386, respectively… Try referencing those in cocktail party conversation…) probably come closest to the synthesis the Quartet was seeking, while the four different versions of “Impressions,” are a vital cross-section of, not just a single composition, but an entire musical approach in a state of flux.
The tracks on MILES DAVIS & JOHN COLTRANE: THE FINAL TOUR, BOOTLEG SERIES VOL. 6 have been available for years in various combinations and permutations, but Columbia finally gave them an official release this year, and even though these live recordings date from 1960, they’re still as mind-blowing today as they must have been then. Documenting three live shows – in Paris, Copenhagen, and Stockholm – these dates, as their title indicates, would be the last time Miles and Trane would play together. Coltrane had already left the Miles Davis Quintet, having recorded the seminal GIANT STEPS the year before, and he had no desire to return. Davis pled and Coltrane reluctantly relented, but insisted he would not go backwards and would play as he was, not as he had been. The results, ranging from jarring to jaw-dropping, are a reminder that even the saintly Coltrane could be contentious when pushed, and that Davis, the uncompromising visionary, was always willing to allow his players their creative freedom. The Paris concert, in particular, shows Coltrane in shockingly aggressive form, challenging the audience and the Quintet, alike, with his wild excursions. The audience can even be heard arguing about him between numbers. By Copenhagen and Stockholm, the frictions seemed to have subsided somewhat. Coltrane is a little more relaxed, and the Quintet has found ways to accommodate him, but the entire box set makes for electrifying listening. There’s even a brief radio interview with Coltrane where he talks a little bit about where he’s at creatively and gives a shout out to fellow tenor genius Sonny Rollins…
But speaking of shockingly aggressive…
Every bit as brutal as “STRANGER FRUIT,” and no less accomplished, is DAUGHTERS’ triumphant don’t-call-it-a-comeback-because-we’re-all-going-to-die album, “YOU WON’T GET WHAT YOU WANT.” A harrowing, evocative record that sounds like nothing less than the soundtrack to the post-apocalypse, it’s not that it’s assaultively paced (though it has its moments) or features wall-to-wall shrieks and wails – DAUGHTERS long ago left any adherence to grindcore orthodoxy in the dust. But, while it could never be described as delicate, “YOU WON’T GET WHAT YOU WANT” is actually a remarkably textured and atmospheric record – almost ambient, at times – using its vivid builds and blasts to paint a desolate, damaged landscape. Percussive bursts echo like stray machine-gun fire, guitars cut through throbbing bass lines with siren-like urgency, and Alexis S.F. Marshall’s strained baritone suggests civilization’s final emergency radio broadcasts. There’s a prodigious amount of musicianship on display, but always in service of the album’s larger, bleaker vision, steering clear of self-indulgence, and becoming something much more – overwhelmingly, at times – than the sum of its parts.
Washington, D.C.’s RED HARE and Oakland’s SUPER UNISON keep the hardcore punk spirit alive without succumbing to the stagnancy that’s so often a by-product of the genres rigid strictures. The pugilistic power chords that punctuate RED HARE’s “LITTLE ACTS OF DESTRUCTION” are slashed through by guitarist Jason Farrell’s dissonant, angular riffs, mirroring the call-and-response vocal pattern of Shawn Brown’s grizzly wails and Farrell’s sardonic retorts. Brown and Farrell were founding members of the seminal (though underappreciated at the time) D.C. hardcore band SWIZ, but their efforts with RED HARE are no mere retread or nostalgia exercise. Their riffs and rhythms come colored by the musical careers they’ve enjoyed in the interim, injecting post-hardcore’s rhythmic and tonal innovations back into their roots. Similarly, on their second full-length, “STELLA,” SUPER UNISON’s Meghan O’Niel Pennie might shout and shriek with the best of her hardcore forbears, but churning and swirling beneath her howls are layered instrumental harmonies, shifting tempos, and melodic – sometimes, even delicate – guitar riffs reminiscent of nothing so much as 90’s alternative (in a good way). On “Comfort,” they even offer up what can only be described as a hardcore ballad, Pennie’s screams taking on the character of an impassioned plea. Both bands show that there’s still room to stretch within the confines of the genre, and rank alongside WESTERN ADDICTION and WHITE LUNG as the very best it has to offer.
And EMINEM dropped his surprise album “KAMIKAZE,” a dizzying dive-bomb aimed directly at the heart of our nation of scolds. It’s been interesting to note the fidgety response to the record, as critics and audiences have tied themselves in knots arguing that the album’s unapologetic offensiveness should be grounds for its dismissal, while barely touching on the fact that it’s Eminem’s fiercest and most focused effort since “THE MARSHALL MATHERS LP.” It’s not just his blistering feats of flow or whiplash wordplay, as he mercilessly lays waste, often at lightning speed, to anyone who’s recently had anything unkind to say about him. His production has also steadily improved over the years, and seems carefully calibrated here to provide sonic texture and stylistic variety to an album that is, on its surface, blindingly fast and furious. But, of course, there’s always more to Eminem than what’s apparent on the surface, and “KAMIKAZE” does possess moments of genuine introspection, however disguised. The misogynist finger-pointing in the blackly comic “Normal” is deliberately staged as a front for his own feelings of shame, confusion, and guilt about his relationship history. And “Stepping Stone,” far from being a mere nostalgia trip, contains a genuinely mournful apology at its core. Yes, the album’s overall attitude is puerile, arrogant, vulgar, and violent, but whether the politically correct gatekeepers of our society like it or not, that’s the mode in which Eminem’s remarkable talents have often found their most piercing expression. As any audit of art history will reveal, artists and their artistry have often been deemed socially unacceptable and even culturally corrosive, because truthful artistic expressions frequently demand that the artist embrace the value in what society considers offensive and objectionable. We often want to celebrate their talent, while simultaneously seeking to “tame” them, overlooking the fact that a wholesome, culturally conformed artist would be, like everyone else, too repressed to express anything genuinely truthful. To refuse to acknowledge that expressions of rage, ego, aggression and provocation can be powerful, inspiring, and even beautiful – to call a dramatic return to form like “KAMIKAZE” a “regression” – is not criticism, but a dishonest act of moral desperation.
And speaking of dark arts…
IHSAHN’S latest, “AMR,” might be described as the INLAND EMPIRE to the MULHOLLAND DRIVE of 2016’s exceptional “ARKTIS.” His focus on song craft is still in evidence, but as the album’s title indicates, the overall guiding vision is darker and less approachable. That’s not a bug (especially when discussing the work of a Black Metal icon), it’s a feature, as it’s never less than fascinating to hear mainstream musical elements deployed in service of something so uncompromisingly grim. On the Black Metal flipside, SIGH frontman, Mirai Kawashima, worried publicly that the band’s latest, “HEIR TO DESPAIR” would be too personal and idiosyncratic for fans to enjoy. Of course, anyone who knows the band knows that unpredictability is an essential part of their creative signature, and in that respect, “HEIR TO DESPAIR” fits perfectly within their catalogue. Though not as grandly theatrical as 2015’s “GRAVEWARD,” much of it sounds like the SIGH we know and love. The new twists and turns, such as the inclusion of traditional Japanese melodies and instrumentation, or the psychedelic synth-driven trilogy, “Heresies,” are not only welcome innovations, but serve to add a sense of intimacy (for SIGH) and make “HEIR TO DESPAIR” their most intriguing listen since “IMAGINARY SONICSCAPE.”
But speaking of unpredictable twists and turns…
Though the title of SONS OF KEMET’s Impulse! debut, “YOUR QUEEN IS A REPTILE,” makes it sound like a harsh indictment, the music contained within is nothing short of exultant. An irresistible synthesis of sounds, dual drummers Seb Rochford and Tom Skinner, along with Theon Cross on tuba, lay down a blend of Afro-Cuban and Brass Band grooves, while leader and reed player Shabaka Hutchings preaches and wails through his sax in a variety of styles, as the spirit moves him. There’s even some spoken word poems/raps on a handful of tracks, courtesy of Joshua Idehen and Congo Natty. What’s remarkable is how organic – and infectious – all these disparate elements become when brought together, unifying in what the track titles reveal are not a series of condemnations, but counter-celebrations, each an ode to an iconic black woman the ensemble has chosen to honor as their Queen.
A similar synthesis of disparate sounds, though more melancholic and avant-garde, can be found on AMBROSE AKINMUSIRE’s “ORIGAMI HARVEST.” Akinmusire teams with the classical Mivos String Quartet and rapper Kool AD to create a series of moody meditations on America and moving memorials to black lives unjustly lost. Throughout, Akinmusire is often content to step back and allow the Quartet to carry the major portion of the music, his trumpet less a lead instrument than a haunting presence, momentarily materializing, then fading away. Simultaneously caustic and delicate, those looking for anything resembling a traditional jazz album will be disconcerted initially, and “ORIGAMI HARVEST” can make for forbidding listening. But such daring explorations are not only the essence of jazz, as in this case, they often pack a powerful, poignant punch.
And speaking of poignancy…
EMMA RUTH RUNDLE made no secret of the fact that the writing and recording of 2016’s “MARKED FOR DEATH” was so physically and emotionally taxing, it nearly killed her. And as anyone who has heard that album knows, the anguish and the stakes were viscerally palpable. Few albums can boast its level of intensity or emotional impact. Her follow-up, “ON DARK HORSES,” finds her psyche and her songwriting on firmer ground, and as a result, has left me struggling with myself. Like all her work, “ON DARK HORSES” is a heavy, haunting, beautifully crafted album, more than worthy of praise. In many ways, it’s a more controlled and disciplined album than “MARKED FOR DEATH.” But, as such, would it be fair of me, as a fan or a critic, to suggest that there might be something missing…? It seems shortsighted and selfish to demand – or even request – that our beloved artists destroy themselves for their art. And when I read that Rundle had kindled a revitalizing romance with JAY JAYLE’s Evan Patterson (the pair duet on the tellingly titled “Light Song,” which is one of the album’s most beautiful tracks, reminiscent of Rundle’s best work with THE NOCTURNES), I was genuinely happy for her. (Or, you know, as genuinely happy as a person gets for someone they know only through their artistic output.) But as lush and brilliant as “ON DARK HORSES” is, it simply doesn’t punch me in the gut, crawl inside me, hollow me out, and leave me heaving the way “MARKED FOR DEATH” does. And, reading that back, I have to ask: Is that even a criticism…? And let’s say she HAD produced something as mercilessly cathartic as “MARKED FOR DEATH,” would doing so have somehow retroactively reduced its predecessor’s power and personal impact…? I don’t know. Perhaps we simply need to let an artist’s towering achievements stand, and not allow their long shadows to obscure that which might seem lesser only by comparison. To insist on anything more, even for an unforgiving critic like myself, would be… (sorry about this…) ruthless.
Finally, two different trios produced two very different, but equally exciting, instrumental albums this year. THE MESSTHETICS pairs Brendan Canty and Joe Lally, known primarily as Fugazi’s rocksteady backbone, with jazz/avant-garde guitarist Anthony Pirog, and the results, as documented on their self-titled debut, are as sensational as you’d expect. Canty and Lally haven’t lost a shred of their singular synergy in the years since Fugazi announced their hiatus, and given that their post-hardcore rhythmic stylings have always incorporated jazzy flights and flourishes, Pirog proves to be a perfect fit, seamlessly blending his own sound with theirs. Running the gamut from aggressive thrashers to angular, HOVERCRAFT-esque excursions, to quietly hypnotic meditations, some of the tracks might leave you pining for a Fugazi reunion (optimally with the new addition of Pirog on lead), but there’s no doubt that this trio is a force to be reckoned with on their own. And NIGHT VERSES, on their latest release, “FROM THE GALLERY OF SLEEP,” create such a thick, layered, spiraling sound, full of racing, snaky riffs and intricate percussion, it’s sometimes hard to believe there’s only three of them. Each distinctive track has its own ebb and flow, but there’s an oceanic fluidity to the album as a whole that carries you buoyantly over its tidal swells, as the trio gracefully flows in and out of numerous genres, from punk to prog to psychedelia, without ever sounding indulgent or unfocused. Though it’s tempting, at times, to try and untangle each track’s dense orchestrations, it’s best to just give yourself up to the journey.
Oh, did I say, “Finally…?”
Because, it’s true, that’s the music I found most interesting that was released THIS YEAR, but…
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the secret Facebook musical cosa nostra that I was inducted into last year… Or, I guess, year before last, now…
Normally, I don’t much like being a member of anything, but this is really sort of the musical equivalent of a book club (only with a lot of weird rites, rituals, and by-laws that it’s probably best I don’t get into), and while I don’t like book clubs, because I want to read what I want to read when I want to read it, and it usually takes me months, anyway, as I noted earlier, music is a little different because it’s not as much of a time commitment…
The point:
Thanks to this little group whose existence I’m not even supposed to speak of, I’ve made a couple of great discoveries this year…
The first is Australia’s KING GIZZARD AND THE LIZARD WIZARD. Now, I know what you’re thinking. But don’t let the name fool you: They’re EXACTLY what that name would lead you to believe. Namely, some unholy hybrid of FRANK ZAPPA, KING CRIMSON, and LED ZEPPELIN with a west coast punk rock fuel injector. If that doesn’t intrigue you, check out 2016’s “NONAGON INFINITY.” If that doesn’t do it for you, you’re probably hopeless, but you can also check out any of the five – that’s right, five – albums they released in 2017, including a sci-fi rock opera, a jazz collaboration, an album of microtonal explorations, and a more straightforward (for them) rock album released in the public domain. You might think five albums in a year would tax a band’s creativity. You’d be wrong. Every one of them is inventive, eccentric, and inspired. The only thing this band can’t do is stop…
But speaking of stopping…
This is the last bit. I swear.
But this one is also, far and away, the best and most important musical discovery I’ve made this year. And if you want to talk about coming late to the party…
I’ve always known ABOUT Nick Cave. I knew who he was. I had heard OF his band THE BAD SEEDS. Had I ever actually HEARD his band THE BAD SEEDS…? I don’t know. There’s a part of me that thinks, if I had, I would have climbed onboard a long time ago. But there’s also part of me that knows how erratically prejudicial I could be about music in my youth…
A few years ago, though, I read an article about a band called THE BIRTHDAY PARTY. This was apparently Nick Cave’s post-punk band before THE BAD SEEDS. And the terms the writer used to describe them were so incendiary – even apocalyptic – I figured I had to check them out. So, I picked up a couple of albums and they were… OK. I mean, I see what the guy was talking about, and they weren’t bad, but my overall feeling was, I’ll stick with THE GERMS…
Then I started watching PEAKY BLINDERS. (You might remember, I mentioned this a bit earlier…) The song used in the opening credits grabbed me immediately. A B-minor blues, with a vaguely Western edge that evoked – not the soundtrack, but the feel of – Eastwood’s darker cowboy movies, it was also spare and desolate, almost nihilistic, with threatening vocals, and a bell that rang like impending doom…
If you’ve seen the show, you’re more than familiar with “Red Right Hand”…
Over the course of the first season, it became clear that whoever did that song was all over the rest of the soundtrack like a bad rash, and I was really liking what I was hearing, so I looked it up. Lo, and behold…
By sheer coincidence, at this exact time, the top secret music group I’m a member of that I didn’t mention earlier was winding their way through Nick Cave’s entire discography. Now, according to the ancient bylaws, you’re supposed to go one album at a time, but who has time for that…? I put NICK CAVE & THE BAD SEEDS’ three-decades-long catalogue on shuffle.
I listen to a lot of music. My taste is, if not catholic, at least eclectic. But you know how, every once in a while, a band or particular musical artist comes along who really hits you where you live…? Something in their music makes them seem like kindred spirits, or expresses things that feel very personal to you. You become obsessed, living for a time almost exclusively in their albums, learning as much about yourself as about them. You start carrying the music within you to such a degree you almost don’t need to listen to it anymore, but at the same time, it seems inexhaustible. Every time you put it on, you find something new…
A handful of artists have occupied – still occupy – that space in my life. But it very quickly became apparent that NICK CAVE & THE BAD SEEDS would join their number.
It’s hard to sum up the musical style of such a feverishly creative band that has released 17 very different albums over more than thirty years. At root, NICK CAVE & THE BAD SEEDS play a mix of Blues, Gospel, and Folk, but channeled through a chaotic, passionate, and poetic post-punk sensibility. Over the years, their sound has also picked up, as the inspiration strikes them, elements of pop, alternative, electronica, classical, and even – lyrically, at least – hip-hop (I’m fairly certain the violence and vulgarity found on some of the tracks on “MURDER BALLADS” is not only an homage to those real down and dirty blues songs from the past, but a deliberate response to the cultural and critical condemnations of gangster rap that were happening around the same time)…
Which brings us to Nick.
A baritone in the Jim Morrison tradition, but grittier and less polished, he can growl menacingly, croon beautifully, or howl at the moon like a lycanthropic Jerry Lee Lewis. As a front man, he’s a cross between a dark preacher and a punk poet. His lyrics often tell stories, in the folk tradition, frequently narrated from the perspectives of different characters. They can be wickedly witty and satirical, bleak and desolate, confrontational and provocative, or even delicate and romantic, depending on his mood, but there’s also always a mythic, sometimes even spiritual, undercurrent to them. In other words, he’s, all at once, the heir apparent to Jim Morrison, Johnny Cash, Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, and Darby Crash…
To which, you all reply: “We know.”
Because it’s been thirty fucking years, and pretty much everybody was a fan before me, and I’m like the guy who shows up to his first day of film school going, “Hey, have you heard of this Scorsese guy…? I saw a couple of his films last night and…”
I get it.
But fuck you. NICK CAVE & THE BAD SEEDS are mine now. In fact, I’m pretty sure they exist solely for me, at this point in my life, and the rest of you are just lucky hangers-on.
In any case, I’m done. Until next year, at least. Maybe forever. These things are always so exhausting… I’m gonna go listen to “DIG, LAZARUS, DIG!!!” again…
If Scarface and Soderbergh can whimsically pop in and out of retirement, so can I…
This site has spent most of the year in a state of hibernation, as I have been focusing my energies elsewhere. And, in all honesty, it is likely to remain so. An obvious result of my concentrating on other endeavors is that I really haven’t consumed much in the way of current films, current books, or current television shows in the last several months. Certainly, not enough to honestly weigh in on which might or might not be the year’s best or worst. But I’m always listening to music, seeking out new music, and picking up new albums from reliable favorites. And I’m always happy to write about them…
Many people feel that 2016 has been an especially dark year. Some have even described it as one of the worst ever. While I’m not entirely sure that’s true, it’s perhaps fitting that the year’s most notable releases seem saturated with that sense of darkness, doom, and gloom. From the final offerings of two departed greats, to energized efforts from established acts who have found themselves walking on the dark side, to peak achievements from those for whom the dark is their natural habitat, almost every album on the list below seems heavy and shadowed…
Of course, it could also just be a reflection of my own personal tastes. Regardless, these are the records I found especially ear-catching this year, and I can recommend any and all of them without reservation…
10. GARBAGE, Strange Little Birds
Garbage was there when the genre designation of “Alternative” became synonymous with, “popular.” And it is a testament to their talents that, throughout their career, they have managed to remain – remarkably and respectably – both. It’s not just their often imitated, but never bettered sound – a densely layered swirl of dance pop, industrial rock, and electronica, captained by drummer Butch Vig’s prodigious production acumen. It’s also – perhaps even primarily – the feisty, fiery punk persona of the band’s front-lioness, Shirley Manson, who, despite achieving iconic fame, has never lost touch with her misfit soul. In a musical landscape currently overrun by gratingly optimistic pop plastic, Strange Little Birds is, fittingly, a strange little album, and its willingness to be unapologetically – even confrontationally – neurotic, anxiety-ridden, perverse, pessimistic, and lonesome seems somehow reassuring. A dark, jagged, meditative mission statement gifted to the marginalized everywhere, it’s also an exceptional achievement, encapsulating everything that makes the band special (including their propensity for being subtly challenging) – a document of how far they’ve come, and how true they’ve stayed to themselves in the process. Garbage has never shied away from their popularity, but Strange Little Birds is a lugubrious, yet loving reminder that, while all are welcome, their true audience has always been those who don’t feel welcome anywhere else.
9. NIECHEC , Niechec
After their spellbinding debut, Śmierć w miękkim futerku (“Death in Soft Fur,” if Google translator is reliable, which we know it isn’t…), Poland’s Niechec dodged the sophomore curse by writing and recording their second album, destroying it entirely, and then immediately writing, recording, and releasing their official self-titled follow-up. We’ll never know what was contained in those original recordings, but it’s hard to care much when they’ve offered something so utterly unique and engaging in its stead. On Niechec (the album), Niechec (the band) actually picks up right where Śmierć w miękkim futerku left off, delving further into their dark, zig-zagging (and, often enough, goddamn groovy) fusion of jazz, post-punk, and good old-fashioned rock, plus whatever the hell else they feel like throwing into the mix. It actually makes for a fascinating tonal (if slightly more aggressive) compliment to Bowie’s eccentric jazz explorations on Blackstar. But it’s not just Niechec’s fearless inventiveness that makes the album so compelling, it’s that the fact that it can be so intriguingly unpredictable while still maintaining such a hypnotic and haunting sonic synthesis, synergy, and cohesion.
8. DANNY BROWN, Atrocity Exhibition
Like the musical manifestation of a psychotic break, Danny Brown’s Atrocity Exhibition is relentless: relentlessly dark, relentlessly aggressive, and relentlessly delivered in his signature shrill, yet ferocious flow. It is even relentlessly paced – minus a few, no less erratic, exceptions (such as the addled opener, “Downward Spiral,” the angular “Pneumonia,” or the eerie, and surprisingly affecting, “Lost”) – picking up momentum as it barrels forward. But, like the most extreme psychotic episode, it is also overpowering and undeniable. Brown has constructed a catchy, captivating nightmare, evoking images of bodies in ecstatic motion as equally as in plastic, keeping even the most disturbing moments perversely buoyant with infectious beats and pitch-black humor. Grim, jarring, and uncompromising – and ultimately, strangely galvanizing – Atrocity Exhibition is a high-energy horror-show that will leave you battered, breathless, and begging for more.
7. PLAGUE VENDOR, Bloodsweat
Crashing through your speakers like the bastard spawn of Gun Club and the Stooges, Plague Vendor’s seamless synthesis of proto- and post-punk might not be particularly pioneering, but the band’s latest, Bloodsweat, shakes, rattles, and rolls with a refreshingly raw intensity that has been absent from so much contemporary punk music. The infectious, thumping beats and pounding chords, warped periodically by pitch bends, throb beneath Brandon Blaine’s tortile baritone with barely contained violence, only to explode into frenzied assaults and tortured shrieks for their chaotic choruses. Each track burns with a threatening instability, as if, at any moment, the band might rattle apart – musically, mentally, or emotionally. Comparisons to garage rock revivalists, from Jack White to The Hives, may abound, but Plague Vendor is neither as coolly calculated as the former, nor as charmingly satirical as the latter, opting instead for a straightforward, sincere, and scorching attack. Where I come from, that’s punk rock.
6. Emma Ruth Rundle – Marked for Death
About a year ago, Emma Ruth Rundle (of The Nocturnes, Marriages, and Red Sparrowes) secluded herself in the cold of the California desert to write and record her second solo effort. The creative hermitage evolved into an exorcism of some very personal demons and Rundle emerged with what might be the most powerful album of her career. In terms of sheer cathartic impact, only Sinead O’Connor’s The Lion and the Cobra occurs to me as a possible rival. Hovering somewhere between doom folk and post-rock (though such groping classifications do little to describe it), Marked for Death is wrenching, aching, devastating – and devastatingly beautiful. Often armed with nothing more than her rumbling baritone guitar and, all at once, weathered and vulnerable voice, Rundle unflinchingly confronts death, grief, and all other manner of fates and furies, repeatedly bringing herself to the breaking point, before finally letting go on the shattering closer, “Real Big Sky.” If this album doesn’t reduce you to abysmal, cleansing sobs, all I can say is that this whole music thing might not be for you.
5. LEONARD COHEN, You Want it Darker
Like Bowie’s Blackstar, another virtuoso valediction from a dearly departed musical icon. But where Bowie’s swansong offers meditations on mortality, Cohen’s suggests a weary resignation from life. Still, surrender has never sounded so quietly majestic. Though, the music is typical (and typically entrancing) latter-day Leonard – that is to say, it evokes closing time in some desolate dive bar, its last call sung by a swaying, slightly tipsy Gospel choir – the lyrics are among Cohen’s bleakest and best. Speaking in his deepest basso profundo (Cohen barely bothers to really sing, anymore; not that he needs to), he shrugs in dismissal, disillusion, and despair, in the face of friends, gods, and lovers, but always with his inimitable combination of cool-headedness and warm-heartedness, transubstantiating sorrowful sentiments into his unique brand of poetry, peace, wit, and wisdom.
4. DARCY JAMES ARGUE’S SECRET SOCIETY, Real Enemies
You’ve never heard a Big Band jazz outfit play like this. Conceived as a musical examination of the socio-political paranoia that festers beneath the surface of American culture, Real Enemies sounds like the tense and sinister soundtrack to a 70’s political thriller, only erupting into spiraling avant-garde flourishes, and ornamented with spooky atmospheric touches and relevant real-world samples worthy of Al Jourgensen. Though divided into separate tracks, it’s best experienced as an entire journey, the individual songs functioning more like movements in a symphony. As inventive and effective musically as conceptually, Real Enemies is a carefully crafted and seductive twelve-tone descent into the conspiratorial mindset.
3. THE JD ALLEN TRIO, Americana
Everything old is new again. Allen’s intensive exploration of the blues roots of jazz (and, for that matter, all American music) is much more than a mere academic exercise. His trio wails, struts, and swings with an irresistible soulfulness and sincerity, cutting deep into nine blues-based tracks that manage to evoke Skip James and Son House alongside Coltrane and Sonny Rollins. There’s even a rueful, roiling cover of Vera Hall’s “Another Man Done Gone,” that features some truly breathtaking sax and bass interplay. All at once, familiar and revelatory, Americana accomplishes what so many popular jazz players have been attempting for decades – looking back in order to move forward – while additionally offering a thoughtful survey, and a passionate critique, of the history of America, its culture, and its music.
2. IHSAHN, Arktis
By far, the most upbeat album on this list – which is a surprising thing to say of the latest offering from one of the pioneers of Norwegian black metal – but, having expressed a desire to focus on song craft after the wild experimentation of 2013’s Das Seelenbrechen, Ihsahn has delivered what may be his most approachable – and inspiring – album to date. Arktis is still an aggressively intense listen, of course, driven by searing guitar licks, ominous keyboards, pummeling percussion, and Ihsahn’s unsettling Satanic rasp, but like JD Allen’s Americana, the album succeeds in being surprisingly and engagingly tuneful, while sacrificing none of its creator’s core characteristics or capabilities. Perhaps even more strikingly, while the familiar lyrical themes of death and darkness are still omnipresent, rather than a bleak survey, a brutal attack, or a misanthropic brood, Arktis’ confrontations with the abyss ultimately offer a vital, empowering vision (sometimes veering perilously close to what can only be described as self-help or tough-love). Arktis, as its title indicates, may be a harsh realm, but as Ihsahn makes clear, it is precisely in such forbidding landscapes that we are given our best chance to stand strong and shine.
1. DAVID BOWIE, Blackstar
Speaking of shining, I’m not even a David Bowie fan, but there’s no question that this album is the year’s – and possibly Bowie’s – crowning achievement, incorporating elements from across the eccentric icon’s eclectic musical career, while still stretching out into new territory (not bad for an artist pushing 70…). Bowie knew how ill he was during the album’s composition and recording and, as such, Blackstar feels simultaneously visionary and funereal (especially on the dirge-like “Lazarus” and the stunning title track). Synthesizing haunted tones and off-kilter experimentation with pop hooks and an almost transcendental beauty, Blackstar is a musical memoir, a self-authored requiem, and a superlative send-off for a truly unique talent.
Honorable Mentions: On their debut album, Auto, Super Unison delivers the kind of blistering hardcore onslaught we haven’t heard since Black Flag (or, at least, Western Addiction). Dalek’s infusion of metal, industrial, and ambient music into their incisive, intellectual brand of hip-hop hit an apex on Asphalt for Eden. The dizzying, dazzling, and sneering White Lung continue to evolve impressively with Paradise. KA’s Honor Killed the Samurai offers a subdued, stoic – and also moving and thought-provoking – tour of the internal conflicts of hood life. Vijay Iyer & Wadada Leo Smith bring their unique improvisational chemistry to the razor’s edge of revelation in their musical realization of Nasreen Mohamedi’s artwork on A Cosmic Rhythm With Each Stroke. And French/Ethiopian team-up UkanDanZ sound appealingly like Rage Against the Machine, only with traditional African chants and sax solos, on their debut, Awo.
From earthquakes in Asia to epidemics in South America, from increasing economic inequality to encroaching environmental catastrophe, from Charlie Hebdo to Boko Haram, it’s been hard, over the last year, not to feel a sense of instability about our planet, uncertainty about our future. And while there’s nothing daring or visionary in suggesting that volatile circumstances often inspire some of the greatest art, it’s also been difficult not to feel a bit frivolous compiling a list of 2015’s best pop culture offerings…
And yet…
While writing the retrospective below, patterns began to emerge: Stories of people trapped in chaos and conflict, trying to find their way. Oppressive atmospheres, thick with dread. Binary oppositions dissolving into disorder around lone figures desperately seeking to blaze a path between. Artistic and scholarly attempts to find new perspectives on a world that, for all our intellectual progress, so often seems incomprehensible. And an almost desperate creativity as new modes of expression are sought to articulate our dismay, our determination, and our defiance. In various ways, every work below is a reflection of – and a response to – the moment in history in which we find ourselves.
And isn’t that what art is for…?
Maybe it’s not a “Best of…” As I always say, I’m just one guy. There’s a lot of great work from the past year that I haven’t seen. A lot that I’ll probably never see. Nor is everything on the list below flawless. Perfection, after all, is rarely inspiring. But each, in its way, offers a striking, inventive, resonant vision of life in these distinctly, if not uniquely, troubled times…
* * * * *
MOVIES
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THE ASSASSIN
From stunning star, Shu Qi, to the staggering cinematography by Lee Ping Bin, Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s The Assassin is almost intolerably beautiful to look at. But its breathtaking beauty is more than just skin deep. As engaging – and elusive – as it is entrancing, The Assassin borrows its often deliberately obscure narrative from “Nie Yinniang,” a 9th Century chuanqi by Pei Xing about a young girl who is taken from her home at ten years old, only to return five years later as a trained killer. The similarity pretty much ends there, but attempting to sum up the film’s enigmatic events would be futile. Plot is not the point. A diaphanous portrait of a girl trying to reconcile who she once was with who she has become – caught, like her uneasily insurrectionist home province, between fealty and freedom – The Assassin is a work of ethereal poetry. A meditation on the burdens of flight. If that sounds incomprehensibly abstract, it’s only fitting for a film this rich and this delicate. It’s the kind of cinema that demands the repeated viewings you’ll be more than happy to give it.
CHI-RAQ
Inventive, explosive, hilarious, heartrending, vulgar, visionary, incisive, and outrageous, Chi-Raq is Spike Lee’s most inspired and arresting film since… Well, at least, since The 25th Hour, but possibly ever… A fiery socio-political protest in madcap satirical drag, Chi-Raq transplants Lysistrata to the streets of Chicago’s South Side, using Aristophanes’ anti-war text to take on America’s epidemic of urban gun violence. If extreme situations call for extreme measures, Lee is more than up to the task, and his film pulls out all the stops: as in Aristophanes, the characters speak entirely in verse (a strategy that’s right at home in the world of rap battles and the Dozens), conversations spontaneously evolve into choreographed dance numbers, and the performances (led by an appealingly sensitive and sensual Teyonah Parris) are often hilariously over-the-top. There’s even a Chorus-cum-Rudy Ray Moore analog named Dolomites, played with note-perfect panache by Samuel L. Jackson. But what’s truly extraordinary is not that Lee can so confidently combat lunacy with lunacy, but that he succeeds in deftly balancing the outlandishly comedic with the affectingly dramatic, the drunkenly profane with the soberly sacred, never losing sight of the searing grief and anger that drive the film. He pulls no punches in his depictions of a mother’s loss or a minister’s outrage. For all that his characters can come off like cartoons, they bleed real blood and cry all-too-recognizable tears. An insane response to an insane world, Chi-Raq is a hysterical cry for help.
A PIGEON SAT ON A BRANCH REFLECTING ON EXISTENCE
A literal bird’s eye view of humanity, Roy Andersson’s A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence contemplates the absurdities of human frailty and fragility from a puzzled, yet pacific remove. Noncommittally following two traveling salesman through a series of bleakly comic vignettes, from the mundane to the momentous, from the mournful to the quietly beautiful, Andersson’s use of static wide shots, minimal cuts, and dramatic performances reminiscent of zombie mental patients allows us to view the action (and inertia) as an alien species might. Laughter and tears, love and carnage are all observed with the same bemused detachment. Wringing horror from hilarity, significance from simplicity, and in both cases, vice-versa, A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence is a funhouse mirror held up to human nature: a desolate and deadpan, strikingly minimalist and strangely moving vision of our species, our civilization, ourselves.
EX MACHINA
Alex Garland’s quiet and contained story of a programmer (Domhnall Gleeson) hired to perform the Turing test on an artificial intelligence (a mesmerizing Alicia Vikander) is less a cautionary sci-fi fable about the project’s inherent dangers than an intense psychological drama about the ways in which people attempt to manipulate and control each other. We have invented the enemy and she is us. Full review here.
INSIDE OUT
“Children’s psychological comedy” is not an especially competitive genre. But Inside Out, Pixar’s tale of the inner workings of a young girl’s brain as she confronts the challenges of adapting to life in a new city, is not only inspired and inventive, it is also every bit as magical, and as moving, as any of the studio’s best offerings. Following the personifications of Joy (an aggressively chipper Amy Poehler) and Sadness (a delightfully dismal Phyllis Smith) on an odyssey through 11-year-old Riley’s (Kaitlyn Dias) turbulent psychological landscape, Inside Out paints an imaginative, insightful portrait of the human mind and its workings, while – somewhat daringly, in our inane, negativity-shaming, feel good culture – satirizing our obsessive desperation to stay positive all the time, and acknowledging the value of negative responses to trauma. Featuring faultless vocal performances by Bill Hader, Mindy Kaling, and Lewis Black as Fear, Disgust, and Anger, respectively, and an especially notable turn by Pixar regular Richard Kind as Riley’s former imaginary friend Bing-Bong, the film is, simultaneously, so instantly appealing and so plainly purposeful, it would feel manipulative if it weren’t also so deeply sincere. By turns, hilarious and heartbreaking, Inside Out is one of the more poignant, powerful, and perceptive “Children’s” movies you’re likely to find.
THE TRIBE
A bleak and brutal film set within the squalid corridors of a boarding school for the deaf, Ukrainian filmmaker Myroslav Slaboshpytskyi’s debut feature has received a great deal of acclaim for its effective cinematic rendering of a world without dialogue (the film is purposefully presented without any subtitles, so unless you’re fluent in Ukrainian sign language…), but has left a few critics and moviegoers pondering what, exactly, Slaboshpytskyi was trying to say. Viscerally and formally arresting – both riveting and, at times, difficult to watch – The Tribe’s descent into teenage cruelty and criminality is a study of contained and systematized savagery: a microcosmic allegory exposing the violence inherent in any form of tribalism. The interactions and interrelationships between the students are clear enough, even if the specifics sometimes get a bit muddled, but more importantly, the lack of dialogue deprives them of the ability to rationalize or justify their actions (to us, anyway). We are silent observers, any sympathy or identification offered only fleetingly, if at all. Composed almost entirely of subtly, but impressively choreographed long takes, often featuring deliberately repeated compositions, the film literally traps us within its characters’ grim and grimy routines. When our unapproachable – and not especially likeable – protagonist disrupts the natural order, the escalating conflicts he sets in motion provide a desolate and disturbing commentary on escaping such oppressive systems. A comment that, perhaps, some critics and moviegoers have no desire to hear.
WILD TALES
An altogether different – and more easily enjoyable – take on human savagery can be found in Damian Szifron’s blackly comic anthology, Wild Tales. Over the course of six riotously funny vignettes, Szifron plunges with maniacal glee into the repressed animal passions that explode from within when people are pushed to their limits. Vengeance, guilt, greed, frustration, and jealousy are vividly caricatured in stories of road rage, marriage, and the particular rage evoked when navigating bureaucracy. But unlike Slaboshpytski, Szifron makes his characters both cartoonishly outrageous and uncomfortably sympathetic, over the top yet firmly rooted in our feral instincts, and at various times, we find ourselves almost cheering for them to indulge the worser beasts of their natures. Unbridled and unforgiving, but also cathartic and vital, Wild Tales reminds us that, while such base behavior might be distressingly common, it is common to us all, and suggests that there is something liberating, even empowering, about facing the beasts within and laughing.
’71
Such is the powerful authenticity of Yann Demange’s intense action-drama, ’71, you could almost believe it was actually shot in the decade in which it takes place. Driven by a genuine street-level urgency and arresting visual immediacy, the film energetically evokes some of that bygone era’s best cinematic offerings without ever falling prey to nostalgia, caricature, or mimicry. Dropping us in the rough and ravaged streets of 1970’s Belfast, the film follows Gary Hook (Jack O’Connell), an unassuming British soldier abandoned by his company in the aftermath of a riot, whose run for his life brings him face to face with the realization that his country’s war on IRA terror may be more complex than it appears. A captivating cat-and-mouse chase film, adept and assured enough to dwell in its more meditative moments, ’71’s grey and gritty historical odyssey also resonates as an understated and artful allegory reflecting our own present-day attempts to navigate the moral complexities of our war-torn world.
WTF…?
Not necessarily disappointments, but some surprisingly poor offerings that have received inexplicable praise…
MAD MAX: FURY ROAD
A prolonged demolition derby roaring its way through an apocalyptic (and aesthetic) wasteland, George Miller’s final (we hope) installment in the bafflingly overrated Mad Max franchise has been met with such widespread superlative acclaim, I’ve been forced to question, not only the judgment, but the sanity of many critics I respect and rely on. Utterly devoid of competent storytelling, compelling characters, or any kind of content at all, the film is so unceasingly kinetic and cacophonous it actually becomes monotonous. Yes, the effects are (for the most part) practical, and the choreography often impressive, but in service of what? Despite what any critic may claim regarding Fury Road’s deeper meanings or cultural significance, any anorexic attempts at feminist commentary or genre reinvention are brutally pulverized by the film’s barreling bombast, thudding script, bloodless characters, and wooden performances. At a time when so many critics claim to be weary of empty, overblown spectacle, the praise lavished on Miller and Mad Max seems almost hilariously ironic. It’s not that the emperor has no clothes; it’s that the clothes have no emperor.
SPOTLIGHT
Earnest, sincere, likable, and, unfortunately, not very good, Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight wants very badly to be All the President’s Men, but possesses none of that film’s immersive intrigue, precision craftsmanship, or wit. Focusing on the Boston journalists who exposed the child abuse cover-up in the Catholic church, Spotlight neither invests in their drive, their personal relationship to the story, or the larger significance of the story, itself, amounting to little more than a dull and superficial recounting of factual events. Minus a bizarrely mannered Mark Ruffalo, most of the cast gives committed, sincere performances, but they can’t save the film from its flat screenplay or shoddy technique (politely excused as “restrained” by those critics swayed by the film’s good intentions). It’s not offensively bad. It’s just offensively bland.
CLOUDS OF SILS-MARIA
Olivier Assayas’ Clouds of Sils-Maria is exactly the type of brittle and pretentious exercise that gives arthouse films a bad name. A drama about an aging actress (Juliet Binoche) and her young assistant (Kristen Stewart), the film doesn’t explore their relationship so much as absently bat it around like bored cat with a dying mouse, punctuating their labored interactions with pedantic babble about art, truth, maturity, etc. (“It’s theatre. It’s an interpretation of life. It can be truer than life itself.”) Stewart is as excellent and understated as the bewildering praise heaped on the film suggests, but Binoche is shockingly poor, as forced and awkward as the dialogue she’s made to recite. An empty and self-important film about empty and self-important people that veers perilously close to self-parody.
TELEVISION
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RIVER
By now, the trope of the gifted – and cursed – eccentric detective has become as worn and weary as River’s title character. But with her six part BBC series, writer Abi Morgan (Shame, The Hour) successfully breathes new life into the tired premise by giving investigative focus to the miseries that drive her protagonist, rather than the mystery that drives the show’s plot. As psychologically troubled Detective Inspector John River, Stellan Skarsgard delivers a stellar performance, equal parts weathered and vulnerable, compassionate and removed. Probing his peculiar and problematic relationships to his co-workers and his cases, River offers an unsettlingly unromanticized depiction of loneliness and loss, exposing the contradictions and hypocrisies lurking beneath our culture’s fascination with mavericks and outsiders. Dark, desolate, and supersaturated with a haunting melancholy, River is uncommonly powerful and affecting television.
THE AFFAIR
After spending the initial installments of its second season finding its feet, The Affair made a sudden standing long jump into a series of wrenching, challenging, and uncomfortable episodes that live up to – and even surpass – the artfully agonizing promise of its prior season. Expanding its he-said/she-said narrative structure to include the perspectives of Maura Tierney’s Helen Solloway and Joshua Jackson’s Cole Lockhart, The Affair continues its unflinching plunge into the muddy waters of its characters emotional lives, reaching darker depths than ever, as it tallies the costs of their failed relationships and individual desires. As Noah Solloway, Dominic West continues to peel back the layers of his charmingly roguish screen persona, fearlessly exposing the festering self-doubt and self-loathing underneath, while Ruth Wilson’s Alison Bailey remains intriguingly inscrutable, all at once, ice cold and disarmingly delicate. But it’s Tierney who really emerges as the season’s star player, executing a magnificently controlled breakdown, as Helen struggles – and fails – to pull herself together in the aftermath of her broken marriage and find a way move forward. Best of all, in a truly masterful stroke, the season finale successfully folded The Affair’s strained murder mystery scaffolding into its character-driven narrative with a jarring reveal that neither compromised the show’s realism nor simplified its emotional conflicts.
DAREDEVIL
Aside from being just tremendously entertaining, Netflix’s Daredevil performs a marvelous balancing act. It’s not just the series’ artful blend of gritty urban drama and comic book fantasy, or its thematic exploration of the space between heroism and villainy. On every level, one finds a study in sharp contrasts that are allowed to bleed into one another until it becomes impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. Even its dramatic tone expertly synthesizes the appealingly old-fashioned with the strikingly fresh. The central duality, of course, is the conflict between lawyer/vigilante Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) and entrepreneur/criminal kingpin Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio). Anyone with the slightest familiarity with the comic book knows which one is the good guy and which is the bad, but over the course of its thirteen episodes, Daredevil blurs the distinctions between them, offering a surprisingly rich portrayal of two troubled men, both raised on violence, each trying to save their city in the only way they know how. And it’s that investment in character that gives the series its grace. Unlike a lot of other comic adaptations, Daredevil’s choreographed martial arts melees and quick-witted rhythmic banter are consistently supported by the recognizable reality in which it remains anchored, and the identifiable humanity that runs through its veins.
DOCTOR WHO
One of its finest, to date, Doctor Who’s ninth season offers an intense and intensive investigation into its title character’s complex and combative relationship with death. Comprised primarily of two-parters – a structure that not only reflects the thematic death/life dualism, but also riffs on the season’s driving narrative mystery of the “hybrid” – each story examines the complicated comingling of mortality and morality, from The Magician’s Apprentice/The Witch’s Familiar (the series’ first truly worthy sequel to 1975’s superlative Genesis of the Daleks), which begins with a variation on the old ethical question of killing a baby Hitler, to The Zygon Invasion/The Zygon Inversion (a fierce political allegory that would make Malcolm Hulke proud), which critiques the notion of revolution and righteous slaughter, to Heaven Sent/Hell Bent (a haunting and heartrending finale), which considers the Doctor’s extraordinary determination – and extraordinary recklessness – when it comes to saving lives. The Doctor/Clara relationship (which has become one of the most engaging in the series’ history) provides the season’s beating heart, their dynamic anchoring – and reflecting – the show’s binary explorations. Now fully comfortable and confident in the title role, Peter Capaldi pushes at the boundaries of his Doctor’s charismatic cantankerousness, adding layers of humor and compassion, as well as shades of Doctors past. And Jenna Coleman continues to dig deeper into Clara, maintaining her captivating confidence and charm, even as she continues to evolve, making the most of her memorable last bow as the new series’ longest serving companion.
ASH VS. EVIL DEAD
After 2013’s unexceptional Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell produced Evil Dead remake, those with a longstanding love for Raimi’s classic slapstick-horror trilogy could be forgiven for approaching this series with some trepidation. News of Campbell’s return as the hapless Ash was met with giddy anticipation, but the question lingered: After 30 years, could they recapture the black comic magic of the originals? And, considering how different the three films are from each other, which particular magic would that be? Ash vs. Evil Dead turns out to be the best case scenario in that it synthesizes elements of all three while creating a magic all its own. After an uncertain pilot, the show quickly finds itself, as an aging Ash, saddled with two young misfits, sets out on a road trip determined to close the book on the evil he let loose once and for all. That, from episode to episode, the acting, writing, and directing can be a little uneven is ultimately insignificant. With the perfect synergy of the franchise’s distinctive over-the-top B-movie self-awareness and Campbell’s perfectly overcooked lead performance – to say nothing of the fathoms of near ludicrous gore – the magic is invincible. But what makes it a more than worthy successor is that, in the midst of its outrageously bloody cartoonishness, it delivers moments that are both genuinely creepy and – especially in its later episodes – genuinely affecting, infusing the gruesome theatrics with the kind of surprising and unsettling impact the Evil Dead series hasn’t possessed since its superlative second installment. And if watching Dana DeLorenzo repeatedly run a zombie’s face through a meat slicer while Death’s “Freakin’ Out” plays on the soundtrack isn’t TV bliss, I don’t know what is…
MISSED OPPORTUNITIES
Promising programs that failed to deliver…
TRUE DETECTIVE
There’s no arguing that the second season of HBO’s True Detective was a profound disappointment. There is some argument to be had about the cause. Though many, for various (sometimes not especially objectively critical) reasons, were eager to take down Nic Pizzalotto, blaming the new season’s failures on his deliberately stylized writing is as wrongheaded as the directing and casting choices that actually sank the show. (A quick glance at David Milch’s Deadwood reveals how artful and effective such ornate and dramatically stylized approaches can be when handled properly.) The poetic discourses on fate, characters named Anitgone, etc. make it abundantly clear that Pizzolatto was looking to inject a classically tragic sensibility into the show. A risky strategy, considering contemporary audiences, but one that, even if it had alienated the average viewer, could have been successfully realized on an aesthetic level in the right hands. The problem is that tragedy – classical tragedy – demands an austere, unsentimental realization (something with which most modern actors and directors are unfamiliar, to say nothing of uncomfortable). When executed with the typical Hollywood focus on emotional approachability, dramatic emphasis, and audience appeal, the whole thing collapses in a heap of overcooked melodrama. Which is exactly what happened. Thus, a potentially unique and poetic drama about the destructive power of buried secrets was reduced to a pompous and overwrought policier.
JESSICA JONES
Despite a promising premise and a commendable attempt at allegory, Marvel’s Jessica Jones simply doesn’t hold together. With its tale of a failed superhero-turned-private detective haunted by a dark past, and its novel use of the hero-villain dynamic as an metaphor for abusive relationships, it could have been something really remarkable. The problem is that while showrunner Melissa Rosenberg clearly knows what story she wants to tell, she doesn’t seem to know how to tell it. Awkward and unfocused, the show hits its stride for an episode or two, only to lose it again, making its best moments some of its most frustrating, as well. Compounding the problem is the bratty lead performance by Krysten Ritter, who, despite delivering effective turns in Veronica Mars and Breaking Bad, simply lacks the gravitas to fully convey the weight of her character’s damaged soul. David Tennant is solid, but underused, as the sad and sociopathic Kilgrave. And Mike Colter’s layered and laid-back performance as Luke Cage inspires some optimism for his forthcoming Netflix series. Beyond that, Jessica Jones – in its first season, at least – never lives up to its potential.
MUSIC
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ALGIERS
Music for the end times. And maybe that’s why this punk/industrial/gospel trio’s searing debut has not been showered with the acclaim it rightfully deserves. Soulful wails build and break atop haunting and volatile sonic tides, lyrically demolishing our contemporary comforts and complacencies. It’s an intense, often challenging listen, both musically and intellectually. It’s also the most commanding, vital, and passionate album of the year. A revelation. Full review here.
SLEATER-KINNEY, “No Cities to Love”
Sleater-Kinney came roaring back from an eight year hiatus with an album that might be their very best yet, proving that they’re still one of the most accomplished, exciting, and important bands around. Full review here.
BEAUTY PILL, “Describes Things as They Are”
One of the most unique bands to emerge from Washington D.C.’s post-punk environs, Chad Clark’s Beauty Pill also came back from a long hiatus in 2015 with a compelling, affecting album unlike anything you’ve ever heard. All at once, dense and delicate, appealing and esoteric, lush and angular, “Describes Things as They Are” carries you away on its flowing soundscapes of guitars, drums, electronica, and reflective vocals, while quietly revealing its complex layers with every repeated listen. Clark possesses a lyrical gift for expanding the personal and idiosyncratic into the realm of cultural relevance and powerful catharsis. “Afrikaner Barista,” a sweet and funny song about a crushing on a coffee server, also examines the complications and frustrations of navigating identity politics. “Steven and Tiwonge” presents a moving vignette of star-crossed love that masks a subtle, but fiery, protest of institutionalized homophobia. And on “Dog With Rabbit in Mouth, Unharmed,” an ode to a departed pet evolves into a meditation on mortality and loss. Ultimately, though, no description of this album can do it justice. Like the best musical offerings, it just needs to be experienced.
TROYKA, “Ornithophobia”
I’ve never been a fan of demanding – or even suggesting – the retirement of specific words or phrases from the critical lexicon, but I might make an exception with the phrase “not for everyone.” Obviously, Troyka’s eccentric, knotty, unrepentantly unpredictable musical synthesis is not everyone’s taste, but you know what? Neither is Taylor fucking Swift. It’s a phrase that only further cements the erroneous notion that popular appeal somehow suggests artistic accomplishment. The fact is, whether or not it’s your thing, “Ornithophobia” is a dynamic, inventive, funny, disquieting, and dizzyingly sophisticated album offering a one-of-a-kind musical experience that needs to be heard to be believed. Deftly blending fusion jazz with math rock – at times, evoking nothing so much as Faraquet covering Bitches Brew – “Ornithophobia” can swing with an easy cool one moment, snap into strutting funk the next, erupt into a dissonant frenzy, and then downshift into haunting harmonies. Strange, surprising, and surprisingly beautiful, it will never be Top 40. But that’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
BINKER AND MOSES, “Dem Ones”
While the rest of the jazz world had orgasmic fits over Kamasi Washington’s “The Epic” – a masterpiece, admittedly, but an overproduced, bloated, and self-indulgent one, to these ears – I found myself much more enthralled by this short, spare sax-and-drums offering from longtime bandmates Moses Boyd and Binker Golding. Comparisons to “Interstellar Space” are inevitable, and Boyd and Golding wisely lean into the punch, paying tribute to Coltrane’s free-jazz classic in various ways. But “Dem Ones,” while certainly adventurous, is more unapologetically groovy than any of Coltrane’s searching latter day peregrinations, anchoring the better part of its six tracks in swaggering rhythms and soulful runs, even as they stretch into the atonal and avant-garde. A dazzling display of musical synergy from two players whose proven partnership has provided them with the confidence to cut loose and see where their particular chemistry takes them.
LE BUTCHERETTES, “A Raw Youth”
On her follow-up to 2014’s raging, ravaging “Cry is for the Flies,” Teri Gender Bender (nee Suarez) offers a bracing, ravishing flirtation with pop melodies, crafting a textured ode to youthful resistance and resilience in all its forms. “A Raw Youth” tears ravenously into 60’s rock ‘n’ roll, 70’s punk, 80’s synth-pop, and 90’s electronica, while sacrificing none of Le Butcherettes’ trademark passion or power, confidently synthesizing its diverse influences into a tenacious, undeniable, irresistible whole. Full review here.
SIGH, “Graveward”
If Emperor spent their legendary career elevating Black Metal to the majestically operatic, Japan’s Sigh have, on their latest album, decked its halls with all the flash, splash and dash of a Broadway spectacular. And, believe it or not, that’s praise. Flamboyantly, defiantly – almost recklessly – experimental, ever since their landmark 1997 album, “Hail, Horror, Hail” (which came with a warning label cautioning the listener that, “If you find that some parts of the album are strange, it isn’t because the music in itself strange, but because your conscious self is ill-equipped to comprehend the sounds produced…”), the band has relentlessly pushed into increasingly eccentric territory, developing a sound that can only be described as an unholy hybrid of Black Sabbath and Frank Zappa. “Graveward” features plenty of driving, pitch-black metal aggression and impressive riffage, but – as always – careening over dense layers of synths, organs, strings, horns, chants, and chimes, breaking into magnificent choral refrains, and veering unpredictably into strange interludes incorporating everything from acoustic strums, to jazz piano, to hip-hop beats, to theremin solos. While all of that may be business as usual for Sigh, “Graveward” also boasts a grandiose cast-of-thousands theatricality that lends it the air of a Tony Award winning production. Though perhaps not as insanely inventive as 2001’s “Imaginary Sonicscape,” or as focused and furious as 2007’s “Hangman’s Hymn,” it’s nonetheless one of the most wildly entertaining and evocative albums of the year.
CZARFACE, “Every Hero Needs a Villain”
While I’m not, for a moment, going to pretend that Czarface’s “Every Hero Needs a Villain” is the best rap album of the year (that honor, almost certainly, goes to Kendrick Lamar’s “To Pimp a Butterfly,” which, try as I might, I just can’t get into), it’s easily the most fun. Turning the tables on the hip-hop superhero concept they laid down on their self-titled debut, “Every Hero Needs a Villain” finds Inspectah Deck and Esoteric wickedly playing up the dark side of their collaboration’s comic book sensibilities. Backed by 7L’s rock beats and guitar flourishes, the result is even cooler, catchier, and more charismatic than its predecessor. Who can resist Deck referencing every geek-centered enterprise from Star Wars to Harry Potter to Doctor Who? Or such lyrics as, “You lack vision, like the first Avengers?” Sure, it may not be as ambitious or innovative as Lamar’s magnum opus, but “Every Hero Needs a Villain” is pure energy and enjoyment from start to finish. And I don’t care what anyone says: “Lumberjack Match” is the best hip-hop song of 2015.
SURVIVAL GUIDE, “Way to Go”
An uneasy dream of an album, Survival Guide’s debut finds former Tsunami Bomb vocalist Emily Whitehurst paying homage to all her 80’s synth-pop influences, while still wearing her punk heart on her sleeve. Deceptively dulcet, Whitehurst and guitarist Jaycen McKissick freight “Way to Go’s” swirling melodies with an undercurrent of dark, buzzing menace, and a quick glance at the lyrics reveals a series of gloomy musings and weary self-reckonings. The result is something haunting and beautiful and, for all its seeming familiarity, quite unique. Full review here.
SCARFACE, “Deeply Rooted”
Hip-hop’s elder statesman of the Dirty South, Brad Jordan aka Scarface, emerged from retirement (yet again) in 2015 with this grim, gritty, and intensely soulful album that only further cements his place as one of the genre’s most unflinching and affecting tragic philosophers. Having begun his career with the almost cartoonishly violent Geto Boys, Scarface’s solo albums, though often no less brutal, increasingly evinced the sort of weathered wisdom that can only be obtained through years of wrestling with darkness. On “Deeply Rooted” he strikes a perfect balance, exhaustively investigating the two deeply rooted ideologies – religion and gangsterism – that have both propped-up and let down his culture and community. Clear-eyed and courageous, he pulls no punches in condemning the failings of spirituality or acknowledging the empowering allure of criminality, but it is his personal portraiture and intimate experiences with both that give his anecdotes and analyses their cathartic force. For a gangsta rap album, it is almost entirely free of any posturing or platitudes, seeking instead to get to the more troubling truths that lurk beneath them.
SONGHOY BLUES, “Music in Exile”
When northern Mali fell to Ansar Dire in 2012, many of the Songhoy found themselves exiled from their homes and fleeing south. Among them, four young musicians who met in Bamako and formed Songhoy Blues. Offering an irresistible mix of early American rock ‘n’ roll, blues, and traditional Songhoy melodies, “Music in Exile” exemplifies the best aspects of all those traditions: music as an expression of cultural identity, resilience, and protest. That you won’t understand the lyrics (unless you speak the language) is unimportant. The music, in its sincerity and simplicity, is so catchy and compelling, it’s almost enough to restore your faith in humanity.
In a year full of so much exceptional music, why waste time on disappointments, missed opportunities, or misplaced praise, when I can, instead, mention a few…
RUNNERS-UP
For all its bloat and bombast, KAMASI WASHINGTON’S “The Epic” is still a pretty magnificent achievement. UnWED, a new post-hardcore/rock outfit featuring former members of Hot Water Music and Small Brown Bike, released their very solid debut, “Raise the Kids.” MARRIAGES’ first full-length, “Salome” is a dark, haunting post-rock nightmare that really gets under your skin. And PARTIKEL’S “String Theory,” though it really should be more exciting and surprising than it is, still makes for a very interesting, if dispiritingly easy, listen.
Finally, in terms of more short-form offerings, Devin Ocampo’s new band, EFFECTS, released a series of cassette singles (available through their bandcamp site) that will have fans of Faraquet and Medications salivating for more. And Oakland’s SUPER UNISON released a grippingly frenetic debut EP that picks up where latter-day Black Flag left off…
BOOKS
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FORMS by Caroline Levine
Leave it to a critic to name a book of critical theory one of the best of the year, but Forms is a truly visionary work. Re-inventing (and resuscitating) formalism for a post-historicist, post-post-modernist, post-post-structuralist age, Caroline Levine surveys the strengths and failings of previous literary and political theories, while mapping a fresh, holistic approach to both aesthetic and political landscapes, and illustrating the ways in which they often shape each other. Using historical and literary examples, Levine examines the affordances of four formal arrangements – whole, rhythm, hierarchy, and network – revealing the complex ways in which seemingly unified structures, events, and texts actually contain competing, conflicting, overlapping, and potentially subversive elements. It’s a much needed approach that acknowledges the intellectual value of considering spatial, temporal, and textual definition, while pushing beyond those illusory borders to gain a more comprehensive understanding. Refreshingly brief and direct for a work of political/aesthetic theory, Forms is, nonetheless, thorough, penetrating, and exhaustive, offering something every critic – ideally, every reader – finds exciting and empowering: a new way of seeing.
SPOOKY ACTION AT A DISTANCE by George Musser
Taking its title from Einstein’s troubled musing on the nature of quantum entanglement, George Musser’s Spooky Action at a Distance provides a thorough, and thoroughly enjoyable, explication of the concept of nonlocality. Guiding us through the concept’s long and troublesome history – which, in a sense, is the history of science, itself – Musser not only introduces and illuminates the various complex theories, hypotheses, and (sometimes contentious) debates in which nonlocality has played a role, but also the various complex personalities who devised, tested, and argued them, expertly balancing detailed scientific information with vivid characterizations and entertaining anecdotes. But nothing surpasses the mind-blowing implications of the concept itself, and what it reveals about our limited – and possibly illusory – understanding of the universe.
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME by Ta-Nehisi Coates
A passionate, pleading, fierce, and fatalistic boots-on-the-ground memoir of growing up black in America, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me consciously borrows its structure from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, taking the form of a letter written by the author to his teenage son. Deftly balancing piercing analysis with searing emotion, Coates takes him – and by extension, us – on a lightning tour of his childhood, adolescence, college, and early adult years, while forcing us to confront and consider the harsh and unjust realities of life on the flipside of the American Dream. Keeping his reminiscences grounded, anchored – often palpably – in the physical, Coates’ eschews the spirituality, the progressive optimism, the political oratory, and the moral sermonizing that have become all too commonplace in contemporary discussions of race, allowing his personal vision of America’s entrenched and intractable racial divide to emerge more organically. He offers no solutions and, perhaps most strikingly, even goes so far as to suggest that none may realistically exist. Unlike so many other meditations on race and racism, Between the World and Me is not a prescription, but an honest reflection – an uncompromising and enlightening one from which everyone in America might have something to learn.
BOOK OF NUMBERS by Joshua Cohen
It’s been interesting to watch the arc of the acclaim that followed the publication of Joshua Cohen’s dense, dizzying, and dazzling Book of Numbers last June. Initially hailed as superlatively brilliant, it began to disappear from various “Best Of…” lists after a barrage of condemnations from hypersensitive cultural watchdogs whose obsession with parity blinded them to parody, as they attacked everything from the book’s “unrelatable” depictions of privilege to the casual sexism and prejudice occasionally evinced by its protagonist. To say such criticisms missed the point of the book would be an understatement. They also misrepresent it. A masterfully complex investigation into issues of identity and isolation in the internet age, The Book of Numbers follows a satirically distorted author surrogate named Joshua Cohen who is hired to ghostwrite the memoirs of an iconic Silicon Valley innovator, also named Joshua Cohen. The binary, like everything else in this richly and carefully detailed novel, is pointed and deliberate, as the book divides itself between Cohen the writer’s first-person narration of the events, and the incomplete drafts, fragments, transcripts, and emails relating to the memoir he attempts to write. Along the way, we travel from New York to Dubai to Europe, tour some of the wealthiest and most impoverished environments on the planet, and learn the history and evolution of the internet (at least, as experienced by Cohen the computer genius). What emerges is a fractal set of closed systems competing within vast networks, struggles between the private and the public, and contrasting accounts of the impact and importance of new technologies in our lives. Engrossing, entertaining, and enlightening, dismiss the denunciations. Book of Numbers deserves to be counted among the best of the year.
OUTLINE by Rachel Cusk
These days, I find myself getting pretty exasperated with books about writers. In the last few decades, the dictum, “write what you know,” has been epidemically interpreted among novelists as “write only about yourself.” Ironic, then, that both fiction books on my list this year feature not only writers, but author surrogates, as their main characters. But what’s interesting about Rachel Cusk’s deceptively quiet and compact novel is that it’s really not about her at all. Or, rather, it is. Just not in any conventional way. Outline follows an English author on her journey to Athens to teach a writing workshop, but its first person narrative is not so much about her, as the people she encounters. Cusk describes them in vivid detail, allowing them to come to life on the page, as they discuss their lives, their histories, their perspectives. As the title suggests, despite her marginal – almost documentary – presence, our main character is developed and defined through her perceptions and her portraiture of others. It’s a technique that is simultaneously innovative and classical, in that, without directly addressing any of these issues, Cusk questions not only the nature of authorial presence in fiction, but the nature of authorship – and even identity – as a whole.
DISAPPOINTMENT
I was really looking forward to getting my hands on this one, and I stuck it out all the way through…
GUTSHOT by Amelia Gray
The dark and disturbing stories collected in Amelia Gray’s Gutshot are inventive, intriguing, unnerving, and often funny. Unfortunately, what they aren’t is focused, polished, or terribly expressive. Gray clearly has talent and a twisted imagination, and her stories are economical and entertaining. But, too often, they come off less like the output of a driven and inspired author than a series of assignments completed by a wickedly eccentric creative writing student. And the lack of a compelling vision too often translates to a not terribly compelling read.
A box-office flop, thoroughly reviled as a sacrilegious and superfluous remake, as well as a bloated, bombastic object lesson in auteurist excess at the time of its 1977 release, William Friedkin’s Sorcerer has enjoyed a renaissance in the last decade or so, as scores of critics and cinephiles (myself, included) have called for the film to be given a second look and a proper DVD/Blu-Ray release, which it finally received last year. An adrenalized, full-throttle reimagining of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Wages of Fear, Sorcerer is less an existential thriller than an existential nightmare – a riveting, amplified odyssey of fate vs. will, in which Friedkin’s superlative talents for dramatic intensity and visceral impact are given their fullest and, perhaps, best expression. Gritty, grueling, and relentlessly grim, its financial failure and critical crash-and-burn signaled a sea change in cinematic sensibilities. (It must have felt assaultive to audiences who were lining up around the block for repeat viewings of Star Wars…) But after decades collecting dust in near-obscurity, it has finally emerged as one of the last great masterpieces of the New Hollywood era.
In a series of globetrotting prologues, the film takes us from Veracruz, to Jerusalem, to Paris, to New Jersey, introducing us to four career criminals – an assassin (Francisco Rabal), a terrorist (Amidou), a corrupt banker (Bruno Cremer), and an armed robber (Roy Scheider) – right at the moment their luck runs out and fate closes in. After fleeing their respective countries, they find themselves damned to the green hell of Porvenir, a remote, poverty-stricken village in the jungles of Latin America, where the only hope of living is the hope of leaving. The closest thing to civilization is an American oil well, 200 kilometers away, leeching off the land in more ways than one. After the well suffers a catastrophic explosion, our four fugitives are offered a deal with the devil: in exchange for driving two truckloads of dangerously unstable dynamite through the jungle to the disaster site, they will be given a way out: new identities, cash, and passports. That is, if they survive.
Though initially criticized for it, Friedkin and screenwriter Walon Green deliberately take their time establishing Sorcerer’s scene and setting, its characters and their circumstances. Before they even set out into the jungle, we acquire a thorough understanding of each man’s individual nature, we experience their shared desperation and desolation, and we learn what each man is capable of, for better and for worse. As they prepare for their journey, we watch them develop an uneasy dynamic, regarding each other with disdain, suspicion, and self-interest, a potentially explosive interpersonal friction added to their already tense and volatile situation. All four actors deliver thorough, internalized, often wordless performances, throughout, fully embodying the plight of hardened men who have found themselves at the end of the world, possibly the end of their lives. They are lived in to the point of being worn out, their battered hopes, fears, regrets, and desires often powerfully communicated through the smallest gestures, flickering across their weathered faces.
White-knuckling their steering wheels, as they push their way through the treacherous terrain, they contend with a series of insurmountable obstacles and lethal perils, confronting each with uncommon resourcefulness and fierce resolve. The trucks move slowly, stop frequently, and there is precious little in the way of dialogue, yet every moment is gripping, harrowing, heart-stopping. Friedkin is a master of rooting his films in a down and dirty realism that can violently erupt into events of almost supernatural extremity. Whether it’s the frenetic, obsession fueled car chase in The French Connection, the ravaging demonic entity in The Exorcist, or the pyromaniacal nihilism that spreads across Los Angeles in To Live and Die in L.A., there is always the suggestion that just beneath the grey and grungy surface of reality is an incomprehensible, unstoppable destructive force waiting to rip through and consume us. In Sorcerer, all of nature becomes perversely malevolent, rising up to thwart these men on their mission: torrential, blinding rains beat down, turning the meagre roads into oozing, squelching flumes of mud; rickety bridges sway and strain over swelling, crashing rivers; trees become twisted, monstrous claws reaching out to grab or obstruct. Friedkin jarringly juxtaposes these hysterical, convulsive bursts with their silent, sober aftermaths, following moments of shadowed darkness with blinding light – a technique he perfected with The Exorcist – keeping us in a perpetual state of breathless uncertainty, as the film descends into an increasingly hallucinogenic unreality. Aside from vividly reflecting our characters’ own besieged mental state – their sanity pushed to the brink as they forge ahead on their trek – these formal strategies also cut right to the infernal heart of the film.
And maybe that’s why the “Me Generation” couldn’t go along for the ride…
Sorcerer is not a redemption story. Our four fugitives’ punishing jungle crossing is not a penance from which they will emerge with their sins forgiven, their souls cleansed. These men have no interest in redemption. They are utterly impenitent. Seen in a spiritual light, their mission is nothing more than a devil’s bargain; and their journey towards the blazing inferno their volatile cargo is meant to extinguish, a furious attempt to climb out of hell. Taken from an ecological angle, they are pawns of corporate oil, hired guns attempting to profit in the war against the planet. (Is it any wonder, then, that the planet fights back so aggressively?) But from a more purely existential perspective, they are simply desperate men who have used up their lives, and the lives of others around them, for personal gain, and are now desperate to escape the resultant ruin. The mission dangles before them their only slight glimmer of hope: a new life, which they will likely not live any better than the first. They push forward relentlessly, almost admirably, defying the merciless forces of fate, but they still exist solely for themselves. (“We’re sitting on double shares!” Scheider gleefully exclaims when it appears two of the others have been killed.) Their mission will not make them better. It will not even make them stronger. It will simply bring them face to face with the hopelessness and futility of their efforts. In a macabre twist on Sisyphus, even if – against all odds – they succeed, we must imagine them failures.
Purged of the demons she so fiercely exorcised on 2014’s savage and sensational Cry is for the Flies, Le Butcherettes’ founder and frontwoman Teri Gender Bender (nee Suarez) is back with A Raw Youth, a stunning follow-up album that is every bit its predecessor’s equal in power and intensity, yet its complete antithesis in topic and tone. Energetic, invigorating, and accessible where Cry is for the Flies was dark, despairing, and dissonant (even the album’s more tuneful tracks sounded dangerously deranged), A Raw Youth positively blazes with passion and vitality, fearlessly flaunting a host of irresistible rock ‘n’ roll riffs, catchy pop hooks, and singalong melodies. Not that anyone should interpret that as, in any way, signaling a sell-out. There’s still plenty of challenging material here, both in style and substance, and Suarez is as fiery, as uncompromising, and as idiosyncratic as ever. What’s remarkable is how seamlessly – and how satisfyingly – she is able to incorporate these elements into Le Butcherettes’ signature garage punk sound.
The album kicks down the door with “Shave the Pride,” a rousing, literally in-your-face, rocker, in which a boyfriend’s untamed beard evolves into a metaphor for dominance assertion, then spreads out, somewhat surprisingly, into two unabashedly 80’s-inspired pop-rock numbers: the heartfelt and full-throated ode to self-reliance,“My Mallely,” and the bitterly anthemic “Reason to Die Young.” But while the latter song might sound right at home on a Pat Benatar album, its outward aural appeal is belied by its lyrics, which lament a generation driven by a hopeless future to seek meaning in martyrdom. In the same way, the upbeat percussion and bouncy synth-horns of “Sold Less Than Gold” provide a disturbing counterpoint to Suarez’s first-person narrative of teenage sex slavery. The use of mainstream melodies on these tracks is not merely ironic, however. Nor it is it simply a candy shell to make the medicine go down. In each case, it also serves as a disconcerting illustration of the resiliency and adaptability of youth, even in the midst of abject miseries – a reminder as troubling as it is reassuring. Of course, there’s also plenty of youthful piss and vinegar to be found: the aforementioned album opener, the decidedly punky “Oil the Shoe if the Critter Knew Any Better” (yes, that is the title), or the snarling “They Fuck You Over,” which sounds almost like a leftover from the early Kiss or Kill EP. But the album’s most intriguing tracks – and the ones that tip it from “exceptionally good” to “great” – are those in which Suarez indulges her flair for the unusual, as in the haunting, howling invocations of “Witchless C Spot,” the quiet, shifting melancholy of “Lonely and Drunk,” or the jaw-dropping “La Uva,” whose psychedelic lurching sounds like a cross between “Tomorrow Never Knows” and an ancient pagan chant, made all the more ominous by guest-vocalist Iggy Pop’s guttural growls.
Featuring a brand-new, but thoroughly tour-tested back-up band, A Raw Youth also finds Le Butcherettes at its tightest, tensest, and most textured, and the band’s audible chemistry no doubt played a role in facilitating the album’s sonic explorations and experimentations. Chris Common proves a versatile percussionist, equally effective laying back or pounding forward, on or off-beat. And the rolling thunder of Jamie Aaron Aux’s bass provides a pervasive motor and muscle, occasionally even taking the lead and allowing Suarez’s guitars and keyboards to ornament, augment, and accentuate with greater expressive freedom. It may be the best Le Butcherettes ensemble yet. As always, though, it is Suarez’s voice that takes center stage. One of rock’s finest vocalists, as well as one of its most dynamic performers, she can soar above the songs with a commanding resonance reminiscent of Grace Slick, chirp in a fragile falsetto, or hiss as threateningly as Clint Eastwood. After channeling Robert Plant on the blues-y “Stab My Back,” she belts out a Riot Grrl scream on “They Fuck You Over” that Kathleen Hannah would envy. But what really sets Suarez apart is her ability to imbue any song with its own distinct and compelling dramatic character. Her striking vocal theatrics have been evident and abundant in all her musical efforts, but they’re always at their most pronounced on her Le Butcherettes albums, and they’ve never been better than on the last two LP’s. The petulant, coquettish lilt she brings to “Sold Less Than Gold” only makes the song that much more affecting and unsettling. On the phenomenal “The Hitch Hiker,” in which a dialogue between a female hitcher and a predatory driver becomes an allegory for patriarchy and resistance, Suarez plays both parts, alternating frantic desperation with seething menace. And “Lonely and Drunk” allows her to run the gamut from airy self-pity, to deep sorrow, to rage and recrimination. It is her intense vocal commitment to each and every song that brings A Raw Youth so powerfully and vividly to life.
It’s worth noting that, “The Raw Youth” was the original English title given to Dostoevsky’s often overlooked penultimate novel, The Adolescent. Ever fond of the sly literary reference, on A Raw Youth, Suarez seems, not only to be paying homage to Dostoevsky’s portrait of generational conflict, but also throwing down the gauntlet before him. While Dostoevsky consistently condemned the young of his generation as foolishly ambitious, prone to rebellious – and, ultimately, violent and nihilistic – convictions, Suarez has delivered an irresistible collection of engaging and exhilarating songs that, for all their tales of martyrdom, sex slavery, and betrayal, seem to unapologetically celebrate the power of youth – in all its vulnerability, defiance, romanticism, rebellion, and naïveté. And why not…? At only 26, with three superlative albums already under her belt, she is, herself, a prime example of what youthful conviction and energy can accomplish. Having lost not an ounce of her trademark ferocity, on A Raw Youth, Suarez has instead expanded its palette, revealing that what burns at its heart is not nihilism, but a genuine, however incendiary, lust for life. As the man himself said, “Youth is pure, if only because it is youth.” For Suarez, it’s that and much, much more…
The slasher subgenre has never been particularly artful but, let’s be honest: it has never needed to be. The directing may be crude, the acting wooden, and the writing barely functional, but all of that is beside the point. (If, in fact, there is one…) As a rule, slasher films are exercises in epicaricacy, propelled by sado-voyeuristic camerawork and steeped in gallons of Grand Guignol gore, any and all creativity channeled into devising increasingly inventive ways to butcher sexually active (and startlingly acerebral) adolescents on screen for the savage delectation of an audience largely made up of the same. In retrospect, it might be possible to read such genre cornerstones as Halloween, Friday the 13th, or Nightmare on Elm Street as primal purges of sexual paranoia in post-free love America, but it would be disingenuous to suggest much in the way of deliberate artistic intent. Which is not to say that these films are not, in their own way, classics, or that they are not, in their own way, thoroughly enjoyable. But their inherent, even willful, artlessness might help illustrate why David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows has captured so much popular and critical attention.
Simultaneously entertaining and frustrating, It Follows succeeds admirably at pumping fresh blood into some of the slasher genre’s weariest tropes, while somehow managing to fail at just about everything else. The story is, all at once, fresh and familiar: After a single sexual encounter with her seemingly loving and considerate boyfriend, Hugh (Jake Weary), local looker Jay (Maika Monroe) finds herself being terrorized by an entirely new kind of STD: a Sexually Transmitted Demon that relentlessly pursues its victims (though, at a predictably languid pace) with murderous intent. (Now, that’s what I call venery!) The only way to rid yourself of it, according to an apologetic Hugh, is to pass it along, as (for some reason) it can only follow one person at a time. So, with the aid of her curiously credulous friends and family, creeping threat ever at her rear, Jay sets about trying to conceive of a way to deliver herself from her follower’s advances, or else destroy it entirely.
If it all sounds a bit silly, it is. As a narrative conceit, it’s not significantly smarter than your average slasher film, but what sets It Follows apart from its forebears is not its story so much as its style. Eschewing the slasher’s primitive and overworked leer-and-stalk aesthetic, Mitchell’s camera seems to hover at a dreamy remove creating an uneasy unreality: hazily idyllic in its calmer moments, then lurching nightmarishly into its numerous, often genuinely creepy, chase sequences. Almost entirely bloodless (the body count may set a record low for the genre), It Follows also gracefully sidesteps the slasher film’s fondness for gratuitous indulgence. For a film about sex and death, there’s surprisingly (almost disappointingly, I confess) little of either. Mitchell, instead, anchors the drama in his characters, and it’s a testament to him and his cast that they are what make the film so consistently engaging. Though there seems to have been little to work with on the page, there is a lived-in naturalness and ease to the performances. The relationships, shared experiences, and emotional dynamics among this handful of suburban teenagers is palpable, even when not explicitly stated, making them a far cry from the cardboard casualties-in-waiting we’re used to. It Follows’ most revolutionary departure from the slasher genre, in fact, may be that it relishes its characters’ lives rather than their deaths.
Unfortunately, the deeper failings of the genre can’t be remedied solely by Mitchell’s skillful presentation. Beneath the shiny, new packaging lurks the same old story and, as such, it suffers from the same lack of logic and cohesion. The inescapable irony of It Follows is that it doesn’t. Not narratively. Not thematically. Not aesthetically. It’s not that we need to know what the titular “It” is, or where it comes from, or why it feels compelled to stalk and slaughter sexually active teens. It’s a dark, unknowable, unnamable thing. And, in a horror film, that’s exactly what it should be. The problem is that what little we do understand about it makes it almost comedically absurd. (Take 30 seconds to write down all the questions you have about its abilities and limitations, and I guarantee you’ll be in hysterics before your time is up…) As an unstoppable preternatural force, it would be pathetically easy to outthink and outmaneuver, which makes the all too typical boneheaded behavior and questionable conclusions of our otherwise very believable characters that much more infuriating. The capable pacing and lush atmosphere are enough to distract from the gaping holes while you’re watching, but they become painfully apparent as soon as the credits roll. Some have suggested that the film’s dreamy ambience is enough to excuse these lapses, but there’s a difference between dream logic and illogic, and It Follows is ultimately less Lynch-ian than just lazy.
Most dispiritingly, despite the film’s arty veneer, it’s really not especially artful. Mitchell clearly wants to challenge the genophobia and misogyny endemic to the slasher genre, but lacks the courage of his convictions. His premise may be a laudable step up from the reactionary prudishness of his genre predecessors, but it’s not exactly sex-positive. As a “final girl,” Jay is unconventional due to her “sullied” status, but in all other respects, she’s as reassuringly wholesome (and as slow) as her precursors. Similarly, like his camera, Mitchell seems to be hovering hazily around themes relating to the loss of innocence, but there’s not enough coherence or coordination in his narrative, his allegory, his motifs, or even his compelling visual style for anything comprehensible to effectively emerge. Despite the superlative praise lavished upon it, It Follows is not particularly intelligent, or particularly deep. It’s not even particularly scary. Which is not to say that it’s not diverting, involving, or enjoyable. But it collapses utterly under the slightest scrutiny. It might be significantly better than your average slasher film, but let’s be honest: That’s not saying much.
But is it Art...? 