AR: The La's

The La's - The La's (1990)

Quick review for a quick 35 minutes of a pop-bliss album: The La's sole entry into the world of popular music is a stupid-good gem of jangly twelve string simpleton rock. It's invocation of the British Invasion is overt, but it's so steeped inside an '80s alternative sensibility that it doesn't seem, ha ha, "out of time," so to speak. Actually, while one may be tempted to invoke the Kinks and R.E.M. in describing the sound of this disc, I'll go ahead and smack of sacrilege as I say the bright tones and happy times remind me sharply of The Monkees (!). Minus the sitcom buffoonery, natch, but this is a similar shimmery sunshine pop with pop, and it's a brilliant addition to any collection.

The album is anchored by a tune that dictates that yes, even if you're sitting there saying The-La's?-Never-heard-of-them, you have indeed heard them. "There She Goes" has littered numerous soundtracks, up to and including So I Married an Axe Murderer, with good reason - it's saccharine love ditty genius, the type of tune that seems it was carved out of the air rather than written. And while that tune does a fair job exemplifying the aesthetic employed here, what makes this a classic album is the variety they accomplish within that nouveau-Invasion approach. On repeated listens, some of the subtle tension and grit, the neat stylistic tricks, start to become apparent, and "There She Goes," in all its sleek perfection, sticks out as more glistening than the remainder of the album. Great trick - the smooth edges of pop are ever-so-slightly detailed by the teeth of the underground, and something that achieves a fantastic cohesion reveals itself to be varied and intense. Yes - intense jangle pop. I know.

Highlights abound: "Son of a Gun" is a fantastic, energetic but spare acoustic opener, "I Can't Sleep" is a bright stomper, "Timeless Melody" is a sad-sung soarer ... actually, I'm going to bail here before I just write a adjective-laden description of each and every track. Just listen - it's top-to-bottom excellent, and again, exquisitely varied so as to sustain a thousand spins. Fuzz rock? Eastern European taunt rock? It's all here, down to a Who-esque extended melodrama to close in "Looking Glass." This one justifiedly makes all kinds of lists - it's really a shame that, thanks reportedly to a songwriter with maniacal perfectionist tendencies, it's the only album the La's ever recorded. Highly rec'ed, even if the ultimately unfulfilled promise makes you sad.

Status: Recommended

Nyet's Fave: "There She Goes"

Ramadhan kali ini.

Saya kalah. Itu saja yang ingin saya katakana. Ternyata saya kalah pada kesenangan dunia. Ternyata saya kalah pada hawa nafsu. Dan saya merasa tidak mendapatkan berkah ramadhan kali ini. Semuanya berlalu sekejap mata. Tidak ada yang berarti. Tidak ada yang berkesan.

Masih teringat sebulan yang lalu ketika Ramadhan datang mendekat. Saya menyambutnya dengan euphoria berlebihan. Memiliki segudang rencana ini dan itu. Akan begini dan begitu. Nyatanya? Semua tidak berjalan dengan lancar. Sepertinya memang saya harus menyambut Ramadhan biasa saja. Lebih dikuatkan pada niat, dan bukan pada rencana.

Apa yang terjadi dengan Ramadhan ku? Entahlah. Saya pun tidak dapat menjawabnya. Ketika tahun lalu saya diuji dengan sebuah kesusahan, dengan patah tulang dan bebat dimana-mana. Ternyata saya bisa melaluinya. Kali ini Tuhan menguji lagi. Bukan dengan kesusahan, tapi sebuah kesenangan. Kesenangan duniawi akan pekerjaan dan eksistensi. Dan ini yang saya belum bisa lolos darinya.

Saya yang mempunya waktu untuk jalan kesana kemari. Mengurus ini dan itu, mengerahkan setiap tenaga dan kemampuan, justru bahkan bangun untuk Shalat Subuh pun sulit kulakukan. Ketika saya mampu nongkrong sampai tengah malam bersama teman-teman, tapi kenapa bahkan satu rakaat terawih pun sulit kutegakkan?

Begitulah cobaan di dunia ini. Saya masih mengingatnya dari ceramah agama di waktu yang lampau. Bahwa Tuhan tidak akan mengujimu dengan kesusahan saja. Tapi dia akan mengujimu juga dengan kesenangan, dan biasanya inilah ujian yang paling berat. Karena di saat susah, kita akan sangat gampang merasa dekat dengan Tuhan. Sedangkan di saat senang? Kita akan berubah menjadi manusia pongah tidak tahu diri.

Ada satu kesyukuran ketika saya masih diperkenankan untuk bertemu dengan Idul Fitri tahun ini. Sebuah bentuk perayaan atas kemenangan melawan hawa nafsu. Tapi mungkin perjuangan saya tahun ini tidak maksimal. Dan saya menyadarinya dengan sepenuh hati. Bahwa memang saya telah kalah.

Panjangkanlah umur ini ya Rabb. Untuk bertemu dengan Ramadhan mu lagi di kali yang akan datang. Yang akan siap dengan semua ujianmu. Yang akan menyambut hari kemenangan dengan satu senyum tersungging di bibir, bahwa saya telah mampu melewati perang yang paling besar. Perang melawan hawa nafsu.



Selamat Hari Raya Idul Fitri 1431 H. Minal Aidin Wal Faidzin, Mohon Maaf Lahir dan Bathin.

New textual punctuation

Never before seen grammar^*...Have you noted, dear readers, one of the new textual punctuation techniques that the kids of today are using?

It is to place a period after each word in a given sentence. This full stop functions as a hammer to bang home the seriousness, gravitas, power of the utterance.

Check out this example from the infamous website, Texts from Last night...

"Best. Roommate. Ever."

Which in modern textual grammar is bigger ups than "Best roommate ever!!!"

^*Save for possibly in a telegrams.

AR: American Slang

The Gaslight Anthem - American Slang (2010)

This review is by request from reader "Jon Sigma," who asks the straightforward and thoroughly justified question: why the hell, given that this band sounds *remarkably* similar to Against Me!, is everyone making such a big deal about this band? So in my newfound interest in writing concise reviews, I'm going to write a paragraph that covers what this album sounds like, one paragraph that parses Jon's question, one that attempts to answer it, and a wrap up paragraph that gives something resembling the smoldering embers of an original thought of my own experience of hearing it. Review, VOILA! These are the terrible trials of someone engaged in the perpetual reading of grad school texts.

By invoking cultural allusions like Bon Jovi, The Sopranos*, "George Costanza's employer" and "Michael from The Office," I am simultaneously dodging the lame routine of name-checking this band's powerfully obvious musical influence/ancestor AND engaging in the equally lame routine of referencing the fact that said comparison is inevitable in reviews of this band. I'm not sure if referencing the fact that referencing the fact is routine has yet become routine, but that sprinkling of meta-cheese makes this word salad oh-so-tasty... aw, screw it... restart paragraph one:

* - On two levels, really, if you think about it.

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN. Phew. American Slang is a half-hour blow-by of (unsurprisingly) anthemic blue-collar rock music, steeped in a particular kind of Americana - think more pop-rock, heartland blues and Motown than, say, the folk-Americana of the Grateful Dead - and delivered with a familiar, emotive vocal snarl. It's the same frustrated, wistful sickness of the suburbs that his Bossness mastered decades ago, but delivered with enough of an edge of Clash-esque genre-mixing to qualify as not entirely derivative. (Feel free to question how incorporating not one but two 1970s acts renders things non-derivative). Bruce rather famously mocked the pathos of barroom remembrance ("speedball? "really?) while engaging in music that heavily evoked the '50s, and this is a sort of post-ironic update of that idea; "Don't sing me songs about the good times / those days are gone" sung in the 2000s version of indie-rock BruceTimbre is largely the game here, and it's largely effective. It's nostalgia music on two planes - in the fact of its hearkening to '70s barroom rock AND it's constant references to "when we were young" - and via its great composition / insightful if occasionally embarrassing-to-this-cynic's ears lyrics, it hits a nice middle ground of longing for the comfort of the past while admitting that it probably wasn't all that comfortable. It's heart-on-its-sleeve big-verse-bigger-chorus rock, which for a lot of people is pretty much the epitome and aim of the sport. Oddly, it's not always particularly catchy, just sort of big, if that makes sense as a categorical difference. It's no doubt a good album start to finish that feels downright professional in its tight structure, but really, for all its commercial success, it lacks standout single material. You know, like a workingman's album should.

So it's admittedly good - but how did it manage to leap its way into critics' hearts and MTV show soundtracks? Jon noted accurately that it if you listen to this with a punk ear, the similarities to Against Me! are readily apparent (and indeed, The Gaslight Anthem opened for AM! once upon a time). I've listened to this disc and tried to dissect the phenomenon / Jon's q over the last week, and I think it comes down to three possibilities. One, the question on face is at least a little misleading, as it's not like this band has broken through and Against Me! didn't. The latter got all kinds of mainstream press with 2007's New Wave, including "album of the year" status from Spin and the like. I.e., one answer to this question is that TGA is successful BECAUSE they sound like Against Me!, and this is just the nostalgic-anthemic pop-punk formula, now with extra BS, succeeding once again. But if we grant that TGA has been more successful (or at least it's strange that they succeed with such immediate similarity), we're led to another possibility - that the overt Bruce-similarity is so overwhelming that the Against Me! similarity goes unnoticed. A quick survey of the reviews shows AM! coming up about 1/30th as often as the Boss, so there may be something to that - the consensus admiration of TGA's successful incorporation of Springsteen as an obvious influence sort of blocks out accusations of derivation from other bands. But that, natch, just invokes the question of why it's okay to mimic Springsteen. So I'd prefer to dwell on the third possibility*, that as similar as TGA may sound to both AM!** and BS, there is at least one important difference - the treatment of nostalgia - that distinguishes them.

* - Damn the paragraph rule - there is a fourth possibility that one should at least keep in the back of one's head, and that is the whim of the momentum of critical reception - i.e., if the right person in the right context picks up on the band and has enough influence to get the ball rolling, then bands that sound extraordinarily similar will have highly divergent career arcs. This is akin to saying "it's arbitrary" and is thus deeply unsatisfying, but it is worth noting that sometimes the locus of explanation is in the social process of establishing something as "good," what assholes like me sometimes refer to as "reification," rather than being in the content of the art itself.

** - Damn the paragraph rule again, because I should also note that TGA has an important difference in sound from AM! - the latter is given to rebellious punk anthems, while the former utilizes a much cleaner guitar sound reminiscent of an undistorted fifties electric. In other words, both bands are fairly bright and glossy sounding with big, stringy melodic guitar leads over their cha-chung guitar and bass rhythms, but AM! is more immediately recognizable as a punk band whereas TGA comes off as more of a good ol' rock band. Both are fist-pumping rebel-rousers of a type, even outside of lyrical content, but AM! seems more inherently angry - okay, "irked" - relative to TGA's sad/hopeful sound. This is yet another way of saying that "TGA sounds more like Bruce than AM! does," but it may betray the notion that discontent and that odd strain of despair/hope are just flat out more compelling to critics now than the rebel yell, even if it's just in the guitar tone.

Now that I've shattered all my rules of brevity, I'll keep the actual thesis short. AM!'s nostalgia is one, personal - it's a literal remember when *we* were young and did thing X - and two, defiant. They are nostalgic, true, but nostalgic explicitly for the energy and rebellion of their youth so as to bring it to bear on their current state. This strikes me as an emergency, midlife crisis sort of nostalgia, or even better, that of a seventeen year-old yearning for when he was ten. It's powerful, but there's something trapped about it, like the nostalgia-experiencer is still naive enough to think that this time, things are going to be different. It's also steeped in personal history and again, more "teenagey" in that respect, a little too focused on the immediate narrative. So it's brimming with optimism and energy, but optimism that does not realize its ultimate futility. TGA's nostalgia, by contrast, is a more general, collective nostalgia, speaking on the shackles of youth and such as experienced in middle-class America. Two, it's more aged in its assessment. It makes the paradoxical realization that nostalgia simultaneously releases and leaves one stuck, and so does not try to rally the nostalgia for energy of rebellion, instead merely looking for a largely qualified dose of sad comfort. That difference is key - the TGA version is almost automatically more mature and thereby more attractive to the critical audience who is itself aged and, as noted above, in charge of awarding stars and generating buzz about albums. Note that I am not saying that it's a "better" nostalgia - you could make the charge that it's a cop-out, resigned sort of past-longing. As futile as the teenaged version may be, at least it rails its fists against the void, doesn't just wax about it. And finally, if you'd like to grab me a beer sometime, I'll expound on the following thought - that what critics appreciate via the overt Bruce-referencing is that the album appears to be nostalgia-for-nostalgia, and so dodges charges of repetition by appearing as another stairstep locked in the American music narrative. Not to mention that said nostalgia happens to be about a favorite artist from the youth of many an influential critic. So, it seems, aping an all-time critic's darling in a way that seems to be about, loosely, that critics' darling - so not imitating at all, but invoking - may just be a really solid career move.

There are a few factors, sadly, that stand between me and joining the critical consensus. One, as I'm sure I've mentioned before, I'm a textual learner, so i find it really tough to concentrate on sung / spoken lyrics (unless it's the obvious center of the art, as in folk or hip-hop). That which grabs my attention from this album is occasionally compelling and also occasionally embarrassing, so I'm not as in love with TGA's songwriting as others are. Two, I am not the world's biggest Bruce Springsteen fan - I don't dislike him, but his overwrought, melodramatic tendencies tend to grate on me. Seeing their shadows here, and in less catchy / radio-friendly form, doesn't make me dislike them, but I'm not drawn by any means. Three, while I try to be something of a post-ironist - someone invested in getting to the authentic and not just, believe it or not, the distanced critical snark - I don't think this nostalgia / hypersincerity is really the right way to go about it. Four, there's too much mid-tempo here that results in a bit of the samey, dangerous for an album that is already confined by its adherence to a couple of easily-recognized influences.

So while I get the mode in operation here, and again, I think this is a finely crafted, top-to-bottom solid album, it doesn't really do it for me on a profound level. I have the repeated experience of "this sounds stirring" rather than being stirred, and that is the quickest way to put it. More than usual, I recognize this as an instance of preference at work, and I wouldn't bemoan anyone whom it does strike meaningfully. There is definitely a lot to enjoy here, not the least of which is arch-professional musicianship, and more than a few little fun allusions mixed about - keep an ear out for an embedded "Please, Please Mr. Postman" chorus. But even the tune I enjoy most, the quasi-jazzy number noted below, comes off as formulaic to me - this is what catchy, genre-bending jazz-blue-collar-rock sounds like - so I'm left short of the mystic depth others seem to feel with this disc. Definitely worth spinning, but I'm at least somewhat with Jon in questioning the extent of the praise that this one's grabbing.

Status: Recommended (solid)

Nyet's Fave: "The Diamond Church Street Choir"

Shrooms help cancer patients cope

A new study reports a controlled dose of the main ingredient in hallucinogenic mushrooms, psilocybin, appears to help reduce anxiety and lift spirits in people battling advanced cancer. The study, by Dr. Charles Grob, will be published in the January 2011 print issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry.

The government, suffering from bad vibes dating back to the 60's, when its foundations actually shook, is still incredibly reluctant to fund this kind of research. Health Day reports that it took four years to get the funding and necessary approvals for this trial, even though it only involved a dozen patients (all with advanced cancer). It has been over thirty years since a similar study was conducted.

In the study, patients reported feeling calmer and happier, and that they felt closer connections to friends and family. They were better able to address end-of-life issues. This is very important according to Dr. Amy Abernethy, director of the Duke University Cancer Care Research Program in Durham, N.C. She told Health Day, "We know that with some people with advanced life-threatening illness, there is very truly a substantial existential component and importance and need for meaning-making in life, and that until people start making that transition they can be very, very distressed. It can be hard to get back to the business-of-life closures and other things you need to do at the end of life. This kind of intervention [may] allow people time and space and extended cognitive ability to reflect on life and see it in a different way, make that transition and then get back into a more relaxed space and get back to the business of living.

"Being in the business of living is about doing what is important and meaningful to you every day even if you don't have many days left, focusing on things like saying goodbye to loved ones, which can be hard to do if you're distressed."

Read the whole story here.

Film a bedroom scene with Pam Anderson

That sounds almost too good to be true... And you know what they say about things that sound too good to be true, they probably are.

In this case Nokia is sponsoring a contest, in which the winner will film a 'bedroom scene' with former Kid Rock and Tommy Lee squeeze, Pam Anderson. The film will be shot entirely on the Nokia N8 handset, to show off the upcoming phone's HD video capabilities. No guarantees that just because it is in the bedroom, that the winner will actually get to use the boudoir with Pam. Will she be the maid? The consort? The telephone operator? Nokia is keeping mum.

It is to be written and directed by the British directors, the McHenry Brothers. For those less inclined towards Pam's charms, Nokia is also offering a parallel competition to star with Gossip Girl heartthrob Ed Westwick. This scene, for the even more adventurous, takes place in an elevator.

Kecanduan Twitter

Ya, untuk beberapa hari ini ada satu hal yang sangat membuatku kecanduan. Bukan, bukan Farmville. Sampai saat ini memang saya masih menekuni menjadi petani di dunia maya, tetapi tidak seperti dulu kecanduannya. Yah, kalo sehari tidak bertani juga sudah tidak apa-apa.

Lantas yang menjadi kecanduan baru saat ini adalah nge-twit! Hahaha, emang ketinggalan euy! Setahun yang lalu kala saya masih di Asta, Twitter sebenarnya menjadi salah satu alat untuk berpromosi. Cuma yah itu, saya malam. Berpikir tidak ada untungnya nge-twit. Dasar geblek! Soalnya saya belum paham tentang apa itu Reply To, ReTweet, dan sebagainya. Tapi sekarang? Hohoho, dimana-mana sudah harus nge-Twit.



Jadi, follow me @iqkoberuang dan selamat berjumpa di Timeline saya :)