something about last year's album from Plants and Animals, "The Jungle"

 

Here is an album that did not get enough attention last year—The Jungle, by Plants and Animals. It was released in October 2020 and is Plants and Animals’ fifth studio album and first in four years. The Montreal indie-rock band broke through with its 2008 album, Parc Avenue, which featured the glorious kiss off, “Bye, Bye, Bye.” But coverage of subsequent albums dwindled. High-profile music site Pitchfork had reviewed every Plants and Animals album since 2008, but not this one. I do not know why: the band self-produces wonderful, beautiful-sounding records, and The Jungle is no exception.

 

The title track features a restless bass and head-nodding beat. Plants and Animals has always captured this kind of nervous cool. The last 90 seconds jams out. The song sounds casual, but that belies its precision. The good ones can make it sound easy. Then comes “Love That Boy” with its acoustic layers, electric guitar shimmering out alien, submerged little notes, and trippy, translucent lyrics: “Is the moon following us? Is it moving at exactly the same speed? All experience connected, holding on its fingertips.” The floaty sounds complement the tight drumming and loudly churning bass.

 

What follows are the album’s best parts. “House on Fire” is fucking great. The hi-hat riding atop a throbbing, plucky bass; the synthesizer that comes in at 51 seconds like the air horn on a semi-trailer truck; the programmed synthesizer that darts through scales; and then the verse—delivered with ebullient focus and clarity: “Your house is burning—your home is on fire!”

 

Plants and Animals capitalize on that intensity with “Sacrifice.” This song includes sudden rhythm changes. Insistent tom drums and gained-up guitar hack away through several chippy bars in the verse, then chords splish as the singer implores, “Hold on to yourself / Don't you want to die?” Then the song abruptly downshifts into a dependency-shedding chorus: “I gave you the best years of my life, volunteered on your behalf / sacrifice—it doesn't matter—for dopamine and lots of laughs.”

 

A cassette tape that sounds like it was left in the car all summer plays a recording of an acoustic guitar picking out a chord. Jangly, slightly warped. That is “Get My Mind.” At 21 seconds, the hi-hat opens up, the drummer raps on the snare, and the music tumbles into a song. A guitar slices off a thick, fuzzy riff of single, heavy notes, and the arrangement builds into a spiritual experience.

 

And it is here that The Jungle pulls back. “Le Queens” steams. A woman sings, “Sous les lumières dans le Queens / Tu t'embrasse avec moi / Ton visage blanche sous les fars / Pour la premiere fois”; then a switch to English: “Baby, don't you laugh ‘cause hearts get broke like that.” On “In Your Eyes,” a heavy phaser with subtle wah-wah effect produces underwater tones. And then the finale: “Bold” walks in quietly. But at the chorus, it cries out for your attention: “Waiting for you to be more bold / The drama rising, running out of time / Okay, what's next?” I first heard The Jungle two months ago. I have listened to it over and over, and I know what is next. I will return to The Jungle as time runs out.

 

 

 

 

something about "You Were Never Really Here" by Jonathan Ames

Joe's job is rescuing young girls who have been kidnapped and trafficked into the sex trade. You Were Never Really Here describes a job that will probably put Joe out of his misery.

Joe, a former Marine and FBI agent, gets hired to save the daughter of a corrupt politician in New York. But when he briefly disturbs operations at a brothel, Joe becomes a threat to a conspiracy and soon learns the stakes are higher than just a few months' income for a sex trafficker. The threatened trafficking organization murders the few important people in Joe's life. Joe, a deeply damaged human being, responds immediately by going on the offensive. He intends to brutalize his way to the crime boss who just destroyed the life Joe had come to accept. Now he has nothing left to lose.

"You Were Never Really Here," a slim novella published in 2013, was a huge departure for American author Jonathan Ames, whose work tries to be humorous. A gritty film version written and directed by Lynne Ramsay came out in 2017. It stars Joaquin Phoenix, who is real and the best actor of all time.

The book has a clumsy description of Joe early on. I wanted Ames to take us deeper. But, nevertheless, You Were Never Really Here was a highly engaging but too short read.

about a late spring weekend

 

I love rain—I want hours of rain, rain that pools on the ground under weighty skies and then runs paths in and out of the puddles. Rainy weekends are the weekends I want. How about you? Some people say weather is a dull topic of conversation. I guess they are right.

 

something about Black Ink Stain’s debut album, "Incidents"

Guitars lumber, vocals bellow, drums exorcise still spirits: this is Incidents, the debut from Black Ink Stain.

The French noise-rock trio sounds like Unsane, and this album is like a used cargo van overloaded with deep-groove riffs bowling down the freeway.

“I See You Dead” opens with a continuous track of bass and drums along with a dissonant guitar. Then the song rounds into a steel-chain groove accompanied by a flat, shouted vocal. A vacant, moody section comes at about two minutes in, and, after that, everything condenses again loudly into the groove.

“Pont Des Goules” is the most dynamic song on Incidents. It starts with a soft-focus riff, fuzzy notes soon accompanied by another steel-toe beat. Then comes a clean vocal—a rarity for Black Ink Stain. The song flows between parts like lava and recalls the soft-loud-soft-loud style so prevalent in the 1990s. On “Frozen Stance,” a bass riff rumbles and jabs through the opening minute. Restless drums and a dissonant guitar join, and this leads into a loafing, bottoming-out chorus.

Most songs fit this pattern: trunky grooves power ahead, find pockets of noise, then get back in gear. Black Ink Stain also takes advantage of the loads of momentum it builds in songs to add in breakdowns or syncopated high-knee jogs and not lose the groove. I guess once you build up that inertia, the easiest thing to do is keep going.

 

something about the Jars album, ДЖРС III

Jars moves you with a mix of dangerous grooves and hardcore punk on its latest album, ДЖРС III. The first song, “Заебало” (“Sick”), hammers out snaking riffs with a mallet. The guitars cut a dissonant, high-end whine, and the anxiety is eased only by the yelling vocals (“Oh!”) and driving drums and bass guitar. The tension grows over the song—and over and again on these nine tracks of ear-filling discontent.

Jars is a Moscow-based noise rock trio. It has existed in some form or another since 2011. The band has a handful of albums and EPs, and in December 2020, released ДЖРС III (a Russian translation of the band's name plus III).

Find the dialed-in inebriation of “Черное прикосновение” (“Curse Curse Curse!”), the five-minute musical equivalent of bashing in car windows in a convenience store parking lot. The song features a bass-driven groove below guitar notes that crunch and jangle while the vocal yells behind the din.

Jars want you to recall the 1990s and record label Amphetamine Reptile. I hear Shellac and Drive Like Jehu. And on “Спидкоп” (“Speedcop”), I hear even a little Converge. This compact, powerhouse of a song opens with a moment of feedback, then explodes into hardcore. Everything sounds good: the screaming vocal, the way the guitar strings ring out rather than shoosh a wall of distortion, and the penetrating bass and crisp drums. Nicely done.

The album ends with “Москва слезам не верит” (“Moscow does not believe in tears”), a half-marathon in a pocket groove. Nasty guitar streaks color and vocals shout out—but all succumb to the flexing rhythm of the bass and drums. The song retools after five minutes, escalates, slows—the sound of a band sharing consciousness—and drives on, passing 10 minutes, with gobs of mud thrown off with each turn of the wheel. The album’s song lengths vary, but the volume stays the same.

 

something about the film, “Joker”

In the movie "Joker," Arthur Fleck ekes out a miserable living as a party clown in Gotham City, 1981. Crime is up, unemployment is up, and poverty is up. Violent events lead Arthur to become a folk hero in a rapidly intensifying class struggle. The movie is an unofficial imagining of the origin story for the Batman villain, the Joker.

The New Yorker published a piece titled “'Joker' Is a Viewing Experience of Rare, Numbing Emptiness,” which says the following:

“Joker” is an intensely racialized movie, a drama awash in racial iconography that is so prevalent in the film, so provocative, and so unexamined as to be bewildering. What it seems to be saying is utterly incoherent, beyond the suggestion that Arthur, who is mentally ill, becomes violent after being assaulted by a group of people of color—and he suffers callous behavior from one black woman, and believes that he’s being ignored by another, and reacts with jubilation at the idea of being a glamorous white star amid a supporting cast of cheerful black laborers. But, unlike the public discourse around the Central Park Five, and unlike the case of Bernhard Goetz, and unlike the world, the discourse in “Joker” and the thought processes of Arthur Fleck are utterly devoid of any racial or social specificity.

I do not know what this means or how the film would be different if the racial iconography were more examined or if the movie had more racial or social specificity. I agree that “Joker” does not reinforce a politically left-leaning perspective on race, but I do not see how that makes the movie bad. I think the movie is good.

“Joker” is a sick person’s fantasy about meeting real-world conditions that allow the fantasy to become reality. Arthur thought he was a victim.

I used to think that my life was a tragedy, but now I realize, it's a fucking comedy.

He was nice to people, but they responded with indifference or cruelty. He discovered the power of revenge and began leading a class war.

What do you get when you cross a mentally ill loner with a society that abandons him and treats him like trash? You get what you fuckin' deserve!

Arthur's story and dialog gradually allude to a populist and class-oriented politics, which can be manipulated by demagogues and made dangerous. But this movie dwells in the origins of the discontent that allows a populace to accept demagoguery and then turn dangerous and to fascism. Arthur, during a serendipitous turn as a guest on a late-night talk show, asks his celebrity host, Murray:

Have you seen what it's like out there, Murray? Do you ever actually leave the studio? Everybody just yells and screams at each other. Nobody's civil anymore. Nobody thinks what it's like to be the other guy. You think men like Thomas Wayne ever think what it's like to be someone like me? To be somebody but themselves? They don't. They think that we'll just sit there and take it, like good little boys! That we won't werewolf and go wild!

Notes:

• "Joker" was released in 2019, was directed and produced by Todd Phillips, who co-wrote the screenplay with Scott Silver. The film stars Joaquin Phoenix as the Joker.
• I do not know if the concept started out as such, but I drew lines to Trump’s political rise leading into the 2016 election.
• The New Yorker also published a formal review of “Joker,” which was also critical. That review is fine.
• "All I Have Are Negative Thoughts."

something about another metal album

Progressive death and thrash band Cathartic Demise burn like a welding torch on the calculating new album, In Absence. But the band’s sound is not especially violent. Cathartic Demise are builders, not warriors.

The album sounds more like death metal than thrash—and more like death metal than prog, even though many songs top seven minutes. Like “Pale Imitations,” which goes almost eight. It opens with a poured-syrup guitar riff. That riff gets double-guitared for the harmony. The band uses dual-guitar harmonies throughout to find center, and these moments root the album in a metal tradition. At one minute into “Pale Imitations,” the drums and bass guitar join in, sound-tracking a death march. Then a counterpoint guitar line threatens the pace, so the tempo picks up until the band is at full blast. Rich, atmospheric, melodic sections with layers of guitars pile into the song’s latter moments. The last two minutes sound almost buoyant, and the song finally passes in the blurred reflection of melody.

Cathartic Demise put out its first release in April 2019, a self-titled EP. Today, this Ontario band releases In Absence independently. I listen to it now and hear all these wonderful metal influences. The musicianship is superior and the production is very good—a compliment to proficiency. And how could you not accept a sound so proficient?