Liam Finn is a doer. ‘Precocious’ springs to mind. After three missed opportunities in the last year, I was lucky enough to hunker down amidst a sparkly crowd of bright young things with the odd douchebag thrown in for good measure (bless their dear ‘earts!), and catch him live at the Gaelic Club on Friday night. He’s an energetic bloke – other apt adjectives include: ‘chipper’, ‘zesty’ and ‘more twitchy than a sack of snakes’ – a talented songwriter and, with his trusty cohort Eliza Jane, put on a highly entertaining show. Which is unsurprising really, considering his pedigree.
Mr Finn is a man in the midst of a love affair. The object of his affections: the humble loop pedal. Having heard live recordings of the plucky lad in the past, I wasn’t hugely surprised by this, but was more than a little impressed by the skill and sophistication with which he and EJ manipulated the technology at their disposal. Seamless textures were the order of the evening, overlaid with some beautifully executed harmonisation between the pair, Gather To The Chapel being a case in point.
An epic rendition of I’ll Be Lightning was another highlight, Finn’s drumming becoming so frenetic in the song’s tail that he ‘broke the fucking loop pedal!’ – he hadn’t, but in some ways it would’ve been nice if he had. The songs are certainly strong enough to withstand the exposure of an acoustic treatment.
I understand the urge to approach things differently, especially in a scene that knows no shortage of talented male singer songwriters, and the whole ‘one-man-band’ aspect of his act is certainly an attractive one. It must certainly help cut down on tour costs not to have three other blokes in tow. On this occasion however it seemed as though the techno-gimmickry was a touch counterproductive beyond a certain point, serving to obscure the music rather than enhancing it. This was underscored by those few instances when things went wrong, including a failed attempt at audience participation, as well as the fact that the drums sounded absolutely piss-weak when looped.
Not to worry. Liam Finn is a consummate performer, his playing filled with irrepressible manic energy which is coupled a great sense of showmanship. Aside from playing around with a Theremin as well as his ‘birthday present’, a toy megaphone artlessly decorated with flashy red lights, he did a great impersonation of the sort of angry rocker who utterly destroys his guitar on stage by completely destroying his guitar on stage. Twas hilarious. Meanwhile on stage right EJ proved a quiet but effective foil to his antics. Give them another year or two and they’ll be a force to be reckoned with.
Smile raisers: rediscovering Bughouse; the possibility of Bela Fleck hitting Australian shores in the new year; riding one’s bike along Botany Bay of a Sunday afternoon. It was most splendid.
* Happy Happy Fun Times
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
The only way is
My lungs hurt. This of course has absolutely nothing to do with various weekend indulgences and everything to do with the end of the world. Not that it's the apocalypse of course, merely a highly sophisticated conspiracy between the Australian Window Washers' Union and CarLovers. And they would have got away with it too if it weren't for those meddling kids!
Ahem. My regular movie-going buddy has been in a foul mood of late, so late last week in an attempt to shake him from a burdensome glower and spite, we forwent our more regular combination of wild rides, explosions and cheerful brainlessness and treated ourselves to the new Pixar flick. Up! is a rare beast: colourful, captivating and utterly unique. Chubby, hyper-imaginative Carl and scrawney hyper-energetic Ellie dream of traveling to Paradise Falls, a forgotten valley in South America, thus emulating its discoverer, intrepid explorer Charles Muntz who vanished, never to return.
Fast forward seventy years and grouchy retiree Carl (Edward Asner), bereft after Ellie's death, shows what can be done with helium and several thousand balloons to make a final gesture of defiance towards a city whose approach to caring for the elderly is to swindle them with one hand while subjecting them to infantilising 'care' with the other, launching his hokey little house into an atmosphere noticeably free of superfine red dust and away in search of Paradise Falls. Along for the ride is Russel (Jordan Nagai), an overtalkative eight year old 'wilderness explorer' in need of some fatherly attention, an 'assisting the elderly' badge and large quantities of ritalin.
Needless to say that they reach Paradise Falls far more quickly than their unconventional mode of transport might seem to allow. While it is of course a foregone conclusion that Carl will eventually learn how to put up with hyperactive children, the film is far from predictable, the story unfolding in a series of delightful, often can't-stop-laughing-gasping-for-breath surprises, each new element being adroitly woven into the simple tale its the core. Any concerns that Pixar might have become prone to Disnification (an irreversible and grotesque process whereby one develops an overwhelming thirst for cliches, cheese and cuban children) after its 2006 merger with said company should have been laid to rest after last year's brilliant WALL-E - with Up! such thoughts have been shown to be so much hot air.
Just try not to think about how much money Steve Jobs is making off of it.
Tasty treats: The Ruminant Band by the Fruit Bats; Grim Reaper Blues by The Entrance Band; ham and cheese jaffles for afternoon tea.
Ahem. My regular movie-going buddy has been in a foul mood of late, so late last week in an attempt to shake him from a burdensome glower and spite, we forwent our more regular combination of wild rides, explosions and cheerful brainlessness and treated ourselves to the new Pixar flick. Up! is a rare beast: colourful, captivating and utterly unique. Chubby, hyper-imaginative Carl and scrawney hyper-energetic Ellie dream of traveling to Paradise Falls, a forgotten valley in South America, thus emulating its discoverer, intrepid explorer Charles Muntz who vanished, never to return.
Fast forward seventy years and grouchy retiree Carl (Edward Asner), bereft after Ellie's death, shows what can be done with helium and several thousand balloons to make a final gesture of defiance towards a city whose approach to caring for the elderly is to swindle them with one hand while subjecting them to infantilising 'care' with the other, launching his hokey little house into an atmosphere noticeably free of superfine red dust and away in search of Paradise Falls. Along for the ride is Russel (Jordan Nagai), an overtalkative eight year old 'wilderness explorer' in need of some fatherly attention, an 'assisting the elderly' badge and large quantities of ritalin.
Needless to say that they reach Paradise Falls far more quickly than their unconventional mode of transport might seem to allow. While it is of course a foregone conclusion that Carl will eventually learn how to put up with hyperactive children, the film is far from predictable, the story unfolding in a series of delightful, often can't-stop-laughing-gasping-for-breath surprises, each new element being adroitly woven into the simple tale its the core. Any concerns that Pixar might have become prone to Disnification (an irreversible and grotesque process whereby one develops an overwhelming thirst for cliches, cheese and cuban children) after its 2006 merger with said company should have been laid to rest after last year's brilliant WALL-E - with Up! such thoughts have been shown to be so much hot air.
Just try not to think about how much money Steve Jobs is making off of it.
Tasty treats: The Ruminant Band by the Fruit Bats; Grim Reaper Blues by The Entrance Band; ham and cheese jaffles for afternoon tea.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Cannibal Capers in Colonial Tassie
Van Diemen’s Land is the latest in a long series of painfully earnest, artistically spineless and ultimately pointless Australian films. It is 1823 and the isolated island colony that eventually became Tasmania is not a hugely fun place to be. Conceived by the British as a place of permanent banishment for reoffending convicts it is, as the Gaelic-speaking narrator muses, for all intents and purposes ‘the end of the world – a fine prison.’ The speaker is Alexander Pearce (played by co-writer/producer Oscar Redding), a ‘quiet man’ who, along with seven other convicts, escapes the grinding brutality of internment by fleeing into the island’s mountainous wilderness.
Meticulous attention has been paid to establishing an authentic sense of the period; the actors are all scraggily hirsute, sporting clothing stitched together from possum skins with the backs of some riven with scars from old floggings. Aside from their shared desperation, lust for freedom and longing for women the men have little in common. They quickly segment along ethnic lines, the English around presumptive leader Robert Greenhill (Arthur Angel), the Irish around Pearce and his friend, the young, hot-blooded Alexander Dalton (Mark Leonard Winter).
Although it is initially difficult to work out who’s who (not helped by the occasional dodgy accent), there are some nice establishing scenes depicting both the tension between these cliques as well as moments of camaraderie. However as conditions become more unendurable and the provisions run out, these ties prove to be all too easily broken as the groups’ hunger takes a bloody turn.
From here the plot moves with wearing inevitability towards its last-man-standing denouement. Richard Flanagan, author of arguably the most stunning fictional treatment of the early days of the Tasmanian colony, Gould’s Book of Fish, has commented that the film is ‘spare, compelling and poetic.’ Although the first and last are certainly true, the script being characterised by terse, evocative language, the film can hardly be called compelling. Violent action gives way to long, long stretches of silence, the filmmakers filling the void with shots that slowly pan across the lush wilderness that succeed only in sapping any dramatic momentum.
The film is unrelenting in its realism, first time director Jonathan auf der Heide depicting Pearce’s descent into cannibalism with unsensationalised detachment. The problem with this approach is that rather than simply providing the viewer with critical distance, the film begins to seem as though it is avoiding its own subject matter. This amounts either to a lack of artistic imagination on the filmmakers’ part, or simple squeamishness, unwilling to directly confront the questions raised by the extreme, abject acts that lie at the heart of the story. Ultimately, Van Diemen’s Land seems to be a victim of its own lofty pretensions, the filmmakers’ timidity allowing it to slide into nihilistic meaninglessness.
Local release 24th September
Things to warm the heart: Fantastic Mr Fox is imminent (hooray!); xkcd is releasing a book (hooray!); despite how it may seem at the time, hangovers DO eventually evaporate. Thank christ.
Meticulous attention has been paid to establishing an authentic sense of the period; the actors are all scraggily hirsute, sporting clothing stitched together from possum skins with the backs of some riven with scars from old floggings. Aside from their shared desperation, lust for freedom and longing for women the men have little in common. They quickly segment along ethnic lines, the English around presumptive leader Robert Greenhill (Arthur Angel), the Irish around Pearce and his friend, the young, hot-blooded Alexander Dalton (Mark Leonard Winter).
Although it is initially difficult to work out who’s who (not helped by the occasional dodgy accent), there are some nice establishing scenes depicting both the tension between these cliques as well as moments of camaraderie. However as conditions become more unendurable and the provisions run out, these ties prove to be all too easily broken as the groups’ hunger takes a bloody turn.
From here the plot moves with wearing inevitability towards its last-man-standing denouement. Richard Flanagan, author of arguably the most stunning fictional treatment of the early days of the Tasmanian colony, Gould’s Book of Fish, has commented that the film is ‘spare, compelling and poetic.’ Although the first and last are certainly true, the script being characterised by terse, evocative language, the film can hardly be called compelling. Violent action gives way to long, long stretches of silence, the filmmakers filling the void with shots that slowly pan across the lush wilderness that succeed only in sapping any dramatic momentum.
The film is unrelenting in its realism, first time director Jonathan auf der Heide depicting Pearce’s descent into cannibalism with unsensationalised detachment. The problem with this approach is that rather than simply providing the viewer with critical distance, the film begins to seem as though it is avoiding its own subject matter. This amounts either to a lack of artistic imagination on the filmmakers’ part, or simple squeamishness, unwilling to directly confront the questions raised by the extreme, abject acts that lie at the heart of the story. Ultimately, Van Diemen’s Land seems to be a victim of its own lofty pretensions, the filmmakers’ timidity allowing it to slide into nihilistic meaninglessness.
Local release 24th September
Things to warm the heart: Fantastic Mr Fox is imminent (hooray!); xkcd is releasing a book (hooray!); despite how it may seem at the time, hangovers DO eventually evaporate. Thank christ.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
The Beasts be Feelin' their Oats
I've been revisiting the Dirty Three back catalogue over the last few days, Master Ellis and Co acting as, amongst other things, a highly effective sleep aid. The veteren trio's set on the final day of this year's Green Man festival in the misty climes of the Welsh countryside had, by all accounts, a touch of magic about it. Sigh.
Fortunately, I've had some tip top music around to help soothe this unaccountable yearning for ye olde land of uk. Wild Beasts to be precise, a band whose singular debut Limbo Panto emerged last year as a sharp rebuttal to those who had* grown disenchanted with the state of British rock. Although singer Hayden Thorpe’s idiosyncratic style (read: raging falsetto) turned off as many as it attracted**, everyone pretty much agreed that this was a band that held in abundance that most elusive of musical attributes: originality.
The lads seem to have benefited enormously from the intervening year of touring, riding the wave of creative energy to produce with their second album a trimmer, darker and sleeker beast. Two Dancers dispels any anxiety that Limbo may have been a simple aberration from business as usual (i.e. Muse), fizzing with creative bouyancy.
Much of the theatricality that characterised the debut has been toned down, resulting in a leaner record that benefits from a more focused sense of purpose. Which for Wild Beasts simply means that the high drama of say ‘Woeboegone Wanderers’ has been shed in favour of the clear hooks and shimmering mesh of guitars of ‘The Devil’s Crayon’.
This isn’t to say that they’ve lost their sense of humour, opener ‘The Fun Powder Plot’ setting the tone with teasingly nonchalant irony. The band’s lyrical sensibility has continued to develop in a direction that is socially aware as well as being unequivocally English – the kind of Englishness that combines pills, lads and… well, Essex, with green fields, historical references and Marmite. Take this from the stellar ‘Hooting and Howling’ for instance:
We’re just brutes bored in our bovver boots, we’re just brutes clowning round in cahoots
We’re just brutes looking for shops to loot, we’re just brutes hopin’ to have a hoot
Thorpe’s at times almost agonised cry at once expressing helplessly detached observation and intimate identification, while enjoying a sly dig at the tabloids.
It’s also a fine example of the increased danceability quotient on display this time round, thanks to the unyielding, yet strangely buoyant, propulsion provided by the watertight unit of drummer Chris Talbot, guitarist Ben Little and bassist Tom Fleming. The latter again shares vocal duties with the effervescent Thorpe, his resonant baritone providing an almost welcome respite on the charming ‘All The King’s Men’, as well as on the bleak couplet ‘Two Dancers I’ and ‘II’ that form the thematic core of the album.
The band’s theatrical side is given room to breathe on ‘Underbelly’, while the sole line of ‘When I’m Sleepy’ is inflated into a simmering, lascivious groove, complete with a guitar scrunch that mimics with surprising authenticity the sound an adult giraffe produces during the heat of coitus***.
Ahem. In summary, Two Dancers is quite grand: joyful, sober and a little bit cheeky, it bubbles with musical creativity and as such, should be listened to by everyone.
Other nice things include: 'Exposure' – Peasant; 'The Kirwan Song' – The Amazing; avocado on rye toast with salt, pepper and a dribbling of balsamic vinegar
* justly
** not unlike gorgonzola
*** do not enquire as to how I know this
Fortunately, I've had some tip top music around to help soothe this unaccountable yearning for ye olde land of uk. Wild Beasts to be precise, a band whose singular debut Limbo Panto emerged last year as a sharp rebuttal to those who had* grown disenchanted with the state of British rock. Although singer Hayden Thorpe’s idiosyncratic style (read: raging falsetto) turned off as many as it attracted**, everyone pretty much agreed that this was a band that held in abundance that most elusive of musical attributes: originality.
The lads seem to have benefited enormously from the intervening year of touring, riding the wave of creative energy to produce with their second album a trimmer, darker and sleeker beast. Two Dancers dispels any anxiety that Limbo may have been a simple aberration from business as usual (i.e. Muse), fizzing with creative bouyancy.
Much of the theatricality that characterised the debut has been toned down, resulting in a leaner record that benefits from a more focused sense of purpose. Which for Wild Beasts simply means that the high drama of say ‘Woeboegone Wanderers’ has been shed in favour of the clear hooks and shimmering mesh of guitars of ‘The Devil’s Crayon’.
This isn’t to say that they’ve lost their sense of humour, opener ‘The Fun Powder Plot’ setting the tone with teasingly nonchalant irony. The band’s lyrical sensibility has continued to develop in a direction that is socially aware as well as being unequivocally English – the kind of Englishness that combines pills, lads and… well, Essex, with green fields, historical references and Marmite. Take this from the stellar ‘Hooting and Howling’ for instance:
We’re just brutes bored in our bovver boots, we’re just brutes clowning round in cahoots
We’re just brutes looking for shops to loot, we’re just brutes hopin’ to have a hoot
Thorpe’s at times almost agonised cry at once expressing helplessly detached observation and intimate identification, while enjoying a sly dig at the tabloids.
It’s also a fine example of the increased danceability quotient on display this time round, thanks to the unyielding, yet strangely buoyant, propulsion provided by the watertight unit of drummer Chris Talbot, guitarist Ben Little and bassist Tom Fleming. The latter again shares vocal duties with the effervescent Thorpe, his resonant baritone providing an almost welcome respite on the charming ‘All The King’s Men’, as well as on the bleak couplet ‘Two Dancers I’ and ‘II’ that form the thematic core of the album.
The band’s theatrical side is given room to breathe on ‘Underbelly’, while the sole line of ‘When I’m Sleepy’ is inflated into a simmering, lascivious groove, complete with a guitar scrunch that mimics with surprising authenticity the sound an adult giraffe produces during the heat of coitus***.
Ahem. In summary, Two Dancers is quite grand: joyful, sober and a little bit cheeky, it bubbles with musical creativity and as such, should be listened to by everyone.
Other nice things include: 'Exposure' – Peasant; 'The Kirwan Song' – The Amazing; avocado on rye toast with salt, pepper and a dribbling of balsamic vinegar
* justly
** not unlike gorgonzola
*** do not enquire as to how I know this
Friday, September 11, 2009
The Up Start
Let's keep this simple and short: this is a blog about film and music. Books might get a look-in too. Who knows.
There are many others like it. Some are better than others. Some are worse. Some should never have been made.
My hope is that with time this might become one of the better ones. Fingers crossed. Here goes!
There are many others like it. Some are better than others. Some are worse. Some should never have been made.
My hope is that with time this might become one of the better ones. Fingers crossed. Here goes!
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