mercoledì, ottobre 31, 2007

Halloween comes sickeningly

So. Following my plan to embrace my navel-gazing seasonal misery, last night I went to a Benjamin Biolay concert despite a nasty headache from having my long and curlies viciously brushed and blowdried to Afghan-hound-straightness by a sadistic, perfumed, pretty hairdresser who made me feel inadequate in all respects as a woman except, of course, that I have a body like a shapely sack of bowling balls and she had tits like fried eggs. Hah. Now today I have a huge headache and an upset tummy and I'm taking the day off work because I don't get paid by the hour. Double hah.

I wasn't expecting much. I'd heard he wasn't touring with strings or horns, and that he was a wooden and uncertain performer who'd rather not perform - heard that after I'd bought the tickets, of course. But expectations be buggered, for it was a fucking good concert. A rich indie sound, though he's not, of course, he's EMI or Virgin or something. Great texture. Great rhythm. That three-and-a-half dimensional sound you get at a show carried out by people who understand fully how music works as a collaboration. And his voice - I didn't know this was possible with pop acts - is better live than on the albums, and him actually suggesting melody with it goes a long way to making up for the lack of all the recorded instruments.

The best songs to hear live were from A l'origine, an album I like but whose tracks sound much better - louder, angrier, faster, and in the case of 'Tant le ciel etait sombre'* scarier live than they do recorded. A l'origine was apparently a commercial disaster, Trash Yeye selling more in its first two weeks then A l'origine has ever sold, and I thought it was interesting that he played so many songs from an album that tanked. Except it wasn't interesting at all, because the songs seemed like they'd been written for live performance. Certainly more so than the pretty tinkliness of Rose Kennedy (though I'm a sucker for 'Les cerfs volants' and the MacBook Marylin singing 'The River of No Return' brought me close to tears) and the gloomy folk rants off Negatif, which both came before. Not to say the renditions of songs from those albums were lots worse than the songs from A l'origine, but they were different from the recorded versions. He'd arranged them in a way that was more appropriate for a live show and it was good.

As for him as a performer - maybe he got a bit more self-confidence since the last round of critiques. Because while he looked like a freestyle rapper who'd smoked a whole lotta spliffery, and while there was cynicism in his carriage and banter bespeaking an awareness of the absurdity of the audience/rock star dynamic, his musical delivery was fantastic, and not cynical. The right energy, the right pitch, the right emotion. And there were some honest to goodness rock star moments when I would have thrown my panties at the stage if I hadn't been wearing trousers, such as when he started playing the trumpet for 'Dans le Merco-Benz'.

It didn't hurt that he had a great four-piece backing him, of which the drummer was the most obviously great to me. It did hurt that the one backing voice he had was from a very breathy woman who was more sound effect than soprano. He used proper voices to great effect on Trash Yeye and there's no excuse for not ponying up a couple thousand extra dollars for a trained singer who can modulate her voice without sounding like she's just finished gagging on someone's dick. But then that sort of voice seems so popular in French music. I think it's part of their unhealthy gender dynamics, which one day I will write a series of extended angry blog entries about, because, you know, I can. Triple hah.

Also, while him playing the trumpet made me want to throw my panties at him, it also reminded me there wasn't enough trumpeting, that there weren't any strings. Okay, it was a good sound, but it would have been a sublime sound with them, particularly on 'Los Angeles', which was missing its lovely rise-and-fall line in the refrain. Finally, the show was hurt by 'Little Darlin'' not getting played so I could really indulge my SAD. It made me think maybe he needs a full time sampler. But he was a touch of a human sampler, trotting out the refrain to 'Clint Eastwood' while winding up 'Negatif' and making it sound like music to massacre to. And he sang 'As Time Goes By' and made it sound, and excuse me for the earthiness of it all, like music to make babies to. Another rock star moment, when I simultaneously congratulated and berated myself for wearing pants.

Verdict - buy all his shit and see him live.

*Which I think will be my theme tune for this round of seasonal affective disorder, because the ciel in this city is sombre - Jeebus fucking Murphy, Halloween and I already want to shoot myself - happy Halloween, by the way!

lunedì, ottobre 29, 2007

Daylight, save me!

Daylight Savings Time is fucking brutal. My seasonal affective disorder is kicking in like a soccer playing motherfucker. So I'm trying to be all farmery about it - getting going earlier, spending a bit more time outside despite the weather being execrable. This year, I'm trying something else that worked pretty well for me when I was a teenager; self-consciously embracing the depression. In that vein, here's the first few songs in a list of 15 songs that have a strong tendency to make me cry:

1. 'Parigi o cara', Giuseppe Verdi. I get the feeling people these days would really dislike the public persona of a celebrity like Violetta, to the degree of her illness starting up a morbid Britney-Spears-esque deathwatch. No matter. The mutually delusional swansong of Violetta and her man, whose name I don’t remember, is chilling, sad and beautiful, its little minor notes and slightly jarring end a failsafe way to get me to cry.

2. 'Grandma’s Hands', Bill Withers. Even thinking about the lines “she said ‘baby, Grandma understands that you really loved that man, put yourself in Jesus hands’” followed by the final verse and conclusion ‘when I get to Heaven I’ll look for Grandma’s hands’ sung by a man whose voice is maybe the most effecting in pop music always reduces me to a pile of snot. The musical equivalent of a bucket of water on the Wicked Witch of the West.

3. 'Stand By Me', John Lennon. Only the Rock and Roll version; I've heard him slaughter it elsewhere. This filthy, rich, pebbles-in-a-cheese-grater plea to let good love endure usually makes me shed a couple of unsad, cathartic tears. The backing, especially the percussion, is good enough to make me think Lennon was a selfish fucking twat for not listing the band members on the liner notes. But his vocals here are still the best thing any Beatle did after the Beatles stopped being the Beatles. Though we mustn't forget:

4. 'Starting Over', John Lennon. It’s the most stapley staple of post-Beatledom because even two legless drunkards can dance to it. In fact, this is the song Elvis taught me to couples-dance to and it remains the only song I’m fully comfortable couples-dancing to, besides the 'Stand By Me' above. The thought of Elvis, who made my childhood hell but who now lives too far away from me, a whole fucking planet away, combined with the trembly uncertain joy of love that keeps coming back from the dead without behaving like a zombie, usually gets me weepy.

5. 'Purple Avenue', Holly Cole. When she leans and dips on the line ‘I’ll sleep right here on the draaaaaaaaining board’, my heart remembers all the times it broke and curled up for a long, stunned rest. And I cry. That bell-like voice of hers yodeling out Tom Waits’ incisor words is as satisfying as successful plastic surgery. She followed this album up with an album completely made up of Waits covers and I’m itching to get my hands on it.

Anyways, that's enough for today. Tonight I'm going to a Benjamin Biolay concert, and two of his tracks feature elsewhere on the list, so that will be plenty depressive for me. In that vein here's the least depressing weepable song on the above list:

Not something to bring up at your next AA meeting

Went to a lovely exhibition yesterday in Ghent, or as the French call it "Gaw(n)" or as the Dutch atrociously call it, "Hxxxxhentt." You remember that scene in Splash when Tom Hanks asks the dewy and delicate Darryl Hannah what her name is in her own language, and she yelps out a shocking, painful series of unfiltered dolphin cries? That's the way I feel whenever a Dutch person says anything. Anyways, we went to Ghent to see an exhibit at their splendid gallery called British Visions - lured in by the promises of Lucian Freud, who the F-word loves, and Turner, who I love, and lots of others - David Hockney, who I never feel is faking it - Hogarth, who's just so heartbreakingly funny - and a bunch of Francis Bacons; poor Francis Bacon. I guess you can't tell much about a man from his work but when I look at anything he's painted I feel he's sure he's going to hell when he dies - an unsympathetic dread of his own future, an uncensored vision of his own futile present. It makes neat paintings but I would not have traded brains with him for anything. And then lots of Stanley Spencer, who was new to me but very appealing, even in the way his second wife's breast wrinkled in the painting of them together.

Anyhoo, we were mostly there for the newer stuff, but it did occur to me as we looked at the older stuff that we don't fully appreciate what Europeans have achieved, culturally. Oh sure. We put the past in museums and we traipse the schoolchildren through them, struggling to instill greater regard for our own narrative than the narratives of our historical enemies or underlings. We protest when newcomers don't slot into our molds, we watch absurd period piece movies, and we devote the economies of cities like Bayreuth, Florence and Stratford to celebrating the glories of the past. But we never consider all the hurdles that our European predecessors had to overcome to create our patrimony, principal among which in my mind today was that they were drunk from dawn until dusk, from being weaned to being shriven. They were drunk, drunk, drunk.

Everybody was full of something that had been fermented or distilled in an effort to kill all the bad bacteria that was swimming around the water in those days, everybody was tolerating sieges where the enemy would chuck corpses into your water supply, everybody was paranoid about Jews or heretics or witches poisoning wells, or whoever. So everybody was pissed out of their tree. They went from their mother's tit to the bottle and they stayed there until they died. And despite this, somehow we had the Renaissance, Goya, the Van Eyck brothers, opera, orchestras, Gothic architecture, the postal service, Yorkshire pudding, colonialism, Shakespeare, guns, the re-invention of the novel, and all the other things that make us go 'how did they do that!?!' when we ponder what our ancestors achieved without laptops, GPS, or a life expectancy much beyond 30. Who knows how they did it, but do it they did, and they did it all drunk.