This is a re-post from the Bearcast Music blog. Head over there to check out reviews of current albums, which can be heard on Bearcast. I wrote this review on Sunday, February 21, 2010.

Eels frontman Mark Oliver Everett, better known as “E,” has made a cottage industry out of his personal pain and suffering.

His body of work, from the seminal Electro-Shock Blues to his sprawling magnum opus Blinking Lights, has drawn heavily from an autobiography laced with cancer, suicide, and insanity. As his family dies off and his lovers leave him, E industriously sets these tragic tales to catchy melodies.

The most recent Eels album, End Times, makes me want to hurt myself.

But in a good way.

End Times comes hot on the heels of Hombre Lobo, with only six months separating the two albums, and they couldn’t be any more different. Conceived as a pair, Hombre Lobo is about the blossoming of love between E and his wife, while End Times is about their bitter divorce.

The album shuffles off the glossy production values of earlier Eels albums, and favors a “Band in a Box” sound. Glimpses of the old Eels occasionally shine through, thanks to the return of drummer Butch (Jonathan Norton) after seven long years of estrangement.

It’s easy to call E’s lyrics self-absorbed, if you’re not willing to go along for the ride. He captures the essence of depression, singing “I take small comfort in a dying world, I’m not the only one who’s feeling this pain” in “Gone Man Gone.” Such negativity doesn’t have universal appeal, but it’s perfectly at home on a breakup album for grownups.

It’s odd to hear E speak so personally about his relationship with his ex wife, which was kept almost entirely under wraps until the publishing of his autobiography Things the Grandchildren Should Know in 2008. Prior love songs from the group were written in the third person, and E’s discomfort with the subject reveals itself in some kind-of clunky lyrics.

End Times is varied in its sounds, drifting from frail electric ballads like “End Times” to the raucous rockabilly of “Gone Man Gone” and “Paradise Blues.”

The album has three must-listen tracks, each demonstrating E’s mastery of simple melodies and heartbreaking lyrics.

“A Line in the Dirt” is a piano ballad whose chord structure lifted almost exactly from E’s song “Manchester Girl,” a B-side from 20 years ago. It sets a simple scene of a man making appeals to his wife through a locked bathroom door, as she makes him realize that, in reality, he wants to be alone. A subtle orchestral arrangement of strings and horns swells as he accepts this, and drives off into the dark.

“Mansions of Los Feliz” is the acoustic confessional of a shut-in who’s trying to ignore the outside world and forget his past. The song stumbles when E breaks into a falsetto “la-la” chorus over the bridge, but the rest is A-grade classic Eels.

“Little Bird” is an astoundingly beautiful and frail song. E sings to a bird on his porch, his only friend, about how much he misses his wife. This is accompanied by a soft, clean electric guitar arpeggiating over a nearly-inaudible orchestra. The song hearkens back to the title track of Daisies of the Galaxy, another underrated gem from the band’s library.

End Times isn’t for everyone. It’s more melancholy than prior Eels albums, which is saying quite a bit. It’s easy to miss the beauty of the arrangements, in the face of the ugly words laid over top of them. It’s also easy to miss the arc of the story. Like all Eels albums, it spends a great deal of time wallowing in despair, but eventually it gets a grip and realizes that things might just be okay after all. Hardly triumphant, but it counts for something.

Score: 8 out of 10

This is a re-post from the Bearcast Music blog. Head over there to check out reviews of current albums, which can be heard on Bearcast. I wrote this review on Sunday, February 21, 2010.

Shearwater’s latest outing, The Golden Archipelago, fits nicely alongside the band’s previous albums Palo Santo and Rook. Whereas Palo Santo was about the horrors of war, and Rook was about the splendor of nature, The Golden Archipelago marries the two concepts and explores how man’s brutality affects the natural world.

“This is how I learned the lie that power breeds regeneration.”

Shearwater has come into its own, and can no longer be considered a side-project of fellow Austin, TX band Okkervil River. Shearwater Mk. II’s output has been consistently haunting, atmospheric, and environmentalist. Their lyrics and melodies paint an impressionistic landscape, with images that jab out with stark vividness before fading back into the ether.

The Golden Archipelago is a narrative album, based on frontman Jon Meiburg’s travels to islands in the Pacific. This trip followed the footsteps of his grandfather, who was a radio operator in World War II. His grandfather’s story frames the album, contrasting his military life with the islands that were being destroyed in the fight.

“His eyes on the waves, and a god below the waterline.”

Meiburg’s vocals remain his best strength, as he sings with tremendous clarity and range. In a single song, he will transition from a falsetto whisper into a bellowing wail, as in the album’s first single “Castaways.” What’s remarkable is that he’s often kept low in the mix, obscured by the wall of sound that’s built around him. When his voice pierces through, it leaves an indelible mark on the song.

The cerebral nature of the lyrics and softness of the melodies makes the band difficult to classify… Until you hear the drums. Percussionist Thor Harris ushers the compositions along with driving, often tribal beats on tracks like “Corridors” and “Landscape at Speed.” Where drums are inappropriate, Harris mans the vibraphone, contributing to the complexity of the melodies. A drummer named Thor hammering on the skins? That sounds like a rock band to me.

“Where the hull scrapes the silent eyes and the gulls on the frozen ropes.”

The standout track of the album is “God Made Me,” which brings the family aspect of the story to the forefront. It starts out with timid strings mimicking a chorus of insects, coalescing into a simple melody alongside Meiburg singing about witnessing some horrible catastrophe. The song builds to a tremendous crescendo of exploding electric guitar chords… Suddenly halting, giving way to a short denouement of strings and guitars, like fading air-raid sirens, as if nothing had happened at all.

The Golden Archipelago is not a perfect album, but it’s pretty damn close. It’s solid gold from start to finish. It has a story to tell, and a bitter message to deliver about the wholesale destruction of natural beauty in this world. The album drifts in and out of focus, like a waking dream, pulling you in with its atmosphere and subtle complexity.

Score: 10 out of 10

When I was seven years old, my family went to Disney World, where I watched Honey, I Shrunk the Audience!.

Backed by the dulcet tones of Rick Moranis’s whiny voice, I was treated to all manner of dorky 3D trickery. A dog, bigger than god, poked out of the screen and licked me. This event caused a jet of water, ersatz saliva, to shoot into my face from the back of the chair in front of me. Lab rats escaped their cages, rushing into the auditorium, causing spinning pieces of plastic under the seat to thwack the backs of my calves repeatedly. Because of this, I instinctively lifted my legs onto the seat.

This was hardly the infancy of 3D, but it was new to me. The gimmickry of the visual and practical effects was lost on me, since I was too young to be cynical about that kind of thing.

Contrast this with my skepticism regarding James Cameron’s Avatar. Of course, I read about the movie on all manner of websites. I saw Twitter explode when the trailer was released. I read about the bloated budget, the extended production time, and heard Cameron talk about how he was revolutionizing film.

None of these claims found any purchase with me. It looked like Fern Gully, except with blue people and without a rapping bat voiced by Robin Williams.

I threw my $10.25 onto the pile, along with the other $1 billion or so, solely out of technical curiosity. Just how revolutionary could this be? How would this new technology change the way the shots were composed? How could Cameron reconcile the 3D with an actual narrative?

Early on in the movie, Siguorney Weaver’s character says “You’re not in Kansas anymore” to the film’s bewildered main character, Jake Sully. It’s a heavy-handed reference, but Avatar is light on tact. The message is clear: The Wizard of Oz was a spectacle, an easy-to-understand story that made Technicolor a mainstream success. The audience was brought along for the ride, transitioning from Earth to Oz, from sepia tones to a world where the brick road was yellow, goddammit!

Avatar is to 3D what The Wizard of Oz was to color film. What remains to be seen is if the 3D films that follow it will implement the tech as subtly and masterfully as Avatar.

When the 3D trailers started, I was immediately disoriented.

Those kids whose eyes were ruined by Nintendo’s Virtual Boy? I was one of them. A lifetime of inner ear problems have left me incredibly susceptible to motion sickness. I watched in horror as previews for Alice in Wonderland and a new Shrek movie threw candy-colored visual hell at my face. It felt like each eye was moving on its own accord, and I couldn’t tell where to focus. I had to look down at my lap more than once to keep my bearings.

Put simply, it sucked.

The feature itself had much more grace. James Cameron wasn’t Jo-Jo the Indian Circus boy with his pretty new pet. He didn’t throw things directly through the screen, just to show that he could. Instead, shots are composed in such a way that stray leaves obscure the edges of the frame, just barely out of focus, placing the audience in the bush with with the “cameraman.” Floating motes of nature dust glow around the characters. CGI drop ships stand out in front of ridiculously picturesque vistas.

Since this review is already full of digressions, let me tell you about the first time I played Splinter Cell on my brand new Xbox. One level features an industrial freezer, separated by a doorway of hanging, transparent rubber flaps. When Sam Fisher walks through them, they flop around realistically, as you’d expect they would. This blew my mind. I spent probably ten minutes just walking back and forth through these flaps, seeing how they’d react.

It’s the little things that draw me in to a world. I felt the same way about the use of 3D to lend depth to shots including windshields or mirrors. The illusion was complete, I saw glass windshields, and then a few feet behind them, I saw faces. The rear-view mirror of a mech featured a realistic reflection, with the proper depth and everything.

There’s only one “OH MY GOD IT’S FLYING RIGHT AT ME” moment, and its really satisfying.

I’m not fooled for a second, though. I know that Hollywood is rushing to embrace 3D as a way to bolster its distribution model. Why would I pay $10 to see a movie when I can wait 3 months and enjoy it on my own time, with high definition and surround sound? Movie theaters need a hook, and Avatar is a successful pilot run of what’s likely to be a real shot in the arm for brick and mortar theaters. That, and beaming Glenn Beck live into the heartland.

My cynicism was marginally justified in that I found it difficult to watch large portions of the movie. The eye naturally searches a frame for the area of focus. Size and movement dictate the magnetism or weight of the imagery, telling is where to direct our gaze. Shots are composed with foregrounds, mid-grounds, and backgrounds. This is the paradigm of cinematography, that you manipulate images in order to create the illusion of three-dimensionality on a 2D plane. This new 3D technology takes the way we naturally watch movies, and forces perspective on us by keeping our eyeballs on a tight leash.

I’d find my eyes straying from what was “in focus,” only to receive a headache as reward for my curiosity. Foreground and background elements are put (literally) right in front of you, and blurred out, causing your eyes to fight to bring those things into focus. This also creates a nasty effect where live-action elements look like cardboard cutouts compared to objects that are rendered to be “naturally” 3D. It’s difficult to explain, and not everyone notices it, but it bothered me.

You’ll notice that I’ve said very little about the narrative of the film. It’s a pressing issue, and it’s what would keep the movie from being a 3 hour tech demo.

The story is a thinly veiled allegory for 1). the Iraq War (specifically) and 2). Imperialism/Exploitation (generally). Cameron doesn’t give the audience much credit, and refuses to treat us as adults who can draw our own conclusions. That said, I agree with Avatar’s politics, personally, I just would have enjoyed a less heavy-handed approach to the subject matter.

Cameron’s an effective storyteller, though, and the majority of the film is incredibly exhilarating. My chest was thumping during the battle sequences, and I was along for the ride on most of the movie’s emotional ups-and-downs. It was emotionally manipulative without pissing me off, which is more than I can say for many films which hamfistedly attempt to elicit some kind of human response from me. Avatar is like Star Wars in that is adheres strictly to the Monomyth, but that’s a set of cliches I can’t argue against. It’s stood the test of time pretty well.

The characters were solid. I empathized with the right ones, and felt that the wrong ones were sufficiently villainous. The performances were very good, especially in regards to the digital actors. I was sold on the facial expressions and fluid animations of the Na’vi. The illusion was complete, and at very few points did I feel like I was watching a video game cinematic.

Avatar is deserving of your attention, if only because it’s a spectacle that must be seen before it leaves theaters forever. 3D television sets are too far away, and this is an experience which, regrettably, can’t be duplicated in the home.

I want to leave you with a small anecdote, which I feel sums this over-long article up quite well.

The theater was packed, and I had to sit right next to a little kid, around 7 or 8 years old. Right around the age that I was when I saw Honey, I Shrunk the Audience!. At several points during the movie, I noticed that he was waving his hands in front of his eyes, as if to scatter the leaves/dust/debris obscuring his vision. Even though I knew it was all 3D trickery, I caught myself doing the same. Just like Honey, I Shrunk the Audience! was my first experience with 3D, Avatar was this kid’s first experience with 3D. I can quantitatively say that Avatar is the better of the two, and we’ve come a long way since 1994.

Progress is an amazing thing, and if the leap forward is big enough, we’re all little kids again, and everything is a wonder.

The best advice I can give to anyone going to see this movie is to pay a visit to RunPee.com. You will have to piss by the time the credits roll, and I guarantee there will be a line at the bathrooms.

I’m no stranger to music games. I purchased PaRappa the Rapper day one. I went to Best Buy daily to play their pre-release demos of Guitar Hero. I can beat “Painkiller” on expert drums in Rock Band 2.

Due to my storied career with the genre, it takes a lot for a music game to impress me.

Thankfully, DJ Hero lives up to my expectations, despite its flaws.

Developed by FreeStyleGames and published by Activision, DJ Hero is to turntablism what Guitar Hero is to rock music. With the turntable controller in-hand, you tap, scratch, and crossfade notes as they move toward the screen. The songs you play are mash-ups of two different tracks, and the game tasks you with “mixing” them together on the fly.

It’s an immensely satisfying experience when you do it right.

A music game lives and dies by its track list, and DJ Hero contains more hits than misses. FreeStyle managed to jam a lot of genres into the game, more often than not pitting widely disparate musical styles against each other.

This pays off most when the guest DJs are behind the mix. The entire Daft Punk set list could justify a purchase, if you’re of the right persuasion. Other standout contributors are DJ Shadow and the Scratch Perverts.

These tracks work because you can tell what’s happening with the mix, which can be difficult sometimes since DJ Hero’s concept is more abstract than Guitar Hero’s. The interface is incredibly complicated, since the game is asking you to perform a wide variety of actions.

There’s no jarring “thunk” if you miss a note: the track just doesn’t play. This lack of feedback makes it difficult to improve at the game, as does the inability to fail out of a song.

The music falls flat whenever guitar based rock songs are featured. Those mixes are absolute trainwrecks. The guitar set list, in which one person mans the turntables while another plays on a guitar controller, can be safely ignored.

The music genre thrives in a social setting, but DJ Hero’s biggest flaw is that it’s an incredibly solitary experience. I imagine you could pull it out at a party, play it, and expect people to dance. But I can also imagine being beaten up at said party, because that’s really lame.

A word about the turntable controller. It’s a solid piece of work, and it only takes about 30 minutes to get used to it. There is a very comprehensive tutorial, but unfortunately it can’t be skipped. I recognize that it’s necessary, and quite helpful, but non-skippable tutorials are never excusable.

Eventually you get lost in the music and forget that the controller is even there, but some glaring flaws keep it from being a great device.

My biggest issue is with the crossfader. There’s a “click” when it’s in the middle, neutral position, but it’s not sticky enough. Too often, I’d overshoot my mark while fading back to the middle, and break my combo. Forget about nailing the faster sections. Perhaps some more practice will negate this, but probably not as quickly as a redesigned crossfader.

It sounds like I’m down on this game, but I nitpick because I see potential. Don’t be misled for a second, the game drew me in. I started playing DJ Hero immediately after it was delivered to me. Four hours later, I realized I’d forgotten to eat dinner. It offers a new challenge for music game veterans, something that hasn’t happened for a few years.

DJ Hero feels like the original Guitar Hero. The “one more song” compulsion is overpowering, it forces you to develop new hand-eye coordination, and offers fun insight into the music being presented.

It also seems a little unpolished, and will certainly benefit from another iteration before it truly hits its stride.

I will award extra points if the sequel contains tracks from LCD Soundsystem.

Score: 7.0