PSYCHEDELIC ROCK FOR THE 21ST CENTURY
CD Review: The Mars Volta -
Frances the Mute
9/10
by Evan Smith
Frances the Mute, released today by Universal Records, is The Mars Volta’s highly anticipated follow up to De-Loused. Consisting of only five tracks (three of which are split into sub-movements) Frances the Mute manages to boast a running time of nearly 78 minutes. You do the math: 78 minutes / 5 tracks = spacey mayhem. Frances the Mute is a time-demanding concept album trademarked with furious drums, scale-climbing bass, psyched-out guitar riffs, spacey keys, and Omar’s amped-up, operatic wail. To enjoy this album, you have to be able to endure minutes of creepy ambient sounds in order to earn the sweetly rewarding crescendos. The album is best described as a technologically enhanced, twenty-first century version of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, cranked up on enough Benzedrine to kill an elephant.
Frances relies heavily on the guitar mastery of Cedric Bixler. Within the very first minute of the opening track “Cygnus… Vismund Cygnus” he is already shredding out a jaw-dropping solo. Bixler plays everything from acoustic guitar to the most obscure guitar-effects, truly testing the limits of guitar sound and creating lush, unique landscapes for the rest of the band to perform around. And then there is Omar Rodriguez. Periodically jumping between English and Spanish, Rodriguez howls out vividly hysterical one-liners, raving things like “twenty-five snakes pour out of your eyes,” and “heaven’s just a scab away,” on the 32 minute, frenzied climax to the album “Cassandra Gemini.” It is Rodriguez’s incredible range and the lurid haunting-ness of his voice that truly completes TMV’s ethereal sound.
The official single from Frances the Mute, which also happens to be the only track under six minutes in duration, is a gorgeously composed song entitled “The Widow.” If this album is Mars Volta’s Wish You Were Here, then this track is subsequently their “Wish You Were Here.” Featuring an appearance by Flea playing the trumpet (his true musical passion) and fellow Pepper John Frusciante pitching in some work on the synthesizer, “The Widow” passionately reaches out to former band mate Jeremy Ward who recently died of a drug overdose, and to whom this album is dedicated.
While Frances the Mute is an incredible concept album that seems to deliver on almost every front, there are points when TMV’s work seems a little bit self-indulgent. One track in particular, “L’via L’viaquez,” goes on to the point of tiring redundancy. The song returns to the same Latin-influenced, two-minute chorus five times and only boasts slightly impressive instrumental improvisation between breaks. Five minutes could easily be trimmed away from this track.
Frances the Mute is a difficult album that will take a few undisturbed listenings to fully appreciate. Its sound is chilling, yet irrepressibly powerful. While De-Loused is a more listenable album, Frances is more of an overall experience. If you’re bored with three-minute chart toppers, sick of all the emo/punk/hardcore/indie genre labels, and have time to listen to an incredibly forward thinking and sounding album, this one is a good choice.
NOT SO MEAN A CREEK
DVD Review: Mean Creek
8/10
by Bobby Ellis
Mean Creek, a movie that has just recently been released on DVD, is one of a group of films that premiered at Sundance last year and found fairly lucrative distribution deals after the festival. Among this group were some of the biggest surprise hits of the last year, Napoleon Dynamite and Open Water. Mean Creek, like Open Water, is a movie that casts an unusual and captivating emotional hold upon its audience, and takes the kind of real risks you’d be hard pressed to find in any major studio film of the past year. For these and many other reasons, Mean Creek emerges as not just one of the best films to come out of Sundance last year, but one of the best movies to come out last year, period.
Consisting of a cast of relative unknown child and teenage actors, Mean Creek is a story of childhood in the vein of Stand By Me, but possibly even a bit darker. The story begins and ends with George, an overweight and ultimately misunderstood bully. He keeps a running diary of his life on tape because, as the audience comes to find out, he doesn’t have too many real friends. Sam, played by Rory Culkin, makes the mistake of fiddling with George’s video camera, and swiftly receives a public beat down in return. Sam’s older brother Rocky, played by Trevor Morgan, and his friends plot a revenge that will “hurt George without really hurting him.” Innocently enough, they plan on embarrassing him, and concoct a plan specifically to do just that.
At that point Mean Creek could have taken a turn in any direction. The basic plot could almost be seen as a set up for comedy or even a thriller up to that point, but first time director Jacob Aaron Estes carefully peppers his script with very precise tonal devices, cementing his story as an honest drama and establishing figuratively the “guns on the mantle.”
Like Estes’ script, his direction is near flawless. Not in a very long time has a group of young actors so confidently tackled such serious subject matter with so much honesty, and one can only imagine that it was the delicate work of Estes which spurred on their truly remarkable performances.
Mean Creek will mostly become an enabling film for many of these young actors, gaining them the interest of big-time directors and almost ensuring that you’ll be seeing much more of them soon. This couldn’t be truer than in regard to Scott Mechlowicz, whose intense performance as Rocky’s best friend Marty is the darkest in the film. Also notable is the amazing performance from the very young Carly Schroeder as Millie, Sam’s girlfriend. Carly carries much of the film, as her character Millie is seen as the most sympathetic, and is as much a captive audience as the viewers, watching the tragic events unfold themselves.
Mean Creek is a complex movie that is not so much about getting to a certain point in the story as it is about the issues faced when we get there. After the pivotal scene in the movie, there is about five minutes of no dialogue; all that can be heard are the sounds of the creek that surround the young characters as they face the tragic reality of their situation. Mean Creek, as a film, shines in almost every way, but in no way more than with its faithfulness to the reality of the situation. The movie is painfully believable, and will haunt you with its difficult questions of morality, youth, and family. If you’re looking for a film that will challenge you and give you an emotional impact that will match any of the best movies this year, Mean Creek is your answer.
QUITE THE SPREE
Book Review: The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby
8/10
by Christopher Ahearn
Nick Hornby is the best friend that you never had. He’s unbelievably smart and eloquent, but at the same time, he’s self-deprecating and witty; the kind of guy who would rather kick back with a few brews while watching the game than pontificate on obscure Victorian literature. And that is exactly why his new book, The Polysyllabic Spree, which spends a fair amount of time on the subject of said Victorian literature, is so great.
For those not familiar with Hornby, he is the hilarious and charming author of High Fidelity and About a Boy, as well as last year’s superb collection of essays on his favorite pop songs, Songbook. He also writes for a few magazines, most notably as the pop music critic for The New Yorker, and a monthly columnist for The Believer, the publication from which The Polysyllabic Spree derives its material.
The Believer is an offshoot of Dave Eggers’ quarterly, McSweeny’s, and specializes in “positive” literary criticism; a reaction to today’s “snarky,” as they term them, literary reviews. The book’s title is a play on this militantly optimistic perspective; Hornby characterizes the magazine’s editorial board as similar to the startlingly cult-like and robed band, the Polyphonic Spree. The book consists of all of his columns from September 2003 through this past November.
Though The Polysyllabic Spree is ostensibly a collection of literary criticism, that is not its true subject matter. The novels that Hornby chooses to review vary widely, including everything from Dickens to Moneyball, an expose of the economics of American baseball. He chooses them not because of their relevance or recent publication dates, but for the same reason that any reader chooses to pick up a book, because he’s been meaning to read it, it’s been recommended, or it just looked interesting. Though he is a smart and perceptive critic, Hornby’s writings are not interesting because of their critical value, but because the book is a chronicle of what it is to be a reader. Reading it, you feel more like you’re having a conversation with a good friend than being lectured to by some stuffy nerd from The New York Review of Books.
Each essay begins with two lists, one entitled “Books Bought” and the other “Books Read.” The titles in each column seldom match each other, with some of his purchased books showing up months later to be critiqued, while others are indefinitely relegated to bookshelf purgatory. A good portion of each column is spent explaining why the football (that’s soccer to us non-limey bastards) matches he watched took precedence over his reading, how his various book buying trips went, and the actual mechanical specifics of how he read (on a plane, in the car, etc.) rather than talking about the books themselves. It is in this way that The Polysyllabic Spree is so much like Hornby’s other work, and why it is so enjoyable. He writes with a warmth and wry wit that is easy to identify with, but rare to find in literature. This is a book that you can connect with by simple virtue of being a reader, whether you liked, hated, or haven’t even heard of the books that are reviewed within. It may not be profound, and it probably isn’t going to tell you something you’ve never heard before, but as far as books created for the sheer pleasure of reading go, this one is top notch.
