Crushing Krisis

The Newest Oldest Blog In New Zealand

music

30 – Adele | the expectations game

by Leave a Comment

As a music fan, consumer, and review, it’s hard for me to detach my reaction to a new album from the expectations game.

That’s especially true of fourth albums, like Adele’s 30.

Everyone loves an indelible debut record. When we love an artist’s first album, we fall in love with the songs, but we’re also deeply curious about their potential. What path will they take? How will their follow-up sound?

We applaud when an artist releases a strong second album. We are amazed when it is even better than the first. When we love an artist’s second album, we fall in love with the songs, but we’re beginning to measure a vector. They’ve moved in a direction, even if that direction is to provide more of the exact same. Will they continue to progress in that same way?

Third albums are tricky. That’s when things become interesting. Third albums are when we think we really know something about an artist. We have a reasonable sample size of songs. We have three points from which we can triangulate position and estimate future progress.We can say, “the artist usually does this or that.” We can decide if their progression has been linear or if it took a hard turn into unexpected territory.

That is why fourth albums are dangerous. They are the realm of proving or disproving all those things that we thought we understood. They have the potential take an artist’s progression from a line – or even a triangle – to some wild uneven quadrilateral that might even intersect with itself. They’re often the moment where an artist solidifies who they really are and who they will continue to be for many years to come.

I think most people navigate that musical map subtly. Unconsciously. The average listener has some expectations that might be fulfilled or shattered, but I don’t think they consider a fourth album to be particularly significant.

I’m not like that. I can’t turn off the part of my brain that dissects songwriting and production, and that draws out vectors of musical style and influences. I am graphing each release as a point on a musical map and drawing the vectors between them. I can’t help it.

Adele has had a textbook progression through these first three steps Memorable debut? Check. Explosive classic sophomore effort that raised her to worldwide acclaim? Check. Stylistically rangy third record that at once confirmed her strengths but pushed some of her boundaries. Check.

Now, 11 years after her debut but a whole 6 after her third record, we’re getting that fourth album. The dangerous one. It’s dangerous for Adele, but dangerous for me, too – because I feel the weight of all of those expectations.

I had to listen to it two different ways. First, just to hear the songs. Then, to hear them with the weight of all of that piled on top of them.

It was terrible both ways, which leaves me fearful of Adele’s future trajectory.

30 – Adele

Adele is the biggest blockbuster voice in popular music today, both in spectacle and in sales. That makes any album of hers a hotly anticipated release. 30, in particular, has been inflated even further. The first in six years! The first since she got divorced! Got thin! And it’s accompanied by a pair of pan-Atlantic concert specials! And an interview with Oprah!

I don’t know that the spectacle could get any bigger. It threatens to overshadow the features that made Adele so famous in the first place: her massive voice, her clear-eyed songwriting, and her biting sense of humor.

Adele is famous for using that massive voice to command attention on her emotional ballads just as well as she uses it to power surprising, genre-defying pop hits like “Chasing Pavements” and “Rolling in the Deep.” She has never lacked for strong material in either category. Her songwriting skills are as notable as her vocal power, even if her vocals sometimes overshadow them.

Now at a pinnacle of her popularity, 30 finds Adele coasting through a set of charmless songs without an earworm refrain to be found. Suddenly, she is putting the schmaltz at center stage rather than her songwriting acumen. I don’t begrudge her the sales, but I wish they came with a more enjoyable record. [Read more…] about 30 – Adele | the expectations game

Song of the Day: “If You Harden On The Inside” by Hezekiah Jones

by

This post makes me absolutely giddy with joy: I’m debuting a song by my favorite band in Philly, who I also interviewed for this post, and if you buy it all the proceeds go straight to Women’s Law Project.

The song is “If You Harden On The Inside,” the first new tune from Hezekiah Jones since after their 2016 EP Har Har Har and a track on December’s Vilomahed project curated by Michele Lynn. You can get it for as little as $1, although I encourage you to donate more!

Hezekiah Jones is the folk collective formed by and around Philly-based songwriter Raphael Cutrufello. He pulls a peculiar double-duty while fronting the band, acting the entire time as Hezekiah, with each one of the band’s rotating cast of musicians presenting themselves as another fictional member of the Jones clan.

(My favorite: Dow Jones.)

That little touch of mythology goes a long way to contextualizing Cutrufello’s songwriting. When you hear Hezekiah Jones’ music, you have the profound sense that a weird band of back-country geniuses have briefly descended from their cloistered home on a hill to play for you, like a roving band of thespians in Shakespeare.

(It may be a hill in an alternate timeline.)

The songs are full of piercing observations on the human condition, always tinged with optimism. There’s also a smattering of details that place them in a vaguely post-apocalyptic landscape full of endless roiling wars and the Mississippi river expanded out to a sea.

Hezekiah Jones, photographed by Lisa Schaffer.

Hezekiah Jones, photographed by Lisa Schaffer.

“If You Harden On The Inside” could easily be a handclaps-and-harmony 60s pop song if it was dressed up with a full band arrangement. Instead, a whimsical chorus of Hezekiahs sings “blah blah blah” as backing to the track, later joined by a swell of electric pianos. As the song whirrs to life with its halting rhythm it gives serious vibes of Dirty Projectors.

Cutrufello AKA Jones plays everything on this track save for drums by Daniel Bower (AKA Roy G. Biv Jones) and bass by Philip D’Agostino (AKA Pepe Jones), a Philly music scene legend and touring member of Get The Led Out.

Half your saints
Are playing video games
Or they’re out doing meth
Or too depressed to get out of bed

All these bodies
What a delicate make
If you harden on the inside
You’ll be easy to break

If someone
Gave into love
Their guard would be down
We could steal all their stuff

That is the paradox of our human fragility in three stanzas, each repeated to make sure the message sinks in. [Read more…] about Song of the Day: “If You Harden On The Inside” by Hezekiah Jones

Filmstar at the NorthStar

by

Waiting to go on with Filmstar at NorthStar Bar.

 

Since taking this photo we’ve begun watching the so-far awesome The Way Home, who played with Filmstar long before my joining two years ago. Three and four part harmony, awesome keyboard vibes, acoustic/electric mashup – pushing pretty much all my buttons.

We’re playing next, followed by our esteemed colleagues in Venice Sunlight.

#MusicMonday: “Anything We Want” – Fiona Apple

by

Fiona at SXSW this spring.

It was 1999, my freshman year of college, when Fiona Apple’s When The Pawn…dropped.

I don’t know if I would have called myself a fan of Apple’s at that time. I had picked up her first album in Junior year of high school thanks to the recommendation of my computer programming teacher, and saw her twice on the tour behind it.

Though I grew to love Tidal over time, it was always a little sleepy for me at the time. I loved “Sleep to Dream” from the start, plus “Criminal” and the thrumming “Carrion,” but on the whole it was subtle for my teenage years. So I can’t tell you exactly why I picked up When the Pawn… If only I had started a blog a year earlier!

What I can tell you is that I thought – and still think – that the LP is a work of utter genius. Every song is an incredible feat of songwriting. Fiona’s voice is throaty and lush. All of the arrangements are imaginative without being over-bearing. It is a five-star effort that I still listen to front to back almost once a month.

I followed all the Extraordinary Machine drama and, as you may recall, I didn’t love the finished product. I did still love the songwriting. It was another all-genius every-time effort. That’s not easy to do twice in a row, especially on your second and third releases!

I was notably cooler in my zeal when Apple’s The Idler Wheel… was announced earlier this year. Sure, new Fiona Apple record – great! But who knows if she could keep up the genius streak or find the right sound for her songs.


(Yes, I know, advertisement, but this performance is so amazing, it’s worth it. If you’re seriously opposed, here’s another great performance on YouTube.)

I don’t know that she achieved either, but she made an arresting, challenging work of art in the process, and she is delivering similarly arresting and somewhat terrifying live shows in support of it. At the Tower Theatre Apple looked like she might shake herself right off the stage, or simply disintegrate where she stands from the sheer intensity of it all. (She also sounded haggard, which is concerning, since we’re still early into her tour, but she sounds better on the video, just a week prior.)

While many are fixated on single “Every Single Night,” I thing early leak “Anything We Want” is the pièce de résistance on this record. It’s the one song where the minimalist pounding-on-things style of found-sound production definitely doesn’t detract from a song that clearly has some intricacies built in.

Also, the lyrics are quite genius – a story of seduction spanning time and space. Witness this clever device.

first verse
My cheeks were reflecting the longest wavelength
My fan was folded up and grazing my forehead
And I kept touching my neck to guide your eye to where
I wanted you to kiss me when we find some time alone

last verse
Let’s pretend we’re eight years old playin’ hooky
I draw on the wall and you can play UFC rookie
Then we’ll grow up, take our clothes off and you remind me that
I wanted you to kiss me when we find some time alone

That’s just stunning. The very oblique seduction in the first verse is resolved by very adult tryst in the final one. Yet, in the final verse she contrasts that lust with pretending that she’s eight years old. Kids kiss, and grown-ups take their clothes off. Is the “let’s pretend” a remembrance of her own youth with a now adult lover – a flashback to more innocent flirtations? Or, should we read the “Let’s pretend… then we’ll grow up” differently – that they are so effortless and comfortable with each other that they regress to their childhood selves and grow forward in the room together, until they are adult enough that he reminds her where she wanted to be kissed hours or days before, since forgotten?

Stunning. The turn of the lyrics keeps me rapt every single time I listen to it.

I want to believe Fiona Apple is healthy and happy at the moment – a recent giggling and quite normal appearance on Jimmy Fallon supports the theory. If she keeps laughing and living and releasing strong work, I’d say it was one of the best concerts I’ve seen in my life, and The Idler Wheel… is a brave experiment by a singer with a still-unbroken streak of excellence – even if it’s never the excellent we expect from her.

break it and build it again

by

I wasn’t allowed to sing for two weeks. It’s a story I’ll get around to telling once it stops freaking me out quite so much.

That meant no Arcati Crisis rehearsals. My singing is much less central to Filmstar, so we kept rehearsing sans my mic stand.

Right now we’re in pre- pre-production for our next recording. For our last one we started with recording drums to click tracks, and even if is taking me forever and ever to mix them into something listenable it was certainly worth the effort. Being able to steal sounds from any take and blend them together seamlessly was totally worth the tempo wrangling. Plus, everything is nice and consistent!

An outtake from our recent Filmstar photo shoot.

Unless you are playing the most obvious 1-2-3-4 rhythm on the planet, when you play to a click it is like the musical world you are creating from within has had its gravitational value altered. Songs feel too slow when you play them quietly and deliberately, but too fast at full blast. Syncopation puts your emphasis off-click, which feels like swimming against tide. You discover parts where you subtly speed up or slow down, and the seconds of discontinuity give you musical vertigo.

To that imbalance, this week we have returned my singing to the equation, but it’s different, too. Yes, I am more cautious of my high notes, but it’s more than that. My voice doesn’t have that worn-in groove that it usually has, where I can settle in and belt. I have to actually think about where I am placing my notes, and how I will support them.

Add to that a new set of strings on my bass and a handful of new effects pedals, and it really feels like I am playing these songs again for the first time, relearning my parts piece by piece.

What makes that so interesting is that these are the songs we learned after I joined the band. The pieces are mine. The parts came from my brain. Instead of fiddling with someone else’s bass line that doesn’t quite fit me to begin with, I am rebuilding each song from components of my own design.

It is totally different. I get to ask questions about my own musical logic. I am tearing down old rhythms and fingering for things that are more efficient or intricate, or both.

I know it is the same band of the same four people and these are songs I have been playing for a long time – two years, for some of them – but I can’t help it: it feels new to me.

The next Filmstar show is on Sunday, August 5th at NorthStar Bar, where we will have the pleasure of sharing the bill with the darling boys of Venice Sunlight.

You should come.

Photo Shoot with Filmstar

by

Editor’s Note: This post was drafted on this date but not finished or published. I believe that at the time I was waiting for one of the photos from the shoot to add to it. I’ve retroactively published it as one of my last written accounts of Filmstar prior to the band dissolving in September of the same year.

Being in a band involves a lot of activities other than playing music – organizing cables, sending emails, promoting shows, and posing for photos, among many other administrative and hard labor tasks.

You might assume photo shoots are the most fun of all the non-music-playing options. I mean, who can argue with being glamorous and having a photographer follow you around for a day?

I’ll admit, that part is pretty fun. But as someone who occasionally manages photo shoots for a living, I know it’s not all lipgloss and striking a pose. There is a lot of organization that goes into a good photo shoot, and when it is lacking it the quality of your photos can become a matter of chance.

That whole diatribe is for another time.

On Saturday all of Filmstar convened at new drummer Brad’s house in Northern Liberties, along with longtime fan Jake (not Arcati Crisis Jake), who was our photographer for the day. I’ve resisted in appearing in band photos since I joined, as I’m still technically a contracted player and not a band member, but with half of the band from the prior photos gone I had to submit to finally stepping in front of the camera.

We started out in an underpass. I know – bands and their brick walls, fences, and urban decay. So tiresome. Except, this particular underpass was rife with colorful, artful graffiti – some of which was dedicated to the recently deceased artist Moebius. So, not your typical graffiti. We also lugged a massive old monitor cabinet with us from Brad’s house to sit on and pose around. A great shot can be just a single prop away.

After the underpass we were intent on finding some other picturesque NoLibs locations to shoot. We had a few favorite bars in mind, but hadn’t had a chance to call ahead and ask for permission.

We walked towards Girard Avenue, debating the best approaches to springing a photo shoot on an unexpecting bartender, when we passed a fantastical wonderland of vintage lighting. It was a lighting fixture warehouse, whose massive load-in ramp was marked with a felled art deco lighting fixture that was flanked with high-backed chairs bearing decommissioned chandeliers.

Glam Decay. The perfect playground for Filmstar.

It turned out that the shop’s owner was a former owner of JC Dobbs from its 80s heyday. You find these sorts of connections all around Philly. He regaled us with stories of a young Kurt Cobain and renting light fixtures to Angelina Jolie movies while we scouted his shop for interesting photos. Well, I mean, the whole place was interesting photos, but we were trying to find one that we would look good standing in.

Feeling quite ingenious and victorious after our impromptu location, we headed into the bars and did what any intrepid band of beer-appreciators would do in that situation – we turned our photo shoot into a bar crawl. In an effort to not have to ask awkward questions about photography, we simply ordered a round of beers at each one.

This had the added bonus of loosening us up a bit. Not that we weren’t loose and gorgeous in our pictures already.