The Return of Glassjaw

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Mar 03
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Whilst an unconventional release strategy has been getting Radiohead more attention than any band could use, Glassjaw have slipped out a pair of EPs all but unnoticed. Unless you follow Daryl Palumbo on Twitter (@DarylPalumboCC) or habitually check the band’s site for new, you’d be hard pressed to know that they were putting out new material: I haven’t seen coverage on any of the big music blogs as yet.

The release strategy opted for is perhaps best described as wilfully obtuse. It started with fans being posted blank pieces of cardboard and only got stranger from there. New music was released one track at a time on sequential date & month matching days: i.e. the track ‘Jesus Glue’ was released on 9/9, ‘Natural Born Farmer’ was released on 10/10(/10) etc. The releases were vinyl only, accompanied by a single-take web promo, with a $1 digital download following a month later.

Things got even crazier for the release of the November track ‘Stars’; from Wikipedia:

Interested fans were required to visit Mario’s Pizzeria in Seaford, New York at 1:11pm on 11/11/2010 and order “The Glassjaw” for $11.11. Inside a special box contained a personal-pizza and the ‘Stars’ 7″ vinyl, and the first 88 recipients were also given an invitation to a secret event at 11:11pm at an unknown address printed on the box…. [T]he event was for the music video filming of the unreleased song ‘Black Nurse’.

In total five tracks were released this way, and then collated into an EP titled Our Color Green which was released in January ’11. By that time the band’s site had been altered to an announcement of another EP, to be called Coloring Book, which is currently only available, free of charge, at shows.

That is unless you can find somewhere to download it from, something I had no qualms about doing being that a) they’re not asking for money for it anyway; and b) there is currently no other way of obtaining the music in the UK. For those same reasons I feel OK about posting a stream of opening track ‘Black Nurse’ here; a short review of the new material follows.

(photo by Tommy Au)

Though it’s tempting to put these two EPs together and consider them as one release, the music doesn’t make that easy or profitable. The five tracks released as singles lack cohesion, with their strongest connection being perhaps that they wouldn’t belong on Coloring Book. ‘Natural Born Farmer’ is perhaps the most similar to the sound of Glassjaw’s previous releases, and also the most complete track. It is an expertly handled mix of melody and energy that pulls no punches. The same could be said for ‘All Good Junkies Go to Heaven’; the pair of tracks leave no doubt that the passion remains for Glassjaw as a project – something which was in doubt among even the band’s hardcore faithful after more than eight years of silence. Interestingly, though these two songs in particular recall the band’s 2000 debut Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Silence, ‘Jesus Glue’ points even further back, to a pair of 1995 records. The vocal is sometimes reminiscent of Mike Patton’s performance on King for a Day… Fool for a Lifetime, and the spacious production arrangement recalls Deftones’ debut Adrenaline.

Even if the five songs don’t sit all that well together, its a strong set of material which could represent half of a great album if sequenced differently; if it was to be subsumed into an LP release perhaps one track, ‘You Think You’re (John Fucking Lennon)’, could be dropped without being missed. Clearly the weakest of the five, it feels a little unfinished – more like the seed of a song than the finished article.

The six tracks of Coloring Book are a different story: released as an EP they clearly belong together and represent something of a step forward for the Glassjaw sound. The track above, ‘Black Nurse’, incorporates some latin sounding elements with a great sense of menace, and sits brilliantly alongside the dense, winding snake of ‘Gold’, a muscular track showcasing great drumming and a high, cycling guitar element.

‘Vanilla Poltergeist Snake’ introduces electronic stabs amongst the prancing bass line and supplements the percussion with subtle use of a drum machine at points. The use of an electronic siren-like sound is reminiscent of Tom Morello – as is the distorted guitar line which drives ‘Miracle in Inches’. The production is spacious to great effect, where the easier choice may have been to opt for something claustrophobic.

The final two tracks represent another shift in gear. Warm and hazy with prominent electronic elements and percussion light and woody or performed with brushes, the closest connection in the band’s back catalogue is perhaps Worship & Tribute era b-side ‘Convectuoso’. When the EP’s closer ‘Daytona White’ breaks apart into washes of distorted guitar which fade in and out alongside cycling drums it’s impressive to consider how much ground is covered on these six tracks.

Author Adam
Category Music
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Sin City, Frank Miller & Robert Rodriquez dir. (2005)

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Jan 28
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As much as I love Darren Aronofsky, back in 2008 whenever I heard anyone giving him credit for singlehandedly resuscitating Mickey Rourke’s career, one word kept coming into my head: Marv. Despite the myth that Rourke had dropped off the cinematic map until Aronofsky went and found him, a quick peek at his IMDB page confirms that he never really went away. It’s true that The Wrestler was a different calibre of performance to the ones he was giving in The Pledge and Tony Scott’s Domino, but at the time that he was being celebrated for finally turning in another great performance, it had only been three years since his last one.

2005′s Sin City sees Rourke on top form, and to me he feels very much the centre of a film which is divided up pretty equally between him, Bruce Willis, and Clive Owen (w/ Benicio Del Toro). Marv is classic Frank Miller: square-jawed and hulking, nigh on invincible, and just flawed enough at his core to make you care. Miller (& Rodriguez) aren’t afraid to test an audience’s limits of compassion, and watching Sin City can sometimes feel like an exercise in figuring out who you dislike least. As a writer Miller is curious about absolutes, and the idea of finding out what happens when two conflicting absolutes run into one another. His bad guys–such as the sadistic cannibal Kevin, and the serial torture-rapist Roark Jr.–are irredeemably blacker than black (unless they’re yellow), and his good guys are often most at home in the grey areas.

And Sin City is one giant grey area. Throughout the film’s two hours we see corruption everywhere from its mayoral office, through its police force, to its religious leaders. The closest the city has to heroes are the vigilantes and prostitutes brave enough to take matters into their own hands.

Having not read the source comics I can’t speak to how faithful an adaptation this is, but there’s a definite sense of the story’s original format in the way the film is presented. Sometimes that can work for the film: providing it a unique style and a perfect excuse to indulge in gratuity and excess. Sometimes it can work against the film: leaving the structure of the film’s various plots seeming disjointed and disunited. Bookending the movie with two short Josh Hartnett scenes, inside of which are another pair of bookends of the Bruce Willis storyline, inside of which are two other stories feels more than a little clunky. And whereas self-contained stories work well in the weekly comic format, the cinematic effect of meeting Willis’s Hartigan in the second scene and then losing track of him for 90 minutes is less effective. Perhaps if more of an effort had been made to interweave the telling of these tales–as Rodriguez’s best pal Tarantino had accomplished masterfully the year before in Pulp Fiction–the film would feel a bit smoother.

I’ve never been the biggest fan of Rodriguez’s work. Again, I can’t speak to the Spy Kids movies, but some of his more outlandish sensibilities (along with a deep-seated dislike of Antonio Banderas) really put me off the El Mariachi trilogy. Here it seems that being kept within the stylistic confines of Miller’s look and feel helps rein Rodriguez in a little; it’s hard to fault Sin City on the way it looks, the way it moves and the tone it captures throughout.

Rodriguez has also assembled a wonderful cast. As well as a great none-more-noir performance from Rourke, Bruce Willis gives good hard-bitten cop, Benicio Del Toro expertly walks the line Nicholas Cage can never find between crazy and too crazy, and amongst the women Jessica Alba is solid and Brittany Murphy turns in some of the best scenes of her short career.

Though there has been speculation for five years now about a sequel, the question remains whether another set of stories simply shot and presented in the same style would be enough to satisfy. Personally I would happily return to Rodriguez & Miller’s Sin City; the look, by virtue of its abstractness and relative simplicity, hasn’t dated at all since the film’s release, and if there are more stories to be told as entertaining as the ones here then it’s a ride I’d happily take. That said, if QT is available to give some script structure advice that would be a call worth making.

Author Adam
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Black Swan, Darren Aronofsky dir. (2010)

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Jan 22
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As with all reviews posted on the site, the following contains discussion of the entire film without regard to spoilers. You may be better off bookmarking this post and coming back once you’ve seen the movie.

When I left the dingy Odeon cinema in Reading after seeing Fight Club in 1999 I felt elated. The movie had surprised and thrilled me, done things I’d never seen on the screen before, and knocked me back in my seat with its last 20 minutes. Fincher’s film was brave and brash and masculine, and like Palahniuk’s book it challenged some assumptions about what it meant to be a man in the modern world: the psychoses resulting from the protagonist’s breakdown fuel the movie and really give you a picture of a person’s dilemma as well as his time and place.

Leaving the beautiful Curzon in Soho yesterday, having just watched Black Swan I was struck by the similarities to Fight Club, and the extent to which Aronofsky has made a really wonderful feminine counterpart to that film. Like the earlier story this one is driven by psychosis stemming from the protagonist’s neuroses. Nina Sayers is obviously beset by all kinds of questions about her femininity: she has multiple body issues which are both shown in the film and hinted at in her past; her relationship with her mother is mutually overdependent to increasingly uncomfortable levels; her sexual repression inhibits her both emotionally and as a dancer. Just as Fight Club‘s narrator struggles to adjust to a world in which what is expected of men is unclear, Nina finds herself unsure in her roles as ingénue, seductress, daughter and modern woman.

Black Swan‘s script is brilliantly crafted to give Nina any number of models to test herself against. Her mother was a dancer and now has (too) high expectations of her; the fate of Winona Ryder’s character–who precedes Nina as the ballet company’s lead soloist–serves as an object lesson; Mila Kunis’s new girl to the class seems to be Nina’s shadowy opposite… and then there’s Nina herself. In almost every scene of Black Swan we are presented with multiple Ninas as Aronofsky’s camera seeks out every mirror in every room. Rarely do we see Natalie Portman without also seeing her doubled, moving differently, from some other angle. If it seems an obvious touch, employed by every horror movie you care to name, it is still masterfully done here and the extent to which it is taken throughout the film’s running time leaves the viewer dizzy and a little unsure of what they’re seeing – perfectly in keeping with the tone as a whole.

Natalie Portman is all over this film. Appearing not just in every scene but multiple times in most, her face also appears on other characters, in dreams, on posters…. The density of the character, as well as the physical demands of the role ask an incredible amount, as do some of the scenes in which we see Nina battle with her sexual inhibitions. In many respects–though some of the dance scenes show her graceful and athletic–the role of Nina Sayers is an unflattering one which could only have been accomplished this convincingly by a mere handful of actresses. Though her lack of height gives her away somewhat amongst the other dancers, Portman’s physicality and dedication to the demands of the part make for a remarkable performance which richly deserves the attention it has been receiving.

Aronofsky’s direction is certainly to be applauded too. Though it retains some of the handheld sensibility he developed to great effect on The Wrestler, there is a more directed feel to Black Swan. Whether it is the aforementioned use of mirror images or the very deliberate (and effective) use of black and white in the costumes and sets, there is a lot more to the film’s aesthetic than was perhaps the case with its predecessor. Any given frame of The Fountain will serve as testament to the fact that this is a director with an eye for rich detail and composition, and like that film Black Swan feels like the product of a considered and masterfully orchestrated vision.

Author Adam
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