Real Life Rock (280 page)

5
Gang of Four, First Avenue, Minneapolis (February 12)
In front of an unfawning but enthusiastic crowd whose ages, from twenties to sixties, matched those of the four onstage—founding members Andy Gill and Jon King in their mid-fifties, new members Tom McNiece and Mark Heaney in their forties and thirties but appearing much younger—the strongest performances were physical epics. Compositions that were once tied to specific social or political circumstances—“Armalite Rifle,” about torture in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, or the stop-time, spoken “Paralysed,” about mass unemployment and forced redundancy under Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s—reemerged as basic, general, borderless tales, to be told around the campfire of a show like this one. “Do As I Say,” from the band's recent
Content
, was a hysterical, then implacable acting-out of an all-pervasive tyrannical madness. These songs and others went on and on, as if for each number the writers had forgotten to include a way out. It was one long analysis; the cheering was loud after the first encore and louder after the second.

6
Antietam,
Tenth Life
(Carrot Top)
As the leader of this undefeated New York trio, singer and guitarist Tara Key has never pulled her punches, but never have they landed so fiercely, and with such grace, as they do here, six songs in. “Clarion” is an instrumental, a melody building on its own lyricism, all sunsets and sunrises, until it fades into “Better Man,” where it reveals itself as a fanfare, because this is the song—relentless, confident, triumphant, every swagger earned and paid for a hundred times over—you didn't know you were waiting for.

7
Social Distortion,
Hard Times and Nursery Rhymes
(Epitaph)
Over nearly twenty years this Southern California punk band—led by Mike Ness, who sometimes comes across as the bad seed of namesake Eliot—hasn't come close to making a poor record. This is staggering.

8
Howard Jacobson,
The Finkler Question
(Bloomsbury)
“After more than a dozen years roaming the ghostly corridors of Broadcasting House in the dead of night, knowing no one was listening to anything he produced—for who, at three o'clock in the morning, wanted to hear live poets discussing dead poets, who might just as well have been dead poets discussing live poets?—he resigned.”

9–10
Platters, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” (Mercury)
Released in 1958, just months after Eddie Cochran's “Summertime Blues,” it's drifted through its own haze ever since, now for a long moment hovering over Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling for the awful sex scene in Derek Cianfrance's
Blue Valentine
, until the music fades away and dies as the sex does. Bryan Ferry covered the Platters' version—the composition goes back to the 1930s—in 1974 for
Another Time, Another Place
, trying to get underneath the Platters' soaring, heroic embrace of the song, to find a smaller song inside of it. Sneaking in behind the closing credits in Sofia Coppola's
Somewhere
, his version is gorgeous, threatened, a heart exposed, and for a verse or so he's allowed to say everything the movie can't, or more likely won't.

Thanks to Daniel Marcus

JUNE
2011

1
Gareth Liddiard,
Strange Tourist
(ATP)
The film critic Mick LaSalle, in the
San Francisco Chronicle
, recently answered a reader's query as to why the superb film
Never Let Me Go
—the movie about an English boarding school attended exclusively by boys and girls destined to be harvested for their organs—failed to receive an Oscar nomination as one of the ten best films of the year. “. . . a movie's chances go down if viewers feel like killing themselves after an hour,” LaSalle replied.
Strange Tourist
is like that: a man sitting in a room, hitting notes on an acoustic guitar, meandering through tales of one defeat after another, with alcohol leaving tracks on the songs like a snail. But Liddiard leads the Drones, who with far more drama, dynamism, and fury can also make you feel like killing yourself, or anyway wishing the world would end, or wondering if, in one symbolically complete event at a time—a school shooting here, a successful Republican filibuster there, a new Lucinda Williams album on the horizon—it hasn't already. Here, in a quiet, artless, shamed, constricted way, a person emerges: a fictional construction, someone without a flicker of belief or, for that matter, interest in redemption, cure, or another life. Against all odds, especially across the more than sixteen minutes of “The Radicalisation of D,” the final track, he makes you want to know what happens next.

2
Jay-Z,
Decoded
(Spiegel & Grau, 2010)
An old-fashioned artist's book—thick, gorgeous, a collage of memoir, rhymes, photos, newspaper front-pages, drawings, paintings, and so dense in mass and swift on the eye that you have no idea what might appear each time you turn a page. For me the book lit up when I stumbled on the page with an old picture of Ronald Reagan—from the '40s or '50s, looking ingratiating and slick—with the shadow of Osama bin Laden peering over his shoulder. The little super-imposition swirled: Jay-Z's point was that Reagan was happy to see New York turn into Crack City, that we've forgotten the “historical amnesia and the myth of America's innocence that led us into the war in Iraq.” But to me, Reagan came right out of the book, smiling over Jay-Z's shoulder, handing him a Medal of Freedom, telling him that he, like all of the other people on the stage, was an American hero for proving that in this great country anyone can make himself so rich democracy is beside the point.

3–4
Mildred Pierce,
directed by Todd Haynes, written by Haynes and Jon Raymond (HBO)
and
Michal Grover-Friedlander,
Operatic Afterlives
(Zone Books)
At the end of the fourth episode, Kate Winslet's Mildred, Brian F. O'Byrne's Bert (Mildred's ex-husband), and a few others gather excitedly at one of Mildred's restaurants; someone brings out a 1930s box radio and places it on a table. They're going to hear the radio debut of Mildred and Bert's daughter Veda: a “coloratura soprano,” though they're not sure what that is. Mildred and her daughter, played by Morgan Turner as a child, and by Evan Rachel Wood as a near adult, are more than estranged; her daughter considers
her mother, a successful businesswoman, little more than a peasant. There's nervousness all over Winslet's face.