The Lounge Lizards - The Lounge Lizards (1981)

Listening to The Lounge Lizards I can’t help but think of those film noir parodies you’d see on kids TV shows, where you’d have the main character as the fedora-wearing private eye and the leggy dame and the unlit office filled with alluring shadows. In other words, all the touchstones except the fifth of rye. I cannot even begin to think of the names of any of the shows that played with this kind of joke (the image is so indelible in my mind that I really hope I didn’t make it up) but I’m sure they all had the same kind of music - a smoky, sleazy jazz leaking in through the slant-blinds. This is that type of jazz.

What these lizards are doing here is pulling an elaborate joke. At least, from what I’ve read, this was their initial intention. After this album they settled down and became just an ordinary jazz band. The joke, as imperceptible as it may be, is mostly in the sound, the way genre constructs are flashed and then quickly translated into a blaring spoof. There are the basic ingredients of jazz – the sax, trumpets, upright bass, drums and piano – but they’re bastardized into an outlandish cartoon. Once you understand this you can begin to appreciate the way the joke extends to the cover art, and also just how subtle a send-up this is, the laughable earnestness of skinny white guys in starched shirts looking pensive in their dressing room.

It’s tempting to opt for a Roy Lichtenstein comparison and say the entire joke is in the way the product relates to actual traditional jazz. It seems, from the cover at least, like this should be a jazz album, and so in presenting the style as is but in a different context you’re forcing the original style to make fun of itself. But Lichtenstein pieces were veritable copies, and really, there is no jazz that sounds anything like this, at least none that takes itself seriously (if there is, it really shouldn’t). What we have instead is a wet bag of clichés swollen up and jostling against one another.

This is the same referential stance that other acts (Tenacious D for one) take in mocking their genre of choice, by attaching themselves to the most extreme, absurdly bombastic aspects and winking a lot to make it clear they’re not being genuine. The Lounge Lizards are different; they go even further into the reaches of absurdity but they’re not so much joking (forget how I’ve described it so far) as they are screwing with genre limits. This isn’t an album that you laugh at.

Of course, it’s also not all that easy to mock jazz in the first place. You can dislike it (the best criticism I’ve heard is a comparison to masturbation – interesting only to those involved and a select group of fetishists) but for the most part the genre lack the dumb strut that makes rock and rap so easily lampoonable. So to play around with jazz the Lizards inflate its elements to a ridiculous proportion, at which size anything would look silly. It fails as criticism then (who knows if this was what they were even going for), but this failure is inconsequential because the album still succeeds musically. This is a great record. It’s like jazz, but it does things that it doesn’t, making it satisfying as a bizarre interpretation of the genre.

Generally, these songs sound like they’re about to explode. They strain at their limits, shaking them around like a dog with a rag doll, but as loose as the mask of genre slips it never really falls off. This sound has a lot to do with the guitar, which is offering commentary on the music behind it and at the same time effecting it. The best example is the opening track, “Incident on South Street,” which, besides the exaggerated back-alley horns and the campy sleaze of the piano actually starts off pretty normally. Things sound smooth; the cymbals do that little rain drop patter and the bass thumps along. Then the guitar kicks in, and, far from acting cordially, it tears a big hole in the song, screeching and grinding, sending the saxophones and drums into an epileptic fit in the process.

This kind of squelching nightmare has roots in free jazz and recalls well-costumed punk but relates most to no-wave, the movement that the Lizards are most closely identified with. They certainly apply its aesthetic, atonal and repetitive, but blast it through the jazz filter, blowing out the genre into garish, gaudy expositions. Again, the Lichtenstein comparison seems just out of my reach.

It’s hard to identify the point where self-aware mockery turns into a satisfying example of what’s being mocked, but that’s exactly what The Lounge Lizards are providing. In some ways, what they do here doesn’t seem to bizarre. Compare it to Sun Ra, as reinterpretation on a grand and bizarre scale. One abducts jazz and flies off with it into space; the other takes it into a back alley and beats the shit out of it.

Begushkin - Nightly Things (2007)

Nightly Things sounds like a lot of things - a backwoods black mass, a confusing joke, a Carpathian fever dream - but never actually settles into becoming any of them. It's too anxious, or too focused on staying unfocused, to be anything definable. This kind of furtive indifference, where influences and genre reference points are sampled and tossed aside just as quickly, has the potential for creating a disaster, but here it congeals nicely. This is an album that makes no sense and is all the better for it.

When I say "makes no sense," I really mean "doesn't conform to any kind of recognizable pattern." This results in something like the title track, which matches ghostly ambiance and eerily quavering guitar with lyrics that resemble a filthy slow-jam written by Rimbaud.

I could try to peg this as an I See A Darkness with strange gypsy-folk tendencies, but even with that unwieldy description I'd be ignoring the mock-poetic vocal style, the fascinating pairing of haunting and absurd, the way it tricks you into taking it seriously and then pokes you in the eye. The title track exemplifies the entire mood of the album. It sounds grave and spooky, an atmosphere that pulls you in until you realize you're listening to fancifully veiled descriptions of the devil's penis and increasingly painful sea-shanty metaphors for doin' it (the winner: "in your booty, I’ll be looting.")

Other songs are slightly more predictable. "At Night with Me" employs some of the most ridiculous lyrics but uses them seriously. Accordingly, the music is hushed and reverent, gushing strings and chilly mandolin. With this pairing an opposite mood to the title track occurs, and lines like "You can be my monkey girl / I will be the dude" are actually invested with some real feeling. "In the Yard" aims for increasingly preposterous apocalyptic imagery, but this build is matched with gypsy violin and theremin. An off-kilter tension remains in these songs' refusal to conform to expectation.

This is night music. It's an exploration of a landscape that seems like it could exist but becomes increasingly impossible to believe in. At times it's like Kentucky standing in for Romania, or vice-versa, with gypsy strings and picked guitars converging at some common and indistinguishable point. It embraces genre like a kid at a petting zoo - the needly stomp of the Black Heart Procession here, the wistful elegance of Django Reinhardt there, but inevitably rejects both place and influence. Stylistically, it refuses to behave. And that, as unsettling as it may be, is a good thing.

Louis Malle - Elevator to the Gallows (1959)

Good thrillers are like puzzles, and in that respect, Malle's Elevator to the Gallows is a perplexing steel trap. It starts simply enough. Julien Tavernier is a soldier turned businessman, working for a government-backed arms dealer whose wife he happens to be sleeping with. To clean up this situation he kills the boss, perfectly, sets it up as a suicide, and then promptly gets stuck in an elevator, only feet away from both escape and the murder scene.

This sets the narrative spiraling in three directions, two of them constantly poised at an intersection of noir and new wave, the third about a guy trying really hard to get out of an elevator. The first is the journey of Tavernier's mistress, Florence, who misses him at their meeting point, assumes he's run off without her, and begins fruitlessly combing a rain-soaked, neon-lit Paris for any sign of him. The second is that of young couple Veronique and Louis, who, presaging Godard's classically doomed teenage pairs, pull innocently at a thread of small crime that inevitably leads to murder.

Veronique has a crush on the dapper, wealthy Julien, and when Louis steals his idling car, wallet and gun (and by default his identity) she is dropped into a welcome fantasy as his mistress. The two head off on what becomes an unintentional crime spree, creating a fascinating parallel: as the trapped Julien and the distraught Florence search for a way to reconnect, the young couple, now defined as their shadow selves, commit a crime that both mirrors - and eventually exceeds - theirs.

It may seem like standard genre fare, but there is some message here, about violence always begeting violence, and more specifically, the way in which war profiteering creates an unstable global atmosphere of death for monetary gain. There are no good guys in this story; everyone is implicated in some way. Julien has fought in Algeria and Indochina and has clearly killed before, and not for the right reasons. His boss sells weapons. Louis is a small-time crook and the wealthy German (who figures into the story later on) has not been back to France since 'the occupation' (as he lightly refers to it).

His flippancy should be offensive, but this is a world far removed from that of World War II, one where war is a business like any other. Only the police seem above this, but the way the lead inspector transforms into a strutting orator at the appearance of reports suggests otherwise. This is a film that's deeply concerned about the cost of a world where certain people thrive off the murder of others.

Apart from this, the elevator is one of the best thriller conceits I have ever seen, especially because it seems like such a limiting device. How long can Malle keep us interested in a man trapped in a tiny steel box? Quite a while, it turns out, especially when, having escaped, Julien finds himself wishing he was still in the elevator.

The icing on the cake is the soundtrack, done entirely by Miles Davis, which is smooth and burnished in the vein of the best work from his Kind of Blue/Birth of Cool period. It seems overreaching to say it ties the entire film together, but this may be the best way to put it, especially in the way his tunes blare out of the teenage couples' car stereo and lurk behind Florence as she gropes desperately along the wet streets. In the end, everyone gets what they deserve, and we can see how clearly Malle has presented a world where every action has its own indirect consequence.

VA - I'm Not There (2007)

As a tribute, I'm Not There should be mediocre. At least, it should be expected to be, considering that passability is par for the course on these kind of mass reclamation projects, where the past is dredged up and passed around to a lot of willing (and often dirty) hands. As long as it's not atrocious (and maybe even if it is) the tribute will succeed in reminding us why we liked the original so much in the first place. I'm not sure exactly who to thank, but this one does better than that. It doesn't just exist on its own, it's impressive, even daunting, not because of the work of one artist but because of its levelheadedness, its size and its range.

There are 29 artists or groups represented, with a sort of revolving cast of musicians (Tom Verlaine, John Medeski, Lee Ranaldo, Calexico and others) doing a lot of extra work here and there. This house band (called The Million Dollar Bashers) stands as a supergroup of skilled musicans who aren't terribly exciting names. The rest of the selection follows the same mold - the best thing to call the choices is sober - which sounds boring but actually gives this whole thing the strength to sustain itself for so long (34 tracks, more than 2.5 hours) and with so many hands in the pot. There are no huge surprises but also no disasters.

Most importantly, there's also no deluge of in vogue radio favorites or buzz bands or even classic contemporaries. There are nods in each direction, and while these are some of the biggest missteps (Jack Johnson, Los Lobos, Sufjan Stevens) they're generally inoffensive (although Stevens comes really close).

As is the case with covers in general, the worst songs are the ones that stray to close to a format, whether it's that of the original song or the artist's own sound. Typically then, the crappiest stuff here is not only the retreads (Cat Power doing a half-hearted, husky impression of Blonde on Blonde Bob) but the covers that depart stylistically from both Dylan and the rest of the album (Sufjan giving "Ring Them Bells" the sixth-grade band recital treatment, The Hold Steady spilling beer and cigarette ash all over "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?," Karen-O screeching through "Highway 61 Revisited" with witless megaphone cadence).

Maybe I'm being a little harsh, but these uninspired flights of fancy look ridiculous next to great interpretations from some notable stalwarts, namely Stephen Malkmus, Sonic Youth and Yo La Tengo, whose six combined songs justify this album by themselves. Sonic Youth does nearly the same thing that the younger indies fail at - applying their own sound on top of Dylan's - but it's done through the subtlest intrusion, a layer of almost wispy distortion on the title track.

The old-timers here also do well for themselves, and again, the album is smart to not force any overbearing personalities upon us. There's Roger McGuinn, who reinivented "Mr. Tambourine Man" with The Byrds and contributes a spot-on cover of "One More Cup of Coffee." Calexico nails the backing on this one, casting it as a revolving wheel of violin, organ, mariachi trumpet and Spanish guitar that's indicative of the stellar work they do in their five appearances here. Richie Havens, Willie Nelson and Ramblin' Jack Elliott are great at transposing the gruff harshness of modern Dylan onto his younger songs. Standouts also include Mark Lanegan ( a vast, spectral version of "Man in the Long Black Coat"), Charlotte Gainsbourg (gossamer and just fragile enough on "Just Like a Woman") and Eddie Vedder, whose cover of "All Along the Watchtower," while more a success for his backing artists (the usuals) is a twisted rendition that lands somewhere between the original and the Hendrix version.

I'm guessing the theme here is meant to be the same as the movie (he's everyone, he's no one, he's a rambling vampire drawing from all kinds of musical veins) and if so, the producers have done a great job at representing one man with many voices without resorting to the gimmickry of a Fall Out Boy appearance or the security of a classic-rock roundup. Best of all, this isn't a greatest hits album, it's a journey, the selections are often obscure and the format is intimidating, both for its size and the unfamiliarity of many of these songs. Like Dylan himself, I'm Not There is undefinable, challenging, and ultimately very satisfying.

Jules Dassin - The Naked City (1955)

Now seems the best time to admit that, for the past three entries, this blog has been living a lie. Yes, it may seem like a music blog. It was, and it still is, but as it turns out my opinions on other things are so far-reaching and vital that they can’t be contained to one subject (seriously). With this in mind, I’ll be writing not only about music but also film, books, television and any delicious cakes that I may have eaten.

On this note, I’ll mention that I went into The Naked City expecting two things: a classic “New York” movie and a solid, if not exceptional, film noir. The film delivers on the first point but not so much on the latter.

When I place New York in quotes like this I’m referring to the kind of film that not only takes the city for it’s setting, but, like Mean Streets or Manhattan, exists entirely within an idea of it, with the story and the characters as almost secondary figures, byproducts of the mysterious essence the filmmaker is trying to capture. The Naked City is not only one of the first films to push this kind of idealized image, it takes the idea further than most.

This dedication to a full-scale representation of the city ends up creating a beautiful snapshot but also a dangerously splintered film. Really, there are two films here. One is a non-fiction documentary on New York - the outer shell which enfolds the second - a slightly undercooked noir that takes place within this defictionalized city.

Much attention is paid to the documentary aspect. The film begins with an extended explanation of the techniques used to capture the feel of actual city life – cameras placed behind one-way mirrors and in vans, unwitting extras, stolen shots – all of which serve to capture the city in the same context that a nature film might. This is a film that is groundbreaking for it’s time, it knows it and it wants us to know it, which may explain the overeager misstep of burying the film’s actual story so deeply that it becomes of auxiliary importance.

This story, which we finally get to after a gorgeous run-through of the city at night, is by the books pulp – a dead beauty, some faceless toughs and a few puzzled but confident cops. The narration (which is saddled with the awkward task of telling us a fake story inside of a real one) acknowledges the everyday nature of the crime to show us how it fits into the nightly routine we have just been shown. Basically, to accommodate the documentary aspect, we’re given as normal a story as possible, which is meant to further emphasize realism but gives a humdrum feeling from the start.

The same goes for the police officers, who are meant to be commendably average but instead come across flat and stereotypically sketched. Most prominently, there’s the Irish detective (grizzled, over-experienced, bubbling with old-world gentility) and the rookie cop (beautiful wife, cute kid, house in Queens). The film seems to want us to embrace these characters in the same way it wants us to embrace the anonymous lives it peeks in on every so often, but in their paved over normalcy they somehow come across less than the woman hanging her laundry or the kids playing in the street. Against this backdrop of real images of actual lives they stand out as pulp tropes and little more.

While I’m harping on the negative, it seems necessary to note that, despite its reputation as a classic of the genre, The Naked City isn’t really even a noir. First of all, it’s way too bright. The femme fatale is killed off before the movie even begins. The line between the good and bad guys is rigidly defined. It’s even cheerful. What it really is, then, is a sub-par police procedural with extraordinarily good outdoor footage.

Judging by the quality and demeanor of Dassin's other films (think of the brutal closing section of Rififi) it’s probably safe to blame these shortcomings on producer and narrator Mark Hellinger. Hellinger was a journalist who specialized in heart-tuggingly sentimental people pieces, and that shows here, in the way everyone but the scantily featured villains seems to operate around a shared kernel of inherent goodness. This seems anathema for a supposed noir, and any sense of grit is lost without the chance for our heroes to get their hands at least a little dirty.

On the other hand, Hellinger can be credited for the success of the realism the movie attempts to put across. It runs off a deep-rooted populism, presumably his doing, which makes the film memorable as a celebration of a city and the people who live in it. The fact that a murder exists at the center of the story doesn’t serve to cast doubt on the beauty of the place or to paint it in a darker light; it’s only a device that allows us to experience a few of “the 8 million stories in the Naked City.” This may be where the real problem lies. The film doesn’t seem too interested in the murder, only as far as its red herring status leads us to its true purpose of illuminating New York from the ground level. Yet without the murder at its core there’s no reason for the film to exist. This is a strange dilemma, and it leaves a fractured, although still entertaining film.

Jens Lekman - Night Falls Over Kortedala (2007)

I’ve always been torn over Jens Lekman’s befuddled loser shtick – the awkwardness, the self-deprecating humor, the off-kilter lyrics draped in canned horns and strings. Beyond his albums, which have ranged between flashes of brilliance and musty excursions sagging with filler, I have real doubts about the persona itself, which can be either subtly infuriating or unwittingly charming. At his best, Lekman is fascinating. At his worst he’s drippy and frustrating, all puppy dog eyes and shuffling feet, a socially stunted twin brother to Sondre Lerche with a sampler and a strange unwillingness to leave his bedroom.

I won’t go as far as to say that Night Falls Over Kortedala has won me over, but it’s a start. Not that much has changed. The good-hearted but socially crippled loser motif remains consistent, but it really clicks here, mostly because the epic bluster of the music seems to be slyly mocking the triteness of the lyrics. With this in mind, the whole album plays out like a half-joke; Lekman sings from the heart and his music reflects it, but his words are so ridiculous (touching on asthma inhalers and Slingo) that his earnestness becomes laughable, and the backing even more so.

The clearest example is “Kanske Ar Jag Kar I Dig” (Swedish for ‘I Love You’), where backup soul crooners follow Lekman’s stumbling opening about a boy and his pet pig with a rhythm of oohs and ba ba bas. It’s strange and funny and succeeds in making him sound more awkward than any acoustic guitar ever could. The same singing voices appear briefly on “A Postcard to Nina,” where Lekman helps a lesbian friend by posing as her boyfriend during a family dinner, only to find himself pursued by an over-friendly father who he fights off with "out of office e-mail replies."

So Lekman not only has to deal with his own clumsiness and constant rejection from cute girls, but the fact that his own music is against him, a designation that elevates him to the most loveable kind of loser. At times there’s a Chaplinesque humor in the way he's forced to deal with this kind of trouble. This works best on “Friday Night at the Drive-In Bingo,” when skipping along to a snappy piano tune, he starts to fall behind and has to sputter to catch up with the track, gaining so much speed that he loses the beat again on the other side.

Moments like this poke fun at the artificiality of the musical backing. It's basically all samples, which puts Lekman in the same line as Girl Talk or The Avalanches in terms of a drag and drop, scrap yard style of recording. But while these bands create palettes that are cold and exact, Lekman’s is more like a painted screen that’s falling down behind him as he tries to sing. His songs are patchwork quilts made from other people’s clothes, but he wears them well, a willing clown that, at least for now, pushes the act just far enough to not grate on our nerves.

Okkervil River - The Stage Names (2007)

There’s something different about The Stage Names, and on my first listen I mistook it for a weakness. Compared to earlier Okkervil albums, this one is small, even spindly; the songs never reach for the sweeping crescendos of Black Sheep Boy. Instead they remain tight and focused, hinging on simpler structures and reworked turns of phrase.

I have to say now that this creates an album that’s ultimately more satisfying, and on closer inspection The Stage Names is the band’s best work yet. Not only because of its subtlety – these songs don’t need to stretch out or graze the borders of melodrama to be effective – but because the complexity of Will Sheff’s lyrics is even more impressive when squeezed into a smaller context.

The emphasis on fiction is obvious, but the roots of the album’s themes run so deep and intertwine so well that it begs for some analysis. Ignoring the side ideas and distilling it down to one point, the album’s basic conceit seems to work off the twisted relationship between art and life. Art, of course, is influenced by life, but life is also invariably influenced by art, creating a loose circle that Sheff plays with very carefully.

The first two tracks establish the revolving convolution of this circle, the idea that life and fiction are separate realms but also that they tend to exist within one another. “Our Life Is Not A Movie, or Maybe” exposes the tendency towards enjoying the former as a mixed cocktail of fiction and reality but denies that impulse, while “Unless It’s Kicks” wonders “what gives this mess some grace unless it’s kicks, man / unless it’s fiction / unless it’s sweat or it’s songs.” The emphasis lies in the last line – the two are basically inseparable.

“A Hand to Take Hold of the Scene” contains first use of nesting on the album, where Sheff buries one layer within another to expose how easily they mix. “I’m the band in a show” he begins, establishing the reality of himself as something standing behind a fictional curtain. The whole thing gets even messier when you acknowledge that he’s talking about a reality show (I’m not even going to think about opening that can of worms). In this case, the first two verses refer to Okkervil River’s songs being featured in TV shows, Breaking Bonaduce for the first and Cold Case for the second.

The song continues with the mention of “a line” that the narrator “picks up right through the TV.” Art intrudes in life and gives rise to more of its kind. The repetition of a need for “a hand to take hold of the scene” calls up the idea of an outside influence that exists to steady life. Normally this role would be expected of God, but in Sheff's view of our media-saturated world, the steadying influence is instead the comfort of the cinematic imagery that he speaks of earlier in the song.

“Savannah Smiles” places this whole thing in a smaller context, with the story of a father and the disconnect between he and his daughter. The obstruction here exists between the reality of her life and his personal expectation of his her. He sees her as the child of eight, the girl in the picture, not what she actually is. What he reads in her diary upsets him because it challenges the fictional image of her with which he's struggling to keep hold. The song gains yet another layer as the story of Shannon Wilsey, the porn star Savannah, whose assumed name comes from a film about a neglected child who ends up being sheltered by two criminals (check Sheff’s Pitchfork interview for more information about this and some good insight into the album).

“Plus Ones” seems on the surface the most artificial song on the album, hinging on a lyrical gimmick (Sheff toying with the titles and lyrics of popular songs), but its genius is that it embraces its own inanity while exposing the love song as a cobbled mash of previously used ideas. The fun in interpreting the song is separating the references from the actual content (the use of "What’s New Pussycat" breaks the ‘plus one’ mold, so all bets are off). Where do Sheff’s borrowed words end and his own begin?

This kind of inspection is exhausting, so I’ll skip to the last song, “John Allyn Smith Sails,” which is probably the most complex. Here Sheff focuses on the suicide of poet John Berryman (born John Allyn Smith). Within he reminds us that stage names are in effect ways of fictionalizing ourselves, recasting our person as a specific image we’d like to portray. Berryman himself is quoted as saying that at a young age “he didn’t want to be like Yeats, he wanted to be Yeats.”

In the song Sheff blends two narrative perspectives – himself and Berryman – to show how much of a mess this all is; the poet is the reader is the songwriter is the listener. Sheff seems to be speaking of Berryman’s childhood with the idea of the imagined suicide attempt, but at the same time refers to his own age (31) and the figure of ‘John’ coming in with his mother and seeing his cold body.

So John, like all of us, is both creator and viewer. We’re all creators because whether or not we produce something directly, we all experience (be it from reality or from fiction) and that experience is channeled into our created version of ourselves, which is never the same as the one that existed before that experience. We are always changing based on what we experience, and the version of ourselves that we project (like the three poems that stand in for the body at the funeral) becomes the only reality of ourselves. Sheff wraps this all up by fulfilling his own prophecy (“by the second verse my head will burst”), although a little late, lapsing out of his own words into the slightly modified words of the Beach Boys’ “Sloop John B.”

It seems telling that this song itself is a cover of a traditional Caribbean folk ballad. Not an original, but what really is?