The Wild Youth

I'm from the school of the Proust, Fitzgerald and other voices obsessed with time.  As I often do, I found myself reflecting on youth this week.  The wildness of it; the audacity.  During my quest for art related to youth, I came across this song; The Wild Youth, by Daughter.  Elena Tonra's vocals are haunting, and a bit reminiscent of Florence Welch, but a touch more restrained and ethereal - a quieter force.  There's a lyric quality here that suits my mission for finding something tinged in nostalgia.

You can find the 4 track EP,The Wild Youth on Bandcamp http://ohdaughter.bandcamp.com/.  Another reminder that there are many great artists to be discovered through these platforms; a great way for bands to distribute directly to their fans, and fans to discover days of pleasure uncovering new music.  Yes, I said days.

Some with daring and yearning, will want to live in a youthful state forever.  But how could you resist the temptation to remove yourself from that place and look back with longing and terror.

"We thought we were young and that there would be time to love well sometime in the future. This is a terrible way to think. It is no way to live, to wait to love." - Dave Eggers, What is the What

This Music Crept By Me Upon the Waters

This music crept by me upon the waters,
Allaying both their fury and my passion
With its sweet air: thence I have follow'd it,
Or it hath drawn me rather. But 'tis gone.
No, it begins again.

-The Tempest

Of Monsters and Men, My Head is an Animal

There's something about Iceland; about the Nordic countries in general.  Cold, cruel, sparse, and terrifyingly beautiful.  Just ask Bon Iver, who's Holocene video was filmed entirely in Iceland.  That video is unreal (moment of silence).

I've always been fascinated by Nordic folklore, with images that are haunted with powerful female creatures, water spirits, invisibility, and enchanted places or Álagablettur.  

There's certainly enchantment in this music; but there's also some sort of light darkness, and of course monsters - which always make for good art and music.

Jam on: Little Talks

Repeat: Love, Love, Love

Lower Lights Burning, Coming Back

I'm a complete sucker for bands from the Northwest.  I survived the 90's in Seattle (or outskirts of, I should rightly state), and now I'm delighted to see that the angst and teen spirit that got us through that phase has transformed itself decades later into something equally as cathartic but graceful and softly provoking.
I was first drawn to this band after seeing their Coming Back video.  A tribute to sea, to song.  It feels more like Homer than Cobain.  It feels good.  No offense grunge, we had a good time together...

Jam on: Coming Back
Repeat:  Samson




Gregory Alan Isakov, This Empty Northern Hemisphere

Ideally, I should have kept these albums to those released in 2011.  However...I seriously can't stop listening to this album, which was released in 2009.  It's like a sickness.  These words; this quiet, still, strong sound echoes everywhere.  And I can't get enough.  I'll let it speak for itself.

Jam on: That Moon Song
Repeat: Seriously, the whole album.




City and Colour, Little Hell

My dearest friend first exposed me to Dallas Green years ago in the depths of Canada, appropriately enough.  I really enjoyed it, but it didn't quite set-in until I happened upon a live acoustic performance of As Much as I Ever Could.  Whoa.  This year Little Hell was released and I think it's a quite striking album and highly overlooked.  There's a fresh, fuller sound here on tracks like Fragile Bird and Weightless, and of course that familiar sound and lyric quality I'm so drawn to in Northern Wind and Sorrowing Man.  Hope for Now will archive itself in my memory without ever being played again.  "Oh, and I sing."   His voice is truly haunting and its refreshing to hear a solo guitarist sing honest, pointed  lyrics about love and loss and sorrow without screaming infidelities..if you know what I mean.


Jam On: Little Hell
Repeat: Grand Optimist




Brothers of End, Mount Inside

Back to the Northern Hemisphere we go.  This album is weirdly delicious.  The album itself unfolds like a story; ephemeral, almost creepy and at times upbeat; it's certainly a journey from beginning to finish.  Give a few listens, and you'll find that sounds are reminiscent of those as varied as Sigur Rós, a touch of Midlake, The Amazing, a bit of Simon & Garfunkel if you dare.  I know it sounds crazy.  It's a ride people, get on it.

Jam on: Daybreak
Repeat: Valinge Träsk

Like Crazy

I've tried a few times to write movie reviews and always find myself fumbling; over language, over ways to express images. I'm not quite sure it's ever right. But i'm going to make a desperate attempt for this film.

Like Crazy is one of these films that speaks not to the heart, but the gut.  In fact, the first 15 to 20 minutes are just turn-away, hide behind your beverage painful.  No one wants to admit to remembering or laboring through these first moments, these blundering fragments of a love story.  It's just awkward.  There's a a distinct intimacy here, an intimacy that it feel's we've violated as an audience.
As we labor through the scenes we're not sure if we've stumbled upon or if we've been invited to, we're reminded that first loves are not the stories we once thought they were but merely a desperate, passionate category of images and feelings.  Lacking a real story line, they surf on apparitions of hope and lust and everything that lies down in between.

The story starts with Anna, played by Felicity Jones, the perfectly lovable British girl who leaves a poetry-laden love note on the car of Jacob, played by Anton Yelchin.  They quickly start a romance and we're not really given the birth and the blossom, just images.  There are montages indeed, but somehow done well.  They unfold not as they are really happening, but from the bank of someone's recollection.  This is the way these stories are meant to be told.
Soon it's time for Anna to go back to England but she defers on her visa to stay the summer with Jacob; a summer seen only through hyper-sequences of images and mostly just body language -the most apt judge of young love.  But then due to this impulsive love-choice Anna has deferred on her student visa and is no longer allowed into the United States. 1  Once images of entangled bodies, Anna and Jacob are now bodies apart.  Soon there are other relationships, missed phone calls, separate time zones, different worlds, tearful attempts at phone calls, name mishaps, and just...life. And so the second book -the new testament -the real movie begins.

It's unraveling; a roller coaster of highs and lows, it's images, it's sickening, it makes your gut hurt.  I read a review that said it was a bit like watching Blue Valentine, but without giving you the desire to cut your head off.  I agree in a way, and given Blue Valentine was one of my favorite films of last year, I guess I should just go ahead and deem myself a movie-going masochist and move on.  But something about Like Crazy felt inherently more painful to me.  I'm sure many movie-goers could find a transient youthful adolescence or even a hopefully quality.  I won't deny it's there, but it doesn't resonate as the part of the story that we are to carry away.

Classic tragic formula has taught us that plot is the "soul of tragedy". 2  The story usually involves a protagonist who is esteemed higher than the ordinary person, and this person is brought from happiness to misery by either a tragic flaw, or a dramatic turn of plot.  Even the Romantic Tragedy assumes that there is a choice made by the protagonist's hamartia that eventually leads them to misery.  A mistake, if you will; a stray from the good or normal, a mishap - your typical romantic comedy formula.  There is an obstacle in this movie, but it's overcome.  And when it is, we're still empty.

Like Crazy feels tragic, but represents a story separate from plot and choices. The characters are not heroic, in fact they are wonderfully ordinary.  The plot is but a minor presence in this film.  It's almost as if the director relies on us to attach to these images, and our nostalgia becomes the third character, the tragic plot twist.  It's a play on memory and belief, and in the end there's just the space between the memory of what was and what will be.  And that space hurts like crazy.
But even so, let it pour over you.  Let it pour over you, like crazy.
And then, let it go...

"I thought I understood it. But I didn't. I knew the smudgeness of it. The eagerness of it. The Idea of it. Of you and me." -  Like Crazy

1) And they say we're not strict enough on border control.

2) Thanks Aristotle, what would we do without Poetics?