This is the time of year when I get caught up on records I missed and my old new record of the moment is Bright Eyes‘ Cassadaga, released this past spring.
This is an enchanted record. A confessional, grandiose, oratorical, piece of Americana that mixes the pretentious and the personal in the grand, Whitmanesque tradition. It’s full of fiddle hooks, great choruses, and romance in the old school sense.
It’s a record about spiritual renewal named after a century old camp of psychics in central Florida to which our hero has limped after a doomed affair with an older woman (”She said I kissed her different/That all the men her age are mean”) ends with an abortion (”Since the operation I heard you’re breathing just for one”) and a stint in rehab (Cleanse Song).
Well I went back by rented Cadillac and company jetLike a newly orphaned refugee retracing my stepsAll the way to Cassadaga to commune with the deadThey said, “You’d better look alive”And I was off to old Dakota where a genocide sleepsIn the Black Hills, the Badlands, the calloused EastI buried my ballast. I made my peace.Heard Four Winds, leveling the pines
The record alternates between rockers that wheel and lurch on their way to soaring choruses, apparently the work of bass player/guitarist Mike Mogis (think: Rolling Thunder Review) and chamber folk songs intricately orchestrated with woodwinds and percussion by pianist Nate Walcott (think: Five Leaves Left).
But the album’s best music comes from the tumbling overflow of words that pour out of singer-songwriter Conor Oberst’s mouth. Like early Springsteen, classic Bob Dylan, or hell, ol’ Walt himself, Oberst harnesses words for their flow as much as for their meanings, a flow which Oberst achieves through internal rhyme and layers with vivid images:
I keep looking for that blindfold faithlighting candles to a cynical saintwho wants the last laugh at the fly trapped in the windowsill tape
or, later, in Classic Cars:
I made a new cast of the death mask that’s gonna cover my face
Great lines linger in the mind as much as great hooks do (”the whole world loves you if you’re a chic chameleon,” “I felt nauseous with the truth,” “never trust a heart so bent it can’t break”), but there are hooks a plenty (Cleanse Song is as irresistible as Donovan’s There Is a Mountain), and nice melodies too for a folk rock album.
I’m told this is the most polished album of Conor Oberst’s career. It’s a career I haven’t followed. But that’s not unusual, I usually don’t pick up precocious indie rockers until they cast off the lo-fi and make a higher-fi, more mainstream move. Maybe it sounds like selling out to some, but it sounds like buying in to me. At least, I’m buy in. Great album.
(Cross posted at Trickster!)
Source : http://newcritics.com/blog1/2007/10/28/old-new-music-cassadaga/
Sunday, December 30, 2007
Heather Mills splashing out £30,000 on New Year party
As much as celebs get flack in the media for representing causes in which they’re not experts, the other side of that coin is that a scientist appearing to discuss global warming would never be sidetracked into talking about her pending divorce. That’s what happened this week to Heather Mills McCartney. After unsuccessfully trying to keep a low profile for a year, she decided to use her unavoidable high profile for something she believed in: Heather tried to explain the connection between eating meat and dairy and global warming.
She cited stats from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO): “18 percent of global warming comes from livestock and deforestation.”
That’s about as far as she got before all the interviewer wanted to talk about was her impending divorce, and kept pushing the issue. And so the headline becomes, “Heather Mills walks out during interview.” (Hey—it got my attention.)
Rush Limbaugh reported the story in an even less accurate manner (I know—shocker!), skewing it as if Heather had proposed drinking rat milk as a solution to global warming. (She’d asked people to imagine they were drinking rat milk—do people need rat milk to survive? No.) Good job, Rush--he practically just disproved global warming! But if anyone could stand to lay off the meat and dairy, it’s that guy, so he has a vested interest in making them vegan lib’rals look crazy.
Oh yeah, and if you listen to that windbag and other sensationalistic sources, Heather also stormed out of the interview. Watch the video yourself and you’ll see that Heather made a firm but graceful exit when it was apparent she wasn’t getting the interview she had signed on for.
But then if you listen to Heather herself, speaking at New York City’s Bryant Park on Wednesday, she only reluctantly associated herself with certain rich folk to promote her own causes.
"Sadly, you have to mix at a certain level of people to raise the level of funds you need to bring about the greater good," she said. "Because people are very snobby. These people who have lots of money, they're either snobby or they're stingy. If you have lots of money, you have to be stingy because why would you want that amount of money?"
Also, Sir Paul McCartney cites Heather’s “unreasonable behavior” in their divorce. Hmm. Clearly there’s more to this story than we have blogging inches, and there’s various sides to every story, y’all.
S0urce:http://www.plentymag.com/blogs/dirt/2007/11/heather_mills_mccartney_dishes.php
She cited stats from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO): “18 percent of global warming comes from livestock and deforestation.”
That’s about as far as she got before all the interviewer wanted to talk about was her impending divorce, and kept pushing the issue. And so the headline becomes, “Heather Mills walks out during interview.” (Hey—it got my attention.)
Rush Limbaugh reported the story in an even less accurate manner (I know—shocker!), skewing it as if Heather had proposed drinking rat milk as a solution to global warming. (She’d asked people to imagine they were drinking rat milk—do people need rat milk to survive? No.) Good job, Rush--he practically just disproved global warming! But if anyone could stand to lay off the meat and dairy, it’s that guy, so he has a vested interest in making them vegan lib’rals look crazy.
Oh yeah, and if you listen to that windbag and other sensationalistic sources, Heather also stormed out of the interview. Watch the video yourself and you’ll see that Heather made a firm but graceful exit when it was apparent she wasn’t getting the interview she had signed on for.
But then if you listen to Heather herself, speaking at New York City’s Bryant Park on Wednesday, she only reluctantly associated herself with certain rich folk to promote her own causes.
"Sadly, you have to mix at a certain level of people to raise the level of funds you need to bring about the greater good," she said. "Because people are very snobby. These people who have lots of money, they're either snobby or they're stingy. If you have lots of money, you have to be stingy because why would you want that amount of money?"
Also, Sir Paul McCartney cites Heather’s “unreasonable behavior” in their divorce. Hmm. Clearly there’s more to this story than we have blogging inches, and there’s various sides to every story, y’all.
S0urce:http://www.plentymag.com/blogs/dirt/2007/11/heather_mills_mccartney_dishes.php
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