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Ben Allison, Michael Blake, Rudy Royston, Union Square
The net effect is greater than the sum of their parts
Union Square is like that shy, cute guy or girl who was easy to overlook in class or at the office, until a chance extended encounter revealed them to be smart, incisive and charmingly modest. All three members of this trio are well established in the jazz firmament and typically push their projects into a higher profile. But here they embark on 10 collaborative originals with no guest stars, studio effects or attendant hype. Their music unfurling patiently with assured aplomb, so that the net effect is greater than the sum of their parts — both within each tune and in the overall collection.
My favorite tracks are the two in the middle. On “Big Smile,” Blake’s soprano sax is tonally and texturally contrasted with Royston’s tom-tom beats, with Allison’s bass neatly wedged in. “Wig Wise” opens with glazed, metronomic cymbals from Royston, Allison’s adds to the toe-tapping groove and Blake, again on soprano, gradually ups the intensity. Elsewhere, “Flapper” has got a little of the madcap, Roaring ’20s in its agile interplay, “Compassion” is, not surprisingly, the most plaintive and vulnerable tune on the disc, and the closing “Freedom From Exile” has what sounds like a low-drone bass clarinet from Blake (though it could be Allison on arco) resolving into a defiant breakthrough. But there is something to recommend on every track.
The scant press materials take pains to point out that Union Square is also a locus of political activity for Occupy Wall Street and the gay rights movement in New York. This recording avoids slogans and heavy postures, but performs enough good musical deeds to prove its heart is in the right place.
Doc Pomus, It’s Great to Be Young and in Love
A blues set that's more than just a curiosity
Yeah, that Doc Pomus, the one who wrote such ’50s and ’60s rock ‘n’ roll standards as “Save the Last Dance for Me” for the Drifters, “Teenager in Love” for Dion and the Belmonts and “Little Sister” for Elvis. Inspired by the powerhouse voice of Big Joe Turner, Doc entered the record biz as a jazzy, jump blues shouter. He turned to writing after realizing he’d never make it as a performer, especially as a white blues singer. But you know what? He sang with real feeling for the blues, making this set more than just a curiosity. He swings on “Too Much Boogie,” rocks on three versions of “Bye Baby Bye,” belts on “Pomus Blues,” makes with the double entendre on “Pool Playing Baby” and croons something suspiciously like a rock ‘n’ roll ballad in the title song. He also had access to the better New York sessions cats, so his records usually sound good, if not quite good enough that he really could have been a blues star. In other words, Doc made the right move.
Otis Taylor, Otis Taylor’s Contraband
Because it runs the risk of sounding samey, Taylor’s trance-inducing sound, based mainly on blues and other traditional styles, is no easy thing to do year after year, and his last couple or three albums have sounded relatively thin. Not so with this one, with its wall-to-wall harrowing songs and tunings, tempi and textures to match. If anything, he’s using a little more instrumentation than usual; opener “The Devil’s Gonna Lie” rides on haunting pedal steel, swirling B-3, pounding drums, multi-tracked cornet and African djembe, as well as Taylor’s gruff gospel vocals and choral backups, to explore evil’s ubiquity, and it kicks booty. “Contraband Blues” uses considerably less instrumentation to create just as dense and eerie a sound while commenting on the Union Army’s holding of escaped slaves in the North as contraband during the Civil War. His songs — often musings inspired by stories more than stories themselves — aren’t “topical” so much as considerations of human conundrums like the World War I soldier in “Never Been to Africa” who fights abroad but never gets to see his ancestral homeland.
Gabriel Kahane: Hipster Wistfulness
It’s a wonderful thing to be talented, versatile, 30-ish, well connected and living in Brooklyn, where your neighbors are likewise talented, versatile, 30-ish, and well connected — where you are, in fact, among their most fruitful connections. Despite the fact that the bio on his website opens with the words, “Gabriel Kahane is not part of a scene,” in fact he is. Kahane is a singer-songwriter-pianist-composer-lyricist with a distinguished artistic pedigree (his father is the pianist and conductor Jeffrey Kahane) and more creative friends than he could possibly have time to meet for coffee, let alone collaborate with. He should be writing music that brims with appreciation for the great good fortune of being him, right now. Instead, a nostalgic melancholy permeates his finely carpentered songs, as if he had never felt more comfortable than in the years before he was born.
It’s not that his style is antiquarian — a lively inventiveness bubbles up in every measure. Rather, he has figured out contemporary ways to describe memory in music. “Light Upon the Hill,” from the musical February House, has a fluid, conversational rhythm, like a well-rehearsed anecdote told against the cozy tinkle of a banjo: “Here’s to the driver who took me downtown when I got to New York/ I was glad for the ride/ How the buildings we passed were all gleaming/ I was dreaming a life I’d look out from the inside.”
The refrain (“In Brooklyn, there is light upon the hill/ It glows despite the storm”) sneaks out of the stream of words and notes, a moment of stillness interrupting the run-on verse and thickening instrumentation. The song evolves quickly, giving the music a narrative quality — this is theater, after all. But the words offer no story, just a succession of images from a fondly remembered life. The melody emulates the act of leafing through those snapshots by circling back on itself with Sondheim-like obsessiveness. The tempo trots along, with nowhere to go but the past, and the past is not a destination.
February House, which had its premiere at the Public Theater in New York, in May, 2012, recreates the sort of “scene” Kahane insists he wants no part of. The building of the title is a run-down Brooklyn Heights brownstone where in the early 1940s the editor George Davis played den mother for a highbrow commune that included W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears. It was the perfect moment for Kahane’s sensibility: a gathering of talented, versatile, 30-ish, well-connected people living under the same Brooklyn roof. To Kahane, it is the aesthetic idyll that couldn’t last. The best and most elegiac number is “Goodnight to the Boarding House,” a mournful ode to the fragility of happiness, delivered in an upper register somewhere between a falsetto and a sob.
I was first drawn to Kahane’s lyric gift, and his sincere, slightly sandpapery voice, by Craigslistlieder, a cycle of songs set to personal ads scavenged online. “Neurotic and lonely, average height, brown eyes slightly disproportionate, Jewfro,” begins one, and the advertiser’s self-consciousness is reflected in the jumpy, slightly obsessive melodic line and anxious piano counterpoint. Craigslistlieder is a startling piece — smart, beautifully made, and darkly funny.
Since then, Kahane has sped off in a number of different musical directions, not so much eliding genres as hopping from one to the other. He has collaborated with the bluegrass icon Chris Thile and the jazzman Brad Mehldau, he has written an intense but somewhat inchoate piano sonata for Natasha Paremski, and he is now writing a cello sonata for Alisa Weilerstein. Carnegie Hallrecently commissioned what it hoped would be a large-scale work for voice and string quartet. It turned out to be a suite of miniatures.
Kahane keeps returning to the song form, where he has staked out territory as a hyperliterate bard of hipster wistfulness. The Carnegie Hall piece is called The Fiction Issue, a reference to The New Yorker‘s annual short story collection, and the score’s sensibility is not far from the magazine’s. Subtlety, complexity and wry humor are spiced with timely references and flecks of musical slang. Kahane draws a distinction between his pop songs and his “classical” works, but they often come tumbling indistinguishably out of the same fingers, and the same sensitive throat. His album, Where are the Arms is by a pop balladeer who can sing Schubert’s Winterreise as a party trick. In the album’s first song, “Charming Disease,” the cryptic phrase is fragmented into a Gertrude Stein incantation (What a charming what a charming charming little disease”). It hopscotches around the beats, momentarily blurring the sense of meter. The next track, “Merritt Parkway” opens with a pensive chain of piano chords that could have fallen out of Schumann’s wastepaper basket, but Kahane disguises their romanticism slightly with a string tremolo that shimmers dissonantly and the quasi-chanted words: “I was on the side of the road, / Shiny traffic beetling by” — and what a touch worthy of Lingua Franca, that word, “beetling.” Kahane no doubt has a future as a major musical figure in coming decades, and maybe also as a dramatic character: the slightly depressive elf in some future sequel to February House.
eMusic’s Best Audiobooks of 2012
A good book is a funny thing. Sometimes we know from page 1 that a book is going to be a classic, while others are a slow burn, and we’ve made it through to the end – perhaps a few times – before we realize we just can’t stop reliving that one climactic scene or fixating on a turn of phrase.
Over the course of 2012, this happened to us a lot. Most of our favorite books were slow-burn stunners, ones that woke us up in the middle of the night weeks later. There were a few showpieces and, for once, a few books that deserved every second of the publicity they received. By December we were walking around brimming with all of the fantastic books we’ve read – like burning sage, this list is a cleansing opportunity to let them all go and get ready for next year.
With only 40 slots to fill, it was inevitable that some great books got left off, and we hope you’ll fill in the gaps with your favorites in the comments. Here are our best books of 2012.
40. David Levithan, Every Day
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David Levithan has spent the last 10 years writing about teenagers in love in many different forms — from the whirlwind angst of Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist to the sensitive happy-go-lucky treatment of gay teen life in Boy Meets Boy. His most recent novel complicates the theme, following A, a character who wakes up inside a different person's body every morning and must learn to live their life... without disruption before starting over again the next day. Falling in love with Rhiannon upends all of A's coping mechanisms, as he foregoes normalcy to be with her every day. Meanwhile, her reciprocation questions both the characters' and our deep-seated beliefs about attraction, sexuality. The result is a beautifully crafted allegory for the confused, all-consuming, thrilling, baffling nature of first love.
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39. Michael Chabon, Telegraph Avenue
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After five long years, Michael Chabon came back with this sweeping novel of the collision between nostalgia and progress in the borderlands between historically black Oakland and hippie-white Berkeley. With a jazz-funk soundtrack, a cameo appearance from soon-to-be President Obama, and the creation of the greatest black action hero since Shaft, no novel has had such a deep respect for the way pop culture shapes our identities since High Fidelity.
38. Mark Leyner, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
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It was the mid-’90s when cult classicist Mark Leyner released his last novel. Known for his antic prose, free-associative humor and postmodern mind games, Leyner now appears, in retrospect, to have been eerily prescient, his early work like drafts of the sort of Internet culture we’re all now accustomed to.
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In The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, we get multiple and recursive narratives: not only the biography of Ike Karton, an unemployed New Jersey butcher,... but also the story of the universe’s very origin, as well as its eternal pantheon of gods, who no longer get along and spend all their time in Dubai, squabbling on the top floor of a skyscraper and obsessing over Ike’s fate.
The book is an epic, a supernatural oral tradition infinitely revised. Its every aside and mistake is part and parcel of what the gods, who are in fact recanting it in real time, intended.Even your reaction to the story — your enthusiasm, your boredom, your break for a snack — has been predetermined.
In the Internet Age, we take infinite scrolling, constant distraction, and the existence of a never-ending collective story as matter of course. In that light, the strangest thing about The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is how un-strange it seems.
37. Keigo Higashino, Salvation of a Saint
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It seems as if Japanese detective novels as a whole are more finely crafted than their American counterparts, with a flair for bone-dry absurdity and psychological twists that would seem forced in less skilled hands. Case in point: Keigo Higashino's Salvation of a Saint, the latest installment in the adventures of Detective Galileo, an erstwhile physics professor who made his first appearance in The Devotion of Suspect X. Galileo's calculations point... the police in ever-more-preposterous directions as they try to unravel the murder of a philandering CEO. The minutiae of modern Japanese urban life coupled with astonishing flights of logical speculation combine to make a truly gripping, original thriller.
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36. Maria Semple, Where’d You Go, Bernadette
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The story of a family of flawed geniuses, written as a semi-epistolary novel in diary entries, letters, fragments of conversations, and government reports, Where'd You Go, Bernadette could easily veer into uber-twee Wes Anderson territory; instead, it's a sharp, hilarious delight made even better by one of the best adult-playing-teenager narrations we've ever heard. It helps that author Maria Semple is a longtime comedy writer — most recently for the beloved Arrested... Development —and that the story is a searing satire of life in Seattle.
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35. Shalom Auslander, Hope: A Tragedy
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The title of Shalom Auslander’s debut novel is as tersely comic as the prose it contains. If a previous book of short stories (Beware of God) suggested that the author might deserve a place within the hallowed tradition of literary Jewish pessimists, his newest effort confirms it. Hope, a gutsy book with a gutsy premise – begins when a man named Solomon Kugel hears tapping noises coming from his attic. Kugel follows... the sounds and discovers a living, elderly Anne Frank residing in the uppermost reaches of his farmhouse in upstate New York. She’s working on a novel; what Kugel heard was the typewriter.
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To this living arrangement, add one tyrannical hypochondriac of a mother, one semi-sympathetic wife and one toddler. Then stir. The result is a satire that transcends its clever conceit thanks to Auslander’s unmistakable voice. That voice, incidentally, is one that some listeners will recognize from This American Life, where the writer often pops up with stories that bridge the territory between soul-crumpling and hilarious. What make for a brilliant radio piece, it turns out – economy, rhythm, stylishness without frippery – make for an equally beguiling novel.
34. Richard Zacks, Island of Vice
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Island of Vice is like a greatest hits of the tropes of historical nonfiction; you've got a skeptical look at Victorian mores, an investigation of the seamy underbelly of a city, an age-old struggle that still echoes today, and a beloved historical figure playing an unexpected role. Like Rudy Giuliani a century later, it turns out that Teddy Roosevelt spent years attempting to clean up New York, which was apparently nothing but... brothels and opium dens in the 1890s. Roosevelt was New York police commissioner at the time, and his attempts were mostly thwarted by Byzantine regulations and double standards. A compelling portrait of a town at a turning point, the book moves quickly along, buoyed by anecdotes and letter excerpts that add levity and character to the essential plot.
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33. James M. Cain, The Cocktail Waitress
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OK, so this one's kind of a cheat. James M. Cain, the classic noir author, wrote The Cocktail Waitress in the 1970s, right before his death. But the novel languished in fragments for 30-plus years, and was only just assembled and published this year by intrepid editors, so we get to count it as one of the best books of 2012. While it's not Cain's best (with Mildred Pierce and ... href="http://www.emusic.com/book/james-m-cain/the-postman-always-rings-twice/10026306/">The Postman Always Rings Twice just a few of his many, it's a tough crowd to compete in), the master of dark, moody suspense still looms large over contemporary mystery authors.
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32. China Mieville, Railsea
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Moby Dick has retained a particular hold on the global literary imagination in the century-and-a-half since its publishing. Some writers have been seized enough by Melville’s epic to spin off new stories based on its characters, while others have taken on the theme of Ahab’s suicidal single-mindedness to frame new tales of obsession. China Mieville’s Railsea is a new literary heir on the scene: fantastical, post-apocalyptic and, like its predecessor, packed with... equal parts exhilarating chase and incisive reflection on the nature of the chase itself. In this case, the one doing the reflecting is Sham ap Soorap, a bumbling young introvert who finds himself taken on as a doctor’s assistant aboard the Medes, a mole-hunting train on the railsea. In this never-stated, probably-future time, the earth (if it is the earth) is covered with mile after mile of snared and tangled rails, and, like the seamen of yore, those who ride the rails form a culture unto themselves. And, oh yes, I said “mole-hunting” – out of the ground on which rails are laid come all manner of vicious, burrowing creatures, from pesky carnivorous rabbits to vicious ferrets to the bounty of the Medes: the moldywarpe, a bad-tempered giant mole. One particular moldywarpe, an ivory-colored one, no less, has taken the arm of the Medes captain, and it has become the life’s aim – the “philosophy,” as Mieville puts it – of Captain Naphi to track down said moldywarpe and harpoon it to kingdom come. At heart not a hunter but a dreamer, a would-be salvor (salvager of ancient junk), Sham gains a quest of his own when he learns of a place that’s unsullied by the endless snarl and clatter of the rails. Railsea enchants by its language alone, and reader Jonathan Cowley proves expert with Mieville’s invented vocabulary and his rollicking, alliterative sentences. Intended for readers of all ages, Railsea will enchant any reader who understands what it’s like to want something and to burn with the dream to discover it.
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31. J.R. Moehringer, Sutton
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Wake up in Attica, go to bed at the Plaza. Fuckin’ America. Such was the life of bank robber Willie “The Actor” Sutton, an Irish kid from Brooklyn who came up during Prohibition and stole an estimated $2 million during his career. The con was released from Attica Correctional Facility on Christmas Eve 1969 to the acclaim and notoriety that a nickname like “The Actor” might have earned earned him – or... so Moehringer would have us believe. Sutton (who died in 1980) granted a single post-prison interview, though the resulting article, Moehringer writes, contained several errors and “few real revelations.” To, in effect, give a fascinating subject the profile he deserves, the Pulitzer-winning journalist and memoirist (The Tender Bar) has imagined Sutton’s first day of freedom, being followed around New York City by an unnamed reporter and photographer.
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Flashing between Sutton’s Christmas ’69 and his Prohibition-era bank schemes, Sutton is a witty, whiskey-soaked romp through a Gotham populated by Chesterfield-smoking hustlers and surly newsmen. Sutton is undeniably the story’s moral center, less a thuggish Dillinger clone than a romantic and intellectual who reads Cicero behind bars. Leading a tour from the Brooklyn waterfront to Times Square, Sutton is struck by the vanished landmarks of his criminal career and haunted by memories of his former love, Bess Endner. The wealthy daughter of a shipping magnate and the poor Irish son meet as kids at Coney Island, but her family disapproved and Bess disappeared around the time Willie entered the racket. He muses: “Money. Love. There’s not a problem that isn’t caused by one or the other. And there’s not a problem that can’t be solved by one or the other.”
Narrated by actor Dylan Baker, Sutton shines a light on the class divide while affectionately adding to the legacy of a famous antihero.
30. Alice Munro, Dear Life
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Alice Munro has been quietly, guilelessly dominating the field of the short story for nearly 50 years and shows no sign of slowing. Maybe it's her Canadian-ness that keeps her flying below the radar, even after having won PEN, O. Henry, National Book Critics Circle and Man Booker awards. Or maybe it's the finely drawn, intimate quality of her work – no showy flights of language, no mystical beings or tricksy maybe-real-maybe-imagined... characters, just people writ small living lives that are at once infinitely relatable and emotionally universal. This collection is no exception, which is to say that it is essential reading.
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29. Etgar Keret, Suddenly, a Knock on the Door
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It might seem a bit odd to call Etgar Keret’s collection a delight; it’s 35 stories about loneliness, alienation, depression and death that shoot out at a blistering pace. But there’s a disorienting hopefulness to many of them. Narrated by a who’s who of literati, artists and actors, including Dave Eggers, Miranda July, Stanley Tucci and Neal Stephenson, Keret’s stories exist in worlds of magical realism. Bodies literally unzip to reveal entirely... different people underneath the skin and dreams become portals to new, entirely real dimensions — where life is still unpleasantly banal. These are places in which everything is ordinary and nothing quite makes sense.
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Keret is Israeli, and much of Suddenly is an examination of that nation’s psyche, battered as it is by suicide bombings, isolation, and ideological division. In “Healthy Start,” one of the standouts in this strong collection, the actor Ben Foster narrates the story of Avichai, a man who, after being left by his partner, finds that no one quite seems to know who he is. Mistaken for several other men, he decides to abandon his own identity as easily as others have abandoned him.
For these characters, the more unpleasant parts of life are made simultaneously more and less ordinary compared to the stranger events that befall them. Death is still something terrifying, incomprehensible, and sad, but is it any more so than finding an unpleasant German man inside one’s lover? Keret’s stories, in all of their sweet distress, say no.
28. Baratunde Thurston, How to Be Black
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Attention, black people. Listen up, white people. Hey, everybody. Baratunde Thurston — author, political blogger, cable-news talking head, comedian, tech nerd and the digital director of The Onion knows what you know and what you think you know about black people in America. He’s got 30-plus years experience as an African American. He’s heard the same things you have, from the stereotypes and the sad-but-trues to the diluted history lessons and popularly... accepted narratives. And he’s not buying them.
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“In the age of President Barack Obama, all of them are limiting and simply inadequate to the task of capturing the reality of blackness,” he writes in the introduction to this funny, poignant, biting (and a little bit baiting) memoir/satire. “In this book, I will attempt to re-complicate blackness.”
From there he intertwines his personal journey (raised by his mom, simultaneously enrolled in a mostly white prep school and a “black power boot camp,” cleaned toilets/took classes at Harvard) with sometimes silly, but more often straight-faced and subtly scathing, chapters like “How to Be the Black Friend,” “How to Be the Black Employee,” and “How to Speak for All Black People.” Along the way he solicits input from a “Black Panel” of experts, mostly fellow writers and comedians (and all black except for that dude who wrote Stuff White People Like). There are plenty of tiny heartbreaking and hackle-raising moments in How To Be Black — race is serious business in America, after all — but the book is also funny as hell.
27. Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers
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Katherine Boo's National Book Award-winning work could be described as Slumdog Millionaire without the Bollywood flash, but that would be missing the point. Yes, it's an unblinking look at life in the Mumbai slums, but it's at once much bigger and much smaller than that. It's a piece of journalism that shows how the unfathomable economic disparity of modern India is complicated by a new myth of upward mobility, drawing into relief... the concept of the American Dream and its own devastating effects. It's also a personal story of a handful of people; some happy, some not, living mundane lives and affected by grand tragedy. Not just pawns in a reporter's chess game, they are allowed to exist on the page in all of their complicated, human nature — a rare feat, indeed.
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26. John Hodgman, That Is All
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John Hodgman, Daily Show Resident Expert and celebrity glasses-wearer, completes his trilogy of Complete World Knowledge with this compendium of fake facts about wine and sports, tips on being a deranged millionaire and how the world will end. More comedy album than straightforward audiobook, That Is All features celebrity cameos from Paul Rudd, Patton Oswalt, Rachel Maddow and more, skits and original music. Fans of Hodgman’s highly formatted, stylized print books may... hesitate about listening to what is essentially a book of lists and trivia, but wonder no more — by the time you get to the audio wine tasting, you’ll be hooked.
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25. Karen Thompson Walker, The Age of Miracles
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What if you woke up one morning to discover that the earth’s rotation had begun mysteriously slowing overnight? And what if you were also a sixth grader, unable to do anything but watch while your world changed around you? This is the premise of Karen Thompson Walker’s compelling debut novel, in which 12-year-old Julia tries to navigate the difficulties of middle school in a world where tides, fault lines and magnetic fields... have all gone awry; days stretch into weeks; and animals and plants are dying en masse.
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If The Age of Miracles were a standard-issue sci-fi yarn, the story would center on the race against time to save Earth from certain doom. Instead, Julia is stuck in her California suburb, the lengthening days and nights merely one more uncontrollable thing. So what if the slowing forewarns the end of all human existence? It’s exactly as incomprehensible and inevitable as adolescence itself. The earth is slowing down, and Julia’s best friend will barely speak to her anymore; the birds are falling dead from the skies and her parents’ marriage is falling apart; people are crazy and people are crazy.
The story is narrated not by adolescent Julia, but rather by a 20-something Julia, recalling the events of that pivotal summer. “I remember,” she says, often, and, “That was the last time.” She is prone to pensive, melancholic metaphor: After the slowing, she says, “We all had a little more time to decide what not to do. And who knows how fast a second-guess can travel? Who has ever measured the exact speed of regret?” Hers is that wistful nostalgia earned only by time, one in which the meaning of small things is acquired in hindsight. Would you watch more closely the last bird you ever saw in flight? Would you say goodbye to the people you love?
Despite its dystopian urgencies, the book moves quietly, softly, driven by characters rather than plot: a state of affairs both odd and fascinating for a book whose central premise conflates adolescence and apocalypse. But then, how does adolescence end? There is no satisfying denouement. There is only the gradual slide of one self into another, and the matching realization that one’s world will never again be quite the same.
24. Timothy Egan, Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher
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In the hierarchy of historical eras, turn-of-the-century America is about as low as it gets; it's all dusty frontiersmen and hoop skirts, long stretches of open country and stilted Victorian talk from politicians with ludicrous facial hair. Not so for Timothy Egan, the gutsiest, most balls-to-the-wall chronicler of the American experience writing today. Winner of the National Book Award for The Worst Hard Time, Egan has a knack for... cutting through the flowered speech and dirt to craft page-turners from decades of bureaucratic red tape. Short Nights is a biography of a little-known photographer who set out to, grandiosely, document every Native American nation on the continent. Surprise, he failed, and his failures both professional and personal make for a compelling narrative of a country in flux.
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23. Lydia Netzer, Shine Shine Shine
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Lydia Netzer creates a sci-fi folk tale with her debut novel, weaving together an epic love story that transcends (literal) space and time, vibrant characters, and, naturally, robots.
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In Shine Shine Shine, Sunny, a congenitally bald little girl and Maxon, an autistic boy, fall in love and eventually get married. Flash-forward to the future, when Maxon becomes an astronaut on a risky, high-profile mission to the moon while Sunny remains at home, raising... their lovably robotic son, Bubber, gestating their second child, worrying about her dying mother and relinquishing her reliance on wigs as she struggles to maintain a normal life at home. Except that “normal” in this story is so not normal. There’s a recurring theme of learning how to be human and learning how to read emotions that applies sweetly to both the robots and the humans in the book.
22. Peter Heller, The Dog Stars
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We thought we were done with apocalypse novels too, really. But then along came Peter Heller's The Dog Stars, which somehow manages to be full of hope and beauty in the midst of the hideous struggle for survival. After an epidemic wipes out most of humanity and leaves the survivors infected with a deadly virus, our hero Hig spends as much time remembering the good from his former life and admiring the... natural beauty that remains (and in fact flourishes) in civilization's absence as he does fighting off marauders and searching in vain for friends in a savage wasteland. It's a potent reminder to stop and smell the roses — even if you're not being chased.
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21. David Foster Wallace, Both Flesh and Not
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This posthumous collection of David Foster Wallace’s essays as published in various outlets over almost 20 years of his prolific career has its faults, as so many posthumous publications do. But while some of the 15 essays included have not aged well, when it works, it’s a reminder of the startling joy that truly great nonfictionThe book draws its title from Wallace’s gorgeous essay on tennis phenomenon Roger Federer, which... opens the collection and which showcases his most dexterous moves as a writer — the breathtaking descriptive prose, the philosophically rigorous language interrupted by funny, humane, and surprising colloquialisms. It’s a rigorous and pleasing read, one that offers satisfactions and challenges both (as the title implies) material and abstract.
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20. Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth
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We’ll go on record as never having been particular Ian McEwan fans, especially when he writes female characters. Maybe that’s why Sweet Tooth’s Serena Frome is such a delight – her simultaneous arrogance and palpable need for guidance post-Cambridge will ring painfully true for anyone who was once a know-it-all college graduate. Tied up in her personal development is a labyrinth of a story about the crumbling British espionage system in the... 1970s, at the end of the empire, as the old boys’ methods lost favor and they scrambled to stay current. While the gimmick of the final chapter’s reveal is bold choice that, understandably, lost this book a lot of fans, it’s a charming twist that belies the book’s real strength: as a fairy tale of a young woman’s self-discovery.
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19. Zadie Smith, NW
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The title of Zadie Smith’s fourth novel refers to the neighborhood of North West London, where, for Smith’s characters, the main currency is voice. NW is structured around three voices in particular: Leah Hanwell, her best friend Natalie (nee Keisha) Blake and Felix, a young man whose brief section forms the pivot point around which the two women’s stories circle and collide. The daughters of Irish and Jamaican immigrants, respectively, Leah and... Natalie leave the neighborhood for college and brief plunges into the world beyond. Leah returns as a social worker and Natalie as an upwardly mobile lawyer, allowing Smith to chronicle a brilliant and nuanced range of spoken language. This also makes listening to the audiobook a particular pleasure, as the readers skillfully voice the dialogue-driven text. As Natalie reflects, listening to her mother gossip ruthlessly, “People were not people, but merely the effect of language. You could conjure them and kill them in a sentence.”
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NW‘s central contradictions rest in this succinct proposal, referring not only to the novelists task but to Leah and Natalie themselves, who face their own conjuring acts of self-reinvention and parenthood. Using fragmented chapters and a looping chronology to dilate what might have been a fleeting, faceless headline of neighborhood violence, Smith makes it clear that what’s at stake is the capacity for empathy – her characters’ and our own.
18. Paul French, Midnight in Peking
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It’s very easy to write a decent true crime story, and very difficult to write a great one. Paul French’s Midnight in Peking should be required reading for all who plan on attempting the genre at some point; it’s a remarkably drawn tale of the end of the era of white decadence in the “exotic Orient” circling around the sensational murder of a young British woman in Peking (aka Beijing) in the... 1930s. Government officials from both sides confounded the investigation, which French details for the first time in 80 years. Overwrought and not entirely academic in places, the story is so gripping and evocative that factual vagaries go by unminded.
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17. Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman
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Since the end of the Riot Grrrl glory days of the early ‘90s, the word “feminist” has somehow made its way back onto the list of slurs thrown like a hot potato at women who talk about gender equity, make uncommon personal grooming decisions or simply speak seriously about anything unpopular. Caitlin Moran, the British essayist who has been writing hilariously opinionated, outspoken, confessional criticism since the age of 16, takes this... regression to task, weaving an appeal for more strident feminists around her formative lessons on femininity. Moran describes it as “an update of Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch written from a bar stool” — while it is exactly as boozy and profane as that sounds, it’s also more touching, more hilarious and, ultimately, more convincing. Moran may singlehandedly haul feminism off of the scrapheap and back into the public discussion, where it belongs.
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16. Patrick Somerville, This Bright River
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Patrick Somerville’s fourth book is one of those novels that’s both epic and intimate. Written from multiple first-person perspectives – all of them dead-on, authentic and hilarious – the novel tracks mysterious pasts, families in distress, substance abuse, and a favorite topic (rightfully so) of any novelist: social awkwardness. The story is mainly told by Ben, a brilliant, recovering drug addict, and Lauren, a doctor escaping a tragic marriage, who are former... high school classmates now returned to their hometown of St. Helens, Wisconsin. Somerville (The Cradle, The Universe in Miniature in Miniature) has a blessed gift for sharp, witty dialogue, and the plot zooms, which makes This Bright River an ideal audiobook experience.
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15. Charles Yu, Sorry Please Thank You
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Charles Yu is very smart. Some might argue too smart for his own good, but hiding under the formalist gymnastics and technical jargon in the stories in Sorry Please Thank You is a deep well of empathy and tenderness. Toying with sci-fi tropes, Yu turns the genre on its head with a deadpan stare into the heart of modern alienation as he effortlessly describes impossibilities like a machine designed to fulfill one's... greatest desires, a corporation that outsources the experience of pain, and the day-to-day realities of living inside a video game. Full of bleak humor and conceptual absurdities, Sorry Please Thank You is a delight that will surprise you with its ability to inspire some serious soul-searching.
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14. Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis
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If you aren't already convinced that Indian literature is more than tales of colonial bad behavior, languid tropical scenery and upward-striving urchins, stand back and let Jeet Thayil drive the final nail in that coffin. Narcopolis is about Mumbai, yes, but more importantly it's a narrative of addiction, masterfully told from a multitude of perspectives in a beautifully harsh, poetic language. The city's underworld shift from genteel opium dens to the rough... desperation of the heroin trade serves as a mirror for the protagonist's descent, riots in the street serving as a backdrop to his ruin and rebirth. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, this meticulously crafted book dazzles with its skill without ever feeling forced.
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13. Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies
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In two consecutive books, Hilary Mantel has succeeded in accomplishing the impossible, a feat neither Shakespeare nor Showtime could achieve: making the political machinations of the reign of Henry VIII as gripping as a Tom Clancy thriller without resorting to heaving bosoms and bloody murder scenes. Following Thomas Cromwell, Henry's personal fixer who dealt with everything from arranging that first fateful divorce to prosecuting would-be traitors, all the while avenging the murder... of his own mentor, Cardinal Wolsey, the novels are relentlessly modern, told entirely in the present tense. Throughout, Mantel weaves in historical detail as effortlessly as she might mention Will & Kate. No wonder Bring Up the Bodies brought Mantel her second Man Booker Prize; we'd put money on the yet-to-be-published third part of the series taking the trifecta.
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12. Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King
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Dave Eggers’s latest protagonist, A Hologram for the King‘s Alan Clay, is a hollow man. Not in the T. S. Eliot “this is the way the world ends” sense, but the in the globally emasculated, forever-middle-management sense. He’s Willy Loman without the rage. In his past fiction, Eggers has often had an international focus. Unsurprisingly, his latest work retains that focus — but twists it around the average, recession-era American businessman.
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The down-on-his-luck... businessman may be the trope of American fiction in the last 70 years, but in presenting Alan Clay as such, we’re more aware of his everyman qualities. A “ghost” to his family, he’s holed up in King Abdullah Economic City (also known as the Arabian desert), designing holographic communications software with a team of contractors. Ruminating on his place in the world, we see the hints of a drive behind Clay — a new technology in a new economic power may make him a wealthy, and potentially worthwhile person.
But truthfully, A Hologram for the King is all about emptiness. The vast tracts of the desert, the literal insubstantiality of connecting-via-hologram — not to mention the bland quality of Dion Graham’s narration all underline the degree to which Eggers’s Clay claws at relevance as the cohesive bonds of his life come apart.
11. Louise Erdrich, The Round House
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Returning to the some of the same characters and geographies as in her 2008 novel The Plague of Doves, Louise Erdrich’s National Book Award-winning book is a wrenching work centered on three members of the Native American Coutts family in the aftermath of the rape of Geraldine Coutts, wife of tribal judge Bazil and mother of Joe.
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In a departure from Erdrich’s prior novels, The Round House’s sole narrator is the 13-year-old Joe,... voiced with honesty and conviction by Canadian First Nations actor Gary Farmer (best known for his featured role as Nobody in Jim Jarmusch’s 1995 acid western Dead Man). As his mother’s rape forces Joe to try to reconcile his own teenage desires with the reality of sexual violence, the crime finds itself in a dead zone of prosecution due to the overlapping jurisdictions of tribal, state, and federal law. The Couttses must balance their need for closure with their longtime efforts toward tribal sovereignty. As the investigation drags on, Joe remarks of his mother that “with all that we did, we were trying to coax the soul back into her. But I could feel it tug away from us like a kite on a string. I was afraid that string would break and she’d careen off, vanish into the dark.”
Erdrich’s prose offers a compelling look at the grey areas of justice, sex, love, family and ethnic identity, while Farmer’s narration allows the Coutts’s North Dakota reservation to creep slowly under your skin until you feel an integral – if silent – part of the community.
10. Carol Rifka Brunt, Tell the Wolves I’m Home
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Carol Rifka Brunt's debut novel, about a teenage girl coming to terms with her uncle's AIDS-related death in 1980s New York, is an unapologetic tearjerker. It's also a beautifully painted coming-of-age story and a nuanced, intimate portrait of the AIDS epidemic in its early, shadowed days. Protagonist June is caught up between taking care of her late uncle's partner, himself dying, and keeping peace with her family, whose rabid disapproval of their... relationship belies their fear and confusion about the disease. It's easier to blame one person for being the source of infection than to try to grasp the political magnitude of the epidemic's vicious spread and pernicious misinformation; as June uncovers these nuances, she finds herself further and further distanced from her parents, whom she once believed infallible, and from the childhood innocence we all enjoyed once upon a time.
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9. Moshe Kasher, Kasher in the Rye
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Crammed into comedian Moshe Kasher's semi-preciously titled memoir are at least four separate, well-wrought memoirs: of being the hearing child of two deaf parents; of the parenting paradigm shift between his mother's secular liberalism and his father's deepening involvement in an orthodox Jewish sect; of growing up white in the predominantly black, relentlessly poor city of Oakland, proving ground for some of the '80s' most brutal, tell-it-like-it-is hip-hop; and of becoming an... addict at age 13, hitting rock bottom before his senior year of high school. Somehow Kasher manages to tell all of these stories well, with a hard self-awareness that leaves no room for the self-pity that could (rightfully) permeate the exposure of such painful experiences. Shot through with Kasher's dry wit and featuring some truly laugh-out-loud scenes, Kasher in the Rye is the disabled/religious/racial addiction memoir you didn't know the world needed.
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8. Cheryl Strayed, Wild
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At 26 years old, Cheryl Strayed was lost: A recent divorcee (and recent/former heroin user), she couldn't find her way out of a years-long funk after losing her mom to cancer. So she decided to do what very few 26-year-olds would think to do: got rid of all her things and with little hiking experience set off on a solo, 1,100-mile trek through the Pacific Crest Trail in California and Oregon. In... Wild, Strayed beautifully tells the story of her adventure with Monster, her over-stuffed backpack, and the people she meets on the trail — most importantly, herself.
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7. Lauren Groff, Arcadia
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All utopias fail (seen one around recently?), but the undoing of the titular hippie commune in Lauren Groff’s fantastic second novel is exceptionally spectacular and heartbreaking. Of course, there are cracks in Arcadia from the beginning: the endless influx of Frisbee-tossing d-bags, the shady weed deals, the labor disputes, the charismatic guru whose teachings on equality are undermined by his own weaknesses. It’s a hot mess.
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Still, for little Bit Stone, the first... kid born on this secluded stretch of upstate New York farmland, the place is a verdant wonderland stocked with fresh produce, fresh air, an extended family of oddball characters, and sexual awakenings at every swimming hole. It’s also the only home he knows, so when the real world finally drops by to tear Arcadia apart, it’s devastating — for Bit, for his wayward crush Helle, for all the dirty ol’ bohemians and new age types who’d worked so hard to build the place, for the readers who’d half-seriously started daydreaming about life off the grid.
Groff, who turned heads with 2008′s wonderfully cockeyed family drama The Monsters of Templeton, has built something unassailably beautiful in Arcadia. Her sentences are lush, vivid, sensual things that twist and sprout in surprising but natural directions. Like Bit, the story goes where it goes, leaping forward in years and leaving familiar places for scarier frontiers. And when the world at large seems ready to collapse the way Arcadia did, it’s tragic and truthful. Lots of dystopias succeed, after all.
6. Christopher Hitchens, Mortality
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Originally published as a series of extended essays in Vanity Fair, the seven chapters that make up the meat of Mortality are vintage Christopher Hitchens: robustly philosophical, witty, blunt. The astonishing part is that their subject is Hitchens' own impending death. Begun shortly after his diagnosis with esophageal cancer and ending with a chapter of fragments left unfinished on his deathbed 18 months later, Mortality is mostly memoir, a clear-eyed self-assessment threaded... through with the stubborn refusal to resort to exceptionalism or fatalism. While dying with dignity has long been upheld as the ideal way to go, Mortality shows there's an even more desirable end: death with honesty.
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5. Jami Attenberg, The Middlesteins
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In the depths of the obesity crisis, beset on all sides as we are by first ladies urging healthy habits and celebrity chefs revealing the hidden costs of fast food, it takes serious bravery to write about eating as lovingly as Jami Attenberg does in The Middlesteins. At the center of this family drama/black comedy is Edie Middlestein, whose relationship with food has been bringing her unequivocal joy from the liverwurst of... her childhood to the suburban Chinese food of her present. Diabetic, under strict orders to change her habits or die, Edie continues to eat in a noble, grandiose way.With her waffling, doubting husband gone and her grown children dealing with their own unhappinesses, Edie is free to draw a future for herself we're taught to believe is pitiable – until you see how happy it makes her. An entertaining portrait of suburban Jewish life and an eater's rhapsody, The Middlesteins' Edie may just be the most heroic character of the year.
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4. Anthony Shadid, House of Stone
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It’s a little strange, hearing author Anthony Shadid graphically describe the toll a missile exacted on a Lebanese village in House of Stone; strange because one is immediately reminded that Shadid himself died suddenly and much too soon in the Middle East, though he couldn’t have known it as he wrote of victims choking on sand and dismembered corpses. Yet if death continually haunts House of Stone (as a veteran war correspondent,... Shadid saw his share of it), the book relentlessly pursues the life that goes on in death’s stead and gives it meaning.
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House of Stone‘s narrative concerns the reporter’s efforts to rebuild his great-grandfather’s house in Marjayoun, Lebanon, which was destroyed by an Israeli rocket in 2006. What comes of this effort is part national saga, part family history, and part tale of a stranger in a strange land. Shadid finds no shortage of amazement at the time and money he puts into a house that the Lebanese think should simply be destroyed. Suppliers cheat him, necessary parts prove difficult to find. He must clean human refuse out of the house’s water tanks. Interwoven with Shadid’s trials as he attempts to rebuild the house is an account of the histories of his family and their land, and it is here that House of Stone shines most brightly. It is almost as though Shadid, aware of how much of the story is not told by journalists like himself (“Television and the craft I practice show us the drama, not the impact,” he writes), now makes his best effort to fill in those spots. The result is a book that leverages Shadid’s keen reporter’s eye, complementing it with the emotion and in-depth engagement wrung from a family story. It is a tale of history with a heart, grounded in those familial bonds that we all have in common.
3. Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise
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There's no question about it: Nate Silver is this year's big winner. With the possibility of a sophomore slump gleefully held over his second presidential election at the helm of his blog, FiveThirtyEight, by pundits from both sides of the spectrum, Silver had a lot riding on his math. Thankfully, as he elaborates in his book, The Signal and the Noise, that math is basically foolproof. While the book is... not the victory lap he so richly deserves, it's just like Silver to give us something better, a measured call for continued logic in all arenas of speculation, from weather to finance to, yes, politics. As public debate becomes less about fact than about manufacturing drama, this call for open-eyed analysis may be our last hope for sanity.
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2. Junot Diaz, This Is How You Lose Her
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Some books, like some songs and movies, can be so achingly sad they’re pleasurable, and that’s the perfect balance Junot Diaz strikes with This Is How You Lose Her. The melancholy and pain of the displacement, romantic breakups and losses of loved ones in Diaz’s collection of loosely connected short love stories is balanced out perfectly by the writing’s snappy dialogue, dark wit and frank sexuality.
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Diaz fans will recognize Yunior, the subject... of several of the stories, from Diaz’s first collection, Drown, as well as from parts of his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Diaz reads his own work in the audiobook, lending an even more distinctive tone to some already memorable narrative voices. Latin idioms are sprinkled throughout the stories with only context in the way of explanation, making the listener feel as though he or she is eavesdropping on a hyper-intelligent, vulgar person telling a really good story – to interrupt for clarification would throw things off entirely.
This Is How You Lose Her will make listeners appreciate the simple joys of friends, lovers, work and the home, as well as the poetry that can be found when any of those can fall into discord.
1. Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl
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We will confess to reading the print version of Gillian Flynn’s third novel, Gone Girl, before listening to the audio version, tearing through it hungrily one lost weekend, feeling resentful of all interruptions, staying up later than usual to read just one more chapter. It is a book of twists and turns — page after page keeps the reader enthralled — but at the end of the book, when all is revealed... in this tale of a marriage gone awry with the wife gone missing, there’s a sensation of finally knowing everything at last. All the mysteries were revealed — why would one need to listen to the audiobook?
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And yet Gone Girl —a New York Times bestseller that has been optioned for film by Reese Witherspoon’s production company — is so engaging and funny, and the narrators Julia Whelan and Kirby Heyborne do such a knock-out job with the quick-witted prose, that it was simple to get sucked right back into the story all over again. Time flies with this audiobook, just as it did with the novel. Start listening, and suddenly it will be two days later.
As for the plot, well, this is one of those books the less said, the better, so as to not reveal too much to the reader. But if we must: It is about Nick and Amy Dunne, two writers, late of New York, who move to North Carthage, Missouri, when the money runs out. Nick says of himself, “I have a face you want to punch.” Amy used to make up quizzes for women’s magazines, and is the child of two famous children’s book authors who made a fortune off writing about her. Gone Girl alternates between their perspectives. And whether you love them or hate them (and you will likely feel all kinds of emotions with this book), you will not stop listening until you get to the very end.
Tim Maia’s Superbly Idiosyncratic Soul
Although he died in 1998 at the age of 55 after nearly collapsing onstage a week earlier, Maia’s myth has been growing steadily since the 2008 release of Nelson Motta’s best-selling biography, Vale Tudo: O Som e a Fúria de Tim Maia (Anything Goes: The Sound and the Fury of Tim Maia). The book was turned into a hit musical that in turn inspired a forthcoming biopic. Not bad for a former lunch delivery boy and nearly lifelong dope fiend, who once revealed the secret to his three-decade recording career as “having a balance: Half of my songs are armpit soakers and the other half are panty soakers.”
Although Tim Maia continued to produce hit records throughout the ’80s and ’90s, the ’70s turned out to be his most artistically fertile period. And for Maia’s music, the decade can be further divided into the years before and after his involvement with Manoel Jacintho Coelho’s Rational Culture sect, whose bible, Universe in Disenchantment, Maia encountered while tripping on mescaline. Inspired by Coelho’s Scientological promises of purified consciousness and a flying-saucer rescue back to our real home planet, the Rational World, Maia cut his hair, dressed himself in white, gave away all his possessions, eschewed inebriants, and demanded that his band follow suit. Having already recorded everything except the vocals for his fifth album, Maia rewrote his lyrics, returned to the studio, and transformed his already epic blend of soul, funk and Brazilian into the two-volume 1975-76 masterpiece of propagandistic sect-acular hooey that is Racional.
You’ll find Racional‘s “Imunização Racional (Que Beleza),” “Bom Senso,” “You Don’t Know What I Know,” and 12-minute groove epic “Rational Culture” on The Existential Soul of Tim Maia – Nobody Can Live Forever. Released as part of the Luaka Bop label’s World Psychedelic Classics series on what would have been Maia’s 50th birthday, Nobody Can Live Forever cherry-picks Maia’s peak years, which began in 1970 with Tim Maia — the first of 10 eponymous titles among the baby-faced singer’s 30-something-album discography. His brilliant and eccentric blend of raw funk, remarkable soul screaming (“Eu Amo Voce”), insane instrumental rock (“Flamengo”), and breezy Brazilian pop sold more than 200,000 copies and made Maia a star.
Born in the Tijuca neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro on September 28, 1942, Sebastião Rodrigues Maia was the 18th of 19 children, of whom 12 survived childbirth. A natural when it came to music, Maia formed two bands while still in high school and performed on television. After his father died, Maia hustled his way to America, where he arrived with $12, no English to speak of, and the address of a family friend in Tarrytown, New York. His nickname “Tião” was shorted to “Jimmy,” then “Tim.” During his four years in America, Maia joined a soul group called the Ideals, worked odd jobs and committed petty crimes. In 1964, he was busted in Daytona, Florida, for smoking pot in a stolen car, and spent six months in prison before being deported. Moving to São Paolo, Maia got his break thanks to Elis Regina, who invited him to co-write and record “These Are the Songs” with her in 1970.
With his fluency in American English and soul bona fides, Maia became a powerful force for musical change in Brazil. He inspired the Black Rio movement associated with Jorge Ben, Banda Black Rio, and the Gerson King Combo. He also became an increasingly loose cannon well-known for his many concert no-shows and hard-partying ways. (His preferred “triathlon” mixed whiskey, marijuana and cocaine.) He was married five times, fathered a half-dozen children, and did yet more jail time.
Following an angry break from the Rational Culture club in 1976, Maia quickly released an innovative disco album (Disco Club) and then another excellent Tim Maia disk, which contains the poignant “Nobody Can Live Forever” and Marvin Gaye-like “Brother Father Mother Sister.” Where other Brazilian artists contemplated black America from afar, Maia had imbibed it deeply. He released tracks in English throughout a career that included a lot of late-period hits, misses, and two albums of nicely assayed bossa nova: Tim Maia Interpreta Clássicos da Bossa Nova (1990) and the valedictory Amigos do Rei – Tim Maia e os Cariocas (1997). Maia made a second and final trip to America, and Tarrytown, in ’97. This time, unfortunately, the country didn’t provide the fuel for another three decades of superbly idiosyncratic soul. Instead, Maia ballooned up to more than 300 pounds, which was his weight while attempting to record a television show in Niterói, across Guanabra Bay from Rio de Janeiro, on March 8, 1998. Perspiring heavily, he left the stage shortly after attempting to sing “Não Quero Dinheiro (Só Quero Amar)” — “Don’t Want Money (Just Want Love).” He was taken by ambulance to Antonio Pedro University Hospital, where he died a week later.
Icon: Frank Zappa
An ideal entry point into Zappa's classical works
Frank Zappa focused most of his final years on art music, working with Pierre Boulez’s Ensemble InterContemporain, composing dozens of works for Synclavier and releasing The Yellow Shark, his work with German classical group the Ensemble Modern and, ultimately, his final album. An ideal entry point into Zappa’s classical works, Shark pits Zappa classics (Uncle Meat‘s title track and “Pound for a Brown”) against his modern compositional stylings, running the gamut from chunky repeating patterns like those of Rite Of Spring (or, say, rock music) to exhilaratingly formless note runs to wild sound effects. After years of complaining about shiftless orchestra union members being unable to devote the proper time and energy to his work, Zappa’s string-torturing sonatas finally got the treatment they deserved.
Interview: White Lung
Remember the first time you got wasted at a house party as a teenager? Let me remind you: Someone puts on the Ramones, turns it up full blast and you pogo with all your crushes until you can’t stand up. You are Judy! You are Sheena! You are a misfit who finally fits! A cretin at the hop! The night gets fuzzy, you get dizzy, you stumble upstairs. You need to sit down. Suddenly, the scene turns sinister. This is your introduction to sex, drugs and violence. You start to crave a different soundtrack. You play X’s Los Angeles and soon you’re puking your guts out a second story window to “Nausea,” watching your friends scatter while the cops show up. As the flashing siren lights up your view from the bathroom floor, life becomes noir, and you realize you need to rewrite the script to avoid being victimized.
The next day at the coffeeshop you see a girl you vaguely remember from the night before. She is writing in a notebook that’s full of her drawings. She shows you a comic depicting prey vs. predator, demanding to know which one you are. Determined to survive, you ask her to sing for your band, which doesn’t exist yet. She has a leather jacket and shows you how to apply liquid eyeliner like Mary Weiss from the Shangri-Las. Together you are invincible.
I am always looking for that girl — the one who can save me with her words, the one who will reflect the world I see back to me and encourage me to resist. She is who I seek in music, in writing, in a friend. At their best, White Lung evoke that rare moment of tough-girl solidarity that exists behind genuine female camaraderie. Singer Mish Way is a punk poet in a lineage that extends from Exene Cervenka to Kat Bjelland to Kathleen Hanna, telling stories of existential angst that use addiction as a metaphor for life under capitalism. Her lyrics document the rampant alienation experienced by those who seek refuge in nihilism as a way of refusing culture that turns people into objects through mindless consumerism. I talked with her via email while the band was in the throes of a European tour.
I saw you guys play Olympia several times early on, and still listen to the early singles — how has the band changed since then?
Obviously, the addition of a new guitarist has changed our sound. I think that Kenny [McCorkell]‘s style of playing is a lot more aggressive, nervous and anxious then our old guitarist, but it works much better for us. When you saw us play in Olympia, we didn’t have the musical and personal unity we have now. It’s just time, you know? We are a band that knows how to write together, tour together, just be together. I have changed as a frontwoman. I feel much more comfortable on stage.
Do you consider yourself a feminist punk band?
I am a feminist and I am proud to declare that. I believe my bandmates have feminist attitudes, but they would not necessarily label themselves as such. I do not feel the need to call us a “feminist band,” because it’s not something that we have ever discussed. Yes, feminism bleeds into my lyrics because it’s a part of my life, but I am not consciously trying to relate a very obvious message with my lyrics.
Anything I say could be considered a feminist issue if you really dissected it. For example, let’s say I’m singing about men in my life, complaining about them hate-fucking girls they don’t respect. The listener could just read that as a song about hate-fucking and that’s it — just a moment in a bed that is complicated. Or, it could be a song about gender imbalance. Why do men commonly hate-fuck? Well, because men fuck and women get fucked — then it’s an issue of biology mixing with our common social understanding of heterosexual interactions and, boom, feminist issue. You know?
Can you name a band that inspired you to play music?
Well, your band Bikini Kill inspired me. I used to cover “Capri Pants” in my first band. We did a lot of covers because we couldn’t actually play our own songs, or we were too afraid. I was the main songwriter — it was like Liz Phair threw up all over a really, really distorted guitar. I was like 19 years old, I was writing super graphic lyrics over simple, loving chords then just cranking it up. The Wipers inspired me — they still do. They did it right. I can’t think of one song of theirs that I don’t like. The Replacements. I get really inspired by the attitudes of certain front people, the performance, Paul Westerberg is one of those influences, so is Cristina Martinez. Hole, Babes in Toyland and L7 inspired me. The ’90s alt-punk scene just sucked me in. I just kept uncovering more and more and more and then the influences of those bands. When you first discover music, it’s like this onion you just keep peeling. It never ends. There is always something new to find.
Do you all have day jobs?
Yeah, we do. I am a writer who focuses mostly on music journalism.
How does economics inform the band?
I remember being in Atlanta, Georgia, two years ago on tour. I was so broke. I had so much debt waiting for me at home. I was constantly scared about money, because I had none. We had just played a show and had found out that the promoter had totally fucked us on payment and paid the other band way, way more because they were aggressive dudes who demanded it and we didn’t. I just felt so defeated and annoyed. I remember calling my dad on that tour, just begging to borrow $100 so I could eat for the next few weeks and he was like, “Nope, you chose this life so you deal with it.” I’m glad he said that, but at the time, I just cried.
Anyway, I was at this guy Ruby’s house, and there was an old zine with some piece Kathleen Hanna had written, and it was talking about the exact things I was going through. It just made me even sadder. I wrote a lot on that tour because I was constantly defeated. I was letting the bad outweigh the good. Being in a band is not a desirable ‘career choice.’ It’s the most expensive sport. But there is nothing like it, and I wouldn’t trade my life choices for anything. If I wasn’t in a band, I’d be very unhappy. I went into this knowing that being in a band would never be something I could make money from. But I loved playing music. I loved being on stage.
What is the point of punk rock in 2013 from your perspective?
The point of punk rock is to be exposed and vulgar. To get shit out. For me, it always has been.
Icon: Fleetwood Mac
A thorough, justifiable flop
Capturing yet another short-lived phase in this ever-changing ensemble, 1995′s Time is notable for the absence of both Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. In their place is ex-Traffic guitarist Dave Mason, a solo star during the ’70s, and singer Bekka Bramlett, daughter of rock duo Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett. Mac producer extraordinaire Richard Dashut returns, but with little effect: Time lacks the fleeting highlights of 1990′s Behind the Mask. Even Christine McVie falters in the songwriting department, and most everyone performs like dispassionate session players, not a coherent band. Despite Fleetwood Mac’s longtime reputation as a reliable brand, Time thoroughly — and justifiably — flopped.
Icon: B.B. King
The best of his box sets
It’s so easy to take an artist like B.B. King for granted, especially this late in his career, when his timing, dexterity and vocal chops aren’t what they used to be. Most box sets confuse “best of” with “greatest hits,” but of the multi-disk packages available, this one is the best, even though it’s still vulnerable to criticism. Older listeners would doubtless like even more tracks from his RPM/Kent years, for example, and fewer from the ’80s. But then, this box does include a healthy sampling from the ’50s and early ’60s that, at the time of this release had never appeared anywhere before (though many have since been issued elsewhere). In all, there are some 30 tracks here that were new at the time — a handful still appear nowhere else — and there’s still room for the hits and assorted other gems. Arranged chronologically from 1949-91, they document an astonishing career — one that never stopped evolving even as it stayed within strictly-defined parameters. That’s the thing about King that can’t be over-emphasized: His singular style was there in embryonic form from the beginning, and was fully realized within a few years of his first hit. He’s dedicated the rest of his life to exploring every possible nuance, no matter how subtle, of that style. In doing so, he’s leaving behind an unmatched — and instantly identifiable — body of work.
T.I., Trouble Man: Heavy is the Head
Reverting to a familiar narrative, but with a distinctly somber tone
No Mercy, T.I.’s last studio album, was a pop-star-studded affair, a far cry from the rapper’s earlier Rubber Band Man Days. On his recent mixtape Fuck Da City Up, however, he stomped and sneered like vintage T.I.P. amid 808s of Rick Rossian proportions. His eighth album Trouble Man: Heavy is the Head, splits the difference: T.I. reverts to a familiar narrative of inner turmoil about his trap rap reign, but with a distinctly somber tone: “In my city that’s the way we ride,” he broods, as if recalling harder times before “What U Kno.”
True to post-King, Chelsea Handler-guest form, Tip can’t help but boast of his VH1 reality show. He brushes off critics in “Sorry” (featuring a Capitol One-quoting “What’s in your wallet?” crack) as much as he does in the cruising “Hello” (“Showing haters the taillights of my two-seaters”). But as Heavy ends, T.I. stops skirting past his high-profile shortcomings. In grandiose closer “Hallelujah,” he recalls how much he missed his wife during his most recent prison sentence: “I reach out for Tameka’s hand/ I’m trippin’ because she missing.”
Heavy‘s best parts, though, are more about recalibration than atonement. DJ Toomp, who helped launch T.I> into the stratosphere on “What U Kno,” dials back his signature triumphal fanfare for “Who Wants Some,” and in “Trap Back Jumpin’,” T.I.’s staccato verses prove that he can navigate I’m Serious territory like it’s his childhood home. One of Tip’s verses on “G Season” may as well be a thesis statement: “It might sound wild, but it’s all I know.”
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Reminding us of what we love about the fallen artist, with a new twist
"It's irrelevant to dwell on the past/ I'm accountable for all of that." And with that lyric from "Mine Again," Mariah Carey was back in our hearts, no longer the crazed diva pushing an ice cream cart on MTV, no longer a zonked-out has-been, no longer a lousy actress murdering her own career. The Emancipation of Mimi fits snugly in the tradition of comeback albums because it reminds us of what we love about the fallen artist (in Mariah's case, that powerhouse voice) with a new twist (incorporating '70s-style R&B flashes, and the most dynamic phrasing in her career). Mariah innovates a kind of sing-rap style, thanks mostly to Jermaine Dupri, the pop-rap impresario who writes and produces some of the best songs here, particularly "It's Like That," "We Belong Together," and "Shake It Off," the stunning trio that opens the album. Dupri, famous for pioneering the kiddie-rap subgenre with Kriss Kross and Lil' Bow Wow, seems an unlikely Florence Nightingale for the singer, but he is indispensable, supplying a light, mischievous bounce against the broadsides of Mariah's five-octave range.
For Mariah, the songs work as double narratives; when a song is heartbreak-themed, it's about her failing career as much as failed love. This is a timeless trick, employed by everyone from Sondheim to Dylan, and Mariah, often marginalized as little more than a pop singer, transcends for the first time in nearly decade by cannily pumping persona for poignancy. And did we mention this album rocks the party? Forgetting the brand-rebuilding at work, these songs work in any setting — dance floor, shower sing-along, karaoke, YouTube recreation. Because Mariah, incomprehensibly batty as she may seem at times, has a kind of infectious quality that makes us see we aren't so far from madness. Who better to show us than Mimi?
2012′s Overlooked Books
When you read as much as we do, it’s inevitable that some of our favorite books will come and go without so much as a whimper of recognition, much less the great bang they deserve. Critical praise is never a great predictor of public success — and public success doesn’t always bode well for a book’s critical reception, either. Then there are those books that don’t get much of either, books that might be a little weird, or of a genre that never gets much respect, or that just came out on the wrong day. Whatever the reason, even though the rest of the world passed these books by on the first go-round (frankly, sometimes we did, too), we just can’t stop singing their praises. Here are our favorite unsung gems of 2012, each personally vouched for by one of our writers. It’s always a good time to discover your next favorite book; we’re willing to bet yours will be one of these.
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Judging Brian Evenson's books strictly by their titles is enough to give you a good idea of the kind of dark, thrilling experience you're in for when you read him — Contagion, Dark Property, Father of Lies and, of course, Altmann's Tongue, whose extreme violence led to Evenson's exit from Brigham Young University. But Evenson is no mere horror novelist; his cerebral, visceral thrillers have racked up praise from everyone from bestseller... Peter Straub to postmodern theorist Gilles Deleuze. But while Evenson has had a cult following for years, Immobility deserves a wider audience.
more »
Here's the deal: A cataclysm known as the Kollaps has left the Earth all but destroyed, and it is into this reality that Josef Horkai awakes after having been in stasis for 30 years. He's promptly informed he'll soon die of an awful disease: "Eventually you'll be completely paralyzed, suffering from utter immobility." Josef has been awakened because only he can withstand the ubiquitous post-apocalyptic radiation that poisons anyone who is exposed for too long, and he is needed to perform a task that might save what remains of humanity, a ragged community known as the hive. In the process, he's given a difficult choice that puts the fate of the human race in the balance.
Though Immobility is, like so much of Evenson's work, a riveting horror story of bleak survival, it is so much more — the sharp prose and terse dialog probe deep questions about how we know things and what we believe. Josef comes across as a post-apocalyptic version of Camus's Meursault, a man struggling to remember who he is while dealing with a much more pernicious question: Is the human race worth saving? — Scott Esposito -
A wisp of a novel, Office Girl was easy to miss when it arrived in summer, its intimacy and quirky charm quickly overshadowed by the year's fall blockbusters — liken it to the indie film that plays for a week and lives on through word-of-mouth hype. Joe Meno's story of a romance between two 20-somethings during a Chicago winter is best savored as a few hours' escape from the cold. It's February... 1999 when Odile, the titular girl and an art school dropout, meets Jack working in adjoining cubicles at their dreary third-shift gig answering phones. She gets her kicks biking around the city and vandalizing signs, while he's up for anything if it means she might fall in love with him. Written in short, angsty bursts — which are narrated with eye-rolling perfection by Julia Whelan — Meno's novel sets these two dreamers in dank cubicles and cozy walkups late at night and captures the optimism and nervous energy of the Y2K moment. — Kate Silver
more » -
Why didn't everyone I know rush me and demand that I read I Am an Executioner back in April when it came out? Were the sturdy, hilarious narratives too accessible for the experimentalists I sometimes run with? Was the formal playfulness too weird for my fellow fiction devotees? After all, in this debut collection, tigers, cinematographers, aliens and humans bray, mate, devour, love and write. Even so, Rajesh Parameswaran's fiercely imaginative plots... and hyper-precise prose add up to a must-read. Parameswaran tests the line between nature and culture — or between one culture and another — to ask, what happens when that dividing line shifts?
more »
"Demons" tells the darkly humorous tale of an immigrant couple, using realist conventions to discuss the assimilationist potential of Thanksgiving turkey. In other stories, an elephant dips her tusk in ink to write a memoir and an Indian stationmaster pines over his peculiar clerk in a queer retelling of Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener." What unites these varied characters are the ever-present forces of love and death. As one extraplanetary being muses, pondering the fatal culmination of his mating ritual, "Life feeds other life. It is equal with the act of love." — Amanda Davidson -
I'll admit it, there are some formidable reasons James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge's Zoo does not belong on a list of unsung literary gems. For one, while legit reviewers of literature wouldn't touch this thing with a 10-foot quill, the book was a bestseller, read by — and I'm just guessing here — 100 million people, many of whom had just learned their flight was delayed. And as for its "gem" qualifications,... Zoo is a deadly serious adventure yarn about, basically, a full-on global war between animals and humans. Yeah, OK, the Man Booker Prize people probably needn't waste their time.
more »
The thing is, lit nerds like myself — OMG, George Saunders just accepted my friend request! — have been shamed away from reading Patterson (and Tom Clancy and Danielle Steel and Jackie Collins, etc. etc.), but maybe that sort of snobbery is outdated. Surely we can switch our brains to energy-saver mode and just have fun with a book like Zoo, despite its clichés and inconsistencies and parts where the scientists don't seem to know much about science. Because it's wild and weird and unexpected. Because guilty pleasures are still pleasures. Freed from shame and pretense, we can all admit that a scene in which thousands of dogs take over Manhattan and have a giant, disgusting orgy is just plain awesome. Sometimes, that's what a gem looks like. Like a giant dog orgy. — Pat Rapa
2012′s Overlooked Books
When you read as much as we do, it’s inevitable that some of our favorite books will come and go without so much as a whimper of recognition, much less the great bang they deserve. Critical praise is never a great predictor of public success — and public success doesn’t always bode well for a book’s critical reception, either. Then there are those books that don’t get much of either, books that might be a little weird, or of a genre that never gets much respect, or that just came out on the wrong day. Whatever the reason, even though the rest of the world passed these books by on the first go-round (frankly, sometimes we did, too), we just can’t stop singing their praises. Here are our favorite unsung gems of 2012, each personally vouched for by one of our writers. It’s always a good time to discover your next favorite book; we’re willing to bet yours will be one of these five.
-
Judging Brian Evenson's books strictly by their titles is enough to give you a good idea of the kind of dark, thrilling experience you're in for when you read him — Contagion, Dark Property, Father of Lies and, of course, Altmann's Tongue, whose extreme violence led to Evenson's exit from Brigham Young University. But Evenson is no mere horror novelist; his cerebral, visceral thrillers have racked up praise from everyone from bestseller... Peter Straub to postmodern theorist Gilles Deleuze. But while Evenson has had a cult following for years, Immobility deserves a wider audience.
more »
Here's the deal: A cataclysm known as the Kollaps has left the Earth all but destroyed, and it is into this reality that Josef Horkai awakes after having been in stasis for 30 years. He's promptly informed he'll soon die of an awful disease: "Eventually you'll be completely paralyzed, suffering from utter immobility." Josef has been awakened because only he can withstand the ubiquitous post-apocalyptic radiation that poisons anyone who is exposed for too long, and he is needed to perform a task that might save what remains of humanity, a ragged community known as the hive. In the process, he's given a difficult choice that puts the fate of the human race in the balance.
Though Immobility is, like so much of Evenson's work, a riveting horror story of bleak survival, it is so much more — the sharp prose and terse dialog probe deep questions about how we know things and what we believe. Josef comes across as a post-apocalyptic version of Camus's Meursault, a man struggling to remember who he is while dealing with a much more pernicious question: Is the human race worth saving? — Scott Esposito -
A wisp of a novel, Office Girl was easy to miss when it arrived in summer, its intimacy and quirky charm quickly overshadowed by the year's fall blockbusters — liken it to the indie film that plays for a week and lives on through word-of-mouth hype. Joe Meno's story of a romance between two 20-somethings during a Chicago winter is best savored as a few hours' escape from the cold. It's February... 1999 when Odile, the titular girl and an art school dropout, meets Jack working in adjoining cubicles at their dreary third-shift gig answering phones. She gets her kicks biking around the city and vandalizing signs, while he's up for anything if it means she might fall in love with him. Written in short, angsty bursts — which are narrated with eye-rolling perfection by Julia Whelan — Meno's novel sets these two dreamers in dank cubicles and cozy walkups late at night and captures the optimism and nervous energy of the Y2K moment. — Kate Silver
more » -
Why didn't everyone I know rush me and demand that I read I Am an Executioner back in April when it came out? Were the sturdy, hilarious narratives too accessible for the experimentalists I sometimes run with? Was the formal playfulness too weird for my fellow fiction devotees? After all, in this debut collection, tigers, cinematographers, aliens and humans bray, mate, devour, love and write. Even so, Rajesh Parameswaran's fiercely imaginative plots... and hyper-precise prose add up to a must-read. Parameswaran tests the line between nature and culture — or between one culture and another — to ask, what happens when that dividing line shifts?
more »
"Demons" tells the darkly humorous tale of an immigrant couple, using realist conventions to discuss the assimilationist potential of Thanksgiving turkey. In other stories, an elephant dips her tusk in ink to write a memoir and an Indian stationmaster pines over his peculiar clerk in a queer retelling of Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener." What unites these varied characters are the ever-present forces of love and death. As one extraplanetary being muses, pondering the fatal culmination of his mating ritual, "Life feeds other life. It is equal with the act of love." — Amanda Davidson -
Marilynne Robinson's essay collection illuminates what matters to the author about philosophy, literary criticism, U.S. history, and religion. These may sound like heady matters and, indeed, this is not an audiobook for bopping around town doing errands. Read by Robinson herself (in exactly the voice devotees of Housekeeping and Gilead would expect her to have — considered, warm, a tinge of prairie) this is the audiobook to savor on a long solo... car trip, preferably through some wide open spaces, when you've got the time and headspace to contemplate the big questions.
more »
When I Was a Child garnered critical praise upon its release, but I was one of many, I think, who were interested but ultimately turned off by the extent to which the book is informed by Robinson's Christianity. Wrongly so; it turns out that for Robinson, religious belief is not mere dogma. To her, it is an opening up of thought, rather than a circumscribing, and the essays in this volume provide ample evidence to support her belief that religion, like literature and like America itself, is about generosity, wonder, and possibility. — Sara Jaffe -
I'll admit it, there are some formidable reasons James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge's Zoo does not belong on a list of unsung literary gems. For one, while legit reviewers of literature wouldn't touch this thing with a 10-foot quill, the book was a bestseller, read by — and I'm just guessing here — 100 million people, many of whom had just learned their flight was delayed. And as for its "gem" qualifications,... Zoo is a deadly serious adventure yarn about, basically, a full-on global war between animals and humans. Yeah, OK, the Man Booker Prize people probably needn't waste their time.
more »
The thing is, lit nerds like myself — OMG, George Saunders just accepted my friend request! — have been shamed away from reading Patterson (and Tom Clancy and Danielle Steel and Jackie Collins, etc. etc.), but maybe that sort of snobbery is outdated. Surely we can switch our brains to energy-saver mode and just have fun with a book like Zoo, despite its clichés and inconsistencies and parts where the scientists don't seem to know much about science. Because it's wild and weird and unexpected. Because guilty pleasures are still pleasures. Freed from shame and pretense, we can all admit that a scene in which thousands of dogs take over Manhattan and have a giant, disgusting orgy is just plain awesome. Sometimes, that's what a gem looks like. Like a giant dog orgy. — Pat Rapa
Five Debut Novelists to Watch in 2013
As we slide gracefully into 2013, here are five first-time novelists who made impressive debuts in 2012. Fitting for the year the Mayans prophesied the world would end, two of these novels deal with the apocalypse, though both are more concerned with our reactions than with the mechanics of destruction. Another one of these debuts is quite magical — what else would you call a child made out of snow? — but reigns it in with beautiful evocations of day-to-day life in a harsh Alaskan setting. And the last two deal with tragedies as American as apple pie: In one, a tour of duty in the Iraq War forever changes a young man, and in the other a wealthy East Coast family slowly unravels in the best tradition of F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Liza Klaussmann
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Perhaps great writing runs in the family: Liza Klaussmann, whose first novel Tigers in Red Weather has been winning raves for its innovative structuring and subtle narration, is the great-great-great granddaughter of Herman Melville. Though Klaussmann, like her legendary ancestor, found literary inspiration in Martha's Vineyard, this debut novel is much more reminiscent of another American giant: F. Scott Fitzgerald. Rather than write a novel about the epic exploits of an insane... whaler, Klaussmann has instead told a riveting, insightful story of a gin-soaked, upper-crust brood crumbling beneath the pressure of forging a family narrative. In order to embody how competing truths pull this family apart, Klaussmann narrates the novel in five sections, each from the perspective of a different family member. The result is a complex narrative that artfully embodies the totality of family life.
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Klaussmann, a longtime New York Times journalist, moved to London in 2008 to pursue a creative writing degree, and this is the first fruit of that labor. With the accolades Tigers has been racking up, it's hardly going to be her last — after an eight-way bidding war for the book, Klaussmann was reportedly offered a six-figure contract for two novels, of which Tigers is the first. The second is said to deal with artists in 1920s France and will also owe a debt to Fitzgerald, whom Klaussmann has recognized as a major influence.
Peter Heller
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As a longtime contributor to NPR, Outside Magazine, and Men's Journal, Peter Heller is used to describing some of the most amazing things on Earth. He's explored Tsangpo Gorge in China (three times as deep as the Grand Canyon) and interdicted Japanese whalers with an eco-pirate ship in Antarctica. Now, with The Dog Stars, Heller enters the realm of fiction in order to write about something not even an adventurer like him... can see firsthand: a post-apocalyptic world in which a killer flu has eliminated 99 percent of humanity and climate change has utterly transformed the environment.
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No doubt Heller would relish the challenge of going it alone after the apocalypse, but hopefully he wouldn't be quite as gruff as his protagonist, Hig, who feeds human carcasses to his pet dog and commits murder from time to time. Hig flies a small airplane, and one day receives a signal from far away – farther away, in fact, than he could fly with enough gas for the return trip. He is thus faced with a decision: live out his years in relative solitude or risk seeing what's left (if anything) of humanity.
With an MFA from the famed Iowa Writers Workshop and two books of poetry on the way, The Dog Stars won't be Heller's last venture outside the realm of nonfiction. He told the Denver Post that he's halfway through a second novel, adding, "Once you start making it up, there's no going back." And with raves from everyone from Oprah to Junot Diaz, how could a thrill-seeker like Heller turn down the challenge of exceeding his fiction debut?
Eowyn Ivey
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With a first name inspired by a character from Lord of the Rings, it's hardly surprising that Eowyn Ivey tends toward the fantastical; the seed for her first novel was planted by a Russian fairy tale. That book has since topped bestseller lists, been translated into more than 20 languages and was a Washington Post Notable Book for 2012. Ivey here uses her decade as a journalist for the Frontiersman, as well... as her experiences shooting moose and raising turkeys in Alaska's wilds, to imbue The Snow Child with an intimate understanding of life in cold climates. These gritty details ground a sometimes magical story of parents who try to construct a daughter out of snow. Ivey's descriptions of the Alaskan wilderness — equal parts beautiful and deadly — set this book apart, as does her carefully balanced plot, which skips over sentimentality in favor of pathos and subtle surrealism.
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Ivey's already at work on a second novel, concerning three men who attempt to travel up Alaska's Copper River in the 19th century. She's said that it will be "more adventurous and more epic," than The Snow Child. That's easy to believe: She and her husband traveled 100 miles of the river — the United States's tenth largest — in an inflatable raft in order to research the forbidding terrain. It's that kind of deep, personal knowledge of the land that will likely make Ivey's second book stand out as much as her first.
Kevin Powers
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Garnering a National Book Award nomination and a fat advance from David Foster Wallace's legendary editor, Michael Pietsch, isn't too bad for a first novel. Drawing on Kevin Powers's 2004-05 tour of duty in Iraq, The Yellow Birds is an in-your-face account of the war that centers around a young man who's just trying to keep up with the chaos. It's a tall order for a soldier who got beat up in... high school for reading poetry, and here Powers makes it into a lyrical, singular coming-of-age in the most demanding crucible imaginable. Though his next book likely won't draw so directly on his war experience, look to Powers, who was a Michener Fellow in Poetry while earning his MFA at the University of Texas at Austin, to again utilize his capacity for language and shifting narration to great effect. With Pietsch on the editorial duties and Powers just 32 years old, the sky's the limit.
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Karen Thompson Walker
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Random House reportedly paid $1 million for this debut from Simon and Schuster editor-turned-novelist Karen Walker, who plugged away at The Age of Miracles in the morning before work for three years. In this spare, well-observed novel, the rotation of the Earth is slowing, forcing massive changes to humanity's way of life. Walker here steps confidently into the decade-old trend of American authors writing novels about the apocalypse, yet, like Tom Perrotta's... The Leftovers, Walker is less concerned with the fire and brimstone of the end times than with how such a fundamental event would impact daily life; the voice of her 11-year-old narrator casually blends observations about the trials of growing up with ones about dealing with much more cosmic happenings.
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In interviews, Walker has admitted to being hard at work on a follow-up to her bestselling debut, but she's reticent to give details out of superstition. Regardless of just what she's up to (Walker has said it will, like Miracles, deal with "people facing an extreme situation" and will feature "science fiction elements"), with a husband enrolled in the Iowa Writer's Workshop, she'll be in the right environment to produce a fitting follow-up.
Who Is…Rachel Zeffira
“I’m not very good at following rules,” says 29-year-old Rachel Zeffira, who is also one half of Cat’s Eyes alongside Faris Badwan of The Horrors. “Anything I’m supposed to do, I automatically don’t do.”
Zeffira’s route to pop has been anything but by the rules. At 17, she was all set to become a professional soprano at London’s prestigious Royal Opera House. But after a mix-up at Heathrow airport, the Canadian was deported and lost her spot. So instead she forged a CV and came back to London to work as a supply teacher. She went to Italy to study at a music conservatory, then moved back to London and gave up opera altogether.
When she met her garage-rocker boyfriend Badwan, their worlds collided. Together they formed Cat’s Eyes and released one of the most lauded debuts of 2011, a self-titled album that reinvented ’60s girl-band symphonic pop and, true to rule-defying form, was launched with a gig at the Vatican.
The Deserters is Zeffira’s first solo album, and merges her classical roots — you can hear the influence of Debussy and Michael Nyman — with her newfound love of pop and Ennio Morricone’s cinematic compositions. Played and produced by Zeffira herself, it is released on her and Faris’s RAF (Rachel and Faris) label.
eMusic’s Elisa Bray met Zeffira to talk about going it alone, hanging out with The Horrors, and playing at the Vatican.
On discovering a world of new music:
My tastes have changed dramatically in recent years. Before I met Faris, I didn’t know what shoegaze was and I’d never come across My Bloody Valentine, Spiritualized or Sonic Youth.
Faris has taught me that sometimes you have to completely destroy something in order for it to sound good. When we recorded the Cat’s Eyes album, there were times when I’d go, “I really nailed that high note!” But by the time the song was finished, you wouldn’t even be able to tell it was a human voice.
Being brave with sound was a whole new thing for me. When I sang opera, I’d be preparing for a week beforehand. I’d stay away from heaters, air-conditioning and dairy products, and I wouldn’t talk too much the day before a concert — I’d use a little notepad [to communicate]. Now it doesn’t matter. I’ll do a gig and the sound engineer will forget to turn my microphone on [laughs].
On making The Deserters:
Bobby Gillespie [of Primal Scream] was one of the reasons I did this album. He did an interview where he said I had a nice voice and I was really shocked. Sometimes I’d get it in my head that I’m a fraud — I’m not a real pop singer, I just got lucky or something. But Bobby and Faris believed in me. Bobby doesn’t lie. He’s just incapable of BS.
Faris was touring when I was recording The Deserters and I would send him stuff. I really value his opinion. And I sent one song to Bobby. He said it was spectral and haunting. He was really supportive and I owe him a lot.
On combining pop and classical music:
When I did my album, it was really important to me that I stayed true to my roots. I love the sound of the oboe, I think it sounds mournful and melancholy. And I know my strong point is orchestration. But I didn’t want a really overblown orchestra — I didn’t want it to sound like musical theatre. The songs are quite subtle, so the orchestration had to be too.
I really love the organ. You only find it in churches, and I wanted to bring it outside the sacred world. It’s basically a big synth. It’s the mother of all synths.
On playing the Vatican:
There is a Cat’s Eyes song called “I Knew It Was Over,” and Faris and I thought there was something sacred-sounding it about. I thought if I rewrote it for a choir and a cathedral organ, it could fit into the mass setting. I wrote to the Vatican and said we were from the Church of St. Mary of the Angels. I didn’t say we were Cat’s Eyes — I lied and changed my name on email. I know it was a bit underhanded, but I was raised Catholic and didn’t want to offend anyone.
We brought our choir to Italy with us and they were allowed to sing an afternoon mass at St. Peter’s Basilica. We did sacred songs like “Ave Maria,” then for the last part we did “I Knew It Was Over.” No one really noticed. It wasn’t like we went in there with amps and did a rock song. The only problem was the choir. Their dresses were a little short and we had to go to the store and buy opaque tights so they were allowed in.
Obviously we didn’t get a sound check. Suddenly Faris was singing at a mass and I was playing this organ that I’d never seen in my life, a massive thing that if you make a mistake on, the world knows it! It was a once in a lifetime thing.
On hanging out with The Horrors:
I’ve never met anyone else like them. Josh [Hayward — the band's guitarist] has a physics degree and built The Horrors’ studio. Rhys [Webb — the bass player] is an insane record collector, a true music lover, and has a night in London called the Cave Club where he plays psychedelic music. Everyone who goes is there because they love music. I think I’ve met more music lovers in the last few years than when I was in classical music.
Meeting The Horrors has opened up a whole new social scene for me. Even my sleeping hours are different. I am the worst insomniac. It’s a nightmare. I used to go to bed really early because I knew I’d be up at 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. But now I go to bed at 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. — every musician I know in the pop world works best at night.
On her favorite composers:
Sibelius paints a picture with music. I like Ligeti’s experimentation. And everything comes back to Bach. One of my heroes is [Italian film composer] Nino Rota; he did the Godfather soundtrack and tons of classical stuff. I’m friends with his daughter, Nina Rota. He had theories about music I think are important to stick to. He believed music was connected to the soul, and that what separates us from animals is music and that emotional connection. He didn’t care about reviews — he wasn’t worried about being seen as sentimental or old-fashioned. He was also one of the most important Hermeticists of all time — he had the largest library of books on potion-making.
The Unknown Dave Brubeck
Naturally enough, obituary writers focused on the milestones in Dave Brubeck’s career: his early, proto-cool octet, umptyzillion ’50s college dates with his long-running quartet, the Disney waltz “Some Day My Prince Will Come,” Take Five with its oddball rhythm patterns, musical revue The Real Ambassadors with Louis Armstrong and his occasional classical compositions. Sketching a career so extensively documented — his recordings span nearly 70 years — necessitates short-shrifting many worthy recordings. Here are a few you might have missed.
The early college tours that helped establish Brubeck’s classic quartet yielded numerous concert LPs — Jazz at Oberlin, Jazz at the College of the Pacific, Jazz Goes to College, Jazz Goes to Junior College. But the band also brought back memories of getting out there and back. Brubeck composed “Plain Song,” a highlight of the 1956 studio album Jazz Impressions of the U.S.A., on the road somewhere between Yankton, South Dakota and Iowa City; the repetitive alto melody and piano solo represent the rolling-in-place flat landscape, Norman Bates’s 2/4 bass thump and Joe Morello’s flicks of brushes on snare are the rhythm of bus tires rolling over concrete highway slabs. On the pastorale “Summer Song,” Brubeck’s piano intro sets up the hook, but then Paul Desmond’s alto saxophone runs with it, through one pretty, perfectly formed improvised chorus after another. There are urban numbers too — “Curtain Time,” “Sounds of the Loop” — but the breezy swing of the rustic stuff (including a horseback-loping “Ode to a Cowboy”) trumps the city-slick.
Much has been written about the creative contrast/tension between the urbane, unflappable Desmond and the easily excited pianist: one suave and poised, one jumping up and down on the piano bench. But Brubeck’s melodies gave the altoist plenty to dig into.
Once they expanded their territory beyond North America, the quartet brought back more than tricky rhythms like “Blue Rondo a la Turk”‘s 9/8. Like Duke Ellington, Brubeck made music based on his touristic impressions. The 1964 recording Jazz Impressions of Japan begins with “Tokyo Traffic,” written by Brubeck his first day in-country, a tongue-in-cheek pastiche of Hollywood Asianisms: Morello’s mock-kabuki woodblocks and ceremonial gong punctuate a melody drawn from a pentatonic scale. (Brubeck says their Tokyo audience got the joke: it’s a tourist snapshot of obvious scenery.) “Toki’s Theme” plays with Japanese hipsters’ embrace of modern rock. But Brubeck doesn’t neglect the contemplative mode, as composer or pianist. “Fujiyama” is one of his prettiest slow winding melodies, perfect for Desmond’s melancholy lyricism. (So is “Koto Song.”) The insistent bass figure underlining “Zen Is When,” left over from a 1960 session, curiously anticipates Coltrane’s A Love Supreme.
The iconic album Take Five took off in the early ’60s, spawning four sequels (where, in truth, those 5/4, 7/4, 9/8 and 11/4 time-signatures can sound rounder, less painstakingly counted-out). By now the ¬¬quartet mostly recorded original material. A notable exception is Angel Eyes, recorded in 1962 and ’5, and devoted to Matt Dennis songs. The name may not ring a bell with devotees of the American popular songbook, but his tunes will. This batch includes “Angel Eyes,” weepers “Everything Happens to Me” and “The Night We Called It a Day,” and Von Freeman favorite “Violets for Your Furs.” The quartet’s “Let’s Get Away From It All” is speedier than Fats Waller’s ambling take, and the splashy rhythms of “Will You Still Be Mine” unleash the keyboard percussionist. This is the Brubeck who caught the young Cecil Taylor’s ear. (For what those pianists share, hear “Maori Blues” on Time Further Out.) The faster ones also bring out the rhythm player in Paul Desmond. He didn’t need fancy time signatures to superimpose his own shifty syncopated beats.
By the 1970s, the quartet was over, and the pianist often teamed with three of his sons as Two Generations of Brubeck. A new movement preoccupied with odd time signatures had arisen — jazz-rock fusion — and the second-wave Midwestern avant-garde was ascendant. There were half-hearted attempts of link Brubeck with either movement. Witness the Two Generations’ 1974 “Mr. Broadway,” an old 6/8 Brubeck TV theme reborn as fast jazz rock, with Dave and son Darius on dueling piano and electric piano and son Danny bashing like Billy Cobham at the traps. (Jerry Bergonzi’s on soprano sax.)
Four months later, for the album All the Things We Are with Roy Haynes on drums, Brubeck was joined by Chicago vanguardist (and great admirer) Anthony Braxton and/or cool contrapuntalist Lee Konitz on altos, meetings of historic more than musical interest. (Konitz is on “Like Someone in Love” and “Don’t Get Around Much,” Braxton on Dave’s signature ballad “In Your Own Sweet Way,” and both saxists on “All the Things You Are.”) More satisfying is a loose reunion with Paul Desmond, 1975: The Duets. Brubeck had calmed down considerably from his prime — he revives 1956′s “Summer Song” as a piano solo — and Desmond sounds ever more wistful, the alto’s Stan Getz.
The putdown “bombastic” plagued Brubeck for decades. There’s no denying he could go overboard, early — as on a long, live “At A Perfume Counter” from 1955. “Exuberant” is probably a better word for his youthful excesses at the ivories. The title of one late-period album, 2007′s solo Indian Summer, sets the tone: the warm side of autumn when days grow short. The pace is unhurried, the mood reflective, the selections a thematic blend of standards (“Indian Summer,” “September Song,” “Memories of You”) and originals — including one final “Summer Song,” harking back to the years when Brubeck was king of the road.
Various Artists, Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
An oddly congruent cross-section of styles that effectively build a narrative arc
We can call the Quentin Tarantino soundtrack a legitimate subgenre of its own now, can’t we? After all, the director has said that he constructs his scripts partly by crafting accompanying mixes. Naturally, Django Unchained, the director’s eighth film, features an accompanying disc constructed of an oddly congruent cross-section of styles that effectively build a narrative arc. It’s also his eighth soundtrack album, and the fourth in a row — preceded by Kill Bill Vol. 2 (2004), Death Proof (2007), and Inglourious Basterds (2009) — to prominently feature vintage pieces by the master Italian soundtrack composer Ennio Morricone.
This time around, though, Morricone dominates — as he should, since Django Unchained is a spaghetti-Western homage. And since so much of those films’ mood comes is set by the music, QT borrows heavily as well from vintage soundtracks by Luis Vacalov (the Rocky Roberts-sung theme to 1966′s Django) and Jerry Goldsmith (“Nicaragua,” from 1983′s Under Fire, featuring Pat Metheny). And since Django Unchained is also a Blaxploitation homage (aka a Quentin Tarantino film), it makes room for “Unchained (The Payback/Untouchable),” a no-brainer dead-guy extravaganza between James Brown and 2Pac, and John Legend sounding even more like an old soul singer than usual. It will make your local coffeehouse seem that much livelier.
Eric Revis’ 11:11, Parallax
An apt title for music with this many angles and ideas
It’s almost a shame Eric Revis is still best known as the longstanding bassist for the Branford Marsalis Quartet, because his own projects have been consistently meaty, masterful and stylistically multi-faceted. Parallax — his third disc as a leader, not counting the trio Tarbaby — is a bold, star-infused quartet date that deserves to be heard above all the year-end list-making hoopla surrounding its release.
Revis emerges as the guiding force among such dominant sidemen as pianist Jason Moran, Ken Vandermark on tenor and clarinet, and Nasheet Waits in the drummer’s chair. He stakes out the terrain with showcases that include a modulated blizzard of notes from his bow on the 80-second solo opener, “Prelusion”; agile plucking on the 102-second mid-disc solo, “Percival”; and the closing title track, an ominous and deliberate texture-contrast duet with Vandermark.
Revis challenges his supergroup in unique fashion by structuring “Celestial Hobo” around the individual musical reaction of each band member to a poem by Bob Kaufman. He and Waits build funhouse mirrors out of crazy-glue in their intrepid intros to two standards, raking and scratching for beats on Fats Waller’s “I’m Going to Sit Right Down and Write Myself A Letter,” and lurching about like mimes pretending inebriation on Jelly Roll Morton’s “Winin’ Boy Blues.” And among Revis’s group compositions, “Edgar,” sports a marvelous stalk-swing groove that is by turns spooky and whimsical.
The sidemen deploy their enormous talents with bristling elegance, mixing brutish abandon with expertly honed restraint, so that the customary patterns of ensemble interplay are elevated and/or altered by extraordinary innovation. You hear it in the way Vandermark refuses to climax the tension of his high-wire clarinet solo on “MXR,” the way Waits swings the centrifugal force out to the periphery on the Waller tune, the two-handed gusto that Moran uses to both goad and waylay the groove on “IV,” and the distinct unison harmonies Moran and Vandermark wring out of their front-line tandem on many of the tracks.The two group improvisations are among the best of their kind that I’ve heard in recent years. “IV” is hard-bop rampaging through thorny rose bushes. “Hyperthral” lives up to its title, gradually escalating into shred-fest while Revis’s bass holds the ground with the ever-presence of an afternoon shadow. A “parallax” describes the displacement of an object viewed along two different lines of sight — an apt title for music with this many angles and ideas.
Various Artists, Diablos del Ritmo 1960-1085: The Colombian Melting Pot
A weird and wonderful journey where every twist and turn opens up colorful new vistas
The city of Barranquilla on the Caribbean coast of Colombia is the place where Latin America and Africa meet. The Spanish brought slaves here in hundreds of thousands, and over the centuries Barranquilla has grown into a melting pot where cultures, and music, blur.
This compilation celebrates a time of glorious musical experimentation in the 20th century, when the sounds of native cumbia and vallenato swirled together with funk and psychedelia from Europe and the United States, all underpinned with the rhythms of Africa. Half of this double-album focuses on the African side of Colombian music, half on its indigenous (Indian) styles, but what’s fascinating is how they come together. Try the Colombian dub experience of “Eco En Stereo,” or “Quiero Mi Gente,” a song aching for a Talking Heads cover, to hear how beautifully the fusion can work.
Two tracks by Wganda Kenya stand out on the African side. “Shakalaodé,” clocking in at nearly eight minutes, is a steaming slice of Afrobeat that would make Fela Kuti proud. But “El Caterete” is more twisted. A Latin piano line dances around African percussion and funk guitar, before a singer with operatic ambitions jumps into the fray. It’s a startling combination, especially when a fractured piano solo seems to pull ideas from the Cecil Taylor free-jazz songbook. Welcome to the new, transatlantic Colombia.
Andrés Landero represents the campesinos with his raw country style, shaped by Colombia’s indigenous music. Championed by both Joe Strummer and novelist Gabriel Garcia Márquez, his music starts out as a gleeful, anarchic mix of accordion, percussion and off-key brass, fighting for control of “Busca La Careta,” a compelling car wreck of a track. But on “La Pava Congona,” he mixes things up. The accordion and vocals are still heavily rhythmic – pure Colombian cumbia — but the drumming that underpins everything is straight out of the Congo. The funk comes to the jungle.
Lovingly assembled over five years by Analog Africa head Samy Ben Redjeb, Diablos del Ritmo is a weird and wonderful journey through a landscape where every twist and turn opens up colorful new vistas.