Phonomancy: The Christmas Single

Yeah, it's been a while since the last tour of my iPod. Real life intervened, as it's wont to do, and I didn't have time to do it every Friday. But, on this 24th of December, Phonomancy returns for a noble Yuletide tradition: The Alternative Christmas Playlist.

December sends all manner of chills down our spines, and not just physical. There's the chill of having to set up the decorations, untangling lights from Gordian knots, and buying plastic Christmas trees (and if you bought a real one, have fun cleaning up all those pine needles). There's the chill of asking your loved ones what they want this year, fighting beleaguered parents and partners to the death to claim one for your own, and desperately beating the traffic to wrap it up. There's the weather, there's setting up dinner, there's making sure you're within postage dates, and there's the dread horror of the neverending unchanging music that is absolutely everywhere even in your dreams.

Some people like cheery goodtime holiday music, and I would never begrudge them their joy, but no type of music is more stagnant than Christmas tunes. Very little is new, and even less has a chance of getting big and becoming another standard. What was the most recent song to truly make it big in the last twenty or so years? "All I Want for Christmas is You", undeniably. "Christmas Time (Don't Let the Bells End) by The Darkness, possibly. I haven't heard that one get played to death, but it does get a lot of playtime. We here in the UK didn't have to suffer Mannheim Steamroller like they do across the Atlantic, and we're mostly safe from awful Christian rock like "Christmas Shoes", but we also have the annual tradition of the Christmas Number One.

I'm a bit surprised how big a deal it is over here than other countries. Record sales usually hit their peak in the weeks leading up to Christmas in the UK, so getting number one around this time earns the musician (or, more likely, the record company) a little crown for most units shifted. The easiest way to get that is a song about the holiday, but not always; The Beatles have more Christmas number ones than anyone else, and they're all decidedly un-wintery affairs like "Day Tripper", "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and "Hello, Goodbye".

With the unstoppable rise of Simon Cowell and his evil reality-TV empire, the Christmas number one has the very dangerous chance of going to the winner of Pop Idol or The X Factor, who notches that one hit single and then sinks without a trace. Looking over the data, however, that trend gets bucked; Girls Aloud won Popstars: The Rivals and the Number One spot with "Sound of the Underground", but they continued to achieve success and avoided being a flash in the pan. In fact, it was only last week an X Factor winner got the Number One, with Sam Bailey. But the stretch of time from 2005 to 2008 was a dark one indeed, with Shayne Ward, Leona Lewis, Leon Jackson and Alexandra Burke taking it like bland vapid Vikings and making lots of money for SyCo. It was so bad that a successful counter-protest was launched in 2009 to get "Killing In The Name" by Rage Against the Machine at the top. SyCo may not have had the Number One the most, but oh God was it depressing seeing it on top for what felt like forever.

So fuck it. I'm joining in with all the hipsters and putting together my own alternative Christmas playlist. No Wham!, no Pogues, no Michael fucking Bublé. I set myself some rules while curating this:

1. No Christmas Number Ones. This meant ruling out songs I really liked, including the Pet Shop Boys' cover of "Always on My Mind" and The Darkness. The point of this playlist is that they're meant to be songs not heard by everyone. I'm highlighting overlooked gems or classics here.
2. Very little cynicism or "funny" choices. Bad Religion's Christmas records are good for a laugh, but it's fleeting. Also, 'tis the season for peace on Earth and goodwill to all men, and I want that emphasised. Christmas is the one time of year when we shouldn't be cocks to each other. The only two songs I have here that are close to cynicism are by Tom Waits and Lou Reed, a) because they're really good at this shit; b) they're excellent storytellers in their music; and c) there's a loneliness to Christmas as well. Not everyone finds themselves celebrating with their families, and joy means more if there's sorrow beforehand. As the recently-late Mr Reed said, "there's a bit of magic in everything, and a little loss to even it out".
3. Must relate to Christmas or winter in some way, lyrically or musically. Anything that doesn't mention Christmas, or has it in the title, I chose because it has a certain "feel" to it that evokes the season. "The Devil is in the Details" by Hanna is the soundtrack for a film set in Finland, and has a very fairy tale vibe to it; the whistles and fairground carnival music in "Devil" matches that, while also feeling kinda Christmassy in its own right.

With that in mind, I managed to find 15 odd, underrated, or otherwise overlooked Christmas ditties for you to enjoy. Low's Christmas is here by hipster law, "Gaudete" is a choral number most people probably aren't aware of, and "Only You" was pushing it because, while a cover of it reached the Christmas Number One, I imagine more people are familiar with the not-actually-acapella version than the original by Yazoo. Also, I couldn't not include it; it felt properly wintery.

From all of us here at The Airtight Garage to all of you: have a very Merry Christmas/Holidays/Saturnalia/whatever you celebrate. Get drunk, feel your waistline expand comfortably while watching The Great Escape, and keep safe. See you in 2014.

A Life in Six Stars (A Cloud Atlas review)

Poster by Tumblr user WatsonPrime.

"The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, you speck of dust!"

Friedrich Nietszche, The Gay Science

The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.

James Hopwood Jeans 

I. Dogs of Diogenes

Most of the people who know me, or who just take a glance at my Facebook timeline, would tell you I'm cynical. I question what's presented, tear it open, and try to divine the truth from its entrails. In truth, it's a side of me I'm actively trying to fight, or at least keep on a leash. To be a cynic nowadays means to be jaded, to have little to no faith in humanity. This isn't, of course, how it used to be. The philosophy of Cynicism, the kind espoused by Antisthenes and Diogenes and the like, espoused virtue above all else, prizing a free happy life as the greatest thing one could possibly have.

I wouldn't say being a Cynic, rather than a small-c cynic, appeals much more to me. Being a Cynic sounds like going straight-edge, or like following a warrior's code; nothing is more important than virtue. Not money, not power, not hygiene, not reputation, not society. The name itself comes from the Ancient Greek "kynikos", meaning "dog-like", and initially lent itself to insults; Cynics were frequently called dogs for rejecting societal norms and living in the streets, though Diogenes took it as a compliment: other dogs bite their enemies, I bite my friends to save them. To be a dog meant being free and loyal to your cause.

At some point down the line, Cynicism lost the privilege of a capital letter, moving from evangelical crusader for happiness to bitter loner on the outer fringes of society. And while small-c cynics can certainly have an eye for improving life and human interaction - that's probably what fuels our most well-known grumpy bastards - all too often, that noble goal gets lost in favour of being perpetually disillusioned and getting a sense of grim satisfaction when things go tits-up. It's trendy to be cynical. It's even bled through into our entertainment, with the heroes of Western fiction - films, video games, TV, comics - becoming increasingly harder and sociopathic, to better appeal to our power fantasies. Even when they "win", it's a Pyrrhic victory. Man of Steel ends with Superman killing the last survivors of Krypton. John McClane is no longer an Everyman cop who can get hurt, he's a Category 5 hurricane made of bullets.

Too many of us are cynics.

II. From Heaven to the Gutter

Talking about Cloud Atlas really is like dancing about architecture. The original novel by David Mitchell has a narrative structure like a Chinese puzzle box, with six different stories in six different styles nestled within each other, interrupting one another before reaching the middle, with each one being wrapped up in succession. These stories are, in order:

1. American lawyer Adam Ewing (Jim Sturgess) travelling across the Pacific Ocean in 1849, saving a runaway Polynesian slave (David Gyasi) from death even as he slowly succumbs to illness from a parasite. His adventures are chronicled in a journal, read by...
2. English musician Robert Frobisher (Ben Whishaw), disgraced son of a wealthy family, as he flees to Edinburgh (Belgium in the book), to become the apprentice of renowned composer Vyvyan Ayrs (Jim Broadbent) and prove himself as a musician. He writes about his experiences to his lover Sixsmith (James D'Arcy), who retains the letters well in to old age, which eventually fall into the hands of...
3. Investigative journalist Luisa Rey (Halle Berry), who is tipped off by an aged Sixsmith about foul play involving a new nuclear reactor being developed in San Francisco during the 1970s. Key figures in the reactor's development turn up dead, and time's running out on Rey to figure out the mystery. Her story becomes the basis of a manuscript, Half-Lives: The Mystery of Luisa Rey, read by...
4. Vanity-press publisher Timothy Cavendish (Broadbent) in 2012, experiencing quite a windfall when his Irish gangster client throws a well-known critic out a window. Eventually, his client's family come knocking for their share, and in an attempt to flee London ends up being tricked by his elder brother (Hugh Grant) into incarceration at a brutal nursing home. He soon turns this into a screenplay called The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish, a film watched by...
5. Somni~451 (Doona Bae), a clone waitress living in a futuristic Korea, forced into servitude by the caste system. After her friend is killed for disobeying orders, she's taken under the wing of a revolutionary movement and falls in love with one of their leaders, Hae-Joo Chang (Sturgess). The movement fails, and before her execution, she makes one last recorded statement to the world, which centuries later becomes the holy text of a religion followed by...
6. Zachry (Tom Hanks), a shepherd who lives on the island formally known as Hawaii, 106 winters after "The Fall". After his tribe is beset by the cannibalistic Kona tribe, he allies with Meronym (Berry), the ambassador of the last remnants of futuristic society, to preserve what's left of "The Smarts"; the technology their ancestors left behind.

The structure looks something like this.

What's particularly clever is how they all link. Each story is a text being read by the protagonist in the next narrative; the transcription of a revolutionary's last words in Story E becomes the basis for a religion in Story F, for example. And then there's the very real possibility that these stories may not be completely true. Frobisher notes how Ewing's journal seems too neatly structured to be the real thing, yet his own composition, the Cloud Atlas Sextet, is structured exactly like the novel, a sextet with overlapping stories, and a character in his story reappears in Half-Lives, which is a manuscript for a novel. It's metafictional, stories within tales buried in narratives.

It's this unique structure that led many to declare the book unfilmable, but people should really know by now that particular label will only dare filmmakers to try even harder. Tom Tykwer managed to get a decent adaptation out of Patrick Susskind's Perfume: Story of a Murderer, another daunting task for bibliophilic screenwriters. But he couldn't do this alone; he needed the help of Andy and Lana Wachowski, massive fans of the book, and who have never shied from the task of trying to carry big ideas to a mainstream audience. The Matrix was a distillation of Baudrillard and Plato and Gnosticism, after all, wrapped up in a kung-fu superhero action movie. Hell, Tykwer's own Run Lola Run dabbled in talks of free will versus determinism and chaos theory, giving a philosophical bent to a hard and fast action film scored to pulsing techno.

In short, these three specialised in the mixture of high and low culture. In that sense, they were the perfect people to adapt Cloud Atlas.

III. "The Weak Are Meat..."

Mitchell described the story as being about "predacity, the way individuals prey on individuals"; cannibalism and greed are recurring features in all the stories. Dr Goose (Hanks) remarks to Ewing that the Pacific beach they're standing on was once "a cannibal's banquetting hall"; Ayrs intends to screw Frobisher out of the royalties earned from The Cloud Atlas Sextet; the greed of an energy company causes Rey to start sniffing around; Cavendish flees to Aurora House, unable to pay his client's murderous family, and jokingly wails about how "Soylent Green is made of people!" to the confused residents; fabricants who've served their purpose are a cheap source of protein in Neo-Seoul; Zachry's tribe are routinely at danger of becoming the Kona tribe's dinner. As Goose puts it, "the weak are meat, and the strong do eat."

The Wachowskis are fond of this as a trope. All of their works are about free-spirited individuals fighting against a faceless System, the tide forever bashing against the rocks until it's shaped for the better. Speed Racer sees the title character and his family continuing to race in defiance of a decades-long conspiracy to fix competitions for corporate interests. The Matrix has the faceless Caucasian government agents as servants for a collective of machines leeching humanity of power, while the free people of Zion are multi-racial and full of life. Their script for V for Vendetta has the System in its most primal form - a tyrannical government who rule over every aspect of life, using the outsiders (the blacks, the gays, the foreigners) as lab rats.

Such is the case with Cloud Atlas. Every story has the protagonist fighting against their fate, in bitter refusal that this is how things are meant to be. The most obvious is Somni waking up from a life of drugged ignorance, living as a slave with the hopes of one day reaching the end of her contract, and bringing down the corporate government. It manifests in other ways, however. Frobisher wants to prove to his "Pater" that he can make it on his own, and his attempts to retain the rights to his Sextet lead to him going on the run from the law yet again. Aurora House is a prison, but Cavendish and his motley crew attempt to break out regardless. Ewing's actions lead to Autua becoming a freeman, and he and his wife later announce their intentions to join the abolitionists, a decision that riles his father-in-law: "there is a natural order to this world, and those who try to upend it do not fare well".

This natural order, then, is where those with power prey on those who are weak. Hugo Weaving, in all of his roles, represents this idea in various aspects: an assassin hired by a greedy power company, a sadistic nurse, a bureaucrat, a Nazi (albeit a sympathetic one, characterised more by his unrequited love, though still a representative of assholes with power), a demonic trickster. All of his appearances, from Haskell Moore to the fiendish Ol' Georgie, mark The Way Things Are; even his Nazi commander is resigned to the fact his love for the Jewish Jocasta can never be, because that is the order of things.

IV. Psychography

At its core, Cloud Atlas is the story of one individual as they fight against the establishment to varying degrees of success. This one individual is male and female, old and young, of various classes and races and nationalities and sexualities. This individual is denoted by the presence of a birthmark on their person, in the shape of a comet; it appears on Ewing's chest, Frobisher's lower back, Rey's shoulder, Cavendish's leg, Somni's neck, Zachry's head. There's something very Buddhist about this; the idea of a single soul returning to the mortal coil over and over again evokes samsara, a repeating cycle of reincarnation (across six realms, fittingly enough; six is somewhat important to the narrative).

With that, Mitchell, Tykwer and the Wachowskis manage to have their cake and eat it, crafting a story that's human and intimate, while also being epic on an unprecedented scale - not just in terms of setting, hopping back and forth from post-apocalyptic Hawaii to Edinburgh at the turn of war, but the characters. Cloud Atlas has a large principal cast of thirteen actors (American, British, South Korean, Chinese and Australian) playing multiple roles across all of its six stories, spanning gender and, controversially, race. Tom Hanks is a Scottish hotel manager, an Irish gangster and an American scientist; Halle Berry is a black journalist, a white Jewish socialite, an Indian partygoer, a male Korean doctor; Doona Bae is an American and a Mexican; Hugo Weaving is a woman and a demon; Hugh Grant is a decaying English millionaire and a proud cannibal chieftain.

On a surface level, this racebending is uncomfortable. The film industry does have a reputation for casting white actors in roles meant to be played by non-whites (just look at The Last Airbender, with white kids playing unmistakably Inuit and Tibetan parts, or Johnny Depp and his barely-there Cherokee ancestry as Tonto in The Lone Ranger), and while Cloud Atlas is a German production, it looks guilty of that particular charge. Jim Sturgess as Hae-Joo Chang comes off the worst, though not for lack of effort on the actor's part. He's trying, but stifled by Korean make-up that's just flat-out unconvincing. To be fair, Bae's Caucasian prosthetics and very noticeable contacts are similarly dodgy. In any other film, I would call bullshit, but Cloud Atlas feels genuinely progressive in some ways. Halle Berry can appear in a period movie as someone other than a slave, and Ben Whishaw can play a neglected wife. Given that the film is about eternal recurrence, the idea that all of this has happened before and shall happen again, it makes sense. It's post-racial casting, and is decades - if not centuries - ahead of its time. The day will come when we can legitimately cast actors in roles regardless of race, but sadly that day is not today.

Speaking in terms of acting, this can get distracting; while Hanks is clearly having fun playing a Cockney-Irish brute, you can't escape the fact he's playing a cartoon, and the film will probably earn several rewatches just through games of "Spot-The-Actor". This may be intentional. It's quite jarring seeing Hanks as a kindly scientist and heroic shepherd one minute, then a giggling obsequious doctor and greedy hotel manager the next, and Jim Broadbent going from fun-cantankerous (as Cavendish) to hateful-cantankerous (as Ayrs) (could we call this switch "putting on Ayrs"?), as though the film is blurring the lines between heroism and villainy. Other times, it creates parallels; Sturgess and Bae, when on-screen, play couples, one doomed (Somni and Chang), one saved (Adam and Tilda Ewing). It's gauging your attention, forcing you to look for links. It's the difference between viewing a story as a single thread, and viewing all the stories as forming a tapestry.

The dodgier elements are, thankfully, minor, and rarely the focus of the stories. The central characters are superbly cast: Hanks's Zachry is wonderful even while speaking in a futuristic Creole, a man haunted by the devil on his shoulder but prepared to swallow his fear regardless. As Luisa Rey, Berry is the best she's ever been, tough and warm and sympathetic. Broadbent gets to showcase his skills as a dramatic actor as the scaborous Ayrs, and his comedic side as Cavendish; it probably helps that Cavendish is delightfully pompous and bumbling, rather than the bigoted jerk he is in the book. The stand-out by far, though, has to be Ben Whishaw. He plays Frobisher as arrogant and bullheaded, but thoughtful and bright and full of love: for music, and for his beloved Sixsmith. Whishaw's been one to watch for a while - his lithe build, androgynous beauty and knife-like tongue have seen him play Shakespeare's Ariel, angelic killer Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, and MI6's snide gadgeteer Q, but Cloud Atlas sees him firing on all cylinders, burning with youthful pride and ambition, and is the perfect fit for the most romantic of the six stories.

V. In Concerto

The novel's Matryoshka doll-like structure would have never worked on film, so Tykwer and the Wachowskis went with a different way of presenting the stories. Mitchell referred to it as a "mosaic"; Wikipedia calls it "hyperlink cinema". Examples of the latter description include Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia, Fernando Meirelles's City of God, or (more popularly) Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. It's a type of cinematic storytelling where whole plotlines interlock with each other, often in a nonlinear fashion, where connections between these often disparate stories are gradually revealed.

Cloud Atlas the film operates on the same principle. The audience is given a brief introduction to the status quos of each story, in order, and then cuts between each of them. The main narrative flow is rapidly diverted time and time again, with transitions often handled on-screen; a car in 1975 can turn the corner and the scene would cut to a hovercar in 2144, for instance. Eventually, you begin to see links between them; Somni and Chang consummating their relationship is juxtaposed with Frobisher's dream where he and Sixsmith destroy a china shop in slow-motion. How much is intentional, and how much is us seeing patterns that aren't there, like looking for familiar shapes amidst the clouds? It's the cinematic equivalent of spinning multiple plates; or, maybe more accurately, like a sextet. Each story is a soloist, or a musical phrase, playing in concert with the other stories, adding up to one big symphony.

This is nothing new, fundamentally. Cinematic language has included the Soviet montage technique of intercutting different scenes with each other for quite some time now, and Cloud Atlas isn't even the first to apply Soviet montage to whole storylines, but nothing of this ambition has been seen for a while now. Certainly, very few works transcend time, location, genre, and social categories like race and gender. And there's no sense of Tykwer or the Wachowskis half-arsing it. They believe completely in what they're doing. That's probably what makes it so endearing.

VI. The Great Thought

I mentioned, way back at the start, that cynicism is increasingly prevalent in our society and culture. This isn't to completely disparage it as an outlook. There are times when we need a trickster looking outward at the world and pointing out what's wrong with it, someone with no illusions. The problem is there are so goddamn many of these people in the world. It can give way to a general sense of misanthropy quite easily. And where does that leave you? With the likes of Bret Easton Ellis or Dave Sim, who find it easy to turn their bile onto something, and that's not good company to keep.

I went down that road once. I never want to go down there again. Cynicism and a jaded perspective are cool and all, it's fun to act superior to something (and also why writing a negative review is easier and often more enjoyable than a glowing one), but man, that can be seriously draining. It's like living on absinthe. I've made no secret about the fact that All-Star Superman by Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely and Jamie Grant shaped my belief system, and myself, for the better. In a world that's mostly cruel and chaotic, why would you want more fiction that emphasises that above all else? Not to shun everything dark and serious and weighty altogether, but add a bit more stuff about how good it is to be, well, good.

Cloud Atlas is not a complex thematic work, whatever form the structure takes. The message is very simple: "Doing good is good, doing bad is bad". Some will think it's trite and simplistic, an overtly grandiose, pretentious way of delivering a simple moral lesson. What gives it more weight is that, by mapping out all of human existence over such a broad canvas, Cloud Atlas shows how important altruism and kindness ultimately are. The world is one where power is abused, where those who are weak are routinely preyed upon and devoured. This is true of the natural world, of the concept of "survival of the fittest". So, in a life full of cruelty, the most important thing is to try and be noble.

I can't speak for Tykwer's filmography, but the Wachowskis are very positive filmmakers. The underrated Speed Racer is a big ode to the joys of family, and is shot as a pure kaleidoscope of Technicolor energy intended to get the viewer giddy. The Matrix films are about rejecting a comforting lie in favour of truth, however painful that might be. Even their 1996 effort Bound is about embracing your own identity, and had close involvement from sex-positive feminist Susie Bright, who signed on upon finding the script was full of women enjoying sex without apologising for it. So Cloud Atlas feels right at home with their brand of silly high-concept idealistic filmmaking.

There are moments, yes, when it doesn't completely work, where it falls into camp and is too overstuffed. But an honourable failure is better than a successful mediocrity, and you'll rarely see films as brave and as beautiful as Cloud Atlas.

Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies - "God damn it, you've got to be kind."

Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

Drugs, Alcohol or Lies (A 24 Hour Party People review)

Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal. Drugs, alcohol, or lies. Unable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort. 

Jean Cocteau, "On Invisibility", Diary of an Unknown 

You know your trouble, Tony? You don't know what you are. I fucking know what you are, but you don't know who you are.

Well, my curiosity's got the better of me, Rob. Tell me, what am I?

You're a cunt.

Well, you see, I knew that, you see. That was something I did know. 

Anthony Howard Wilson can be viewed as the patron saint of Manchester, or as the biggest prick to ever crawl out of Salford. Often both. A Cambridge-educated journalist working for Granada Television, he had a reputation for being very intelligent and charismatic, but was also pompous and infuriating. Part of this was intentional - Wilson took delight in "wind(ing) up all the people in Manchester who think I'm a flash cunt", and set out to become the flashiest and the cuntiest of them all.

Wilson was growing bored with the music scene of the 70s when he attended a Sex Pistols gig at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in June 1976, organised by future Buzzcocks frontman Howard Devoto. Forty-two people watched Johnny Rotten stamp and sneer on stage amidst a squall of cheap guitar: Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook, then going by the name Stiff Kittens; Martin Hannett, the future architect of the Manchester sound; Jon the Postman, legendary for jumping on stage and treating all and sundry to his bellowed rendition of "Louie Louie"; Steven Morrissey, the poet laureate for angsty teens the world over. For them, the gig was revolutionary. Here was a new type of music, one anyone could do. If it was good enough for the red-haired tit on stage, it was good enough for them.

This lighting of the blue touch paper is captured in 24 Hour Party People - sort of. Tony Wilson, here played by Steve Coogan, points out all the important players (and Mick Hucknall) in the story, talking about their futures, like how Sumner and Hook go on to become Warsaw, later Joy Division, and how Hannett will try to kill him. He describes the gig to his producer as "history", comparing the small turnout at the Free Trade Hall to that of the guest list at Caesar's assassination. Wilson is obsessed with the idea of creating a new mythology. 24 Hour Party People chronicles how successful he was at that.

...Where Somebody Else Has Gone Before (A Star Trek Into Darkness review)

Poster by Matt Ferguson.

I don't go into films looking for problems. Really, I don't. When you go into a cinema, you're making a pact with whatever's on the silver screen - "I will suspend my disbelief, I will give you the time of day, but only if you give me something truly worthwhile". It's only fair. It's like deliberately looking for the moment when the magician slips something up his sleeve - where's the fun in that? It's better to enjoy the show.

So I went into Star Trek Into Darkness prepared to meet it halfway. I was beyond annoyed by the marketing constantly teasing the identity of Benedict Cumberbatch's villain, even though everyone and their mother and their mother's friend Jean knew who it was. But then I remembered how much I liked the previous film from 2009, which managed to soar despite a shoddy script, purely through the strength of its cast and JJ Abrams being a pretty damn fine action director. I wasn't expecting a masterpiece, I just wanted a fun little popcorn movie.

I got that movie only on the most superficial level. Star Trek Into Darkness is a film that just flat out doesn't work anywhere else.

(WARNING: This review will contain spoilers, so if you haven't seen the film, I'm sorry, but turn back now. There's no way of discussing all the bullshit that happens without doing so; it's vacuum-packed bullshit. They're clever like that.)

Return to the Classics (A Behind the Candelabra Review)

He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel, which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many-colored disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher — shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, and monograms of Indian blue. Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.  

“They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. “It makes me sad because I've never seen such — such beautiful shirts before.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

There was a time when Władziu Valentino Liberace was a king. The child of Italian and Polish immigrants in Wisconsin, he rose to success throughout the 40s and 50s tickling the ivories in a variety of increasingly baroque costumes: tuxedos and fur capes encrusted in rhinestones. His reign has long since passed. Now, when his name is evoked, it's to mark someone as flamboyantly gay; Wallace Wells in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World refers to him as the writer of the "Gay Handbook". It's obvious now looking back at him with hindsight. This guy, with his glitter-encrusted bouffant hairpiece, soft lilting voice and face dolled up to the nines? How did people not know he was gay?

Those people had the obvious answer: gays were decadent demons bent on corrupting your children, humping you in back alleys like a dog taking a bitch, and dragging America into a cesspool. They weren't entertainers, they weren't the softly-spoken man doing renditions of Chopin and Berlin, and they weren't richer than Croesus. Liberace was successful, popular; even when his star faded from the mainstream in the 60s, he remained a darling on the Vegas circuit, selling out night after night, working round the calendar, and living in a miniature Nevada palace. In the words of Roy Cohn from Angels in America, homosexuals were "men who know nobody, and who nobody knows". Liberace was successful, ergo he was a bachelor who just hadn't met the right woman yet.

Bob Black (Scott Bakula) says as much in the opening minutes of Steven Soderbergh's Behind the Candelabra. When Liberace (Michael Douglas) wheels out his protégé (Cheyenne Jackson) for a quatre mains duet, Black jokes about them being "a pair of queens", earning him the outrage of an elderly woman sitting in front. To the surprise of his partner, Scott Thorson (Matt Damon), only the two of them, expatriates from the gay underworld, can tell he's hiding in plain sight.

...In a Single Bound (A Man of Steel Review)

Poster by Martin Ansin.

Behold, I teach you the superman! - Friedrich Nietzsche

The generic template for a superhero is a man in spandex and tights flying about doing good, cape billowing in the wind, and it all started 75 years ago. Superman is more than just a superhero. To paraphrase Tom Baker, he's The Superhero. The definite article, the idea given form. As in fiction, Superman has two fathers: writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster, who had been plying their craft in the funnypages for years before striking gold. The Superman that appeared in Action Comics #1 was a socialistic demigod, not yet capable of flight, but able to leap tall buildings "in a single bound!" and more than willing to let might make right, fighting against injustice from the street on up.

Over time, Superman evolved into the airborne friend of humanity we all know and love. Well, the one we should all know and love, if it weren't for that emotionally crippled upstart in the bat costume. In film, Superman has had several earthly incarnations. Christopher Reeve pretty much wrote the book on Superman with his mannered, detailed, fantastic performance in Richard Donner's 1978 film, a high every other adaptation has tried to recapture. Superman II suffered from executive interference, leading to two quite different cuts circulating; Superman III had Richard Lester up the slapstick to diminishing returns; Superman IV: The Quest for Peace was...just...sad to behold; and Superman Returns tried in vain to recapture Donner's glory days and instead gave us Superman as Deadbeatdad Man.

Now Zack Snyder, of 300 and Watchmen fame, steps up to the plate for a newer take on the Last Son of Krypton. Warner Bros. have obviously been eyeing up all the bank the Dark Knight films have made, and are keen to recapture the success with Christopher Nolan overseeing production, and David S. Goyer providing a script. Keep in mind, when a studio attempts to catch lightning in a bottle twice, all that's left are burns, so how does Man of Steel manage?

All the Sad Young Men (A Great Gatsby review)

Poster by Sharm Murugiah.

I felt (adapting Gatsby) was a very chancy thing to attempt. A lot of what was in the novel was by suggestion. So much of it was in prose and so much of it was utterly untranslatable, and even if you could translate it, I thought it would be a thankless task and you'd just be some Hollywood hack who fucked up a classic. I felt that I had a lot to lose and very little to gain. That whole book is a mirage. - Robert Towne

Often considered a candidate for the title of "The Great American Novel", and more likely considered by every high school student as "that book in the 20s that's full of assholes", The Great Gatsby went unappreciated upon release, with F. Scott Fitzgerald going to his grave believing his work was a failure. The book got a second wind in 1942, where it proved to be incredibly popular with soldiers, and soon with the rest of the world, including Hollywood.

There have been, to date, four previous film adaptations of Fitzgerald's novel - a 1926 silent version by Herbert Brenon of which only a trailer survives; Elliott Nugent's efforts in 1949 which is difficult to get a hold of; a made-for-TV movie in 2000; and the most well-known, the 1974 adaptation with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, boasting a script by Francis Ford Coppola. By all accounts, none of these really came close to the mark. Robert Towne turned down a handsome offer of $175,000 to adapt Gatsby, plumping instead to write his original screenplay Chinatown for $25,000, because he considered Fitzgerald's kiss with a fist to the Jazz Age unfilmable.

So along came Baz Luhrmann to take his stab at it with his loyal co-writer Craig Pearce. You've got to admire their ambition, at least.

Phonomancy Mixtape 3: The Holy Dark

Phonomancy Mixtape #3: The Holy Dark

1. Tom Waits - "Way Down in the Hole" - Franks Wild Years


AWHENYA WAWK THREW TH' GAHDEN! YEW GOTTA WAHTCH YAW BACK!

Nowadays best known as the theme to Possible-Best-Show-Ever The Wire, with a different version for each of its five seasons, the original version by demon-voiced troubadour Tom Waits was used to open Season 2, which focused on drug smuggling and was devised by the creator to be "a mediation on the death of work and the betrayal of the American working class". Fittingly, Waits's version is sinister and understated, with gentle tambourine rattles at the very back underscoring the slinky horn section, and features the man himself in fine voice, demanding his procession fear God and All His Angels like a preacher in a cheap white suit. No less is expected from Waits, the poet laureate of America's seedy blue-collar underbelly.

2. Peter Gabriel - "Come Talk to Me" - Us

I've already talked about this before with regards to Bon Iver's cover, so I won't go into too much detail here. The original does contain everything you need to know about Peter Gabriel - bizarrely beautiful lyrics that sound like an Eliot poem ("With reptile tongue/the lightning lashes/towers built to last", "The earthly power/sucks shadowed milk/from sleepy tears undone"), a massive arrangement that draws upon world music and overstretches itself (it opens with bagpipes, features an African choir, and somehow crams a duduk solo before the song's out), and a big emotional plea to ground it all. This is what saves Gabriel from merely being pretentious - he sings with genuine love and passion.

One final comment: the lyrics make more sense for this than Bon Iver's, considering it's about Gabriel trying to reach through to his daughter, rather than a lover as Justin Vernon appears to be.

3. The Rolling Stones - "Gimme Shelter" - Let it Bleed

There's probably a High Canon of songs associated with the Vietnam War by now, and I'd be very surprised if this isn't in there. Written and recorded during the American campaign, it's dark and moody like a gathering thunderstorm, with Jagger and Merry Clayton singing of an oncoming hurricane of bullets and napalm and screaming babes. It's just so...ominous and foreboding; I can almost smell the sweat and Agent Orange. The song really belongs to Clayton, who allegedly suffered a miscarriage after laying down the vocals. It's just so powerful and brilliant, the Stones have tried to fill the gap with Florence Welch, Mary J. Blige and (most bafflingly of all) Lady Gaga, but - as with so many things - the original just can't be topped.

4. Gackt - "Birdcage" - Crescent

A few years ago, I was crazy into J-rock. It was melodic, it was daring, it was grandiose; goddamnit, this is what rock was meant to be! The obsession petered out a while ago, due to a few factors: 1) My discovering the classics of rock and pop; 2) All those melodramatic ballads where the singer shrieks over an orchestra tended to blur together; 3) X Japan taking too fucking long with that comeback album. (Seriously, any day now guys.)

Gackt was one of my favourite musicians during this time, and while I don't listen to him that much, he still earns a place in my iPod. He's like the Japanese David Bowie - androgynous and artsy, capable of elevating films by his mere presence, and more than willing to try new things musically. Crescent, his 2003 masterpiece, is the best example of this, an eclectic mix of folk, prog, hard and art rock. "Birdcage" is unusual on its own merits - it starts as a gentle acoustic, and then, around the 2:20 mark, a squall of electric guitar enters, and it turns into a completely different song, all high-tempo drums and manic violin. It works surprisingly well and builds to a nice conclusion, guided along by Gackt's melodramatic lyric.

5. Scott Walker - "The Seventh Seal" - Scott 4

The doomed magnum opus of Walker's time in the 60s. Consisting entirely of self-penned material, Scott 4 failed to chart anywhere, despite its composer's status as pop music's premiere brooding artist; given that it was released under his birth name of Noel Scott Engel, it probably isn't that surprising. While I love this record, it does lean towards the self-indulgent a few times, and I can sort of see why the few who did buy it might have been jaded. There aren't any major pop hooks, the songs just kind of drift in their own little worlds. Scott was studying Gregorian chant and lieder (German romantic songs) while working on it, making them more European than his other work at the time, and hinting at his modern albums that lead the viewer into little universes of their own.

"The Seventh Seal" is in the same vein. The melodic structure of the verses remains constant throughout, with the accompaniment gradually unfolding into a more storming, rousing Spaghetti Western-esque backdrop. Not the one I'd have chosen for a song that's literally a re-telling of Ingmar Bergman's masterpiece, but hey, it works. This was the first Scott Walker song I ever heard, and it won me over right away. It's self-indulgent and ambitious, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

6. Gackt - "Mizérable" - The Sixth Day: Single Collection


Gackt's debut single, this version is from a 2004 compilation and was re-recorded to match his deepened voice (probably due to his smoking habit). I have to say I prefer this one over the original, since Gackt is better as a baritone with occasional bursts of tenor-ness, and it makes him distinct among the many, many, many J-rock pretty boys out there.

Goddamn do I love these strings. I've toyed with the idea of learning the violin for a while now, and I think this song is why - they give the song a strong opening, they're lush and romantic when they need to be and become crazy awesome at about 2:48, just as energetic as a guitar solo.

7. David Bowie - "Where Are We Now?" - The Next Day

I remember getting the news from this in the morning, checking Twitter then Facebook then the official Bowie page to confirm that no, this isn't a put-on, the Dame is coming back to music, he did it in a way that nobody saw coming, and you can get the new song right now. Having gotten used to the idea of Bowie never releasing new material after Reality in 2003, this was like Christ coming back on the third day for me. I was so happy.

Bowie's choice of a lead-off single, "Where Are We Now?", was an unusual choice - it's a slow-tempo ballad from an album mostly dominated by rock n' roll, it doesn't have obvious (or even any) commercial appeal, and his voice is frail and plaintive. Some assumed his fragile vocals were signs he wasn't up for a comeback, but he's been peddling that voice out for a while now. This one took a while to warm up to, to get used to and identify all the textures and layers within, but oh boy was it worth it. Poignant, sad, yet hopeful, it's a sign that Bowie has aged gracefully, and that his music has evolved and matured with him.

8. The Smiths - "How Soon is Now?" - Hatful of Hollow

Everyone has a Smiths phase when they're young. They just had this knack of encompassing the heartaches and tribulations of being a bright young thing within a series of perfect pop songs. Yes, as much as I dislike that pretentious miserable contrarian old sod Morrissey, his lyrics are some of the best I've heard. "It takes guts to be gentle and kind" is my creed.

"How Soon is Now?" is just the best synthesis of everything great about The Smiths - Johnny Marr's sterling vibrato guitar work, and Morrissey's artful, passionate writing. A lot of Morrissey's work has connections to gay culture, but this is so universal; whether it's a guy from Manchester bursting to come out, or a disenfranchised girl in Sussex wanting someone anyone to notice her, it fits together so nicely.

9. Kanye West ft. Lupe Fiasco - "Touch the Sky" - Late Registration

Kanye West is the idiot savant of rap music. In interviews, he has no filter, no little angel on his shoulder to stop him saying absolute clunkers and taking potshots at his contemporaries, and I don't think I'll truly get what he sees in Kim Kardashian and what makes him think, "Y'know what? She'll totally never leave me!" As a musician, though? He's one of the best producers in the game, more than making up for his weak flow and endearingly banal lines. Let me put it this way - for a while, I didn't listen to a lot of hip-hop, and I rarely bought whole albums. Come My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, I purchased the whole thing.

Late Registration is the second part of what's referred to roughly as the "College Dropout Trilogy" of Kanye albums, coming in between The College Dropout and Graduation. Kanye definitely stepped his game up for the sophomore effort - he brought in film composer Jon Brion to create a more intricate textured sound, got in some top players in music (Jamie Foxx, Adam Levine, Cam'ron, Nas and Jay-Z) to make guest appearances, and added some pretty funny skits about the fictional fraternity Broke Phi Broke (WE AIN'T GOT IT!), who take pride in having no money or girlfriends.

"Touch the Sky" opens with one hell of a bang - a slowed-down sample of "Movin' On Up" by Curtis Mayfield that gives the song the right amount of opulence and cool. The lyrics themselves are your typical rags-to-riches narrative, coloured by Kanye's trademark ego ("I was havin' nervous breakdowns/Like 'Man, these niggas that much better than me?'") - decent, but nothing remarkable. Then Lupe Fiasco swoops in and runs away with the track, referencing Lupin III, Thundercats and Mrs Butterworth's syrup in 16 bars, seemingly without effort. Awesome.

(Also, if you're one of those people who joke about how rap is spelt with a silent 'C', do me a favour and punch yourself in the face.)

10. John Cale - "Hallelujah" - I'm Your Fan

Ah, back before "Hallelujah" was touched by The X Factor and everyone grew really fucking tired of it. I'm willing to bet most, if not all of you, first heard this in Shrek, and were perplexed as to why this version wasn't on the soundtrack. John Cale's cover first appeared closing out a Leonard Cohen tribute album by French music magazine Les Inrockuptibles, and it's Cale's piano arrangement that has proved the most enduring - it formed the basis of Jeff Buckley's ever-popular cover. Where Cohen sounded beaten down and weary on the original, Cale sings with haunting sincerity. Where Cohen's moves at a funereal tempo, Cale's has a steady drive to it. The original is like a gospel, with percussion, choir, bass and keyboard; Cale's is a simple piano hymn sung by a devout believer.

Phonomancy Mixtape 2: Ladytron

Well, the first "mixtape" seemed to go alright, so let's try it again. In celebration of International Women's Day, and taking inspiration from Phonogram: The Singles Club, all the tracks featured are ones by female artists; all of you about to come in going "but where's international men's day jack you gender-traitor", go face the fucking wall.

Phonomancy Mixtape #2: Ladytron

1) Arianne - "Komm, süsser Tod" - The End of Evangelion


Another soundtrack choice, this one coming from The End of Evangelion, aka the Final Boss of Anime. An  alternate true well, definitely an ending of sorts to the apocalyptic mecha TV show Neon Genesis Evangelion, it's a feature-length animated film where the fate of the world rests in the hands of a manic depressive 14 year old and his godlike giant robot. Without giving too much away, it goes about as well as you'd expect, with all manner of lurid hyperviolent psychotic chaos breaking out.

And it's all scored to a pretty little pop ditty (unusually for an anime, this song is entirely in flawless English and is played in End of Evangelion with no subtitles for Japanese audiences). There's not much about this that's completely original - the organ at 0:24 is similar to Procol Harum's "Whiter Shade of Pale", and the big chorus sounds an awful lot like the singalong part of "Hey Jude" - but it works as a slice of morbid melancholy pop, given wings by Arianne Schreiber's gorgeous singing voice. Despite its pleasant piano-drums-strings backing, the narrator sings about a deathwish, a desire to fade away and for the world to end. Even the title, borrowed from Bach, translates to "Come, Sweet Death". Arianne wants to die, and she couldn't be more bubbly about it. It's really quite disturbing.

Now everybody sing along! "It all comes TUMBLING DOWN TUMBLING DOWN TUMBLING DO~OWN!"

2) Kate Bush - "This Woman's Work" - The Sensual World


It's a source of pride for me that one of the most influential female musicians of modern times (if not the most) comes from my hometown of Bexley. Despite all the legions of clones and imitators in her wake, Kate Bush still stands without compare, her crown still untouched. As ostentatious and "artsy" as her work can be, like Peter Gabriel, her music never comes across as pretentious because a) she commits to it entirely, and b) she's really, really damn good at it.

The Sensual World saw Bush continue to explore her artistic palette, what with songs about unrequited love,  Molly Bloom from Ulysses, and going on a date with a man who turns out to be Hitler. There's nothing like side 2 of Hounds of Love, but it's a solid album regardless, and comes with this rather beautiful track about childbirth. Featured in the John Hughes film She's Having a Baby (not one of Hughes' finest moments, admittedly), the song is unusual since, despite the female vocalist, it's from the point of view of the film's male lead, played by Kevin Bacon, as he waits for his child to be born and hopes his wife will be alright. Bush brings it home with an octave-spanning vocal that never feels forced or mannered. Sublime.

3) Yoko Shimomura - "Scherzo di notte" - Kingdom Hearts Original Soundtrack


Say what you will about the Kingdom Hearts series, like how it's stopped really being about Disney properties and how the newer games have appalling storytelling; the music has always been top-notch, and this is one of my favourite tracks. Having spent most of my childhood trying in vain to complete the Hollow Bastion level, the soundtrack is now ingrained firmly into my brain, especially the battle theme "Scherzo di Notte" (Italian for "Joke of the Night"). An elegant rousing melody with a dramatic string section and piano coming in at just the right time.

4) Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds & Kylie Minogue - "Where the Wild Roses Grow" - Murder Ballads


This one's kinda pushing it since Nick Cave plays just as big a part in this as Minogue, being one of the narrators, but the focus is always on the woman, the tragic Eliza Day, so it gets in. The UK has Kylie as something of a patron pop goddess, so it came to a surprise when I learnt how adored she is overseas, particularly the States where - as a lesser-known pop star - she has the same amount of indie cred as European artists like Robyn and Annie.

Between her cameo in Leos Carax's bizarrely beautiful love letter to cinema Holy Motors and this song, Minogue has earned that cred. The song's parent album, Murder Ballads, is full of songs old and new about spilling someone else's blood, and like Komm, süsser Tod, the dissonance between its lovely cinematic musical backing and its dark haunting lyrics makes it all the more disturbing. A song about a mad young man beating his lover's head in with a rock to keep her forever beautiful doesn't deserve to sound so beautiful, and it isn't helped by how Minogue sounds so innocent and naïve here.

5) Hikaru Utada - "Passion" - Ultra Blue


More Kingdom Hearts, this one being the theme song for the seco technically third game if you include Chain of Memories. Japanese-American superstar Hikaru Utada recorded English versions of her songs for the international releases, and both "Simple & Clean" and "Sanctuary" are good songs, but they're trumped somewhat by the original Japanese.

Recently I've developed a taste for electro-pop, but I liked "Passion"/"Sanctuary" ever since I first booted up Kingdom Hearts II many moons ago, with Utada's ethereal vocals about moving on despite still clinging to the past complementing the militaristic drums and mournful strains of electric guitar. Maybe we can consider this Year Zero for "Jack's Sudden Weird Liking of Synth Pop". Both versions are very atmospheric: it opens with breathy backing vocals and spacy synths, then the guitar kicks in and it explodes into life, the near-constant presence of percussion adding weight and gravity to a track awash with airy synthesizer and pulsing guitar chords. The use of reversed English in the chorus and the bridge (with "Sanctuary" using it a wee bit more) is a delightfully weird touch and only adds to the idea that we're somewhere completely alien, yet beautiful.

What edges "Passion" out as the victor over "Sanctuary" for me is Utada serving as her own choir in the choruses through multi-tracked vocals; it just adds a little something extra.

6) Kate Bush - "Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)" - Hounds of Love


More Kate Bush? Aren't you guys lucky?

Hounds of Love came out in 1985 when Bush was being a better David Bowie than the actual Bowie, who was out recording mediocre tripe like Tonight, and it leads with its best foot forward in "Running Up That Hill", a wonderfully atmospheric track with haunting synthesizers, a driving beat, and another typically strong Bush vocal about trying to further connect with a significant other. The couple are so scared of hurting the other during intimacy, the woman thinks about making the titular deal with God to swap their roles, so they can better understand each other - an inspired idea. A lot of Hounds of Love is inspired by Low, what with its attempts at crafting alien atmospheres and a second side of instrumentals, but as much as I love Low, it never had something as great as "Running Up That Hill".

7) Kate Bush - "Wuthering Heights (New Vocal)" - The Whole Story

This song is awesome, and I will hear no word against it. This is also the best version.

8) Arcade Fire - "Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)" - The Suburbs



One of those wonderful Arcade Fire tracks where Régine Chassagne takes lead vocal, "Sprawl II" is possibly the finest track on what is already a pretty damn fine album about trying to escape the stagnation of suburbia. The arrangement is wonderfully baroque, with burbling synths pushing it forward and I'm suddenly aware this is just one of many tracks in this post that includes mentions of synthesizers. In Arcade Fire's defense, they rarely use them. There's something retro about the track, from the odd disco feel of the music to Chassagne's Debbie Harry-esque performance; it's a time bubble of the past generation, where disco and New Wave were king.

Every time I listen to this, I'm amazed at how good Régine is. She starts the song singing timidly about her small-minded parents/neighbours/asshole high school classmates ("They heard me singing and they told me to stop/"Quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock"), but as it goes on, she becomes full of energy and fire, laughing at them for being so stuck in the past, repeating the opening line with fresh defiance. For a while, I didn't get the hype behind Arcade Fire; then I heard this, and it all clicked.

9) Anthony Hamilton & Elayna Boynton - "Freedom" - Django Unchained



I love Django Unchained. I really do.

The soundtrack is one of many reasons, chiefly because a Tarantino film soundtrack is going to be 24-karat gold quality, both with his choice of existing film music and the original songs. "Freedom", a duet by Anthony Hamilton and Elayna Boynton, is one of the latter, and boy is it a beauty. It sounds like a 60s folk-soul ballad without feeling too much like a throwback, and both singers give powerhouse performances. In light of today, I'm going to single out Boynton, whose warm smoky voice sounds tired yet hopeful, but Hamilton's ace as well. If you don't have the Django Unchained soundtrack, or at the very least don't have this song, there's something wrong with you.

10) Metric - "Breathing Underwater" - Synthetica


And rounding off this post is yet another synth-pop song with a female lead vocalist! Gosh, my playlist sure has a lot of variety, right?

"Breathing Underwater" almost feels full to burst at times, opening with what sounds like a video game console booting off and bombarding the listener with synthesizers, keyboards, guitars, and probably a little bit of the kitchen sink too. It almost approaches stadium rock, the kind of genre U2 have been successfully cultivating for years (and often snidely referred to as "corporate rock") that relies on a big arena to get the most out of. Having not seen Metric live, I can't comment on its effectiveness, but this is the best kind of stadium rock, in the same vein as "With or Without You"; it's bursting with life.

Phonomancy Mixtape 1

Somehow, in the past year, I've become a massive music geek. In retrospect, this isn't too much of a leap forward; ever since I got my first iPod, I've always had a pair of headphones on me, and now the world without music seems so drab and dull. Now, I'm actively seeking out new bands and acts, and even went to my first gig on Wednesday (Chvrches at the ICA, and they were uh-mazing).

The result is an iPod that has, at the time of writing, 1694 songs. This translates to a couple of days worth of music, which is more than I can probably get through, like a smorgasbord the length of Oxford Street; sounds great, but there's a good chance you'll collapse before the end. Out of these 1694, I've gathered a playlist of 500 songs, constantly changing and very, very eclectic. Genres on here range from grandiose cinema soundtracks to slick electro-pop, from hip-hop dripping in braggadocio to rock of all stripes. As a writing exercise, I'll post ten songs from here every week on Friday - what the song is, why I like it, and why it's worthy of your time. Hope you enjoy.

Phonomancy Mixtape #1

1) Scott Walker - "Mathilde" - Scott

Oh, we're off to a good start. My last Phonomancy post was me extolling the virtues of dear Mr Walker, and as starting points go, you can't go wrong with the first track from his first solo album, an English-language cover of Jacques Brel's "Mathilde". What's so extraordinary about this is that Scott had just come out from a teen idol band whose repertoire mostly consisted of covers of lovelorn ballads given sumptuous Spector-esque orchestration. Then they disband, and the most beloved of them releases an album full of gloomy ballads about death, prostitution, the goings-on in a shared house, and - leading the charge - a grand charging number about a man in a sadomasochistic romance, who fears the titular Mathilde and yet, in a repeat of the first verse, embraces her, eagerly telling his mother "Your baby boy's gone back to Hell!" Hard to see any of the current wave of teenyboppers pulling that off.

The original French version is ace as well, but that's because Jacques Brel was a god and could do whatever he liked. The arrangement there is mostly piano-led with a horn section adding bite, but the arrangement by Wally Stott (later Angela Morley) opens with a timpani roll, segues into a triumphant brass section, and later adds Hitchcockian strings as Scott whimpers "My hands, they start to shake again/When you remember all the pain", his mental shell peeling away. Stott's arrangement work would always come closer to truly replicating the Wall of Sound better than the Walker Brothers' albums, which still did a sterling job considering they were comprised of British session musicians.

Scott believed his solo album would flop; John's effort, If You Go Away, had disappeared without a trace, and the doomy young Mr Walker always had the least desire to be a pop star. Somehow, a sombre baroque pop album by a troubled musician ended up being what the public wanted.

2) Japandroids - "Fire's Highway" - Celebration Rock



Canada seem to keep producing good alt-rock bands - Arcade Fire, Tegan and Sara, Metric, all of these have discographies worth your time. It's a bit early for me to say if Japandroids can join that Elite Indie Corps, given they have two albums and I've only just started listening to them, but they're definitely on the shortlist.

Really, if you name your album something like Celebration Rock, it needs to do two things: it needs to be about having a good time; and it needs to rock. And Japandroids succeed admirably on that count, not just on this song but the whole album, which opens and closes with the sounds of fireworks in the sky. This isn't just about a good night out, it's about every good night out. The guitarwork is so relentlessly energetic, you can't help but start dancing like a dork to it. The percussion keeps it surging forward. The lyrics are a call-to-arms to fuck everything else and just enjoy the moment, about letting it overtake you. It's elemental - the narrator's blown away by gale force winds, and finds salvation in a girl with "a soul of fire and eyes of flame that overwhelm her tender frame".

No, this isn't the deepest thing in the world, the lyrics are ridiculous, and an album about one's right to party does eventually get tiring. But goddamn it, this is fun.

3) London Music Works - "Requiem for a Tower" - Requiem for a Tower | Dream


The Music to Every Modern Film Trailer Ever™. The original version is "Lux Aeterna", composed by Clint Mansell for Darren Arofonsky's Requiem for a Dream, better known as Super-Smile-Happy-Fun-Time to those with a bitter sense of humour. I'll admit, that version will always be the victor: the Kronos Quartet give it the proper sense of discomfort, tragedy and of falling into a pit of despair that the film needs while still sounding full. The fact it isn't as overplayed as "Requiem" probably helps as well.

Still, this isn't to be sniffed at. It takes considerable arrangement to change a sad disturbing composition into a rousing blood-pumper, even if it was to get audiences excited about Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. If "Lux Aeterna" was the mental apocalypse, the ever-consuming black hole of depression, "Requiem", with its full orchestra and choir, is the actual apocalypse; that moment when the hordes of Hell are at your back, and you're the only thing that stands between them and all you hold dear.

Also, essay writing becomes a manner of life and death when you have it playing.

4) Plan B - "ill Manors" - ill Manors


This one had me hooked right from its opening frantic burst of strings, the musical equivalent of a pure shot of adrenaline, and which are sampled from Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony. Shostakovich completed it in 1941 as a tribute to the city of Leningrad for holding out against the invading German forces, and is very much a middle finger to a giant faceless power looking to consume and assimilate all it approaches.

So you can see why Ben Drew, alias Plan B, thought it would be useful for a protest song (the strings were already appropriated by Peter Fox's "Alles neu", but I think Drew would have looked up where it came from as well). 2012 was a golden year for him - having gotten the mainstream's attention with his blue-eyed soul/R'n'B crooner concept album The Defamation of Strickland Banks, Drew switched gears back for ill Manors, the best-selling soundtrack to the film of the same name, which he also wrote and directed. An intelligent, perceptive young man, Drew wrote the title track in response to the 2011 London riots, viciously laying into Britain's failure to truly provide for its disenfranchised youth. He weaponises the idea of the chav, the estate kid, sneeringly telling the listener everything they read in the Daily Mail is true "so stay where you're safest/there's no need to step foot out the 'burbs", and for every chav to "be the joker/play the fool". Middle England doesn't care about you, so you might as well live up to the hype, right?

As a middle-class kid from a Kent suburb, I'm definitely not the target audience, but listening to this, I can't help but feel pumped.

5) David Bowie - "I'm Afraid of Americans (NIN V.1 Mix)" - Earthling



It was only a matter of time before Bowie showed up on here. The 90s are largely a forgotten period for the Dame, but then to the public, any time past 1983 probably counts as a lost period. People still remember the Let's Dance album, but have you ever heard "Blue Jean" on the radio? Following the collapse of Tin Machine, where he recharged his creative batteries and make us all suffer for it, Bowie began stretching his wings and adding new elements from the world of music, particularly electronica and techno, into his work, to mixed results. Earthling is one such offering, and is often thought of as Bowie's drum n' bass album even though not many of the tracks take after it.

"I'm Afraid of Americans" is a good example. Composed by Bowie and Brian Eno, and originally intended for his rock-opera album Outside, the original track is an aggressive slice of industrial rock full of buzzsaw guitars, synth-strings and white noise. This is a remix by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, and where the original frequently goes off the rails, this is more like controlled, tightly controlled insanity; the bassline and synthesiser dominate, the chorus changes in intensity as the song progresses until all hell breaks loose towards the end and the drum machines come in DRRDRRDRRDRRDRRDRRDRRDRRDRR, before they all fall away to a restrained bass and Bowie numbly going "God is an American".

Even if you don't like Nine Inch Nails, this remix should leave you with no doubt that Reznor is a fantastic composer.

6) Björk - "Army of Me" - Post


One of the newer additions to the playlist. Björk is someone I've been meaning to get into, considering she's basically Kate Bush turned up to eleven, and "Army of Me" seems a good place to start. For someone who has a reputation as being away with the fairies, this track has a surprising amount of steel, opening with feedback and seguing into one hell of an industrial bassline, complemented by her deadpan crooning. It sounds like an outtake from the Blade Runner soundtrack, and it's icily cool.

7) Bon Iver - "Come Talk to Me" - Flume/Come Talk to Me


Peter Gabriel released Scratch My Back in 2010, an album where he covered various artists with no instrumentation other than an orchestra. It was a diverse range - Elbow, Paul Simon, Radiohead, Arcade Fire, Lou Reed, and Bon Iver. Scratch My Back was planned to have a sister album, I'll Scratch Yours, where all the artists he covered would respond with a Peter Gabriel cover, but with some of the acts bowing out, the project dissolved into a series of one-off singles containing both covers.

In this case, Gabriel's cover of "Flume" was matched with Bon Iver's cover of "Come Talk to Me", a song about growing emotional distance set in an esoteric...nightmare-scape? References to "shadowed milk" and deserts transforming into jackals mean your guess is good as mine. In true Gabriel tradition, this becomes strangely beautiful with the right arrangement, and Bon Iver's suits that, being a lovely mix of banjos, synthesised chords, acoustic guitars, and voiceless chants. If anything, it makes the bizarre setting more mystical; it could be a hallucination from a desert in an Alejandro Jodorowsky film.

8) Yasushi Ishii - "A World Without Logos" - Hellsing Original Soundtrack - RAID


This may sound like English on the track, but it's basically just Japanese musicians scat-singing anything that might vaguely be called Anglophonic. The original Hellsing anime was not particularly strong, with a subpar horror script married to ugly limited animation, but soundwise? It was fucking ace. An English dub with actual British voice actors for a show set in London, and Crispin Freeman's delightful turn as everyone's favourite mass-murdering vampire assassin Alucard? What's not to love?

If nothing else, the makers were going for "cool", and there's not much cooler than the blues. A nifty Barrelhouse piano riff anchors the song, the ghostly wails after the first chorus are a nice touch, and then you have what sounds like a haunted organ breakdown followed by whistling synth chords. In short? This is awesome.

9) Scott Walker - "Farmer in the City" - Tilt

And here we are, back to Walker. Or rather, moving forward to latter-day Walker. Having outgrown the rich baroque instrumentation after years and years of doing contractually obligated albums that nobody bought, Scott moved to the sound of Bowie and Eno circa "Heroes" for a track on the last Walker Brothers album, which marked his beginnings as a modernist composer. Yet the ghost of 60's Scott still clings - the sound is as full as ever, but it's not a ray of golden light; it's funereal, stark, sorrowful.

As is par for the course with Walker, the lyrics are abstract stuff that feels like what would have happened if T. S. Eliot turned to songwriting: if you can figure out the meaning of "Can't go by a man/with brain grass/go by his long/long eye gas", you stand to win a major prize! "Farmer in the City" is loosely inspired by a poem by Italian film director Pier Paolo Pasolini for his protégé and lover Ninetto Davoli - the song's subtitled "Remembering Pasolini", the song's narrator drifts from Pasolini ("Hey Ninetto, remember that dream?/We talked about it/So many times") to Davoli ("Paolo, take me with you!"), and the chant of "Do I hear 21?", combined with the rest of the lyrics, suggest someone who was drafted into the army and then left. He's a country boy in the big city, but only darkness and torment await him, so he has to flee, being careful not to run into the wrong man.

The strings are hauntingly beautiful throughout, whether they rise and fall through the main body (that "dah-DAH, dah-DAH, DAH-dah, dah-DAH" motif), or when they reach a crescendo as Scott screams how he pleads Pasolini to come back for him. The song rests on the Sinfonia of London's playing, no mean feat considering it's just a few chords repeated over and over, and the result is a work of dark beauty.

10) Queen & David Bowie - "Under Pressure"

Dun-dun-dun-dadadundun. Dun-dun-dun-dadadun-DUN-DUN. God, I love that bassline.

Hearing that and trying to figure out whether it was Queen and Bowie being awesome or Vanilla Ice's bare-faced theft for "Ice Ice Baby" is this generation's Vietnam moment, at least until the gestalt horror that is Jedward mashed the two up and now the whole system's fucked. It feels weird to get defensive about this song because it's essentially a glorified demo. This really shouldn't work when you think about it - it barely changes key, the lyrics are abstract social commenatries about how terrible it is that people live on streets, and a good chunk of it is comprised of scat-singing. It's incomplete. Yet the two acts will this into being so much more than it is by performing these two-bit lyrics with real passion and emotion. The zenith of "Under Pressure" has to be the bridge when Mercury reaches a devastating falsetto, the calls for "love! (love, love, love, love...)" echo into the aether, and Bowie sings with ferocity "insanity laughs/under pressure we're CRACKING!"

From there, it becomes a hymn, Bowie and Mercury shouting "LOVE" at the heart of the world. It's cheesy when put down in words, but it's delivered with such sincerity, especially when they talk about how "love's such an old-fashioned word", that you can't help but be swept up in it. It's big, it's ridiculous - it's everything beautiful about pop music.