Tag: Best of 2010 Page 2 of 4

2010 in Music: #5 Arcade Fire – The Suburbs

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This was easily one of my most-anticipated albums of the year, if only to see where Arcade Fire would go next after the angsty anthemic rock of Neon Bible I was not disappointed, with the Canadian group bringing a much softer but still meaningful album – almost a concept album – centered on the theme of suburbia and all the facets of modern life that term encompasses. I’ve listened to this album a bunch, but I always feel like there’s more to get, like I understand it better every time, but there’s still more to unearth in it.

All the songs are great, but I have to say I’m particularly partial to Regine’s two main ones – “Empty Room” and “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)” – they have a wild, uninhibited quality to them that makes them that much more memorable than Win’s more restrained numbers. The album took a while to grow on me (with 16 tracks, it’s a lot to take in), but when it did, oh how it did.

2010 in Music: #6 The New Pornographers – Together

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Most of the time when I get a new album it takes me a few listens to settle into it, get a feel for the sound, and hear all the songs enough to feel fully acquainted with it enough to decide how much I like it. This is true even of bands I know well and love – it’s a process with each new album. With Together, the first playthrough felt like I coming home to something familiar and wonderful, in a good way. There was no getting acquainted time, it was just immediate love.

I got into The New Pornographers with their previous album Challengers, most of which I love, but there are some songs I don’t care for that much, which makes the album as a whole kind of a mixed experience. This time, everything is really well-balanced, and so far, there isn’t a song I don’t like. It feels more cohesive as an album; even though there are a similar assortment of Neko Case songs, Dan Bejar songs, and A.C. Newman songs as usual, somehow they don’t seem as disconnected as in Challengers – they all sound like New Pornographers songs, and that cohesion steps the album up a notch.

My 2010 in Film: Playtime

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[My list of favorite films released in 2010 will be going up on Row Three in mid-January, so I want to do something a bit different here. This series will include any films I saw for the first time this year and loved, regardless of release date. It may also include films from this year.]

French writer/director/comedian Jacques Tati is often compared with Charlie Chaplin – despite his major films coming in the 1950s and 1960s, thirty years after the end of the silent era, Tati’s style of comedy is nearly silent, depending on sight gags and the empathetic persona of his character M. Hulot much as Chaplin depended on the Little Tramp. That comparison is well-founded, and since I love Chaplin, I assumed I would immediately love Tati. But my reaction to the first two Tati films I saw (M. Hulot’s Holiday and Mon Oncle, which are also his best-known) was mixed at best – I just didn’t really feel involved in them or care what happened. That all changed when I saw Playtime this year, and I’m really looking forward to rewatching his other films now.

Playtime combines several threads of interweaving story, the most prominent of which is a group of American tourists in Paris. M. Hulot runs into them at various points – at the airport business offices, where he is unsuccessfully trying to get a problem fixed, at a sort of electronics trade show, and finally at a newly opened night club. Each of these locations (and a few others) are mined for every bit of comic action, but Tati has plenty of time for some incisive social commentary as well, especially on the rise of consumerism and artificiality.

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The entire film was shot on a giant replica of Paris that Tati built just outside of the real city – the expense of this endeavor mixed with the disappointing reception of the film devastated him financially, but it’s not hard to see why he did it. Throughout the film, the tourists joy at finding “the real Paris,” but they never actually do – they find replicas of the Eiffel Tower and the Arc du Triomphe (the real ones show up only in reflections in open doors, reflections most of the tourists don’t even notice), and they find street cart vendors who let them take staged pictures, but the real thing, the real gritty, grimy, living thing they wouldn’t know what to do with if they found it.

Except for one woman who we kind of single out to identify with and who becomes the major connection to Hulot throughout the film. Meanwhile, Hulot gets pulled into sight gag after sight gag that are all the more hilarious because Tati lets them go on forever – long after most directors would’ve cut and gone on to something else. But Tati knows exactly how to pace this, and he lets every joke play out completely and wonderfully. He also uses space better than almost anyone else I’ve seen, shooting on 70mm, but not in widescreen, which gives a tremendous depth of field for shooting long-angle shots that let you seek out every corner with delight for something else he’s hidden there for you. I swear, you could watch this film several times, every time focusing on a different part of the frame, and see things you’d missed every time.

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Despite Tati’s tendency to use people almost as props rather than as developed characters and let the camera look on noncommitally as they bumble their way through the set, he achieves a great sympathy for his characters in Playtime, and a great depth of theme in his subtle commentary on the state of the modern world. Going back to the Chaplin connection, this is his Modern Times. Many might point to Mon Oncle for that comparison, which makes sense with Mon Oncle‘s setting in a mechanized house, but for my money, Playtime is his masterpiece, and mirrors Chaplin’s masterpiece in the themes of modernity and displacement within modernity yet with the promise of human connection despite the odds.

2010 in Music: #7 Seaspin – Reverser EP

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Normally I wouldn’t include include EPs along with albums on my yearly top ten, but Seaspin is currently hovering very near the top of my last.fm charts for the year based on just this EP – which means I’ve listened to these five songs at least twice as much as most other songs this year.

Seaspin is a local LA band that I randomly caught one night at a free residency show and totally fell in love with – their shoegaze noise pop is exactly my thing right now, and I’ve since seen just about every show they’ve done. Really hoping they put out a full-length, or at least another EP soon.

There aren’t any videos of them on YouTube, even live (I’ll have to see what I can do about that next time they play!), but I’m linking a phone interview with Ronnie Washburn done by a radio station; it bills him as the singer/guitarist, but really Jen Goodridge handles most of the lead vocals, and very well, too. The EP is available through iTunes and Amazon, but I believe it’s better for the band to get it through Bandcamp, so that’s the embed I’ve used below – also, the Bandcamp embed streams the entire song rather than just a preview.

Phone interview with Ronnie – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROWqi_OvwMM

2010 in Music: #8 Best Coast – Crazy for You

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[#8-12 on this countdown are basically tied. I’ve put them in order of release date.]

I have moved this album up and down on my list so many times it was starting to get a little ridiculous. That’s because on the one hand, these songs are fairly simplistic, don’t stray far melodically, and have pretty superficial lyrics. On the other hand, I CANNOT STOP LISTENING TO THEM. Despite the songs’ simplicity (or maybe because of it), Bethany Cosentino has somehow managed to nail the earworm factor squarely on the head. And it’s so wonderfully attuned to the California coast that it was a big part of my summer’s soundtrack.

Best Coast is kind of the darling of the LA indie music scene right now (especially in concert with her boyfriend, Nathan Williams of Wavves). So much so that I’ve seen numerous comparisons between Bethany and Jenny Lewis, who along with her band Rilo Kiley was the toast of LA five years ago. She’s not nearly as nuanced lyrically as Jenny, but I can’t deny that her almost manically upbeat songs about unrequited love and happy relationships strike a chord somehow.

This album comes after a year or more of singles and brief EPs that were nonetheless touted constantly by the music blogs, and already in that time, the band’s sound has gotten cleaner and stronger while still retaining its ’60s pop vibe and noise pop aesthetic. I’m really curious to see where she goes from here. Honestly, the only thing I could really wish for is a bit more thought put into the lyrics, but it’s possible that their directness is an intentional part of the style. It certainly seems to be working for her – the album has hit most of the Best Of lists I’ve seen this year.

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