theo|digital

The latest issue of Innocent Words is out today, including my review of Brooklyn-based Anthem In.

Today is also my first official day of classes, and I’ve already mentally moved to writing arcane run-on sentences in academic style. It’s always hard to make the shift. I’ll probably have to come back with the editing pen and cut out all those illegal contractions and pop-culture references. Sigh.

Head over to Innocent Words to see my review of Aimee Allen’s album A Little Happiness.

And it’ll be nice to get the blog back in gear soon.

My favorite disc in December (and maybe for the year!) was Hannah, an unsigned title by The Age of Rockets.  They’re Postal-Service-like, but I think better in more ways than one.  Innocent Words , the online indie music rag, has a new issue posted, so you can check out my review .

So if you Google for reviews on The Submarine’s second album, you don’t even get the one I wrote (maybe if you kept up, but I only looked for five pages). And it’s all because of this Apple ad:
So this is my post where I strut and say that I was way ahead of everyone being all cool—I wrote my review this past summer, giving these super-poppy kids the thumbs up. Hardly shook up the world.  But hey it’s my blog, so I gotta work the cred any chance I get. 

Anyway, here’s what I said then (for Innocent Words):

The Submarines
Honeysuckle Weeks
(Nettwerk Records)

Hip-SoCal-popsters are all over The Submarines, the Weepies-like, boy-girl duo that showed up via (sigh:) Grey’s Anatomy and had done the NPR interview and released an iTunes exclusive cut before most 20-somethings could get an intelligent blog post sketched up in draft.

The sound is Fiest meets Postal Service with a touch more cheese, which is what you’d expect from a love-struck couple that produced their first album by breaking up and simultaneously penning songs about it. Back together, their second effort Honeysuckle Weeks proves that John Dragonetti knows his programming—his beat loops and square-wave tones (beep! boop!) provide the arcade layer and fun, while Blake Hazard (she’s the girl) slips the in the poppy charm. Though both sing, Hazard’s vocals dominate the tracks with cute-smart lyrics about a relationship that went bad for a time but is happily back on course. Occasionally gag-able (Every day I wake up ~I chose love ~ I chose light) , but not infrequently insightful (maybe we’re strong, but maybe, maybe we’re wrong), the pop duo finds the hook buried in every song and charts it with las, ahs, and the occasional underwater glockenspiel.

While I could do without a few of the extra claps, the couple is enigmatic (she’s the great-granddaughter of F. Scott Fitzgerald) and have an electronic whiz-kid thing that’s tightly produced and even Beatles-aware. Toss in a few more socially conscious themes (“You, Me, and the Bourgeois” dogs plastic bottles and sweatshop clothing) and The Submarines dive deep enough for a second play.

It’s rumored that Steve Jobs hand-picks all the Apple songs for their commercials.  I’d like to pick on him for that, but I were in his position, I’m sufficiently self-inflated about my own music taste that I probably would too.  (although on Honeysuckle Weeks, I gotta say track 5—”The Wake Up Song” is even better than “You, Me, and the Bourgeoisie”).

Before I recently wrote a review of Kasey Chamber’s newest album Rattlin’ Bones, I didn’t know a lot about her, except of her few more popular songs in the US.  The country singer is a down-home Australian (really) whose pop-country is enough off the mainstream to like her.  I can’t post my review cause it hasn’t been published yet, but I’ve gotta note her video of her 2004 single Pony, which I can’t stop watching.  Chambers bats happy, expressive eyes to be simultaneously five years old and all grown up.  The video makes the song.

There’s something about Kasey here that makes me think “little sister”—which makes me think of my fake little sister Heidi (something about her facial expressions) and my real little sister Erika (who is hardly a country fan, but I think will like this anyway).

That the newest Christian culture blockbuster sported shiny endorsements from Michael W. Smith and Wynonna Judd almost had me quitting before I started. But Eugene Peterson’s reassuring quote (plus the predictable rumors of heresy) drove me in to the William P. Young novel about a father who faces God after losing his little girl.

Theologically, The Shack has been condemned by everyone from Mark Driscoll to the Amazon.com review panel (“Trojan horse subtly infiltrating the Christian community”). But what first caught me was the writing. Its opening words sketched wind and color with a soft touch, a paragraph of hope breaking the clouds of Christian mediocrity. No sunshine followed. As quickly as it began, the weather froze into painfully unrealistic dialogue, belabored scenes, and complete loss of point-of-view, that clever tool invented by writers to provide characterization via appropriately framed perspective.

Trudging past overt lines underlining the writer’s agenda (“This came as a shock to Mack’s religious system”), some nicely constructed themes still emerge. Young’s representation of God the Father as a large, generous Black woman is effective reminder of God essential gender neutrality. That she is “especially fond of” both Mack—and every other person she’s made—brings a smile, and seems just about right. And I like the Holy Spirit portrayed in Sarayu’s wildflower garden: chaos from within but an intricate fractal pattern from above.

I find no heart-stopping theological points insidiously poised to hijack orthodoxy. Still, poor attempts at plot (reconciling with a father we’ve never met?) and a slew of eye-roll chapter titles don’t add up to a new generation’s Pilgrims Progress (sorry Eugene) as much as a novel hastily nailed together and soon to be left forgotten in the woods.

Regional rag Innocent Words Magazine reviews indie music nationwide, with an emphasis on Illinois and Chicago scenes. I’m still enjoying doing some writing for them. Here’s my last.

Butterfly Pinned
Monster in the Machine
(2007 Emotional Syphon)

Funny thing about titles like “New Wave” – the “new” always overstays its welcome. Classed as the backlash to disco, the early-80s-keyboards -plus-reverb-snare genre is fun for lunchtime radio, but otherwise is appropriately semi-retired. Of course, there are always some for whom the wave still rolls. Enter Bowie-inspired Shannon Crawford, the chain-smoking keyboardist-guitarist-painter (really) who’s released a 2007 new album with a new band to go with it –complete with (not so new) synth lead.

Butterfly Pinned is Crawford’s eye-shadowed brainchild, and though it’s band-attributed to Monster in the Machine, Crawford’s accompaniment seems about as permanent as INXS’ lead vocals – recording bassist Doug Ardito and drummer Josh Freese aren’t even touring.

The lead man probably doesn’t mind using replacements – his tracks are soaked in melodramatic vocal flair – whispers, echoes, counterpoints, and falsetto croanings that evoke the show-stealing emotional vibrato of a 1985 Danny Elfman (Oingo Boingo). And here comes the synth! Fat pads and programmed arpeggios barrel us into the (“new”) electronic age of music in luscious detail. “Helicopter” doesn’t make it a minute in before succumbing to a dream sequence of fading vocals and spinning effects under the heady influence of the pitch-blend wheel. And hand-keyed pan flutes (whee!) show up in at least three tracks.

The 80s-is-back-I-Heart-Duran-Duran crowd (check out “Dot on my Soul”) will enjoy Butterfly Pinned as an admittedly skilled revival entry in the New Wave. But those who don’t like it so thick should run sideways to the tenured and original Of Montreal. Unless you’re producing an over-sexed new 80s film. In that case, Shannon Crawford’s got your walkout credits covered.

~ Chris Ridgeway
(more reviews at www.innocentwords.com)