Grizzly Bear & Beach House (October 14th in Baltimore)

15Oct07

 

I saw Grizzly Bear play with Beach House last night at the church on 26th and St. Paul. The church itself is a great venue, especially for a show like this, the ambiance and the great stained glass add to the relaxed pace of both bands’ music. I had the opportunity to see Grizzly Bear last year, at Sonar, when then opened for TV On The Radio, and even though this time they struggled with a number of technical difficulties throughout the shows (levels, monitors, etc) I think this show was my favorite. Not only does Grizzly Bear seem more put together, they seem to have spent some time developing their sound. Listening to Yellow House, their newest album, afterwards, I’m impressed with the difference in quality. For one, their entrances and exits feel a little less forced. It might just be seeing them live, but their ability to listen to each other and play as one – their songs are sort of meandering, and there are a bunch of times where entrances are dependent on a lot of cooperation – has strengthened since last year. Beach House, who opened for Grizzly Bear, was also great. They played mostly new songs off their upcoming album, which was really impressive. I like their debut album, Beach House, but it wasn’t something I had spent much time with before the show. Since last night, however, I’ve been listening to it pretty much constantly. Beach House is a local Baltimore band, which I didn’t know about, but it made it even better to see them in their hometown. They’re a band that I think has a lot of potential, and it’ll be really interesting to see what happens to them in the future.

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Beirut – The Flying Club Cup

11Oct07

 

I just got my hands on Beirut’s new album, The Flying Club Cup, and am thoroughly impressed. The band has gone from klezmer/slavic/indie to some sort of fusion that feels both fluid and all their own. I’ve really gotten the sense from this album that the band has figured out what they want their own sound to be. Still a mix of lackadaisical lyrics and echolalic horns, the band’s development won’t leave fans of their previous album Gulag Orkestra and the EP Lon Gisland disappointed. While all the songs on the album are worth talking about, the two that I am most impressed with currently are “Forks And Knives (La Fete)” and “In The Mausoleum.” The former is an interesting departure for Beirut. Filled with their regular six-eight/klezmer rhythms, this song includes a sort of melodic quality that’s reminiscent of musical theatre pop. “In The Mausoleum” is an almost purely instrumental song, with a great 6/4 (or if you’re my roommate, 2/4 with a triplet feel) rhythm that carries you through the whole song. The meat of the song is a great violin solo which is a great counterpoint to the lead singers often intelligible (but for that reason even better) melodies.

 

http://www.beirutband.com/

 

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Kafka On The Shore – Haruki Murakami

09Sep07

 

The first book I’ve read by Haruki Murakami, Kafka On The Shore, proved to be a very different read for me. Filled with what can be called magical realism (although that’s not doing it justice), Kafka On The Shore tells the story of a 15 year-old youth who runs away from home to avoid what he believes to be his destiny. Murakami’s prose is a mix of what feels like folktelling, magical realism and minimalism, creating a stark but at times vibrant read. I had some trouble getting into the story, mainly because of the writing style, but once I was within the plot I was drawn in and couldn’t put it down.

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The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo – Peter Orner

07Sep07

 

I just finished The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo, and I must say, although I struggled with the novel at some points, the end of the book won me over. Peter Orner creates, through one to two page sections, an entire environment for the reader to enter. Set in Goas, a small school on a failed farm in Namibia, the reader very quickly becomes familiar with the feeling of drought, mixed-political agendas, and the desperation of a few teachers who know they’ll never leave there. The novel itself focuses on Larry Kaplanski, a white volunteer who comes to teach standard six history, and his experiences with the rest of the faculty and school staff. Soon after Kaplanski arrives at Goas, a female teacher, named Mavala Shikongo, returns from a mysterious disappearance with a one and a half year old child name Tomo. Already the focus of the male teachers attention, Mavala’s return only serves to further develop their fantasies of what Mavala is like.

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Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress – Dai Sijie

04Sep07

 

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress tells the story of one Chinese city-youth during the early seventies sent to the countryside for re-education. Living in the village at the top of a mountain called “The Phoenix of the Sky,” the city-youth soon discovers a hidden collection of Western books translated into Chinese. In what follows, the unnamed youth, along with his close friend Luo and Luo’s girlfriend, the little Chinese seamstress, are forced to keep their secret from the village headmasters, for fear of never being allowed to return home. The story is a quick read and is very well told. The language used by Dai Sijie is simple and pristine. I read this novel while on my road trip, and it proved to be a great fit for it. Balzac was a novel I could pick up and put down whenever, and was short enough that I finished it just when I arrived at St. Louis. The plot is interesting, and gives a great glimpse into what re-education in China was like under Mao. The author, Dai Sijie, was “re-educated” himself during the ’70s. Although the story is not focused very much on the politics of the time period, you get a sense of what it must’ve been like to live through, especially for those people who would’ve been termed “political dissidents.”

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The Satanic Verses – Salman Rushdie

18Aug07

 

Written in the late 80′s, the Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie has been the source of an amazing amount of controversy. My own reason for originally picking up this book is my interest in how controversial it was, I didn’t know much about it beyond that. What I was most impressed with, after finishing the book, was not Rushdie’s ability to stir people up, but instead his writing style; it was unlike anything I had ever read before. Rushdie has a sensitivity for language that is original and impressive, he knows how to write prose that sounds like poetry and is quite remarkable. It took me a while to warm up to his writing, but past 100 pages or so, I found myself unable to put the book down; Salman Rushdie’s storytelling ability is one of the most engaging I have read lately.

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Absurdistan – Gary Shteyngart

17Aug07

 

The second novel by author Gary Stheyngart, Absurdistan is a testament to the author’s ability to write. The novel takes place in the fictional country of Absurdistan, which allows Shteyngart the freedom to develop a new world in which to look back at our own. Gripping, the story is filled with comic narrative and funny excerpts, but the farther the reader gets in the novel the more developed and intriguing the story becomes. What starts out as a silly novel about an over-weight Russian trying to get a Belgium passport to come to America, turns into a surprising critique of American foreign policy, and how information can be lost and misused by the government, the media, and even the people whom the information is hurting the most.

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New Album by The Octopus Project!

17Aug07

Just Announced: The Octopus Project has announced a new album, Hello, Avalanche. Known for mixing electronic sounds and fun beats, The Octopus Project is best defined as “Lap-Rock” or Laptop Rock – that is, it sounds like a lot of it might’ve been put together on a laptop. This definition shouldn’t sound like a negative thing, The Octopus Project has done a wonderful job creating musical textures which can’t be found elsewhere. If you’re interested, I wrote a review of their previous album, One Ten Hundred Thousand Million, you can check it out here. Hello, Avalanche will be available October 9th.

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Chronicle of a Death Foretold – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

15Aug07

 

Chronicle of a Death Foretold is the second novel I’ve read by Garbiel Garcia Marquez. The first, probably obviously, being 100 Years of Solitude. This novel takes on a different style than the 100 Years, and reads almost like a detective novel in reverse. That is, you know who did the crime, and you are watching the victim live out what happens. The story is about the death of a man, and about the people who could’ve stopped it and didn’t. The ending is horribly tragic, because you read what is inevitable, even though the whole novel is filled with people who could’ve stopped it. Through the plot the book touches on the responsibility of the individual, and how when people ignore that responsibility things that don’t have to happen do.

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End of I – Stephen Dixon

09Aug07

 

Stephen Dixon’s latest novel, End of I, is more of a collection of short stories than a novel. Written in sections which feel almost like snapshots of different points during the main character, I.’s, life, Dixon gives the reader an extremely personal insight into the title character’s mind. Each section shows a different aspect of I., and Dixon does well in his attempt to be fair-minded about the character; he’s very good at staying away from the sentimentality that can often overpower such a character-portrait. I actually had the chance to study under Dixon at Johns Hopkins last year, and since then have gotten some good exposure to his writing style. His knack for obsessive and neurotic characters is clearly present in I.’s floundering, best seen in the section titled Daughter, which consists almost only of I.’s fearful thoughts about what his daughter does when she goes out at night.

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